The Coldest Case Ever Solved (2021)

My true-crime interests inevitably intersected with my youtube travels and led me to a type of video that is obviously low-budget and fairly called amateur. The ones I tend to prefer—channels such as Hailey Elizabeth, Stephanie Harlowe, or That Chapter—are basically run by natural storytellers. They do their research and present their findings in narrative fashion (Elizabeth while she is putting on makeup), fortified by available footage and audio that can apparently be found on the internet, some of very poor quality. Most of these videos run 30 to 60 minutes though some can go on for hours if the case is weird and/or complicated enough. Matt Orchard, an Australian (or possibly New Zealander), is one of the best. His channel, Matt Orchard – Crime and Society, has ideas about larger issues like coerced confessions, problems with lie detectors, and other troubled aspects of justice systems (mainly US). These issues make solving crimes tricky business and often exercises in whether we can ever know the truth about some things (and, by implication, anything). Orchard also takes on celebrity cases such as Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard, the JonBenet Ramsey mystery, or Anthony Wiener—probably looking for internet traffic, but his treatment of the Ramsey case is one of the best I’ve seen. As often as not, as in his latest, How Chandler Halderson Didn't Come Close to Getting Away With Murder, he’s riffing on bizarre cases simply for their own sake, and sometimes even indulging a little copaganda, an ongoing pitfall of the genre. Like many youtubers, Orchard has an accompanying Patreon account where even more information and early access can be had for something like $2 a month. The Coldest Case Ever Solved balances a lot of his favored crime elements in one of his best videos, a one-hour treatment. The details are there to be discovered. They aren't what you expect. The case involves a 7-year-old girl who was abducted and murdered in 1957 and the trial of a man accused of the crime 55 long years later, in 2012. A lot of what makes the video work is the case itself. But Orchard’s acerbic recounting has a lot to do with it too, taking us through all the twists and turns. His research feels clinically precise, always—one of my favorite things about Orchard’s videos is the feeling they are authoritative. In that way he separates himself from a lot of the hysterical internet sleuths populating forums and youtube. I like to think Orchard is better than most of them. At the very least, the entertainment value is high. If you like this, try five more.

“Something to Do With Figures” (1945)

Some interesting problems with this story by Miriam Allen deFord—not so much with the story itself, which is competent as mystery stories go, but more with its provenance and related issues. I think the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) has, for the first time, failed me. ISFDB has a page for deFord, who was born in 1888 and wrote science fiction as well as mysteries (even appearing in Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions!), but has nothing on this story or any of the anthologies under the Ellery Queen brand in which she published. Technically, this story would have to be classified as “non-genre” (meaning at ISFDB no speculative elements), but it’s not in the non-genre part of the deFord page either. I’ll give credit for this one as a find to Mary Danby, editor of 65 Great Murder Mysteries. Danby edited Fontana anthologies alongside Robert Aickman, Christine Bernard, and R. Chetwynd-Hayes from the ‘60s into the ‘80s and then went on to put together big fat anthologies of 65 stories each, which haunted Half-Price Books outlets for years. Like any reasonably good anthologist of horror and related, Danby turned often to tried-and-true classics—inevitable in the business of selling these things. But she was also notably good at ferreting out lesser-known pieces that are often surprisingly good. She had good taste, in short, and read widely. There’s nothing fancy or perhaps even that special about “Something to Do With Figures” but it’s a classic detective/mystery story in a certain line descended from Poe. It has a big reveal at the end that verges on gimmickry but plays by all the rules. It hinges on a point of forensics that slightly strained credulity or at least it was new to me and I’ve seen a lot of Forensic Files episodes. The idea is that a body bleeding out dies in different positions depending on whether an artery or a vein was severed. I mean, maybe, I’ve just never heard of it. The premise is that an unpleasant woman has been murdered and her brother is accused of doing it. He was found standing over the body with a knife in his hand that had blood on it, but let’s not jump to conclusions. The setting is a hotel floor with three connected rooms. The detective is certain it’s the strange neighbor in the third room. As mystery stories go, this one is neat and tidy—perfect for Ellery Queen—with some very good misdirection. Nice little find.

65 Great Murder Mysteries, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
Story not available online.

My Night at Maud’s (1969)

Ma nuit chez Maud, France, 111 minutes

Director/writer: Eric Rohmer

Photography: Nestor Almendros

Editor: Cecile Decugis

Cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Francoise Fabian, Marie-Christine Barrault, Antoine Vitez

I was surprised to find My Night at Maud’s sitting highest among movies by director and writer Eric Rohmer on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? It reminded me of the case of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul topping the aggregated critical roundup for Rainer Werner Fassbinder. They aren’t the first movies I associate with either of those directors, but fair enough. For that matter, Rohmer seems to me to be coming in a little low with Maud’s at #266 nor is he that well represented in the top 1,000 with only three titles (also The Green Ray and Claire’s Knee). On the other hand, I’m not sure what if anything should come before it—Pauline at the Beach? For one thing, I think of the look of Rohmer pictures as vibrant color flooded with light. My Night at Maud’s, in contrast, is a dreary black and white in a year when color was more the norm, even for low-budget affairs.

My Night at Maud’s struck me as dreary in other ways beyond the gray color palette. It exists somewhere between the heartbeats of the birth control pill and the next wave of feminism and features college dorm types of discussions about religion among Protestants, Catholics, and atheists in their 30s—not entirely convincing to me. Bachelors and marriage and divorce are well chewed over. The ‘60s are raging outside but you wouldn’t necessarily know as men’s needs are reduced to preferences of body types and everyone has an opinion about Pascal. Our guy, Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant), is 34 and a practicing Catholic, apparently successful in his work, comfortably middle-class or better. He doesn’t know it about himself yet but, as everyone else around him does know, he prefers blondes, which turns out to be true across the length of the movie.

“The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles” (1951)

Margaret St. Clair’s very short story should be a reminder to all of us to read more Lord Dunsany. It rivals Dunsany’s original gnoles story from 1912 (“How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles”)—both are in the Weird anthology. Gnoles are jewel-eyed creatures who live in the woods and have no use and little regard for humans. This story features a Rotary Club style of midcentury salesman, Mortensen, who studies Dale Carnegie and other sales literature. Mortensen has decided on setting up trade with gnoles in order to service their “cordage requirements.” The situation is absurd. Very little is known about gnoles other than a general sense they are quite dangerous. But our go-getter is determined to give it a try—he needs to get his sales numbers up. The story is short enough to verge on short-short but there’s no real hard twist to it. We come to it with a good idea of what’s going to happen. “The gnoles had a bad reputation,” it starts. But Mortensen “reasoned, correctly enough, that cordage must be something for which the gnoles had a long unsatisfied want.” Indeed, that’s exactly what proves out. They are happy to purchase rope and pay him with a fabulous emerald the size of a personal watermelon. Mortensen should have quit while he was ahead but thinks it would be taking advantage of them to accept such an enormous gem. For one thing, he thinks he couldn’t possibly make the change for it. Instead, he asks for something he thinks is less valuable. But that item turns out to actually be infinitely precious to the gnoles. Even asking for it so offends them that they promptly issue their lethal response. “Though they fattened Mortensen sedulously, and, later, roasted and sauced him and ate him with real appetite, the gnoles slaughtered him in quite a humane fashion and never once thought of torturing him. That is unusual, for gnoles.” It’s all quite enjoyably ridiculous, much like the original Lord Dunsany. St. Clair has her slightly savage fun with it and she has an admirable facility for moving in and out of grotesque scenes with a deceptively light hand (much like Lord Dunsany). St. Clair was an occultist, a Quaker, a nudist, and a long-time correspondent of Clark Ashton Smith. She published under various names (“Rope” as by “Idris Seabright”) and was known mostly for science fiction. Her voice could be so tart and acerbic that she had problems with readers who thought she was making fun of them—she might have been. Though gnoles only appeared in these two stories, as far as I can tell, they live on now as “gnolls” in the Dungeons & Dragons universe.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories My Mother Never Told Me, ed. Robert Arthur (out of print)
The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Read story online.

The Ticket That Exploded (1967)

This concludes the Nova (and/or Cut-Up) trilogy by William S. Burroughs. Or actually “concludes” is the wrong word as The Ticket That Exploded may be read first, second, or third in the trilogy, per Burroughs, with The Soft Machine and Nova Express. Your choice. A Grove paperback edition I’ve had lying around for years implies that The Wild Boys fits in somehow too. The vague air of put-on that suffuses all this is of a piece with many of Burroughs’s adventures in publishing and his career as a bad-boy beat, including a star turn in the movie Drugstore Cowboy. There are many tantalizing clues, within and across the novels associated with this trilogy, of a greater, grander scheme. They are all—and Naked Lunch too—sourced at least in part to a massive so-called “Word Hoard” manuscript—circa 2,000 pages of text—from which the language was spindled, folded, and mutilated. The Ticket That Exploded, unlike the others, has no table of contents and the chapter separations are not as distinct. That blows my theory that the novels in the trilogy are actually collections of stories. But you can still read Ticket that way if you want, because it makes no sense as a novel and even less as an anti-novel pretending to be a novel. Sooner or later reading Burroughs I glaze over, which leads me to saying such things. My patience is tried. It’s like meditating, trying to observe thoughts without participating in them. Somehow, through all the murk (not to mention the gay porn), it can be very funny, surprising and cunning. But nuggets are all there is to it as far as I can see.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Riding With the King (1983)

See Wikipedia for details on John Hiatt’s checkered career. It says there his first big break came in 1974 when he wrote a #16 hit song for Three Dog Night, “Sure as I’m Sittin’ Here,” which I don’t actually recall and I thought I was still listening to the radio in 1974. Never mind, skip ahead to Riding With the King, his fifth album and maybe second change of persona (or maybe third?). I first heard this album as a backfill purchase when I was in thrall to Bring the Family. It’s probably not fair and a little too easy to file the Hiatt of Riding With the King under Elvis Costello/Graham Parker soundalikes, which were lining up behind This Year’s Model and Squeezing Out Sparks. But does it help if I say Hiatt is one of the better ones and this is one of the better albums of its kind? Does it help if I note that Nick Lowe participates and produces half the songs, with further support from Martin Belmont and Paul Carrack? Hiatt’s main claim to fame really started all those years ago with Three Dog Night. He writes songs that others cover and sometimes turn into hits, though he’s never had one himself as a performer, e.g., Bonnie Raitt doing “Thing Called Love” (from Bring the Family) or B.B. King and doofus-god Eric Clapton teaming to cover “Riding With the King,” to get back to this album. Hiatt’s heartland white soul—he’s a native of Indianapolis from a large Catholic family, later a recovering alcoholic—may be wearing the Costello mask in this period, but his gift for melody, straightforward songwriting chops, and Nashville appreciation for musicianship just never let him down here. His boyish enthusiasms are there, peeking out, and can turn it in directions that read today a little like incel messaging, for example “She Loves the Jerk” and “Girl on a String” (incel vibe a Costello feature of course) The album notably comes alive on the second side with the pub-rock crew, hitting first with the title song’s fantasy of swinging with the King’s crew. Dad jokes, a staple of Hiatt’s performance, follow with “You May Already Be a Winner,” a song about romance as junk mail. The album by then is a winner itself. The next three songs all include the word “love” and its derivations in their titles (as do two on the first side, for a total of 5 of 12), and the whole thing finishes on a lively nervous rave-up called “Falling Up.” In the brief time I was infatuated with this album I tended to play both sides, and loved it maybe because it ends on such a strong and high note. But there’s good stuff all over this, puns and dad jokes notwithstanding. Worth looking up.

Who Killed Garrett Phillips? (2019)

This two-part three-hour HBO documentary from producer/director Liz Garbus (The Farm: Angola, USA; I’ll Be Gone in the Dark; Love, Marilyn) presents a murder mystery wrapped in law enforcement mistakes and bad faith. The movie lets its subjects speak for themselves through their words and actions. It never has to say a word about racism because we see it unfolding in front of us. It involves the murder of a 12-year-old boy in a small town in upstate New York and the subsequent single-minded focus on the town’s Black high school soccer coach. In the year or so before the murder the coach had been involved with the mother of the boy, Garrett Phillips. She is a white woman and her previous boyfriend, a policeman, did not like the relationship. The coach and the woman had broken up so recently that it still wasn’t clear whether they might not be able to patch it up. There are lots of unexplained gaps in this picture. The relationship of the coach and the boy is one. There are only glancing allusions that they did not get along. The reasons for the breakup are also unclear, though it sounds like racist social pressure was part of it. The mother evidently never wanted to cooperate with these filmmakers, so we never hear her version of anything. We never learn where she or the other son were on the day of the murder. That day, in the afternoon, people heard unusual sounds coming from the second-story apartment where the murder took place, including a neighbor who shared a wall and called 911. At first a lot of people seemed to think it was other kids in some kind of incident that went out of control, but police quickly focused on the soccer coach. He is not a bad suspect as these things go, but the evidence is ambiguous, circumstantial, and often strained. No other lines of investigation were ever seriously followed. The closer the evidence is looked at the less likely it appears to be the coach, but that doesn’t stop police and an overzealous prosecutor (later sanctioned for abuses in this and other cases) from systematically destroying the coach’s life with harassment and innuendo. It’s an object lesson, a cautionary tale, for Black people thinking of moving to white towns even still in the 21st century, no matter how well liked they may seem to be. And it’s another story of raw white fear and aggression. Who Killed Garrett Phillips? details the murder and investigation and then follows along with the attempt to pin it on the coach in court. It’s intense, dramatic, and harrowing, hard to watch as any dispassionate depiction of injustice can be. Definitely worth a look if you don’t mind getting helplessly angry about law enforcement excesses.

Genesis 11: 1-9 (600 BCE)

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.

They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.
—New International

* * *

Carol (2015)

UK / USA / Australia, 118 minutes

Director: Todd Haynes

Writers: Phyllis Nagy, Patricia Highsmith

Photography: Edward Lachman

Music: Carter Burwell

Editor: Affonso Goncalves

Cast: Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Kyle Chandler, Sarah Paulson, Jake Lacy, Carrie Brownstein, Cory Michael Smith, John Magaro, Kevin Crowley

Patricia Highsmith published her 1952 novel The Price of Salt under a pseudonym because she did not want to hurt her crime novel career (Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley) with this romantic drama about lesbians, the only one like it reportedly that she ever wrote. After twice declining to publish it under her own name, Highsmith ultimately relented with the Carol title in 1990, five years before her death. The novel was actually out of print in the ‘70s. All this may speak to how far we have come to get to this sumptuous Todd Haynes treatment, which makes the ‘50s look uncomfortably barbaric behind a sugary frosting façade of American contentment—reasonably accurate.

Todd Haynes has said he tends to divide his work between “boy” and “girl” movies: Poison, Velvet Goldmine, and I’m Not There for the boys, and Superstar, Safe, Far From Heaven, and the TV miniseries Mildred Pierce for the girls. And Carol, of course. I must say I was a little sorry to see Carol overtake Far From Heaven on the 21st-century list at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? I think Far From Heaven is the better example of Haynes’s adoration of the melodramas of midcentury Hollywood (by way of fleeing Nazi Germany) director Douglas Sirk. But I suppose it’s not just some recency effect catapulting Carol into critical favor. The picture has a number of features to recommend it.

“How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles” (1912)

One of Lord Dunsany’s most famous stories is typically very short, suggestive and allusive. No time to learn much directly about gnoles or about Nuth either, except the first are very dangerous, the latter is very skilled. The gnoles live in a picturesque section of the deep forest. Nuth is something of a trickster. He enlists a young man, Tommy Tonker, as an apprentice burglar. Burgling is one of the things Nuth does. His real intention here is to rob gnoles, who by rumor (or perhaps certain knowledge) are in possession of extremely large emeralds. Nuth thinks they can handle two of these gems between them but cautions Tommy they may have to abandon one if things get hot. That’s how big the emeralds are—or how small this cast of characters. For his part, Tommy would prefer to be excused from this exercise, fearful of the reputation of gnoles. By the way, so-called “gnolls” were among the first creatures in the original Dungeons & Dragons game. The spelling was off, but the description read, “A cross between gnomes and trolls (... perhaps, Lord Dunsany did not really make it all that clear).” Tommy, being an obedient pupil, does as he is told and it does not go well for him. In the end it looks more like a kind of reconnoitering mission for Nuth, who learns a few new things about gnoles, such as that they bore holes in the trees, from the insides of which they watch for intruders. I like the tone of the story—cheery and upbeat, like a little fairy tale, streaked with sinister cynicism. This is how Tommy Tonker’s end is described, for example: “And where [the gnoles] took him it is not good to ask, and what they did with him I shall not say.” It’s curious that such an arguably slight story had such an impact—besides shaping D&D, it inspired the science fiction writer Margaret St. Clair to take up the scenarios in 1951 with a story called “The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles.” But there doesn’t appear to be much more mention of Nuth elsewhere. He is mysterious and unsettling, sharing a dry wit with Lord Dunsany. The best part of this story is the description of the woods where the gnoles live—dark and frightening they are. It’s a weird fairy tale with sharp edges.

The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Read story online.

Top 40

1. Immortals, "Techno Syndrome (Mortal Kombat)" (4:51, 1994)
2. Precious Bryant, "The Truth" (2:52, 2005)
3. Morgan Wade, "Northern Air" (4:51)
4. Weakerthans, “Plea From a Cat Named Virtue” (3:49, 2003)
5. Blancmange, “I Can’t Explain” (4:00, 1982)
6. Evanescence, “Going Under” (3:35, 2003)
7. Miles Davis Quintet, “Blues by Five” (10:23, 1956)
8. Fanny, “Hey Bulldog” (3:55, 1972)
9. Anne Murray, “Snowbird” (2:10, 1970)
10. Nick Drake, “Place to Be” (2:41, 1971)
11. t.A.t.U, “Cosmos (Outer Space)” (4:12, 2005)
12. Robin Trower, “Too Rolling Stoned” (7:31, 1974)
13. Miles Davis, “All Blues” (11:32, 1959)
14. Fairport Convention, “Matty Groves” (8:09, 1969)
15. Alternative TV, “Action Time Vision” (2:33, 1978)
16. Chocolate Watchband, “Let’s Talk About Girls” (2:48, 1967)
17. Al Green, “L-O-V-E (Love)” (3:09, 1975)
18. Pavement, “Range Life” (4:54, 1993)
19. Caribou, “Leave House” (5:12, 2010)
20. Stars, “Your Ex-Lover Is Dead” (4:16, 2004)
21. David Bowie, “Starman” (4:14, 1972)
22. Black Sabbath, “Children of the Grave” (5:17, 1971)
23. Space Waltz, “Angel” (3:56, 1974)
24. Gwen Stefani, “Cool” (3:09, 2005)
25. Wire, “The Other Window” (2:07, 1979)
26. Florence Welch, “When in Disgrace With Fortune and Men’s Eyes (Sonnet 29)” (3:09, 2016)
27. Kendrick Lamar, “King Kunta” (3:55, 2015)
28. P. Diddy feat. Notorious B.I.G., Busta Rhymes, 50 Cent, & Lloyd Banks, “Victory 2004” (6:21, 2004)
29. Guitar Wolf, “Jet Generation” (3:22, 1999)
30. Bob Marley & the Wailers, “So Much Trouble in the World” (4:00, 1979)
31. Harry J All Stars, “Liquidator” (3:07, 1969)
32. Adorable, “Sunshine Smile” (5:05, 1992)
33. Dr. John, “Goin’ Back to New Orleans” (4:12, 1992)
34. Slint, “Good Morning, Captain” (7:41, 1990)
35. Jeff Buckley, “Grace” (5:22, 1994)
36. Jeff Buckley, “Forget Her” (5:12, 1994)
37. Bull Moose Jackson, “I Want a Bowlegged Woman” (2:47, 1948)
38. Pharoah Sanders, “Black Unity” (37:21, 1971)
39. Rhinoceros, “Apricot Brandy” (1:59, 1968)
40. Frances Yip, “Shanghai Tan” (3:19, 1981)

Thanks: Dean, rockcritics.com, Skip, unusual suspects

Summer of Soul (...or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (2021)

Director Questlove (of the Roots, Jimmy Fallon house band, and much more) has produced a documentary that is a kind of miracle, as was the festival it is about, a series of Harlem outdoor concerts in the summer of 1969 called the Harlem Cultural Festival. It was filmed in glorious color and promptly put away for 50 years. “Same year as Woodstock” seems to be a common refrain for why that is, but it’s more likely another example of old-fashioned American racism. The ‘60s were receding into the ‘70s, with Richard Nixon and his henchmen running the show, launching the War on Drugs, and generally working in the interests of white supremacy. Whatever the reasons, there has been little interest in the footage all this time. That’s another miracle of this—that someone shot it at all, let alone so thoughtfully, a wonderful document of its moment. The list of artists appearing in it is so impressive I jotted them down as it went: Stevie Wonder, the Chambers Brothers, B.B. King, Herbie Mann, the 5th Dimension, the Edwin Hawkins Singers, the Staple Singers, Professor Herman Stevens & the Voices of Faith, Mahalia Jackson, Jesse Jackson with Ben Branch, David Ruffin, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Sly & the Family Stone, Mongo Santamaria, Ray Barretto, Dinizulu & His African Dancers and Drummers, Sonny Sharrock, Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, Hugh Masekela, and Nina Simone. The amount of gospel surprised me, as did the appearance by Sonny Sharrock. Some of these artists did not play their signature songs, though a fair number did. Greg Tate is a welcome presence providing context and anecdotes. A lot of the people who attended have been rounded up to recount their memories of the shows and the times. There’s an interesting point where the moon landing has happened, and all the mixed feelings about it. Security was provided by the Black Panthers with no problems—I mean, it did make me think of the Hell’s Angels doing the same for Altamont, and the gritty black & white documentary that came of that, Gimme Shelter. This is already a better counterpart to that movie than Woodstock. The mood at these shows is peaceful, celebratory, joyful. The music is amazing—my only complaint is predictable. Why isn’t this five hours long or more? Must-see.