Wired World

In When Gravity Fails (1987), George Alec Effinger transports us to the year 2172 and drops us gently into the Budayeen, a walled quarter within a city located near the forbidding Sahara Desert. The world has long since become politically Balkanized; the old mega-countries are now fractured into republics, kingdoms, principalities, and emirates. It is an otherwise quite recognizable place. People travel in traditional conveyances, cars, ships, and planes. Communication technologies are no more advanced than the ones we use today. Economics are not necessarily manipulated by vast corporations controlled by unseen hands, but are still very much a matter of personal dealings in small markets, souks, and shops. Business is business.

Religion too is still with us. The Budayeen, its surrounding city, and all of North Africa is permeated by Islamic civilization. The Word of the Prophet is revered, the surahs of his Qu’ran are respectfully observed, and, inshallah, peace prevails.

Nevertheless, the Budayeen is a dangerous place. It is a rough-and-tumble tourist trap, featuring bars, clubs, street thieves, con artists, flagrant prostitutes, and murderous predators, all rather casually policed, with a well-populated cemetery.

The distinguishing difference in this world of tomorrow is the development of medical procedures and pharmacology with particular regard to and much encouragement of physical re-engineering and sexual transformation. Men can readily become women and vice versa, producing an indeterminate sexual gestalt and a general climate of experimentation and tolerance. Direct modifications of the human brain are now commonplace through surgical implants that permit those suitably “wired” to become anyone or anything commercially available in “moddies” – or, more menacingly, black market personality modifiers. By the simple expedient of “chipping in” a small circuit board package, one can become any fictional character from literature or any actual character from history from James Bond to Genghis Khan. Under the stimulation of a “moddie”, one vividly experiences that person in thought, word, and deed for as long as one wishes, with true identity submerged. “Daddies” are also on hand – temporary data transfer chips that lend instant knowledge of any language, skill, or corpus of facts, however esoteric, for as long as the chip is in place.

To navigate this world safely, unaltered by surgery, with integrity intact, one must be “the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.” Our narrator, Marid Audran, is such a man.

Marid is an easy-going hustler from the Maghreb, an arid, desolate region of Algeria, where the common denominator is poverty. He has found a home in the Budayeen, pulling himself up by his bootstraps from nothing to next-to-nothing by virtue of his reliability and brass. He has an uneasy relationship with the police, welcome acceptance by nightclub proprietors, camaraderie with his trio of friends, and the love of Yasmin, born a boy, now a voluptuous club dancer with the knockout looks that only surgery could provide. Muslim by birth, Marid is well-versed in his creed, but knows how to take it or leave it. He refuses to have his brain wired, preferring to find pleasure and solace in pharmaceutical products. As he puts it:

“Drugs are your friends, treat them with respect. You wouldn’t throw your friends in the garbage. You wouldn’t throw your friends down the toilet. If that’s the way you treat your friends or your drugs, you don’t deserve to have either. Give them to me.”

Politics is politics, so even the Budayeen is not impervious to influences agitating the world outside its walls. Marid accepts an assignment from a foreign diplomat to locate a missing person. His client is murdered before his eyes. Soon others in his social circle fall victim to grisly homicides. A monster is on the loose. He is recruited by Friedlander Bey, the Budayeen’s wealthy godfather, whose interests are threatened by the murders, to track down the killer. To prepare Marid for his dangerous mission, Friedlander Bey cajoles and intimidates Marid into the brain wiring he has always avoided, adding an extra implant and a rack of special “daddies” that sharpen Marid’s senses and suppress fear, anger, hunger, thirst, and lust. His investigation confronts mystery and mayhem with street smarts and hard-boiled banter.

In the book’s prefatory page, Effinger (1947 – 2002) acknowledges his debt to Raymond Chandler and his source for the title in a quote from Bob Dylan’s “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”. He wrote two sequels to When Gravity Fails. A Fire in the Sun (1989) and The Exile Kiss (1991) return Marid Audran, Friedlander Bey, the Budayeen, and many of the original characters, including Bill, the transplanted American taxi driver, who has had one of his lungs removed and replaced with a sac that drips a continuous psychotropic fluid into his bloodstream – a deliciously sardonic invention considering that the author suffered from childhood ailments that rendered him unable to pilot an automobile.

George Alec Effinger was born in Cleveland, Ohio and lived much of his life in New Orleans. His employment of courteous Arabic verbal genuflections and Muslim pieties add spice, and flavor his trilogy with cultural insight. If you relish science-fiction whodunits, inshallah, you may enjoy all three.

Larger Than Life

    Rex Stout died in 1975, 25 years before the pilot episode The Golden Spiders aired for A&E Network’s incarnation of his larger-than-life creation. Had he lived to see it, it is easy to imagine that he would have been delighted with Nero Wolfe.

    Stout’s whodunits sailed under stiff comic breezes, freighted with corpses but sparing of grisly details. His sleuth is a ratiocinating detective in the manner of Sherlock Holmes who never leaves his home on business, never discusses his cases at meals, dresses fastidiously, and adheres to a strict daily routine he is loathe to interrupt regardless what is at issue, money or murder. He is a 280-pound gourmand with a passion for orchids, beer, books, and leisure. His vocabulary is vast and he employs it as detectives of the hard-boiled variety use their fists. He solves all his cases by confronting suspects conveniently congregated in his office for the denouement. He is arrogant, irascible, petulant, bombastic, and indifferent to the charms of the fairer sex. He is a genius. He is Nero Wolfe.

    Our narrator is Archie Goodwin, Wolfe’s live-in legman, detective, secretary, bookkeeper, consultant, and scourge. Fearless, impudent, and jaunty, Archie is an even better dresser than Wolfe, possesses a steel trap memory, loves poker, corned beef sandwiches, and milk, dances gracefully, and has an eye for the ladies although he keeps his hands to himself. Wolfe hates to work and it is Archie’s job to prod him into accepting the cases that finance their lives, the four-story brownstone on Manhattan’s West 35th Street, Wolfe’s resident chef and housekeeper Fritz, and the 10,000 orchids on the top floor.

    Wolfe’s antagonist, though never his adversary, is perpetually apoplectic Inspector Cramer of Homicide West, who resent Wolfe’s civilian intrusion into police business, his high-handed tactics, and his unimpeachable success rate.

    Rex Stout wrote 73 Nero Wolfe stories from 1934 to 1975, a span of American history that began during Franklin Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats and extended through Richard Nixon’s Watergate denials, a compass that embraced the Great Depression, swing music, World War II, bebop, the atomic bomb, Korea, McCarthyism, rock ‘n roll, civil rights, the Space Age, Vietnam, and feminism, to name but a few of its salient cultural influences. Nevertheless, from beginning to end, the characters of Wolfe, Archie, Fritz, and Cramer are as ageless and impervious to social weathering as the figures on Mount Rushmore.

    The A&E Network aired 20 episodes of Nero Wolfe in 2001 and 2002. The series producers made two significant artistic decisions. First, they elected to retain a reverential regard for Rex Stout’s text, incorporating narrative and dialog lifted directly from the author’s pages. The interior of the brownstone, described in explicit detail in the original stories, is observed as exactly as an architect’s elevations, including the colors of the chairs in Wolfe’s office and the waterfall wall art that masks the peep hole in the adjoining front room. Second, they crystallized the series into one representative time period, circa 1953, a post-war moment epitomized by a certain exuberance in fashion and automobile design that informs both the smart look of the series and Archie’s attitude and attire.

    Timothy Hutton plays Archie Goodwin with superior panache. As an executive producer and the director of four of the episodes, Hutton had a strong hand in establishing the atmosphere and tone of the series.

    Maury Chaykin is Nero Wolfe. Though he does not possess the “seventh of a ton” physique of the character, he more than carries his weight in the role. He growls, roars, huffs, snaps, states assuredly and remonstrates implacably. His voice modulates from unction to umbrage with forceful inflection and flawless pronunciation.

    All the regulars from the novels and short stories are on hand. Colin Fox is dapper and correct as Fritz; Bill Smitrovich is a nest of angry hornets as Cramer; R.D. Reid is Cramer’s phlegmatic assistant Sergeant Purley Stebbins. The A-team detectives Saul Panzer (Conrad Dunn), Fred Durkin (Fulvio Cecere), and Orrie Cather are on call for backup. Omniscient newsman Lou Cohen (Saul Rubinek) of the Gazette is ever ready to trade insider gossip for scoops. Handy Doctor Vollmer, useful attorney Nathaniel Parker, and full-time orchid expert Theodore Horstmann make their appearances.

    A versatile repertory cast handles the various clients, suspects, and supporting characters. Kari Matchett, Boyd Banks, James Tolkan, Debra Monk, Mimi Kuzyk, Gary Reineke, Beau Starr, Robert Bockstael, Nicki Guadagni, Francie Swift, David Schurmann, Richard Waugh, Marian Seldes, Kathryn Zenna, Christine Brubaker, and M.J. Kang deliver considerable vim and solid thespian chops.

    Michael Small provides the swinging Nero Wolfe theme and incidental music.

    Rex Stout wrote most of his Nero Wolfe whodunits for pulp magazines. When he began, he was an older contemporary of luminous mystery writers Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. The stories of all three were designed to be diversions, literary transports for an audience accustomed to reading as a primary form of entertainment. In their construction, subject matter, and import, the work of these writers could scarcely be more different. What they shared was an exalted joy in the use of language. Hammett was a relentless original. Chandler had a muscular gift for description and characterization. Rex Stout specialized in wordplay. His setting and characters were necessarily formulaic and his plots just clever enough to keep the pages turning. It is Stout’s infusion of humor into Wolfe’s sonorous prosody and Archie’s sarcastic asides that endear the characters to us and rightfully canonize Nero Wolfe among detectives that dominate the fictional landscape. The A&E series does Wolfe justice and invigorates the monument.

(Review posted on Amazon.com, May 2010)

Dover In Miniature

Joyce Porter served in the Royal Air Force for 14 years. Later in life she enjoyed the travel that accompanied her international acclaim as a writer. It was therefore fitting that when she passed away in 1990 it was aboard an airplane, not in a crash but of a virus she contracted on a visit to China.

Porter’s great gift to her literary fans was Scotland Yard’s “least wanted man”, Detective Chief Inspector Wilfred Dover, who, from 1964 to 1985, in ten novels and eleven short stories, embarrassed his superiors, mortified his assistant, shocked local constabularies, and terrorized everyone associated with his murder investigations, the innocent quite as well as the guilty.

Dover was Oliver Hardy gone curdled: obese, obnoxious, cheap, lazy, incompetent, unhygienic, and omnivorous. With his pestilent bowler hat, his shabby, wrinkled black suit, his muddy, smelly boots, his fetid breath, and his Fuhrer mustache, he approached every case with the single-minded aim of getting it off the books as quickly as possible with the least inconvenience to himself. In his view, everyone was a culprit who deserved a browbeating until someone had sense enough to confess. If he had his druthers – which he stated plainly unless lying served him better, or pitiful whining, craven pleading, heartfelt complaints, and brutal threats went unavailing – he would simply have locked every suspect – man, woman, or child – in a small room and thumped them with a rubber truncheon until the truth was out.

Unfortunately for Dover that technique was frowned upon by the great British public, who insisted on rather annoying standards of humane behavior toward their criminal class that Dover found to be nothing but a nuisance to his methods and an impediment to his goal, that of retirement with full pension.

Dover’s excesses were curbed only by his long-suffering assistant, the prim, proper, courteous, educated, and elegant Detective Sergeant MacGregor. It was bad enough for MacGregor that his association with Dover stymied his professional ambition. His indignities were compounded by the tendency of the Yard to dispatch Dover to homicides well off the well-trod path in dreary localities whose principal features were inclement weather and acute shortage of amenities. One might almost suspect that Dover’s masters quite relished his prolonged absences from the office. For his part, Dover bitterly resented his energetic assistant’s diplomacy, observance of legal niceties, and evidence-gathering efforts. He cast a jaundiced eye on MacGregor,who cherished the quaint notion that justice should be the outcome of criminal investigations while Dover’s unshaken certainty was that arrests and, when the overly sympathetic courts would allow, convictions were the entire point. Dover reckoned that whether or not the accused was actually guilty was none of his business.

Joyce Porter was raised in a northern English village typical of the setting where most of the Dover whodunits unfold. Her keen ear for idiomatic speech and her sharply affectionate recollection of small town eccentrics enliven the caricatures that populate her stories. Her humor shines not merely in the preposterous Dover and his surly manners, but in the finely wrought prejudices and predilections of the minor characters.

Dover – The Collected Short Stories (1995) is the first aggregate of the short pieces. The reader need not fear that Dover in miniature is any less gratifying than in the novels. Even is small doses, Dover is churlish, abusive, outrageous, unsavory, and delightful.

(Review posted on Amazon.com, June 2010)