Reading and TV

 Politics: Watching the Debate

New York Times reaction, similar to mine:
civility but Vance lied a lot in a very smooth, even unctuous way.

Antidote to Politics

One rainy afternoon we watched The Wizard of Oz. The four stars’ dancing on the Yellow Brick Road is unbelievable, no matter how many times I see it.

A Locked Room Mystery

Akimitsu Takagi (1920-1995) was a very popular and prolific Japanese mystery author. He wrote mysteries of a number of types — The Noh Mask Murder, first published in 1950, is a locked room mystery. I’ve read several Japanese locked room mysteries, each one more ingeniously complicated than the last. This one is absolutely convoluted, to the point that it seems exaggerated even for a classic mystery story. 

A Very Old Mystery Novel

The Greene Murder Case by S.S. Van Dine (pseudonym of Willard Huntington Wright, 1888-1939) features the sleuth Philo Vance. It was originally published in 1919 and many editions are still in print and available online — I read a free copy from Project Gutenberg. Van Dine’s writing has an amazingly modern feel to it, though the action is sometimes a little slower than in a modern mystery story. Descriptions of people and events create clear images — at least I found them that way. The murders all involve the Greenes, a wealthy family of adult children and a bedridden mother, who live with several servants in a large mansion near the East River in New York. A number of policemen and officials work with the private detective Philo Vance as the case proceeds. Suspense is built as more murders occur, and it was hard to stop reading once I started.

Here’s a very retro element of the novel: the detective drives a Hispano-Suiza,
and one of the characters drives a yellow Daimler. They chase around New York City.

I was reading The Greene Murder Case in a coffee shop! Just for a change of scene.

Blog post and original photo by mae sander © 2024