Unsolicited Thoughts on Spider-Noir

One of two things would happen with Episode One of Spider-Noir (Amazon Prime, 2026). Either I would press the stop button quickly, or I would settle in and binge away. I had my reasons for skepticism. Eight of my scarce hours were on the table, and if a show wanted to invoke classic noir, well, hawking "Noir" in the title is already trying too hard. 

My self-disclosures: I'm not a comic book guy. But I grew up on the cartoons, and Spider-Man can be good fun. I also don't go for any multiverse stuff. Endlessly re-versioning a character tends to water down the compelling original. Still, there is always room for an inventive retelling, and Spider-Man as a Prohibition-era detective counts as inventive. Plus, casting Nicolas Cage as said detective is like storing creative gasoline under the bright lights. Something is going to happen. 

I binged the series.

A little despite myself. Not because the series isn't enjoyable -- it is -- but because I have those purist expectations. You can't just put a brokedown detective in a smoky jazz club and call it noir. The world has to feel bleaker by the second. There has to be danger, not least for the detective. Marlowe couldn't lift a car or swing across town. When he got hit, he felt it.

A brief synopsis of Spider-Noir: Ben Reilly (Cage) is the brokedown detective, and not a great one by his own admission. He was better as the Spider, the masked hero who had stood between New York and mobster violence. He is retired these days after blaming himself for his girlfriend's murder. Since then, both he and New York have gone from bad to worse. A rare new case drags him back into the mob world, where he discovers others with superpowers, connections to his past, and possible cure for his inner spider.  

Spider-Noir's New York is rotting from inside out, a squalid town of post-war cripples and trash in the street. Nobody has much future, only a precarious now and a past dragging them down. Even mob boss Silvermane (Brendan Gleeson) is miserable and paranoid after a string of betrayals and murder attempts. 

If that sounds noir, it is. Mostly. But the problem is the same one facing any superhero story: No matter its other ambitions, there is still a superhero around. They have to do superhero things and be drawn toward a superheroic climax, or what's the point of introducing powers in the first place?

To its great credit, Spider-Noir understands this. Reilly dons the Spider outfit only when he absolutely must, a few minutes max in the early episodes. The supervillains are conflicted gangsters, with low-tech displays of powers they understand are slowly killing them. Sandman is sandy, sometimes, and Tombstone can't be hurt. 

Instead, Spider-Noir starts centered around normal-ish people who make bad choices and hate their place in life. As the series progresses, the laws of fiction prove inescapable, and the episodes shift from PI case-of-the-week to superpower flexes. The noir intent shifts, too, from plots and staging to destiny's hand and an inevitable end that even crime lords and superheroes can't escape. It's both Spider and Noir--and thankfully it doesn't wobble too far either way.  

And the writers understood their leading man. Nicolas Cage is going to play Nicolas Cage, not broad but always simmering. Powerful at his best, uniquely funny. Cage is older now, and he brings that to his world-weary, lost-a-step Spider with a bad back. The casting is inspired--and necessary. A play-it-straight actor couldn't bear the concept's load, and the noir spin probably collapses under its own smoked-up weight. No, this called for Spider-Cage, a double pour of Sam Spade and Roger Rabbit.

Which breaks another classic noir rule. When Bogey and Co. cracked foxy in The Maltese Falcon, the wit had a knife's edge, underpinning the tension, not breaking it. Spider-Noir leans on drawing a laugh, and I did laugh. 

Of course, The Maltese Falcon was released 85 years ago. Noir has evolved, whether I grouse about it or not. Noir today is more malleable than back in the Bogey flicks. Pace matters as much as the puzzle. Color signals as much menace as shadow. In a neo-noir lens, anything goes, even spider detectives. 

Still, Spider-Noir picked specific, Golden Age noir trappings. It's a mantel worn loosely, in parts homage and affectation. Spider-Noir doesn't wear that trench coat quite right, but it's not trying too hard at it. It's doing its own thing.

Déjà Vu, 1776

"Study the Past,"
National Archives Building, Washington, DC.

Since June 22, my wife has been promoting her new nonfiction book about the American Revolution. At the events where I’ve tagged along, I’ve experienced a curious sense of déjà vu.

Very déjà, oh so vu.

Starting in 2009—17 years ago—she and I hit the road around this time each year to visit a number of gift shops and bookstores in the former 13 colonies to hawk one and eventually two of our Revolutionary-era history titles.

Our travels took us as far north as Boston and as far south as Georgia. We usually visited sites associated in some way with the Declaration, the Revolutionary War, and the lives of the Signers. Instead of the local Barnes & Noble, we were more likely to be signing at the home of Long Island signer William Floyd, whose home and estate is today managed by the National Park Service. In Philly, we signed in a building across from the Liberty Bell. In Boston, we signed at a shop in the Old State House, which sponsors an annual reading of the Declaration of Independence each Fourth of July.

At the Independence Visitor Center Store, Philadelphia.

Since summer is prime travel season, on those trips we encountered countless tourists. Most often, they were Moms, Dads, and their families on their summer road trip. 

Sometimes, we encountered visitors from overseas whose vacations just happened to coincide with Fourth of July week. I imagine the foreign tourists trying to comprehend why the strangers in this strange land were decked out in red, white, and blue earrings, sneakers, face paint, and T-shirts, and why the slightest hint of evening darkness brought the clangorous pops and sizzles of distant fireworks.

Still…this year’s travels have felt special, and not because of Denise’s book. It was not just any Fourth, after all. This year the US is celebrating its 250th anniversary, so my déjà vu is at least two layers deep. 

On one hand, I remember our 2009-2012 bookstore trips and I remember America’s Bicentennial year, 1976.

That's me in the center, my two brothers at right and left.

Remember, both my parents were garment workers. I recall my Mom hand-stitching the costumes you see in this image, using a Butterick sewing pattern. The outfits were for a parade our school participated in. She also baked and decorated the cakes you see in front of us, the layer cake and the flag sheet cake on the right.

I consumed every children’s book about the Revolution, hoping to soak up as many details as I could of colonial life. Chief among the books I devoured were by the children’s author-illustrator, Robert Lawson: Ben and Me: An Astonishing Life of Benjamin Franklin by His Good Mouse Amos (1939) and Mr. Revere and I: Being an Account of Certain Episodes in the Career of Paul Revere, Esq. as Revealed by his Horse (1953). And there was a charming book about Ben and his grandson living abroad in the year 1776, entitled Poor Richard in France by F.N. Monjo (1973). My fascination with Ben Franklin dates to that era.

Yes, I still have them.

Those books omitted the fact that over the course of his life Franklin owned seven human beings. He later changed his mind about slavery, and devoted the last years of his life to the abolitionist cause.

In her introduction to her new book, Denise tells her 1976 story. She was a few years younger than me. She tells of watching a parade amid red, white, and blue fire hydrants. She was particularly taken by the men and boys playing fife and drums. (Years later, she would master the flute.) Any women and girls she spotted in patriotic reenactments were dressed like Holly Hobby and were either sewing flags, churning butter, or doing laundry.

Surely, she thought, there’s gotta be more for girls to do than that. As you might imagine, that was the spark that led to her current book.

The Betsy Ross story, which is the biggest story Americans remember of a woman contributing to the Revolutionary War, is probably myth. Yes, she did make flags, but it’s impossible to prove that she made the first American flag. Her flag-making was not the most interesting fact about her. Far more interesting is that she buried three husbands, lived into her eighties, and ran a successful business as an upholsterer at a time when doctors and lawyers had trouble paying their bills. I don’t know why I didn’t learn that in elementary school. Was the word businesswoman deemed too difficult for kids in the 1970s?

American patriotism and jingoism are fraught with problems because so much of it is driven by the stories we learned in childhood. What appears in school curricula are the easy facts we know will entice kids and keep them engaged in the story. It’s also what will mollify schools and parents. What is not ever said is that we hope that children will check back in when they’re old enough to learn the fuller story, whatever it is, for better or worse.

Unless that kid grows up to be a dedicated reader, their knowledge of the past will remain stuck at the grade-school level.

The founders expected that citizens would stay informed. But even they would probably not have expected voters to be devoted readers of multi-volume works of history. In their day, the average citizen got the news via word of mouth, public readings, broadsides, and newspapers. And yes, there was just as much propaganda then as now.

But hey—I still look back fondly on those long summer road trips we took nearly 20 years ago. Over time, the booksellers we met on our annual pilgrimage became like friends who looked forward to our visits.
I especially treasured the time we spent in the National Archives, where the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are housed. Usually on those visits, we’d stow our bags in the gift shop downstairs, then go up to reacquaint ourselves with the so-called Charters of Freedom. You press a button to illuminate the documents, which otherwise repose in darkness.

The letters are faint, but they are still there.

We got so friendly with the publicity person in that building that we were permitted to film a naturalization ceremony in the Rotunda one year. What a moving experience! Under giant murals depicting dead white men, men and women of all races and color raised their right hands and pledged to support and defend the Constitution and the laws of the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

One fellow, Dennis, ran the gift shop in the building. He’d set us up with a table outside the shop, and bring us boxes of books to have us start signing stock. Then he’d sprinkle the signed editions around the store.

One year, just as we were packing up, he presented us with adorable pair of goodie boxes he had designed and filled just for us. I was astonished by his kindness.

Bookseller's gift:
On the Road Writer Survival Kit
The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics
"Take this, write something, have a nosh..." —Allen Ginsberg

Another year, as we hawked our books, we were told that David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States (AOTUS) appointed by Obama in 2009, would be coming down to meet us. 

Imagine my surprise when this man stepped off the elevator and walked toward our table, carrying in his hands a copy of my children’s book on the life of Fibonacci. Turns out, the man everyone called the Collector-in-Chief was also a math geek. He introduced himself and asked for my signature. I was so nervous I nearly flubbed the spelling of his name.

The tourists who moved me the most were always kids.

Families that were recent immigrants to the US often appeared at our table in one large group, speaking another tongue, urging their youngest member to step forward and speak. Indian and Pakistani families stand out in my memory because of the ladies’ dress. But we met a lot of newcomers from eastern Europe and South America as well.

“I would like to buy your book,” the child of these families would say.

“Would you like us to make it out to you?”

Nervously, the kids would look to their parents and grandparents, uncles and aunts, and older siblings. As a group, the elders would nod. Thus emboldened, the kid would announce loudly, “Yes, please!”

By 2011, after we had been doing this a few years, I really loved the kids who announced proudly that they had read our first book on the signers of the Declaration and now wanted the one on the Constitution. We didn’t write those books for kids, but they were decent works of popular history, and funny to boot. Sometimes a child would quote a pun or a one-liner we’d forgotten we’d made.

A special spot in my heart is reserved for those kids who announced that history was their favorite subject. Ditto the ones who told us that they themselves were writers or writers in training. (Some of the girls carried their handwritten works in progress in their backpacks, which they were happy to show us.)

As we signed their books, the kids peppered us with questions:

“How long did it take you to write the book?”
“Do you write them on a computer?”
“Do you go to a library to look things up?”
“Are you married?”
“Do you have kids?”

In other words, they basically asked the same questions grown-ups ask writers, only far more seriously. 

And as we answered, both of us thought of the kids we were once. Kids of 1976. The Bicentennial. Kids eager to learn the history of the place we called home.

At the end, we always had a gift for those kids. 

“Would you like a sticker?”

Of course they said yes, as did their older siblings, who I was quite certain would think wearing a red, white, and blue flag, rainbow, or field of stars on one’s cheek wasn’t cool.

Writing is hard. Selling what you write is harder. But sometimes all the work and all the research you've done comes together nicely, and the result is a single product in the hands of one person who will take its words to heart. E Pluribus Unum.

Exterior, National Archives

* * * 

Thanks for reading. See you next time!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

Long Ago and Far Away

I wrote a while back about the Secret Mall Apartment on Netflix, mostly about the social conditions behind it.  And I only briefly mentioned my memories of weird living with fellow artists and the assorted art, all-nighters, constant talk, crazy schemes, weekend parties, home movies, endless music, artwork, and all the general insanity that goes with it. 

Memories are kind of like seeing your
image reflected in the water, aren't they?  

Back in the mid 70s I shared a house in Atlanta with 5-6 other people. (It varied:  My boyfriend and I moved in together, but broke up six months later, and about time, too.  Similar things happened to others.) We each paid $25 per month, and we sometimes had trouble making that. Every room in the house except the kitchen, bathroom, and living room (and a lot of people crashed on the couch) was turned into a bedroom. 

After the break up, my room was the back porch, which had wrap around windows and a gas space heater I lit with a match. I loved it. It was, for me, the equivalent of Tarzan's treehouse, my private sanctuary. I made a desk from a door on boxes with my typewriter and paper and a broken down chair; a mattress on the floor; a makeshift closet; a huge row of books, and FREEDOM!!!!! 

On a tight budget. 

Did I mention poverty? We were all broke, all the time. Like the Secret Mall Apartment artists, none of us were above moving through a restaurant and pocketing the leftovers as we went. We shopped at the day-old bread store (5 loaves for a buck), which also carried such delicacies as dented cans of tunafish (I still can't stand the smell of tuna), smashed boxes of Kraft Mac'n'Cheese (we used water instead of milk in it), and other yummy treats. The only thing I still like from those days is oatmeal. 

I got all my clothes at GoodWill or a couple of the vintage clothing stores in Little Five Points. Including my wedding outfit: a WW2 wedding suit in tattle-tale grey, complete with a half-moon hat with a veil for $15. We had a 1930s-40s themed wedding and we all looked GREAT. 

When we did splurge on dining out, we went to Doby's on Ponce de Leon and got a vegetable plate (4 veg, cornbread) or breakfast or 1 meat, 2 veg, cornbread or biscuit for about $1.75-$2.25. We were indeed the working poor, working all the time, part-time or full-time jobs at all hours of the day or night and then came home to work on our own stuff. I could type 90 wpm, so I worked as a secretarial temp around the city as much as I could during the week and filled in on weekends or slow work times at the corner market a couple of blocks down the road. We ALL did shifts at that market. 

It's because of that last gig that I watch Kevin Smith's Clerks with great nostalgia. And it was just as crappy a corner market as Kevin's Quick Stop Groceries:  No fruit, no veg, just chips, crackers, jerky, pop, etc. If you lived on their food, you'd die. Unless you were pickled in alcohol, which some were. Every Saturday, the local delivery truck dropped off two cases of Polly Peachtree aftershave. The first time that happened, I had no idea why these suddenly appeared, but I found out on Sunday morning: Georgia was a blue-law state, and while no alcohol could be sold on Sundays, the aftershave was 51% alcohol. So all the winos showed up in a long, long line. They bought two bottles: they'd drink the one and puke it up, drink the second and keep it down... 

The liquor and cigarettes were kept behind the cash register. Next to the door there was a bin by the door of paperbacks with their covers ripped off. It didn't take long for me to find out that they weren't just bargain basement fiction, they were detective / spy / porn novels that were so bad they defied belief that anyone had ever written, much less actually sold any of them. But they gave me hope that I'd get published, too, because I sure as hell knew I could write better than THAT. 

There was also a gang that ran the neighborhood, and they strolled through regularly, shoplifting. One night it finally happened: one of the guys on night shift got a gun poked in his face. He emptied out the cash register (none of us were going to die for the owners, who were barely paying us minimum wage), came home, and we all agreed we had to find other work. 

We also made home movies, but get your mind out of the gutter, they weren't the dirty kind. One of the guys had a Super 8 film camera, and he and I cowrote parodies like "Combination Reefer Madness/First Date" (with me as the ingenue), "Dung Stew" (Kung Fu was big at the time), etc. Everyone had a part, including the dog - "Ringo the SuperDog!" - who rescued me on the railroad tracks early one summer morning... 

Meanwhile, I was teaching myself writing by writing like a maniac and reading a stack of books every weekend. I had a guitar and wrote songs and poetry and eventually my first short story. 

One of the guys painted this great mural on his bedroom wall, so that became a thing. Murals went up everywhere, now waiting to be discovered by some future art historian. There was a lot of experimenting in mediums, styles, genres, etc. 

There were fights and diatribes, discussions and debates. People walking out, coming back a couple of days later and everything picked back up. Everyone had something to say, and we said it endlessly, especially with enough beer or wine or weed in us. And we were young enough to stay up all night, show up at work the next day, and come home and (occasionally) do it again.  That or crash so hard we looked like we were dead.

Yes, there was a lot of sex. Or hope for sex:  once a couple of the guys had somehow gotten a date with two student nurses, and went out and rented a porn flick to show them - you can't fix stupid. (Pro tip: probably shouldn't START a date with porn.) But then years later, a friend of ours invited us over to his apartment to join him and his date to see a French film that had just come out: Betty Blue. Turned out it was a first date, and it opened with about 5 minutes of hard-core banging. It's a guy thing, I guess. 

And there was also falling in love.  The real stuff:

Allan and me, 1978 - madly in love and ignoring everyone else at the party.  

Six months later we were married... and still are.

Told you.  Half-moon hat with a veil…

Independence Day

 

Once upon a time there was a storyline, an agreed-upon narrative.  We may have had different ideas about America, but I think we made some basic assumptions.  Of course, that’s hindsight.  Looking back, with a more jaundiced eye, we see it colored by class, and race, and money.

I spent part of every summer at my grandmother’s place on Salters Point, in South Dartmouth, below Cape Cod.  On the 4^th of July, old Major Codman blew on a conch shell, and all the kids lined up in costume, for the Horribles Parade.  I quite honestly hadn’t thought of that in many, many years – it just popped into my head, unbidden.  I remember my sister, one year, with an old 78 tied on her head, and a smooth beach stone taped to it, probably six or seven years old, going to the parade as Rock’n’Roll. 

Some years later, driving down from Canada, I crossed into the U.S. and found myself along coastal Maine, another place I’d spend summers, with each of the small seaside towns having at least hung bunting up, for the 4^th, but more usually decorating the volunteer fire department’s pump truck, for a one-vehicle parade.  I got as far as Hancock, where there’s a small village square on Route 1, actually a triangle, where the old Bangor & Aroostook crosses the highway, and in that grassy triangle is a modest obelisk, inscribed with the names of Hancock boys who went to war in 1941.  My uncle Charlie’s name is on there, and his close pal Hugh Joy; they came back, after the war, and started a garage and repair shop together.  The names of the men from Hancock who didn’t come back are marked with a small star.

I lived in Provincetown, out at the end of Cape Cod, for almost fifteen years.  They had a pretty sizable parade for a town of three thousand people.  (That’s the number, year ‘round - in the summer season, July and August, it seems like ten thousand people.)  Anyway, the fire trucks and the EMT’s and the cops, and school floats, and the VFW, and a marching band, and drag queens and local businesses and just people playing dress-up.  It’s colorful, and fun, and expressive.  I like to think it celebrates an America we’re all a part of. 

Going back, again, to when I was growing up, the Cambridge, Massachusetts, of my childhood was perhaps a parochial place, the college presence well-established, but not so you really noticed.  I didn’t.  Harvard Square, for me, was about the Brigham’s ice cream and the Woolworth’s Five and Dime.  Woolworth’s had a lunch counter, and notions – thread and buttons and needles, potholders and aprons – and in the back they sold goldfish and guppies, and you could carry one home in a plastic bag (very carefully), to put in the aquarium. 

I clearly remember the narrative changing.  Down in Greensboro, North Carolina, four young black college students sat down at the Woolworth’s lunch counter, and when they ordered donuts and coffee, were refused service.  This turned into a nationwide boycott, and in Cambridge, we stopped getting hot dogs at the Woolworth’s lunch counter. 

Four Young Men in Greensboro

Salters, and Hancock Point, and Provincetown, these places conjure up what we imagine to be small-town virtues, and even the Cambridge that I grew up in seemed pretty small to me.  I don’t think that means unsophisticated, but in our minds, at least, it probably stands in for less complicated or adversarial.  The world is confusing, and threatening.  We can take refuge in easy answers, or simple storylines, a sanitized, imaginary past. 

I want to think we’ve outgrown that, that generic refuge.  I want to believe we can tell ourselves more complicated or ambiguous stories.  America is large, it holds multitudes.

EMERGENCY: Sherlock Holmes 2.0

 

Wedding Words

 

My word count is down this week. In my defense, I’ve been distracted by Independence Day, the World Cup, and celebrity weddings.

Jeff Belmonte Creative Commons

My invitation to Taylor and Travis’s wedding is, I’m sure, lost in the pile of unsorted mail on the dining room table. If they’re reading this, I’d like to publicly apologize for missing the fete. I’m glad it went off without me. I’ve been by Crate and Barrel to buy a gift, but I couldn’t find Kelce or Swift listed in their registry.

In truth, the celebrity wedding I’ve been thinking about was Dua Lipa marrying Callum Turner. She sings. He acts. I confess that I am unfamiliar with either artist’s oeuvre or even their career highlights. What caught my attention was a story describing how they met.

I clicked on a Huffington Post article about the newlywed couple. (It’s one of things I’m prone to do when avoiding work.) In addition to details about their splashy multi-day Italian wedding festival, the story related their first encounter. Turner reports that the pair were seated next to one another at a mutual friend’s birthday dinner. They discovered they were both reading the same book. They had both, in fact, just finished the first chapter.

“So we’re on the same page,” Turner claims to have said to his future wife.

A good line nestled in a charming story—this meet cute could kick off a movie on the Hallmark Channel. (In my fantasy version, they bonded over my book. In truth, the pair were both reading Trust, by Hernán Díaz.)

The HuffPost article went on to discuss the role of reading generally in dating profiles. Reading as a social cue for potential partners is not limited to Turner and Lipa. On a dating profile, when one is seeking a possible connection with similar interests, emotional maturity, and a splash of intelligence, the books people choose may provide some of the best evidence.  The idea—what you read says a lot about you—may not be a startling psychological insight. But it was good to see that reading played an important role in a social media culture. The article felt less like celebrity trivia and more like a validation of life choices.

Apparently, it is not just what people read. The habit of reading is also attractive. As generations become defined by shorter attention spans, the notion that a person can unplug from devices and focus their attention on a three-hundred-page book signals that this potential mate possesses patience and curiosity; quiet markers of desirable traits in a serious relationship. In short, reading can make you hot.

As I mentioned earlier, by reading the piece, I learned that Dua and Callum got hitched. Congratulations and best wishes. But the article’s real benefit to me was that it added to my growing realization of reading as a shared event. I spent most of my reading career thinking of it as a solitary activity. I retired to a quiet space to work through a book on my own. Writing, however, began to reshape my thinking. In his memoir On Writing, Stephen King observes that a character begins in the writer’s mind but is finished in the reader’s. When readers talk with me at book clubs about my stories, I hear the details they’ve filled in about my principal characters. They’ve sometimes taken them places I never imagined. Together, we’ve created something. These discussions helped me realize that readers and writers are participating not in two solitary activities but rather in a single communal experience. As I’ve grown, I view writing/reading less as monologue and more as conversation.

The HuffPost article develops this idea. Books spark dialogue and arouse our brains. They help bring people together. As readers and writers, we help build community. So read a story, then tell someone about it. You never know what might happen next.

The HuffPost article can be found here. The Latest 'Green Flag' For Modern Daters? Reading. | HuffPost Life

 

BSP: Black Cat Weekly ran my story, “An Alien Idea,” in the June 28th issue. My story, “Thou Shalt Knot,” appeared in Boots, BBQ, and Bloodshed, the SINC North Dallas anthology on July 1st. If anyone marries because of these stories, please let me know.

 

Until next time.

"Patience"

Diversity may be a toxic word in some circles these days, but mysteries continue their quest for variety and novelty in both sleuths and situations. Detectives are alcoholics and depressives; they suffer everything from paralysis to Alzheimers to Tourette's. They have dependent relatives, obstreperous children, difficult partners, and addictions both novel and traditional.

Lately, they have also been on the autism spectrum. Professor T can be enjoyed in either of his Dutch or British incarnations, while the French Astrid, an autistic librarian involved in crime solving, now appears in an English language version as Patience Evans, in Patience (PBS). 

In a novel twist, Ella Maisy Purvis, who plays the title character, is herself autistic, and one of the recurring events in this six part series is Patience's meetings with other neurodivergent people in her support group. Although the series has been criticized for a rather stereotypical picture of high functioning autism, Purvis makes Patience a fine performer, charming and effective.

And this cannot have been as easy as it sounds, given that her character is easily overwhelmed by noise, confusion, or congestion. Lacking a sense of humor, she is brutally candid and painfully honest, a difficult person all round, especially since she has a fabulous memory for forensic details – and is not shy about correcting other people's errors. Combine all this with a compulsive work ethic and you do not have an easy colleague.

But her extreme, if awkward, talents make her increasingly valuable to DI Bea Metcalf ( Laura Fraser) a driven, if slightly disorganized York city detective. Soon DI Metcalf is venturing down into the vast, and restricted, documents library and returning not just with useful information but also with Patience, who is master of the domaine in nearly every sense.

Indeed, her lair in the depths of the public safety complex is as distinctive as Sherlock Holmes' cluttered rooms in Baker Street. I suspect the brass has no idea that she converts a number of expensive flat files to hold her constructions of cases, complete with documents and photos. They certainly will have missed the enormous glass fronted cage for her pet mice. 

Of course, if a series has a great brain, the plots must be complex, the criminal's MO unusual, the fatal dose, unexpected. Patience, the series, goes all out in this regard, constructing complicated puzzles that may stretch credibility but not the talents of Patience, the character. The solutions she devises are admirable, but the really attractive features of this series lie not in the complicated plots but in something more fundamental: the portrait of a young person venturing out into the world.

In this case, a world she certainly never made. The noted autistic animal husbandry specialist, Temple Grandin, once described her life as being "like an anthropologist on Mars'. Purvis gives a similar sense to Patience's life. Not conventionally brave like the classic detective, her courage comes from her sometimes painful confrontations with daily life. A poignant desire to prove herself  useful propels her into situations that frighten and puzzle her but which slowly increase her confidence and her understanding of strange 'normal' people.

If the series sometimes requires a suspension of disbelief, Patience's character, and her efforts to master a world that she finds continually baffling, ring true. Ironically, a series with baffling crimes and a relatively high body count turns out to celebrate the heroism of ordinary life.

####

The Falling Men, a novel with strong mystery elements, has been issued as an ebook on Amazon Kindle. Also on kindle: The Complete Madame Selina Stories.

The Man Who Met the Elf Queen, with two other fanciful short stories and 4 illustrations, is available from Apple Books at:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-man-who-met-the-elf-queen/id1072859654?ls=1&mt=11

The Dictator's Double, 3 short mysteries and 4 illustrations is available at: 

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-dictators-double/id1607321864?ls=1&mt=11

 

BAM!

© 3DKiwi incredibly detailed DIY orrery

Bricks and Mortars

What? You haven’t heard about Reckless Ben and the Lego legacy larceny?

I’ve intended for weeks to write about a series of crimes in Oregon and Utah. They didn’t begin with Reckless Ben Schneider, but the scene involves alleged crooked franchisors, alleged crooked cops, and, dare I suggest, an alleged crooked judge. All of them are dumber than a box of plastic blocks — which, ironically, started the whole farce. As SleuthSayers states and prudence requires, I must insert the word alleged liberally.

And by plastic blocks, I mean bricks, the official Lego term for those small and incredibly expensive plastic chips embraced by children of every age. “Legos for adults” is a thing now, especially sets priced in the hundreds of dollars and brilliant user designed mechanical computers, calculators, clocks, calendars, and complex devices by frustrated engineers.

Legos are powerful. When a certain public official proposed seizing Greenland, Denmark snorted and uttered one word: “Lego.” Immediately the U.S. saluted and stood down as the plastic barons continued taking over the planet.

Following the plot of nefarious doings is difficult, so I’ve included a handy chart of the bad guys and the good.

We begin with Gary Mansell, an ill and elderly man in Virginia who’s facing his remaining time on this mortal coil. His hobby became an investment obsession, and he purchased Lego sets until he had amassed the largest private Lego Star Wars collection on the continent. He planned to cash in his gazillion sets to help finance his grandchildren’s education.

Toward that end, his son Bryan took on the task of liquidating the collection and arranged with a Keizer, Oregon Bricks and Minifigs (BAM) store to sell the collection on consignment. Store franchisees Chrystal and Benjamin Gorman initially estimated a worth in excess of $200,000, although some say less. However, with certain individual sets running as high as $10–15k and some minifigs valued in the hundreds, $200,000 doesn’t seem unreasonable.

Every month, the Gormans sent checks to the Mansells… until they didn’t. When Bryan investigated, he learned the Gormans had been unceremoniously booted out and new franchise owners had been appointed: Brandon Best, who claimed he didn’t know nuthin’ about birthin’ no babies, and Josh Johnson, who told the Mansells to get lost or he’d call the cops.

Enter Reckless Ben, who operates YouTube and Patreon channels. Ben helps people recover loss of money and loss of dignity. He agreed to help the Mansells. That’s when the game changed. Reckless Ben might look like he’s seventeen (he’s actually thirty) with hair styled by fanjets, but he’s phlegmatic and very, very creative.

Thus began ducking and weaving. Corporate Bricks & Minifigs has a reputation for bullying, discouraging legal action by threatening to drag out litigation until they financially drain the opposition. Ammon and Matt McNeff didn’t do themselves any favors by not doing the honest thing: We don’t know nuthin’ about missing Legos, and anyway they aren’t worth what the Mansells claim, and they violated our consignment policy, if the Legos exist, which they don’t, and if they did, they don’t deserve them back, and…

But worse than the McNeffs was Josh Johnson, the new franchise owner who lives not in Oregon but in American Fork, Utah, population ~33,500. Much of the drama centered around Ben attempting to serve papers on Johnson, who went out of his way to avoid service. Some reports suggest Johnson is an attorney, and if so, knowingly lied about court documents being fake and that he could refuse service. Even though the cop verified Ben was telling the truth about the legitimacy of the papers, the lawfulness of the process server, and the fact that Johnson could not refuse service, Johnson racked up sufficient lies to get the American Fork police to arrest Ben, claiming his family lived in fear of their lives.

This type of public corruption isn’t a matter of bribery, but “You ain’t from around here,” a willingness to accede to a lying local rather than do the correct and legal thing for an outsider. At one juncture, a cop tells Ben, “We do things different here.”

Thus, day after day at the behest of Johnson, American Fork police tailed Reckless Ben, stopping him multiple times on false pretenses — such as running a stop sign when police cameras clearly show a full stop. It appears Lt. Quinn Adamson so roughly handled Schneider that he apparently dislocated Ben’s shoulder. In another incident, American Fork police claimed Ben was transporting heroin and spent three hours taking apart his car. When Johnson claimed the missing Legos were actually stolen by Ben, police raided his B&B and arrested everyone inside. Throughout, police kept muting their microphones as they scratched their heads trying to find reasons to arrest Ben. However, in court, a recording appears to reveal a judge colluding with a prosecutor looking for a way to jail Ben.

The saga is extensive and entertaining, thanks to the humor and imagination of Reckless Ben. The case came to me early on, thanks to John Bryan, “The Civil Rights Lawyer” (TCRL), and shortly thereafter by other attorneys I follow such as Legal Eagle. Soon it seemed every outraged lawyer was commenting, and the case swept into other channels before making the leap to The Wall Street Journal. The Dadvocate dedicated one of her slots to the story from an entirely different viewpoint, altogether avoiding mention of cops and lawyers.

In one dirty trick, Bricks & Minifigs, used to getting their own way in court, sent a takedown notice to Patreon, demanding Reckless Ben's account be shut down, content removed, and defunded. Here’s how that went:

Monday Update

After this story went to press, another thread came to light. After BAM seized control of their shop, the Gormans claimed in the dark of night, Brandon Best returned with a U-Haul truck and carted off the creme of the crop. McNeffs denied it, Johnson denied it, and Best insisted he arrived and left in a rental car. Security cameras picked up nothing. Only a neighboring shopkeeper thought he saw a U-Haul the night of the seizure. No one gave the Gormans’ cry much credence.

And then, in a episode out of a crime thriller, someone leafed through security recordings and zoomed in on the window of a neighboring storefront. There in the reflection sat a U-Haul box truck.

So push aside your 2500 piece Lego rendering of Hogwarts, grab a bowl of popcorn, and google Reckless Ben, Legos, BAM, and/or American Fork. It’s good for an afternoon’s entertainment in the guise of crime research. At least that’s what I claim.