strange and random happenstance

Death at the Dress Rehearsal by Stuart Douglas
Published by: Titan Books (UK)
Publication Date: June 4th, 2024
Format: Paperback, 400 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy

Edward Lowe believes that Floggit and Leggit might just be where his career dies. If anything, being a the lead in a slightly vulgar situation comedy bodes ill for the 1970s. He knows he shouldn't complain, he's the lead and he's employed, but it's not where he thought he'd be at his age. He's always faced an uphill battle; he doesn't look like a leading man, a short northerner without the right education or connections. That would be his costar, John Le Breton. Which is why their downmarket show is popular. The intrinsic humor of Edward Lowe as George Wetherby, the self-important owner of a provincial antique shop, being John Le Breton's boss? Comedy gold. They're currently out on location which means that Edward Lowe is subjected to his fellow cast members continually. Do they not understand that a raised newspaper or a seperate table means he doesn't want to interact? And they all want to talk to him after he discovers a body. They were getting ready to film the testing of some vintage diving gear at the local reservoir, the episode "wittily" titled "That Sinking Feeling," when Edward stumbled on the body of a woman. Not only did this put the day's filming into disarray, who knew when they could finally film at the reservoir now that it's a crime scene. Constable Primrose tells Edward and the others that it's best if they forget what happened and get back to making people laugh. Which didn't instill Edward with much hope for the case, the constable seems to be their target audience. Meaning it was Edward's job to investigate the death of Mrs. Alice Burke. Because she sure as hell didn't die accidentally. Plus what else is there to do with filming shut down for a few days? Which is exactly what John thinks when he weasels his way into the investigation. The two of them track down Alice's father and Edward is in for a shock. Back during the war there was a suspicious death of a women with several men involved. One was named Lowell Edwardsson. If it wasn't for the fact his name was almost the reverse of Edward Lowe Edward would never have paid attention. But Lowell Edwardsson is Alice's father. That can't be a coincidence. Especially when another body with ties to that long ago case appears. Again looking like an accident. It's up to Edward and his Watson to solve the case before another woman dies. If only Watson would get the clue he's not needed...

Just like the seventies, we are once again in the Golden Era of quirky detectives. Columbo, Jim Rockford, and Kojak could easily hang out with the likes of Charlie Cale, Benoit Blanc, and the members of The Thursday Murder Club. As could Lowe and Le Breton. They fit the bill. They tick both of the boxes, being quirky and set in the seventies. Here Stuart Douglas is able to offer up a pastiche of Dad's Army while creating two memorable characters who come to really care that justice is served. Two characters who each have a unique voice, a feat not many authors can pull off. In most cases the inner monologues are much the same, the authorial voice thinly veiled. But not many authors are Stuart Douglas. Edward Lowe and John Le Breton are two of the most unique and disparate crime solvers you could find. Actors as unalike in their dispositions as their methods. Which leads to some interesting crime solving methodology as well as acting methods. Just their interactions create a tension that propels the narrative forward. Edward is dedicated and far more traditional in his ideas of what a detective should be. Whereas John is there for a laugh. Well, not a laugh, as that would be insensitive to the dead, but he's there because he thinks it would be a diversion, a fun way to spend his downtime versus chasing skirt. And while this leads to much butting of heads, as anyone who reads or watches enough shows with a dead body or two in the hedgerow will know, sometimes the best partnerships are made of oil and vinegar. And Lowe and Le Breton are the best partnership, something even John concedes by the end, wondering if more adventures would really be so bad? As a reader, the answer is hell no. I need this infusion of nostalgic crime solving because no book has so encapsulated the Sundays of my childhood spent on my grandparents' farm as Death at the Dress Rehearsal. With my grandfather watching old BBC comedies and my mother and her sisters running their own murder mystery lending library over the dining room table. There's even a beloved collie! My grandfather's collie was named Jenny if you were interested and he favored Are You Being Served? over Dad's Army. But those are just the specifics of my life, I'm sure this will bring out different memories in you. I entreat you to spend a nostalgic Sunday afternoon with Lowe and Le Breton. You won't regret it.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Actors, Are You Being Served, BBC Comedy, Dad's Army, Death at the Dress Rehearsal, Edward Lowe, Floggit and Leggit, John Le Breton, Lowe and Le Breton, Murder Most Foul, Nostalgia, Seventies, Stuart Douglas, WWII

Death at the Dress Rehearsal by Stuart Douglas
Published by: Titan Books (UK)
Publication Date: June 4th, 2024
Format: Paperback, 400 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy

Edward Lowe believes that Floggit and Leggit might just be where his career dies. If anything, being a the lead in a slightly vulgar situation comedy bodes ill for the 1970s. He knows he shouldn't complain, he's the lead and he's employed, but it's not where he thought he'd be at his age. He's always faced an uphill battle; he doesn't look like a leading man, a short northerner without the right education or connections. That would be his costar, John Le Breton. Which is why their downmarket show is popular. The intrinsic humor of Edward Lowe as George Wetherby, the self-important owner of a provincial antique shop, being John Le Breton's boss? Comedy gold. They're currently out on location which means that Edward Lowe is subjected to his fellow cast members continually. Do they not understand that a raised newspaper or a seperate table means he doesn't want to interact? And they all want to talk to him after he discovers a body. They were getting ready to film the testing of some vintage diving gear at the local reservoir, the episode "wittily" titled "That Sinking Feeling," when Edward stumbled on the body of a woman. Not only did this put the day's filming into disarray, who knew when they could finally film at the reservoir now that it's a crime scene. Constable Primrose tells Edward and the others that it's best if they forget what happened and get back to making people laugh. Which didn't instill Edward with much hope for the case, the constable seems to be their target audience. Meaning it was Edward's job to investigate the death of Mrs. Alice Burke. Because she sure as hell didn't die accidentally. Plus what else is there to do with filming shut down for a few days? Which is exactly what John thinks when he weasels his way into the investigation. The two of them track down Alice's father and Edward is in for a shock. Back during the war there was a suspicious death of a women with several men involved. One was named Lowell Edwardsson. If it wasn't for the fact his name was almost the reverse of Edward Lowe Edward would never have paid attention. But Lowell Edwardsson is Alice's father. That can't be a coincidence. Especially when another body with ties to that long ago case appears. Again looking like an accident. It's up to Edward and his Watson to solve the case before another woman dies. If only Watson would get the clue he's not needed...

Just like the seventies, we are once again in the Golden Era of quirky detectives. Columbo, Jim Rockford, and Kojak could easily hang out with the likes of Charlie Cale, Benoit Blanc, and the members of The Thursday Murder Club. As could Lowe and Le Breton. They fit the bill. They tick both of the boxes, being quirky and set in the seventies. Here Stuart Douglas is able to offer up a pastiche of Dad's Army while creating two memorable characters who come to really care that justice is served. Two characters who each have a unique voice, a feat not many authors can pull off. In most cases the inner monologues are much the same, the authorial voice thinly veiled. But not many authors are Stuart Douglas. Edward Lowe and John Le Breton are two of the most unique and disparate crime solvers you could find. Actors as unalike in their dispositions as their methods. Which leads to some interesting crime solving methodology as well as acting methods. Just their interactions create a tension that propels the narrative forward. Edward is dedicated and far more traditional in his ideas of what a detective should be. Whereas John is there for a laugh. Well, not a laugh, as that would be insensitive to the dead, but he's there because he thinks it would be a diversion, a fun way to spend his downtime versus chasing skirt. And while this leads to much butting of heads, as anyone who reads or watches enough shows with a dead body or two in the hedgerow will know, sometimes the best partnerships are made of oil and vinegar. And Lowe and Le Breton are the best partnership, something even John concedes by the end, wondering if more adventures would really be so bad? As a reader, the answer is hell no. I need this infusion of nostalgic crime solving because no book has so encapsulated the Sundays of my childhood spent on my grandparents' farm as Death at the Dress Rehearsal. With my grandfather watching old BBC comedies and my mother and her sisters running their own murder mystery lending library over the dining room table. There's even a beloved collie! My grandfather's collie was named Jenny if you were interested and he favored Are You Being Served? over Dad's Army. But those are just the specifics of my life, I'm sure this will bring out different memories in you. I entreat you to spend a nostalgic Sunday afternoon with Lowe and Le Breton. You won't regret it.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Actors, ARCs, Are You Being Served, BBC Comedy, Dad's Army, Death at the Dress Rehearsal, Edward Lowe, Floggit and Leggit, John Le Breton, Lowe and Le Breton, Mystery, Nostalgia, Seventies, Stuart Douglas, WWII

Bellman and Black by Diane Setterfield
Published by: Atria/Emily Bestler Books
Publication Date: November 5th, 2013
Format: Hardcover, 336 Pages
Rating: ★
To Buy

William Bellman's life was perfect for a time. He excelled at the family business, a thriving mill which he helped make more prosperous. When his uncle died suddenly his cousin decided that William should take over and he pushed the mill's productivity even further. This allowed him to marry for love and have as many children as they could. His life was at it's apex. Things started to go wrong. Those he loved started to die. At each and every funeral he sees a man who knowingly looks at him and yet William can not for the life of him place this familiar face. After his wife and all his children but one die he meets the man, a Mr. Black, in the cemetery standing over his family's freshly dug graves. William is pleading for the life of his poor daughter, dear Dora, and though he can't remember what happened that feverish night, he knows that he and Mr. Black struck some sort of deal. That deal, however nebulous, starts William Bellman on a new business venture. He is to create an emporium in London catering to the bereaved. Bellman and Black will have the finest in all funerary needs. William doesn't sleep, he doesn't eat, he lives and breathes this new company. He finds the backers, he finds the location, he finds the architect, he finds the blackest of black fabrics, the subtlest of stationary, the discreetest of employees, he finds everything but his associate Mr. Black. Mr. Black is nowhere to be found. This starts to gnaw on William. Is their bargain complete? Will his partner ever come for the funds he is so diligently putting aside? As William lay dying he looks on the face of Mr. Black and a memory comes back to him. William is ten and out with three of his friends. He boasts he can kill a rook with his slingshot. No one there thought he could do it, and yet the dead rook spoke to his success. A success that he forgot but the rooks remembered.

I don't know why I gave Diane Setterfield a second chance. The Thirteenth Tale was predictable and what plot it had was simplistic. The reveal was so laughably telegraphed that I can't believe that anyone fell for it. And then I read the cunningly calibrated wording to promote her second novel "a heart-thumpingly perfect ghost story, beautifully and irresistibly written, its ratcheting tension exquisitely calibrated line by line" and I was sold. I have to remind myself that the marketing department is not the author and also, where was the ghost!?! There was no ghost! Wait, was it the ghost of a plot? No, it couldn't be that because instead of going from a simplistic plot with her first book to a more complex one with her second she went in the exact opposite direction and wrote a book with no plot. No ghost of a plot, simply NO PLOT. Also where was that ratcheting tension? Was it hidden in the hundred pages about how a mill works? Or was it happening offstage in the next hundred pages when Bellman was building his Selfridges of death? Somewhere amongst the building plans and finding the blackest black? And another thing, this book does a disservice to stories about department stores! The Paradise, Mr. Selfridge, even Are You Being Served? have proven again and again that department stores are rife for storytellers. But I don't think Diane Setterfield is a storyteller, I think she has to admit at this point that her writing just puts people to sleep and should therefore start a practice helping insomniacs and leave us poor unwitting readers who jump at the Gothic alone. This book literally took me two weeks to read because every night it would lull me to sleep with it's lack of plot and too much time on wool!

You would think with all these hundreds of pages devoid of plot that she could really nail down her details, and to an untrained eye she might... but I have a sneaking suspicion that she is writing out of her ass. She writes in loving detail about warp and weft, how to get blacks the blackest they can be, and who am I to know if this is right? I'm not an expert on milling and dyeing in the 19th century but I do know to make black blacker you add blue not more black! What I am an expect on is anything to do with art, therefore I know my paper stocks. At one point Bellman is talking about some exquisite paper he is getting in that will be perfect for mourning stationary and it's 1/2" thick. Excuse me!?! Firstly paper is done in pounds and if you are taking a caliper to measure it, they are small increments indeed. And yes, I know paper is different stateside to the UK, but I learned both systems at school and I think the UK system is SO much more logical. Therefore I can definitively say that if Bellman stocked paper that was 1/2" think it wouldn't be paper it would be a block of wood. It would be freakin' 1/2" thick, a THIRD of the thickness of a 2x4. I feel especial pain that as this book was supposedly edited by someone in the book world, a world of paper for printing and publishing that no one scratched there head and went "hang on a minute something seems wrong here" but alas such is the case. Therefore the integrity of the author has been impinged. I know she got this 100% wrong, so how can I trust any of the details she gives? Nothing can be taken at face value and therefore she has completely devalued her own work with shitty research.

Though her shitty specificity doesn't carry throughout the book. It's very nebulous as to when the events take place. The section in the mill indicates that it's just at the cusp of the industrial revolution so the first half of the 19th century, but then the prevalence of Victorian funerary practices would mean that it would have to coincide with Prince Albert's death in 1861, and yet by the end of the book cremation is all the vogue which didn't happen until the turn of the 20th century, and as Bellman was in his fifties when he died how the fuck does time work in this book!?! Maybe if you say his mill was backwards, despite the author trying to show otherwise, we could say that Bellman was born around 1850 and everything can kind of fall into place, but just... Yet it drives me batty that she can spend hundreds of pages on fabric and I had to go online to see that the first cremation was in 1885 and in 1902 the cremation act was passed. Though I still can't be sure that this is what she was referring too as the inevitable downfall of the Selfridges of death! What could have been interesting to explore in a book was the radically changing funerary practices over the course of this one century, with cremation taking the place of grand pomp and circumstance due not only to cost but to consideration as the cities for the dead impinged on the cities of the living. If the history aspect had been explored, going into Queen Victoria and her staying in mourning until her death, interestingly enough until the year before the cremation act, I could have so read the heck out of those details! Instead we are left with imbalance. A book with no plot going into excruciating and erroneous details about non-essentials and vaguebooking anything of historical significance that could have given the book depth.

But then in the end Setterfield decides to revel in the vague. A draw your own conclusions approach that made me draw the conclusion that she can't write. Here's the thing, putting an ampersand between two things DOESN'T link them. You actually have to establish a connection, you need to set this up, you need to link the very human world of Bellman with the probably avian world of Black. You can't have a connection so tenuous that at times the protagonist actually wonders if there was ever an agreement between them. And just randomly having short sections about corvids with pointless facts isn't integrating them into the story, it's breaking up the monotony with information that has no bearing on the rest of the book. And here is the crux of this problem, without a definitive link between Bellman and Black, without some explanation as to who Black is there is no "other" element to this book. The Gothic goes out the window and the supernatural has sped away. When your hints are so vague you can't draw ANY conclusions perhaps it's time to realize you have failed at whatever it was you were trying to do. Because the truth is I have NO idea what Setterfield was trying to do here. Is Black death in a Meet Joe Black kind of way? Is Black the human form of a rook? Is Black both? Gaw! So annoying! I mean, is he even there at all or just a hallucination that Bellman has, a kind of Grim that haunts Bellman? Because if it is just a presentiment of death that's been stalking Bellman since he was a child, well, that's just lame, because if you think about it death stalks us all. So that's the point of the book is it? You live a life and then you die? Wow, that's some original thinking there...

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Are You Being Served, Bellman and Black, Diane Setterfield, Funerary Practices, Going Gothic, Gothic, Graphic Designer, Meet Joe Black, Mr. Selfridge, Queen Victoria, Rooks, The Paradise, The Thirteenth Tale

When I was just a little girl... (ok, now I have "Que Sera, Sera" in my head). But, seriously, when I was just a little girl I don't think I ever had a full weekend at home. My brother and I would be bundled into the car and would either head east to Milwaukee, where my dad would have work and we would stay with my Uncle spending vast periods of time at the Milwaukee Public Museum, or, which was more likely the case, we would head west to my maternal grandparents farm. They had a big old farm house out in the driftless region about half way between Spring Green and Lone Rock (the coldest place in the state with the warmest heart) out on Hwy. JJ. The house was huge, having been a mail order farmstead from Sears that was expanded on over the generations. Almost every Sunday this is where I was to be found, in the house, while my grandfather would always insist that we should go outside and play (rare photo of me "in the wild" flying a kite above). There were many reasons that I didn't like to go outside. One was my really bad allergies, two was it was usually hot or cold and I liked the standard temperature indoors, but three was because of Doctor Who.

I am a tv addict. I love television (though I am studiously ignoring it and obviously bored in this picture of my grandparents living room). I can honestly say that I came by this through genetics. My grandfather was a worse tv addict then me (notice, the tv is the center of the room). Not only did he have the tv on constantly, even eating his dinner away from the rest of the family watching tv, but when he got a VCR he would record everything he watched as well. Now there is only so much space for tapes of America's Funniest Home Videos... I mean seriously, that house was filled with them. At this time though, what was to be his favorite and most recorded show had not yet made it's debut. Instead he turned on PBS and left it on all day. No one was allowed to turn the channel because in the morning was This Old House, which being a constant remodeller in the most unique of ways (there was an outlet built into the top of the house to hang lights on the old satellite dish) he had to watch. Then at dinner time Are You Being Served? was on... which was his favorite comedy. So that there would be no interruption between the two shows the channel was never changed all day.

What was on PBS during the interval between This Old House and Are You Being Served? you might ask? The answer is Doctor Who. Doctor Who with Tom Baker. Now, I'm a little kid at this point, like 6 or 7, and, not wanting to go outside, well, that left Doctor Who. This show freaked me out on a regular basis. I liked the goofy man in the blue box who saved the day, but what I most remember is him being chased in gravel pits by evil monsters, notably, the Cybermen. Now to add to this story the crucial point. My grandparents farm had two big fields and then hills. In these hills were located two quarries. As in gravel pits. As in, the place where The Doctor always encountered his enemies. So after spending an afternoon seeing a show that clearly stated the dangers of gravel pits, my grandfather would tell me to go out and play in a gravel pit (in the photo above, the gravel pit is out of sight to the right). Now, at this point, you might be thinking that, oh, he didn't mean to scare me, this isn't his way. WRONG! This is just the sadistic kind of humor he had, which I have indeed inherited. This is a man who would hid peas in his blind cat's food to watch him sort it out in a little line on the side, laughing the whole time. So in other words, he knew exactly what he was doing.

Whenever I went to the lower gravel pit my parents always wondered why there was one section I would never go into. Well, in fairness, I spent so much time learning about the dangers of gravel pits, I knew that that little curve in the valley created by the gravel was where the Cybermen lived. I knew it in my heart. Years later, when Doctor Who had fallen out of my life, now that my grandfather had switched to watching ABC on Sundays, I would still get chills thinking about that lower pit. In fact, it wasn't until I started watching Doctor Who again that I remembered that this was the reason I was scared. I had totally forgotten about Cyberman and the goofy guy in the blue box, but I remember expecting to see a flash of silver if I where to turn round that corner. I still find it odd that years later I would look back on this time as a defining time in my life, despite the fear. Was a born to be a Whovian? Or did my grandfather make me into one?

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: America's Funniest Videos, Are You Being Served, Cybermen, Doctor Who, Driftless, Farm, Gravel Pits, Lone Rock, Quarries, Spring Green, The 4th Doctor, This Old House, Tom Baker, Whovian