Green Men and Occasional Pseudonyms

Mystery Club #4

I enjoy the spooky and melodramatic cover art that graces vintage paperback gothic mysteries, but I rarely pick them up to read myself -- probably because they tend to be heavy on the 💕romance💕 and helpless female protagonists. 

However, a couple of years ago I found a 1987 US printing of The Castle of the Demon by Patrick Ruell (one of UK mystery author Reginald Hill’s pseudonyms), and couldn’t resist.

I had fun with its mashup of tropes – a little bit of vintage gothic, a little bit of mystery, a generous dollop of local folklore, a dash of potential romances (plural!), all set against a seaside cliff breeze, and by the end … well you might read it yourself, so I don’t want to spoil anything.  Things get a little crazy towards the end!

What really grabbed me about the book initially besides its title (!!) and the diabolical cover (!!!!) was the writeup on the back:   

“For Emily Follet, alone in the remote village of Skinburness, fear could take many forms.  It could be the college, formerly the castle of a renowned sorcerer, where no one seems to know what goes on.  It could be the mysterious black rider on his black horse.  Or the two recent unexplained drownings.  Or the green men.  Above all, the green men.”  And off I went to follow the train of green things, as I always do.  

Please note that Skinburness is a real place, and its name is honest-to-gosh thought to mean "the headland of the Demon haunted castle."  I’m glad it inspired Hill to pen this tale!  

Our narrator, Emily Follet, is a woman finding her own way for the first time perhaps ever.  She is determined to be independent.  She makes new friends during her vacation break, playing dominoes with the old village dudes at the local tavern, spending time alone with her lanky lolloping dog Cal on the beach, and at night she reads from a book on local folklore that she’s found on the bookshelves in her cottage.  

But strange things start happening at an accelerating pace, and it becomes difficult to know who to trust and who to avoid, who to keep at arm’s length and who to have dinner with, if only for politeness’s sake.  New disappearances occur, the windswept dunes hide secret excavations… and maybe a corpse or two?  And in the depths of the night, alone in her cottage, she hears strange voices on the phone line, and sees something unbelievable peering through the window into her bedroom at 3:00 in the morning. 

Of course, she can’t tell the polite Constable Parfrey the whole story about the face at the window.  He would think she was barmy.  “He seemed doubtful enough about its existence, as it was.  He probably suspected some kind of hysterical nightmare.  He would have hardly been reassured if she had told him the face was green.”  Events continue to ramp up, with mysterious nurses, midnight assaults, strange “archaeologists”, and then it goes completely off the rails in a fun little darkride.  

So if you like a diversion on the spooky side, with a decently-written female narrator, a gothic seaside setting, just the barest dusting of romance, and a dog named Cal instead of Scooby-Doo, you’ve got yourself a book recommendation here!  I hope someone brings it back into print soon. 

 

TONIGHT! Event: JAWS documentary at SPACE Gallery!

 

WHAT: Film screening of The Farmer & the Shark

WHEN:  TONIGHT!!!

Weds Sept 10 @7:00pm (doors open 6:30)

90 min runtime, followed by Q&A

WHERE:  SPACE Gallery, 538 Congress St, Portland ME

TICKETS:  

https://space538.org/event/the-farmer-and-the-shark/

It's the 50th anniversary of Jaws this year!!!  

 

Join us TONIGHT at SPACE for the Maine premiere of "The Farmer & the Shark" - a documentary about the making of Jaws through the lens of Craig Kingsbury, the Martha's Vineyard farmer and fisherman who inspired the film character of the one and only QUINT!!! 

 

Director John Campopiano joins us for a Q&A after the film, as we celebrate the tail end of summer in a very New England way. 

Poet vs. Jabberwock - FIGHT!

Mystery Club #3

Fredric Brown’s Night of the Jabberwock (1950) 

vs. Michael Connelly’s The Poet (1996)

Reading Michael Connelly’s The Poet resurrected my experience of reading Fredric Brown’s Night of the Jabberwock, even though they are very different books.  So of course I had to dig out my old copy of it, and re-read it – even before I finished with The Poet.

I’ll start with The Poet because I really want to talk about Jabberwock – I like both books, but Jabberwock remains a favorite.  You’ll see.

Michael Connelly’s The Poet:

Last year, after years of hearing about him from others, I decided it was finally time for me to try a Michael Connelly novel.  I started reading The Poet, and was feeling pretty lukewarm about it – but as soon as the literary element made itself known in the storyline, I was hooked. 

The Poet is one of three novels Connelly has written featuring the main character Jack McEvoy, an investigative reporter.  In discussing McEvoy, Connelly has mentioned that his character is somewhat autobiographical, but “what is autobiographical is his view of the business” – when Connelly is writing the character, he writes what he himself would do in each given situation, drawing from his own experience as a crime beat reporter throughout the 1980s.  (see interview with Paul Davis here: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jul/16/michael-connelly-on-fair-warning-and-his-crime-rep/)

The Poet definitely feels personal, so I was pleased to find that verification in his own words.  I say personal, but really it feels like it’s unpretentious, more specifically.  McEvoy’s inner dialogue is raw and straightforward.  It gives you the impression that you are hearing his thoughts as fast as he is – there’s no filter, no buffer to slow them down and sift them out.  This also means there are moments in the story where McEvoy is just as in-the-dark as you, the reader (perhaps even more so).

McEvoy’s twin brother, a police officer, died shortly before the story starts -- a purported suicide.  But something about the case bothers McEvoy, and when he latches onto some strange clues while digging into other similar cases, ostensibly in the process of researching police suicides as a whole, he knows he’s laid hold of a case much bigger, and more dangerous, than anything he could have imagined.  At the end of Chapter Two, he lays treacherous groundwork for the story to come, telling us, “I thought I knew something about death then.  I thought I knew about evil.  But I didn’t know anything.”

Two sentences form the lynchpin of this story, written inside the fogged windshield of the brother’s car: “Out of time.  Out of space.”  A cryptic legacy of which no one knows what to make.

And from those two short sentences spin the rest of this tale, feathering pinions of tiny case details, cop by cop, that stand out on reinspection, that have bothered the investigating officers, sometimes for years after their fellow officers’ deaths.

Needless to say, things accelerate quickly.  McEvoy finds himself first working against, then with, then against, then with a special FBI unit, and the creep of a killer piles horror upon horror as he hears the baying of the hounds getting closer.  The elegant sentences stolen from an age-old poet to grace each incident cannot conceal the sordid dealings which lie at the root of this spreading evil.  The only solution is a brutal cauterization of the elusive source.  I won’t spoil the story for you, in case you have yet to read it yourself.

Fredric Brown’s The Night of the Jabberwock:

Several years ago, while I was attending ReaderCon in Burlington, MA, my friend and fellow bookdealer Bob Eldridge gave me a copy of Fredric Brown’s Night of the Jabberwock.  I had never read Brown before, although I was familiar with him by reputation from his wild and absurd scifi work such as Martians, Go Home (1955).  Brown was also an early originator of flash fiction (the two opening sentences of “Knock” 1948, which form a complete story themselves, and “Answer” 1954).  But I hadn’t realized he also wrote mysteries.  That evening, sitting in my hotel room, I began reading Night of the Jabberwock, and didn’t get to sleep until very late that night.

Where The Poet embeds a few choice lines in each of its cases, waiting to be found by McEvoy’s stubborn tenacity, Night of the Jabberwock opens each chapter with an epigraph drawn from Lewis Carroll’s poem "Jabberwocky."  And like Connelly, Brown uses his experience as a newspaper proof-reader and reporter to build the backbone of this winding story.

The passage beginning with “’Twas brillig and the slithy toves,…” sets us out on our adventure, not quite knowing what we are up against, and feeling as ill-prepared as the forewarned son of Carroll’s rhymes.

Our guide and narrator is hardly better-off than we are.  Doc Stoeger, regularly haphazard newspaperman, publisher of the weekly Carmel City Clarion, and Lewis Carroll afficionado, wakes from a dream of the Jabberwock coming for him on the dark streets of his small town, only to find he’s fallen asleep at work waiting for the next-to-final proof of his latest issue, due to come out on Friday morning.  A few small tweaks to the type for the edition accomplished, he heads for Smiley’s across the street, looking forward to a drink to end the long day.

Smiley tells him, “Glad you got here early, Doc.  It's damn dull this evening.” 

Doc commiserates with him.  “It’s dull every evening in Carmel City, and most of the time I like it.  But Lord, if only something would happen just once on a Thursday evening, I’d love it.  Just once in my long career, I’d like to have one hot story to break to a panting public.”

Clearly, we readers know things are about to change.  Instead of the usual Thursday night drill, Doc is about to find himself in the middle of what seems like a dozen different nightmare collusions, none of which he could have anticipated in a million years.  This Thursday, he’s going to wish the evening’s brouhaha started and ended with having to figure out what to put in the paper now that the Tuesday rummage sale has been canceled at the last minute.

The evening starts off normally enough.  Rummage sale kerfuffles (you thought I was kidding?), some booze, a chess game, rampant Carroll-quoting challenges, etc.  A weaving walk home through the dark.  A dite[1] more booze.  Then Doc learns of the existence of the Roman Candle Department at the local fireworks factory (introducing him to a new lifegoal).  Still, all fairly normal Thursday night events.

Next one Yehudi Smith arrives on Doc’s doorstep, a peculiar chap hailing from a Lewis Carroll-loving club, with a strange invitation for Doc to attend a secret meeting.  More booze!  More Carroll quoting!  But these veer into some wonderful deepdives, introducing the lighter Carroll reader to such passages as:

I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,

And each damp thing that creeps and crawls

Went wobble-wobble on the walls.

-- from “The Palace of Humbug”

Smith also brandishes a clipping from a nearby newspaper at Doc, titled “Man Slain by Unknown Beast,” and broaches the topic of risks associated with joining ranks with the Carroll-loving club.  Attack by a real Jabberwock?!

And thus the night begins to turn its tail and reveal a sinister side.

Before dawn breaks, Doc will have lived a lifetime’s worth of insane and terrifying events, all by pure happenstance.  All echoing back and forth from Carroll’s rhymes.  All insensible, as most human things are.

It’s not in the book, but surely at some point Doc quoted Alice in Wonderland to himself: “Dear, dear!  How queer everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning?”

In closing:

Both Brown and Connelly are aces at writing a tale that lures you in quietly, then gets its hooks in you with all sorts of intriguing details, and then thrashes you mercilessly (but with great interest in your entertainment as a reader).  Almost a half-century apart, but both highly skilled, and both well worth a read.

Early dustjacket art for Jabberwock!

 [1] A “dite” is a Maine measurement, somewhere between a smidge and a bit.  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dite

EVENT: Jaws documentary! The Farmer & the Shark by John Campopiano

WHAT: Film screening of The Farmer & the Shark

WHEN:  Weds Sept 10 @7:00pm (doors open 6:30) - 90 min runtime, followed by Q&A

WHERE:  SPACE Gallery, 538 Congress St, Portland ME

TICKETS:  https://space538.org/event/the-farmer-and-the-shark/

It's the 50th anniversary of Jaws this year!!!  

 

Join us at SPACE for the Maine premiere of "The Farmer & the Shark" - a documentary about the making of Jaws through the lens of Craig Kingsbury, the Martha's Vineyard farmer and fisherman who inspired the film character of the one and only QUINT!!! 

 

Director John Campopiano joins us for a Q&A after the film, as we celebrate the tail end of summer in a very New England way.

Picnics, Lies, and Videotape

Mystery Club #2

There once was a book that haunted me.  

First, it haunted me as a movie, which I watched on VHS tape back in the 1990s, when I worked at Videoport.  

Then, it haunted me because I hadn’t read the book yet (that took a while, finally read it in 2022, phew).  

Finally, several months later, it haunted me from within another book!!!  Madness!  What is this willful book?

It is none other than the Australian masterpiece, Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay.  

 

The dreamlike movie of the same title (1975) was directed by Peter Weir, in his iconically surreal manner (his Last Wave also made a deep impression on me in my 20s, another Videoport-era watch).  

 

The novel was written based on a series of dreams Joan Lindsay had, and wasn’t published in the US until Penguin brought it back to life in 2014, so I guess I can be excused for not having read it until recently. 

 

And the third element? 

Well… that’s how this post happened.  I had picked up Riley Sager’s The Last Time I Lied and was intrigued by it immediately.  It wasn’t the first Riley Sager I’d read, that was Home Before Dark.  

 

The Last Time I Lied starts by introducing us to our narrator, Emma, an artist who is gaining notice for her mysterious paintings.  What no one know is that each of these dark wooded landscapes hide three missing girls from Emma’s past, obscured but present under their layers of paint.

I devoured The Last Time I Lied in a matter of days (rare for me), and found myself haunted by it in a way which distinctly reminded me of Lindsay’s book.  It wasn’t even so much the matching set of missing girls, three from Appleyard College in Picnic at Hanging Rock, and three from Camp Nightingale in Sager’s book.  

 

It was moreso the dreamlike summer atmosphere, the liminal spaces being explored by the girls outside of their normal lives while away at camp, and then off-hours in forbidden adventures outside of the camp. 

The setting (beyond the warm weather) couldn’t be more different between the two books.  

 

Picnic at Hanging Rock is sunstruck late Victorian Australia, arid, all sandstone and dust, peppered with desert-dwelling plants, parched and sparse with a fringe of greenery and forest, made more uncomfortable by school uniforms and formal dress requirements.   

 

The Last Time I Lied is a wooded lake, rich with birdsong, treeshadow, and moss, carpeted and cloaked by water and woods.  While the camp's founder, a foreboding presence who lives on-site, is not to be argued with, within the strictures of the camp the young women find ample room for pushing boundaries.

 

At Hanging Rock, there seems to be no space for secrets, no place to hide, which makes the disappearances all the more unsettling.  The sunbleached stony heights of Picnic Rock stand brazenly out and dare searchers to exhaust and dehydrate themselves in their futile quest.  

 

At Camp Nightingale, there are too many places to hide.  While the disappearances are upsetting, they don’t defy explanation.  The wilderness around the lake’s dark water closes in and thwarts searchers.

 

It wasn’t until I finished reading The Last Time I Lied, and in a mood of thoroughness read the afterword by Sager that I realized how right my instincts were!  Sager had deliberately riffed on the dreamy haze / nightmare sharp glow of Picnic at Hanging Rock, drawing from the haunting mood of Peter Weir's excellent movie, but not allowing himself to read the original book by Joanna Lindsay until long after he'd completed his own novel.

 

Both books are well worth reading.  

 

Lindsay’s book was a perfect read in the thick of winter for me, especially February and March where everything seems to slow down to a trickle and reading about hot, dry places on the other side of the world is a balm, no matter how intriguingly nightmarish they might be.  

 

I would recommend reading The Last Time I Lied in the thick of summer, when the sun is so hot you flee for the wooded shadows, and the humidity makes you not want to move any more once you reach the shade.  

 

Criterion's cover art for their rerelease.

Criterion was kind enough to rerelease the film in recent years, so you can watch it via their streaming channel or by picking up a DVD or Blu-ray of the film.  There's a good trailer here, if you'd like to get a taste of the film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_XNrF6lsvw