Classics: Oh, it’s Young Adult! Let me guess: a mystery that needs to be solved, a dragon, secret powers, a mIsUnDeStOoD prota- Young Adult: Oh, Classics, let me guess. An old country house, set in England, maybe, unrequited love, someone goes off to war and comes back married to someone else?
I have an interest in men’s clubs dating back to reading Around the World in 80 Days and The Time Traveler as a kid, and I have no idea why. Boys like clubs and clubhouses as a rule, I think, and the grown-up setting with serious talk and consumption of exotica like ‘mutton’ and ‘brandy’ fascinated me — and this has persisted through the years, with my loving books like the Black Widower series and anything on the Inklings. The Club was therefore of immediate interest to me, especially because of some of its personalities – Johnson, Burke, and Adam Smith. These were men whose professional interests and gifts cut across British society: playwrights, painters, literary experts, politicians, lawyers, and (in the case of Smith) creators of entire fields of study. Leo Damrosch opens with biographies-in-brief of the core members of his study before The Club was conceived and organized, which is interesting in its own right even before these strong personalities gather together and begin discussing politics and literature. Many of the figures were unknowns to me, aside from “I’ve seen that fellow’s name before, I probably should have an inkling of who he is”: these included Boswell himself (whom I know only as the biographer of Johnson), Garrick, a fantastically talented actor and director; and Sheridan. It’s safe to say that Johnson dominates The Club: regardless of the subject matter, Damrosch opens Johnson’s Dictionary to see how his definitions of a subject reflected his views therein. The members of the Club were not uniform in their tastes or political persuasions, which made for an interesting chapter on the Club in the dawn of English empire, and because of the range of their professions, readers are treated to an enormous variety of subjects. We learn about the 18th century theater, Scottish romanticism, the birth of economics, etc. There’s a great deal of historical detail encountered here that I was otherwise unaware of, like the fact that whisky had not yet made it into England, or the fact that Shakespeare editions were so adulterated and edited that even veteran actors didn’t recognize large parts of the originals when they encountered them. This is a girthy but interesting dive into the mid-late 18th century, and has some good-quality prints throughout as well as a fetching cover.
Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is “Books that have been on our TBR the Longest”. I dealt with my physical TBR last year, so I’m going to take a look at my Kindle library, sort by “Oldest”, and take a look at Kindle titles I bought (probably for a $1 or $2) and then forgot about because eBooks are easy to forget about.
(1) Joan of Arc, Hillaire Belloc. There’s a Joan book I own but haven’t read?! Like, zoinks, Scoob!
(2) ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, Michael Weiss & Hassan Hasan
(3) Hacking ISIS: How to Destroy the Cyber Jihad, Malcolm Nance
(4) AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order, Kai-Fu Lee
(5) Thomas Jefferson, Revolutionary, Kevin Gutzman. I can only assume I bought this and decided to wait for my usual USA! USA! USA! reading in late-June early-July, but then forgot about it.
(6) Trouble is my Business, Raymond Chandler
(7) The Maharajah’s General and The Devil’s Assassin, Paul Fraser Collard. Not sure why I lapsed reading this series.
(8) Star Trek: My Enemy, My Ally, Diane Duane. First of her Romulan series.
(9) Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition, Sir Roger Scruton.
(10) The Good Shepard, C.S. Forester. Presumably purchased for one year’s Read of England.
Let us travel to a city which, in great part, no longer exists: Tudor London, much of which has been erased by time, fire, and ‘progress’, which holds burying swimming pools under concrete as a capital idea. I first read Picard a few years ago, with her Victorian London, and later visited Restoration London though I neglected to review it. Picard begins here with the physical setting of London, particularly the prominence of the Thames, and moves from a discussion of its bridges and gates into the city proper. After we’ve examined some of its notable buildings, many lost now, we move into the last two thirds of the book, which examine society during the era of Elizabeth.
This is not an easy time to be alive: not only are there the standing medieval threats of disease, war, and being executed for an impressive amount of crimes, but Elizabeth’s is zealous in the defense of her legitimacy and will brook nothing that smacks of disloyalty to the Church of England and thereby to Bess herself. (The law’s consequences are not necessarily logical: some people got death for minor things, while a servant woman who poisoned her bosses had her ears cut off, her forehead branded, and was tied to a post for some time.) I mentioned in the book on Victorian London that the mount of detail Picard brings up is impressive. That’s still the case here: there are extensive section on Tudor-era food and clothing, on sewers and schools, on the growth of the Inns of Court and of the international scene where Elizabeth is vying against the powerful Hapsburg who have holdings clear from Austria to Spain. There’s less content on the poor here than in the Victorian book, possibly because less has survived on them. Oh, they’re here — and they’re in a bad way, because Henry VIII seized all of the monasteries and seized their possessions to enrich himself and his friends, closing schools and shelters that used to house orphans and the poor. (This book provided a partial answer to my question of why people would go into service: many girls who were orphaned were taken to households to be raised as servants: as bad as being a maid working sixteen hour days is, it beats prostitution or death.) The section on the poor is more about their being poor, though, and less about their culture. I was amused to learn that beggars required a license, but not all ‘beggars’ were people dressed in rags and sitting miserably in the street: instead, they could be college students who had spent all of their money on mead parties at the ol’ bear-baiting round, or mariners who had been discharged and, having mysteriously lost their money at the local brothel, were looking for a way to get home.
Happily, Picard devotes a chapter to religion: one of my gripes with Ian Mortimer is that he pretends it doesn’t really exist, which — given the deep union of culture and religion — is inexplicable. Even if one is a strident secularist who doesn’t understand what religion means to people, an attempt should at least be made. I wouldn’t say Picard goes as far as trying to plumb the English religious mind, but she does knowledge its large role in English society – -especially in this period, when priests were required to remind parishioners that if they did anything papey, like pray with beads, they were damned. The dreary curse of Puritanism was also leading paintings and shrines to be destroyed. They hadn’t yet rubbed all of the fun out of life, though — have to wait for Crumwell for that — as this was the age of Shakespeare, and we take a look at leisure activities like games that are proto-sports. Elizabeth’s London is a solid survey of City life in the late-Tudor age, but readers looking for information on society in general should keep in mind that Picard keeps tightly to her subject, to London itself, and so doesn’t address European politics or the Age of Discovery.
To us, many of the flowers in an Elizabethan garden would look more like wild flowers than our carefully hybridised varieties, since modern varieties have been bred to maximise flower size and length of season, often at the expense of perfume. An Elizabethan gardener laid great emphasis on perfume. Arbours had fragrant climbers round them and sweet-smelling flowers and shrubs near them, such as wallflowers, pinks, rosemary and lavender.
All tourists need a phrase-book.Caxton printed Dialogues in French and English in 1483. It was still selling in 1600. The 1589 edition, giving translations from English into Flemish, German, Latin, Italian, Spanish and French, would be a great help to a tourist in an inn. On arrival: ‘My she [female] friend, is my bed made? Is it good?’ ‘Yes Sir, it is a good feather bed, the sheets be very clean.’ ‘Pull off my hose and warm my bed, draw the [bed] curtains, and pin them with a pin. My she friend, kiss me once and I shall sleep the better. I thank you fair maiden . . .’ And when leaving: ‘Where is the maid? Hold, my she friend, there is [a tip] for thy pains.’
If, like me, you became interested in the goings-on of English servants via Downton Abbey, Alison Maloney opens with a word of caution. Many servants didn’t work in small armies at places like Highclere Castle. Instead, they were thoroughly leavened into society, most frequently found in middle-class homes, and were such a part of society at large that the only class that didn’t employ servants to some degree was the working class itself. That said, however, most of this text is about the staff of the great houses, drawing from oral histories of staff (Forgotten Voices of the Edwardians and Not in Front of the Children) as well as from household management guides and the like. It’s quite readable and has a good range, opening with a diagram of the Downstairs hierarchy (ranging from the Butler to the lower maids and dogsbodies) and then tackling various aspects of servant life in turn: the dynamics between the Household and the staff; the dynamics between the staff themselves; the nature of various duties, and so on. Maloney takes us through an average day in a great house like Highclere, as well as a normal years — punctuated by the summer visit to London for The Season, as well as the holidays. Reading this, I could only wonder how some people managed to stay in service for decades, because the work schedule appears absolutely brutal: up hours before dawn, working late into the evening and sometimes into the next day, depending on the lord’s schedule. Given that industrial England would have surely had opportunities for young people — young men, at least — life in service must have had some attractions or upsides. Surely pride in being connected to a great house wouldn’t suffice for the constant work (Oh, did someone track mud on the steps right after they were scrubbed? Back at it!) or the dehumanizing way servants could be treated, depending on their station: maids were especially ill-treated, and there was as much of a pecking order downstairs as there was upstairs. This was a fascinating social history, though I wish there’d had been more of a look at those in service throughout society, instead of just those attached to the big houses. That may simply reflect the availability of service accounts, though.
There was a….bit of a theme to this month’s movie watching, at least for the ones I watched solo. See if you can guess what it is. I bet you can!
The Scout, 1994. Albert Brooks plays a scout who, after a bad call, is sent to the baseball version of Siberia — rural Mexico – to ‘search’ for talented baseball players. He discovers an extraordinary young man played by Brendan Fraser, who like the Babe and Shohei Ohtani is a ‘double threat’, a man superbly talented in both pitching and hitting. Unfortunately for him, Fraser’s character has certain….ehm, eccentricities. Hilarity ensues. Also, there’s Tony Bennett.
Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot!, 1967. Spaghetti western. I…don’t know what to tell you. Gang rolls into a town, everyone dies.
Benched, 2011. John McGinley, aka Dr. Cox, is a little league baseball coach used to Winning – but then not only does his son & star pitcher leave the time to perform in the school play, but he’s saddled with one of those irritatingly modern and therapeutic parents as his assistant. This is a story of friendship forged amid pain and trial with an additional fathers-and-sons story, set amid a season of kids’ baseball.
Hardball, 2001. Keaneau Reeves owes five figures to two sets of angry bat-wielding bookies, and out of desperation takes a gig as a little league coach in the projects. The result is The Mighty Ducks, if it involved the constant threat of death, lots of profanity, and a hip-hop soundtrack. Supposedly based on a true story, and quite enjoyable until one of the kids was shot. I stumbled on this one while watching some MLB players analyze various baseball movies.
Reservoir Dogs, 1992. A few men try to rob a diamond store. Things do not go well. Lots of Steve Buschemi & Chris Penn, plus some Harvey Keitel.
Major League, 1989. A woman running the business end of the Cleveland Indians wants to move to team to Miami because she doesn’t like bad weather and dead factories (oh, wait, this is pre-NAFTA…) , so she’s fixing things to make the team fall into dead last so attendance will fall and she can use the Indians’ contract with the city to skedaddle. James’ Gammon’s mustache and deep voice has other ideas. So does Charlie “Wild Thing” Sheen.
The Natural, 1984. Robert Redford is a promising young ballplayer on his way to get signed up by the Cubs, but he picks up the wrong woman at a train station and get shot. Fifteen years later, the itch to play ball is still there, and he signs on with the ailing New York Knights, only to be dismissed by manager Wilfred Brimley who is thinking about quitting ball and taking to the airwaves to talk to Americans about diabeetus. He finally gets his shot to prove what he’s capable of, though, and the movie has a smashing good ending. (Not as ‘smashing an ending’ as Bump Bailey, though. Heehee.)
Take Me Out to the Ballgame, 1949. A young Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly are entertainers and ballplayers. This is Frankie in his first bloom – he hasn’t yet lost his voice (‘52), and hasn’t had his revival courtesy of femme fatale Ava Gardener recommending him to play Maggio in From Here to Eternity (‘53). Entertaining enough, especially as Frankie and Gene have to deal with their new ballclub owner being not only a dame, but a distractingly attractive one who knows the game as good as they do. Based on costumes, it’s meant to be set decades earlier, in the opening decade of the 20th century.
Amy, 2021. Documentary about Amy Winehouse’s life and death. Rough going for an Amy Winehouse fan. I heard her first in 2005 or 2006 and became an insta-fan, and I missed a lot of her downfall in college, until that lurching moment when the news hit that she was dead. Film goes into the role her parasitical husband played in her downfall.
Mad Max Fury Road, 2015. Tom Hardy is someone who is captured by The Guy and all his pasty bald minions. The Guy is sending out a big truck to do something, but surprise! A Fierce Strong Female (Charlize Theron) is using the big truck to spirit out a bunch of The Guy’s sex slaves, and in the resulting fight Tom Hardy joins up with Charlize and her damsels in distress. Together they engage in an Epic Car Chase across a barren wasteland trying to find some oasis, but are disappointed to discover it’s a poisoned swamp. Tom Hardy and Charlize agree that they need to go back to The Guy’s hideout because he has water and such, so there’s another Epic Car Chase in which they kill The Guy and arrive back at The Guy’s hideout and show The Guy’s people his head, and the people are like “Oh! You killed The Guy! You are now The Guy!”. I think maybe I should have seen the movies before this one.
Bad News Bears, 2005. Found this while looking for a way to stream the original, and since I had free access to it via my last day of Paramount, I figured: why not. It’s been too long since I’ve seen the original to compare them, but I enjoyed Thornton’s version of the character enormously. The kid playing Amanda was also solid, though when I searched for her (Sammi Kane Kraft) to see what else she’d been in, I was sorry to see she was killed in an auto accident. I enjoyed the scene of a ‘drunk’ Billy Bob Thornton repeatedly hitting kids with fastballs entirely too much. I think the remake had more sexual humor than the original, given that I don’t remember Walter Mattheau ogling softball players or warning kids to stay away from crack lest they wake up in a prison married to a guy named Bubba Blue tattooing his initials on their butts.
My Blue Heaven, 1990. Steve Martin is a wiseguy in witness protection, who can’t stop running scams – much to the worriment of his FBI handler, Rick Moranis, who really needs to keep him out of prison and out of the morgue so he can testify back in New York. A comedy with romantic elements. Pretty sure this was a rewatch for me, but it’s been so long I’d forgotten pretty much everything.
Michael Collins, 1996. FREEEDOO- wait, wrong movie. Liam Neeson plays Mick Collins, a leader in the Irish republican movement who was killed by members of the same who opposed his backing of a treaty with the Crown. I knew nothing of Collins before this and the movie’s lack of a narrative kept me more or less confused. My buddy and I watching this had no idea who was attacking whom when the tank started shooting people at a soccer match. I read on Wikipedia that the royal forces thought the fellas shooting collaborators had blended into the crowd at the match, but you don’t get that in the movie: it’s just “Oh, hello, you’re doing sports? I’d like to do a repeat of Amritsar now, thanks.” Made me realize that holy wow, do I need to read some Irish history. Perhaps in June I’ll give a week over to it. (April, of course, is England’s, and I have…Plans….for May.)
Bad News Bears, 1976. A rewatch. Still fun. Walter Maltheau is a former ballplayer who has descended into drunkenness and pool cleaning, but accepts some money to coach some kids rejected from the local little league.
Damn Yankees, 1958. An aging real estate agent who dotes on the Nationals and hates the Yankees is tempted by a mysterious figure with supernatural powers, who offers him youth and amazing baseball talent, enough to see that the Nationals beat the damyanks for the pennant race. Oddly enough this is the second baseball musical I’ve seen this month. The big dance scene reminded me a lot of the mambo scene in West Side Story: I imagine that’s Bob Fosse’s influence, since he was the dance choreographer in both. Enjoyed it very much, though there were weak points — especially the musical number about ‘urp’ and the mambo. The best part of the movie was seeing “Boothby” from Star Trek TNG playing Mr. Applegate/Satan. Based on a novella called The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant.
A good slugga, we haven’t got A good pitcha, we haven’t got A great ball club, we haven’t got Whattawe got? We got heaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaart!
It Happened in Flatbush, 1942. Years after his critical error caused the Brooklyn Dodgers to lose a game and the pennant, ‘Butterfingers’ McGuire has returned to his team as manager, struggling against residual resentment and distracted by his attractive new boss. It’s very much a movie about the way communities can dote on their teams, especially the intense affection Brooklyn had for the Dodgers before they went chasing silicon dreams in California. In 1957 the Dodgers would leave Brooklyn for silicon pastures in Los Angeles, in part thanks to Robert Moses being terrible. The Rookie. 2002. Dennis Quaid is a science teacher who once dreamt of playing baseball. After observing him in action, the high school team he coaches challenges him to try again — if they win the pennant. Source of one of my favorite quotes for this month: ” Do you know what we get to do today, Brooks? We get to play baseball.”
Mickey, 2004. A lawyer with tax problems goes on the lam with his son to escape the goonie-boys, using his and his son’s new identities to give his son another year in the little leagues – despite him now being technically too old. Unfortunately, his son’s stellar performance on an already dominant team takes the team to the Little League World Championship, drawing the attention of the aforementioned goonie boys. Screenplay is by John Grisham, who has a cameo.
Syk pike | Sick of Myself, 2023. A disturbing film about a young woman (Signe) who falls into a deep well of narcissism: her need for attention is such that she orders anxiety pills off the black market which she knows will make her break out into a skin rash if she takes too many of them — so naturally, she eats them like skittles. There are papers waiting to be written on her transformation throughout the movie, as she becomes increasingly disfigured by the pills’ side effects: the Gollumization of Smegol is the most apt comparison, I think. (One could also make an allusion to Dorian Gray, but Signe’s inner and outer ugliness mirror one another.) The scenes of her taking photos of her disfigured self to share on social media, her toxic delight in any attention is profoundly unsettling, though it becomes darkly comic at times, as when she and her partner are having sex: his “dirty talk” is telling her how he’s visiting her in the hospital, and if she dies he’ll make sure her dad and her ex-friend Anine can’t come because they didn’t come see her in the hospital, that sort of thing.
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 1953. Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell are two friends with different approaches to relationships (Marilyn is after money, Jane after bodies). Before the boat ride is over, they’ve both sang a lot of songs and gotten married. My first Marilyn Monroe movie, I think.
Jesus Christ Superstar, 1973. Some group of young people travel into the desert and stage an elaborate recreation of Holy Week, with added rock opera elements. It had its moments, but is incomplete: it ends on Good Friday, with none of the joy and wonder of Sunday.
The Sandlot, 1993. The best movie about baseball, boyhood, and summers. Period.
Taxi Driver, 1976. A mentally disturbed and socially awkward veteran who is getting by driving a taxi becomes infatuated with Cybil Shephard, a political campaigner: after disgusts her taking her to a dirty movie (he’s socially oblivious), he hatches a plan to assassinate the man she’s campaigning for, but then encounters a child prostitute (played by Jodie Foster) who he decides to rescue. Fascinating and disturbing.
Little Big League, 1994. A kid whose grandfather owns the Minnesota Twins inherits the ball club after grandfather goes on to extra innings in the big ballpark in the sky, and promptly appoints himself manager. He’s an absolute freak with statistics and strategy, but is soon overwhelmed by the ways the job warps his social life, school responsibilities, etc. Surprisingly good.
Chinatown, 1972. Jack Nicholson is a private eye who is asked to follow a politician who may be cheating on his wife, but realizes sharpish that he’s being used by ne’er do-wells who view the politician as an obstacle. Darker ending. I don’t think I’ve ever disliked any film Jack Nicholson was in.
Trouble with the Curve, 2012. Clint Eastwood is an aging scout whose declining eyesight threatens his ability to work, but his daughter Amy Adams joins him on a scouting trip at the request of John Goodman and they stumble on a major find. Amy Adams is ocassionally distracted by Justine Timberlake playing baseball trivia with her. Enjoyed the actors quite well, and the story was…ok. The ending was very tropey/stereotypical.
MASH, 1970. The original movie. I’ve seen scenes of the show (my grandparents played reruns almost constantly when I was growing up) so I knew all of the characters. Development seemed a bit different — Hawkeye was more of an ass, Hot Lips lost her mettle, etc. Enjoyable enough despite the inexplicable football scene. They’re in the middle of a war and can source uniforms and field posts?!
Field of Dreams, 1989. “Hey, dad, wanna have a catch?” “…..”I’d like that.”
Well, the year is one-fourth spent already. Criminy! March was fairly…all over the place. Didn’t do well with Lenten reading at all, but Opening Day was a solid performance, I think, and I even got a head start on Read of England with two reviews scheduled to roll out.
Classics Club A third of the way through Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy. Thinking of dropping Plutarch from my list and making two substitutions because my library’s copies were ‘permanently borrowed’ and I can’t find the exact editions we had for restocking.
The Unreviewed: Mating in Captivity, a book on managing intimacy and desire in relationships. A rare DNF. The core idea of it was interesting (that attraction is coupled with mystery, and that over-sharing/over-familiarity smother desire), but I was put off by the obsession with sex, to the point that the ‘therapist’ recommended divorce to one couple so they’d find each other interesting again. Emperors and Idiots: literally just finished this Saturday afternoon.
In the summer of 1949, young David Halberstam was fifteen years old, facing a father in declining health and thankful for the distraction that was baseball. The Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees would provide it in spades, the arch-rivals competing for the American League pennant. 1949’s pennant race was especially dramatic because the Red Sox came from behind: after a very disappointing early season, they suddenly began winning, overcoming an eleven-game deficit — and it all came down to one game in Yankee Stadium. Summer of ’49 is a history of that ball season, following the victor of the game to the World Series, and then following up on the lives of all the players involved. Halberstam does not limit himself to a play by play of the games, as he uses the season to explore different trends in baseball: the way television was changing player and official behavior, for instance, or the slow integration of the Major Leagues. Jackie Robinson had donned the Dodgers’ jersey only two years prior, and the number of black ball players remained in the single digits. The Yankees and Red Sox would be among the last to add black players to their rosters, despite the Red Sox recruiting a Mexican player over ten years prior, and Halberstam notes that this would hurt both teams later on, passing up as they did major talent like Willie Mays. In addition to shining a spotlight on particular players, like Ted Williams’ obsessive study of the game and his computer-like ability to remember pitchers’ favorite sequences, etc, Halbestam also explores a little of the culture around baseball players in this golden age. Already being much familiar with Toots Shor’s establishment in New York from numerous Frank Sinatra biographies, I was surprised and delighted to find myself back there again: it was a favorite spot for baseball players and sports writers to congregate after games, at least until night games became the norm. Quite enjoyable on the whole.
This wraps up the scheduled ‘Opening Day’ posting week, but there will still be pop flies in the weeks to come.
Highlights:
It was said that while managing Chicago in the twenties, McCarthy had once lectured Hack Wilson about the seriousness of his drinking. He illustrated his lecture by pouring a shot of whiskey into a glass filled with worms. The worms quickly died. “What did you learn from that?” he asked Wilson. “That if I drink I won’t have worms,” the slugger answered.
Television, he soon decided, was a medium in which both the broadcaster and the fan became lazy—the broadcaster because he had to let the camera do so much of the work and the fan because he did not have to use his imagination. Allen felt he had a less-intimate relationship with his viewers.
To the other young reporters he was somewhat self-important and pompous, his use of language outdated. As Red Smith once noted, the people he quoted in his stories did not say things, they exuberated or vehemed. Once when he was discussing an earlier pennant race, his friend Frank Graham said, “Oh, Dan, stop veheming.”
It was as a Red Sox fan, he later realized, that he had first learned that man is fallen, and that life is filled with disappointment. The path to comprehending Calvinism in modern America, he decided, begins at Fenway Park.
With the Red Sox, it was a less-refined sort of racism. The top management of the Red Sox was mostly Irish, the most powerful group in Boston. They had established their own ethnic pecking order, which in essence regarded Wasps with respect and grudging admiration for being where they already were; Jews with both admiration and suspicion for being smart, perhaps a little too smart; and Italians by and large with disdain for being immigrants and Catholic and yet failing to be Irish.
I spent two wonderful days with Tommy Henrich at his retirement home in Arizona. I told him how much he had meant to me as a boy, and in our first phone conversation I recalled a moment in 1948 when he had almost broken the then-record for grand-slam home runs—I had been seated in a car listening to Mel Allen’s call as the ball hooked foul. Henrich, with what seemed like almost total recall, finished my description for me. He loves, more than anything, to talk baseball. As we sat and talked, me in my fifties and he in his seventies, I was struck by how boyish we both must have seemed.
When I turned back to face him, he asked in a confidential tone, “Tell me: why did you really kill that fellow?” I started to say “I didn’t—,” then caught myself. What was the point of denying it, I thought. No one believes me anyway. “Because he was a Yankee fan,” I said.
Utility infielder Mickey Rawlings is in a fix. A man trying to organize baseball players into a union has been shot dead, and everyone is saying Mickey did it. In self defense, sure, so the police don’t care: indeed, the police seem to be quite happy with the idea that a labor organizer pulled a gun on a war veteran like Rawlings and got himself shot. Nevermind that when Mickey heard the shot and found the body, there was no revolver near it, and when the police took the photo, there was — miraculously! — a revolver in the dead Wobbly’s hand. The big baseball men want to champion Mickey as their hero and pledge that America’s ballplayers won’t stand for this commie nonsense, and the International Workers of the World threatening to ‘strike’ — to strike Mickey, repeatedly, maybe beat him to death for shooting a union man. Fortunately, Mickey has made murder mysteries something of a side gig over the years (kind of like Ty Cobb performing onstage during the off-season), so now he needs to dig in and find the killer just to save his skin — and keep the rest of his club from turning him into a dead ball.
I have thoroughly enjoyed Soos’ baseball murder mysteries since discovering them years ago, and Hunting is no exception, combining as it does labor disputes with the ordinary murder mysteries. The drama is especially tense here because Mickey is threatened from all sides. The Wobblies want to do Mickey serious damage, and he’s granted a reprieve only because the Upton Sinclair-like friend of his who told him about the meeting vouches for him, but that vouchsafe has a time expiration. At the same time, dubious ‘labor coordinators’ hired by the league want Mickey to go full-throttle anti-union, and to stop looking into the odd circumstances of the organizer’s death — or, yanno, things will happen. Alone and friendless after his author-buddy is imprisoned investigating the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, Mickey has to bring all of his investigative experience and cussedness to the plate with him, and dig in. There’s a lot in the air in this book: Mickey is not overtly sympathetic to the Wobblies, but nor is he hostile, and he realizes that some teams are so badly treated by their owners that scandals like the World Series being thrown by the White Sox are connected to said behavior. All he wants, really, is to get two groups of men to stop threatening him, especially since an old girlfriend has blown into town and she’s interested in restoring their old pickup game. Being murdered is no good for the love life. Soos pitches a good story and the tension stays taut right down to the wire, wrapping up only in the last few pages. I’m think there’s one more book in this series I’ve not read, and I’ll definitely be pursuing it. Soos’ series is unique in itself — historical fiction + baseball + mystery — but the exploration of 1920s labor politics and the arrival of an organization headed by some J. Edgar fellow makes for a great story, and there are connections in topics to Soos’ previous books, especially Hanging Curve which explored the Negro Leagues.
Highlights:
“Would you want to be accused of killing somebody if you didn’t do it?” He pondered a moment. “Well, I don’t expect that would bother me as much as if I did kill somebody, and the papers printed it.”
I’d finished dressing when there was an urgent hammering on the door. It was my landlady, who’d just discovered the glass on the sidewalk and the broken window. I let her in and tried to calm her down. She wasn’t satisfied until I agreed to pay for a new window and not let anyone shoot at me again. I wished I knew how to comply with that second demand.
I did become a major-league player, but I never got to meet Rube Waddell. In 1914 he died from pneumonia after helping flood victims in Texas. That ended something for me, but it took years more until I realized what it was: when a boyhood hero dies, it means boyhood is irretrievably lost. I sighed. I no longer had the innocent faith in baseball that I’d had at age thirteen, and I was angry as hell that I couldn’t get it back.
“I’m not entirely sure what she‘s—what we’ve—talked about. It always seems we have a lot to say to each other, but I’m never quite sure afterward what it was that we said.” There’s something about the lovesick that reminds me of the mentally impaired.
“Let’s just say that I think the laws should apply to everyone the same. I don’t like a cover-up for whatever reason.” “You’re a fair-minded man.” “No, I’m a lazy cop. It’s a helluva lot easier to enforce the laws evenly instead of deciding who should be exempt from them.”
I thought that was the reason for going to war: defeat the bad guys and then everything would be peaceful and happy again. Sure as hell didn’t turn out that way. All that happened was some boundary lines got changed and a whole lot of kids got killed in the process. What was the point?”
Reading Freely 