Oysters, snails, and a most satisfying quiz win

At a world-cinema-themed quiz conducted last month by whysoQrious (Adittya Nath Mubaiyi and Mudita Chauhan-Mubayi) at Depot48, Greater Kailash-2, our team… won. This was certainly a first for me (not that I have much of a history in quizzing; mainly just attending a few of these informal monthly quizzes over the past two or three years). And the win was thanks largely to the heavy-lifting done by the taciturn Uday Bhatia (his first appearance at one of these) and quizzing veteran Tathagata Chatterjee.
 
Nikhil Kumar and I – the other two participants – were mostly content to be spectators, but the final, tie-breaking question was one that it might be said I had prepared for over 34 years. It involved Spartacus and the famously censored snails-and-oysters scene between Laurence Olivier and Tony Curtis, which I had read trivia about in cinema books during my nascent obsession with Old Hollywood in the early 1990s. (I watched Spartacus for the first time in mid-1991 - it was one of my major entry points into Old Hollywood, as mentioned in this 20-year-old post - but the version I saw then didn't have the snails-and-oysters line. I probably first heard about the story from Kirk Douglas's memoir.)
Anyway, as Nirupama Kotru (a former team-members, not with us last night but hovering about in spirit like a relentless kotri bird) pointed out, the Spartacus question was my Slumdog Millionaire moment.
 
P.S. the team name, suggested by my punster friend Tipu, was “Jaani Hall” or “Jaani All” (a tribute to Diane Keaton, who had died the previous day, and Annie Hall). The Bengali “Jaani” turned out to be prophetic too - since the very first question, which Tathagata gleefully pounced on, involved Ray’s Charulata. (And a later question featured Ray’s short film Pikoo.)
 
P.P.S. Tathagata has an entertaining public post on FB about the evening, which you can read here.

The Ritwik Ghatak online discussion

Ritwik Ghatak’s birth centenary is this month. Last week a few dozen of us had a wide-ranging Zoom discussion about him, and about my friend Shamya Dasgupta’s new anthology, which I mentioned here. Four of the contributors to the book – Shamya, Amborish Roychoudhury, CS Venkiteswaran, and myself – were present, as you can see from these images (all bearded men - I call it a WolfManel), but other participants weighed in too with thoughts about Ghatak and his work and influence. As did the Westland publisher, Karthika VK.

A few of the talking points included: how a viewer can feel differently about Ritwik Ghatak over time (with personal growth and of course with the availability of better prints/subtitles); a political move in his seemingly least “political” film Bari Theke Paliye; Keralite attitudes to Ghatak; the film teacher who claimed not to care for cinema as a form; humour, playfulness and music in Ghatak’s cinema.

Anyone who would like the link to the Zoom recording, please email me (jaiarjun@gmail.com) and I’ll send it across.

(And thanks to Shillpi Singh for these creatives and for pushing us to keep sharing information about the book.)

More from my crime-fiction treasure chest

Some of the loot I have accumulated in the past few weeks – most (not all) from Golden Age Crime Fiction, and most of these yet unread. Over periods of much personal distress/agitation in the past few months, I have found that nothing focused my mind and provided a few hours of calm as much as GA mysteries do. John Dickson Carr has of course been the cornerstone of my rediscovery of the genre, but I have been exploring other works too.

Very brief notes on some of these: 

1) I have loved a few of Fredric Brown’s short stories (notably the impossible-crime/no-footprints story “The Laughing Butcher”) but The Fabulous Clipjoint is the first of his novels I will be reading.
[UPDATE: read it, liked it very, very much – though it is more of a coming-of-age story, with elements of "soft-boiled" noir, than a complex murder mystery. Something very comforting about the relationship between the narrator, young Ed Hunter, and his uncle Ambrose, who takes him under his wing.]

2) Hake Talbot wasn’t exactly prolific or widely known as a crime writer, but Rim of the Pit has a considerable cult reputation among locked-room-mystery fans; I have heard some great things about it.
[UPDATE: read it – some clever stuff in it, many good ideas, but parts of the solution are also confusing/hard to picture without the illustration that I believe was in a earlier edition of the book. Will try to write a longer review sometime.]

3) Tour de Force will be my second Christianna Brand novel (after Green for Danger, which I wrote about here recently). But I did read a brilliant meta short story by her called “Dear Mr Editor” (originally published as “Dear Mr MacDonald” in an anthology edited by John MacDonald).

4) Big admirer of Cornell Woolrich’s short stories, and The Bride Wore Black (not quite a mystery in the sense that the other books here are, I believe) is a long-overdue read. 

5) Having greatly enjoyed Yukito Ayatsuji’s The Decagon House Murders (in particular) and The Mill House Murders, I have high expectations of The Labyrinth House Murders, which was published around the same time (late 1980s, part of the shin honkaku or “new orthodox” movement in Japanese crime writing).

6) The Carr you see here, It Walks by Night, was his first novel, from 1930. This edition includes one of his short stories from that period, “The Shadow of the Goat”, which I have read and enjoyed.
[UPDATE: I read It Walks by Night two days ago and mostly liked it very much – though I felt a bit let down by the final “locked-room” explanation, which seemed to derive from the omission of some key information. Carr’s writing though is often very vivid – as a young man he was a bold, stylish writer, and I like the Grand Guignol aspects of his first few novels.

I am sharing here a short excerpt from a bit where the narrator visits a fencing school - one of many neat descriptive passages in this book.]

For Asrani, in admiration

(Did this little tribute to Asrani for Frontline magazine. Didn’t get to revisit some films that I would have liked to, but the Koshish memory I mentioned – and the Bawarchi one, and a few others – are indelible, even after having watched the films many years ago)
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If you were growing up in the 1980s, watching Hindi films of that era and the previous decade – while also toggling between the mainstream and the so-called Middle Cinema helmed by Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Basu Chatterjee and others – the name Asrani could mean different things.

One Asrani was the comedian who formed a troupe with Kader Khan, Shakti Kapoor and others in a number of formulaic 1980s movies – many of them remakes of south Indian films – that had almost stand-alone comic tracks. Playing stock roles like hawaldars and munims and pandits. Some of those scenes were entertaining enough, but they were often facile and lowbrow – and if that’s how you first met him, it was easy to see him only as a funny-looking little man born to play slapstick.

As a child I thought of Asrani – if I thought of him at all – as a personification of a Jack-in-the-box toy I had. A clown popping up suddenly in the middle of a scene, with a big wide grin and a seemingly oversized head: speaking fast, veering towards hysteria while “heroes” and “heroines” retained their gravitas in his presence. I had him slotted as one of those comedians – along with Paintal and Jagdeep and, from an earlier generation, Mukri – whose truncated stature seemed symbolised by the fact that they were only known by a single name. These impressions were bulwarked by a film that cast an inescapable shadow – Sholay. Asrani, as the Hitler-like jailer, and Jagdeep, as Soorma Bhopali, are the two most slapstick-y elements in that classic – and (purely from a narrative point of view) also the two most dispensable, even though their performances are so skilful.

Given these perceptions, I was genuinely startled to learn that Satyajit Ray had initially thought of Asrani for the part of Wajid Ali Shah when he was casting Bombay actors for Shatranj ke Khiladi. This was surprising not just because of the physical difference between the lithe Asrani and the man who eventually played the role, the imposing Amjad Khan – but because of a perception that the former had a limited range.

How wrong I was about that!

Yes, Asrani’s non-“hero”-like physique and face did seem to limit him in terms of the roles he might do (especially in an industry which loved typecasting) – but watch a swathe of his films across the 1970s, and there is no second-guessing his versatility. The more you see, the more impressed you get. In Gulzar’s Koshish, he is aptly loathsome as the man who causes the film’s central tragedy, the death of an infant – this is a thickly moustached rogue who could have been another sort of caricature, yet he also finds beats of quiet naturalism, as in a little moment where he corrects someone who says “Devdas” instead of “Surdas” (to refer to an unsighted man). A year earlier, in Mere Apne, Asrani more than held his own while playing alongside such performers as Vinod Khanna, Shatrughan Sinha and Danny, who appeared to have more “swag” than he did. In Basu Chatterjee’s Chhoti si Baat, with all appearances to the contrary, he convinced us that he was enough of a potential romantic rival to Amol Palekar to justify the film’s amusing plot.

His style and personality made for a very intriguing contrast with another of my favourite performers from that era, Deven Varma (who was also closely associated with the Middle Cinema directors). Varma was a master of the deadpan, a style of acting common in Marathi theatre – some of the funniest things he did and said were with a straight expression and monotone voice. Asrani, on the other hand, had one of the most mobile faces you could imagine, and he made it work to his advantage across a spectrum from massy comedy to intense drama. This often happens in the same film: watch his effortlessly natural moves in the opening scene of Abhimaan, swaying and gesturing in the background as Amitabh Bachchan’s Subir sings “Meet na Mila” – then watch him a little later, squawking in astonishment when he hears that Subir has married Uma (Jaya Bhaduri). And then still later, in the marvellously performed scenes where his character chastises Subir: an example of someone who might have remained the irrelevant sidekick coming into his own and distilling the film’s themes and concerns.

Then there is his delightful work in musical sequences. Music has always been one of the great levelers in Hindi cinema – it can make equals of men and women, rich and poor… as well as of macho heroes and their comedian buddies. Asrani is magnificent in these scenes, including many directed by Hrishikesh Mukherjee. One can point to the songs where he is central – the tonga-wallah’s song which he sang in his own voice in Alaap (after Kishore Kumar didn’t show up at the recording studio) and the energetic “Woh Jhootha hai Vote Na Usko Dena” number from Namak Haraam. But even when he isn’t centre-stage, the eye is drawn to him. One of my favourite moments from Bawarchi is when the impish old Harindranath Chattopadhyaya joins the “Bhor Aayi Gaya Andhiyara” song, and Asrani, playing the Westernised son, comes out of his room and sees his father singing: his expression goes from being faintly amused to becoming attentive and moving his head in tune with the singing, and nodding along approvingly, keeping the taal with his gestures and movements. As a viewer, here and elsewhere, you feel like you can appreciate a song better just by watching Asrani absorbed in it.

****

Naseeruddin Shah has spoken of seeing American actors like Dustin Hoffman in the late 1960s and realising it was possible to look like that and still be a popular star-actor. With Asrani, if he hadn’t settled into the Bombay mainstream, it is very easy to imagine him fitting into the 1970s parallel-cinema world, with a personality and looks that were as off-kilter as Naseer's or Om Puri's. There is a precedent for this: when very young, at the FTII, he appeared in Ritwik Ghatak’s avant-garde short film “Fear”, where the striking black-and-white cinematography makes the most of his face, often seen in close-up in the foreground, enigmatic and inscrutable (he plays “the quiet man” in this eerie chamber drama). When you watch him here, many what-if scenarios open up.

But of course, what Asrani did accomplish in his chosen stream was enough. For me, and for others of my age, an essential step in growing up as movie-watchers was to realise that the funny little character actor of our childhood was a performer of tremendous depth and seriousness (and those qualities can apply equally to his comic roles, not just the dramatic ones). “Hrishi-da saw hidden things in me,” he told me modestly on email once, “Sometimes, I was taken aback at how he could tap in me something unusual which even I was not aware of.” But it’s the actor in front of the camera who has to execute, and Govardhan Asrani – to give him that full name denied in screen credits – did this over and over again in the course of a career that is studded with beautiful little moments. Even those who think they know Hindi films of that time inside out would do well to revisit them and savour his contributions.

Saving private Pandey

Pandey update (a sequel to the previous post): he is back. And I am nearly as exhausted as he must be – hence, staccato-ish post:

He had made it to Alaknanda, a good 7-8 km from Saket.

If that surprises you – firecracker-disoriented dogs regularly cross much longer distances, even across busy city roads, moving further and further from their safe spaces as they try futilely to escape the terrifying noises assailing them. Last year a few Saket dogs ended up in Noida and probably beyond (I can only speak for the ones who were actually traced). And the big Jahanpanah forest often becomes a corridor from one part of south Delhi to another.

While I’m very happy and relieved, and a little self-congratulatory too, I also know this could so easily have gone the other way – chance and luck played a big part here, as they do in all things.

It began with a kind-hearted woman in Alaknanda sending me a short video yesterday, which she had happened to take of a very scared thirsty lost Pandey coming to her for comfort on Diwali night (before quickly bolting again). Given that the video was from two days ago in a neighbourhood packed with large apartment complexes and societies, I realised this was going to be a needle-in-a-huge-haystack search. (Also because of his personality type – constantly running and hiding, unlikely to spend a large amount of time at any one place.)

Then, as I was driving towards the area yesterday afternoon, further word came that he had been seen in Narmada Apartments on two separate days – which created a little more hope that he was trying to stay put somewhere, or was too tired to keep running around.

After getting there and looking around, I spoke to guards and shopkeepers and dhobis, circulated photos, left my phone number with as many people as I could. Then went back there late at night, and was there again from 5 onwards this morning, these being the timings when he was most likely to come out and scavenge. Walked around a lot, saw many other lost dogs, including collar-less ones – victims of this beautiful “festival of light and love” – running helter-skelter. Many of them won’t find their way home.

By 8 AM I had reconciled myself to not finding Pandey today. In fact I would have left already by that time, but I was standing by my car, sending a few updates to animal groups, when I got a call from a sympathetic-looking dog-walker whom I had happened to meet in Narmada Apartments (and whom I had mechanically given my number to, though almost sure by this time that Pandey was no longer in the colony). He had spotted Pandey on his walking route. I went back in, taking directions, preparing myself for more dashed hopes… but there he was, whining away at the many injustices wreaked on him by an uncaring universe.

He is limping and has wounds on his back paws, which is understandable. Had to carry him to the gate and then to the car. Drove with one hand while handing him paneer pieces in the back-seat with the other (this is probably frowned upon in some countries).

Have kept him in my flat for now – Lara doesn’t like this but that can’t be helped. Have put a new collar with my number on him. Hoping he gradually overcomes his fear and his injuries, and starts going down the stairs. And that there aren’t many firecracker interludes in the coming days. (A chhath puja is coming up now, I’m told. And the sound of crackers was fairly pronounced near the Jahanpanah forest area at around 11.30 last night.)

Meanwhile, thanks everyone, for your wishes. Do please extend a few of them towards the hundreds of other lost animals, many of whom won’t be as lucky as Pandey was. And more practically, IF you get a chance to help or feed a runaway animal – or to take a photo/video and share it to any groups you know – please try to do it. (I know this sort of thing isn’t easy. Apart from anything else it can take a big emotional toll. But still.)

In the most wretched week of the year...

An occasional side-benefit of being a professional cynic is that one is very rarely surprised or shocked by bad things. This year’s Diwali “celebrations”, though, have surpassed my most dire expectations. (Given the Delhi government’s statements and the general ugly gloating about “Hindu pride”, I had accounted for five or six straight days of firecracker activity of varying intensity – instead it began a good week before Diwali, around Karva Chauth, and is still going on today, with Govardhan Puja presumably being the latest pretext.) And there’s a very real chance now that I have lost one of my gentlest, most nervous community dogs for good: despite having made every effort days in advance to keep him safe; despite having pledged to myself (after a couple of traumatic instances when he fled the more moderate cracker activity of previous years and re-emerged only after two or three days) that this time I would do everything possible for him.

On the evenings of the 15th and 16th, when loud fireworks were already in use – even if “only” for a couple of hours – in the colony park adjacent to mine, I kept this dog inside the flat and let him out only when the noise outside had died down. What I couldn’t have realistically accounted for was that the next *morning*, at around 10 or 11 AM, a series of loud explosions would spook him so much that he would flee our part of the neighbourhood.

He has been gone for six days as I write this, and there doesn’t seem much hope, especially given his very timid personality, reluctance to come out into the open in unfamiliar terrain even when hungry or thirsty, and the fact that he is always liable to get attacked by other dogs. (When he first appeared in our colony around seven years ago, he was immediately attacked and wounded. It took him a long time to settle down; even after all these years he still gets bullied by a younger or more boisterous dog, and he spends – I mean spent – the majority of his time on our DDA flat stairway.)

What makes it especially painful this time is that there has been not a single day’s respite from loud crackers over the past week: it’s the 22nd evening as I write this, and occasional deafening bombs are still bursting nearby. Even if it’s just two or three sudden explosions per minute (it is currently more than that), that’s still more than enough to keep nervous animals on edge, anticipating worse noise to come. Pandey ji – that’s the name given to this extremely nervous dog when he first came here, and it stuck – is exactly the sort who might stay hidden deep inside a colony naala waiting to emerge only after half a day of absolute silence. And in the past week, there have been no such windows of time.

I have been up nights, keeping a couple of the other outside-dogs indoors, circulating information on animal groups (which are anyway chock-full of posts about lost dogs across the NCR, including the ones that get run over after straying, badly disoriented, onto busy roads or highways), and making as many rounds of nearby areas as I can. And asking our guards – this is morbid but it has to be done and there are precedents for it – to let me know if there are any foul stenches from any of the narrow naalas where a dog might get trapped. Will of course keep hoping, but it’s wearing thin.

P.S. anyone tempted to offer their opinion that Diwali has been “quieter” this year, kindly desist. People who are trying to help terrified street animals with very heightened hearing might have different benchmarks for these things than you do; in recent years, even though I don’t have super-sensitive hearing myself, I have flinched each time a loud bomb has gone off nearby. And anyway, it also varies with the nature of the colony and its residents. While a Panchshila Park colony group I am on regularly calls out residents who express enthusiasm for loud fireworks, and asks for quiet celebrations (whether this works is another matter), it is sadly the opposite in the neighbourhood that I live in (not helped by a very animal-unfriendly RWA). On Karva Chauth night I got into a nasty altercation with a fellow who was proudly encouraging his kids to behave like hoodlums and burst loud crackers, and who later abused me soundly on the RWA group calling me a Leftist devastated by the emergence of the brave smoky new Hindustan. (I haven’t been a Leftist at all in this millennium, and barely even a typist in the past few months, but whatever…)

(I also mentioned Pandey in this post from two years ago - an obit for his friend Kaalu)

A super anthology about Ritwik Ghatak

A few days ago I got my copy of a book I’m super-excited about – my old friend Shamya Dasgupta’s massive, beautiful-looking tribute to Ritwik Ghatak (whose birth centenary it is next month). Doing an essay for this anthology, after almost having backed out, was probably the highlight of my writing life this year – and after the initial misgivings and much grumbling, I really enjoyed working on it. It also gave me the opportunity to feel like a teen film-student again, by rediscovering a major filmmaker whose work I hadn’t fully engaged with before (largely due to poor and poorly subtitled prints), and whom I had consequently developed many narrow perceptions about. Getting to watch (mostly) good prints of films like Subarnarekha, Bari Theke Paliye and Meghe Dhaka Tara was a very invigorating experience.

My piece is about this rediscovery of Ghatak, but the book looks to be chockful of treasures about various facets of the man and his art. It's great to be sharing space with such contributors as Mahasweta Devi, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Safdar Hashmi and Adoor Goplakrishnan – and a few writers whom I personally know, such as Sumana Roy (whose essay on “Ritwik’s trees” is near the top of my to-read list), Amborish Roychoudhury and Joy Bimal Roy. There are also some terrific illustrations by Soumitra Adhikary.

Unmechanical: Ritwik Ghatak in 50 Fragments is available for pre-order now. Link here.

Golden Age crime, contd: Death from a Top Hat

When I saw that Clayton Rawson’s 1938 novel Death from a Top Hat – one of the best-regarded locked-room mysteries of its time – was available online at a not terribly inflated price, I ordered it immediately. I knew I was taking a slight risk – a few of the reviews I had looked through, including on blogs run by Golden Age Crime Fiction experts, suggested that this book’s reputation was inflated, or that it didn’t hold up so well when read today. Or that it was a little convoluted or esoteric (which was plausible, given that the narrative is populated by professional and amateur magicians – including the main sleuth, The Great Merlini – and other specialists in the arcane arts).

Anyway, I finished it yesterday and am glad I bought it. Apart from its quality as a whodunit (and a howdunit), I knew within a few pages that I was going to enjoy it purely at the prose level. The narrator, a freelance writer named Harte, starts by mentioning an essay he is writing on the “modern detective story”, which we read excerpts of: with a listing of famous fictional sleuths – from Poe’s Auguste Dupin to the present day, i.e. the 1930s – as well as murder methods. But then he is interrupted by noises coming from the hallway outside, and discovers three strange people and one dead body. A man has been murdered in the opposite apartment… in a locked-room situation.

Much of the fun in the ensuing chapters comes from the banter between Merlini, brought in to investigate (it helps that he is professionally acquainted with some of the suspects), and the police chief Gavigan (who is no mug himself – definitely not the caricature of the over-confident cop who exists only to be a foil to the genius detective). Along with the narrator, they puzzle over alibis and motives – and, of course, methods, given the puzzling nature of the crime setting – but their speculations are soon complicated by a second murder. And so it goes.

Along the way there are snippets of information about conjurors, their tricks, and the history of the profession. There are amusing footnotes, not imperative to the plot. Gavigan rolls his eyes in despair whenever Merlini gets a little pedantic or goes into a mystical-sounding explanation. One chapter, a discussion of impossible-crime methods, specifically cites the "Locked-Room Lecture" from John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man, which had been published just three years before this book.

There are some enjoyable chapter-ending cliff-hangers too (including funny ones), and a neat little mystery-within-the-larger-mystery, involving the disappearance of a man from a taxi after he had been seen getting in. And as for the final solution – I liked it a lot, and I thought Rawson had practised the fine art of misdirection well enough that it was rewarding to go back to the earlier chapters to see what one had missed the first time.

So this is well recommended, for the fluidity of the writing, and the humour, as well as for the mystery. (The second half of the book does sag a bit in places, but picks up quickly enough.) I’m told that Rawson’s short stories are very good too – I have a couple of them in anthologies, and will get around to them soon. 

(Another recent Golden Age crime post is here)

An unexpected book-movie connection: Cat People and John Dickson Carr

Most serious horror-film buffs will be familiar with the swimming-pool scene from the 1942 film Cat People – famous for its use of the power of suggestion, and a classic example of producer Val Lewton’s moody, abstract approach to horror (the scene has a woman being menaced by an unseen presence during a late-night swim, while we think we see something leopard-like amidst the dark shadows on the wall around the pool area). During my recent immersion in the work of John Dickson Carr, I realised that the Cat People scene may have been partly inspired by a creepy passage in Carr’s 1941 novel The Seat of the Scornful (also known as Death Turns the Tables).

The passage has a young woman named Jane who finds herself locked in the indoor-swimming-pool section of a hotel basement late at night… then the lights go out, and she thinks she is being stalked by someone or something in the darkness. The writing isn’t too elaborate, but there is something very vivid about the setting (a twilight zone located within an otherwise plush non-threatening space) and the imagery, with the water casting shadows on the wall and the unsettling acoustics.

As discussed here before, Carr was one of the giants of Golden Age crime fiction – nearly as popular as Agatha Christie at the time – and this book came out just a few months before Cat People went into production in early 1942. So it’s very plausible that Cat People screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen had read it. A couple of short excerpts are below.

(The book itself? Highly recommended as an example of one of Carr’s non-impossible-crime mysteries; in fact, it seems obvious almost from the start that only one person could have committed the murder in question – but of course things don’t turn out to be that straightforward. The swimming-pool scene isn't central to the narrative, by the way - it's a bit of a red herring, if you can expect a red herring in a hotel pool.)

(A post about Curse of the Cat People - a sequel that is very different from Lewton's other horror films - is here)

Murder and romance in a military hospital: on Green for Danger

Continuing with capsule reviews of Golden Age crime fiction. Yesterday I finished Christianna Brand’s 1944 military-hospital mystery Green for Danger (it was made into a popular film too, starring Trevor Howard and Alastair Sim among others). This is a solid, well-crafted whodunit – which is impressive when you consider that there are only six serious suspects, all doctors and nurses involved in a pre-surgery procedure that goes very wrong. (And that’s followed by a second death, which is much more clearly a murder.) So here is a small pool of characters, and some of the book’s humour comes from the way in which they sit around chatting with each other (often in the stiff-upper-lip British way) about which of them might be guilty.

I can see Green for Danger not working for some readers, especially crime-writing fans who want regular, fast-paced thrills. Much of this narrative, and especially the first 40-50 pages where the characters are being established, has a romantic-soap-opera-ish quality to it: being about the sometimes-complicated interrelationships between these men and women (two of whom are officially engaged to each other, but there’s much other flirtation going on) – and while some of this is important to the mystery, it can make the book meander in places.

But on the whole, I liked it very much. There are a couple of good, well-placed red herrings, and some fine sociological detailing of wartime England - about life in a time and place where flippant or hedonistic behaviour can become a way of dealing with unpredictable horrors. This isn’t quite a M*A*S*H* or Catch-22 as army-hospital dark comedies go, but it is irreverent in its way. And strangely moving at times. (Also you learn a decent amount about operating-theatre procedures of the era.)

Carr, Christie and others: about a few more Golden Age crime novels

“Reader’s block” is something that has afflicted me a lot in recent years – some of it having to do with guilt about reading other things when I’m supposed to be concentrating on my own book (and also, an increasing fatigue about doing the sorts of long book reviews that I once enjoyed writing). But one almost fool-proof way of emerging from this is to bury myself in Golden Age crime fiction. I have written a few posts already about my encounters with John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen, Helen McCloy, Stanley Ellin, Edward Hoch, Josephine Tey and others, in addition to the novellas and short stories in enormous crime anthologies edited by Otto Penzler – but here is a brief update post. A few mystery novels from that era that I have recently read (or reread):

First-time read: He Who Whispers (by John Dickson Carr)

I have been reading a lot of JDC, partly because the British Library Crime Classics editions have made his work a little more easily available than it used to be. He Who Whispers has quickly become one of my favourite Carr novels, despite my having come to it with very high expectations (because of its reputation among crime-writing experts).

The murder here – the stabbing of a man who was alone at the top of an inaccessible tower that was being watched from all sides – is one of Carr’s most intriguing “locked-room” or “impossible-crime” scenarios; but there is a lot else going on. There is the central character Fay Seton, one of the most mysterious of Carr’s doomed women (or femme fatales who may not be femme fatales); there is the hint of something supernatural afoot, which Carr was always so good at suggesting (before giving us the purely rational explanation); there is a second attempted murder which is almost as puzzling; and there are some fine passages such as one in a London subway train where two characters get together and exchange vital information (giving us, the readers, a firmer grasp on what is going on) while in the background the conductor at regular intervals calls out the name of each train station, and we just *know* that they are going to end up missing the vital stop that they must get off at.

Re-read: She Died a Lady (by Carr)
I have alluded to this one before, but it’s difficult to properly discuss it without giving away something essential. So for now I’ll just say that 1) it is probably my favourite Carr novel, 2) that it held up equally well on a second read, and 3) it includes another “impossible crime” (involving inexplicable footprints) that is hard to work out.

Also that (no spoiler) I absolutely love the little trick he plays at the end of the book, a trick that is comparable in some ways to what Agatha Christie did in arguably her most famous mystery – but this one is subtler; it isn’t as dramatic or as gasp-inducing as Christie’s denouement, but it lingers in the mind long after one has finished the book, and I think it would work very well for a creative-writing class that is examining the nuts and bolts of structure.

Re-read: Till Death Do Us Part (by Carr)
A nice cosy well-plotted village mystery that should appeal to Christie fans who like the Miss Marple books. While I would recommend this one enthusiastically to anyone, I have a slight reservation: a piece of information that we are given early in the book – involving a fascinating, seemingly impossible series of crimes – turns out to be misleading, and this can make a reader feel let down or even a little cheated (that is, if you have set a very high bar for these things when reading Carr: of course the *actual* mystery that he manufactures here is hard to solve too).

Re-read: The ABC Murders (by Agatha Christie)
Most Christie aficionados rate this as one of the very best of the Hercule Poirot novels: though it has never had the larger-than-life reputation of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Murder on the Orient Express, or Death on the Nile, for many of us it is up there with those works. (I would include at least two other Poirot books – Hercule Poirot’s Christmas and Five Little Pigs a.k.a. Murder in Retrospect – in my personal list.)

The ABC Murders is also perhaps the only Christie novel that deals with an apparent serial killer (the term isn’t used in the book, but there are allusions to Jack the Ripper). I first read this one at the age of 12, and I may not have been equipped to fully appreciate it then – in the sense that there is something disorienting about the narrative shifts between Hastings’s regular first-person voice (where he chronicles Poirot’s investigation) and the chapters where he reconstructs things that he didn’t experience firsthand, involving another important character. Glad I reread it after all these decades.

Re-read: Through a Glass Darkly (by Helen McCloy)
I love this poignant, haunting and gently philosophical 1949 thriller, though I wish I had a more elegant-looking edition – this one makes its tragic heroine look like a scream-queen from a B-movie. (Incidentally I have the opposite problem with the John Dickson Carr editions I have bought online – the British Library covers are much too prim and antiseptic, not even hinting at the more pulpy aspects of those mysteries.)

To my mind, this book falls in a special sub-category of the thriller and horror genres – a narrative that centres around an imperilled woman, not so much a helpless “ablaa naari” as someone who is dealing, as best as she can, with a cruel, all-consuming and perhaps inescapable destiny. (When I picture the protagonist Faustina, I always see her as resembling the melancholy Christiane in the brilliant film Eyes Without a Face, trapped in her father’s mansion as he seeks a cure for her disfigured face.)

A no-spoilers plot outline of Through a Glass Darkly: Faustina, a young teacher at a girls’ school, is abruptly dismissed from her position because many terrified people believe that she has a silent, ghostly double – a doppelganger or a Fetch – that can materialise in one place while Faustina herself is in another. As the psychiatrist Dr Basil Willing investigates, he must pit his own rationality against the knowledge that there are things about our own minds which we don’t know; that science has so many secrets to reveal yet. Meanwhile Faustina grows more melancholy as she grapples with the possibility of something un-human within herself.

Wonderfully written book, with a beautiful, ambiguous ending. I wrote a review for Scroll many years ago – here is the link. (Avoid reading the comments section there, since there is a spoiler.)

(More to come, since I have just ordered a few more crime novels of this vintage, including by a couple of authors whom I haven't read before. Meanwhile here are a couple of my earlier crime-fiction pieces for Scroll: impossible crime, rational explanation; and how to make things disappear)

In praise of the Father Brown mysteries

You might think that as a non-believer I’d be somewhat irritated by GK Chesterton’s Father Brown stories – or put off by the little priest-detective’s many snide remarks about atheists. Small and round, droning and monotonous, Father Brown is the most harmless-looking of sleuths: blinking distractedly as he solves a case or makes a big revelation, a gentle soul who believes that the biggest criminals can be redeemed and brought back into the light. But on the subject of non-belief, this sweet man can be mercilessly cutting in his observations – you almost feel he would be glad to see an atheist in hellfire (even if he hadn’t done anything to deserve such a fate).

So there’s a conflict here. And yet, I love the Father Brown short stories – at least the 12 or 13 of them that I have read so far (most of which are from this collection, Father Brown: The Essential Tales, which I borrowed from my friend Samyukta long ago). There is something so rich and evocative about Chesterton’s writing, including the descriptive passages, and there is also something mysterious about the arc of the stories – a narrative often begins on an offbeat, quirky note and it takes a while before you can tell which direction it is going in, and what the nature of the problem (much less the solution) will be. (For a good example, see the first two pages of “The Head of Caesar”, with its description of a particular avenue in Kensington, and a conversation in a little eating-house tucked between tall houses.)

The first Father Brown story I read, years ago, was “The Invisible Man”, which was in a big fat anthology of locked-room (or impossible-crime) mysteries – and I was drawn into it by the opening passage, a description of a bright, inviting confectioner’s shop at twilight. But for anyone who is starting on these stories, I recommend that you begin with “The Blue Cross”, which is where we meet the little priest for the first time – through the eyes of the celebrated Parisian investigator Valentin, who, while on the track of a criminal, encounters Father Brown’s remarkable deductive qualities. (The reader’s experience here exactly mirrors Valentin’s: we have his vantage point throughout the story, and Father Brown – initially dismissed as a delicate little naïf – comes into clear relief only in the final few pages; by the end of the story, all our pre-conceptions about what a Great Detective must look and behave like have been swept away.)

“The Blue Cross” also introduces another major character, the criminal mastermind Flambeau who is eventually “saved” by Father Brown and ends up on the right side of the law, assisting the priest in some cases. One of my favourites in that lot is “The Honour of Israel Gow”, an unusual tale about the recent death of an Earl who was living alone in a castle with a half-witted servant named Israel Gow. As Father Brown, Flambeau and others enter this space, they are confronted with several inexplicable objects including piles of snuff, loose diamonds, candles without candlesticks, and lead pencils without cases. Of course, Father Brown does find the connection between these objects in the end – and it’s a marvellous, whimsical solution – but what’s more amusing is that early in the story, he casually comes up with a few other explanations of what the link between these items might be. Before telling his fellow investigators that no, none of these is the right answer. (The effect is a little similar to that of the famous “Locked-Room Lecture” in John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man.)

Other stories I have especially enjoyed: “The Hammer of God”, “The Secret Garden”, “The Three Tools of Death”, “The Man in the Passage”, and “The Absence of Mr Glass” (which turns out to be slight, even silly, as a mystery, but is very enjoyable for all that). Looking forward to reading more, though availability is an issue.

Some gushing about John Dickson Carr (The Black Spectacles, She Died a Lady, etc)

I have got back to reading John Dickson Carr mysteries from what is generally regarded his peak phase (mid-1930s to mid-40s) – a few of these can now be bought online at not horrendous prices, and delivered within a week or two. (Reading e-books is still not my thing, at least not for cosy Golden Age crime fiction.) Finished and greatly enjoyed his 1939 novel The Black Spectacles over the course of a day. Premise: a nasty episode of poisoning in an English village results in suspicion and hostility directed at a young woman – and is followed a few months later by a strange experiment conducted by this woman’s uncle at his country house, apparently to prove to a small audience that they can’t always trust the evidence of their eyes. (A Hindi translation of this book could be titled Ankhon Dekhi.) Of course, a second murder takes place at this demonstration – practically in front of everyone’s eyes, but with no clarity about exactly what transpired – and soon the formidable, harrumphing Dr Gideon Fell is called in to investigate.

As most serious crime buffs know, Carr’s reputation and popularity were once almost at Agatha Christie’s level – but he never became a bestselling author worldwide on anything like the scale she did, and many of his books are very hard to obtain today. (One reason may be that some things about Christie’s work – the simplicity of her prose, the tidiness of her plotting – travelled and endured better; so that she was more accessible to readers outside the Anglophone world, including those for whom English wasn’t a first language.)

Something I struggle to articulate about the effect of my favourite Carr novels: I am not usually blown away by the denouement – I mean, I do appreciate the skill and craft, and how carefully plotted the thing was, but it doesn’t necessarily build up to a specific “oh wow!” moment that you sometimes want from a whodunit. At the same time, I can see that this could be because Carr has so much going on simultaneously that his solutions tend to be long and winding, covering much terrain, and you can’t distill the finale to a single gasp-inducing revelation (“They *all* did it!” or “The detective is the murderer!”) More importantly: the fact that the reveal isn’t the most thrilling part of the book – the build-up and the anticipation are more exciting – doesn’t take away from my enjoyment of the whole. Carr is great at creating some genuinely unsettling, creepy moments early on, which work entirely on their own terms as atmosphere-generators for the mystery. (Take the beginning of The Hollow Man, with a masked man gaining entry to a private club and having an enigmatic interaction with one of the patrons.)

That said, The Black Spectacles does have a satisfying and well-worked-out solution; nothing to quibble with on that front. It’s just that I find other parts of the book equally or more compelling – such as the speculation around the possible ways that regular chocolates at a sweet-shop could have been replaced with poisoned ones, or the opening chapter which presents a view of some of the central characters during a trip to Pompeii (as seen through the eyes of a young detective who will later get involved in the case).

P.S. Carr’s most celebrated work is probably The Hollow Man (also published as The Three Coffins), but I tend to agree with Carr aficionados who consider this novel overhyped. (My reasons: engrossing and atmospheric though the book as a whole is – certainly worth a second read – the final explanation is too long and complicated, and I think it can be argued that Carr “cheats” a bit when it comes to the chronology of events in the story; or at least holds back a piece of information that makes it almost impossible for a reader to work things out.)

What The Hollow Man does have going for it – and this is a big reason for its reputation – is an almost standalone chapter titled “The Locked-Room Lecture”, in which the voluble Dr Gideon Fell holds forth on “the general mechanics and development of the situation which is known in detective fiction as the hermetically sealed chamber”. It’s a beautifully audacious ploy to include something like this in a mystery novel (complete with references to famous earlier books such as Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room), and it’s done with wit too. (“All those opposing can skip this chapter,” Dr Fell says – and also “We’re in a detective story, and we don’t fool the reader by pretending we’re not. Let’s not invent elaborate excuses to drag in a discussion of detective stories.”)

Incidentally, The Black Spectacles has a fun segment about the mental makeup and methods of the “male poisoner” – drawing on famous real-life cases such as those of EW Pritchard, TG Wainewright and Thomas Neill Cream – that reminded me of the Locked Room Lecture. Not as elaborate, but wry and informative, even as Gideon Fell is being his exasperating self.

P.P.S. perhaps my favourite Carr novel so far is She Died a Lady, a very good mystery on its own terms, with a typically confounding premise (two adulterous lovers appear to have walked to the edge of a cliff and thrown themselves off it – the footprints confirm this beyond a doubt – but when the bodies are recovered, it turns out they were *first* shot and killed at close range!) – but equally fascinating is a narrative ploy that makes the book a very interesting companion piece to one of Agatha Christie’s most famous works. Not saying more.

Sholay, in fragments: a 50th anniversary tribute

[Wrote a version of this piece for Mint Lounge, as part of a tribute to Sholay on its 50th anniversary. Have written about the film before, of course – including a 40th anniversary piece which you can read here – and it doesn’t feel like much new can be said. But I took a personal slant here, likening the film to a famous oral epic, imagined and experienced in bits and pieces, never quite “finished”]

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Is it possible for the most iconic and mythologised film in your life – the one that is most thoroughly familiar – to also feel like a jigsaw puzzle that took a long time to put together?

Like any other super-fan, I have my personal Sholay history, and it includes this confession: even though the film is central to my pop-cultural journey, looming forever on the horizon like those boulders against the sun in Gabbar’s domain, there have been many gaps in my viewing. Of course I have watched it in the conventional way from beginning to end, at least five or six times (as opposed to the dozens or hundreds claimed by other devotees) – and yet it always feels like I came to it piecemeal through a melange of things heard and read, narratives constructed, back-stories related in magazines and books… and finally, prints with scenes missing in them.

Here’s how this can happen.

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You’re six or seven, and going for a rare family outing to a hall, to see a film that’s less than a decade old but already fixed in legend. Someone dawdles, you reach 10 minutes after the show has begun, walking into a noisy action sequence involving a train, bad guys on horses, and three leading men whom you recognise. It’s exciting but you’re overwhelmed, and lost about who is doing what: why is one of the “heroes” in police uniform while the other two look roguish, though they all appear to be fighting on the same side?

Then, in the very next scene, Sanjeev Kumar – the cop on the train, energetic and youthful – is older, tired, speaking slowly. You’re not sure what’s going on: the concept of the flashback and flashforward, the idea that these images can jump rudely from one period to another, is not something you have fully assimilated. Anyway, a few moments later the other heroes, Dharmendra and Amitabh (your childhood crushes), looking the same as before, are goofing around on a bike, singing, clowning about in jail.

It’s a night show, you may be drifting off now and again. The spectre of Gabbar Singh arrives: first his name, spoken fearfully many times, and later the man himself. But even amidst the terror of his first appearance, with the minatory music and the belt being dragged along the rocks, you feel confusion: you think he resembles one of the dacoits on horseback – curly-haired, green shirt – from that train scene, and wonder if there’s a link you missed.

A mid-film flashback where Sanjeev Kumar is young again. Through blurry eyes you register the shifts: black moustache to grey moustache, hands to no hands, police uniform to sombre shawl. Later, a fragmented viewing at someone’s house will leave you with more confusion about the two major flashbacks, and more questions about the sequence of events.

Which is to say that there was a time in my childhood when the plot of Sholay was as much of a maze as a convoluted David Lynch or Christopher Nolan film might be.

Navigating the labyrinth was complicated by the fact that for a while it was done simultaneously along two mediums: listening to the famous double audio-cassette of the film’s dialogue, and watching a videotape that was much cherished but also problematic.

The audio-cassette was unnerving: you had to identify characters by their voices; it didn’t feature entire songs, playing only the first couple of bars of each familiar tune, before returning to the prose scenes. Some excitement lay in the details – I was tickled to bits by the line “Thakur ne hijron ki fauj banayi hai”, not having expected to hear a word like that in a film – but on balance I preferred to watch Sholay, not hear it.

The videotape, one of my favourite childhood possessions, came for some reason from faraway Lagos, brought by a visiting uncle who had been assured that the thing I wanted most in the world was my own Sholay cassette. I was ten now, we had just got a video player at home, and I must have worn it out over days with this tape. The train flashback now made sense to me, as did the overall chronology (though there was still some disorientation in, for instance, seeing Gabbar’s henchman Kaalia alive and gloating in a flashback after he had been bumped off in that sadistic roulette scene).

At last I was getting to watch the complete film, from start to finish. Or so I thought.

There were abrupt cuts here and there, especially in the first hour – it took some time to realise that chunks had been snipped to fit the VHS’s 180 minutes. Which meant that years after my first, mysterious hall viewing as a small child, some things still had to be figured out.

Sleuthing, carefully matching the video footage with the audio on my dialogue-cassette, I realised that the scenes involving Soorma Bhopali (Jagdeep) and the Hitler-like jailer (Asrani) had been excised in the former. That makes some sense if you have to cut 15 minutes: those sequences are fun and show off the skills of two fine character actors, but they are dispensable to the main narrative, and they greatly delay Veeru and Jai’s arrival in Ramgarh.

Even so, I feel cheated that it took me years, maybe decades, to realise that the beloved Keshto Mukherjee had a small role in Sholay (in the jailer scene).

Things were also complicated by the fact that Sholay’s characters were continuing with their lives in other forms and media. Gabbar Singh was selling glucose biscuits in ads long after he had been vanquished (or killed, in the ending that was shot but not released). In the late 1980s came a film called Soorma Bhopali with Jagdeep, featuring Dharmendra and Bachchan in cameos unrelated to their Sholay roles; after that, Ramgarh ke Sholay, which seemed cheap and B-grade-ish, being filled with star-impersonators, but which still had the real Amjad Khan (looking much paunchier, as if Gabbar had taken his role as biscuit mascot too seriously).

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Between all this, during my video viewings, Sholay did perform the epiphanic functions that a landmark film is expected to. For instance, I can never forget the tense scene where the villagers turn hostile towards their mercenary protectors, because this was the moment when the idea first entered my nascently movie-obsessed head that a camera movement is a deliberate, engineered thing that builds meaning: when the line “Kab tak jeeyoge tum, aur kab tak jeeyenge hum, agar yeh dono iss gaon mein rahe?” (“How long will we stay alive if these two remain in the village?”) is accompanied by a camera swish that places Veeru and Jai at the centre of the frame, precisely on the words “yeh dono”.

I learnt about the mysteries of personality too, and how a creative work can bring catharsis or draw out aspects of yourself that you hadn’t fully processed yet. As a painfully shy and quiet child with a taste for sardonic humour, there was every reason for me to relate to Bachchan’s Jai; instead I was always more drawn to, and even felt a kinship with, the boisterous Veeru.

But that Nigerian tape was also responsible for the biggest of my Sholay gaps – one I was unaware of until well in my thirties. That’s how old I was when I watched Sholay’s great opening-credits sequence for the very first time. While that might not be a big deal for most Hindi films of the period, in Sholay the craft and attention to detail begins right here – in the scene where the manservant Ramlal leads a policeman on horseback from the railway station to the Thakur’s haveli.

My tape had the credits only until the names of the six principal actors; there was a sudden cut after the title "And Introducing Amjad Khan". This is a major bone I have to pick with the anonymous tape-editor sitting, in my mind’s eye, in some squalid little Lagos bootleggers’ shop. Because, watching the full sequence on DVD decades later, I saw how it sets the stage, giving us a detailed view of Ramgarh and its surroundings, long before the narrative actually takes us there. The superb RD Burman background score changes from a guitar-dominated tune as the riders move through a barren, American Western-like setting to a more Indian sound, with mridangam and taar shehnai, as they pass through the village. The symbolic nature of Sholay’s mise-en-scene is made obvious here too, with the contrast between swathes of rough landscape (where the dacoits, creatures of the wild, perch like vultures) and the village, where people live together in an ordered community – a setting that will soon welcome two rootless men who will learn about taking on responsibility and integrating into a larger world.

So here was a clear case of me watching a segment of Sholay as an adult with no pre-conceptions, seeing something new and being utterly impressed. When I screened and discussed the sequence in classes, the discussions were perceptive, intense and wide-ranging – even when they involved students who had never actually watched the film. (Yes, there are now many such movie buffs.)

It is widely acknowledged that Sholay was the most polished and fully realised of the Hindi films of its era, the most flawless technically, the one with the best action scenes and sound design, the fewest loose ends or awkward cutting. The sort of mainstream film that even Satyajit Ray could (grudgingly?) admire. But however complete it may be, I think of it as a series of unforgettable moments that are so deeply embedded in one’s consciousness (and so easily accessed from the mind’s old filing cabinet) that it almost doesn’t matter which order those fragments come in – there are any number of entry points. It’s a bit like knowing key sections of a legendary epic – say, the Mahabharata – and still feeling like you know it in its entirety. But the possibility of being surprised by a detail here, or a fresh re-watch, still exists, even for old fans who thought there was nothing more to learn.