Alder Street Capital

Rob Thesman's personal web page

Daily Journal March 15, 2020

by

Hobie was the Maine Coon cat I got in 1991 to replace Dexter, the Abyssinian that died in September 1991 from Feline Infectious Peritonitis. Hobie was the last cat in a large litter of a skitchy breeder in Sultan WA, although I didn’t know how skitchy at the time. He was the runt of the litter, that much the breeder told me. His mother was around 18 pounds and his dad was nearly 25 pounds, fairly normal sizes for Maine Coons. Hobie was never larger than about 13 pounds & toward the end of his life he was down to around 8 or 9 pounds.

By the time I took him to the vet a couple of days after I got him, there wasn’t any way I was taking him back to the breeder, even though the vet told me he had a heart murmur that pretty much ensured he wouldn’t live that long. Hobie lived to be 22, finally passing away in 2012, so the vet was off a bit, although every vet that checked Hobie mentioned he had a heart  murmur.

Hobie was a bit weird, but was super companionable during his whole live. He bonded with a few people over the years. Pam, our personal assistant who worked at our house in Petaluma was a huge favorite of his – we swear that when he saw her arrive, he meowed something that sounded like he was trying to say her name. And he liked our cat sitter a lot, even though she was really a dog person – she bred Boxers.

Hobie liked a well-run household, especially he liked early breakfasts. The earlier the better – 4 a.m. if possible. If no breakfast had been organized by 6, the chances of be getting bitten on the nose if I were still in bed increased with each minute.

The Tuscan Child by Rhys Bowen

by

I just finished The Tuscan Child, a 2018 novel by Rhys Bowen. It’s the first book I’ve read by her. Although I can’t remember why I picked up the book (it’s way outside of the usual thrillers I’d read), it’s a worthwhile read. 

It’s a genre story in the cozy mystery category, so it’s different than what I usually read – for example, there’s no body at all until mid way through the story, which is remarkable if for no other reason than half the story takes place in WW II Italy.

The story is about a WW II British bomber pilot who is shot down over occupied Tuscany in the waning months of the war. The Allies are advancing, although the area where he is shot down is still held by the Germans. The pilot, Hugo Langley, is badly injured in the plane crash and takes refuge in a bombed-out monastery near the crash site. He is discovered by a young woman, Sofia, who is foraging for food. Sofia’s husband, conscripted into the Italian army, has been lost and presumed dead in wartime Africa, leaving Sofia to raise their small boy alone in a remote Tuscan village a few miles from the monastery where Hugo is hiding. While she nurses him back to health, they (predicably) fall in love.

Hugo is later rescued and returns to England after the war, only to find out that his titled father has died, leaving Hugo as the next Lord Langley, along with a crumbling family estate and a large estate tax bill. Almost thirty years later, Hugo’s estranged daughter Joanna (born several years after the war) is notified that her reclusive father has died, and she returns to the family home to arrange for his funeral and to clear up his estate. Among his personal effects, she finds an unopened letter to Sofia from her father dated immediately after his return from the war. The letter had been returned to him marked undeliverable. It’s a surprising discovery, because the letter mentions a beautiful baby boy. 

Wondering whether she has a half sibling in Tuscany, Joanna leaves immediately for the small town in Italy where she believes Sofia might still be living. When she arrives there, she soon discovers that some of the townspeople do not want the past brought up. Joanna persists and what she finally uncovers is even more startling (and dangerous) that what she’d thought.

It’s an interesting story structurally in that the chapters alternate between a third person narrative of Hugo’s wartime story of the crash, his injuries and his relationship with Sofia, shifting to chapters told in the first person by Joanna in the early 1970s as she finds out about her father’s death and her subsequent trip to Tuscany.

There’s plenty of Tuscan atmosphere to satisfy Under The Tuscan Sun fans. While I’m not a big cozy mystery fan, this book was pretty good.

Past Tense by Lee Child

by

Past Tense is the 23rd Jack Reacher novel by Lee Child. I’ve read all of them, starting with the original book, Killing Floor. Child follows a fairly simple storytelling formula, sticking closely to the Hero’s Journey as explained by Joseph Campbell. 

I say explained rather than invented by Joseph Campbell because, as was the point made by Campbell, no one “invented” the Hero’s Journey, it has always been – it’s a storytelling formula that resonates emotionally in humans across time and cultures. If you’re interested in reading about Campbell’s ideas, the starting point is probably The Hero With a Thousand Faces, although there is nearly an infinite amount of background material on the Hero’s Journey, explaining how it’s been used from Greek, Roman, Hindu, Christian, Japanese, etc. myths for all of recorded history. Most Hitchcock scripts can be charted out as following the Hero’s Journey conventions, as can the original canonical Star Wars movies (now known as IV, V, and VI), Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, most Pixar movies, and virtually all Disney movies.

Probably no literature genre adheres more closely to the Hero’s Journey conventions than mystery/thriller books, especially hard-boiled mysteries starting with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, which follow a subset of the Hero’s Journey stories often called knight-errant plots, where a lone figure protagonist wanders the earth (like Kane in Kung Fu), righting wrongs or rescuing (usually) women or children. [I’m skipping talking about the Dark Tower series by Stephen King and graphic novels.] I’ve never been able to find the original source for the definition of noir mysteries but it sounds like Chandler: “A flawed hero searches for some measure of justice in an unjust world.” Chandler’s extensive letter writing about literature in general and mystery stories in particular prompted academic reappraisals in the 1970s and 1980s of noir writing.

The zenith (or maybe the nadir, depending on your opinion of him) of knight-errant hard boiled mysteries may have been Mickey Spillane. Spillane was hugely successful (measure by sales) in the 1950s and 1960s and he’s one of the best-selling authors of all time. I’ll confess that I’m a Spillane fan and, at one point, had a copy of every one of his books. While contemporaneous reviews of his books almost universally savaged his work, his work is being reevaluated as a work of a particular political and cultural era.

Circling back to Lee Child – stories don’t get much more knight-errant-y than Jack Reacher. Like Kafka’s Odradek, Reacher has no fixed abode, although Reacher’s homelessness is by choice. Homeless, without assets other than a toothbrush, Reacher hitchhikes himself from one trouble spot to another.

I haven’t (and am probably too lazy to) gone back and read the early Reacher novels, but my impression is that the more recent ones aren’t as good as the earlier ones. That may be because the storyline was fresher then – it’s possible that I’m misremembering how good the first ones were. That said, Child’s fall off in quality is much less than Patricia Cornwell; I found her books starting with Point of Origin getting weirder and weirder and finally stopped reading her all together after the execrable Predator, her literary decline roughly coinciding with the start of the dumpster fires of her personal life.

Anyway, in this installment, Reacher ends up in New Hampshire, stopping for a few days to research some of the oral history he was told about his family. Coincidentally, a young couple from Canada on their way to a new life in Florida ends up in a motel nearby, only too late finding out that it’s like Hotel California– “You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.” The two plot lines merge as the story continues, but not smoothly – too much of the plot seems contrived and a little clumsy, especially the ending where one plot line is resolved in only a couple of pages with a (to my mind) unsatisfactory explanation.

Child depends a lot on the Reacher as a caricature and I think over the last ten books or so, Reacher has become more comic book hero than literary protagonist. He’s virtually indestructible, rarely personally in danger – basically a hitchhiking Superman clone in cheap clothes. Another not-completely-believable indestructible thriller protagonist is Mark Greaney’s Gray Man series, which was interesting for the first few books and has now gotten to be too much like a knockoff of Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp series.

All that said, my main criticism of the more recent Reacher books is that Child doesn’t plot out stories in advance. Like, not at all. There’s an interesting article here about the writing of a book about Lee Child writing a book – a sort of recursive navel gazing exercise – but the article is interesting. Some authors who claim not to do detailed plots in advance at least start with an idea of what the story will be about and then develop a plot along the way. Lee Child however proudly claims to only do a single draft.

My current favorite thriller and mystery writers, Michael Connelly and Mark Dawson, clearly obsessively plot their books and in reading Past Tense it’s obvious that Child does not. What Child does amazingly well is control the pacing of the stories – for all my criticism of his lack of plotting, he makes up for it in the pacing of the stories. All of his books are fast and satisfying reads.

The publishing business has changed enormously in the last half century – best-selling authors can (and have) become billionaires. Besides an Upper West Side apartment in Manhattan, Child owns a mansion in the south of France. Although the business aspects of publishing have changed since Spillane’s day, is Reacher really the literary descendant of Mike Hammer?

Reckless Daughter by David Yaffe

by

Reckless Daughter is a biography of singer Joni Mitchell written by David Yaffe. The book was published in 2017, so after Mitchell’s stroke and during her recovery. Yaffe is an unabashed fan of Mitchell and this is reflected in the book. Some of the reviews I’ve read about the book claim that Yaffe’s book amounts to an approved biography, which is reasonable given the number of hours Yaffe spent interviewing Mitchell over the course of several years.

Yaffe has written other nonfiction books about music, including a 2011 biography of Bob Dylan (Bob Dylan: Like A Complete Unknown) and the role of jazz music in American literature (Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz in American Writing). His writing is solid and very detailed – he interviewed hundreds of people in researching Reckless Daughter and the book seems like a fair portrait of Mitchell, inarguably one of the most influential musicians and composers of the last half of the 20thcentury.

The book details her childhood, the start of her musical career, the recognition of her place in music history, her career difficulties in gaining acceptance while shifting gears to a more jazz-like musical oeuvre, and her own attempts at managing her musical legacy. The book also covers her difficult relationships with virtually every person she’s ever met: her parents, her first husband, her second husband, “rival” female musicians, her many romantic partners, producers, other musicians, music company executives and on and on and on. 

Like I said, I think the Yaffe meant the book to be a fair but sympathetic look at Mitchell, but the feeling I came away with is that while I enjoy most of her music, I’m really glad I don’t know her or live near her. She got career help from everyone from Leonard Cohen, David Crosby, James Taylor, Graham Nash and many others. In her conversations with Yaffe, she dismissed all of them (save Graham Nash, whom she apparently still cares for) as lesser talents and diminishes their assistance. And she reallydoesn’t like Jackson Brown and Joan Baez. Her difficult relationship with the daughter she gave up for adoption and then reconnected with decades later is examined in detail and Mitchell doesn’t come out appearing less than a monster.

Anyway, the book is interest reading, especially if you’re curious about her songwriting or why she uses myriad guitar tunings. And to reaffirm why you’re probably glad you don’t know her personally.

Thirteen by Steve Cavanagh

by

Thirteen is the third book in a series by Belfast author Steve Cavanagh with Eddie Flynn as the protagonist. Cavanagh is an attorney in Northern Ireland, Eddie Flynn is a con man, hustler, and criminal defense attorney in New York City.

Cavanagh is also half (along with Luca Veste of Liverpool) of the irregular podcasting team that does Two Crime Writers and a Microphone, which is a pretty funny podcast.

Cavanagh does an excellent job with New Yorker style dialog – his ear is accurate, especially for someone who says he never traveled to New York City until after the first two books in the series were published.

Anyway, the premise of the book is that a celebrity actor named Bobby Solomon is on trial for capital murder. One of the jurors who’s been seated for the trial is certain that Bobby isn’t guilty. He knows this because he’s the murderer.

The real murderer, Joshua Kane, goes through a complex (and body strewn) process, often using different guises, to ensure that he’s selected for the jury and, once the trial starts, he begins influencing the other jurors. Up to and including “pruning” the juror ranks.

Cavanagh does an excellent job setting traps for the reader to assume we know which juror is actually Kane; the final reveal is surprising.

It’s a fast paced, well plotted read. All of the Eddie Flynn books are good, but Cavanagh keeps getting better as the series goes on.

A Legacy of Spies by John le Carré

by

I finished the 2017 book by British spy novelist John le Carré a few weeks ago. In the late 70s I read every book he’d written up to that time while I was pretending to be a Lit major in college. So, up through Smiley’s People all in the space of a few months. If he’d stopped writing then, the novels he’d written so far would have been a remarkable body of work. Over the years I read most of his other books when they came out or shortly after.

Le Carré started going seriously off the rails politically by that point in the late 70s and the next batch of books often reflected his his hatred of Israel and the United States. Some observers have noted that Le Carré has the worst characteristics of the old British political establishment: a lingering resentment of the United State supposedly usurping British world political hegemony in the post-WW II era, leaving the UK as America’s lap dog. His obsession with Jews and Israel is, I think, his way of coloring in the supposed evils of America – that the US is simply a puppet on strings pulled by Israeli politicians. All of that said, Le Carré is a towering figure in the writing world and still has the ability to describe a vision of a better England (and a better England on the world stage) than most of the British politicians.

Not that all of this post Smiley’s People work is anti-American and anti-Semitic – The Night Manager (from 1993) being one example of an amazingly well crafted and well written story.

I was eager to read Legacy of Spies if only because the reviews indicated the main character was Peter Guillam, one of Smiley’s devoted assistants and one of the minor characters in the very first Le Carré spy novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), and later on Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974).  The premise of Legacy of Spies is that Guillam, elderly and retired to Brittany, is called back to London to be interviewed/interrogated about events that happened leading up to the death of Alec Leamas in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and the aftermath of that operation. It is revealed that Leamas had a child with an East German woman at the time of his death – that son, now an adult, has appeared and may be trying to claim that the British government is responsible for his father’s death. Or he may not be. 

What I found very interesting about the book is that there were obvious plot gaps and unexplained plot twists in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and Legacy of Spies (written more than fifty years later) is Le Carré’s attempt to revisit that story and fill in the gaps.

The story alternates between scenes in present day Brittany and London juxtaposed against numerous flashbacks to the failed operation that lead to and resulted in Alec Leamas death. Or was it a failed operation?

Even in his mid 80s, le Carré is a formidably talented writer and this story was a great re-visit to Guillam and Smiley and the closing of the story once and for all of Alec Leamas. I enjoyed this book tremendously.

 

Crush by Frederic Dard

by

Pushkin Vertigo is a London-based imprint of Penguin Random House that has been reissuing out-of-print crime, suspense, and mystery books written by a number of foreign authors. Last winter they reissued You Were Never Really Here, by Jonathan Ames, a crime novel made into a movie starring Joaquin Phoenix. 

Among the other books Pushkin Vertigo has released were English translations of a couple of novels by Frédéric Dard, a prolific French author who wrote over 300 novels, mostly from the 1950s through the 1970s. His work was, for the most part, not translated into English during his lifetime, despite his popularity in France.

Most of Dard’s novels (173 of them) featured a dashing French detective superintendent – Antoine San-Antonio; the books were also written under the pseudonym of Antoine San-Antonio. While the San-Antonio novels were mostly spy fiction, he also wrote a number of 40s and 50s-style noir pulp thrillers. Crush is one of the pulp thriller Dard novels translated and reissued by Pushkin Vertigo.

Louise, a bored 17 year old working in a factory in a fictional suburb of Paris, is the narrator of this first-person novella. She has no close friends, lives with her mother and [almost] step father, both of whom she dislikes, especially the step father. Louise becomes fascinated with an American couple living in a fancy house that she walks by on her way home from her factory job. After some machinations, she is hired by the couple as a housekeeper, enabling her to move out of her parent’s house and into the American couple’s house. 

We learn that Louise is developing a sexual obsession with the husband at the same time as it becomes increasingly apparent that she has a tenuous grasp on reality. The reader also learns that Louise is an unreliable narrator, so you have to depend on Louise’s narratives plus other facts to understand what is really going on.

As you’d expect in a noir pulp story – the American wife dies under mysterious circumstances. And, as in the best kind of noir stories, learning what appears to be the reason for the crime and who appears to be the criminal is just a set up for learning the actual murderer, who is revealed on the last page of the book.

The story doesn’t rise quite to the level of some of James M. Cain’s best work (The Postman Always Rings Twice or Double Indemnity), but it’s pretty good. Relatively short, it’s a fast read that isn’t a waste of time. While Louise isn’t totally fleshed out, it’s decent dark thriller.

Interesting article about John Coltrane

by

The Weekly Standard had an long (and good) article about John Coltrane and the history of post-WW II jazz that came out last week. You can click on the image at the top of the post for the article or here.

This was an interesting quote from the article:

“People who write about jazz tend to place the late style at the top of the pile—but what do they know? Most of them cannot play the music and many of them cannot understand the technicalities. Lacking practical understanding, they fall back on fashion and the hagiographic assumption that if progress is good, then late is great. I am not alone in feeling that, as works of art, Beethoven’s Fifth and Seventh are more successfully realized than his Ninth. Nor am I alone in finding the formal asceticism of Four Quartets less satisfying than the grab-bag of The Waste Land. I have also noticed that when someone claims that Finnegans Wake is better than Ulysses, you should stand by for an act of intellectual imposture. The story goes that Coltrane was using LSD after 1965. If so, then the overreach and incoherence of his final music, and his mingling with admiring but inferior talents like Alice Coltrane, the Yoko Ono of jazz, suggest that Coltrane might be the sixties’ first and foremost acid casualty, flailing out rather than flaming out, the peak of his late style already behind him.”

[Illustration by Philip Burke]

The Girl Who Takes An Eye For An Eye by David Lagercrantz

by

I just finished reading The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye (TGWTAEFAE), by David Lagercrantz. It’s the sequel to the The Girl in the Spider’s Web (TGITSW) that I reviewed here recently and the fifth book in the Millennium series that started with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. As you call surely know, the first three books were written by the (now deceased) Swedish author, Stieg Larsson.

The latest book reunites Lisbeth Salander, journalist Mikael Bloomkvist, magazine editor and on-again/off-again love interest of Bloomkvist, Erika Berger, and Salander’s former guardian, the now quite elderly lawyer Holger Palmgren. Camilla Salander, Lisbeth’s evil twin, virtually disappears in this story, which is sort of odd given that one of the main subjects of the book is the psychology of twins.

The book opens to find Lisbeth locked up in prison for two months related to charges brought against her from her actions in TGITSW. Her imprisonment itself seems a bit of a logical leap given the TGITSW, but logic flaws happen with disappointing regularity in this book in the Salander story. While in prison, Salander assumes responsibility for protecting a young woman from Bangladesh being abused by a prison gang headed by a sadistic lesbian skinhead who fancies herself a Mussolini devotee. Salander eventually intervenes in the abuse, with predictable results. Meanwhile, Salander is manipulating the prison warden into giving her internet access so that she can continue her research into her family as well as her hacking.

While Lisbeth’s in prison, Palmgren receives an odd visit from a woman who long ago worked in the psychiatric facility where Salander was imprisoned and abused for years. The woman leaves Palmgren with a stack of documents from the clinic, hinting at the real reasons Salander ended up in the facility.

Bloomkvist and Palmgren become convinced that the documents provide evidence in a (naturally or this wouldn’t be a book) larger government decades-old conspiracy vaguely related to ethnic cleansing. Bloomkvist eventually ends up tracking down a somewhat mysterious Swedish financier who may hold the key to unlocking the story.

I didn’t enjoy this book as much as any of the first four in the series – primarily because of some logic flaws in the plot and that I was disappointed that Salander has almost become a caricature in this book – she’s just short of needing a cape. That said, Lagercrantz is a good writer – the pacing and the juxtaposition of scenes among characters and interposing timelines is really good and makes the story move along faster than it probably has any right to. It’s worth reading if you’ve read the first four books, but it isn’t a reason to start the series if you haven’t already.

Jar City by Arnaldur Indridason

by

I’ve been reading a lot of Celtic and Scandinavian noir stories lately and stumbled across this book, Jar City: An Inspector Erlendur Novel, a while ago and finally got around to reading it. Originally published in 2006, it takes place in Iceland.

An older man named Holberg, who lives alone, is found murdered in his apartment in Reykjavik, beaten to death with an ashtray. Few clues are found at the scene other than a note that says “I am him”. Erlendur Sveinsson, a middle-aged Inspector Detective, and his team are assigned to investigate the death. In establishing who the victim was, they learn there were plenty of reasons for people to want him dead – he was a suspect in several violent rapes years ago as well as an associate’s disappearance more recently. There is the troubling complication of the deaths of several children over the years, which may or may not be connected to Holberg’s death.

Erlendur, long divorced and single, has his own issues to deal with – a drug addicted and possible pregnant adult daughter who seems to be involved with one or more drug dealers. And there’s a missing bride.

Iceland is a central character in the story, the weather throughout the book is always rainy and often storming. At several points in the story the weather hampers the investigation.

I think the book owes a lot to the writing of Ross MacDonald, the pseudonym of Kenneth Millar, who wrote a number of hardboiled detective stories set in Southern California in the 1950s through the early 1970s. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler are credited as being the originators of the detective-as-knight-errant school of hardboiled mysteries and MacDonald ably represented the genre in his Lew Archer novels.

I liked Jar City, it was certainly worthy of the annual Best Nordic Crime Novel award it received. I think Scandinavian noir can be harder for Americans to read because the names are often confusing and I certainly experienced that in this book. That said, it’s a fast paced read and worth a read.