Lord Emsworth has gone to New York to see his sister, Constance, married.
Unfortunately, in his absence another sister, Hermione, installs herself
at Blandings Castle. And she hires a secretary for him. The secretary,
Sandy, has sent her fiance packing and asks Sir Galahad Threepwood to
mail the package containing his letters. Galahad decides to reunite the
two and the whole complex mess that happens goes from there. There is at
least one more messy love plot plus a Nephew who tries to let loose the
pig. I like the Blandings books the best, I think. Lord Emsworth somehow
reminds me of my father, who walked around humming to himself all day. He
did not care for pigs, however. The whole business with the pig amuses me
no end, for some reason.

As with all Wodehouse books, read and enjoy.

Recently, my kids and I were having a “reading supper.” In our house, we
don’t read and eat unless the Father personage is gone. He frowns on the
lack of conversation when the rest of us have our noses in a book. But
he’s taking night classes this semester and the kids and I are free to
read while we eat. Anyway, I was reading The Mating Season
and enduring
the snotty remarks from my teenagers about the title. I read them some of
it to show them that no, Mom is not reading something inappropriate for
public consumption and ended up reading to them the whole meal. It’s hard
to read aloud and eat at the same time.

Bertie is whangdoodled into going down to Deverill Hall pretending to be
Gussie Fink-Nottle after Gussie lands himself in the jug by searching for
newts in the fountain of Trafalgar Square. He cant take Jeeves since
Jeeves’ uncle is the Butler of that establishment. And Deverill Hall is
full of Aunts that make Aunt Agatha seems like a toy poodle. Then Corky
Pirbright shows up with a Dog who somehow ticks off the local rozzer,
Constable Dobbs. Jeeves finally shows up to save the day when Gussie
comes to the Hall pretending to be, yes, Bertie Wooster. There are also a
couple of love plots and an absolutely wonderful scene of religious
conversion by Constable Dobbs. Not to mention Bertie on a chair singing a
hunting song.

I find the plots of Wodehouse novels difficult to explain. They are so
convoluted they nearly defy explanation. You may as well just read the
book. But the wonderful part of this novel, as with all his other work,
is the description of events and the play with words. And Bertie’s almost
pathological aversion to marriage while seeming to surround himself with
marriageable young women. And the Aunts.

I’ve read this book three or four times now, and I still like it, and I
still have no idea what the title means. Matthew Scudder is still a
morally ambiguous character, but he’s still compelling, and the tale is
not only a darn good one, well told, but in fact it’s considerably better
than its predecessor, The Sins of the Fathers. Block keeps us
guessing, and while it’s still gritty the sex and violence aren’t the
point.

The premise is nifty. An acquaintance of Scudder’s named Spinner gives
him an envelope to hold. So long as Scudder hears from Spinner once a
week, he’s to
leave the envelope alone. If Spinner gets murdered, Scudder is to open the
envelope and do what he thinks best. So happens, Spinner is
murdered (no surprise), and when Scudder opens the envelope he discovers
that the guy has been blackmailing three different people. It’s almost
certain that one of them had him killed. Which one? Spinner wants the
guilty one taken care of, but the other two should go free.

I like it. It works.

After re-reading the first book in John D. MacDonald’s much touted
Travis McGee series and finding the sex and violence there-in
seriously uncongenial, I found myself wondering why I enjoy Lawrence
Block‘s equally gritty Matthew Scudder series. And so I took the
first book in the series from the shelf, and re-read it. It’s by no
means the best in the series–in fact, I’d put it near the bottom–and
yet I still liked it better than The Deep Blue Good-By.

This is surprising, as the two series have a lot in common. Scudder,
like McGee, works as little as possible. He’s not a licensed detective;
but sometimes “friends” ask him to find something out, and sometimes they
give him “presents” of money in return. Scudder, unlike McGee, doesn’t
think of himself as any kind of knight errant; in fact, he’s an ex-cop,
an alcoholic, and not a very nice guy. He’s not above being violent when
it suits him, and when he was a cop it suited him to take money when
it was handed to him.

So why do I like Scudder better than McGee? Upon reflection, I think
that there are several reasons. First of all, McGee judges everybody he
meets, and often unfavorably. You sense that he feels superior to almost
all of them, even when he’s using them. Scudder judges very few people,
and doesn’t feel superior to many; in fact, he rarely speaks of himself.
It makes Scudder easier company. Second, Scudder engages in
straightforward investigation; McGee is always about recovering property.
That could be extremely interesting–every novel a scam novel, and I do
enjoy a good scam. But instead of retrieving the loot with cleverness
and skill and vanishing into the night, it always seems to come down to a
violent confrontation. Sometimes the Scudder novels end that way, but
not necessarily.

And finally, I guess, Scudder grows during the series. He starts out as
an alcoholic on the edge of losing it completely, and as the books go on
he gets sober, he gets married, and eventually (if I recall correctly) he
even gets a real P.I.’s license.

And maybe Block is simply a better storyteller than MacDonald. I dunno.

Travis McGee is one of those characters you hear about from time to time,
usually with superlatives attached; and the same can be said about his
creator, John D. MacDonald. And so, when the Travis McGee books came
back in print some years ago I acquired and read the first six or eight
of them, and then stopped. Part of the reason was that they were
grittier than I liked, and part was that I’d simply lost interest. I
kept them, though, and after reading Ed McBain’s
Nocturne I decided to give him another try.

For those who aren’t familiar, Travis McGee is a beach bum. He lives on
a houseboat in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. And sometimes people who have
had some object or other taken from them come to him and ask him to get
it back. If he succeeds, he gets 50% of whatever he retrieves–and then
he lives the good life on his houseboat until the money runs out and he
needs to take a new client. McGee is frequently described as a knight
errant–a fundamentally decent guy who can’t help aiding the weak and
oppressed.

In this particular book a young woman comes to him. Her father had been
in the Air Transport Command as a freighthandler, and apparently had
managed to make quite a bit of money on the side smuggling. On returning
to the States he’d killed an officer and been sentenced to life in prison.
A cellmate of his, on release, comes to see the young woman, and
insinuates his way into every part of her life, until he finds out where
the money was stashed, and then he disappears. The woman wants the money
back.

I’m afraid I didn’t like it much, this time through. I even found it,
and Travis McGee himself, to be a bit tedious. I’ve spent a couple of
days pondering that, on and off, and I think I’ve figured out way.

What people seem to like about Travis McGee, other than his knightly
character, is that he philosophizes. As the book goes on he tosses off
little gems of wisdom about this or that or the people he meets. And
that, it turns out, is a big part of what I dislike, because a lot of it
is pretty damned depressing. There’s no joy and no humor to speak of in
this book.

And then there’s McGee’s vaunted moral code. He’s a real nice guy; one
of his rules is that he won’t engage in casual sex with people he really
cares about. Instead, he only engages in casual sex with brainless
idiots who aren’t looking for anything else. And while you expect the
hero in a book like this to treat the bad guys violently, he treats other
folks badly as well if it gets him the information he wants.

And then, finally, there’s a whole pornography of violence thing going on
that I find repulsive. It’s one thing to kill somebody in a novel; it’s
another thing to describe the process and the results in detail. I was
repulsed by them in Nocturne as well, but I didn’t have the
sense that the book was about the violence; rather, it was about
finding the perpetrators.

I might re-read one or more of the remaining Travis McGee’s in my
collection, just to see if my generalizations hold true…but if they do,
I think that Good Ol’ Travis is going to get purged.

I suppose I first heard of Ed McBain and the 87th Precinct series fifteen
or twenty years ago, but (surprising though it may be) this is the first
of McBain’s books I’ve ever read. I don’t even know where it came from;
I’m sure we didn’t buy it. It’s pretty well beaten up, which argues that
somebody left it here, or it might have been in a bag of books my Dad was
getting rid of. Anyway, I found it on our shelves during the Great Purge
(which is stalled at about the midway point, by the way) and decided to
give it a try.

I’ve not read anything quite like it. More than anything else, it
reminded me of an episode of Law and Order, with one
difference–as the camera follows the detectives around the city, asking
their questions, McBain lets us know what they are thinking. Not in
large measure; there are no internal monologues. But we hear the little
comments they make to themselves in response to the things going on
around them. We do hear a little bit about the personal lives of the
detectives, but we aren’t necessarily meant to like them, or identify
with them, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a different set of
detectives in each book.

It’s a gritty book. An aging pianist is murdered in her apartment; a
streetwalker is murdered and left in an alley; a trio of frat boys go on
a drunken killing spree. Many of the details are things that I didn’t
especially need to have in my head. But what I’m left with at the end
isn’t so much the grit as the air of clinical detachment with which
McBain relates the story, and the skill with which he weaves diverse
elements into a complete, coherent story.

I don’t know whether I’ll seek out more of McBain’s work, but I
definitely respect his skill.

This is a collection of short stories mainly about Blandings Castle and
Lord Emsworth. There are more to the volume, but I confess, I only read
the Blandings ones. I love the Blanding stories! Lord Emsworth amuses me
no end and his brother, Sir Galahad Threepwood is a hoot. Like Bertie’s
Aunts, Lord Emsworth has Sisters and worse, Nephews. But the bane of his
life is his younger son, Freddie. Fortunately, Freddie marries an
American heiress to a dog bone manufacturer and goes off the the States
to work in her father’s vicinity. This collection includes the, I think,
first Blanding story “The Custody of the Pumpkin” which has Lord Emsworth
adoring his prize pumpkin prior to the advent of the Empress of Blandings
into his life. It also includes the classic “Pig-Hoo-O-O-O-Ey” where Lord
Emsworth really learns how to call a pig. As usual with everything by
Wodehouse, these stories are a delight.