In all of Marsh’s long career, she wrote only one novel with a
collaborator, and this, her third novel, is it. This is a medical
mystery, and appropriately enough her collaborator was a medical doctor
named Henry Jellett (not that you’d know that from the edition of the
book I have; I found it out on a web page some where, quite a long time
ago now, when I was looking for a complete list of Marsh’s books).

Full disclaimer: I actually read this before my trip to
Australia, and neglected to write a review before I left. Usually I
don’t let quite such a long time go by before writing about a book, but,
well, there were special circumstances.

The set up is simple: a prominent politician, the Home Secretary in fact,
suffers an attack of appendicitis just as he’s pushing for a new law that
will allow the government to pursue revolutionaries with vigor. This was
written in 1935, remember; the bomb-throwing anarchist was not forgotten,
and the Bolshevik was a real presence in England. The Secretary
collapses in the Halls of Parliament and is rushed to a hospital.
The operation is a complete success–except that he receives an overdose
and dies shortly after the operation. Who gave him the drug? It could
have been the surgeon; the Secretary had recently had a sordid affair
with the woman the surgeon loves. It could have been one of the nurses;
one of them is the woman with whom the victim had the sordid affair, and
another is a Bolshevik who laughed at his death. Was it thwarted love?
Politics? Or something else….

It’s not a bad book; none of Marsh’s books disappoint. I enjoyed it.
But it was a bit tedious, and if the excursions into Bolshevism aren’t as
absurd as the ones in A May Lay Dead, they still detract from
the picture. There’s better to come.

I don’t get out to the movies
all that much, and I have so many interesting ways to fill my time that
I’m rarely willing to sit and watch one on TV for two hours on end. So
even if I have the DVD, it can take me quite a long while to get around
to watching it. When the movie is one that’s not suitable for little
kids, it takes even longer–those hours after they go to bed are precious.
So even though I got a DVD of Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad, and
the Ugly in a gift exchange last Christmas, I only got around to
watching it last night. My friend Dave the co-worker (as opposed to my
son Dave, or my friend Dave the non-co-worker) came over to watch it with
me, as it’s one of his favorite flicks. Myself, I’d never seen it before.

They say that constraints foster creativity; in this case, I think Leone
was chiefly constrained by having relatively few actors who could speak
English without an Italian accent. Consequently, this is a film of
little dialog and long silences in which the storytelling is almost
completely visual and cinematic. Toward the beginning, for example,
Lee Van Cleef stalks slowly into a hacienda. The family members all
hide, except for the man of the house. The man is clearly terrified, but
he makes a play of bravery: he sets the table for dinner and then sits
down and serves himself some kind of soup. Van Cleef has been leaning in
the arched doorway at the far end of the house; now he walks slowly
forward, sits down, serves himself a bowl of soup, and begins to eat
it–all without talking his eyes off the man for even a second. And his
eyes clearly say, “You’re mine. I can crush you like a bug.”

There’s a similar moment toward the end, when Van Cleef, Eli Wallach, and
(of course) Clint Eastwood are having a kind of three-way shoot out.
There’s something all three of them want; realistically, only the last
man standing will get it. The camera jumps from face to face as you see
them thinking: who will draw first? If I draw first, will I be able to
gun down both of them? And you notice (or perhaps you don’t) that
Wallach is sweating profusely, and that even the face of the normally
cool Van Cleef has a sheen of perspiration, while Eastwood is both
relaxed and dry as a bone, and you think, “What’s going on here?”

But I expected the meaningful glances, the tumbledown buildings,
the wide open spaces, and the violence. What surprised me was
the humor–there are many points that are laugh out loud funny.
Unfortunately, few of them are truly quotable; the funny lines are funny
only in context, as when Eastwood admonishes Wallach, “And after all the
times I’ve saved your life.”

All in all, I enjoyed it–it’s a good bit of story telling.

The April Issue of Ex Libris Reviews is
now available. Come
welcome our new reviewer, Felicity McCarthy!

…or whatever it is I’ve been for the last
couple of weeks. Actually, I got home yesterday about noon, but two
activities–getting reacquainted with my family, and sleep–have taken
priority up until now. I’m still not over the jet lag. But I read a lot
of books while I was gone, and of course there is the tale of my
Australian journey to unfold, so expect posting to resume in earnest.

I’m leaving for Australia tomorrow, and
I’ll be gone for two weeks. (Such timing!) I hope to be able to access
my e-mail during that time; I also hope to be able to update this web log
with details of the trip. But then, I always hope that. Anyway, the
earliest I’ll be able to get on-line is next Monday or Tuesday
(Australian time).

So if you send me e-mail, or you’re worried because there haven’t been
any new posts in days, don’t worry; things will be back to normal when I
get back at the end of the month.

This is not a war blog, and so I haven’t been posting much that
pertains to the pro-war/anti-war debate. But if you’re against the war,
that is, if you think the administration’s rhetoric about the liberation
of the Iraqi people is simply rhetoric, you might be interested in
reading
this.
And if you think Jacques Chirac is being obstructionist purely out of
principle, you might be interested in knowing about
this.
Interestingly, I didn’t see either of these stories in our local paper,
the Los Angeles Times.

This is the fourth book in Drake’s Isles series; I didn’t enjoy it quite
as the others, but I was in a foul mood and blowing my nose every ten
minutes, so I’m not sure if that means anything. Certainly the writing
was as good as before, and once again the action wasn’t simply a rehash
of the previous books.

I’ve finally figured out what really makes this series taste different
than others I’ve read recently–it really is a series. That is,
it’s a series in the old sense of a collection of standalone books about
a continuing set of characters, rather than one gargantuan tale broken
into N elephantine tomes. This is common enough in the mystery and
historical genres (as the books of Patrick O’Brian bear
witness), but it’s come to be unusual in the fantasy biz.

Here the series is simply about the trials of
Prince Garric and his buddies as they try to keep the Kingdom of the
Isles from going under. This is an open-ended premise, as there will
always be new foes and new crises; an author could milk it indefinitely.
And, as it happens, the fifth Isles book is being published in hardcover
this summer.

But the neat thing is, if there were never going to be any more Isles
books, I wouldn’t be disappointed. The fourth book ends satisfyingly;
and so did each of its predecessors. I have similar expectations of the
fifth, which I’ll buy and read when it comes out in paperback.

The March Ex
Libris is up, as you might expect.
Even if you’ve been following the web log for the past month, be sure to
check out Craig Clarke’s reviews.

The whole wjduquette.com site suffered a
temporary outage this morning; it may have started some time last night.
It was all due to a communications breakdown and resulting billing snafu
with my web hosting service, Dreamhost,
on whom be praise; the screw-up was my fault and I’ve taken steps to make
sure it won’t happen again.

IAN HAMET posted
some
kind words about us over on his blog,
Banana Oil, for which I’m grateful, but
I’m calling attention to it mostly because of a comment he makes about the book
Law for the Elephant:

Then, today, he posted a piece about a book that sounds like
a goldmine of background info (speaking as a writer),
Law for the Elephant by John Phillip Reid. According to Will,
it’s a dry, dusty history of the California and Oregon Trails. Research
Research Research!!!

And he’s absolutely right. I don’t know that I’ll ever sell a novel, but
I’ve written a couple, and started on a couple more, and one day perhaps
I’ll want to write a novel that involves the Gold Rush–or some
science-fiction/fantasy analog of it. Perhaps I won’t. But either way,
Reid’s book is a treasure-trove of detail about the emigrants, all drawn
from original sources. Being a legal history much concerned
with the emigrant’s views on property rights, it by no means gives a
complete or balanced account–but on the other hand it includes many
details you simply wouldn’t find in a more conventional history.

I’ve started reading a more recent sequel, Policing the Elephant;
I’ll have more on that when I finish it, which will be at some point in
the indefinite future. Interesting, it is; gripping it ain’t.