In praise of Christianna Brand's Tour de Force

Excursions in Golden Age crime fiction continue, and here is one of my favourite reads from the past couple of months: Christianna Brand’s 1955 novel Tour de Force, which is not only an immensely satisfying murder mystery (with at least three solid false solutions presented to the reader before the true one emerges) but also an amusing travel book full of droll, witty descriptions of how a bunch of (largely insular) English travellers might experience a guided Mediterranean tour. Especially when they have to contend, among other things, with blithe displays of corruption and inefficiency amidst the local cops on a self-controlled island republic called San Juan el Pirata – “with a tiny parliament and a tiny police force and a quite remarkably tiny conscience in regard to its obligations to the rest of society; but with a traditionally enormous Hereditary Grand Duke…”

This place is a hotbed of open smuggling and other activities frowned upon in much of the rest of the world.

The charming Puerto de Barrequitas, Port of the Little Boats, sends forth its fishing fleet night after moonless night and in the grey dawn welcomes it back with its contraband cargo; all hands, including such members of the international anti-smuggling police as have not been out to sea with it, turning to, to help with the unloading. But even so, it has proved, since the war, impossible to feed the insatiable maw of the contraband-hungry tourist trade without recourse to the mainland, and San Juan reluctantly smuggles in the Swiss watches, American nylons, French liqueurs and Scotch whiskey especially manufactured in Madrid, Naples and Cairo for this purpose. These are exhibited in the local shops with “Smuggled” in large letters printed on cards in various languages…

When a member of the English touring party is murdered, the others in the group soon realise that 1) modern crime-investigating methods, such as fingerprinting and forensics, are barely known of in this little fiefdom, 2) all of them, including Brand’s series detective Inspector Cockrill, are now vulnerable because the local authorities quickly want to identify a halfway-plausible suspect and put him or her away for good. (Cockrill does in fact get arrested at one point – but he simply saunters out of the jail because the people in charge forgot to lock it.)

Many of you, even if you deem yourselves crime-fiction fans, will barely have heard of Christianna Brand, much less read any of her novels. (But then, there is a sizable population of us who erroneously *think* we are classic-murder-mystery fans even when the only author we have properly encountered from the 1920s-to-50s period is Dame You-Know-Who.) I was in that league until around four months ago; since that time, I have read three Brand novels (I posted here about her medical-hospital mystery Green for Danger) and a few short stories, and have gathered from perusing Golden Age crime websites that she is regarded as being in the highest tier of writers from that period; and that possibly the only reason she isn’t as revered as Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr is that her output was very small compared to those two.

Based on the evidence so far, her reputation makes sense to me. I enjoyed all three of the novels I read (Green for Danger and Suddenly at His Residence being the others), and intend to revisit them soon – during a first read, it can take a bit of time to really get into Brand’s writing, especially because of how she moves from the headspace of one character to the next; from one third-person-subjective narrative to another. (This entails some very skilful writing, given the varying degrees of guilt or innocence involved.) Her stock in trade is the closed-circle crime: there are basically seven or eight main figures in the story, it is understood that one of them will turn out to be the murderer, and at some point each of these people is examined for motivation and opportunity. (Interestingly much of this examining/speculating happens in the form of playful conversations between the characters themselves; though they have cause to be wary or afraid of each other in the given circumstances, there is some kinship or friendship between them, much bantering, and usually some complicated romantic relationships too.)

All this suggests that there can be no sudden blindsiding, or making the killer someone whom the reader couldn’t possibly have suspected (for whatever reason: airtight alibi, apparent irrelevance, etc). And yet, craftily, Brand ensures that the solution *is* surprising. Even if you have, as a seasoned reader of whodunits, looked carefully at each character in turn and imagined them as the murderer, there will always be a key missing element, something she misdirected you with. A motivation that turns out to be very different from what may have been expected for a particular person; or an unexpected “how they did it”; or an event or conversation that can be interpreted in two or three different ways.

Naturally it’s hard to discuss this without giving away plot details, but here’s a spoiler-free example, as abstract as I can make it. Near the end of Tour de Force a certain dramatic incident, involving most of the main characters, occurs: it involves an object being dropped. Shortly afterwards, when Inspector Cockrill provides one of the false solutions to the mystery, he explains how his epiphany was based on something he observed during the above-mentioned incident. It makes perfect sense as a connect-the-dots – and yet, when Cockrill eventually provides the *real* solution, it turns out that this one *also* hinged on a separate observation he had made during the very same incident. With each of the two revelations, you’ll find yourself flipping the pages back to the description of that incident, looking first at one detail and then another. This is brilliant plotting, and there is much else like it in this expertly structured book.

And, like I said, there’s the humour. A couple of amusing passages are below.

Thoughts on Ikkis (and on watching Dharmendra and Asrani together one last time)

(My latest Economic Times column: only partly a review of Ikkis, more a reflection on how our relationships with onscreen personalities can impact our feelings about a film)
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Going in to watch Ikkis, most well-informed Sriram Raghavan fans knew they should probably not expect a typical Raghavan film – “typical” meaning twist-laden noir-suspense, with doses of dark humour and affectionate tributes to the pop culture that has influenced Raghavan the movie nerd. Ikkis, it was understood, was going to be different from Andhadhun or Ek Hasina Thi or Johnny Gaddaar, more sober and perhaps self-consciously respectful – being a dramatisation of the real-life story of Arun Khetarpal, a martyred hero of the 1971 India-Pakistan war.

And yet, as a Raghavan fan nervous about the possibility of this being an impersonal, workmanlike project that almost anyone else might have helmed, I felt on safe ground the moment I saw an Asrani tribute appear before the film started – alongside a more expected tribute to Dharmendra. “Hum aapke qaidi hain” says the text, below an image of Asrani as the jailer in Sholay – and I thought to myself, that’s Raghavan’s voice all right. The boyish cinephile.

The two veteran actors (who died just a month apart) appear briefly together onscreen when Dharmendra, as Khetarpal’s old father, visits Pakistan. With Asrani playing an Alzheimer’s patient here, this is a moment that works neatly within the diegesis of a narrative about memory and forgetting (or letting go), about conflict and shared Indo-Pak culture. But it operates at another level too, for a movie buff invested in the personalities whose work he has been stimulated by over the decades – as a sentimental tribute, a swansong to two major performers of an earlier age.

Watching Dharam and Asrani, I thought about the first time they had shared screen space, 56 years ago – in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Satyakam – and of the moment in that heartfelt, hopelessly idealistic film where the Asrani character, clowning about, sings the words “Aadmi hai kya? Bolo, aadmi hai kya?” (What is a man?) and Dharam’s Satyapriya, all ponderous and solemn, replies that man is an elevated creature capable of love and friendship and compassion.

Those higher human potentials are the warp and weft of Raghavan’s film too. I was a bit worried – based on things I had heard beforehand – that Ikkis would try so hard to be “humanist”, to set itself in opposition to more strident, bellicose, chest-thumping narratives about nation-love and evil enemies, that it might feel contrived. Well, as a war film that is also an anti-war film, encouraging introspection about the better angels of our nature – especially in moments where individuals get a chance to bond – Ikkis IS everything you’d expect. It ticks every box that would make liberals feel warm and fuzzy inside, with (probably over-simplistic) ideas about universal brotherhood, and about fair fighting on both sides in 1971. But what could have been cloying pacifism is treated here so organically, so matter-of-factly, that it works. Even for someone like me who is always a little suspicious of virtuous cinema.

Ikkis does this by focusing consistently on the small picture rather than the big one – the war scenes give us not large statements about what Pakistan and India are doing to each other, or about the deeper histories of Hindu-Muslim conflict, but instead just a ground-level view of soldiers at a specific point in time, thrust into extraordinary, surreal situations, driving giant armoured vehicles across dusty terrain in which a “dushman” wants to kill them. The taking and passing of orders, staying entrenched in the moment, the razor-sharp focus as one does one’s job as best as one can, for the motherland – all this is part of the film’s DNA, as it is in more aggressive war films; one difference being that we see the same impulses play out on the other side too, with the dushman also speaking the language of patriotism, duty, and “god on our side”. The messy randomness of what might happen on a battlefield is encapsulated in a shot where our protagonist might easily have been blown away from the side by another young man, his Pakistani equivalent, who has his tank in his sights. But the chips just happen to fall the other way – and not because of heroism alone, or because one of them has the moral upper hand.

On the whole this didn’t feel like a film that was practising sapheaded wokeness for the sake of it, without adequate reflection, without at least some hard-won cynicism about the darker sides of human nature. To me it felt honest, apart from one scene that came across as too pat: the one where Deepak Dobriyal as an embittered Pakistani soldier who loathes Indians is quickly won over by a few gentle words. This felt like idealism taken to extremes. Surely a film that is otherwise so warm and empathetic, and so mournful about war, could also allow some space to one character – who appears in a single, short scene – who isn’t willing or able to forgive?

But to return to a point made above: one big reason why I could fully open myself to Ikkis was that speaking as a Dharmendra acolyte, his screen persona was central to the film’s effect on me. This effect was strange and multi-pronged: on the one hand Raghavan is, with some verve, telling a real-life story about an actual former Brigadier who travels across the border to the place where his son died in action thirty years earlier; but at the same time, this man is played by one of our most beloved movie stars at the very end of his career; and the real-life story merges somehow with Dharmendra’s reputation as a son of the soil, a Punjabi who as a child had known undivided India, a Sikh who has written poetry himself in Urdu (with one of those poems being movingly used in the film too). It was impossible not to be sentimental about his scenes in the film – and those scenes are about a hopeful, affirmative view of the world. I couldn’t dissociate any of this from that scene in Satyakam where Dharmendra’s Satyapriya tells his friend Naren: if we don’t have idealism, what do we have left? Or words to that effect.

So I’m happy to endorse Ikkis with a “Jai Sriram” – the Sriram here being Raghavan and no one else – but before that I must channel Utpal Dutt’s gleeful exclamation in Guddi: “Jai Dharmendra!”

P.S. while on Raghavan as purveyor of cultural references... Satyakam was released in 1969, which is a year that falls roughly within the “past” timeline of Ikkis – this being when the young Arun was just getting primed for his duties as a soldier. Within this narrative, the year is represented by references to the films Aradhana and The Wild Bunch (as well as Irma la Douce, made much earlier but perhaps released belatedly in India because of its risqué content). And, of course, Raghavan the Vijay Anand/Dev Anand fanboy also manages to include a talismanic image of Dev in this canvas.

A coexistence mela at PVR Saket

With a few members of our Stray Buddy family at the little “Coexistence Mela” organised at the PVR Anupam complex on Saturday. There was a waterbowl painting contest, a lucky draw, memory games involving dog names, and a crochet stall featuring the work of one of our most pro-active members, Shely, who does more for the PVR dogs than anyone else. And there were puppies, hopeful of being adopted, brought all the way from Noida.

And most of all there was plenty of enthusiasm and bonhomie - much needed in these tough times for community-dog-carers. I was especially pleased that all this was done with the cooperation of the PVR market association, and that two officials (not connected with Stray Buddy or any other animal welfare group) made brief speeches emphasising the importance of all life forms and the need for compassion and empathy. Hoping for many more such events in the near future.

 

 

 

(Meanwhile, in my neck of Saket - Golf View Apartments - things have been crazily stressful in recent days thanks to an unsterilised male dog having been let loose in the colony by an irresponsible "animal-lover". Trying to get the situation sorted, having just got a few of the surviving puppies adopted. People who don't have firsthand experience of these things have no idea how time-consuming and energy-sapping it can get. But one perseveres until the inevitable mental/emotional collapse happens...)

 

Kalamkaval (and the perks of being a leading man who doesn't age)

I liked Jithin K Jose’s Kalamkaval a great deal (though it was a bit surprising to see that a couple of 5/6-year-old kids were in the hall for this serial-killer film). I had gone in worrying that it would be another of those self-consciously “slow-burn” or existential thrillers that get fetishised a lot these days (nothing against that mode – I have enjoyed many such films, especially Malayalam films, in the past few years – but I wasn’t in the mood for something like that on the day). Was glad to find that it was stylish, moved at a good pace, and found interesting ways to cross-cut between the (past and present) activities of the psychotic protagonist and the cops on his trail. This jigsaw puzzle-like structure could have become convoluted, but they kept it clean and easy to follow. Some very good lighting in the indoor scenes (which have an incongruously warm texture even when the protagonist is doing creepy things). And Mammootty and Vinayakan were both terrific.

Even as a big Mammootty fan, I have sometimes felt that in this very productive recent phase of his career, he (and the writers-filmmakers working with him) might be trying a little too hard to tick every possible box: from playing a “respectable” family man trying to come out of the closet in a conservative social environment in Kaathal, to the monstrous glowering chathan in Bramayugam (a horror film I had high expectations of but couldn’t stay invested in), to the childlike but also paranoid and dangerous Kuttan in Puzhu. Some of the choices can start to feel contrived at times. But all that goes out the window when he is on the screen, giving a solid performance in a well-written and structured film, and that was the case with Kalamkaval.

P.S. yes, that inter-title *does* say “The Perks of Being a Subjective Nihilist”, but don’t worry – the chapter heads are mainly playful ones.

P.P.S. I have probably said this a few times in conversations, on my film group etc - but it is extraordinary how Mammootty can so easily pass off as being three-plus decades younger than he is. He is completely plausible as a 45-year-old, and this isn't so much because of boyish features or a super-fit-seeming physique (obviously he isn't a Tom Cruise), but just because of his movements and gestures and body language - all of that belongs to a much younger man. I can't think of anyone else who can pull this off in quite the same way. (Someone like Robert De Niro is very fit and alert, but it was discomfiting to watch him play a character half his age in The Irishman, notwithstanding the "de-aging" CGI used there. With Mammootty, on the other hand, it is currently hard to imagine what a believably 75-year-old version of the man would be like.)
 

Pupdate

A follow-up to my earlier post about these pups in Saket, who need a good and caring home. It is getting very cold, they are in a hostile neighbourhood, the mother is struggling to gather food, no one is really looking after them, and cars are still speeding along the lane at all hours. So please spread the word to anyone who might be interested (*and* has an understanding of the responsibilities involved when one adopts a dog).

P.S. one of the pups got very lucky last week when Dr Parul Saxena from Dwarka saw my Instagram post and then came all the way to Saket to adopt her. She is being well looked after by Dr Parul and her two little daughters, and it’s great to see the photos. (The last pic here is of Dr Parul when she came here to take the pup back home. I wish there were more such people.)

Some love for Fredric Brown and The Dead Ringer (and travelling carnivals)

In between all the intense crime literature I have been reading of late, a more laidback book that I loved was Fredric Brown’s 1948 novel The Dead Ringer – the second entry in a mystery series about the teenage Ed Hunter and his kindly uncle Ambrose. I had read the first book in the series, The Fabulous Clipjoint, some weeks ago, but The Dead Ringer works as a standalone too. And one of the reasons I enjoyed it so much was its carnival setting: Ed is assisting his uncle, who works at a travelling “carny”, and as the narrative begins they are touring various towns in the American Midwest (Evansville, Louisville), staying a week or so in one place before moving on.

Much in the book reminded me of my childhood fascination with the circuses in Enid Blyton stories. Back then, reading about this itinerant life – the caravans which served as both cosy homes and as vehicles for the circus-folk, the bonhomie and sense of community between people and animals, children who had just arrived warily into this world and were learning to settle down – created a weird, nostalgia-like sensation for a place and time I hadn’t actually experienced myself (I would later learn that “anemoia” is the word for this; the Blyton circus books were among the first of many books and films that would evoke this feeling in me).

Later, of course, there were other carnival stories in my reading and viewing life – including the darker iterations to be found in the work of Ray Bradbury or Richard Matheson, or in horror/noir films like Freaks or Nightmare Alley or Dr Caligari. But the interesting thing about The Dead Ringer is that though it begins with the discovery of a murder in the carnival premises on a gloomy, rainy night (and there are two further deaths to come), the book doesn’t feel nasty or dangerous in the way that the narratives mentioned above are. There is a gentle, conversational quality to Brown’s writing even when he is presenting noirish elements – and there is something very comforting about the relationship between young Ed (the narrator) and his uncle Am, who has taken him under his wing.

Both this book and its predecessor (in which Ed and Am had investigated the murder of Ed’s father) are primarily coming-of-age stories. In both, Ed learns not just about sleuthing/crime-solving, but about life in a more general sense – about thorny relationships (including the ones he himself gets into with complex women, who may or may not be femme fatales), or about why people might take a certain path as they negotiate hardships.

I think of these as slice-of-life mysteries – meaning that even as the investigation is on (and we know that Ed and Am have to conjecture and find things out), there is an unhurried naturalism to the telling. For instance, rarely if ever do these books have the chapter-ending cliff-hangers you’d expect in most thrillers or suspense novels. (One of the few big dramatic moments that Ed experiences firsthand in The Dead Ringer –where he sees, or thinks he sees, something unnerving outside a trailer window – occurs right in the middle of a chapter, and he is quite drunk at the time, so there is a haziness about the whole thing.) More often, what happens is that Ed and Am saunter about, having a drink or two at multiple joints along the way, talking, turning things over in their heads, making further appointments. There are occasionally passages where you might expect something to happen that will significantly further the mystery – or provide an important clue – but it turns out that the chapter is simply about a night out on the town. (Though something said during the chat *might* turn out to be significant later.) And none of this was disappointing for me: I enjoyed the pace, and the constant sense that there is room for other things in these characters’ lives.

That said, the actual mysteries are very satisfying too. The plot of The Dead Ringer, since I haven’t said much about it, concerns the stabbing of an unidentified midget – followed, some days later, by the possibly suspicious death of a chimpanzee belonging to the carnival… meanwhile Ed finding himself getting involved with the beautiful young woman, a carnival “poser”, who had discovered the first body.

This could be called “soft-boiled" noir, with a reassurance that things will turn out okay in the end – though Ed might have his heart broken a bit, in a way that will make him more resilient for the future, and for the next journey that he and his uncle take. (I believe the later books in the series have the two of them officially starting a detective agency together. No more carnival, which is a pity.)

P.S. a bit more about Fredric Brown: long before I had read either of these novels, I had read a few of his short stories, two of which are collected in two of my favourite anthologies. Brian Aldiss’s A Science Fiction Omnibus has a wonderful “short-short story” by Brown, less than a page long – it is called “Answer”, and you can read it here – it will take only a minute or so. Consider that it was written in 1954, and then think about its implications in a world that will soon come to be even more dominated by AI and Big-Brother technology than we currently are.

The other Brown story is much longer, and is one of my favourite impossible-crime mysteries: “The Laughing Butcher”, about a “no-footprints-in-the-snow” murder and the subsequent lynching of a much-despised man by townsfolk.
I also have Brown’s collection Nightmares and Geezenstacks, which contains many of those short-short stories – will be getting through that one in the coming days.

P.P.S. see this pic for an Indian connection in The Dead Ringer: reading a very local/provincial midwestern newspaper, Ed sees a mention of riots in Calcutta. Well, all this IS happening in late 1947/early 1948.

Loved the third Knives Out film...

Wake Up Dead Man is excellent. And not just because it contains explicit tributes to John Dickson Carr and the locked-room mystery (somewhat expected given how much of a Carr fan Rian Johnson has become in recent years). Or because Josh O’Connor’s hangdog expressions are always so sexy. This one is well paced, funny when you don’t expect it to be (given the ecclesiastical setting, and Benoit Blanc’s lack of belief, they have much fun with dialogue like this: “We’ve got to nail the real killer… I’m sorry, I mean catch him…”) … and also poignant and empathetic when you don’t expect it to be. (A scene where O’Connor’s Pastor Jud interrupts important business to take time out to provide solace to a woman who has started unburdening herself on the phone… it could have been pedantic, or an obvious attempt to make a point about the young priest – but it manages to feel right and be moving.) And of course there are some nice twists towards the end. Very good stuff. 

 

P.S. Rian Johnson’s love for Carr notwithstanding, he does offer a greatly simplified version of the “locked-room lecture” from The Hollow Man. Gideon Fell is very clear while delivering the lecture that he isn’t covering anywhere near all of the possibilities and solutions.

Big-screen Sholay (and a fire scare)

A surreal thing happened while watching Sholay (the new Film Heritage Foundation restoration) at PVR Select Citywalk on Friday night: as the Holi attack scene began, there was a fire-alarm scare and we all had to rush out of the exit doors (for a minute, before they gave the all-clear again). This was an annoyance, coming right in the middle of one of the film’s most immersive scenes, but it was suitably dramatic too, and amusing: our exodus mirrored the one on screen, the villagers fleeing in panic.

I can say a lot about the overall experience, from the perspective of both the eternal fanboy whose personal mythology is so tied up with this film, and the more detached observer who doesn’t unconditionally love everything in it (e.g. the Asrani and Jagdeep scenes take up too much time at a point when we need to get to Ramgarh) – but will try to keep it short. (I have written two Sholay pieces this year anyway, one of which is yet to be published.) Either way, even beyond the film’s actual quality, this is always such an emotionally overwhelming experience. All the associations. The earliest evidence of my mother leching at Dharam (while being very fond of SK and AB in a more sanskaari-mahila way). The observations she made to me: look how big Dharam’s hands are when he is holding the dying Jai’s head; countless other things.

Anupama Chopra in her book mentioned how the Sippys first realised it was going to be a blockbuster, after a slow start – because viewers were too shellshocked during the interval to go out and buy popcorn etc. I can believe it. Even today, the build-up to the intermission is so intense, and Amjad Khan’s performance so scarily believable (even as he plays a mythic-allegorical-no-shades-of-grey character) – it must have been incredibly dark and unpleasant for viewers in 1975. (As I keep saying, Dharmendra’s and Hema Malini’s superb performances bring so much essential positive energy to a film that is otherwise quite morbid.)

And yes, I have decided that I do prefer the “original” ending that has now been restored and screened here – with Gabbar killed and Thakur breaking down in Veeru’s arms. Makes much more sense overall, and completes the emotional arc of Sanjeev K’s performance (as Chopra also pointed out in her book).

Anyway, enough for now. Please try to watch it on the big screen.

P.S. as mentioned here, the last time I watched Sholay on a giant screen was in 1983 or 84, and we missed the first 10-12 minutes then; I properly got to see the great opening-credits scene, with the wonderful RDB score, only in adulthood. Though I do the bulk of my film-watching alone, this latest viewing wasn’t intended to be a solitary outing – it just turned out that way. Not ideal. But I stayed the duration despite originally thinking I would watch only half the film and come back for another show (since I had a very early morning the next day).

William Brittain's short mystery stories

Continuing my adventures with vintage crime fiction, and an enjoyable new find: the cosy short stories of William Brittain, who was a regular contributor to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine in the 1960s and 70s. These two collections (published by short-mystery specialists Crippen & Landru) include dozens of Mr Strang stories – about the deductive skills of an elderly, (mostly) gentle science teacher. My favourites so far include “Mr Strang Finds the Answers” (which is suspenseful, well-plotted but also strangely moving in its premise of Mr Strang having to figure out which of three students stole the answer keys for an upcoming exam - and bringing their fathers, also his ex-students, in for a chat), “Mr Strang versus the Snowman”, “Mr Strang Accepts a Challenge”, "Mr Strang Picks up the Pieces", "Mr Strang Sees a Play", and “Mr Strang, Armchair Detective”.

But there are also 11 stories from Brittain’s “Man Who Reads…” series (see the contents page here), and for very obvious reasons I leapt right into the first one, “The Man Who Read John Dickson Carr”. This is a concise tale about a young man, obsessed with John Dickson Carr, who sets about plotting a locked-room murder of his own. And does a very clever job of it too… until he doesn’t. Delightful stuff, with a superb closing sentence.

 

P.S. if you zoom in on the cover of The Man Who Read Mysteries, you’ll see that the book being read is Carr’s The Problem of the Wire Cage – which, coincidentally, I read just last week. Tribute-literature can be such fun when it’s well-executed and has a distinct personality of its own – as is the case here.

 

Ritwik Ghatak, Unmechanical: photos from the Delhi events

A few images from Shamya Dasgupta's Delhi trip to promote his big Ritwik Ghatak anthology. 

Four Mayabazaaris and one Gulaabo gaadi. Shamya and I with the intrepid and resourceful Shillpi Singh (who recently translated Piyush Mishra's memoir into English), Yasir Abbasi, and a pink Ambassador at the eye-popping Museo Camera in Gurgaon – just before the Ghatak discussion, expertly moderated by Sanghamitra Chakraborty, on December 4.

Museo Camera is run by Aditya Arya, who was the young stills photographer during the making of Jaane bhi do Yaaro in 1982, and it’s always good to meet him and experience his continuing enthusiasm for his film and theatre days. (An old post about him here.)

The talk went well too, I think – Shamya is quite the pro now when it comes to talking Ghatak, and sounds very much like a seasoned film critic at times despite his protestations that he doesn’t know much about cinema. (You can see and hear him discuss the book in this long session which I hosted on Zoom a few weeks ago.)

At the Museo Camera session I spoke a bit about the things I have written about in the anthology – about being underwhelmed and annoyed when I experienced Ghatak films in poor prints and without adequate context around 20 years ago; and my very pleasing re-engagement with his work earlier this year, when Shamya encouraged me to watch the 1959 Bari Theke Paliye (followed by an experience of really good prints of Ajantrik, Meghe Dhaka Tara – and, of course, the wonderful Subarnarekha). 

A Ghatak talk (by Ira Bhaskar) at JNU the next day, in a packed room…

… followed by Shamya, Ira and Kaushik Bhaumik in conversation at India Habitat Centre on the 6th.

And finally, Shamya and I with a few of our Encyclopaedia Britannica colleagues (including Padma Pegu, who was first our post-grad friend before we were all at EB together).

(Unmechanical: Ritwik Ghatak in 50 Fragments is available here)

 

A hazy photo of a fondly remembered teacher

There was much St Columba’s School nostalgia at the big book launch of Ajay Jain's school memoir Charlie’s Boys at India Habitat Centre a few days ago. I’m not exactly a school sentimentalist (don’t have many good memories, didn’t have any of the rambunctious fun that the extroverted boys did, spent most of my time in a haze of petrified shyness even though I was always doing well academically) but it was nice to see the displays from the pages of old Columban magazines. Including images of nearly-forgotten teachers, especially from my Junior School and Middle School years.

In the picture here: my Class 3 teacher Mrs Ray (extreme right), who was so fond of me she visited mum and me a few times when we had left my father’s house and were staying with my nani in the mid-80s. Mrs Ray brought me some books to read when I was ill once, including a very gripping Arabian Nights-style fantasy novel (I don’t remember the name now) that I never expected a prim classteacher to endorse.

 

Also, supplied at the event, a whistle in the school colours! And Phantom sweet cigarettes of yore.

 

Puppy alert - in Saket, New Delhi

Spreading the word about these sweet and currently VERY vulnerable puppies - they are around a month and a half old now - in Golf View Apartments, Saket. Two litters were born around the same time to two unspayed dogs, making it the first such population increase in over 12 years in our colony. (I won’t get into details of this unfortunate occurrence - it involves both irresponsibility on the part of a particular dog-carer and the mess that is caused by unsterilised dogs straying into new territories after abandonment or a firecracker scare.)

Anyway, there were around 16 pups to begin with - only five or six are left now, most of the others having either died in the cold or having been run over at night when cab-drivers (or uncaring residents) speed through the colony road. They spend most of their time huddled together inside one of our naalas (where they were born), coming out a couple of times a day. With the two mothers dashing about frantically scavenging for food and inevitably getting into fights with other territorial dogs. 

 

I am not personally involved with the pups (have seen them only once) but I have put together a group to collect updates and to try and get them adopted or sent to a good boarding facility for the winter. (The latter course is always dicey: if four or five of them have to be brought back to the colony after a month or two, now larger in size, they will not only find it very difficult to adapt but will also be on the receiving end of hostility from a very dog-unfriendly RWA.)

 

Please spread the word about them so we can try to get a few of them adopted, and then get the mothers spayed once they have stopped lactating. For adoption, obviously we are looking for people who are serious and understand the responsibilities involved - not someone who will impulsively pick up a cute-looking pup and then abandon it after a few days. 

 

If there are any leads at all, or if you’re interested yourself, please mail me (jaiarjunATgmailDOTcom) or get in touch through my public posts on Facebook or Instagram. Thanks.

15 John Dickson Carr mysteries for your reading pleasure

A sequel to the previous post. Here is a listing + tentative ranking of the John Dickson Carr novels I have read so far (around 10 of these in the last two months alone). Many of these I thought brilliant, and none of them has been a clunker. (There have been times when I was underwhelmed by the solution, or thought Carr had gone too far down the rabbit-hole of the overly convoluted or improbable plot – but even in those cases the quality of the writing and the setting up of the puzzle was entertaining enough that the book as a whole worked for me.)

Category 1: my absolute favourites so far. Up there with the best Agatha Christies or who-have-you.

– He Who Whispers (wrote a bit about it here)

 – The Black Spectacles, a.k.a. The Problem of the Green Capsule

 – She Died a Lady (Unlike many Carr fans whose reviews I have read online, I enjoyed the passages of slapstick comedy in this one, including a scene where Sir Henry Merrivale, rattling along noisily in a wheelchair, stirs up the unwelcome attention of every dog in the village centre. I’m surprised that many devoted Carr fans turn their noses up at such humour, especially since it so often balances the darker aspects of a story.)

– The Burning Court (This is one of JDC’s most discussed novels, and among his most divisive… mainly because of a four-page epilogue which seems to not only overturn a perfectly satisfying denouement but also takes the book into territory that is discomfiting for many fans of “fair-play detective fiction”. I loved it, though, and I think the ending can be interpreted in two – if not three – different ways, all of which can work for the open-minded reader.)

– The Four False Weapons (One of those mysteries where, as new revelations and red herrings keep turning up in the book’s final third, you have to laugh out loud at the author’s audacity and confidence. Carr is having *so much* fun here.)

– The Plague Court Murders (A classic locked-room, or locked-hut, situation. With a solution that is inventive but easy to understand and satisfying – though you might wonder how practical it would be to carry out. If you intend to commit a locked-room murder, I mean.)

Note: The first three of the above titles I would have no problem recommending to someone who has never read Carr, is a big Agatha Christie fan, and prefers a relatively cosy/traditional mystery narrative. The last two… it’s probably better that you acquire a taste for Carr’s pyrotechnics first. The Plague Court Murders, for instance, is very heavy on dark atmosphere.
I’m unsure how to categorise The Burning Court along these lines: on the one hand it is a cleanly written book, with a lucid, easy-to-follow plot, a single setting, and a small group of characters; on the other hand, the tightrope it walks between the rational and the supernatural might not work for some readers.

Category 2: not my grade-A favourites, but I love many things about them; highly recommended overall.

– Till Death Do Us Part (A village-mystery Carr that would probably work very well for a Christie fan.)

– The Hollow Man, a.k.a. The Three Coffins – sadly the only Carr novel to have been consistently in print over the decades. Includes the legendary “locked-room lecture” by the harrumphing Dr Gideon Fell.

– The Seat of the Scornful, a.k.a. Death Turns the Tables (This is the one with the indoor swimming-pool scene that I’m convinced influenced a famous scene in the 1942 film Cat People. I would have placed the book higher except that the “how-dunit” or “how-it-happened” is just a little too complicated for my liking.)

– The Ten Teacups, a.k.a. The Peacock Feather Murders (With not one but *two* murder solutions that really stretch plausibility; but it’s very exciting for all that, and there is one moment near the end, involving the discovery of a body – not saying any more – that is as morbidly, eye-poppingly funny as anything else I have read in Golden Age crime-fic.)

– The Corpse in the Waxworks
– It Walks by Night
(These two are among Carr’s first novels, featuring his first series detective Henri Bencolin – and these books, both set in Paris, have a distinctly creepy quality, call it Grand Guignol or Gothic or whatever, that you won’t find in most of his later works.)

Category 3: liked these, but that’s about it.

– The Judas Window (Note: this is the only Carr novel that I have read *online* – and on my laptop, at that, which is not the most fulfilling experience. I mention this because it is one of his most widely admired works, and my relatively subdued feelings about it may have to do with the circumstances of my reading. I am thinking of reading a physical copy soon.)

– The White Priory Murders (As many Carr fans point out, this one has a terrific solution – a simple, uncluttered one – to an “impossible” footprints mystery. But the road to that denouement is sometimes laboured and uninvolving.)

– The Eight of Swords (A wonderfully well-hidden murderer; but again, some of the midsection is a slog to get through.)

I’m sure I’ll be talking Carr again within the next 2-3 months, since I have ordered a few more books, including some that have cult followings…

Rian Johnson on John Dickson Carr

For those of you who know and like Rian Johnson’s work – the Knives Out series, his direction of some major Breaking Bad episodes, etc – I wanted to link to this piece by him, about one of the mystery writers he most admires (who has also lately become one of my favourites).

This is Johnson waxing eloquent on the great John Dickson Carr. It was good to see this because, as mentioned in recent posts here, my reading life in the past few months has largely entailed a discovery/re-discovery of Carr’s work (thanks to some of his novels slowly coming back into print), and I have been staggered by the quality of his output during his peak years: the early 1930s to the mid-40s. One of the big literary injustices I can think of is that while Agatha Christie has been among the bestselling authors of all time worldwide, Carr (whose crime-fiction oeuvre at least for the period mentioned above was every bit as impressive and probably more varied) was almost entirely out of circulation for many decades – with many people who think of themselves as whodunit fans barely knowing his work at all.

I would have preferred to avoid comparisons since these writers have different strengths and weaknesses, but at the present moment I find Carr’s work more stimulating. That said, I also get why Christie’s books travelled better overseas, were more easily adapted to film, and were more accessible to younger readers. (I read most of my Christies for the first time between the ages of 11 and 15; I don’t think I would have found Carr as appealing at that age. This is another reason why I should avoid qualitative comparisons: my reading of these two has been at completely different times in my life, more than 30 years apart.)

Anyway, read the piece. I agree with what Rian Johnson says about Carr’s prose here: “The first quality that blows your hair back in any of Carr’s novels is so fundamental that it’s easy to take it for granted: beyond the plotting or the puzzling, beyond the mystery itself, first and foremost the man is just one hell of a writer. Like walking into a well-put-together room, when you’re in the hands of a good writer you can just feel it…”

Interestingly, the book he is mainly discussing here – The Problem of the Wire Cage – is not rated too highly by serious Carr fans. But I plan to read it soon, and I’ll get this edition which has the Johnson intro. 

P.S. I didn’t realise that the 1972 film version of Sleuth included an allusion to the murder in The Problem of the Wire Cage.

P.P.S. here, on a very good Classic Mystery blog, is a comparison of Carr and Christie.

(Coming soon, a listing/ranking of the JDC novels I have read so far)