Educated Guesswork

The Wind That Swept Mexico: The History of the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1942, by Anita Brenner, with 184 photographs compiled by George R. Leighton

Proponents of revolution—or opponents, for that matter—might soberly consider the course of the Mexican Revolution, the first of the great revolutions of the 20th Century. Like the other revolts in Russia and China, one sees the same arrogant detachment of the rulers from the ruled, the same heart-wrenching poverty in a land laden with every resource people need to thrive, and the same accidents of history and fate which conspired to give birth to what in retrospect can only seem inevitable, foreordained or foredoomed. For we of the United States of America, the upheaval in Mexico is made more difficult to comprehend by our typical disdain for everything taking place below our southern border. (Above our northern, as well; one has to cross oceans for us to pretend to be interested.) Additionally, the names and events of the Mexican Revolution are for most of us living north of the Rio Grande mere unrelated points of history, if we are cognizant of them at all, tiny little beacons of misremembered high school history tests, blinking like radio tower signal lights above low fog, destined only to be engulfed in a haze of forgetfulness if they be noticed at all. Searching beneath the clouds of our ignorance may lead only to learned befuddlement, as we struggle to make sense of unfamiliar names of people and places, and are left with only a residue of (mis)understanding as deep as that enshrined on most tourist postcard pictures.

Fortunately, we are blessed by the torrential poetry of Anita Brenner’s extended essay upon the Mexican Revolution, which is accompanied by almost two hundred contemporary photographs, in The Wind That Swept Mexico. This book, originally published in 1943 during World War II, provided this particular reader with an excellent place to start learning about this revolt that most in the U.S. are almost entirely ignorant of, and that most Mexicans—I suspect—take for granted. Ms. Brenner writes of her subject with a felicity all too rarely seen, moving through her material with confidence and understanding, showing a sympathy both for the plight of the poor working poor as well as for the thorny difficulties of the actual world of politics. Though her liberal allegiances are always evident, she does not allow herself to be encumbered with cynicism, and though she moves quickly through three decades of tightly packed history, she never rushes and never lectures.

Instead, Anita Brenner shows herself a true poet, inspired by love of her subject, the Mexico she lived in for most of her life. Almost every paragraph presents some jewel of language to the reader, as when she describes one nonentity who became President of Mexico as having “the personality of a ship’s purser”. Or when speaking of German interference in the 1940 Mexican elections: “The Nazis detailed agents, blondes, and money to campaign in both camps.” And yet her poetic language remains rooted in reality, revealing the often harsh ability of moneyed interests to somehow oppress the already oppressed still further.

In the long run, it was thought, industry would solve everything. By its mere existence it would create national prosperity that would sift down to the middle class, that is, the ten or fifteen percent who were considered really people. Work would accrue to the rest, and thus the golden cycle would remain continually in motion.

But the process by which wealth was to sift down, reversing its ancient habits of traveling up, had not yet occurred. Instead, another process had been going on—a process of suction. Through it, the peasants—more than three-fourths of the population—had been stripped of land by laws which gave the hacendados more leeway for expansion, more water, more cheap labor. Many village and tribal holdings had been handed over, and most of the public lands, to great concessionaires, often with subsidies. Occupants who resisted being thus reduced to peonage were shanghaied into the army, or sold to work in the tropics, or sent to their graves.

Anita Brenner puts paid to the idea of ‘trickle-down economics’ long before the days of Reagan and David Stockman

I am sure there are more detailed and pedantic histories of the intricacies of the Mexican Revolution; Ms. Brenner’s essay is merely an précis. And I am not going to recite the many ups and downs and twists and turns and surges forwards and backwards of the Revolution’s course. I won’t chronicle the strong though aging hand of Porfirio Díaz on the Mexican nation in 1910, the fighting in Juarez in 1911, the “Tragic Ten Days” in Mexico City which saw the ascension of Huerta, the stark pleas for land from the Zapatistas, the various campaigns of Villa and Obregón against the government and (sometimes) against each other, nor the pendulum swings of the various post-Revolutionary administrations between lip service to the ideals of youth and kowtowing to landed and moneyed interests (and, always, the United States). No, I will not recite those and other events. That is what Anita Brenner does in her book, and does incredibly well.

Every home was in a state of siege. Civilians dodging out for food were often caught in crossfires, and their bodies lay in the streets. Women ran on desperate errands carrying white flags made of sheets tied to brooms. The capital was paralyzed. A million people had become only a battlefield.

“The Tragic Ten Days” during which the first Revolutionary president and anti-Revolutionary forces inside his own government fought for control of Mexico City

The joy of reading this book does not obviate the tragic and bloody history it recounts. Political enemies are murdered, promises are broken, reactionaries win … and yet somehow progress is made, little by slow, for the poorest of the poor, the downtrodden men and women and children who actually make up the Mexican nation. Brenner obviously sympathizes with the ‘little guy’ against the big combines, the big ranchers, the big money, and the big grafters, but she is canny enough to see and tell the difficult choices forced upon the succession of men who sit in the Presidential Chair of Mexico. She unmasks the money behind this would-be throne, but also is savvy to the Communist influence behind the modern Mexican labor union, the CTM.

The revolutionary chiefs … were eager to pay for their power (and the fat rewards thereof) with revolutionary works. Even those who were mere robber barons were as sincere participants in the new credos as the crusader knights who devoutly portioned their Moorish loot with the Church. So any man who had a good idea and who got it listened to by a general or an important politician had the chance to try it out, or made the chance himself. Ideas in progress ranged from irrigation plans to free breakfasts in the schools to serum laboratories and baby clinics and wall newspapers and beggars’ hostels and art for the people and cheap editions of Plutarch.

Lip service sometimes resulted in actual benefits to the people, and always benefited those on top … while they were on top
(My ellipses, in both cases)

Perhaps the Mexican Revolution was spared the tarring and sneering which met the Russian outbreak a few years later simply because the people of the United States have long accustomed themselves to not give a fig for the politics of Mexico or any Latin American country. While the powers-that-be fretted over the possible importation of radical ideas from Bolsheviki in the Urals and points east, no corporations feared any philosophical import from Mexico, only nationalization of ‘our’ oil fields and ‘our’ mines. Thus those powers ignored the actual examples of socialist ideas only slightly south of the border for fears of the same Commies that Hitler railed against in his appeals to the money men of Germany. As Brenner points out, however, the nations south of Mexico were all very aware of and were inspired by these examples.

The sharpest change was intangible. Fear left the have-nots and was distributed to the haves.

After more than twenty years of revolution, some of its ideals were put into practice by President Lázaro Cárdenas

The pictures which accompany the short text underscore the contradictory distance and nearness of the Mexican Revolution. Some images, especially those of the Porfirio regime and its grand buildings, seem to come from a time almost inconceivably far away, though you can visit Chapultepac Castle today and see the imposing building from which the presidents of Mexico once could look down, quite literally, upon the people of Mexico City. Where once Pancho Villa and Zapata lounged in the seat of the president, now the Museo Nacional de Historia displays murals of the Revolution—as well as the original Mexican Revolution of 181o. But in the photographs of the farmers and families fighting and suffering, the child soldier draped in bandoleras filled with rifle cartridges, and dead bodies lying on the ground after battle or brutal murder, in those pictures we can see all too clearly our present, where the hungry stay hungry, and everyone ignores the rats gnawing at our fingers.

all but a fraction of the total wealth was held by about three per cent of the people. The bulk was held by less than one percent, and most of that was in absentee foreign hands. The economic pump was making wealth flow outward, leaving behind a sediment only; and what came in, to multiply, again flowed outward. The dangerously unbalanced distribution of the means to live and produce—which wherever it occurs has always led to oppression and social explosion—had again for at least ninety-five per cent of the people of Mexico an extra taste of wormwood. There was this byword: “Mexico—mother of foreigners, stepmother of Mexicans.”

The situation under the rule of Porfirio Díaz

There is much talk currently of revolution, and it is a historical truism since the twin poles of the American and French Revolutions that there has always been more talk than actual revolt. For which we may be, perhaps, somewhat grateful. Even before the Mexican Revolution really got going there was much talk amongst Mexicans about revolution, harkening back to the glorious overthrow of the hated Spanish starting in 1810. And the French have never stopped talking of revolution, though the abortive experiments of 1830, 1848, and 1870 might have silenced most folk. Perhaps because of the history of the revolution in France, the Mexican intellectuals of the early 20th Century held fast to the belief that revolutions only occur when nations cannot pay their bills—with the corollary being that, since Mexico was quite solvent, it had nothing to fear from that quarter. Though, as events were to prove, much blood was still to be shed, since money jingling in the pocket can only offend those whose pockets carry only holes.

The battleground was everywhere, and every inhabitant became accustomed to living provisionally, and to being ready to migrate fast, in the wake of one army or away from another, to get food. There were nearly two hundred kinds of worthless paper money.

The joys of revolution, after the convention in Aguascalientes fails to bring rapprochement between the various fighting factions

But, as anyone who has studied the history of revolutions knows, such tumult brings with it much devastation even when the desired changes arrive on schedule. It is not only feelings that are hurt in the process. Fans of Che Guevara must elide over his personal involvement with hundreds, thousands of murders in the name of the new state after the seizure of power in Cuba. The events which left the stirring “Marseillaise” also left the drowned bodies of counterrevolutionaries at the bottom of many French rivers in the ghastly noyades, not to mention that obvious symbol of the French Revolution, the guillotine. And the story of the Mexican Revolution has its share of death and depredation. But it also led to real change in the lives of the most lowly, even if sometimes such change seemed impossible, as Anita Brenner points out.

A study of wages and living standards was made, and the results embodied in a minimum wage law. In most cases the wages declared necessary by the panel of economists, physicians, and social scientists who made the survey were so far above what was being paid that little attempt was made to enforce the law. For the peasants, the list of essentials to life, beginning with eighteen hundred calories and four vitamins, and including a pair of blankets and perhaps one medical visit a year, added up, against what they had, to sheer fantasy.

Plus c’est la même chose, plus ça change

This strange balancing act, or perhaps more an exercise in plate spinning by the various Mexican politicians, this radical yet reactionary ‘two steps forward, one step back’ history is what Anita Brenner tells so well. A child living in Mexico when the Revolution began, her interest in the history is nurtured her obvious and real love of Mexico itself, in all its splendor and problems. She deftly but firmly points out that the real danger to monied interests is for unmonied people to get to know one another, to learn about each other.

Americans and Mexicans, who had known each other, dubiously, only through the dealings of carpetbaggers and the resulting quarrels of the two governments, met by the thousand as individuals, and found each other childlike but nice.

Yet another reason to avoid fraternization

Written under the influence of a global conflict whose outcome was then still very much in doubt, and at a time when many of those who had participated in the Mexican Revolution—those, that is, who had not been killed in battle or murdered—were still actively engaged in the politics of the nation, this book may not, cannot, be the final word on the Mexican Revolution. And much more was still to come, as the PRI (originally the PNR of Calles and then the PRM of the much-beloved Cárdenas) shifted through the sands of time down to the eventual loss of power in 2000. But what Ms. Brenner’s book may lack in completeness and academic rigor it more than makes up in immediacy and poetic vigor. She writes, as she tells it, of an ongoing revolution, of a Mexico still in the process of creating itself. And she pleads for greater understanding of the winds buffeting our neighbor to the south, underlining the point that the United States and Mexico have opportunities for greater understanding and greater cooperation, as well as threats to both countries from continued ignorance.

The opportunities are still there. As is the ignorance.

[The Mexicans] fear being cheated, through our domination, of what was achieved by the million lives given up in the revolution. Our record, after all, has been, there and in other Latin American countries, to strengthen those who gain by strangling the Four Freedoms.

Ms. Brenner points out the rational reasons for suspicion of the United States

2 novellas by Wilkie Collins: Miss Or Mrs? & The Guilty River

How difficult it shall be in our ‘woke’ future to read the literature of the past! For, after ensuring that our book is printed appropriately with soy inks upon hempen paper, and reading beneath an LED bulb powered by solar light stored in our landfill-friendly accumulator, we shall still have to face the textual problems that have always beset readers, all whilst confronting a new set of challenges thrown up at every turn by the then-current arbiters of mores, morals, and taste. Those future dictators of culture, the Jacobins-to-come of reasoned discourse, may find their task made difficult by the ever-increasing pace of anachronistic reflection upon the mistakes and woeful ignorances of the ever-nearer past, but we may be certain that they shall meet that challenge, given that their present cousins, the current batch of cultural judges, have shown no inclination to shirk from issuing diktat and condemnation of any action or person seen by the social mediatariat as violating the newly imposed norms of hypervigilant awareness of roles and responsibilities in spheres as diverse as the sexual, the commercial, the gastronomic, the symbolic, not to mention those of fashion, friendship, and language. The Sleep of Reason produces monsters, as De Goya proclaimed in his aquatint, but an ever-wakeful Reason made disjoint from imagination may create its own demoniacal offspring.*

But as the cycles of ‘awareness’ spin ever faster and faster only to dissolve into a discordant mass of graceless notes of angst and reaction, like the audience who clapping along with the performer speeds ahead of the tempo faster and faster until its applause breaks upon an inability to keep the beat, the social member finds himself (or herself, or <your preferred pronoun here>) unable to keep up with what’s what and who’s who and how’s about, unable to raise the correct amount of outrage at this activity while cheering unthinkingly the appeal to that other activity, unable to wear the right line of clothes while simultaneously disdaining that lifestyle brand now deemed not only déclassé but also recidivist. Like the poor fellow traveller trying to keep up with the changes after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the twists and turns required to be ‘with it’ and hipper-than-thou can cause whiplash and may lead to a need for a full spine replacement.

All of which is merely a very roundabout way of saying that reading Wilkie Collins in the aborning Twenty-First Century is fraught—fraught, I say—with perils and concerns that have little to do with the inherent material written by Mr. Collins in the closing decades of the Nineteenth Century. And it is difficult to determine how problematic that material is on its own terms, versus the controversies brought by us to Collins’s work from the oceans of zeitgeist drowning We Who Are Living Now. A sedulous understanding of the correct perspective on difficult societal issues seems to be the hallmark of Our Times, and our especial foreknowledge of the resolution of all formerly taboo subjects might just make it hard for We Living Now to appreciate the (misguided?) insights and ideas of Mr. Wilkie Collins, an old white guy who appears to have lost some of his audience when he became more preachy after losing his best friend, Charles Dickens, in 1870. The works I am considering today come from that post-Dickens period, for the most part, with Miss or Mrs? published in 1871 and The Guilty River some fifteen years later in 1886. Two very short pieces—“trifles”, as Collins called them—were appended to my edition of Miss or Mrs?: “‘Blow Up With The Brig!’” and “The Fatal Cradle”.

All these stories are perhaps impossible to read heedless of the accretions of time long since passed. This may be particularly true of Miss or Mrs?, a novella whose main action concerns the marriage, forced or volitional, of a fifteen or sixteen year old girl. Not to worry, however; our heroine Natalie Graybrooke is rather developed for her age:

At fifteen years of age (dating from her last birthday) she possessed the development of the bosom and limbs, which in England is rarely attained before twenty. Everything about the girl – except her little rosy ears – was on a grand Amazonian scale. Her shapely hand was long and large; her supple waist was the waist of a woman. The indolent grace of all her movements had its motive power in an almost masculine firmness of action, and profusion of physical resource. This remarkable bodily development was far from being accompanied by any corresponding development of character. Natalie’s inner was the gentle, innocent manner of a young girl.

The developing maiden around which the novella turns, doubtless grateful her ears have not grown as much as her bosom

Miss Natalie has two suitors, in effect, though one is secret and the other is a troglodyte. The latter, Richard Turlington, is a man of affairs whose desire for the lovely daughter of Sir Joseph Graybrooke is more than mercantile, perhaps less than entirely honorable. The former would-be lover is Natalie’s cousin (!), the unfortunately named Launcelot Linzie, a medico who is some fifteen years younger than Mr. Turlington. (Meaning, for the mathematically inclined among you, that Turlington is at minimum twice the age of his desired bride.) The story opens on board the yacht of the rich tradesman desirous of the much younger girl. A sea voyage has been prescribed as treatment for Natalie, who has shown “Signs of maturing too rapidly—of outgrowing her strength”, and Mr. Turlington has put his schooner at the disposal of the Graybrookes, the father and daughter, along with her maiden aunt. While on board, two things precipitate the action of the story: first, hints of a strange past for Mr. Turlington; and second, business exigencies which demand the businessman’s immediate attention. As he leaves the family aboard his yacht to manage his affairs, Turlington warns Sir Graybrooke away from Mr. Linzie, whom the older suitor suspects (rightly) of competing for the attentions of his desired prize.

Twists and turns ensue, as often happens when a story is published in serial form, and Wilkie Collins demonstrates his excellence at foreshadowing and at weaving narrative threads into an intriguing and satisfactory pattern. Along the way, the author uses his knowledge of the law to navigate the more peculiar aspects of the English statutes, viz. the Law of Clandestine Marriage. For Natalie is not of age, not to mention the fact that by this time in the story her father has promised her to the ever more brutal Mr. Turlington, and so Launce Linzie (egads what a diseuphonious name) seeks out a legal loophole whereby he and she may be married without her father’s consent. Yes, you read that right: Miss or Mrs? tells how a man may legally marry a fifteen year old girl without letting her daddy know. One wonders if this law was changed after Wilkie Collins let slip this ‘life hack’. It is also indicative of the author and of his age that he delves into legal idiosyncrasies in the service of love, whilst the American focus on law in fiction is generally with regards to murder. Such is life. Fortunately, the creepiness factor is reduced greatly by the strongest character in the novel, the wonderful Lady Winwood, Sir Joseph’s niece (and therefore also Natalie’s cousin). This diminutive woman (as the author says, “But who ever met with a tall woman who had a will of her own?”) has made her own marriage to a lord and insists in her forceful way that Natalie follow her heart:

‘My dear, one ambitious marriage in the family is quite enough! I have made up my mind that you shall marry the man you love. Don’t tell me your courage is failing you – the excuse is contemptible; I refuse to receive it. Natalie! the men have a phrase which exactly describes your character. You want back-bone!’

The strongest woman in Miss or Mrs? speaks her mind

This titled spouse drives much of the remaining plot, and—through her approbation of Mr. Linzie—signals the reader that the young man might make a satisfactory husband for poor Natalie in spite of his lack of funds or position. And so the contest is engaged, fought with stealthy wedding wiles on the part of the want-to-be newlyweds and increasing domineering fury on the part of Sir Joseph and (particularly) Mr. Turlington. Alea jacta est, several times in fact, and the story moves quickly and passionately to its heart-stopping finale.

The other novella by Wilkie Collins that we consider, The Guilty River, is a much later work, which displays the same wonderful prose stylings of the author, though the plot is more turbid and the characters less engaging than those of Miss or Mrs? Unfortunately, the contrivances which flow from the author’s imagination quite naturally into the plot of the earlier work are here quite clunky, and this flaw combines with a hero portrayed in a heavy-handed and not entirely believable manner to create a somewhat ponderous tale of implied peril and almost incredible naïveté. The astonishing denouement of Miss or Mrs? has its parallel in The Guilty River, only here the ginned up closing falls flat. Whereas the first book considered keeps the reader guessing until the very end, the latter seems to telegraph too clearly how it will all turn out.

I stood alone on the bank of the ugliest stream in England.

The moonlight, pouring its unclouded radiance over open space, failed to throw a beauty not their own on those sluggish waters. Broad and muddy, their stealthy current flowed onward to the sea, without a rock to diversify, without a bubble to break, the sullen surface. On the side from which I was looking at the river, the neglected trees grew so close together that they were undermining their own lives, and poisoning each other. On the opposite bank, a rank growth of gigantic bulrushes hid the ground beyond, except where it rose in hillocks, and showed its surface of desert sand spotted here and there by mean patches of heath. A repellent river in itself, a repellent river in its surroundings, a repellent river even in its name. It was called The Loke.

But The Guilty River is not all bad, as this charming description of ugliness proves

The novella concerns a young squire, Gerald Roylake, returned from German schools to assume his inheritance, the manor and lands of Trimley Deen. He is out of place in England, unable to care about those things which seem of most import to his father’s widow (the old squire having remarried after sending his son to the Continent) and the social circle to which he belongs. As in the previous book, love is the driving force, though here the class discrepancy between the anode and cathode in the proposed marriage battery is even greater, as the master of Trimley Deen falls head over heels in love with the miller’s daughter, who can only owe him fealty, not affection. While his stepmother tries to defoliate his budding love and direct the young squire’s attentions towards a more acceptable direction, young Roylake engages in a strange relationship with a Lodger at the mill, a former doctor now become deaf who insinuates himself into our hero’s life, coming between the young man and Cristel, the aforementioned miller’s daughter.

I find myself unwilling to plod through a recitation of the twists and turns of this product of Wilkie Collins’s later years. Suffice it to say that Roylake is a babe in the woods who is manipulated into absurd stupidities, the Lodger is a monotonous (literally so, as his deafness apparently manifests itself by making his speech loud and lacking dynamics) foil, and Cristel is merely implausible.

‘He is very vain,’ she said, ‘and you may have wounded his vanity by treating him like a stranger, after he had given you his writings to read, and invited you to his room. But I thought I saw something much worse than mortification in his face. Shall I be taking a liberty, if I ask how it was you got acquainted with him last night?’

She was evidently in earnest. I saw that I must answer her without reserve; and I was a little afraid of being myself open to a suspicion of vanity, if I mentioned the distrust which I had innocently excited in the mind of my new acquaintance. In this state of embarrassment I took a young man’s way out of the difficulty, and spoke lightly of a serious thing.

‘I became acquainted with your deaf Lodger, Cristel, under ridiculous circumstances. He saw us talking last night, and did me the honour to be jealous of me.’

I had expected to see her blush. To my surprise she turned pale, and vehemently remonstrated.

Our three main characters in a first-person nutshell, showing young Roylake understands women no better than anything else

Though there are some good moments in The Guilty River, most of the tale is quite recalcitrant, shoved along like a fat old cat of disreputable mien towards its unsatisfactory conclusion. I liked it. Many of the same themes are present in both novellas, to wit, idiocies of the English class system and the hidden heart of dark brutality behind handsome masks. But The Guilty River also betrays a sluggish despondency which may be more evocative of the author’s increasing dependence upon laudanum than of the gothic tale he seeks to tell. Though the story is told with the young Squire Roylake as the first-person hero, the narration is of a man looking back years later at the mistakes and missed opportunities of youth, more maudlin than wistful, with a heavier heart than the more ebullient tale of the attempted clandestine marriage of Miss or Mrs?

Wilkie Collins himself had an iconoclastic view of marriage, spending most of his life in a relationship which defies definition with a widow, Caroline Graves, while also fathering three children with another woman, Martha Rudd. Thus, while it is easy to view these strange tales of matrimony as merely artifacts of the Victorian Age, Mr. Collins lived within the transgressive world which betrays the limits of society’s strictures. Also worthy of note is the mixed race of the ‘Amazonian’ heroine of the earlier novella, whose mother is frankly stated to have “a mixture of Negro blood and French blood”, for whatever that may be worth.

The edition of Miss or Mrs? which I have bears the subtitle And Other Stories In Outline, and the two very short stories appended to the longer tale are much better than ‘trifles’—as Collins names them in his introduction. “‘Blow up with the brig!’” is a one-scene story of a sailor facing death one long, long night. And “The Fatal Cradle” is a witty sea tale of fate and fortune, and the vagaries of birth. All three in the volume are tightly plotted, deftly described, and ultimately pleasing narratives. They do much more than “endeavour to interest [the reader] without making large demands on his attention and his time.” This reader was inspired by these tales to order a half-dozen more Wilkie Collins books. And though The Guilty River was as sluggish as the book’s titular waterway, the sparkles of wit and language were still present, in portions large enough to encourage further acquaintance with this very interesting author.

* The nuance of this most famous of De Goya’s etchings from Los Caprichos is often neglected or perhaps unknown, as the full epigraph is only seen in certain editions. Though the print itself always shows the common title “El sueño de la razón produce monstruos”, the Prado edition provides the artist’s plea for the importance of both Reason and Imagination: “La fantasia abandonada de la razon, produce monstruos imposibles: unida con ella, es madre de las artes y origen de sus marabillas.” Situated as he was on the cusp of the Romantic Era, and all too aware of some of the failures of the Enlightenment, De Goya sounded an all-too-prescient warning of possible horrors to come—predicted horrors he later witnessed and depicted in The Disasters of War. The death of God and faith, however, has brought a recrudescence of the numbing dominion of King Reason, as the ‘invisible hand’ of the so-called free market becomes one of the only three metaphysical forces appealed to in our Endarkened Age. (The other two, of course, are the Military-Patriot Industry and the Christian Brand.

Hazell and the Menacing Jester, by P. B. Yuill [Gordon Williams & Terry Venables]

I like reading books. Really, I do. I read for enjoyment, to learn stuff, to delay the inevitable minute when I have to return to work, and to distract myself when I’m sitting in the meditation chamber in my house. And I am continually amazed at the talented people who think the ideas and write the words and fill the pages in the books I read. Kudos to each and every one. Even the ones I report negatively on; hey, you still got published. And occasionally, very rarely, I read a book that underscores the staggering incident which occurred 50,000 years ago (give or take) when human brains developed some strange quirk of consciousness that enabled the invention of the most amazing thing in the entire galaxy—nay! in the entire universe! I speak, of course, of language.

Okay, okay. You’re right. I kind of lost it there. Unfortunately, I am not one of those talented people who can use this almost unbelievable tool we take for granted to transmit information and ideas to my readers. I realize it’s a struggle to read my words, and that makes me all the more impressed and beholden and blown away by those creative writers who go beyond just being staggeringly great and who use language in a way that makes it clear to their readers just how blessed we all are to have words and grammar and all that panoply of language that can be written and printed into little blocks of paper that used to cost a mere sixty pence and which now go for eight, nine, ten bucks at the airport or for next to nothing at the library book sale. (I’m talking about books.) Whatever the cost in mere money, the gift of certain writers is to use words in exciting ways that remind us just what a powerful gift we’ve been given by our long-ago forebears, whether evolutionary or biblical. The tripping creativity of Alan Burt Akers is why I love his Dray Prescot series, when I know in my heart of hearts that I should not. The words and what the man does with and to them is why I revere Stanislaw Lem, and followed his suggestion as to which science fiction writer to read (though I still wonder how much of his innovative wordplay came from his translators, and how much came in spite of them). Her searing mastery of modern speech and her perfect voice is what made me love Cintra Wilson’s Caligula. And now I come—late to the party—to P. B. Yuill.

In James Hazell, a private detective of distinctly working class London roots, the pseudonymous author P. B. Yuill has created one of the most engaging, delightful, human, and (mostly) humane characters ever seen in fiction, certainly in mystery fiction. Unlike the ever-brooding Marlowe, Hazell seems almost to enjoy life, even as he wistfully watches the London he loves being replaced block by block in favor of flash spivs and their money. More than this, he is an authentic Cockney character in a world saying ‘goodbye’ to neighbors, neighborhoods, and neighborliness. In contrast to most of the people he meets in Hazell and the Menacing Jester, Jim Hazell is genuinely interested in everything around him, and while he is perhaps not the most clueful detective (or person, for that matter) at all times, he is as dogged as Churchill was supposed to be, which may be a better asset for a private eye than mere robotic ratiocination.

Hiding behind the P. B. Yuill name on the cover are Gordon Williams, a Scottish author become Londoner, and Terry Venables, an English footballer with a long-storied career both on the pitch and on the sidelines. I assume that Venables supplied much of the ‘real’ London in this book, especially the never-ending flood of wonderful Cockney rhyming slang—but I may just be underestimating how much a trained journalist can pick up by hanging out in the right pubs. In any event, the partnership between the two began in 1972 with a sports novel (under their own names), They Used To Play On Grass. There must have been some magic there, for they collaborated on three novels featuring the blue-collar James Hazell under the P. B. Yuill nom de plume.* Unfortunately, I started with the third book in the series, the subject of this review. Also unfortunately, there are only two more books in the series. On the other hand, I am grateful that there are two more, and have already ordered them from the UK.

I really cannot express adequately how wonderful the language of this book is. Indeed, any words I use simply pale beside the inventive words and images of the novel. From the very beginning right through to the last page, the first person narrative of Jim Hazell as he recounts this puzzling case warms the heart and delights the ear. However, like me, it isn’t always clear what Jim is saying. Unlike me, however, this is a fault of the reader, not the author. The language of The Menacing Jester is so full of slang that I am sure I would have understood it less had I read it when it was originally published almost fifty years ago, because now I can fill the holes in my deficient knowledge of British slang by looking up problem words on the Webbertubes, at least when the meaning isn’t clear from the context. (Even I was able to piece together—once I’d gotten used to the basic premise of rhyming slang—that getting kicked in the Niagaras meant he’d been kicked in the balls (“Niagara Falls” = “balls”).) But this book isn’t just some slapping together of odds and ends from a slang dictionary; P. B. Yuill turns out to be quite a creative fellow. Check out the very opening paragraph of the book:

Moneybags Beevers and his weird little problem first cropped up on a wet Thursday morning in May. I was just back in the office after flu. Outside it was raining knives and forks. I felt about merry as him on the slab with the big-toe label.

Nothing too difficult to follow there. Apparently the Welsh say “raining knives and forks”, in Welsh, one supposes. But those sentences sing, really sing. And even I could understand the first rhyming slang a couple of paragraphs later on the same first page:

I sat there fighting off the day’s first fag. My new black brogues were damp. Bargain shoes, always a mistake. Soon as I got a few quid indoors it was down to Bond Street for a pair of handmades.

The ashtray was still full from last week. It looked revolting. Soon as I got a few quid ahead of the game I’d be puffing six-inch Havanas to go with my St Louis Blues from Bond Street.

Good shoe philosophy

By the way, if you’re going to have a problem with ‘fag’ as a term for cigarette, you really shouldn’t read a book where every black person is called a ‘spade’. That’s about as close to a Trigger Warning as this book needs, unless you cannot stomach novels with violent fight scenes, in which case you probably want to avoid most of the mystery genre.

Now, I occasionally read a book in French, both to keep my hand in and also to remind myself that I really need to study French. And, depending on the book, I’ll need to consult a French-English dictionary for this or that term. If I’m reading something fairly old, I usually don’t have to look up more than a few words every dozen pages; if I am reading Simenon, I just use the dictionary to prop up the book since I’m going to be consulting it often. I don’t even bother with modern fiction with a lot of slang; that kind of depression I don’t need. Well, reading this book is certainly possible without knowing all the various Cockney rhyming slang, as well as the other British slang or specialized uses of specialized terms†—even I could figure out that taking a butcher’s at something meant taking a look at it. But it did help to be able to look up these terms online, although I still am not entirely clear what was meant by someone’s frizzy hair keeping snow off the cabbages, unless that’s just the obvious. Anyway, I ended up looking up quite a few new slang phrases, so many that I have decided to create a Cockney Rhyming Slang page for my blog, as I learned so many wonderful new terms that they’d entirely overwhelm my Friday Vocabulary posts for months to come if I tried to sneak them in there. (I’ll sneak back here and update this post with a link to the Rhyming Slang page once that’s ready.) And here’s the link to my Cockney Rhyming and other British Slang page.

So, let’s see … six paragraphs—more or less—about the book, and I haven’t even begun talking about the story. Well, it’s a doozy, with lots of twists and turns, characters both repulsive and alluring, and one of the best fight scenes I have ever read. If you’re the type who needs a synopsis before you’ll even pick up a book I’ll say that Mr. Beevers is being terrorized by someone whose malicious practical jokes have a sinister purpose. (Yeah, that’s right. The novel doesn’t even start off with a murder in the first thirty pages.) But the already engaging story about the slightly bent Mr. Beevers and his more smarmy partner is made truly magical by the lilting spin given it by Jim Hazell; reading The Menacing Jester we can almost imagine we’re being regaled with the tale at the world’s best corner bar, and Hazell comes off as a man we’d love to bend an elbow with.

Along the way we are led by our author(s) on a tour of the real capital city of post-swinging England, a tour that takes us from penthouse apartments to fabled Wembley, with many stops along the way to deal with hangers-on and the unwashed masses. The masses come off much better, on the whole, than the toffs and spivs who look down upon them. I have only been a tourist in London, so I don’t have the nostalgia for a time forgot that might be the book’s effect on those who have lived or even grown up in that city central to Britain. But there is a homesick tinge to the vibrant charge running through the entire book, and many of P. B. Yuill’s trenchant commentaries on society seem like they could have been made last week.

She had all the trendy ideas, men were destructive, society was polluting itself to death, our food was poisoned, war was coming in two minutes and our only hope was to kneel in front of hairy gurus from caves in India and find inner harmony.

Even in our app-filled age, some trendy ideas have more staying power

Really, I meant it so many words ago when I noted that my own words were not adequate to convey how terrifically good this book is. Is there something about the Cockney life that engenders such poetry in speech and prose? Perhaps a magic in the pints and The Pinch? There are bottles of amber fluid the world over, but wordsmithery of this exceptional quality is a rare delight. Cynical without being weary, fallible without being egregious, and loyal without being a prig about it, James Hazell is my new favorite detective. I cannot wait to read the first two books in the series, though I also don’t want to finish reading all the books in the series.

* The Interwebs list four books by P. B. Yuill, and usually state that all four are by the above mentioned team of Williams and Venables. However, some of the commentary on the first book published under that pseudonym would indicate that that book, The Bornless Keeper, was written solely by Gordon Williams. In any case, the book does not feature Jim Hazell, and, by the accounts I read on screens emitting light towards my eyes, it is not very good.

† Who knew that ‘Scouse’ was a dialect of Merseyside, or even that there is such a county as Merseyside, and that therefore one might call fans of Everton ‘Scouses’?

Turn On The Heat, by Erle Stanley Gardner

Erle Stanley Gardner created more than the always triumphant lawyer Perry Mason. So prolific was the writer-lawyer that he fed the pulps with stories from the pseudonymous pens of over a half dozen noms de plume, creating dozens of characters pleasing readers of mysteries and westerns for over a decade even before the first Perry Mason novel saw print. And though he went on to write over eighty novels featuring the hard-charging defense attorney fortunate enough never to have a guilty client, Gardner kept on dishing out other stories, creating a number of other mystery series, most notable among them the Cool & Lam series featuring Donald Lam, the featherweight but brainy detective working for the agency led by Bertha Cool, a hefty and mercenary woman holding her own quite well in a man’s world.

Those whose experience of Erle Stanley Gardner’s characters consists only of repeated viewings of Raymond Burr’s turn as Perry Mason in the long-running TV show have very little idea just how quick-witted Gardner’s heroes were, nor just how much action he packed into his early mysteries. Members of the A/V club might get a slight idea from the earliest Perry Mason movies starring Warren Williams as the fast-talking, fast-moving lawyer—though those films take serious liberties with the series. In the earliest novels, Perry Mason has no compunction against breaking and entering, and will do almost anything to save his clients.

In a very similar vein and then some, the Cool & Lam series features the clever footwork and cleverer mouthwork of Donald Lam, a quondam lawyer now doing the actual investigation work for Bertha Cool. Written originally under the pen name A.A. Fair, Turn On The Heat is the second book in the series (which ran to well over two dozen titles). This 1940 tale starts with a mysterious investigation for a mysterious Mr. Smith of a woman missing for some twenty years from a moribund Southern California thorp. Lam sticks out like a sore thumb in the no-horse town of Oakview as he pursues the cold trail of Mrs. Lintig, where he almost immediately runs into trouble.

I watched my chance and lurched across the seat. I grabbed the steering-wheel with both hands and jerked. I couldn’t turn the wheel, although the car swerved to one side of the road and the back to the other as he exerted pressure to counteract mine. He snapped up his elbow without taking his hand off the wheel, and it caught me on the point of my sore jaw, making me loosen my grip. Something like a pile driver caught me on the back of the neck, and the next I remembered I was lying flat on my back in the dark trying to figure where I was.

Donald takes a chance and is taken for a ride

Now there’s a reason Lam’s legacy is as a quick-witted detective: he’s no good in a fight. He can’t throw a punch worth a damn and he takes a beating worse than Ned Beaumont, and much more often. He lives by his wits and lucky for him he has a good deal more than his fair share. In Turn On The Heat Lam shows off his ability to keep a dozen bluffs running at once while he figures out just what is behind the sudden interest in a runaway bride long gone since before the Jazz Age. Gardner’s deft and witty prose and dialogue keep pace with his scrawny detective’s perpetual motion through the minefield of secrets he must cross to arrive at the truth behind the seemingly straightforward ‘find the woman’ assignment he is given. The action never stops in this second outing in the Cool & Lam series, and neither does Donald Lam’s headlong rush—sometimes chin first—through dangers both physical and legal as he skates near corruption and murder. He plays the hand he’s given the best way he knows how: all in.

Bertha Cool started to drum with her thick, jeweled fingers on the top of the desk. “What a mess,” she said.

“You cooked it,” I told her.

“I’m sorry, Donald.”

“I thought you would be.”

“Listen, couldn’t you take over and—”

“Nothing doing,” I said. “If you hadn’t known anything about it, I could have gone ahead and done what I thought was necessary. I could have acted dumb and if anyone had questioned me, they could never have proved anything except that I was dumb. Now, it’s different. You know. What you know might get found out.”

“You could trust me, lover,” she said.

“I could, but I don’t.”

“You don’t?”

“No.”

Her eyes hardened and I said, “No more than you trusted me a few minutes ago.”

Sometimes being smart means playing dumb, and sometimes it means playing it smart, but it always means playing it close to the chest

I simply devoured this thriller, and hadn’t intended to finish the same day I started it, but what are you gonna do? It has been many years since I read one of the ‘off-brand’ Erle Stanley Gardner mysteries, and I seem to recall that the Cool & Lam series turns a little runny—more half-baked than hard-boiled—late in its run, just as the Perry Mason novels do after the first twenty years. But I am not sure that is actually the case; trust my recollection as you would any other assertion you found on the Interwebs. I have a few of the later books featuring Bertha Cool and Donald Lam—Turn On The Heat is the earliest in the series I own—and so I’ll report back to you once I’ve read some of those products of Gardner’s ‘more mature’ consideration. For now, it’s two thumbs up for me. Come for the lurid cover, stay for the exciting whiz-bang ending.