Laura by Vera Caspary

"The city that Sunday morning was quiet. Those millions of New Yorkers who, by need or preference, remain in town over a summer weekend had been crushed spiritless by humidity. ... Sitting at my desk, pen in hand, I treasured the sense that, among those millions, only I, Waldo Lydecker, was up and doing ... I had gathered strength for the writing of Laura’s epitaph. My grief at her sudden and violent death found consolation in the thought that my friend, had she lived to a ripe old age, would have passed into oblivion, whereas the violence of her passing and the genius of her admirer gave her a fair chance at immortality" - Laura by Vera Caspary

Many years ago I read a review of Dorothy Hughes' classic noir crime novel In A Lonely Place (1947) and I realized that along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, David Goodis, Chester Himes etc, women also wrote noir fiction in the mid-twentieth century.  I ended up reading In A Lonely Place and loved it and so for this year's Back to the Classics Challenge - choose a classic mystery or crime novel, I wanted to try another bestselling 1940's noir novel and so I went with Laura by Vera Caspary (1943).  

Laura is set in NYC during the 1940's and when the novel begins we learn that the title character in the novel, Laura Hunt, has been murdered.  Laura was alone in her apartment on a Friday night when the door bell rang.  Laura went to answer it and the killer in gruesome fashion shot her in the face.  The housekeeper Bessie found Laura's body the next morning when she arrived for work.

Mark McPherson an experienced NYPD Homicide Detective is assigned to the murder case but who was Laura Hunt and who would want to kill her?   Laura we discover was a beautiful, elegant, young woman who lived by herself in an expensive Manhatten apartment and had a country house in Connecticut.  What's interesting for the time period of the 1940's is that Laura could afford this all by herself.  She was a modern woman with a successful career in advertising fifteen years before Mad Men.  Laura was also a kind person, generous to friends and coworkers. Could that generosity have led to her death?

Detective McPherson quickly zeroes in on two suspects, Laura's fiance Shelby Campbell and Laura's friend and mentor the high society newspaper columnist, Waldo Lydecker.  Both men claim to have loved Laura but in the novel we are shown that neither man had her best interests at heart.  

Shelby for example is handsome and charming but he's a gigolo.  Walter is very controlling and has tried to subtley sabatoge every romantic relationship Laura has been involved in, claiming that this or that man is simply not good enough.  Detective Mark McPherson is becoming obsessed with Laura as well.  But then, a quarter of the way through the novel, there is a dramatic turn of events which anyone who has seen the film will understand and Detective McPherson now finds himself working a very different case.  I'll leave it there.  

I enjoyed Laura I was interested right through to the last page and that's what you want in a mystery.  The author Vera Caspary led an interesting life as well.  She was born in 1899 and died in 1987 and she once joked that she was accidentally born in the 19th century.  That's true.  Vera Caspary was very much a 20th century woman, maybe even a late 20th century woman, years ahead of her time.  Throughout most of her life she was single and self-supporting, working first in advertising, like Laura, and then as a successful novelist,  Vera Caspary married when she was fifty and it was a very happy marriage. She published eighteen novels during her life in different genres but one consistent theme seems to have been "the working woman and her right to lead her own life, to be independent"  I recommend giving Laura a read...

Glorious Cause by Robert Middlekauff

Just finished Glorious Cause by Robert Middlekauff published 1982.  It's the first book in The Oxford History of the United States and it covers American History from 1763 - 1789. It's about 800 pages and the American Revolution must have taken up 500 pages or it certainly felt like that.  The author wanting to be accurate and miss nothing let's us know about every aspect of the war in minute detail.  The end result is that I retained very little except that George Washington was a great general but I knew that going in.  It took me on and off about a year to finish this book and I can't even be sure I read every part of it because I read it in an audio version and at certain points I dozed off while the book kept rolling on.  

I don't fault the author (well, maybe a little) but he did do a tremendous job of research and the book is well written.  It's just that sometimes less is more.  If you go into too much detail regarding a historical period the reader is not going to remember the important events you want to stress.  It will all be a blur.  As to why I have embarked on this American history project it's partly because I don't know that much about American history.  Whatever I may have learned in school I have forgotten and I have come to realize a large part of our country's history I was never taught at all. 

One thing I did get from Glorious Cause is that from America's founding there has been a distrust by the states for the federal government.  The constitution was ratified in 1788 but it almost didn't happen because states wanted their independence and feared a federal government that would be too strong.  You definitely see that playing out today as well.  As for me, I am with Hamilton and Madison.  States going off on their own has not worked out well in our history. 

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

I decided to go with Frankenstein by Mary Shelley published 1816 for the 2022 Back to the Classics category - choose a 19th century classic and one suprise I had while reading the novel is how different it is from the 1931 film version.  

Now, I haven't seen the 1931 film starring Boris Karloff in its entirety but from the clips I have seen I get the sense that the monster is a character you feel empathy for and that in comparison his creator, Victor Frankenstein, is an arrogant mad scientist who abandons the monster right after creating him.  The poor monster has no one to guide him.  He's barely literate but he wants to be friends with people.  He's really a gentle giant at first  but because of his frightening appearance everyone runs from him screaming in horror or hurls rocks and stones at him until he flees.  Eventually it is too much for the monster and he starts killing his tormentors.

In Frankenstein the novel we get a very different picture.  For one thing the monster in the book is brilliant.  He speaks several languages.  He knows history, philosophy, literature and he is completely self-taught since, as in the film, Dr. Frankenstein abandons him at birth. Dr. Frankenstein in the novel is different as well.  He is arrogant thinking he could create a new life in his lab and not have it backfire.  But he's not mad and his intentions started out well:

"No one can conceive the variety of feelings which bore me onwards, like a hurricane, in the first enthusiasm of success.  Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds , which I should first break through, and pore a torrent of light into our dark world.  A new species would bless me as it's creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me.  No father could claim the gratitude of his child  so completely as I should deserve theirs.  Pursuing these reflections, I thought, that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption"

But Dr Frankenstein's experiment goes very wrong.  He creates a being with super-human strength who is so physically deformed in appearance that he can't live among humans.  But the monster in the novel is smart and after reading Paradise Lost he is profoundly affected by the story of Adam and the Garden of Eden and how God after creating Adam didn't abandon him but loved him and provided a partner in Eve so rhat Adam would not be alone.  The monster after tracking down Frankenstein demands the same, that Dr. Frankenstein create a mate for him: 

"as hideous as myself; the gratification is small, but it is all I can receive, and it will content me.  It is true we shall be monsters cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another ... Oh! my creator, make me happy; let me feel gratitude towards you for one benefit.  Let me see that I excite the sympathy of some existing thing".  

Dr Frankenstein is moved by the monster's request feeling that he does have obligations to his creation but the monster is also making a threat.  He has already  killed Dr. Frankenstein's young brother and planted the evidence on Justine, the Frankenstein family's innocent young housekeeper, who is hanged for the crime.  And if the monster doesn't get his mate he is vowing to destroy everyone Dr. Frankenstein loves.  And so unike in the movie I could not feel sorry for the monster in the novel who is not illiterate by any means and his bottomless rage and thirst for revenge if he doesn't get his way are monstrous qualities in their own right.

But I recommend Frankenstein.  It's marvelously written and it's also a book of ideas.  According to literary scholars, Mary Shelley in writing Frankenstein was to some extent criticizing the age of enlightenment where in the 1700's science, rationality, the end of monarchies began to overshadow the Middle Ages where religion and obedience to one's king ruled everything.  Mary Shelley along with her husband Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, John Keats were part of the movement known as romanticism which looked suspiciously at the age of enlightenment.  Frankenstein is seen therefore as a gothic masterpiece but also a cautionary tale about what can happen when science and rationality go too far.  It's a classic horror novel well worth your time.

The Staircase by Ann Rinaldi

Ann Rinaldi (1934 -2021) was a prolific and award winning writer of historical young adult novels.  Her books focus on American history and The Staircase published in 2000 is set in 1878 and centers around the Loretto Chapel and its beautiful spiral staircase located in Santa Fe New Mexico which tourists continue to visit to this day.  No one really knows who built the staircase but the legend says it may have been St Joseph himself.   Regardless the staircase remains a marvel of architectural design.

Ann Rinaldi decided to write a fictional account of how the staircase came to be built.  Her novel is well written and has received fine reviews but it's possible I am not the right age for this book.  It is geared for young adults and certainly I am no longer in that category.  I will say that one of the characters in The Staircase, Bishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy was the actual Bishop of Santa Fe back in the 1870's and he must have been a memorable man because Willa Cather used his life as the basis for her classic novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop.  

Ann Rinaldi passed away in 2021 but her well written books will continue to attract young readers and inspire them to learn more about history.

My February 2022 Reads

I have decided to read four books in February and three of these books, I am embarrassed to say, were on my list to read in January but I didn't buckle down and so this month I am carrying those three books over to February and adding a fourth book.  My reading plan is:

                        Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

                        The Girl of his Dreams by Donna Leon 

                        The Staircase by Ann Rinaldi 

                        Freedom Summer by Bruce Watson 

I am excited about these book choices.  They are not very long and so I should have no problem completing them and posting my thoughts and then in March I can choose a whole new crop of books to read.  I think four books a month suits me.  If I aim for five or six a month I run into trouble.  

I also plan each month to choose one non-fiction book and the subject this year will be American history.  Somehow I have arrived at the age I am without knowing all that much about American history and I want to learn more as a way to navigate these times.  We have to know where we have been as a country so that we can make sense of what's happening now.  Maybe there are answers in America's past, lessons to be learned and historical figures to guard against but also historical figures to nspire.  In any case I need to know more.

Charlotte and Emily: A Novel of the Brontes by Jude Morgan

If you are a fan of the Brontes, as I am, Charlotte and Emily: A Novel of the Brontes by Jude Morgan published 2009 is a must read.  The only qualification I would make is that this book is not available on kindle.  You can only read it in paperback but it is very much worth the effort.  

What makes this novel so good?  Well, it starts with the fact that Jude Morgan is an excellent writer who specializes in historical novels centering around literary figures.  Another one of Morgan's books Passion is about the lives of the Romantic Poets, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, John Keats and has been described by Publisher's Weekly as "well researched, deeply imagined and gorgeously written"  

The same applies to Charlotte and Emily which is also a deeply imagined novel and though the title implies that the focus will be on the two famous sisters, this is very much a novel of a family and that's really the only way the Bronte story can be told.  Their lives were intertwined by their passion for writing, imagining and learning.  But it is also a story of grief and lives cut way too short.

The novel begins for example with the father, Patrick Bronte, at the bedside of his dying wife Maria who is beside herself worrying about what will happen to her children, the oldest of which being only seven.  After Maria passes it is left to Patrick Bronte to raise their six children on his own.  Fortunately, his sister-in-law, Elizabeth Branwell, moves in and she was a great help providing motherly attention and what money she could spare towards the children's education.  But tragedy was never far from the Brontes and after the two eldest daughters Maria and Elizabeth age eleven and ten died from TB at the Dickensian boarding school they attended (a school made infamous in Jane Eyre), Patrick decided to teach his children at home.  

Home was Haworth West Yorkshire and Patrick was the town's parson.  He was not wealthy by any means but what Patrick was able to give his children was a love of reading and learning.  One day he brought home a box of wooden toy soldiers and his children's imaginations took off.  Charlotte and Branwell chose two of the soldiers and created the imaginary world of Angria.   Emily and Ann created the world of Gondol.  For the next eleven years Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Ann wrote poems and little handmade books about their magical kingdoms filled with lords and ladies, battles and adventures for their fictional characters.  

But childhood doesn't last and siblings are expected to grow up and venture out into the world.  As the book shows, Emily could never do this.  If she was away from home for any length of time she began to weaken and so any thought of being a governess was out of the question.  Charlotte and Ann did spend a good part of their twenties as governesses.  It was not an easy life but what could they do?   Branwell upon whom his father, and to a certain extent his sisters, had placed so much hope was floundering. 

So there you have it in 1846, Branwell in serious decline.  Patrick elderly and almost blind.  Charlotte sees the handwriting on the wall since Patrick doesn't even own the house they are living in which belongs to the church.  Charlotte reminds Emily and Ann how much they have always loved writing.  Why not submit their poems to a publisher and more important why not see if they can each write a novel and of course the rest is literary history. 

I enjoyed Charlotte and Emily a great deal and Jude Morgan does a good job of imagining what Patrick, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Ann were like.  The dialogue and their internal thoughts ring true as does their interaction with each other.  It's harder of course to get inside the head of Emily who will forever remain a mystery and Morgan is careful not to assume too much about what Emily was thinking.  Charlotte who was the sister who ventured out into the world is much easier to write about and she left letters as well.

We learn about Ann, a sweet sensitive young woman who had a great deal of self doubt and yet in her novels was bold and ahead of her time.  And Branwell who has come down to us through history as a burden on the family who destroyed himself through drink and drugs.  But as with Anne who is finally getting the respect she deserves might it be time for a second look at Branwell?  He had talent as a poet and painter but is it possible too much pressure was put on him as the only son?  Patrick was counting on Branwell from a very early age to be a brilliant success and to be able to support his three sisters in their later years.  

But of course the Bronte children never reached their later years but we have their poetry and their novels Jane Eyre, Villette, Wuthering Heights, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall which will live on for as long as great literature continues to be read

The Next Century by David Halberstam

A few weeks ago I was scrolling through Book Bub (an online reading service I subscribe to) and I came upon The Next Century by David Halberstam.  I wanted to read this book  because David Halberstam was a great reporter (he died in 2007) and was best known for his coverage of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement.  But what interested me the most is that The Next Century was a book about what the world and the US would look like in the 21st century and he wrote the book in 1991. 

Imagine trying to contemplate what 2022 would look like from the vantage point of 1991?  Halberstam had too much experience of course covering wars and revolutions to make such firm predictions.  Instead in The Next Century he lays out where the world and the US has been since World War II, where we were in 1991 and his concerns for the future.

But what I came to realize as I finished The New Century is that any sort of speculation from 1991 about where we are now was going to miss so many key events that no one saw coming.  Halberstam's book for example begins with Gorbachev, the breakup of the Soviet Union, Lech Walesa and the trade union movement Solidarity.  It seems like a long time ago.  He also writes a good deal about Japan.  Back in the 1980's Japan and how they were possibly moving ahead of the US in auto production, electronics etc was seen as a big challenge.  No one worries about that now. 

But did David Halberstam spot back in 1991 things about America that we should have been more concerned about?  He does write:  

"What started in the early fifties as a sense of possibilities gradually became expectations and then finally entitlements.  Those who have memories of a poorer pre-World War II America, one touched by the Depression, where people (and the nation) had to make choices about spending, are older and increasingly a minority ... Now we have the current generation which believes that living in the present and paying in the future is the best revenge ... How quickly it all goes when it's built on sand ... and Donald Trump's empire is in the hands of banks (the key to the Trump success, while it lasted, is that New York City was in such bad shape that it gave him a 160 million tax benefit for his glitzy projects).  The result, of course, was not greater productivity but greater wealth for the already wealthy".  

Halberstam did a decent job in The Next Century trying to see into the future but it turned out to be an impossible task.  Even in 2019 who could have predicted Covid? And so I can't recommend The New Century.  Instead you might want to go with David Halberstam's other books, his critically acclaimed bestseller The Best and the Brightest about the Kennedy Administration and The Children about the Civil Rights Movement.  Both books I believe will have a great deal to say about today's times.