Books in Progress

Regarding The Anatomist's Apprentice, I finished I last night...but not without a bit of judicious skipping.

I won't read another one. From what I can gather, there are at least six of these "Dr. Silkstone Mysteries." The crucial point is what Mr. Flu said: "Readers like familiarity with those they are reading about."

Thee were no characters in this (perhaps other than Hannah and the boy, Will) who you liked. The rest were insufferable in some way. Silkstone himself often does the most howlingly stupid things. There was one segment where he's fighting the villlain...oh, perhaps read the book just for this bit of botched writing.  Even though he's in, for all intents and purposes, a life-or-death struggle, at least twice Silkstone lets up in some gentlemanly fashion when he seems to have the advantage. He offers the villain a hand up. The villain promptly grabs the hand and drags Silkstone off his feet and the proceeds to pummel him. And that this happened at least twice in what is a major concluding fight scene shows you there some some tone deafness there that needed to be addressed by a good editor. When you produce laughable silliness instead of drama, it's time for a rewrite.

I had made some comparison to the Thorndyke books. And it's true that Silkstone plays somewhat second-fiddle at times to a couple senior doctors. But in no way is there the satisfying and dynamic relationship that Christopher Jervis has with Dr. Thorndyke.

Silkstone is a putz and I have zero desire to read a book with him as the main character. That said, this first book does give you a sense of place. It enters into your mind various facts and customs of the time. And what a gritty and dirty time it was. I wonder if, by and large, England was much more a decrepit country compared to (at the time) The Colonies. (Certainly large parts of London must have been an almost unrivaled sewer-of-humanity...perhaps bested only by Calcutta.)

But the author tries to play add-on with the plot at the end. Not all of it was bad but choices needed to be made. Some stuff needed to be cut. And Lady Lydia's inability to say "Leave my house" to the villainous lawyer reveals the most amateurish writing and lack of basic character detail. It made zero sense.

And it's never resolved why the whole enterprise didn't go into the shitter simply because one of the villains had known that Lydia approached Dr. Silkstone on the sly to ask him to investigate the death of her brother. Silkstone then presents himself to the court as an independent agent ready and willing to render his services. As they do state in the book, if it became known that basically Dr. Silkstone was working for Lady Lydia, then his independence would be discarded and he might quite likely lose his license.

But to finally top off what I consider a book that was three drafts away from something better-than-average, there is the scene at the end where Silkstone is chasing the evil lawyer. The evil lawyer crosses a bridge on a flooding river and is swept in. But Silkstone soon sees the lawyer (they are indeed tough to kill) swimming toward the opposite bank.

Somehow Silkstone crosses the river in pursuit. There is a mad chase through the woods on this far bank. But just before he gets to him, the lawyer is bashed in the head by somebody else and killed. Silkstone couldn't see who it was.

So….how did this other person know exactly where to stand in order to kill the lawyer when this was all in the midst of a higgledy-piggledy chase scene where it was obvious that both Silkstone and the lawyer had run out way ahead of everyone else?

One also wonders, Mr. Kung, if there is a lack of good copy editors. Doesn't anyone help to fix this kind of stuff? It really ruins any kind of flow of the narrative.

I read about a quarter of this biography of Agatha Christie by Lucy Worsley.

There's a certain lack of literacy that this reviewer noticed as well: "I love Agatha Christie and I love Lucy Worsley but somehow this doesn’t read well. It’s written as if Lucy is talking to camera and sometimes the sentences just don’t make sense and I have found myself reading and re-reading."

This is meant to be a positive profile of Agatha Christie. She's sort of the accidental feminist. Certainly that aspect is never far afield. And, of course, after The Great War, not only did the relationships between the sexes changes, but so did that between the commoner and the aristocracy. Christie's work as a voluntary nurse during the war was a window into what had changed and why.

I found this interesting enough in the early going. I read it through the famous eleven-day disappearance. And soon after that the book went into detail on Agatha's relationship with Max Mallowan, who would become her second husband. The book turned into an onerous non-page-turner. I started skipping pages, hoping to get to the good stuff. But I couldn't immediately find any.

This isn't Agatha Christie's fault or even that of the author, to some extent. Christie is a famous writer. But being famous in one regard does not mean that an in-depth biography is going to be riveting. Heck, as much as I like John Wayne, I have no desire to read a biography about him. I did read a good one on Frank Sinatra. And it held my interest because here's a guy – like him or hate him – who led an interesting and tumultuous life.

Christie, on the other had, seemed a fairly normal person, and one who was quite accomplished. But there isn't anything particularly relatable about her, thus the attempt by the author to emphasize the heroic feminist aspect.

As for the missing eleven days, what is bizarre about this is that Hercule Poirot could have solved it in an hour from his armchair. But some of the police were caught grandstanding and hoping to find a murder mystery at the heart of it and did what they could to hype that aspect while ignore blatant clues and/or not interviewing more in depth the people around Christie. She had, for instance, actually written – and posted during her disappearance – a letter to a close relative that generally stated where she would be.

It would appear that Christie had a breakdown, including some kind of dissociative memory loss, due to the recent death of her mother and the actions of her wayward husband. But it's sketchy as to the details. Although friends and family had noticed something was wrong that day, or the day before, there apparently was no previous sign of trouble and this seemed to come out of the blue.

And for this, and other reasons, this became a public spectacle and apparently ushered in the modern age of the public-obsessed mega-celebrity. Some of the public were angry with her, fed by speculation from the press that Christie was just faking the disappearance for publicity purposes.

I started reading a Poirot novel a while back and couldn't stay with it. So I went back and watched all the David Suchet dramatizations.

It's interesting that Christie (in the novels) got rid of Captain Hastings by marrying him off to some gal in Argentina or Venezuela. She thought he was a bit of a dullard. Apparently she used Hastings to narrate the first Poirot novel (and perhaps more from there). But she couldn't conceive making it work out where this guy was going to be there to narrate further stories.

Obviously the producers of the Poirot series thought differently. Hugh Fraser appeared in 43 of the 70 episodes. I think he's wonderfully played by Fraser and gives some relief to some stories that were often very dry.



At one point Agatha Christie hires "Carla" (I think that's her name or nickname) to be her typist/secretary/grammarian. Christie herself admitted that she was never quite sure of her colons, semicolons, and full-stops. In this biography, it bugged me no end to come across incomplete sentences and very inadequate use of the comma. You got a lot of this.

My online friend Mr. Kung has voraciously read just about everything worth reading.

Obviously the proper punctuation is: My online friend, Mr. Kung, has voraciously...

I found myself having to reread sentences to makes sense of them. I have nothing against Christie or this biographer. But at least Christie had the good sense to hire a professional to help her.

I'm presently reading The Cuckoo Clock (free) by Mrs. Molesworth. One reviewer gives context:



How excellently written by presumably an amateur. Anyway, this is not a recommendation to read the book. But I happened upon it by chance and just started reading it.

The early parts are interesting enough, but this is clearly not meant for adults. But it might certainly spark the imagination of a child.

What grabbed me was something this Amazon reviewer mentioned. The moral instruction. And you immediately see (or at least I did) what is wrong with our society. We are not giving the needed moral instruction to our children. I was shocked (although I shouldn't have been) by watching that Ben Shapiro roundtable discussion with a group of college-age kids. Clearly they were spoiled, petulant, arrogant, self-centered, and had not the basic ability to grapple with moral questions.

So you're watching this young girl (could have just as well been a boy...by quite apropos in this case) follow her natural instincts which are almost always wrong, destructive, blind, and foolish.

Some of the writing is better than you might expect for a children's novel. For instance, the child shows indignation for the cuckoo (who can come alive) appearing to her as a cold little bird outside her window sill that she lets in out of sympathy. This bird turns into the cuckoo and the child is put out because the cuckoo, after all, probably didn't actually need any help.



I found the cuckoo's answer to the girl to be exquisite:



That's what you call a poetic bitch-slap by a fairy-tale author. And it's not that the book is full of such wit. It's not. But the point is (something the author clearly understands) that these little monsters (otherwise known as "children") need to have civilization at least figuratively beaten into them. Or else you get that rabble that Ben Shapiro encountered. And we are experiencing a plague of adult-children at the moment...the true legacy of the Boomers.

Right now I'm reading Popular Adventure Tales by Mayne Reid. Free at Amazon or also available at Archive.org.

This is a compendium of three books. The first book is Young Voyageurs. Three brothers set off more or less from Texas, although the book starts with them somewhere in the Midwest. They are going to meet their uncle in a far northern Hudson's Bay Company outpost presumably near the border of what now is the Northwest Territories.

They are making their way via rivers on a birch-bark canoe. The three brothers have been joined by their cousin (son of the uncle) who is acting as guide. The uncle invited them to come live with them. The book suggests that it was his prerogative to command them to come, but in this case the boys all wanted to come.

Their father had recently passed from yellow fever. The father had taught them the ways of the frontier. These boys are the opposite of babes in the woods. They are basically survivalists on steroids.

The first mini adventure (spoiler alert, but just to give you an idea) is when they go hunting for swans. The swans are very wary and the elder brother is itching to bag one. But they just can't get close enough to them to take a shot. However, the cousin knows a technique to hunt them at night and they are successful. Perhaps some form of cosmic justice is meted out, for after having bagged far more swans than they needed, they are caught in some rapids and lose the boat and most of their gear. Worse, they are stuck in the middle of the river, having had to exit the crashed boat onto the rock that it crashed upon.

The book reads much like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It is full of descriptions of the flora and fauna of the North American continent. Frankly, I wasn't aware of many of these creatures, and I have already learned a thing or two along the way. One downside is that many of the names they use are old names that are probably not familiar to most these days.

We learn about the conifers:



This book is not for tree-huggers. There is plenty of hunting and killing of animals for food. But there are dangers even in this as we see when the eldest brother goes after a couple of bison bulls.

I finished Young Voyageurs. And nearly every time I read "voyageurs" in the book (the narrator said this often), in my mind I heard "voyeurs." It's certainly because of the old-fashioned spelling of voyagers.

Be that as it may, even this imagining couldn't spice this book up. It's a tract on hunting mixed with descriptions (generally interesting) of the flora and fauna of northern North America. There is no dialogue between characters. There is no plot, other than trying to make it to their uncle's Hudson's Bay fort. There are no personal conflicts or issues. No love interests. No villains. No heroes. Just problem-solving along the barren tracts of Canada.

And when they finally make it to their goal, it's written more as an afterthought. It's completely anticlimactic and we never do meet the uncle. And when there are a few points of drama, many of them seem highly staged. One (near the end of the book) was when one of the fellows left behind at the cabin to guard their larder (while the others are out hunting) walks out onto the frozen lake that sits just beside their cabin in order to, I guess, get a better view of a natural drama occurring. He gets withing 20 yards or so of a pack a yuge wolves taking down a deer. And then he acts surprised that the wolves begin to get interested in him and that he is in danger because he can't possibly run back to the safety of the cabin without being overtaken. Well, duh.

Even so, I'm delving a bit into the next story which starts in Peru where a Creole (Spaniards born in America, as opposed to natives of Old Spain, as the author defines it), his family, and a trusted servant are escaping Spanish authorities after being on the wrong side of a failed revolution. They will obviously make it over the Andes and plunge into the Amazon jungle.

Strangely, this book does seem vaguely familiar to me. Could it have been on of those adventure books I read in middle school? It's possible. I'll read on.

I've started the third book in Popular Adventure Tales by Mayne Reid. It's set in South Africa. The main character is a Boer father, his four children, and (of course) a faithful indigenous servant.

He's on the losing side with war with the Brits. His land is confiscated. He chooses to leave the area and try his luck elsewhere. The alternative is to have nothing and be a second-class citizen under British rule.

He's a rancher and his new ranch is soon devastated by a plague of locusts. No problem, he'll just move a few miles to the west where there is water and where (he hopes) the locust haven't touched.

And it's a comedy of errors from there. I'm not sure why the author presented the Boer father as such an idiot. But he "forgets" to bring a supply of water along on his trek to his new home. And he also forgot to supply ample food for the cattle (the locust could have been had by the bagful and the cows love them).

And there are other obvious errors he makes. He gets to his destination but fails to build a kraal for this cattle (with thorn bushes, etc., to keep them both penned in and the lions out). The cattle wander back to his old homestead where they are all killed by a lions.

Later, through no fault of his own, all his horses die from tsetse flies. But he has found a place he likes that has a good supply of water in a spring that feeds a small lake. But with all his livestock gone but one cow, he needs to figure out what to do. Well, an elephant happens by the watering hole and gets in a fight with a rhino. The rhino kills the elephant.

The Boer father then has a light-bulb moment and decides he can get rich (wait for it) by killing scores of elephants for their ivory.

I'm never going to be confused with a Greenpeace advocate. But, good golly, what a waste. But then because the killing of wildlife had been very much underrepresented in this book so far (compared to the others), I guess the author is making up for that. Let's go slaughter some elephants.

But the book does read better (so far) because the side excursions into natural history info is dialed back by at least by two-thirds compared to the other books. Maybe that's just because the wildlife is not so abundant in their location just south of the Kalahari.