“As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust” by Alan Bradley

 

448 pages, Bantam, ISBN-13: 978-0345539946

In As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust by Alan Bradley, 12-year-old Flavia de Luce laments her banishment (her word) to Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy, the boarding school that her mother, Harriet, once attended across the sea in deepest, darkest Canada (and author Bradley’s homeland). Flavia’s first day in captivity begins as one might expect…when a charred and mummified body tumbles out of her bedroom chimney, giving our favorite budding chemist and preteen detective a chance to once-more prove her skills to the world.

While attending classes, making friends – and enemies – her own age (a first for Flavia), and assessing the school’s stern headmistress and faculty (one of whom is an acquitted poisoner, much to Flavia’s delight), Flavia is on the hunt for the victim’s identity, suspects, means and motives, just like a proper detective. Furthermore, she must confront the rumors that Miss Bodycote’s is haunted and that several girls have disappeared without a trace. So then…nothing new for Flavia de Luce, and just what one would expect in her world.

In many ways, this book is a return to form for Flavia, seeing as she is in a new environment and must prove herself all over again. She is still an unlikely mix of brilliance and precocious self-confidence, and all of her adventures to date have been entertaining, well-constructed and (somehow) plausible. This particular volume rather put me in mind of I Am Half-Sick of Shadows and The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches for, like those previous books, the murder investigation takes second place to other, more pressing (for Flavia) concerns; namely, SCHOOL.

It quickly becomes evident why Bradley chose to keep Flavia out of these prisons, for the constrictions placed upon our heroine makes crime-solving so much more difficult. While there is a great deal to distract Flavia from the mundane everyday existence of the average schoolgirl – impressing the headmistress and her chemistry teacher, influencing a Ouija board reading, sticking up for a bullied girl, and so on – she must still navigate the Ins-and-Outs of the boarding school, and so the crime takes a backseat most of the time to these other concerns.

But this is a school like no other, for eventually Flavia learns that the headmistresses has ulterior motives for keeping her around that relate to her newfound position in life as a Secret Agent in the making. I was rather unsure about this unforeseen change in fortunes for Flavia, but at heart it doesn’t feel wrong or off-the-wall. Just peculiar. Depending on how far these books go – can you imagine a young Flavia de Luce in Swinging London, riding a Vespa and solving murders in short skirts and go-go boots? – we could very well see a Flavia the Spy series in the future.

Flavia is as intelligent and curious as she ever was. She jumps to conclusions (which aren’t always right) but also, above all, reveres the scientific process. And Bradley, as always, is excellent at describing Flavia’s leaping and whirling mind – “Feigning stupidity was one of my specialties. If stupidity were theoretical physics, then I would be Albert Einstein”. Classic. While the mystery takes time to develop and evolve, there is still plenty of Flavia to go around as she maneuvers through this new chapter in her life.

For all that…Flavia belongs at Buckshaw, as I really missed Dogger, Mrs. Mullet, Inspector Hewitt and Gladys (hell, I’d even like to see Ophelia, Daphne and Colonel de Luce). While I understand that Bradley felt the need to mix things up, I hope that As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust is but an interlude and that Flavia returns to her old stomping grounds of Bishop’s Lacey – or, seeing as how her mother was much more than she seemed (to say nothing of Aunt Felicity), maybe Flavia will follow in Harriet’s footsteps and fly away to parts unknown.

I was pleasantly surprised to find at the end of As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust the one-and-only (thus far) Flavia de Luce short story, The Curious Case of the Copper Corpse. Flavia has been called to investigate a murder in a local boy’s school by one of the boys in which the victim has been electroplated in copper in an empty bathtub; her “client” had had a huge row with the man a short time earlier and he is afraid he’s going to be charged for the murder and wants Flavia to clear his name before the police are called. Will she solve the mystery before the body is discovered by the authorities? Hey, this is Flavia de Luce we are talking ‘bout. I won’t spoil the mystery, suffice it to say that it is a Flavia story and all the hallmarks of what make Flavia’s adventures so engaging are here. Do they work as effectively in a short story? Well…Yes and no. Of necessity the story wraps up quickly but, then again, Bradley gives us a mystery which fits well with a quick solution. But it is also fitting with who Flavia is that she would be present if a dead body turned up in her village in odd circumstances. My complaint is with the motive behind copper-plating the corpse as I just didn’t see why they did what they did; perhaps I missed it, but the reasoning behind electroplating a person escaped me. But for that it was an overall pleasant little diversion.

“Star Wars: The Triumph of Nerd Culture”, by Josef Benson

 

 

190 pages, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, ISBN-13: 978-1538116203

Star Wars: The Triumph of Nerd Culture by Josef Benson, an associate professor of Literatures and Languages at the University of Wisconsin–Parkside, is not a history of the Star Wars movies per se; their writing, shooting, releases and all that are discussed – as well as George Lucas’ other works, THX 1138 especially and even American Graffiti – but it is the following they created, the “Nerd Culture” of the title, that concerns Benson.

Well…officially, for Benson’s focus quickly switches not to the nerds who love Star Wars but to the man who created it, and Benson’s bias against Lucas informs damn near every sentence he writes and the way in which Lucas is depicted as some kind of latter-day techno-monk, obsessed with technology and emotionally – and sexually – stunted. All of which would have been fine if the subtitle to the book had been George Lucas on the Couch.

This long-distance psych-profiling of a man he doesn’t know (that he never even interviewed) undercuts most – if not all – of what he writes about, like when he says that while Lucas began life as a prototypical nerd in high school he then became a bully to all his fans when he gained power. Or when he writes that Lucas is “highly insecure about sex and sexuality in general”, all because he objected to a fanfic in which Darth Vader raped Han Solo. No, seriously.

His obsession with Lucas’ sex life doesn’t end there: Benson’s page-long description of how Lucas and his wife conceived their first biological child is outright disturbing and, of course, makes speculative leaps as to how Lucas needed technology to have a kid, seeing as how screwed up he is. This happens throughout the book as the main subject (Nerds) gets set-aside so that Benson can gaze into Lucas’ bedroom and describe what he thinks is going on in there

When he does return to the fans it is to insult and degrade them. He claims that they evidence religious-like worship of Lucas and his franchise by standing in lines to see his movies, that this was in fact a masochistic display of devotion to Lucas and that they were like “worshippers willing to make long and arduous treks to religious sites in order to experience their God” – OR…we had to wait in long lines because the movies were very popular and lots of people wanted to see them.

This is when these self-same nerds aren’t turning on their God and ripping his ideas and life work to shreds because of their betrayal by the same. Thus, any signs of admiration towards Lucas and Star Wars are treated as pathetic worshipfulness – while any signs of criticism towards George and his creation are treated as unhinged derangement. I tell ya the nerds just can’t catch a break, being either blindly devoted or abjectly hostile.

There’s more: Benson goes off on tangents unrelated to the subjects at hand, for instance Jim Jones, 2 Live Crew, Lucas the nerd-now-bully, and especially in regards to fanfic, devoting a chapter – “A Great Disturbance in the Force” – to the graphic depictions of what goes on in fan fiction. Also, while he goes into depth about The Clone Wars animated series, he says nothing whatsoever about Droids. And mustn’t forget the standard academic swipe against White Male Privilege.

Star Wars: The Triumph of Nerd Culture can best be described as speculative fiction in which Benson, intrepid discoverer of universal truths and sexual peccadillos, unmasks one of the most creative and driven – though flawed and controlling – men from the past 50 years. Oh, I’m certain that George Lucas has his quirks and demons – as do we all. I just didn’t have to read about them, especially in a book ostensibly about another topic by a man who doesn’t even know him.

“Death Comes to Pemberley”, by P.D. James

 

304 pages, Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN-13: 978-0307959850

I first watched “Death Comes to Pemberley” the miniseries when it came to PBS in 2013 before I assigned Death Comes to Pemberley the book by P.D. James for the Fraser Public Library’s Mysteries & Munchies book club – but that’s okay ‘cause I forget who did it. Upon reading this book I was immediately taken back to Pride & Prejudice (reviewed on May 24^th, 2021), and all of the characters I had come to know came to life once more. I must also admit that the miniseries from 1995 made a return, as well, and as I read Death Comes to Pemberley the actors from Andrew Davies’ adaptation came forth and inhabited their characters once again. And so there is Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Darcy, Colin Firth as Fitzwilliam Darcy, Susannah Harker as Jane Bingley, Crispin Bonham-Carter as Charles Bingley, Adrian Lukis as George Wickham and Julia Sawalha as Lydia Wickham, along with Emilia Fox as Georgiana Darcy, Anthony Calf as Colonel Fitzwilliam and David Bark-Jones as Martin Denny – hell, I even thought of Benjamin Whitrow as Mr. Bennet and Lucy Briers as Mary Bennet (er, Hopkins).

Death Comes to Pemberley begins in October 1803 – six years after the events in Pride and Prejudice – with Elizabeth and Darcy happily married with two young sons as they are preparing for the annual Lady Anne’s Ball that they host at Pemberley, the Darcy’s grand manor house in Derbyshire, England. This is when Lydia – Elizabeth’s sister and now Mrs. Wickham – arrives hysterically upset and claims that Wickham was murdered en route. Fitzwilliam Darcy, his cousin Colonel Fitzwilliam and others, including Henry Alveston, leave Pemberley to search for Wickham’s body (since it seems to have happened on Darcy’s land, he is responsible for getting to the bottom of the matter). However, when they reach the spot where Lydia said Wickham was murdered, they instead find Wickham alive and learn that it is in fact Martin Denny, Wickham’s boon companion, who is dead. Furthermore, Wickham tearfully confesses that he is responsible for Denny’s demise, thus evidently confessing to murder. And so, once again, Wickham has made a nuisance of himself and so, once again, Darcy must bail him out.

I won’t spoil any more of the plot for you, only to say that I think that James, naturally, wrote an admirable mystery, although with a rather convenient denouement, if I may be so bold. Her style is to be commended as throughout most of the book I believe that I heard echoes of Austen in the writing (although of course nobody can ever recreate that long-silenced voice). I also give James props for mentioning other Austen characters, such as the Elliot’s – that would be Anne and Admiral Wentworth, and the useless Sir Walter Elliot, Baronet – along with the Knightley’s and Smith’s of Highbury. What I found surprising about the book was that it was more of a 19^th Century English procedural than it was a mystery: we have the crime, the almost non-existent investigation, the inquest and then the trial, throughout all of which the same facts and theories are repeated. This is all rather interesting, to be sure, but not what I was expecting; if Georgian court proceedings are your thing then James has obliged you, but I, for one, was hoping for the crime-fighting duo of Elizabeth and Darcy to investigate the malfeasance at Pemberley and solve the case.

So there it is: with Death Comes to Pemberley some of our favorite Austen characters come to life once more, if only briefly, and engage us with their trials and travails just as they did before. Not exactly a Jane Austen tale, but a reasonable facsimile all the same.

“The Stand”, by Stephen King

 

823 pages, Doubleday & Company, ISBN-13: 978-0385121682

Way back in high school I went on a Stephen King kick and began reading all the books the Utica Public Library had – like The Stand, the ultimate in post-apocalyptic storytelling. I was surprised to learn in my research for this review that it was only King’s fourth novel, published in 1978. Nothing wrong with that, it was just that, seeing as how magisterial it was, I was expecting that it would have been from an older, more mature and self-assured writer. Perhaps that it was early in King’s career shows just what a good author he really was (I have not read a King novel in years so I can’t attest to what his more recent output is like).

The Stand is a post-apocalyptic dark fantasy novel about the aftermath of a deadly pandemic of weaponized influenza (nicknamed Captain Trips) in which 99.4% of the global population is wiped out and the all-too-few surviving humans gather into two opposing factions, fated to clash with each other. Each is led by a personification of either good or evil: Abagail Freemantle, also known as Mother Abagail, in Boulder, Colorado, and Randall Flagg, also known as the Dark Man, the Tall Man, or the Walkin’ Dude, in Las Vegas, Nevada. These factions fight for followers as they maneuver to lead humanity in a world born anew.

King was obviously not in a hurry to get to the final confrontation; while Captain Trips makes its appearance on Page 1 and the consequences follow just as quickly, King has us follow both essential and nonessential characters as they come and go, the situations they find themselves in get worse and worse and the sense of impending doom permeates the whole. That King should spend so much time in world building – or, I guess I should say, world dooming – may bore some readers, but it is, in fact, necessary in creating a world as real and believable as our own in which Big Ideas can be explored and debated. As King himself said:

 

For a long time – ten years, at least – I had wanted to write a fantasy epic like The Lord of the Rings, only with an American setting. I just couldn't figure out how to do it. Then…after my wife and kids and I moved to Boulder, Colorado, I saw a 60 Minutes segment on CBW (chemical-biological warfare). I never forgot the gruesome footage of the test mice shuddering, convulsing, and dying, all in twenty seconds or less. That got me remembering a chemical spill in Utah, that killed a bunch of sheep (these were canisters on their way to some burial ground; they fell off the truck and ruptured). I remembered a news reporter saying, ‘If the winds had been blowing the other way, there was Salt Lake City’. This incident later served as the basis of a movie called Rage, starring George C. Scott, but before it was released, I was deep into The Stand, finally writing my American fantasy epic, set in a plague-decimated USA. Only instead of a hobbit, my hero was a Texan named Stu Redman, and instead of a Dark Lord, my villain was a ruthless drifter and supernatural madman named Randall Flagg. The land of Mordor (‘where the shadows lie’, according to Tolkien) was played by Las Vegas.

 

For a novel of this size I found the character development to be excellent – and there are a LOT of characters, to be sure. Except, strangely enough, for the two leaders: Flagg just wasn’t that scary, seeming more impish than evil – and his motivations beyond being The Bad Guy who has been bad for a long time were opaque, at best. And Mother Abigail was the personification of sainthood, which made her preachy-boring as all get out. Beyond these character’s ability to contact potential followers via dreams, I found it strange that they could gather people to them giving their apparent lack of personalities or fortitude. The story needed to happen, though, and so there they are.

The Stand is also filled with amazingly powerful scenes – just take the opening, for instance, in which Campion, the deserter, weaves towards the gas station in Arnett – along with tracts of fluff in which I kept thinking to myself “Steve, get on with it already”. Some of this is worldbuilding, I know – but not all of it. In 1990, The Stand was reprinted as a Complete and Uncut Edition in which King restored over 400 pages from the text that were initially reduced from his original manuscript, but I wonder if even more than 400 pages couldn’t have been cut, seeing as how so much of what I read seemed like filler. I dunno.

The Stand isn’t perfect (but then again what is?); it is, however, entertaining, thought-provoking, shocking, lurid, violent, inspirational and simply unputdownable. Really, back in the day I was up well past my bedtime reading just one more chapter before exhaustion finally got the better of me. It has stayed with me all these years later and, even though I enjoyed both of the television miniseries adaptations – the first in 1994 and the second in 2020 (in which a world-altering virus took on a newer, darker appreciation) – the book was and is still better, and proves that King is more than just a mere “horror writer”. He is a true wordsmith.

“India’s Love Lyrics, Including The Garden of Kama”, collected & arranged in verse by Laurence Hope

 

181 pages, Dodd, Mead and Company

I don’t remember where I picked-up India’s Love Lyrics by Laurence Hope (more on that later), but I bet I kept it for its age, as 2025 is its 100^th birthday. Originally copyrighted in 1902 (a mere two years before Hope died in Madras, India, aged only 39), my edition comes from 1925 and is missing the front cover and the first couple of pages have been wrenched from the spine – but its what’s been hand-written on those pages that is of interest: “With best love, Josie, May 29^th, 1926”. I don’t know who Josie was nor to whom her gift was meant for. As to how it ultimately ended up in my possession that, too, is a mystery, never to be learned. I just hope to whomever Josie gave these poems to was worth it.

Right, let’s get on with it: the English poet Laurence Hope was in fact the English poet Violet Nicolson, or Adela Florence Nicolson, née Cory, who was introduced to Indian food, customs and poetry by her husband, Colonel Malcolm Hassels Nicolson. These poems were first published in 1901 as supposed translations and arrangements of old Indian poems, rather than as the original works they were later revealed to be. Nicolson’s output would prove to be small and doubly tragic when her husband died in a prostate operation; Adela, who had been prone to depression since childhood, committed suicide by poisoning herself at the age of 39 on October 4^th, 1904 in Madras, where she was also buried. Too few works in too little time.

As should be of no surprise from a woman who lived in India for much of her life, her poems often employ the imagery and symbols of the poets of the Northwest Frontier of India, along with the Sufi poets of neighboring Iran. Her poems are typically about unrequited love and loss, as well as the death that followed such an unhappy state of affairs. Many of them have an air of autobiography or confession; indeed, it was apparent to some of her contemporaries that her poems were deeply personal, even confessional, despite her use of pseudonyms and fictionalized authors. Nicolson would prove to be among the most popular romantic poets of the Edwardian era, an indication as to just how culturally ebullient this society really was.

This is all well and good, but just what am I talking about here? Well…this, “To the Unattainable”:

 

Oh, that my blood were water, thou athirst,

And thou and I in some far Desert land,

How would I shed it gladly, if but first

It touched thy lips, before it reached the sand.

 

Once, – Ah, the Gods were good to me, – I threw

Myself upon a poison snake, that crept

Where my Beloved – a lesser love we knew

Than this which now consumes me wholly – slept.

 

But thou; Alas, what can I do for thee?

By Fate, and thine own beauty, set above

The need of all or any aid from me,

Too high for service, as too far for love.

I have no ear for poetry, but each and every one of these poems spoke to me. So maybe that is why I have held onto my battered and beaten copy of India’s Love Lyrics.

“Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons”, by Ben Riggs

 

293 pages, St. Martin’s Press, ISBN-13: 978-1250278043

I first delved into the history of Dungeons & Dragons with Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons by Jon Peterson (reviewed on August 17^th, 2023). While that magisterial book delved deep into the origins of not only D&D but of TSR, as well, it ended in 1985 when Gary Gygax was forced out of the company he’d founded. With Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons by Ben Riggs, we have a less-detailed yet more-complete story of the rises and falls of D&D and TSR and all the rest of it, not only from its beginnings in Lake Geneva, WI, in 1973 but to its acquisition by Wizards of the Coast in 1997.

Maybe the first quarter of the book is about Gary Gygax, the founding of TSR and the creation of D&D, along with some of TSR’s other, ultimately abortive attempts to expand its D&D franchise beyond the roleplaying table and into other mediums, especially television and movies. Popular wisdom seems to hold that Gygax was blameless for the misfortunes that befell him and his company while holding that Lorraine Williams was the villain who stole his company and ran it into the ground, leaving it as easy pickings for rival Wizards of the Coast. As is usual in such cases, the truth is much more complicated and, it must be said, interesting.

Under Riggs’ pen (or keyboard?), Williams is just as quirky and individualistic as every other nutjob working at TSR, although with a focus on the business aspect of the company rather than it’s creative. Gygax, meanwhile, while undoubtedly a creative dynamo, was a poor businessman, spending money like it was water on a litany of projects, like trying to raise a shipwreck from the bottom of a lake, or a hard-R Dungeons and Dragons movie when they were marketing the game to kids. The cartoon (of which I never missed an episode, FYI) was a good way to expand the market for his product, but precious few of his ideas really had merit.

In contrast, Lorraine Williams was an excellent businesswoman who was disinterested in the product TSR produced and kept her distance from her employees, a bad combination for a creativity-driven company. She was also obsessed with the Buck Rogers IP and erroneously believed it would be a massive success (the fact her family owned the rights to Buck Rogers had NOTHING to do with her beating this dead horse). Later, she would attempt to move out of the tabletop roleplaying game business into paperback publishing because they were selling far more books than games, a move the obsessive gamers within loathed.

There’s a lot to talk about here, and I, for one, was shocked to learn that the 90s was not the silver age of TSR I imagined it to be, the era that I really came to know and play the game. All the products I loved – the player character Handbooks, Ravenloft, Dark Sun, Planescape, Al-Qadim and all the rest – that were being produced by a successful and robust company (I thought) were in fact desperate throws of the dice by a company trying to grow the game by attracting new players with these new campaign settings. Other plans – like partnering with DC to make comics, and then screwing DC by making their own “comic modules” – failed and cost the company millions.

Ben Riggs has written a fascinating story with reams of detail gleaned from interviews with many of the power players involved (not the dead ones, and not Lorraine Williams); if said interviewees contradict one another, Brigg’s is very good at giving us insight into both what actually happened and the biases of those recalling. The writing is cheeky but accessible, not to say irreverent, what with Riggs’ references to “Saint Gary” or TSR’s HQ as the Q-Tip factory. I have to say, however, that I enjoyed this book because of all of the detailed background of the founding I received after having read Game Wizards by Peterson, so you may want to do the same.

Slaying the Dragon is, then, the tragic tale of how a small, independent company that made games for geeks and squares the world over was brought down by stupidity and mismanagement (they passed on a Lord of the Rings RPG?!) only to be swallowed up by another independent firm (that would be Wizards of the Coast) that was, in turn, eaten whole by that gaming leviathan Hasbro. While D&D is still alive and kicking, it is only as an adjunct of a larger corporate giant without identity or spirit. While I’d rather have any D&D than no D&D at all, that chaotic, creative spirit of the original is long gone – and so is the magic.