Today I cheated
and read the rest of Jayne Anne Phillips’ Quiet
Dell because I was so desperate to finish it and move on to something else.
In this last 100 pages, we finally get to the trial, which Phillips managed to
divest of almost all drama, which is no mean feat bearing in mind that it was
held (just like Powers’ actual trial) in an opera house. Although the trial
would have been an obvious moment to flesh out Powers’ character, he remains
little more than a cipher, a boogeyman in whose motives and personality
Phillips remains conspicuously uninterested. As I mentioned before, this would
not necessarily be a weakness in the book if there were other characters about
whom we cared, but there aren’t. Inevitably, Emily ends up adopting Mason the
street urchin as her legal guardian and by the end of the novel, Powers is
safely executed, Mason is safely at boarding school, and Emily and William are
safely on their way to a romantic trip to Paris after exchanging commitment
rings by the graves of the Eicher children (an odd choice!). Nothing could be
more sentimental, predictable, or tedious. Thank goodness I’m done.
On a happier
note (sort of), I also finished Antonio Olmos’ book of London crime scene
photos, The Landscape of Murder. The
main part of the book consists of large reproductions of 79 of the 210 photos
Olmos took for this project, and then all 210 photos are reproduced in
thumbnail size at the end of the book. Each of the photos is accompanied by a
short text that gives the name of the victims and perpetrators, the location
and circumstances of the killing, and the legal conclusion of the case. This
final piece of information seems to me to a weakness in the book in the sense
that it is there as a salve to the reader’s conscience. By implying that
justice has been or will be done, it both gives the reader a sense that our perusal
of these photographs is socially useful and that the circumstances of the
deaths are a little less bleak than they seem. I’m not sure that either of
these implicit claims is true, but it does put the text and images in the book
in a curious tension with each other. One final observation from the
perspective of a British ex-pat who has lived in America for many years: it’s
striking to me how few of these murders feature guns. It doesn’t take much
imagination to figure out how much higher the death toll would be if guns
featured not only in the events depicted in this book but also in the thousands
of punch-ups in which the end result is just cuts and bruises. I think this is
the aspect of the book that would stand out most to an American reader.
As a scholar of
crime fiction, I’m always interested in film adaptations of the genre, so the
title of Buster Keaton’s 1924 film, Sherlock
Jr. caught my eye. As it turns out, only the title is really significant in
this regard, as an example of how early Sherlock Holmes became the ‘type’ of
the detective, but this is a great silent slapstick film for many other
reasons. Keaton plays a movie projectionist who is also studying how to become
a detective, and when he’s accused of stealing from the house of his would-be
love interest, Keaton ingeniously combines these two worlds when his character ‘dreams’
himself into a movie he’s showing as a detective figure. There are the
trademark sight gags and stunts that we associate with any Keaton movie
(including one in which Keaton apparently injured himself quite badly) but the
best part of this film is the self-referential way in which it blends the ‘real’
world with the fictional world of film. There’s a lovely example of this at the
end of the film when Keaton and his love interest are reconciled and Keaton
studies the love scene he’s projecting for cues on how to behave in real life.
This goes smoothly until the film’s reconciliation scene jump cuts to marriage
and children, which gives Keaton’s character pause! Beautifully done.
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