Conspicuous Consumption

 Albert Campion continues to be my favorite of the detectives featured in the various series authored by the "Queens of Crime." One reason for this is that Allingham doesn't take him too seriously. She seems, for example, happy to show him, as she does in Death of a Ghost , outsmarted by the villain who, distasteful as he is, is more of a genius than Campion. Indeed, it is only thanks to the intervention of the actual police that Campion avoids being murdered by this miscreant. The events of the novel occur in the art world, and that's a world that's always ripe for the satirical eye of an observer like Allingham. Hard-boiled mysteries, I have argued, are the great realist fiction of our time. Decades ago, Allingham, along with the other Queens of Crime, had her characters move, for the most part, through a more genteel world than the one inhabited by freelancing private-eyes, but her portraits of the characters who inhabit that world seem as true as those painted...

 A radio station is taken over by a band of revolutionaries in a country that is not unlike the USA, a place where "autumn weather always spells football," but which is not the United States. This insurrection is at the center of the novel, and from that center ("During") the novel spreads out  through a series of accounts from different times: "Two Months After;" "Eight Years Later;" "The Day After;" "Two Years Before, " and from different perspectives including: "Production Director at WRO," "Waiter in Fenchon's," "in the office of Governor Holling," and twenty or so more. We come to understand the event, or to understand that there is no simple explanation of it or the larger rebellion of which it is a part, no single perspective which gives us the truth about it. At the center of that ambiguity is the revolutionary leader Clark Gifford, and this ambiguity makes the form Fearing has chosen ...

  There are, as of this writing, nine books in this series after  The Burning Room , which is the seventeenth volume. The most recent entry was published in 2026. The protagonist, Harry Bosch, is one year away from mandatory retirement and not looking forward to it; Connelly, on the other hand, appears to feel no need to slow down. I'm beginning to wonder whether I will live long enough to make it through the whole series, or if I'll leave the planet with Connelly still cranking out these excellent police procedurals. These sorts of novels are often structured as a series of obstacles erected by the bad guys, but also by the bureaucracy, that the detective has to surmount. One of the odd things about the investigation chronicled in The Burning Room is that a lot of the difficulties seem not so difficult. For once, things go Harry's way. That didn't detract from the pleasure.  Harry's impending retirement won't be the first time he's left the force. The last...

 In To the Lighthouse , Virginia Woolf continues the modernist experimentation that first hit full stride in Mrs Dalloway . That is, there is almost no dialogue, and very little action. The novel is almost entirely the internal ruminations of Mrs. Ramsey, her husband, some of her eight children, and their guests at their country place on a Scottish island. The characters into whose minds Woolf guides us see things and people, and these things and people trigger thoughts, memories, fantasies, and everything else that goes through people's minds. As usual, Woolf is a joy at the sentence-level, but what stands out in To the Lighthouse is her attention to form. This is unsurprising and appropriate, as when narrative is obscure, form is what makes things cohere. The novel begins with a proposed trip to the lighthouse, which is ultimately thwarted by bad weather, and ends, ten years later, with a successful trip to the lighthouse. It is this frame that holds all the internal monologues ...

 Jane Ellen Harrison was the first female career academic in England and perhaps in the English-speaking world. She pioneered a then new approach to the classics which made the findings of archeologists central. She was among the first to notice that Greek vases drew on the same mythological sources as Homer did in The Odyssey . She was one of the inspirations for Virginia Woolf's essay, "A Room of One's Own." In addition to these achievements, her reminiscences reveal her to be a lively writer who is able to convey in charming prose what it was to be a curious and intelligent girl and woman in the Victorian era. And she's brimming with viewpoints that make us wish we could have known her. Bookish sorts, for example, may substitute other stimulants for tobacco, but will agree with her when she writes " . . . with a constant supply of books and a small dole for tobacco, I could cheerfully face the Workhouse." Likewise, except for the conclusion, this educ...

  Everyone knows the story, I suppose. A young sailor with romantic visions of how valorous he will be in trying situations behaves badly. He deserts a ship full of passengers when it is in danger of sinking rather than doing what he could to save the passengers, or barring that, going down with the ship. He seems to have fled in sort of fugue state—either that or he has simply repressed the incident due to his great shame. He is unable to recall what led him to do such a thing, and is appalled to think it might simply have been  fear. This young sailor, Jim, while being tried for his dereliction of duty, meets Marlow who, as he does in Heart of Darkness , tells us the story. In this case the story is Jim's life: his attempts to flee from his shame, his near success, his ultimate failure. There is also, however, an omniscient narrator, which means that for most of the novel it is not the story of Jim's life, but rather a story about Marlow telling the story of Jim's life. T...

It's nice, in one's ramblings around the internet, to hear about a forgotten novel, download it from Guttenberg , and, upon reading it, to discover that it's actually good. This is the case with The Tortoiseshell Cat , a novel by the prolific and, as far as I can tell, entirely forgotten, Naomi Royde-Smith. The Tortoiseshell Cat was published in 1925, a few years before Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness , which some seem convinced was the first lesbian novel in English.  Royde-Smith's novel follows a character, Gillian, to whom lesbians—one in particular—are attracted, and who may have lesbian tendencies herself. It's hard to say, because though she is well read, widely traveled, and perceptive about literature and the arts, she is astoundingly naive, particularly in her lack of understanding of love, and the things people can do and feel when in its grip. The first two-thirds of the novel plays the protagonist's naivete for laughs. In the last third,...