Category Archives: Books

Mr. Dickens Goes to Washington

Charles Dickens visited Washington, D.C. in 1842.

I was sometimes asked, in my progress through other places, whether I had not been very much impressed by the HEADS of the lawmakers at Washington; meaning not their chiefs and leaders, but literally their individual and personal heads, whereon their hair grew, and whereby the phrenological character of each legislator was expressed: and I almost as often struck my questioner dumb with indignant consternation by answering ‘No, that I didn’t remember being at all overcome.’ As I must, at whatever hazard, repeat the avowal here, I will follow it up by relating my impressions on this subject in as few words as possible.

[…]

I saw in them, the wheels that move the meanest perversion of virtuous Political Machinery that the worst tools ever wrought. Despicable trickery at elections; under-handed tamperings with public officers; cowardly attacks upon opponents, with scurrilous newspapers for shields, and hired pens for daggers; shameful trucklings to mercenary knaves, whose claim to be considered, is, that every day and week they sow new crops of ruin with their venal types, which are the dragon’s teeth of yore, in everything but sharpness; aidings and abettings of every bad inclination in the popular mind, and artful suppressions of all its good influences: such things as these, and in a word, Dishonest Faction in its most depraved and most unblushing form, stared out from every corner of the crowded hall.

— Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation.

I think Charles would be pleased to learn that, one hundred and sixty-five years later, there has been an important change: members of our nation’s legislative body can now be trusted not to spit on the floor.

The Senate is a dignified and decorous body, and its proceedings are conducted with much gravity and order. Both houses are handsomely carpeted; but the state to which these carpets are reduced by the universal disregard of the spittoon with which every honourable member is accommodated, and the extraordinary improvements on the pattern which are squirted and dabbled upon it in every direction, do not admit of being described. I will merely observe, that I strongly recommend all strangers not to look at the floor; and if they happen to drop anything, though it be their purse, not to pick it up with an ungloved hand on any account.

American Notes (four paragraphs later).

Cleek of Scotland Yard

After reading Thomas Hanshew’s Cleek: The Man of the Forty Faces on Project Gutenberg (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, click that first link to read an essay from this past June) I knew I had to have a hard copy. So I headed over to AbeBooks and dropped twenty bucks on Cleek of Scotland Yard, an omnibus edition containing Cleek, a few of the short stories Hanshew pasted together to make Cleek, and an eponymous sequel: Cleek of Scotland Yard.

I think there’s a book missing in between. I’m pretty sure it’s one I’ve seen listed as Cleek’s Government Cases. I’m going to have to get hold of that one, too, because Cleek of Scotland Yard—which we’ll call CoSY, to save typing—is almost as good as the first. Continue reading Cleek of Scotland Yard

Review: To Ruhleben–and Back

In 1914, two months after England and Germany went to war, Geoffrey Pyke persuaded a newspaper to hire him as a war correspondent. Pyke was about 20 at the time and, acting under the same impulse by which modern 20 year olds crash keg parties and drink themselves into comas, snuck into Berlin. He was arrested, of course. But, hey, at least he got a book out of it.

To Ruhleben–and Back was published in 1916 and recently republished under McSweeney’s (McSweeney’s’s?) Collins Library imprint. (And damn, this is a handsome book. Good paper, a cover made of sturdy boards and real cloth–Cloth! In an age of big-publisher hardcovers covered in construction paper!–and the design must have time-travelled forwards from the days when books were bound like their publishers gave a damn. I stuck it on my shelf between Phillip Pullman and David Quammen and it looked like Mr. Blackwell at a hobo convention.)

Pyke spent months in solitary confinement wondering whether he’d be shot. Then he was transferred to a cold and inadequate POW camp at Ruhleben. A case of pneumonia left him with a weak heart. He escaped in the company of a man who knew the country better. They walked a very long way to the Netherlands with very little food. Pyke collapsed several times and was once almost left for dead.

As Pyke tells it, all of this was hilariously funny. Continue reading Review: To Ruhleben–and Back

New Adventures Reviews: The Pit

I just read The Pit. It’s staring into me, man. It’s staring riiiiiiight into me.

The Pit. My god. No title has ever described its book with such pure and concise accuracy. Not even the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. This book is a legend among Doctor Who fans. Fifteen years later the mere mention of the name Neil Penswick brings fainting fits. Some people swear their copies of The Pit have tried to kill them.

Can The Pit really be that bad? Yes, it can. Is it the worst of the New Adventures series? Yes, it is. Is it really, as has been an article of faith for so long, the Worst Doctor Who Book Ever?

Well, no. But only because so many boring runarounds were published by BBC Books. The Pit is at least interestingly bad.

Continue reading New Adventures Reviews: The Pit

New Adventures Reviews: The Highest Science

(Another Doctor Who book. Continue bearing with me.)

I’m just getting back to rereading the New Adventures, and I find I don’t have much to say about The Highest Science—in fact, I couldn’t even summon up the enthusiasm to read it properly, though I skimmed bits of it. I don’t know why. There’s nothing wrong with it, and I have nothing against Gareth Roberts in general. It just didn’t grab me. (I’m actually more interested in rereading The Pit, just to see if it’s as bad as I recall.) So this is a much shorter and less careful review than some of my others.

Continue reading New Adventures Reviews: The Highest Science

Short Trips to Bland Places

Fair warning: I’m about to post a couple things that will be of no interest unless you follow Doctor Who. Bear with me.

There’s a small company called Big Finish that has a license to publish Doctor Who audio dramas and short story collections. The latter are published under the series name Short Trips.

Not long ago I discovered a couple of recent “Short Trips” volumes going for ten dollars each on Amazon. I haven’t been following the range, because they’re a bit pricey. Ten dollars is a bit less pricey. So I thought what the hell, and ordered Short Trips: Farewells and Short Trips: The Centenarian.

I am glad I did not pay twenty-five dollars each for these books.

Continue reading Short Trips to Bland Places

Not Really a Review of Spin Control

Sometimes I think I should update this more… so I’m going to try to review some of what I’ve been reading lately. Obviously I’ll have to try harder in future as in this case I did not end up with a review.

For some reason I’ve been reading a lot of Hardass Space Mercenary books. First there was Richard Morgan’s Broken Angels. Then Spin Control. Now I’m reading Morgan’s Woken Furies and pretty soon I’m going to reread the Doctor Who: New Adventures novel Deceit, in which Ace returned to the series. As a hardass space mercenary. I have no idea why I am doing this.

The main thing I learned from Spin Control is that series books really, really need to include plot summaries of previous books. Really. I read the preceding book (Spin State) a couple of years ago. At this point I remember nothing except that (A) I mildly enjoyed it, even though (B) it was fifty to a hundred pages over its natural length. Spin Control’s plot is independent of the earlier book, but kept referencing people and places and bits of future tech that I felt I should have recognized, but didn’t.

Beyond that… well, this one is fifty to a hundred pages too long again, but I get that feeling from a lot of science fiction these days. Meanwhile, fantasy is getting shorter. Charles Stross has had to chop his Merchant Princes books in half, and I get the impression that Paul Park’s Roumania tetralogy was originally supposed to be a trilogy. (Just the way the natural stopping point for the first volume occurs about a third of the way into the second. You know. Little things.)

This is why I could never work in publishing: the forces that shape the industry are as mysterious to me as quantum mechanics.

The Man Who Calls Himself Hamilton Cleek

“‘Cleek!’ he said, in a voice that shook with nervous catches and the emotion of a soul deeply stirred, ‘Cleek to take the case? The great, the amazing, the undeceivable Cleek!’”
—T. W. Hanshew, Cleek: The Man of the Forty Faces

For old-school detective fans, times must come when Lord Peter Wimsey irritates; when Hercule Poirot comes off as an anal retentive with a weird moustache; when they even wish Sherlock Holmes would stop self-medicating his manic depression and get professional help. At moments like this I turn to Cleek. Hamilton Cleek. The Man of the Forty Faces.

Continue reading The Man Who Calls Himself Hamilton Cleek

Annals of 19th-Century Chutzpah

My most recent on-the-bus reading was The Great Pretenders, by Jan Bondeson. In brief, it’s a collection of historic impostors–most of them con artists, but also a couple of accidental impostors who made no claims of their own but became the subject of conspiracy theories after their deaths.

The cases that caught my attention were two tales of purported lost heirs to 19th-century British peerages: The Tichborne Claimant and the Druce-Portland case.

(I first saw the word “claimant” on the spine of Mark Twain’s novel _The American Claimant_. I was a kid at the time, and not knowing what the word meant but seeing the resemblance to “lament” and “climate,” I got the notion that it was about a guy who complained about the weather. As it turns out, _The American Claimant_ is the book where Twain put all the weather in an appendix to obviate the need to mention it during the actual novel. Ah, the irony. It’s enough to make Alanis Morrissette screech unmelodically.)

Anyway. French-speaking, alcohol-abusing Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne was lost at sea in 1864. Years later, a guy turned up in Wagga Wagga, Australia claiming to be Sir Roger. Apparently in the intervening time he had forgotten how to speak French and increased in weight by over two hundred per cent. And yet the claimant–who later turned out to be a butcher named Arthur Orton–still managed to take his case to court. A *lot* of people believed he was Sir Roger. Some of these people were the same kind of people who these days believe the _National Enquirer_ is fine journalism. Some weren’t. Some were people who had known Sir Roger and were happy to testify that he and Arthur were the same guy.

The detail that gets me–the reason I’m writing this post–is the way our pal Arthur financed his lawsuit. He sold bonds. Seriously. For £20 you could buy a Tichborne Bond with the promise that, once “Sir Roger” had his fortune, you’d get a fivefold return on your investment.

And people *bought* them. They bought *£40,000* worth. And the damndest part was that it was apparently legal. It must have been, because a few decades later it happened *again*.

The fifth Duke of Portland (a pathological recluse and a fascinating subject in himself) died in 1879. Years later a woman named Anna Maria Druce claimed that her late husband, Thomas Charles Druce, had been the Duke wearing an unconvincing fake beard, and that her son was therefore the Portland heir.

Mrs. Druce wasn’t the con artist that Arthur Orton was. Actually, she appears to have been genuinely nuts. It’s been just a couple of days since I read Bondeson’s book and already her story is a crazy blur. At one point she claimed that the Duke had for some reason disguised himself as a homeopath named “Dr. Harms” and gotten himself checked into an asylum by pretending to be a dancing bear.

(I badly want to find out more about this thing. Unfortunately, I found just one in-print book about the case–The Disappearing Duke by Andrew Crofts and Tom Freeman-Keel–and on examination it turned out to be worthless… completely unsourced, and full of dialogue which as far as I could tell the authors invented from what’s usually referred to as whole cloth but which in this case probably didn’t even have all its threads.)

Anyway, at one point Mrs. Druce published a pamphlet called _The Great Druce-Portland_ mystery which ended with an invitation to buy “Druce bonds” entitling the bearers to shares in the Portland estate. A few years later another Druce heir turned up–from Australia again, no less–with an improvement: he formed a limited liability company for the sole purpose of suing to claim the Portland fortune.

Passing yourself off as the heir to a fortune takes gall. Taking your purported family to court to get your hands on takes *unmitigated* gall. Forming a startup company to sell shares in the fortune to finance the legal campaign to take your purported family to court takes gall, unmitigated gall, and chutzpah. You just don’t get this class of con artist anymore.

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Transit

Ah, yes, Transit. The book that caused the Great Fan Freakout of 1992.

When this thing was published a great pained howling arose from the fans, or at least from a few of the louder ones. You’d have thought that Ben Aaronovich had personally broken into their homes and relieved himself on their Target novels. Gary Russell wrote a mildly hysterical review in Doctor Who Magazine1 calling it, in addition to “convuluted [sic] and self-referential,” “the most purile, non-Doctor Who book it has ever been my misfortune to read.” And the letters pages were flat-out crazy. I’m embarassed to admit this, but at the time DWM actually dissuaded me from buying Transit. My book budget was limited as a teenager, and the magazine was my only contact with the collected wisdom [sic] of fandom, and I skipped several early NAs when the buzz wasn’t good. Not until I got on the internet and read the opinions of sane people did I go back to it.

I couldn’t figure out what everyone was so upset about. Continue reading Transit