Three Sherlock Holmes Stories to Read in Lockdown

This past weekend, I read a few Sherlock Holmes stories that I found strangely relaxing, even though at least one of them involves murder. Maybe because each story is like an orderly, manicured garden with well-defined paths. Holmes and Watson are ever the same, with Watson admiring the genius of his friend, and his friend saying that it's nothing at all, you just have to observe things. (In some cases, you also have to be able to distinguish between different kinds of cigar ash, topsoil, etc.) The endings aren't mystifying. Just take the route Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has laid out for you, and you'll be entertained.

(You can also amuse yourself imagining Holmes in lockdown. When not on a case, he enjoys being indoors, experimenting with chemicals, playing the violin, or getting a little coked up.)

All of these are from Sterling Publishing Co.'s volume, The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). You can also find the Adventures and the Memoirs online on Project Gutenberg. ("The Crooked Man" is in the Memoirs, and the last two stories in the Adventures.)

Title: The Crooked Man

Crookedness can refer to a physical characteristic or to a moral one. In this story, a man is dead after an argument with his wife, who has fainted away at the scene. There's also evidence that a third person was in the room. Holmes probes a little deeper and discovers a horrific betrayal from decades ago.

Title: A Scandal in Bohemia

Irene Adler is in this one, a woman who looks after herself capably and stays a step ahead of Holmes. Is she the villain of the story, or someone who has been wronged and is trying to protect herself? Holmes falters slightly in this one, I think because he bases his predictions on what a woman would typically do in Adler's situation, and she's unusual.

Title: The Speckled Band

This story involves a country house, a cruel stepfather, and an elaborate method of premeditated murder. What I liked most about it was the sense of dread that builds to the point where everything is revealed.

Six Fun Movies to Watch During the Holiday Season

A few years ago, I made a similar post, which will give you several more recommendations. These movies aren't themed for the winter holidays, but they're fun to watch on a cold night with a warm drink, like hot apple cider with rum, and they're (mostly) family-friendly. (Yes, even The Maltese Falcon can be fun for the whole family... why not.)

Title: Cinderella (1997)
Director: Robert Iscove
Language: English
Rating: G

This is a Rodgers & Hammerstein musical adaptation of Cinderella, set in a pretty Disney version of a European town. The stepmother's house looks like it's made of stained glass and melted crayons. I like how vivid all the colors are in this one, including the lush blues and purples of the ballroom scene.

The cast is vibrant. Whitney Houston plays the fairy godmother, Bernadette Peters is the stepmother, Whoopi Goldberg is the queen (an opinionated lady who makes squeaking noises of dismay), and Jason Alexander (best known as George Costanza on Seinfeld) is a royal servant with an Italian-ish accent and a song-and-dance number about the upcoming ball.

Paolo Montalban is cute as the prince, and Brandy Norwood plays a lovely, fragile-looking, and sometimes vacant-looking Cinderella. I like how, even before the prince finds her at the end, she decides to leave home, knowing that she deserves a better life than the one she has with her stepmother and stepsisters.

Title: How to Steal a Million (1966)
Director: William Wyler
Language: English and some French
Rating: Not rated

This movie has the absurdity of a screwball comedy. The leads, Audrey Hepburn and Peter O'Toole, associate under highly improbable circumstances and look beautiful while doing so. (O'Toole is so damn charming here. Reminds me a little of Peter Wimsey - intelligent, doesn't appear to take much seriously, but is more serious than he appears.)

Anyway, Hepburn plays Nicole, the daughter of an art forger who passes himself off as an art collector. He's a Wizard of Oz type of scoundrel. One thing leads to another, and Nicole realizes that to keep her father's crimes from being discovered, she'll have to steal a statue he loaned to a museum. Simon (Peter O'Toole's character) arrives on the scene as a burglar who may be able to help her. Or so she thinks.

Four Short Stories Featuring Trees

Title: Joshua Tree
Author: Emma Bull
Where I Read It: The Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest

"My point is, sometimes truly crappy experiences have a crowbar effect on the rest of your life. Everything shakes loose. Then you can let it go back to the way it was, or you can step in and make something happen, something that might be permanent."

Tabetha Sikorsky is a teenager growing up in a desert town attached to a military base. It's a dead town, full of dead-end jobs and people who feel their lives have gone nowhere. Tabetha knows she might become one of them. Then a new girl shows up, and some interesting possibilities open up for Tabetha.

One night she's lost in the desert and in danger of dying. However, the night also becomes an opportunity for her to rediscover the weight and meaning of her life.

"But sometimes I can still have these moments of total happiness. And I feel as if every time I pretend to be happy, I'm scaring that real happiness off."

I like how she finds new vitality, taps into the wellspring of life, in a desert. And specifically, among the spiny, twisty, miraculous Joshua Trees.

Week in Seven Words #253

covert
She's hidden things behind her books - keys to cabinets, necklace pendants, folded letters. She says it's extra protection against casual burglars; they won't rifle through her shelves. But I also suspect it's her romantic streak. She's always wanted the kind of bookcase that would hide a secret, like a door that springs open when you pull out a volume of Donne's poetry.

demolishing
The book I use as a sledgehammer, to smash obstructions in my mind.

ducking
He has always crouched behind a shield. Currently, it's his wife. As long as he's with her, he's protected. No one looks too closely at him.

filling
Strange how the book leaves us both satisfied and empty.

olio
He has in his speech flavors of other countries. He's brimful of anecdotes about bodyguards and bugged hotel rooms, spicy cuisine and off-the-road ruins.

redolence
A begonia in a copper-colored pot, and a cup of orange spice tea.

reversals
Two months earlier, she was fine. Now she has health problems and a career in tailspin through no fault of her own. She speaks in disbelief about her life.

The Thin Man (1934): Murder, wit, and martinis

Title: The Thin Man
Director: W.S. Van Dyke
Language: English
Rating: Unrated

There are few movie couples more fabulous than Nick and Nora Charles. Their electric banter, chemistry, and continuous boozing make for great entertainment.


Nick (William Powell) is a retired private eye whose only ambition now is to enjoy the wealth of his heiress wife, Nora (Myrna Loy), a "lanky brunette with a wicked jaw" (his words). They're very much in love, rib each other constantly, and enjoy drinking and doting on their terrier, Asta. But as they're taking a trip to NYC at the start of the film, they're approached by Dorothy Wynant (Maureen O'Sullivan), the daughter of a crotchety, absent-minded inventor who once worked with Nick. She doesn't know where her father is, and as the movie progresses, it appears he's in trouble - first because he's gone on a trip without telling anyone where, and secondly because he's implicated in a murder.

The movie is clever and funny with great dialogue. And while Nick and Nora are the ones who truly shine, there's also an amusing cast of supporting characters made up of crooks, greedy opportunists, soft-hearted romantics, a young man who's overly attached to his mother, and police officers who aren't so much stupid as unimaginative. Nick gets pulled into the mystery surrounding the case, and Nora both helps out and watches, concerned and entertained. The climax of the movie is a dinner party where all the suspects (and police) are invited.

Whimsical, funny, doesn't take itself seriously - it's a great movie to relax with.


*The images link back to their source (Flixster Community).

Good Short Fiction: Three Tales from The Thirteen Problems

Collection: The Thirteen Problems
Author: Agatha Christie

In The Thirteen Problems, all of the stories, except for the last one, emerge in the following way. A group of people meet at someone's home and take turns sharing real-life mysteries. The story-teller knows the solution to the mystery, and the others have to guess it based on the clues provided.

Miss Jane Marple is present in each group, and because she's an old-fashioned, unprepossessing spinster who's lived in a small village all her life, nobody thinks to include her at first. They don't know that living in a village has given her many opportunities to study human nature, and behind her gentle demeanor is a steeltrap mind that misses little. Unsurprisingly, she amazes them all.

What I liked about the collection as a whole was that it shows some of Christie's strengths as a writer. Each tale is a puzzle that the reader can try to solve before Miss Marple presents the solution; the reader feels like one of the participating guests. In each tale, Christie does a number of things efficiently. She carefully lays out each mystery, using well-sketched characters and clever misdirection. She also highlights the personality of each story-teller based on what he or she chooses to share with the guests, who often rib each other and make amusing or interesting remarks as the tale unfolds. As such, she's sustaining two levels of story, one with the circle of guests, and the other with the tales they share.

Three of the tales stood out for me enough to write about them here.

10 reasons to watch Gaslight (1944)

Title: Gaslight
Director: George Cukor
Language: English
Rating: PG

Synopsis
Paula Alquist (Ingrid Bergman) used to live with her aunt, a famous opera singer who was strangled to death in her own home. Years later, when studying music in Italy, Paula falls in love with and marries Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer), a pianist. The two move back to her aunt's old home in a pretty London square, where Gregory patiently sets about destroying her sanity.

(The expression gaslighting - when you deliberately cause someone to doubt their own sanity, judgment, and other mental faculties - comes from the 1930s play on which this movie is based, though the movie itself is what really popularized its usage.)

Good Short Fiction: Coyote Peyote (by Carole Nelson Douglas)

Title: Coyote Peyote
Author: Carole Nelson Douglas
Where I read it: Tails of Wonder and Imagination: Cat Stories (ed. Ellen Datlow)

Midnight Louie works as a detective in Las Vegas. You can find him at the Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino by the koi pond, which supplies him his dinner. He cuts a striking figure - black with "tourmaline-green" eyes and "topping twenty pounds soaking wet" - and has a pretty high opinion of himself. It isn't easy being the foremost feline detective (maybe the only feline detective?) in a city like Las Vegas.

In the story he's approached by a wild coyote who needs his help; the coyote death rate has soared at the borders of a real estate development called Peyote Skies just outside the city. Louie's first assumption is that they're getting killed off for trespassing:

No wonder the coyotes are goners. They were trespassing on some high-end new real estate of the first water. I sit under one of the paired yucca trees that mark the development's entrance to read the billboard, which features colors like trendy turquoise, orange and lavender bordered in a chorus line of alternating jalapeno peppers and howling coyotes.

Though I was curious about the mystery of the dying coyotes (and a dark tale it turned out to be) it was really Louie himself - and the idea of a cat detective - that drew me into the story (I'm sure he'd be happy about that). He narrates like a film noir detective - cool and perceptive, given to colorful descriptions, and knowing just how good he is. There's no femme fatale in the story, but he does get a sidekick for a while - Happy Hocks, a half-grown coyote who worships the ground Louie struts on. Along with the humor, attitude, and striking characterizations I loved the strong sense of place in this story: Las Vegas and its environs through the eyes of a feline who's seen it all.

-------------

Other stories in this collection include Puss-Cat (by Reggie Oliver) and The White Cat (by Joyce Carol Oates), along with Every Angel is Terrifying (by John Kessel), Tiger in the Snow (by Daniel Wynn Barber), Gordon the Self-Made Cat by Peter S. Beagle, and Guardians by George R. R. Martin.

-------------

This post has been linked to at this week's Short Stories on Wednesdays at Simple Clockwork.

Good Short Fiction: 4 tales from The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories

Collection: The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories
Editor: Patricia Craig

Title: Bring Back the Cat!
Author: Reginald Hill
Joe Sixsmith, a Brit of West Indian derivation, is a fledgling private eye called on to help find a cat that's gone missing. The owner, Mrs. Ellison, is a neurotic woman who lives in the sort of neighborhood where a man with Sixsmith's skin color is usually mistaken for the gardener. Her family is a strange, antagonistic bunch: a husband who lounges around reading the paper and pretending he's uninterested in Sixsmith's amateurish sleuthing, and two sullen, dysfunctional teenagers - a son, Auberon, and a daughter, Tittie (an apt nickname). Their next door neighbor, Bullivant, is cantankerous and has a ferocious dog (the prime suspect?).

There's more going on in this household than a missing cat, and from the start Sixsmith is in over his head. Part of what makes the story funny is that the people he interviews assume that he knows more than he does, so they offhandedly share things about themselves that startle him; at times he hits on the right line of questioning by accident. Sixsmith is not a stupid man by any means, just inexperienced, with a tendency to mull things over rather than make quick timely deductions. He's a likable guy with a dry sense of humor, and he does his best to deal with these people; by the end he's uncovered everything, inadvertently, and only realizes it after the fact.

-------------

Title: The Killing of Michael Finnegan
Author: Michael Gilbert

After a spy is brutally murdered, his widow and two of his colleagues work together to track down the killers and attempt to foil a terrorist plot. The story contains a novel's worth of material: a back-stabbing insider, forced confessions, some politics, sharp efficient characterizations, strong emotional moments, a race against the clock, and dry humor mixed in with the deadliness of the characters' undertakings.

-------------

Title: The Oxford Way of Death
Author: Robert Barnard

It has happened twice in the last year that a student would begin to read his weekly essay to a normally comatose old gentleman, only to find on concluding his piece that he had been reading for some time to a corpse.

At St. Pothinus's Hall, the Fellows are for the most part aging and wedded to their ways; they don't care much about their college's poor academic record, so long as they can stay comfortably encrusted to their posts. When the Fellow responsible for teaching Ancient Persian passes away in front of his one student, the other Fellows wonder who can replace him. The mischievous Wittling, who teaches classics, finally points out a suitable candidate: Sandowa Bulewa, who is - horrors! - a woman. Not only a woman, but a young black woman who had studied at Cambridge and the Sorbonne. With the exception of the story's narrator, Peter Borthwick, who at age 47 is the second youngest man there and considered too forward-thinking, the Fellows can't stomach the thought of Sandowa Bulewa as a colleague, though Wittling is willing to give it a try if only to stir things up and make trouble. Little does he know that his suggestion will lead to his death.

The Oxford Way of Death is an excellent dark comedy, a funny and disturbing look at the amorality, conformity, and stagnation often found in academia. Even the forward-thinking narrator, good at stating his principles and making his indignation known, will subside like the rest. As he says: "It's amazing what we liberal intellectuals can take in our strides, when we set our minds to it."

-------------

Title: Three is a Lucky Number
Author: Margery Allingham
"At five o'clock on a September afternoon Ronald Frederick Torbay was making preparations for his third murder." Torbay is a black widower, and one way the author builds suspense is to have him think back on his first two murders even as he's getting ready for the third. In some respects his wives have been similar - middle-aged women, unnoticed and unused to affection, who also have some money; in other ways their personalities have differed, with his current wife (and soon-to-be victim) the most sensible one so far. The story's spark comes mostly from the details, the mounting suspense, and the hope that Torbay will get his comeuppance.

-------------

Other recommended stories from The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories: Death on the Air (by Ngaio Marsh) and Great Aunt Allie's Flypapers (by P.D. James).

Good Short Fiction: Great Aunt Allie's Flypapers (P.D. James)

Title: Great Aunt Allie's Flypapers
Author: P.D. James (Phyllis Dorothy James)
Where I read it: The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories (edited by Patricia Craig)

Synopsis
Canon Hubert Boxdale has inherited a large sum of money from his step-grandmother, Allegra (known to the family as "Great Aunt Allie"). He's reluctant to accept the money, because he was never sure about Allie's innocence in regards to the death of his grandfather; though she wasn't convicted in court, people always suspected that she had murdered her husband to obtain his fortune. Hubert asks his godson, Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh, to reopen the decades-old murder case and see if he can settle the question of Allie's innocence with certainty.

Some reasons to read it

• The characterization of Hubert, who is a good unselfish man. Thinking him naive, people often take advantage of him, but he knows what they're up to even as he keeps trying to help them. A key insight is that "his goodness had in some sense protected him." Dalgliesh will have to protect Hubert too, but not necessarily from finding out anything painful about Allie, who may very well have been innocent. Dalgliesh has great respect for his godfather, and wonders sometimes how a man like that can live "in a carnivorous world in which gentleness, humility, and unworldliness are hardly conducive to survival let alone success."
  

  Dalgliesh told himself that he should have remembered what, as a small boy, he had discovered about Uncle Hubert's conscience; that it operated as a warning bell and that, unlike most people, he never pretended that it hadn't sounded or that he hadn't heard it or that, having heard it, something must be wrong with the mechanism.

  
  
• Another person Dalgliesh comes to like during the course of the investigation is Allie herself. I won't reveal much more about her. In the timeframe of the story she has passed away, and never appears outside of other people's recollections and records, but her presence lingers throughout. The question of her innocence is answered conclusively by the end; and at the end, after we find out exactly what happened to Hubert's grandfather, we're left to reflect on the nature of innocence.
  
  
• James is an engaging story-teller. Her characterizations are sharp, her writing skillful and precise; the story is rich with wry humor and keen observations of human nature. All throughout there are questions - if it wasn't Allie, then who was it? Dalgliesh tracks down witnesses and other potential suspects who are still alive; he pores over trial records. There's always the danger that the truth will be lost to time; or it might be a painful truth that's best left only partially revealed.
  

---------------

Other recommended tales from The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories are Death on the Air (by Ngaio Marsh) and these stories here.

Good Short Fiction: Death on the Air (Ngaio Marsh)

Title: Death on the Air
Author: Ngaio Marsh (Edith Ngaio Marsh)
Where I read it: The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories (edited by Patricia Craig)

Synopsis

On the 25th of December at 7:30 a.m. Mr. Septimus Tonks was found dead beside his wireless set.

Chief Detective-Inspector Roderick Alleyn investigates the death of a man who was apparently electrocuted by his own radio. As it becomes clear that this wasn't an accident, Alleyn needs to sort through a houseful of suspects including the wife and children, servants and employees, and friends of the family. Septimus Tonks was a cruel tyrannical man with no shortage of people who feared and despised him. Alleyn's investigation uncovers secret relationships, dysfunctions, and the wreckage of an unhappy home.

Some reasons to read it

• Marsh attends to the technical details of the crime and to the delicate dance of timing and opportunity that makes it so difficult to pinpoint the murderer. What's most compelling about her story though are the characters and the household dynamics.
  
  
• The precision of the crime contrasts with the messiness of the people. Marsh reveals to us these wounded people, and the man who liked to grind them under his thumb. Sometimes the story only suggests things that are all the more disturbing for not being entirely exposed. You wouldn't find this family sitting around the tree opening presents together.
  

  The radio hummed, gathered volume, and found itself.
  'No-oel, No-o-el,' it roared.

  
  At the same time, they can be decent to each other in small subdued ways, Mr. Tonks excluded. Unhappy or damaged as they are, the different family members and employees understand each other. Love can grow in unforgiving soil, like a weed that's difficult to uproot.
  
  
• The story is absorbing, both for the mystery and for the character portraits. I wonder at what stage Alleyn solved the crime and knew who did it; he's a man who seems to keep his cards close to his chest. Certain conversations gain significance at the end, after everything is revealed.
  

  "I'm the least suspicious man alive. I'm merely being tidy."

  
  

----------

Other recommended tales from The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories are Great Aunt Allie's Flypapers (by P.D. James) and these stories here.