Gumshoe

Gumshoe by Rob Lininger, the first novel about private investigative trainee, Mortimer Angle, is the most ridiculous, absurd story that I’ve read, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Just the name of the protagonist should give you a clue to the tongue-in-cheek, wisecracking tone of this novel. After 14 years as an IRS agent, Mort finally decided he had enough, it was time for a career change to something with more adventure, a job that didn’t automatically kill a conversation at a cocktail party.

The story opens with the disappearance of Reno’s mayor and district attorney, who just happen to have been buddies since high school. Within hours of the time Mort has received his license as a PI-trainee, he discovered the decapitated head of Jonnie Sjorgen, the mayor, which he found it in the trunk of the car of his ex-wife, Dallas, who had been sleeping with Jonnie on and off for the last two years. That was just the first of three severed heads found by Mort. The second head was that of the DA, Dave Millliken, and the third was Mort’s nephew Gregory Rudd who ran the PI firm where Mort was working. It turned out that the men’s brains had been removed from their heads, and their genitals were inserted there. Wow, a novel about dickheads.

The author developed some good characters around Mort including a lineage of dark women figures starting with Jacoba, a retarded girl that Jonnie and Dave had some “fun” with during high school. Dallas was horrified by the beheadings, and of course she turned to Mort for comfort. Then there was the stunning and naked “K” who just suddenly appeared in Mort’s bed, and the PI that Mort hired to help him with the case, power lifter and marshal arts star Jeri DiFrazzia.

If you’re in the mood for a break from the usual crime novel genre, this should be a welcome read. The author brings an impossible story to a very satisfactory conclusion. I know I’ll find more time for Rob Leininger novels. Thanks to Matt Gage for the recommendation.

Hidden By The Leaves

Hidden By The Leaves is the first book in the Hidden Trilogy by SDL Curry, and the subject matter has to do with the 17^th century attempt by the third shogun to rid Japan of Christianity which had been flourishing there for the last 75 years. Between 1614 and 1643, about 5,000 Christians were executed.

I spent an hour with this book and decided not to continue. There were two issues that I found difficult. First, the dialogue of the characters was exceedingly pedestrian.

Second, the author had a decidedly Christian bias in his review of the historical events. He dedicated his books “to all the courageous martyrs and missionaries of Japan.” In the foreword, Curry wrote that the people on whom this historical novel were based were the “real heroes of history, who are just, including all the brave missionaries of the Society along with their faithful converts.” In a letter to his superior about the prosecution, Father Joaquim Martinez wrote that the shogun perceived that Christian “teachings and the Word of God” threatened his authority, which of course it did. As if it was untrue, he wrote of the shogun, “He suspects that somehow the peasants are being seduced and supported by a foreign power. Regrettably, he believes the Society is the channel for that foreign power – a suspicion that has led to our persecution and torture…. I know God will be with us, and His Word will take foundation in Japan.”

I’m too tired of the use of religion to justify intrusions into societies where such beliefs are not voluntarily sought, tired of the religiously entitled who believe their views are the only correct ones, and tired of allegedly righteous slaughter in the name of deity. I’ve read other books about this period that were fascinating and did not need to glorify one viewpoint over another to capture the historical content of the moment. I can’t give Curry’s efforts my endorsement.

A Cold Day in Paradise

Alex McKnight was a cop in Detroit, but that ended 14 years earlier when he was shot three times by a madman called Rose. Rose also killed McKnight’s partner, and he left McKnight with a bullet lodged to near his heart and spine for safe removal. After his recovery, he moved to the Upper Peninsula in Michigan where his father had built some hunting lodges that McKnight had inherited and was now renting out. Recently McKnight got talked into getting his license to be a private investigator. This is the first in an 11-book series, several of which have already been reviewed in the blog.

This 1998 book, A Cold Day in Paradise, introduces the reader to McKnight and the cast of characters that will be developed in the course of Hamilton’s novels. Roy Maven is the highly irritable and troublesome Chief of Police, Leon Prudell is an investigator who has been displaced by McKnight, and Jackie is the owner of the Glasgow Inn which is central to life in McKnight’s Paradise, Michigan.

In this story, two bookies are grotesquely murdered, and clues are left that tie their deaths to the man who shot McKnight. But Rose is still in maximum security at the Jackson State Prison, so how could he have done this? Ultimately, I found the story to be absurd. As much as I like Hamilton’s characters, this is not the best of his books. I would put this series about McKnight in my category of “airplane books,” something to distract you on a cross-country flight, but which not keep you awake if you needed to grab a nap. Still, I keep getting drawn back to Hamilton, so have a look.

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

If you are a TV viewer, you've no doubt seen the TV trailers for the upcoming movie of the same name. The movie appears to follow the fate of three black women who worked as 'human computers' at NASA during the Mercury missions era. I thought the trailers looked interesting and did a little digging and found that the movie is based on a book. So I put in my request to the local library. Within a week, I was deep into the story. My thoughts are about the book, not the movie as I haven't seen it yet.  but that doesn't stop me from voicing some thoughts of the eternal books vs. movie arguement.

The story opens in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Germany is pressing their neighbors and have made significant inroads into the use of airplanes as an offensive weapon. Fighter and bomber designs are significantly superior to what their opponents have.

The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics was a relatively inconsequential program within the US government that had been studying, refining, and testing new airplane designs for quite some time. In the early 1940s, Dorothy Vaughan, a Farmville, VA math teacher, saw an ad in the local post office for mathematicians. Specifically, females to work at the NACA located in nearby Hampton, VA (near Norfolk, Newport News, and Virginia Beach). She was hoping for a summer job. The ad was meant for white women at the local all-girls college. But the region's black newspapers extolled the wartime job opportunities so Dorothy applied to be what was called a human computer in NACA's Langley Aeronautical Memorial Laboratory. The job was to crunch the numbers that the (white) engineers gave them. As the 40s marched on, so did the need for a whole bunch of STEM types: science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Wasn't long before a whole office full of black 'computers' was hired. 

For Virginia in the 1940s, these math jobs were almost unheard of for blacks. Back then, Virginia wasn't the best example of progressive social enlightenment. It was one of the last to accept Brown v. Board of Education, actively fought against equal pay for equal work, and was visibly segregated on and off the Langley campus.

While Dorothy wasn't the first black female computer, she was one of the most sought after by the engineers because of her accuracy and her commitment. Her successes led to opportunities for black women hired after her. In particular Katherine Johnson and Mary Jackson both of whom were instrumental in the early days of space flight. Johnson would be the go-to person in calculating takeoff, flight, and re-entry trajectories for most of the Mercury flights.

As with most adaptations by Hollywood, they take some liberties to present a reasonably coherent story (and dialogue) within the typical 2ish hour time frame. From what little I know about the movie, the screenplay has deviated from the book to follow Vaughan, Johnson, and Jackson through their time at Langley. The book, however, digs far deeper into the social injustices reaped on blacks in the mid 20th century, the state of Virginia in particular.

Shetterly takes us inside the homes, neighborhoods, churches, picnics, socials, sports, and more of the lives surrounding these uniquely gifted women. In doing so, she shows us how these women had to walk a delicate line between the good things their jobs were giving them and what they were giving to their job vs. the realities of life as blacks in a deeply divided state. Langley may not have had overt racism on the campus, but it was there. Newspapers were asking, “Help us to get some of the blessings of democracy here at home first before you jump on the ‘free other peoples’ bandwagon and tell us to go forth and die in a foreign land” (1942 Norfolk Journal and Guide).

In the late 1940s, Virginia and Hampton had "colored water fountains, bathrooms, segregated seating in diners and public transportation. NACA had those, too. Less by design and more by behavioral history – everybody just did it because they’d always done it. Except for bathrooms. ‘Colored’ bathrooms remained." And when far from the cafeteria, wasn’t long before one female computer had to go and just used the closest toilet. Passive resistance or an overfilled bladder? No matter. The die was cast and another wall tumbled inside Langley way before it fell off the campus.

As the book moves into the late 1950s and Sputnik, then into the 1960s and Kennedy's wish to put a man on the moon, there were other social triumphs: “Civil Rights act of 1964. Voting Rights Act of 1965. Jim Crow laws that defined workplaces, modes of transportation, public spaces, voting fell state by state. But economic and social mobility that had been held hostage by legal discrimination remained stuck.”

In the middle 1960s, Star Trek helped solidify science and technology in the mainstream living room.  Shetterly tells the story of Nichelle Nichols (Urhuru) who wanted to leave the show after one year. However, at an NAACP event in LA, Nichols met Dr. King (an devoted fan of the show) and mentioned her desire to return to the stage. “You can’t leave the show! We are there because you are there.” The public saw the future in Star Trek and in that future, a black woman was effectively the 4^th in command of a starship. She had to stay. She stayed, but not until after some serious soul searching.

Despite NASAs successes, Shetterly lets us know that even in the lifetimes of many who will read the book (and see the movie)  “so much money was spent between 1969-1972 to put a dozen white men on an express train to a lifeless world. Negro men and women still could barely cross state lines without worrying about predatory police, restaurants that refused to serve them, service stations that wouldn’t let them buy gas or use the restroom. And the government wants to put a white man on the moon?”

My point is that the book is really in two interconnected lessons. One lesson is the story of a number of black computers (not just the three in the movie) and the pivotal role they played in the rapid advancement of American aeronautics and space travel. The second far more important lesson is about the societal ills that were the way of life and the changes that occurred between roughly 1940 and 1970. Both are history lessons, but overall, Shetterly uses the computers as vehicles to present just how bad things continued to be 80 years after Lincoln's Proclamation.

I grew up in the DC suburbs of Maryland in the 1950s. Family vacations were spent in rural NC east of Raleigh. Farms. Tobacco. Segregation. I can vividly remember seeing those signs over water fountains and bathroom doors. Shetterly is unapologetic in her presentation of what mid 20th century blacks had to face and overcome, even (or especially) the educated mathematicians of the day.

Back to the Hollywood vs. 'the book' argument. Of course they will be different. The mediums dictate that a commercial movie can never present the entirety of a book. Hollywood takes liberties. When John Grishman was asked if he was happy with the way his book The Firm was presented, he said once he signed on the dotted line, the story was no longer his. So while we readers may look down our collective noses at film adaptations, I give you Schindler's List. Like many, I thought Spielberg made a brilliant movie and was inspired to read the book by the Austrian Thomas Keneally to read about what had been left out of the movie. How different was Steven Zaillian's screenplay from the book? To say night and day tells you little. Personally, I thought the book was almost unreadable. A relatively incoherent mess. I was stunned and impressed that a screenwriter could take that book and come up with the story the Spielberg so brilliantly directed.

Bottom line: don't assume that a book will always be superior to the movie. Read one and see the other. Then draw your own conclusions. I'm planning on seeing the film when it opens in about two weeks. If I had to form an opinion right now, I think the two will differ significantly and while reveling in the joy of the movie I will also be appreciating what the screenwriter had to do to put a cinema-worthy story on paper from a book that is essentially a sobering, but exquisitely written, history lesson.

ECD