The Semi X-Rated Blog

Because I am sick unto death of lawmakers explaining women's bodies and how they work with apparently endless ignorance and BS, 

(From https://www.fowllanguagecomics.com/ by Brian Gordon)

I thought we should talk about the female reproductive system.

First, a quick tour:

(Thanks Wikipedia)

Note that the uterus is a self-contained organ that cannot be reached from above. In other words, you cannot swallow a camera and see if a woman is pregnant.  (Sorry, Sen. Vito Barbieri)

The ovaries are next to the fallopian tubes. After ovulation, the egg cell is captured by the Fallopian tube, after traveling down the Fallopian tube to the uterus, occasionally being fertilized on its way by an incoming sperm.  The trip from the ovary through the Fallopian tube to the uterus can take hours or days. Meanwhile, once in a while a fast-swimming sperm can reach the egg in an hour, but not all sperm is healthy and mobile, it's a long way and there are many barriers, and it can actually take days for the winner to finish the marathon to the uterus.

But sometimes a supersperm makes it all the way up to the egg before the egg gets out of the Fallopian tube and fertilizes it there. So the zygote implants there, leading to an ectopic pregnancy a/k/a tubal pregnancy.  

(1) Sadly, it is not as rare as people try to tell you:  about 1 in every 100 pregnancies is a tubal pregnancy.  That's a lot.

(2) Despite the Ohio Bill mandating it, it is scientifically and medically impossible to transplant the fertilized egg from the Fallopian tube into the uterus.  

(3) Ectopic pregnancies will always kill both the mother and the fetus unless the pregnancy is aborted, either with medication or surgery.   (NHS)  

Meanwhile, "miscarriages are much more common than most people realize. Among people who know they're pregnant, it's estimated about 1 in 8 pregnancies will end in miscarriage. Many more miscarriages happen before a person is even aware they're pregnant."  (NHS)  Now most miscarriages happen because there are chromosomal abnormalities in the fetus.  As I've said before, I used to work as a low-level tech at Medical Genetics at Emory University, and the number of possible chromosomal abnormalities is mindboggling. This is important, because currently a number of states whose trigger laws against abortion have been instituted are talking about - and some actually are investigating miscarriages to see if they were actually abortions.  

If this keeps up, with the odds at 1 in 8 of having a miscarriage - approximately the same as dying of cancer - you will soon know someone (or be someone) arrested for a natural tragedy.  

"It's pretty apparent that conservatives believe that all gunowners are future heroes, but all uterus owners are potential criminals. And they legislate accordingly." - Yours Truly

A woman does not have a period until after she has ovulated.  This is why little girls who haven't yet had periods can get pregnant. Meanwhile, an amazing number of men have no idea and don't want to have any idea as to how periods work, and don't want to hear any of the literally bloody details, because it's just so icky.  (Upworthy)  Oh, and no, a woman doesn't automatically have her period every 28 days exactly.  Sometimes it surprises us.

Also, no one quite knows why, but the onset of puberty is getting earlier for both sexes. On average, puberty today begins around age 10 or 11 in girls (11–12 in boys) and ends between 15 and 17.   Some of it's probably nutrition:  My mother, for example, who was born in 1917 in the Appalachian mountains, didn't have her first period until she was 17, in 1934.  

Anyway, considering how our society sexualizes little girls (anyone remember Jon Benet Ramsey and how she was in endless Little Miss beauty contests?), ever younger puberty has dangerous repercussions on our children.  (Wikipedia)  (Psychology Today)  

Which leads us to the 10 year old Ohio girl who was raped and impregnated, refused an abortion in her home state, and had to go to another state to get one. In the process, a number of conservative politicians, including our own Governor Noem, stuck with the concept that abortion was 100% wrong. 

They may also have said, as have so many conservative men (and the occasional woman - HERE) have, that women can't get pregnant from rape.  (So many of them...)  

(1) Every slave woman in the Old South would entirely disagree. And most of the slaveowners' wives as well:

 

"But what do you say to this — to a magnate who runs a hideous black harem with its consequences, under the same roof with his lovely white wife and his beautiful and accomplished daughters? He holds his head high and poses as the model of all human virtues to these poor women whom God and the laws have given him. You see, Mrs. Stowe did not hit the sorest spot. She makes Legree a bachelor." - Mary Chesnut - A  Diary from Dixie 

(2) Every biologist and gynecologist entirely disagrees.  

So why is it that all these states with trigger laws have no exception for rape or incest? Well, one person says it's "Because men are the purveyors of rape and incest. They want to shift the focus away from the offender toward the woman." (HERE)  Maybe. It would explain why there are literally hundreds of thousands of untested rape kits stacked up in police storage around the country.  (The Atlantic)  

It's also a classic Catch-22 argument:  If women can't get pregnant from rape, then if a 10 year old - or any female - is pregnant, she obviously wasn't raped.  

So...  

Meet Matthew Hale, a 1678 master of the Catch-22:  he said witch trials were totally legit because "the existence of laws against witches is proof that witches exist".  A lot of women died to support that circular logic.  

Lord Hale was a primary source for SCOTUS Justice Alito in his Dobbs opinion abolishing Roe v. Wade.  He was also the originator of the Lord Hale Instructions, which were a required part of rape jury trials in the United States until at least 1976:

"It is true rape is a most detestable crime, and therefore ought severely and impartially to be punished with death; but it must be remembered, that it is an accusation easily to be made and hard to be proved, and harder to be defended by the party accused, tho' never so innocent... [W]e may be the more cautious upon trials of this nature, wherein the court and the jury may with so much ease be imposed upon without great care and vigilance; the heinousness of the offense many times transporting the judge and jury with so much indignation, that they are over hastily carried to the conviction of the accused thereof, by the confident testimony sometimes of malicious and false witnesses."  - Matthew Hale, 1678, Pleas of the Crown, p. 635.  

"From the days of Lord Hale to the present time, no case has ever gone to the jury, upon the sole testimony of the prosecutrix, unsustained by facts and circumstances corroborating it, without the Court warning them of the danger of a conviction on such testimony."  People v. Benson, 1856, California, ruling that a 13 year old's testimony was insufficient for a guilty plea because there were no other witnesses.  (LAWNET, my emphasis)   

BTW, what is it about 13 year olds and the male psyche?  Lolita is 12 in the novel and 14 in the movie, so let's split the difference and call her 13.  Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13 year old cousin.  And KY (R) Senator James Lankford said that 13 years old can consent to sex in his 2010 deposition (HERE). Oh, and Lord Hale was a generous man and upgraded the age of consent in his day from 10 (yes, you read that correctly) to 12.  Deep, deep, deep sigh...  

Meanwhile, back to the 10 year old Ohio girl.  A number of people on conservative media are saying that the story is suspicious, if not fake news, because it only has one source.  Now where have we heard that before?  Ohio AG Yost says there's no criminal investigation pending, which is surprising. To which I reply:

1. Dr. Bernard declined to identify to the WaPo her colleague or the city where the child was located, & she was right to do so. HIPAA laws apply here, as does our last shreds of privacy rights, especially of minors. 
2. Ohio AG Yost supposedly also said that this abortion 'clearly fit within the exceptions - “to prevent a serious risk of the substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman,” - and could be legally performed in Ohio.'  (NYPOST)  
• Except that, of course, Ohio has no exceptions for rape or incest. And incest is almost always perpetrated on children. 
• Except that so far, no state with no exceptions has made an exception for anyone. 
• Except that so far, no conservative Governor in such a state has said - in response to this case - that there should be an exception for the girl on the grounds of her health. 
• Aunt Crabby calls bulls***.  

BREAKING NEWS:  There has been an arrest in the 10 year old Ohio girl's case.  (HERE)  So far, no apologies from any of the conservatives, including AG Yost, Governor Noem, and Tucker Carlson, who all said it was fake news, and "too good [for Democrats] to be true".  

Meanwhile, in Brazil:  Judge bans 11 year old rape victim from having an abortion because 'she would not have been "protecting the daughter," and would instead have been "subjecting her to a homicide."' (NEWSWEEK) 

ISABELLA: I'll tell the world

Aloud what man thou art.

ANGELO: Who will believe thee, Isabel?

My unsoil'd name, th' austereness of my life,

My vouch against you, and my place i' the state,

Will so your accusation overweigh

That you shall stifle in your own report,

And smell of calumny.

Shakespeare,Measure for Measure, Act II, Scene 4

 

Cross of Iron

Sam Peckinpah went to Yugoslavia to shoot Cross of Iron in 1976.  The picture was financed through some complicated cross-collateralization, and production shut down without warning when the money ran out.  The movie was put together from footage shot up to that point – with the final scene staged on the fly, improvised by Peckinpah and his two leads, James Coburn and Maximilian Schell: “I will show you where the iron crosses grow.”

Be that as it may, the picture feels pretty complete, and you don’t get the sense of gaping holes, but there’s still a nagging suspicion (the same thing you have with Major Dundee) that something fuller is eluding you.  On the other hand, the movie doesn’t seem characteristically Peckinpah, either.  There’s the Russian kid, the innocent, the sacrificial lamb, who might conjure up Angel in The Wild Bunch, or Elsa in Ride the High Country, but the larger canvas, the history, the broken faith, Steve Judd and Gil Westrum, Dundee and Tyreen, Pike and Deke Thornton, Garrett and the Kid, even Bennie and Elita in Alfredo Garcia, is noticeably absent.  In an odd way, Cross of Iron is maybe a prologue, thematically.  The defining moment, beforehand.

Of course, I’m talking about this as if you know the storyline and characters in Cross of Iron, or as if you know all of Peckinpah’s movies back to front, and not everybody is as obsessed as I am.  Let’s be honest, one Quentin Tarantino is one too many.  So, briefly, Cross of Iron takes place in 1943, in the Crimea; the Germans are being pushed back relentlessly by the Russians, and the Wehrmacht is fighting a rearguard action.  The story’s told from the German POV.  Steiner, the platoon sergeant (the James Coburn character), realizes it’s a losing battle, but fights on anyway.

“Do you believe in God, Sergeant?”

“I believe God is a sadist, but doesn’t know it.”

Stransky, the Junker from the officer class (Max Schell) is desperate to win the Iron Cross, and ready to lie for it.

“I tell you a man’s true destiny is not all this childbirth and chocolate, but to rule and to fight.”

Steiner is a warrior; Stransky is a blowhard.

 

Stransky puts together a false report, taking credit from a dead man to get the Iron Cross.  Steiner refuses to sign off on it.  Stransky abandons Steiner and his men, when the Wehrmacht retreats, leaving the platoon to fight their way back from behind Russian lines, and then – when they’ve almost made it, spoiler alert - tries to gun them down with friendly fire.  Basically, that’s it.

Being as it’s a Peckinpah, however, you get a lot of sidebar.  Somebody throws a shoe at a rat, for example, and Max Schell reprimands him: “Be gentle with my Gigi.”

James Mason, the colonel, orders his captain, David Warner, to the rear.

“I’m prepared to disobey that order, Sir.”

“You’ve been around Steiner too long.”

Steiner reports.

“Two killed, one missing.”

“Two killed, how?”

“Bullets.  Mortar fire, artillery, heavy salvos.  Bad luck, terminal syphilis.  The usual things.”

The actual war stuff is frightening, and incoherent.  Action is very hard to do, both on the page, and in the movies.  We see way too many movies where you can’t tell who’s who, or what’s going on.  Way of the Gun is an exception, because the guy channels The Wild Bunch.  Cross of Iron is intentionally confusing.  Everything is loud, and your kinesthetic sense shuts down.  It’s all adrenaline and endorphins. 

Peckinpah bent the rules of physical cinema, and invented new ones.  Steiner says it best, in a reflective moment. “A man is generally who he feels himself to be.”  Peckinpah tempted Fate, and lost.  God damn, but I miss him.

Crime Scene Comix Case 2022-07-017, Monkeying Around

Once again we highlight our criminally favorite cartoonist, Future Thought channel of YouTube. We love the sausage-shaped Shifty, a Minion gone bad.

Yikes! In this episode, Shifty meets his primate ancestors.

 

 

 

 

© www.FutureThought.tv

 

That’s today’s crime cinema. Hope you enjoyed the show. Be sure to visit Future Thought YouTube channel.

The Top Fifteen Crime Films of the 1930s

The Top Fifteen Crime Films of the 1930s

by William Burton McCormick

Lists are silly. After all, these things are highly subjective.

But, as a writer, the process of making lists can be useful. Analyzing why you like something in narrative form, why it works, and why it does not work, can clarify your understanding of storytelling techniques. At least, that’s my excuse for doing it.

My other excuses? Well, I’m a classic film fan for one and enjoy digging into this old stuff. Lastly, I have a story called “Myrna Loy Versus the Third Reich” in the July/August issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. That story is set in 1938 and includes references to the motion pictures of that era. So, I thought it might be enjoyable to review some of the crime films of the 1930’s. And having watched them, (many for the tenth time or so), why not list them based on my personal preference? It’s more fun (for me at least) than giving you a list in alphabetical or chronological order.

So, here in reverse order are my top fifteen crime films from the decade of the 1930’s. Why fifteen? Well, narrowing it down to ten was too hard and twenty would make this essay too long. Also, inside the crime genre I include mystery, detective, police, espionage, gangster films and even the odd adventure or dramatic film if a crime is central to the plot. Also, there are spoilers here, so if you haven’t seen a film on the list, you might decide if you want to skip that entry. Here we go!

15. Manhattan Melodrama (1934)
Childhood buddies, Jim Wade (William Powell) and Blackie Gallagher (Clark Gable) remain true friends, despite being professionally and romantically at odds. Jim is an incorruptible district attorney; Blackie is a mob owner of speakeasies and gambling dens throughout Manhattan. Both love dancer Eleanor Packer (Myrna Loy). When Blackie does Jim an unsolicited favor and rubs out a man who could ruin Jim, it is Jim himself who indicts Blackie and sends him to the chair. Despite the criminal conviction, and losing Eleanor to Jim, Blackie’s gangster is glad to see his friend for a tearful goodbye moments before his execution.

Manhattan Melodrama was the second of seven pairings between Loy and Gable and the first of fourteen pairings between Loy and Powell (released only three weeks before The Thin Man, both films were smash hits ensuring future collaborations.) Manhattan Melodrama was the picture Loy-fan John Dillinger was attending when ambushed and shot down by police in Chicago, July 22, 1934. Loy criticized her studio, Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, for capitalizing on publicity from the killing.

14. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
Alfred Hitchcock’s first classic of the sound era (he’d already produced a silent standout in The Lodger in 1927), The Man Who Knew Too Much tells the story of British couple Bob and Jill Lawrence (Leslie Banks and Edna Best) in Switzerland whose child is kidnapped by hostile agents.

Remade by Hitch himself in 1956 starring James Stewart and Doris Day, I prefer the original with its brisker pace, deadeye-with-a-rifle leading lady Jill and more memorable villain, Peter Lorre is his first English-speaking role.

13. Little Caesar (1931)
Edward G. Robinson became a star in his role as Rico “Little Caesar” Bandello, who climbs his way to the top of the mob only to come crashing down in fiery fashion. Along the way he drags his reluctant friend Joe Massara (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) in with him.

The film’s last line “Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?” is a cultural touchstone among gangster film fanatics to this day. Immensely influential on Scarface and countless other gangster films, one can definitely say Little Caesar’s finale was not the end of Rico.

12. The Most Dangerous Game (1932)
Fay Wray’s other landmark film was filmed simultaneously with King Kong on the same jungle sets. Wray and Bruce Armstrong filmed the Kong scenes in the day and The Most Dangerous Game scenes at night for what must have been exhausting parallel shoots.

Based on Richard Connell’s 1924 short story of the same name, the plot hinges on a big game hunter Count Zaroff (Leslie Banks) who decides to track and kill human prey as the ultimate test. Eve Towbridge (Wray) and Robert Rainsford (Joel McCrea) must survive unarmed on a jungle island while a rifle-carrying Zaroff pursues them. Imitated countless times but seldom surpassed.

11. The Kennel Murder Case (1933)
Before Nick Charles, William Powell played detective Philo Vance in four films from 1929 to 1933. The best of these is The Kennel Murder Case, an excellent locked room mystery about the killing of Archer Coe (Robert Barrat), the owner of a dog show champion who had bested Vance’s own pooch the day before.

Powell plays detective Vance so similar to his later Thin Man role, one could almost imagine these are the adventures of Nick Charles before he met Nora. The studios were so concerned that audiences would confuse Powell’s two detective roles that the first Thin Man film made a special trailer where Philo and Nick converse to set the record straight.

10. Sabotage (1936)
Alfred Hitchcock kicked the suspense into another gear with this tale of a foreign saboteur (Oscar Homolka) in London planning to blow up Piccadilly Circus. The saboteur’s wife (Sylvia Sydney), ignorant of his plot, begins to suspect more and more, especially when confronted by a British agent (John Loder) who also has romantic interest in her.

At one point, an innocent boy unknowingly carries a ticking bomb across London. Only Hitchcock could get away with what happens next.

9. Another Thin Man (1939)
William Powell and Myrna Loy return as Nick and Nora Charles in Another Thin Man, the third in the series. Colonel Burr MacFay (C. Aubrey Smith), who manages Nora’s family industries, is murdered in his Long Island mansion and the police think Nick is the culprit. Humor and adventure ensue.

Watch for the scene at a Latin nightclub where an amorous dancer won’t let Nora off the floor while a gregarious drunk interrupts Nick’s attempts at interviewing a suspect. Asta, baby Nick Jr., “fourth” Stooge Shemp Howard, and future television producer Sheldon Leonard complete the cast.

8. The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939)
The first and best of the fourteen Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes films, the story keeps reasonably close to Arthur Conan Doyle’s original (save for a séance scene, the change of relationship between a few characters, and a third act action twist).

20^th Century Fox surpassed rival Universal with their use of atmosphere, the eerie landscape on the moors, the sense of creeping dread all around and the ability to recreate the chilling howls of a demonic hound out there somewhere… A perfect fusion of Gothic horror and British manor house mystery.

7. The Public Enemy (1931)
James Cagney forever defined himself as tough guy with The Public Enemy. His Irish-American gangster Tom Powers is an enforcer for the bootlegging industry with a thirst for vengeance against any man or beast who crosses him. An early sound picture, director William A Wellman put the new medium to maximum effect.

The film reverberates with haunting sounds: the gurgling last line of a singer killed mid chorus, the terrified whinnies of other horses when a race stallion is executed (yes, ‘executed’, not ‘put down’), the pulsating popping of beer barrels burst by machinegun bullets. In one darkly funny scene, Cagney uses a gun merchant’s own wares to rob him, a motif used again by Sergio Leone in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The denouement is a kicker like few others, nearly as memorable as White Heat years later. Jean Harlow is second billed here as Cagney’s love interest but has little screen time. It doesn’t matter, this was the most powerful gangster film Hollywood had yet made, one that still stirs ninety years later.

6. The Lady Vanishes (1938)
Possibly Alfred Hitchcock’s funniest film, The Lady Vanishes is the story of an elderly English governess Miss Foy (May Whitty) who vanishes on a moving train somewhere in central Europe.

British travelers Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood) and Gilbert (Michael Redgrave) search for her, exchanging put-downs and romantic-tinged barbs worthy of the best screwball comedies, while indifferent cricket-obsessed passengers Caldicott (Naunton Wayne) and Charters (Basil Radford) were hilarious enough to earn their own spinoff series (directed by others).

An enormous success on both sides of the Atlantic, The Lady Vanishes paved the way for Hitchcock to leave London for Hollywood two years later. The rest is cinematic history.

5. After the Thin Man (1936)
Probably the best mystery sequel ever filmed, many hardcore Thin Man fans consider this the finest in the series. And what’s not to love? Nick and Nora (William Powell and Myrna Loy again) return to San Francisco to find a New Year’s party raging in their house! Soon, Nora’s aristocratic family drags Nick into a mystery that devolves from a missing person to blackmail to murder.

With more time focused on Nick, Nora and Asta than the original, the humor and playful romance runs unabated throughout. My favorite scene is when Asta absconds with a clue and must be chased down by his hilariously frustrated owners. A young James Stewart costars. On a personal note, three reels of After the Thin Man play a key role in my aforementioned Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine story “Myrna Loy Versus the Third Reich.” So, this picture is something of an inspiration for me.

4. The Thin Man (1934)
But how can you surpass the original? When The Thin Man came out in 1934 it was something of a revolution. There had been comedic detective movies before, but none so witty. Bumbling sort of mystery comedies with clownish detectives and bungling thieves were the norm. Think Keystone Cops. The Thin Man, inspired by author Dashiell Hammett’s relationship with playwright Lillian Hellman, was as much a comedy of manners as a mystery.

Clever, teasing dialogue and the immense chemistry between Loy and Powell captured the minds of Depression-era movie goers. Before The Thin Man flirting and romance (on film) were trappings of courtship ending at the altar. Married couples were meant to be dignified and private with their affections – if they had them at all. But – shock! - Nick and Nora proved romance wasn’t dead after marriage. That married life could be sexy and adventurous, and maybe fun and funny.

The Charles’ relationship became the ideal to which many couples aspired. Once known for playing vamps and mob molls, Loy would be voted “The perfect wife” for years afterwards in national magazines. And, of course, with Prohibition ending only five months before, Nick and Nora were free to drink for an entire nation marooned on the wagon for fourteen years. Nominated for Best Picture and a runaway hit, The Thin Man was a release of pent-up frustrations in the mid-1930s. You can see its influence in every romantic sleuth couple since from Hart to Hart, Moonlighting, and countless sexually-entwined literary detective teams. Very close plot wise to Hammett’s original novel, the first film has the strongest mystery element of the series. Much screen time is spent developing the suspects, a rogues’ gallery of colorful oddballs, sycophants and weirdos. As Nora said at the climatic party: “Waiter, will you serve the nuts? I mean, will you serve the guests the nuts?”

3. Scarface (1932)
“The World is Yours,” folks. Directed by Howard Hawks, produced by Hawks and Howard Hughes, and with a screenplay by Ben Hecht, Scarface reigned for forty years as the undisputed greatest gangster movie ever made (until The Godfather arrived in ’72.) Taking the story of a ruthless mobster’s ascent similar to Little Caesar a year earlier, Hawks ratcheted up the violence to unprecedented levels and infused it with an operatic finale worthy of Greek tragedy.

At the heart of Scarface is Paul Muni’s electric performance as Tony Camonte, charismatic yet thoroughly terrifying in his pursuit of his twisted version of the American dream. Even Tony’s would-be-redeeming qualities, loyalty to his friend Guino (George Raft) and love of his sister Cesca (Ann Dvorak), turn to vengeful jealousy and incestuous control respectively by the end. A few of the comedy bits among Tony’s underlings are dated, but even those increase the movie’s effectiveness when those loveable buffoons are murdered in the third act thanks to Tony’s monomania. Watch too for Boris Karloff as a rival gang leader gunned down in a bowling alley. Brian de Palma’s 1983 remake with Al Pacino is good, but the original is the greater film. Not to be missed.

2. M (1931)
With all due respect to Metropolis and the wonderful film noirs Fritz Lang made for Hollywood in the 1940’s and ‘50’s, this is the Austrian director’s greatest picture. And one of the finest films ever made. The story of the manhunt for a child killer in Berlin, it melds unforgettable imagery and brilliant use of the then-new dimension of sound with social commentary. As the underworld and police both seek the killer, Lang hints that differences on either side of the law are not as distinct as some might like. And Peter Lorre’s performance as the murderer remains his greatest triumph, terrifying, unknowable, yet almost sympathetic during his speech before a kangaroo court of thugs who profess to try him. (He asserts essentially that these mobsters choose to be killers, while he is forced by sickness to kill. That their free will makes them – and by extension society – unfit to judge him.).

M’s influence is everywhere including my own novella A Stranger From the Storm. On weight of theme and sheer artistic merit, this is the greatest film on this list, but I can’t quite place it number one…

1. The 39 Steps (1935)
The definitive Hitchcock film (if not the best, though close to it.) Much like a British version of the later North by Northwest, our Canadian protagonist Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) is chased from London to the Scottish Highlands and back in the best “innocent man accused” story Hitch ever did. At a time when British films were inert and cerebral, The 39 Steps was lively, funny and swiftly-paced with a perfect twist ending. (No one will forget Mr. Memory (Wylie Watson), pun intended.) The British Film Institute named this the fourth greatest British film of all time, behind only The Third Man, Brief Encounter and Lawrence of Arabia. And none of those have the humor or breathtaking pace. Hitchcock took very little from the source novel by John Buchan, instead choosing to tell his own tale.

His success heralded the age where directors were no longer beholden to the novelist, but storytellers and artists in their own rights who could take what they wanted from a work and discard the rest. On a personal note, it galvanized me to visit the Scottish Highlands, write a story about the location “The House in Glamaig’s Shadow”, and in many ways inspired me to be a thriller novelist. One of a handful of movies, I could watch on endless loop into happy oblivion, The 39 Steps can’t be anything but number one on this list.

So, that was my Top 15 Crime Films of the 1930’s? What would be yours? Any major films or favorites I missed? Have you seen any of these? All of these? Please let me know in the comments below. And if you enjoyed this, I may make it a series (though a very intermittent one). Next would be the 1940’s, the era of the film noir. Can’t wait!

Crime and no punishment: Public Health

When Leigh kindly invited me to write crime/mystery articles from a medical viewpoint, he certainly wasn’t expecting me to colour wildly, and enthusiastically, outside the lines of my mandate. Both he and Rob have been infinitely patient with me and I owe them an apology, because here I go again.

In my defence, crime can be seen through many lens: breaking the law, injustice and even awful things that happen.

I’ve been thinking a lot about awful things that are happening. They’re not a crimes in the sense of breaking a law. They do, however, result in death and, from a certain point of view, can be seen as murder. Mass murder.

What are these awful things?

Lousy Public Health decisions.

Public health is defined as the organized effort to keep people healthy and prevent injury, illness and premature death. This field was once relegated to textbooks, articles and conferences enthusiastically attended by nerds in the field.

What is this Public Health thing that most of us happily ignored for so long and why is it messing with our lives?

The reality is that Public Health has always messed with our lives. From the 1800s, the sanitary reform movement, spurred on by new understanding of disease transmission, helped create sewage treatment infrastructure alongside water filtration systems to provide clean drinking water. This sounds very technical, but imagine drinking water filled with feces and urine— it’s a great way to spread disease and, seriously, totally gross as well.

From food safety standards to policies for disease mitigation, from mass vaccination to public education, Public Health has been there for us. Before mass vaccination programs, diseases like smallpox, polio and diphtheria were rampant. Before changes in hygiene standards, your surgeon would operate with bare, unwashed hands and your food was prepared and served without hand washing too. Again – gross.

What seems self-evident now, was not always so. In fact, when the Canadian Public Health Association was created in 1910, the early founders were determined to bring about change, “come hell or high water.”

Sounds like fighting words to me and suggest that, even then, the pushback they faced was serious.

Fast forward to 2022 and we see many Public Health decisions move from the ‘hell or high water’ fight to a ‘paddling in leaky canoe and ignoring the tidal waves’ approach.

Harsh?

Hardly.

In my home province of Ontario, we have a surge in the new omicron variant, BA.5 and yet, public health has removed masks mandates, even for hospitals, allowing our most vulnerable patients to get infected. We have vaccines but anyone under 60 is being denied their fourth dose, despite the fact that third doses have long since waned for most people. Allowing BA.5 to infect our citizens by refusing to institute even the minimum of mask mandates or updating much needed vaccines is harsh and unethical. People will die. My statements are mild in comparison.

During COVID-19, decisions that endanger and kill people are being made not just in my backyard - they are being made all over the world.

Some will ask, “Isn’t this politics?” Yes. Of course it is. But here’s the rub: all of these decisions are presented to us by a M.D. who is the Chief Medical Officer. His M.D. gives him credibility – imagine how many would listen to him if he had a botany degree? So, these are Public Health decisions presented by a M.D. and this makes all the difference. If a doctor makes a decision knowing this will endanger or kill a patient, they can and should lose their licence. If a doctor makes a decision that endangers or kills many - give them a title of ‘medical officer of health’ and they have impunity.

Even a non-MD who makes a decision knowing others can be harmed or killed is held accountable - think of a driver who is drunk, drives a car and hits a pedestrian. We hold them accountable for the harm and death they cause. Crimes that can be legally prosecuted apparently are very different than awful things that happen to people. Mass harm and mass murder are O.K. if they are a ‘policy’ decision.

In 2020, I was concerned but optimistic. In 2021, I was worn out and somewhat discouraged. Now, I’ve reached the level of being sad and furious.

Awful things knowingly dumped upon us by Public Health should be crimes.

They are not.

And that is a crime.

The Big Mo

THE BIG MO GETS ITS, WELL, MO

In 1980, George H.W. Bush won the up-first Iowa caucuses and crowned himself the GOP presidential frontrunner, thanks to the now-unstoppable Big Mo--momentum--wind at his back. And Bush actually did win the next open primary. In Puerto Rico. Where Ronald Reagan wasn't on the ballot. Thereafter, Bush suffered a Mo-less drubbing that included his home Texas going for Reagan. 

Bush's main feat in 1980 was bringing "Big Mo" from sports lingo into the cultural vocabulary. And Bush wasn't wrong about momentum's potential. When things go well, empowerment soars toward critical mass. Future things likely go as well or better. On the other hand, confidence drains off when things start going poorly. Setbacks, if left unaddressed at root, breed more setbacks.

Reinforcement equals direction, positive or negative. It's no more true than for writers. We find our self-momentum, or we don't.

Publishing track records owe as much to authors finding an audience groove as to comparative talent. Process-wise, a cultivated routine sustains effort. I write more and better when I'm on routine. Productivity success lures my butt back in that chair the next day. When I lose Mo and get off routine, that empty chair looks daunting as hell.

And then there's craft. By my quick count, the Big Mo is--or isn't--alive in a story three ways. None of them happen by accident. 

#1: LET'S MOVE THIS ALONG, SHALL WE?

Consider the Golden State Warriors. Last month, the Warriors won their fourth NBA title in eight seasons (they also lost the Finals twice in that stretch). This, despite being smaller and less athletic than the Celtics. The Warriors took the trophy because of game pace. Their core line-up pushes tempo and zips passes at a level that is fan joy to behold. They've trained themselves that way. They feed off it. When Golden State kept their signature pace, they ran up big leads. When they eased off the gas, here came Boston. It took a bunch of time-outs for the Warriors to break those runs and reset.

Fiction works the same way. A story needs pace. It needs a constant and crisp focus from avoiding asides down to Strunk and White's advice to omit unnecessary words. No off-plot indulgences. No info dumps to show off the research. Every sentence launches plot or character or both one direct step toward the big finish (red herrings allowed), or else say goodbye to tension. Say goodbye to Big Mo. 

An example. I truly enjoyed about 100,000 words of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. The other 68,000? A perfectly good thriller could've soared next-level if it'd skipped its pace-sapping detail. But hey, what do I know? That novel is still selling--thanks to its hype momentum.

#2: FLOW WORM

A sneaky craft trick? Sentence construction. This sounds so retro as to be quaint, but how sentences unfold is critical tactically. A great sentence build around its moment's conflict. What central person or thing deserves the subject mantle? The most important actor or action. What verb captures that central thing in action? What clauses show the situation or implications? 

That's only part of the trick. When I read great fiction, I don't just see words on the page. If I'm that deep in, the author's words have music. I hear the words. Each sentence rolls into the next, again and again, and carries me with it. Check this out the next time a story hums for you. Maybe, just maybe, the author created momentum through pleasing and varied construction. Like I just did. Hopefully.

#3: CHANGE TO SPARE

Last year, I submitted a literary piece that I'd held back a while. It was long-ish for competing even after painful cuts, and my acceptance rate with literary pieces lacks, shall we say, similar momentum to the crime side. The story was rejected, nicely so by one market. The editor liked the writing and premise but didn't feel powerful character evolution for the length. A correct assessment, on re-read. I hadn't given the story enough forward motion.

Ironically, this is my frequent beef with some high literary pieces. Talented work laced with great imagery and language, but nothing happens. Not really. Don't get me wrong. Form and abstraction makes for an amazing read, in poetry. 

MO' MO

In 1980, George Bush invoked a Big Mo never actually behind him. He might've grabbed Mo anyway, had he altered his patrician style and message. He didn't. He stuck to words and aspirations. That's the thing about the Big Mo. It thrives on hard work, on acts and habits. The Big Mo is a fickle beast. It goes with who feeds it.

Writers can feed our Mo. Our work is, after all, ours. That over-long literary piece of mine? I can edit it. I can get fresh critique, or I can study authors who shine at these mid-long arcs. Or I can file it away and try another piece with more promise. 

Resets aren't easy. Resetting a reset is worse. Be that as it may. We can all tweak our approach to make us better at this writing thing. More enthused about our work, too. And that's when the Big Mo might swing our way a while.

The Detective in Your Mind

I rarely read new books, by which I mean the hot books of the moment that everyone is raving about. There’s an argument that I should not buy more books because I have enough unread ones to last me to the end of my days. But I buy new ones anyway. They assume their place in the rotation, and if they are lucky, are sometimes read within a year of publication.

Don’t be like me. If you write short stories, read A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders now. Read it in paper, so you can scribble notes or highlight as you go. Depending on your years immersed in the craft, you will either a) learn things, or b) find fresh ways to think about the gift for creation you have so carefully nurtured.

For 20 years, Saunders, a MacArthur Fellow, has taught creative writing to MFA students at Syracuse University. His favorite class is one he teaches on 19th-century works of Russian fiction in translation. His book is a crash course on that class. We read seven short stories by four writers—Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gogol, and Turgenev—and Saunders walks us through them. What he teaches his students, he teaches us.

Before I sprung for the book, I listened to a podcast Saunders did with Ezra Klein at the New York Times, and I was struck by the professor’s marvelous gift for conversation. I envy anyone who can speak articulately, with nuanced vocabulary, about complex topics at the drop of a hat. I cannot do that. In fact, I am certain that the reason I write is because I can’t speak well. His comments on revision, especially, about managing the writer’s “monkey mind,” are spot-on. As I read the book, I was pleased to see/hear/feel that same voice on the page. I found myself highlighting things as I read. Here are four disparate observations he makes in the first few pages of the book.

“Notice how impatient your reading mind is or, we might say, how alert it is… Like an obsessed detective, the reading mind interprets every new-arriving bit of text purely in this context, not interested in much else… One of the tacit promises of a short story, because it is so short, is that there’s no waste in it. Everything in it is there for a reason…”

*** 

“When I’m writing well , there’s almost no intellectual/analytical thinking going on. When I first found this method, it felt so freeing. I didn’t have to worry, didn’t have to decide, I just had to be there as I read my story fresh each time…willing to (playfully) make changes at the line level, knowing that if I was wrong, I’d get a chance to change it back on the next read.”

*** 

“We have to keep being pulled into a story in order for it to do anything to us…. Would a reasonable person, reading line four, get enough of a jolt to go on to line five? Why do we keep reading a story? Because we want to. Why do we want to? That’s the million-dollar question: What makes a reader keep reading? …. A story (any story, every story) makes its meaning at speed, a small structural pulse at a time. We read a bit of text and a set of expectations arises…. We could understand a story as simply a series of such expectation/resolution moments.” 

*** 

“(A)story is a system for the transfer of energy. Energy made in the early pages gets transferred along through the story, passed from section to section, like a bucket of water headed for a fire, and the hope is that not a drop gets lost.”

I’m sure the writers among you were nodding as you read these few selections. His biggest global observation or piece of advice is what I call the Big Duh: stories are about escalation. Three times in the book he offers his rule: “Always Be Escalating.”

Professional writers practice this intuitively because they’ve learned the lesson the hard way. Young writers don’t. When Saunders reads student work, his eyeballs smack into expositions that drag on forever. The writers are talented young people, or else they wouldn’t be in this program, but at this stage in their careers, good writing means pretty sentences. They bog down in a recitation of opening splendors.

Saunders.
(courtesy Penguin Random House)

This is nothing new. When Saunders was a student at the same institution, his professor—Douglas Unger—compelled everyone to stop and tell a damn story, verbally, as if around a campfire. If you do it that way, human instinct takes over. Your story cannot help but have a beginning, middle, and end. The story may not be great, but it will be real. That instinct falls to pieces when you attempt to put it down on paper. Which is why you must keep writing.

When revising, Saunders says, you’re engaging in a useful charade. You make minuscule changes along the way, all the while pretending that you’re reading the piece for the first time. Why do you make this change or that one? You probably don’t know. Instinct guides your hand. If you’ve done this countless times before, you will make the story incrementally better, and you will naturally know when to stop. Some piece of you knows that if you press on, you’ll blow it.

The last short story in the book is “Alyosha the Pot,” by Tolstoy. Only after we’ve discussed it at length does Saunders reveal that Tolstoy himself was not pleased with the piece, and never returned to it after that first pass. Saunders nails the problem: the ending is ambiguous, and thus unsatisfying.

I thought Saunders would stop there. Class dismissed! But no—he shows us how the ending has been rendered in English by several translators. Then he asks some Russian friends how they would interpret the passage. Looking over his shoulder as he conducts this analysis, I could not help admire the man’s patience and dedication. It has been a long time since I’ve scrutinized a story that way. Typically, if the story works for me, great. If not, I shrug and move on. But as a writer, it’s enormously helpful to know how subtle changes alter one’s perception of a piece. To think about the problem correctly, you must put yourself in that imaginary state of Never Having Read This Before.

I heard the SFF writer Mary Robinette Kowal once remark on the podcast Writing Excuses that genre writers really ought to be reading some literary fiction, if only to understand how ambiguity can make, break, or enhance your writing. Her remark has stuck with me for years, but I didn’t fully appreciate why until I read Saunders’ skillful treatment of the topic.

This book now occupies a spot on a shelf of writing books that mean something to me. The next time I feel the urge to don my ushanka and pour a shot of vodka, it will be waiting. Thank you, Professor Saunders. Za zdorov’ye!


***


To explore further:

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders (432 pages, Penguin Random House, 2021)

LA Review of Books: Convo with Saunders

New York Times: Review of the book

New York Times: Transcript of the Klein/Saunders interview. (Search for “monkey mind” if you want to read a small snippet.)


See you in three weeks!


Joe

josephdagnese.com

What's in a Name?

A belated Happy Canada Day and Independence Day to our Canadian and American readers!

For new readers of the blog, my name is Brian Thornton. "Doolin Dalton" is the Blogger handle I've had for over a decade. Long story on getting it changed, which makes it a story for another time.

There's a funny story about how my parents came up with my first name.

I was born in 1965. During the previous year, while my mom was pregnant with me, there was a song all over the radio called "Sealed With A Kiss." My dad just loved it. And he liked the name of the singer who released it.

A guy named Brian Hyland.

He had a number of puppy love type hits over the course of the early-to-mid 1960s. The best of these was the aforementioned "Sealed With A Kiss." (You've likely heard it. If you're curious, you can listen here.).

However, Brian Hyland's biggest hit wasn't about puppy love and letters and Summer. It was a novelty song about a swimsuit.

Title: "Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini."

Yep. This one.

My parents got the idea for my name from the guy who sang this song!

Fast forward to 1993. I was a graduate student (History, naturally) at Eastern Washington University in Cheney. I was sitting in my off-campus apartment one night, when the phone rang. The following conversation is transcribed as I remember it:

ME: Hello?

CALLER: Brian?

Me: Yes. Who's this?

CALLER: (Confused) It's Jen.

ME: Oh, hi Jen.

(I know a LOT of women named Jennifer. Wasn't sure which one this was. Just couldn't place the voice.)

CALLER: (Still confused) This is Brian?

ME: Yes.

CALLER: Brian Thornton?

ME: Yes.

CALLER: Oh, okay. Whew! So anyway, I was calling because I'm really concerned about Bill and his relationship with The Lord.

ME: Bill?

CALLER: Bill.

ME: Bill?

(The only Bill I knew well enough that one of my Jen friends would talk about his spiritual life was a practicing atheist).

CALLER: Bill. 

ME: Bill's an atheist.

CALLER: Are you sure this is Brian Thornton?

ME: Yes. Which Jen is this?

CALLER: Your sister.

ME: I don't have a sister.

CALLER: This is Brian Thornton?

ME: Yes.

CALLER: Brian Thornton from Oak Harbor?

ME: No.

Funny story, turns out there were two Brian Thorntons enrolled at E.W.U. that year. Myself and a freshman attending on a golf scholarship. His sister called directory assistance for Cheney and got my number instead of his.

Nothing like this had never happened to me before. Jen and I cleared that up, had a good laugh, and hung up. And I thought that would be the end of it.

Turns out it wasn't.

To this day I have never met this other Brian Thornton. Not while we were both at Eastern, and not since.

Which is not to say that our paths haven't continued to cross.

I got a job teaching in Kent, Washington (Southeast of Seattle in the Seattle-Tacoma metroplex). Turns out, the other Brian Thornton got a job as a golf pro at a nearby golf course. Every year or so one of my students would mention this golf pro who had the same name as myself.

And then it got weird.

Not a reenactment. I was NOT smiling.

I went in to the dentist's office to get a crown on a tooth where the filling had fallen out. At the time I got
my dental care at one of those open bay places which resembles nothing so much as an assembly line. The dentist working with me that particular day was new to the practice, and likely to the country. It would be putting it kindly say that his grasp on the English language was "evolving."

So imagine my surprise when he began to try to numb up the wrong side of my mouth. 

Once I got over my shock, I put a stop to this but quick.

A quick consultation with ladies in the front office revealed that the dentist was planning to give me a crown using the dental records of the other Brian Thornton.

Needless to say, I changed dentists.

So next time you read one of those stories where there's a mix-up with the names of a couple of very different people, rest assured it does happen in real life.

And maybe it's time I tackle this sort of story.

And that's it for me this time around.

See you in two weeks!

Choose Somebody's Own Adventure

A few months ago I woke up in the middle of the night and asked myself: "Whatever happened to adventure stories?"

Yeah, I know.  Other people dream of snakes eating their own tails, thereby revealing the structure of benzene.  But this is what I get.  Blame a faulty imagination. 

But let's talk about adventure as a genre, and then maybe I can get some sleep. Wikipedia quotes Don D'Ammassa in the Encyclopedia of Adventure Fiction:

An adventure is an event or series of events that happens outside the course of the protagonist's ordinary life, usually accompanied by danger, often by physical action. Adventure stories almost always move quickly, and the pace of the plot is at least as important as characterization, setting and other elements of a creative work.

Of course adventure stories flourished for a long time - think of Dumas, Stevenson, Scott - and were a staple of the pulp era.  But while other genres from that period are still flourishing (mysteries, science fiction, horror, romance) or at least hanging on (westerns), the adventure story per se seems to be a vanishing species.

In books, that is.  It survives in movies. (How old is Indiana Jones in his next adventure?)

There has always been overlap between the adventure story and other genres.  Elizabeth Peters's brilliant Amelia Peabody novels are considered mysteries but many of them have little to do with crime-solving. See The Last Camel Died at Noon for a pure adventure tale.

One recent (starting 2007) stalwart example of the genre is the Ethan Gage series, created by William Dietrich, a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist who was a professor at the same university where I worked for many years.  Gage is a classic rogue character, a yankee gambler and world traveler in the Federalist era, trained in the science of electricity by none other than Benjamin Franklin himself.  Based in France, he is constantly involved with Napoleon who can scarcely decide whether to send him on another dangerous mission or shoot him as a possible American spy.

Gage's journeys take him to Egypt, the Holy Land, the Great Lakes, and even Haiti.  And they are a lot of fun.

But taken together the works of Peters and Dietrich may give us one hint why the adventure story is less popular today than it once was.  These books are set in the past and mostly in lands that, to American/European eyes, seemed wild, unexplored, and (as a person of that time might say) primitive.  There are not so many of those lands left in the present day, and even writing about the past authors run the risk of being accused of colonialism or even racism.  If your villain is Asian are you re-creating Fu Manchu?  

You can finesse that problem, perhaps, by having your hero battle a civilization on another planet, instead of another continent, but now you have changed genres.

All of which brings up a related topic, which may earn me some complaints, but here goes.

There is a popular BBC mystery series called Death in Paradise which has been running for more than a decade.  It is set on the fictional Caribbean island of Saint Marie.  It is a commonwealth country and a Scotland Yard detective is assigned there.  And remarkably enough, this White, English-trained cop with no knowledge of the island's people, customs, or geography  is always able to solve murders that baffle the mostly Black locals.  Not problematic at all!

The show tried to dodge that bullet by making the hero a classic English eccentric - the only man on the island who wears a suit and carries a briefcase, for example.  This makes sense: you can't expect the local constabulary to outsmart a Sherlock Holmes-type genius.

But that actor left and they brought in another Englishman with a different set of eccentricities.  I quit watching the show after that but I hear they have had four different stars, all White Englishmen.  Maybe next time they make a switch they should bring in a Black copper.  

That would be a new adventure, so to speak.

---

The Problem with Coincidences

Today I'm going to talk about one of the no-nos in mysteries. The C word. 

No, not that C word. Get your mind out of the gutter. I'm talking about the other C word of mysteries: coincidence.

How many times have you heard that you can't have coincidences in your mysteries? Coincidences might occur in real life, the reasoning goes, but readers plunking down cold hard cash for good stories deserve ones created by authors who don't lazily rely on coincidence for their stories to work.  

I agree—to an extent.

A coincidence that occurs later in a book or short story, enabling the sleuth to figure out whodunit ... don't do it! Your sleuth should be smart enough to figure things out through investigation, without relying upon, essentially, divine providence. That's the kind of thing that makes readers roll their eyes and mutter, "Oh come on!" 

But a coincidence that occurs early in the book or story—that, as they say, is a horse of a different color. (Yeah, yeah, I know. That was another C word. A cliche. Those are no-nos too. But we're talking about coincidences today, not cliches, so lay off.)

A coincidence that happens early in a book or story is okay because usually it is the inciting incident that kicks things off. Take the movie My Cousin Vinny. Billy Gambini and Stanley Rothenstein were driving a 1964 metallic-mint-green Buick Skylark convertible from NY to Southern California by way of the back roads of Alabama. (I'd like to talk to whoever planned that direct route.) They stopped at a convenience store. A few minutes after they left the store, it was robbed and its clerk was murdered by two yoots ... excuse me, two youths ... who not only resembled Billy and Stanley but who were driving a similar-looking metallic-mint-green convertible. Coincidence? Big. Huge. (Sorry, that was a Pretty Woman reference. I'll try to focus.) Because of the similarities, Billy and Stanley found themselves pulled over and ultimately arrested for murder. But the coincidences not only weren't a problem, they were vital to the plot. Without them, Billy and Stanley wouldn't have been pulled over and there would have been no story, not involving them anyway. Mr. Tipton wouldn't have embarrassed himself claiming the laws of physics didn't apply in his kitchen. Vinny may never have won his first case. And Mona Lisa Vito's biological clock would still be tick tick ticking away. (I'm assuming they got married and had little Gambinis who like to argue over everything. I'm a sucker for a happy ending.)

So, you're reading this and thinking, That Barb makes a lot of sense. But crud, crap, criminy, I have a big freaking coincidence in my book and it's not the spark that incites the story. What do I do?

Here's what you do: you take your coincidence and make it purposeful. Instead of Suzie Sleuth coincidentally ending up sitting in a diner booth adjacent to that of the two killers, where she overhears them talking about how they killed Mr. He Deserved It, change things so Suzie realized Killer One seemed shady so she was investigating him. In the course of her sleuthing, she followed him, purposely getting seated in the next booth. That way, when she eavesdrops and hears all the juicy details, she's done it because she figured things out, not because she stumbled upon the solution thanks to an unbelievable coincidence.

(Disclaimer: That was an example. It was only an example. If it this were a real story and you had killers admit their plans in a restaurant where they could be overheard, readers would be wishing they'd had an actual emergency alert in advance, warning them off such a contrived event.)

Contrivances. That's another C word. A blog for another day.