OTT - cozy mysteries - Helen MacInnes

[Robin Landseadel]

Robin Landseadel wrote:
 
Us venerable antiques love a good mystery, you know,
it’s the one sector of the book biz that you can always
depend on. Gail and I can’t get enough of those kinky
Midsommer Murders,
 
Michael Bailey:
Whew, so many good ones - sure, Midsommer, for once
a detective whose job doesn't ruin his family life (iirc)
 
Morse, Lewis, Agatha Raisin, Signora Volpe, Blue Murder,
Harry Wild, Queens of Mystery, Line of Duty (not so very
cozy, that one), Mrs Sidhu Investigates (she investigated
but lamentably only for one series, loved her!) - no wonder
I'm reading so much less these past few years)

R: Yep, Gail selects the TV shows for the most part—if I had my druthers I’d be
watching that complete “Thin Man” box of seven DVDs I picked up at the library for $3,
not to mention finish watching my Criterion Blu Ray copy of “Playtime”.
 
MB: Brokenwood Mysteries is a lot of fun too. Some very
listenable country music for a soundtrack. Gina the
lovestruck Russian pathologist is OTT, imho not quite
offensively stereotypical because mostly - but not completely
- played for laughs; you can tell the actor is enjoying herself
with it. And extremely sympatico recurring character Frodo,
along with various of his family members, manages to show up
as a witness, suspect, or source (of tips, and/or coffee), often
in costume. Current fave. Really good character continuity &
small-town world-building over the 12 years so far. . .

R: Yup, we burned through the whole series last year, started all over again this year. Lots
of great “fully rounded” cartoons, Gina’s shtick is downright vaudevillian, all the more
authentic because Cristina Ionda is Romanian, has a very credible Russian accent.
I remember a Russian I worked with at The Musical Offering, said she was “studying
Buddhism” at UC Berkeley, spat the word Buddhism out with obvious disgust, collected
all those Maria Callas recordings that came out on CDs for the first time in the early 1990s.
A self-consciously “Natasha Fatale” type with lips like Mick Jagger’s and a sinister laugh,
like she was straight out of central casting.

MB:. . . And Endeavour!
 
Not really cozy but pretty darn enjoyable anyway, especially
Strange & also Thursday & his family
 
At least one callback to The Sweeney in one of those, Morse,
Lewis, or Endeavour.
 
The Sweeney - you could find a little cozy if you looked
determinedly - the barroom duet with Dennis Waterman
 
- see also New Tricks - & '70s nostalgia in spades
 
George Gently! Vera! Blue Lights!
 
so forth . . .

. . . Jonathan Creek
 
Alan Davies in anything (!)

Robin:
“Hemorrhoid hash,” Connie banging her spoon in delight, “bowel burgers!”

Uh, sorry, different list. Does sound like an evening’s entertainment at the McCabe/Landseadel
household, I’ve seen 12 of the series cited.

I don’t know if I should call Shadow Ticket a “Cozy”, exactly. In some ways the handle
PoMo Mystery fits like Dirk McQuickly’s trousers. Maybe a little more on the Po-Mo side
of the equation, like Deadloch, the fabulous Lesbian/Tasmanian series, which sadly
wrapped this year. Here’s some out of context bits edited with a Cuisinart, enjoy:

https://youtu.be/7NYs1Vg3tSk?si=hSbd9wkwRg5_cMmE

Or a Twin Peaks frappé perhaps?

https://youtu.be/lswSE-W1sC8?si=MyrQkMNjHWOmoD3G

I’ve been thinking of the fact that the last three Pynchon novels are all representatives of
the mystery genre. My wife reads murder mysteries constantly; she lets me know about
what she’s reading, I get a sense of who’s active, who she likes, what’s new. Sometimes
when she’s reading Harry Bosch, she’ll ask me about what Jazz LP he’s playing. She spends
hours on the phone talking about what she’s reading with her friends. Yesterday we were
visiting a friend who happened to be Dean at Fresno City College and his wife who also was
an instructor. We all talked about mysteries we are reading. For some reason my
environment is filled with mystery novels, I wonder how much of that relates to my
demographic and why.

Inherent Vice has a protagonist located in LA, looks like Manhattan Beach, 1970. I call it a
species of Auto-Fiction. Why Bleeding Edge has a Female detective is beyond me, I’ll leave
that to others. In any case, Bleeding Edge also can be considered a little bit autofiction seeing
as the author lives on the Upper West Side. He reports his experiences of what he refused to
call 9/11. He even refuses to call the site of the event “ground zero”. He’s telling us “They’re”
selling us a myth and he isn’t buying it. A lot of Inherent Vice or Bleeding Edge seems to
consist of bits of daily life of the author’s, swirled as usual into the collection of authorial
quirks and “Big Important Themes” we’ve come to expect from the Pynchon.

But Shadow Ticket is set during a time before the author was alive. All the research in the
book rests lightly but still means much as the story works on the surface level even if you
have no idea about the history of organized crime in America. All you really have to do is
look up the terms you don’t know, find out what they mean and how they apply to the story.
You will have to infer what it all is pointing to, but I’d advise collecting relevant evidence
first.

The first half of the story is a mutated species of 1930s noir, perhaps a bit more on Dashiell
Hammett side of the fence than Chandler’s, the tale warping into spy/espionage territory in
the second half. Pynchon mentions his fondness for spy novels in the introduction to Slow
Learner:

. . . John Kennedy's role model James Bond was about to make his
name by kicking third-world people around, another extension of
the boy's adventure tales a lot of us grew up reading. . .
Slow Learner pg. 11

. . . I had grown up reading a lot of spy fiction, novels of intrigue,
notably those of John Buchan. The only book of his that anyone
remembers now is The Thirty-nine Steps, but he wrote half a
dozen more just as good or better. They were all in my hometown
library. So were E. Phillips Oppenheim, Helen MacInnes, Geoffrey
Household, and many others as well. . .
Slow Learner, pg. 18

Someone mentioned how Philippa Quarrender, the MI3b spy and general gal about town,
resembles Helen MacInnes:

. . . ''She is recognized as the creator of acute, exciting novels
set against backgrounds of meaningful present-day events,''
said Julian P. Muller, a vice president at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
and Miss MacInnes's editor for about 25 years. ''Her purpose
always was to strike at authoritarian governments. In the genre
of highly literate suspense she is considered unrivaled.''. . .

. . . On their honeymoon in Bavaria, the Highets were disturbed
by the activities of the Nazis, and Miss MacInnes kept a diary
filled with examples of Nazi violence and the Hitler menace.
A few years later she fashioned her notes into the novel ''Above
Suspicion,'' the story of a young British couple who sought a
British anti-Nazi agent in Germany in the summer of 1939 while
seemingly on a vacation. An immediate best seller, the book
and was made into a 1943 motion picture starring Joan Crawford
and Fred MacMurray. . .

HELEN MACINNES, 77, NOVELIST AND SPECIALIST IN SPY FICTION - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/1985/10/01/books/helen-macinnes-77-novelist-and-specialist-in-spy-fiction.html

Of course, at 88, the author can do what he wants. There is a lot of affection expressed in
Shadow Ticket and the author expresses his affection for the mystery and spy/suspense
genres in the process. Note that none of the main characters dies in the book, there are
plenty of personality quirks on display, local color, off-beat humor and so forth. It may not
contain all the moving parts one associates with a true “cozy” but it gets mighty close.

Pynchon always has made it easy to pass over the information that’s right before one’s
eyes; we have not seen these names before—Vito and Pete Guardalabene for example, or
Milwaukee’s Third Ward—we are not familiar with these locales. Who knows? he could be
making it up and sometimes he does—there’s no record of a Wisebroad’s Shoes, but there
are plenty of places mentioned that do exist, like 22nd and Wabash down the Lake.
Everybody in Milwaukee knew what that was back in 1932, I had to look it up to find out it
was the Outfit’s headquarters in Chicago. Something might be a key bit of evidence; you’ll
have to find out for yourself—you have to pay attention and use you best judgement like
Hicks doesn’t.

Milwaukee was a very early outpost of Chicago’s Outfit, there’s a lot that happened
in Milwaukee in the 1930s that few people know about today. This has some bearing on the
future growth of organized crime and its relation to the Federal Government, the sort of
great bid deal that happens all through the author’s novels, but it's more on the surface in this
book than any other.

Both Oedipa and Hicks managed to get distracted from their respective goals. Oedipa
winds up on the precipice of revelation after her dark night of the soul, Hicks in the arms of
hot motorcycle babe Terike, teaching him how to kiss in Hungarian after he chased
Cheez heiress Daphne Airmont through Transylvania for what appears to be the better part
of a year*:

Hicks wandering the compound one day hears a piano in the
distance, recognizes the tune as “Star of the County Down,”
a longtime favorite of Irish drinkers he’s known. He follows
the thread of melody to a temporary dance pavilion and finds
seated at the instrument, a tear track not entirely free of
mascara slowly making its way down one cheek, who but
Pips Quarrender, singing, in better tune than the piano, all
but subvocally, “As it fell out upon one day…” Till now he
thought he had the details of silent approach down pretty
well, but not with Old Pips here.

“Gordon Bennett, you again.”

“Nice tune there, Pip.”

“Dives and Lazarus. Old story from the Gospel of Luke, rich
bloke throwing a party, down-and-out leper starving outside
on the pavement, technically it’s a Christmas carol, though
uncomfortable for the average churchgoer given its rather
keen element of class hostility, not always first choice when
the youngsters go round caroling…”

“Congregational Methodist, myself,” as it dawns on Hicks,
breaking like the day, that Pip must once have been an actual
English kid who celebrated Christmas with her family, and
probably sang this once or twice when she was coming up.

Reminding him it does happen in fact to be almost Christmas
season. Snuck up on him as usual.
ST pgs. 241/242

Maybe not the future Hicks planned, but not what I’d call hell either.

Funny to contemplate Pynchon writing a “Cozy” in this epilog of sorts. Not that I’m ruling out
some other work eventually emerging. But this book is a bit like Anette Hanshaw’s kiss off of
“That’s all”, a nod to the roots of the modern detective/spy novel and a work in a “preterite”
literary mode.

I know one most likely would have an impossible time defending cozys as “real literature”,
but here we are.

___________________________________________________________________________________

*So, by page 241 it’s the Christmas season in Hungary.

. . . The period between 1920 and 1945 marked a turning point in
Hungarian Christmas aesthetics. Tree decoration became
widespread, and mass production began to shape the look of
the festive season. The first industrially made ornaments
appeared — silver lametta, tin spirals, icicles, candle holders,
and glass figurines that reflected the warm glow of real candles.
Yet ancient symbolism remained — the star or angel placed
atop the tree represented the guiding light that led shepherds
to Bethlehem.
 
This was also the era when the focus of Christmas shifted toward
children. Gift-giving, once a religious expression, became a
celebration of joy and togetherness. Budapest’s toy shops on
Kertész Street and the famous Árkád Bazaar filled with wooden
animals, spinning tops, porcelain dolls, and tiny furniture sets —
 treasures that turned Christmas morning into pure magic. . .

How Hungarians Celebrated Christmas a Century Ago: From Handcrafted Ornaments to Sweet Traditions - BudAPPest https://budappest.com/how-hungarians-celebrated-christmas-a-century-ago-from-handcrafted-ornaments-to-sweet-traditions/

What with 52 pages to go, it looks like the novel ends around 1934, possibly around the
end of the Pre-Code era, July 1, 1934, maybe a little before that. But there isn't the slightest
doubt that Hitler is already Chancellor of Germany.