Rex Stout and Me

It seems to me, that growing up, the two constants in my life were John D. MacDonald and Rex Stout. Those two were always there, Travis McGee and Meyer, the man of action and the man of those, and Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe, again the man of action and the man of thought. The two series share much in common, both comment on society,on why people behave the way they do, and on people behaving very badly. MacDonald is the harder edged of the two-people die in grotesque ways in his books, and the murderer, him or herself, always comes to a very bad end, sometimes at McGee's hands and sometimes at the hands of fate, while in the Wolfe series, there is usually just the one murder, occasionally one more. Wolfe is much more civilized, relatively speaking. He never leaves his house (which is why I'm enjoying In the Best Families so much, where he leaves home, loses a lot of weight and goes after his Moriarty-Arnold Zeck), he focuses on food, orchids and a case when Archie pesters him into it.

Ah, Archie Goodwin. As a child, I believed New York was full of people like him-smart, smartly-dressed and always with a smart-ass response. If Bugs Bunny formed my sense of humor as a child, it was Archie Goodwin who was my idol as I got older. Of course, having a crush on him helped.

When I moved to DC, I could not bring all my Wolfe books with me, so I picked my two favorites (Some Buried Caesar and Death of a Dude) and let the rest go. Until last week, when I paid a visit to my local used bookstore and ran into The Red Box. Nero Wolfe, I thought. How can I go wrong? And it would be interesting to see my reaction to a series that I had not read in a very long time.

I am pleased to report that time has not reduced any of the pleasure in reading these books (yes, I'm buying them all, again. At least it's only for the second time, not the third like with MacDonald). It's like visiting old friends, the house on 34th St, with Fritz and Theodore, Inspector Cramer and Purely Stebbins, Saul, Orrie and Fred. I'll quote a critic I read recently on this series on re-reading them-"you know who did it and you still re-read it, for the pure pleasure of it" and it's true. How great is it that time has made me appreciate them more?

Thank you, Rex, Archie and Nero and John, Travis and Meyer for always being there. Thank you for all the years of reading pleasure that continues to this day. Thank you for some of the greatest characters in fiction-my life wouldn't have been the same without you and has been all the better for you in it.

I was thinking about this last night and realized a couple more things-when I think about MacDonald and Travis McGee, I think about the plot, the murders, the extravagant items he's trying to get back for his clients. It runs the gamut from ancient Inca gold statues to an invention that blows plastic material with bubbles in it into sunken yachts-and raises them so they can rehabbed and sold-and a treasure book to go with it. And as for death-well, the bad usually comes to a VERY bad end, ranging from fire ants to getting caught in an anchor. These are the things that stick with me from these books-"oh, is that the one where...".

It's a different case with Rex Stout. Yes, the plots are interesting and each case is different, but the deaths are not showy, not like in MacDonald. The people are poisoned or shot or knifed but I read these books for sheer pleasure of reading a sentence like "I am the employer and as such I do not invite familiarities from the help, I said stiffly. However, there are four of us and Fritz will make five for poker and when it's over I will lend you carfare home". But my all time favorite line form Stout is this "I never met a man who let a woman take him to hell who didn't already have a ticket in his pocket or was at least checking the time tables". That's the difference between the two.

I'm Sorry, Eliot Patison

I really thought that when I started Lord of Death, the most recent book in Eliot Patison's Inspector Shan series, that I would read it all the way through and not stop about halfway though and read another book or two, to clear myself of the horrors going on in Patison's book.

This turned out not to be the case, and in reviewng, it turns out that I read MORE books in my break from Lord of Death than any other Patison book.

What did I read?

Ground Zero, the latest Repairman Jack book (great if you're into the series, not so much if you aren't)

Two Nero Wolfe Books-The Red Box and In The Best Families (More on Rex Stout in another post because he deserves his own post for being so influential on my life)

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (beautiful and haunting with an end from Madame Bovary)

Which means it took me a week or two to return to Lord of Death, which is a shame because it really was good-Patison's usual mix of horror with a glimmer of hope at the end. I recommend everything-they were all great in their own way-but I have a huge soft soft for Rex Stout. More on that later.

Outrageous

I've been reading a lot of goods books lately (the latest Repairman Jack, rereading an old Nero Wolfe, an Eliot Patison about Tibet) and have seen a couple of good movies, but right now I want to discuss something I just heard on the Daily Show: that Al Franken added an amendment to bill that would allow rape victims to sue government contractors in the event that they were raped. Why this amendment? Because a woman working for Halliburton was gang-raped by her fellow contractors in Iraq and Halliburton told her that she could not sue because she had signed away those rights when she signed her contract with Halliburton.

First, is that legal? I am certain that case law does not allow you to sign away your rights. Second, how is this not evil? And third, the Senate voted purely along party lines on this-all Republicans voted against it. How heartening is that, that all Republicans voted against this and against rape victims, almost purely because they did not want to legislate how contracts are written and did not want to legislate against government contractors in general and Halliburton in particular.

Evil, pure evil.

Zack and Miri blah blah blah

I LOVE Kevin Smith. Dogma is one of my favorite movies, while Clerks II is one of the funniest movies I've ever seen. And as for Chasing Amy-well, there's a scene in there that I still laugh about even when I think about it-and it was far worse when I saw it in the theater (I laughed at it a good five minutes after the scene ended).

So I was a little disappointed in Zack and Miri. It has it's high points, sure-but it pales in comparison to the wit of Dogma and Clerks II. Yes, parts of it are very funny but I thought the funniest part came after the credits, and what does that say? It says that I was a bit disappointed, that's what it says. Better luck next time, Kevin. I look forward to your next project-hopefully "A Couple of Dicks" will be better.

The Sea Inside

Last week's movie was The Sea Inside with Javier Bardem and Beulen Rueda. I've been thinking about this movie since I saw it-I really liked it but ...well, I'll get to that. Javier Bardem is almost unrecognizable playing a man a good 20 years older (or more) than his real age, and after a sailing accident, has been a quadriplegic for 28 years and wants to die. You can't really say this movie is a "triumph of the spirit", not like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly-not when the main character wants so much to die. But it is a triumph in what his spirit inspires in others, particularly in the two women who care so much for him-one a lawyer and writer who wants to tell his story, and the other a cannery worker, abused by her ex who learns to be strong and face her life without fear-and they both fall in love with him. Everyone gives great performances-and I commend Javier Bardem for a strong performance that didn't annoy me-it's easy to overdo the histrionics when you're playing a quadriplegic and his performance was admirably restrained. Beulen Rueda (who later went on to The Orphanage, a great movie) was also very good, as was Lola Duenas as Rosa, the local cannery worker.

But here's the thing, I spent the who movie thinking "Javier Bardem's head looks as big as a pumpkin". Just when I'd be getting into it and not really thinking about the movie, just being caught up in it, they'd show him again, and I'd think "his head is HUGE". It took me right out of it, which was disappointing when it was so beautiful-the photography and the way it was shot was amazing. The scenes when Bardem seems to shake off paralysis and go flying over the landscape were stunning-so I didn't like thinking "man, look at the size his head" when they cut back to him-but I invariably found that was the case. And what was the neurological disease that afflicted Beulen Rueda? First she's using a cane, then she's in a wheelchair, but both times she's able to discuss the case (he actually has to go to court to win the right to die and not have the people who help him be prosecuted) and the book she's writing, but at the end, she's in the wheelchair and she doesn't remember him or anybody else. What is that? It is possible that she said what she had and I missed it in the subtitles because I was looking at the size of Javier Bardem's head, but don't mind me-it was still a very good movie.