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Mercedes Lackey Arrows series: Arrows of the Queen, Arrows Flight, Arrows Fall

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illsutration for the cover of Arrows of the queen

For those who don’t know, Mercedes Lackey is a best-selling fantasy author.  Her most famous works take place in the fantasy-country Valdemar, which is ruled by a Monarch and a group of people called Heralds.  Large white magical horses with sapphire blue eyes and special powers, called Companions, “choose” people to become Heralds.  The choosing creates a special mystical bond between the Herald and the Companion.  Heralds are, by nature, good people who sacrifice themselves and use their gifts (including special empathy or mindspeech or firestarting Gifts) for the good of the kingdom.  They cannot be corrupted or bribed, and the Companions always choose wisely.   They also always wear white, and are unironically called Whites.

Back when I was a wee Vom, living in the rinky dink Midwest hellhole of conservatism, I ran across Lackey’s first series, the Arrows trilogy (Arrows of the Queen, Arrows Flight, Arrows Fall), which follows the adventures of a young girl named Talia who is raised among conservative Christians I mean, ahem, Holderkin, who believe that as soon as they’re menstruating fairly regularly  (about thirteen) women must either marry or go into the Church, women are inherently inferior,a single man should have several wives, women should be barely literate, etc etc.

Anyway, Talia is different and loves to read.  Her family hates her and one day, the chief wife tells her that she will be married off.  Talia says she doesn’t want to get married,she wants to be a Herald and runs away, crying, wishing she could figure out a way to save herself and to help other people.

Suddenly, a mystical white stallion with sparking sapphire eyes appears to save her!

But, of course, he could not possibly be there to save her.  She is not worthy, is unimportant, just a drab little farm girl with brown hair and brown eyes, boring, etc.

And yet Talia is Talia and she realizes that this horse, one of the famed Companions, must be lost and confused, and she knows her Holderkin relatives won’t help him, so she decides to help him herself.  She sets out, alone and scared and confused, but determined to help this poor helpless mystical white steed with shining silver hooves to get the help he needs to return home safely, because that is how she rolls.

Damn, I love this book.

Yeah, yeah, you can’t possibly cram any more idfic young adult girl tropes into this story if you tried.  I was going to say maybe if you added mystical talking Siamese cats to the mixture, but that actually does appear later in the Storms Trilogy, so hold that thought for now.  Does Talia have a special destiny?  What do you think?

The fascinating thing about this book is that Talia is actually convinced she’s supposed to help Rolan, the biggest baddest Special White Mystical Stallion of them all.  Even though she has self-esteem problems, even though it’s hard, she is confident about some fairly normal life skills and is completely certain she can do those things.  Rule a kingdom?  No.  Babysit a kid?  Hell yes.

Anyway.

It’s not spoiling the story to say that Talia goes off to the capital and becomes a Herald-trainee and a Very Special Herald, called Monarch’s Own, or Queen’s Own.  At first of course, she thinks she’d only get to help out the Heralds by doing their floor scrubbing or laundry, but naturally she has special inner talents that are hers alone and which she can use to help the world be a better place etc.

I don’t want to spoil the whole of the series, because if you haven’t read it, it’s actually pretty good, but I wanted to talk a bit about what it so special and why it holds such a dear place in my heart and then we get to talk about Vanyel.  Ahem.

See, Lackey’s idfic Talia series is incredibly smart in some fairly crucial ways.  Lackey-the-author via Talia-the-13 year old-POV-character sneers at the Holderkin in the first bit of the book–they’re misogynistic tossers who marry their girls off at 13 to husbands who beat them, so you can kind of see where she’s coming from in the Hatey McHateyPants.  But while that shit did happen (and in some places still does I’m sure) it’s just not that simple. Talia believes (as people in those societies believe, although I don’t think Lackey the author does) that actually the early marriage part of the society is understandable and necessary, because in that section of the world, on the Border (think, oh extreme temperature parts of our worlds in Ye Olden Days, or possibly on the frontiers) the life expectancy is so young that you must breed young lest you die out.  If your life expectancy is fifteen, then by having kids at thirteen, you keep the species going.  Which is pretty fucking icky let me tell you what.  And yet, again, the interesting thing about this book is that the older, wiser, kinder Heralds mostly go Ewwwwwwww no.  Which could reasonably be interpreted as authorial disapproval or doubt, but at the same time, Talia and one other character argue back.

When I was young and inexperienced, I found the whole thing kind of horrifying.  Nobody was marrying me off at thirteen, OK, but I did know some girls who got preggers at fifteen (and yes kept the baby), so there you go.  Who thinks this shit is a good idea to do on purpose?  But actually, having read history and having talked to many people, people in that particular kind of socio-economic group (that kind of death rate) do tend to think it’s a good idea and their longer living brethren also tend to drop their jaws and say hell no don’t even think of trying that shit here.

So anyway.  There’s that, and it’s a fairly nuanced picture, but moving on past that to the bit that surprised me in rereading this series the most.  Talia’s crappy childhood aside, she has a whole host of traditional female-coded skills, and these are the reasons she gets chosen.  Or, sorry, Chosen.

See, one of Talia’s gifts is raising children.  The Heir to the throne has been badly spoiled and so actually, Talia was chosen because she has powerful babysitting skills.  Really.  Because of her traditionally female strengths of child-rearing and empathy and lending a calming and sympathetic ear to those in trouble, she helps her beloved kingdom and saves the day.

Which is just not quite the pig farmer goes off and becomes Elite Swordsman kind of story.

It’s pretty subversive in that many of the chief figures in the books, like the Queen, hold gendered roles in non-traditional ways.  The Queen isn’t a great mom, which might be normal text thing, as lots of wicked queens are terrible mothers, but this one is just humanly not very good at it and at a loss about how to improve. She’s overworked because of the whole running the Kingdom problem, and kind of let things slide out of uncertainty.  Her chief counselor was an old guy who was embarrassed at giving advice to a pretty young headstrong woman.  All of that is plausible and interesting and human and so much more fun than older women are wicked news at 11.

Right.  So Talia, besides saving the kingdom with her elite babysitting skills, ends up with some rather cool friends and mentors.  At this point, Lackey’s book slips out of a big fat fantasy series and into something I clutch to my heart and carry with me across various cross country moves.

Talia, who is a shy farm girl, befriends an retired and elderly Herald who is missing a leg.  I type that and yet, it is only in the second rereading this week that I even realized that this Herald is what we, today, would call a person with disabilities.  The guy’s missing a freaking leg!  He walks with crutches or a cane, lost a leg in the war, and while yes that’s actually pretty normal for the time period, amputation being the solution to surviving gangrene, you have to remember that I actually am partially disabled myself.  I walk with a limp and have to use a cane sometimes, and sometimes I don’t get to walk at all, and blah blah boring.  But I’m usually hypersensitive to person-with-disability coding in novels and I completed missed this one, because I was too busy thinking about Jadus as Jadus.

And that, gentle readers, is really fucking awesome and why I love Lackey like burning, because she does this a lot.

It’s not that Jadus is portrayed with the leg and then it’s skimmed over.  There’s a whole subplot about how this old guy with this war wound feels more and more useless and lonely as he ages and just sort of drifts into dreams of his younger years.  But then he meets young Talia and they befriend each other.  It’s sweet, actually. He’s playing his old harp, because he’s bored and sad, she eavesdrops, then he notices her.  They bond over music and become….friends.  Yes, his leg is a thing, but it’s just a part of him–a cranky difficulty making part, but not the only part.  He’s a bunch of things–he’s a musician, he’s a mentor, he’s a old friend of the dead king, he’s good with a crossbow, he’s really thoughtful.  So the leg is just one aspect to this character who has lots of aspects.

I can’t tell you how many of the stories I read about us crips and it’s Name + Disability wot Main Character Learns From.  That just doesn’t even happen in this book.  The leg never gets better, Jadus never uses it as a teachable moment, it’s just a truthful part of some warriors getting old. Most die young, some get wounded and retire, very very few are healthy and old and die in bed.

Another of her mentors, Keren, happens to be a lesbian.  Keren is the riding instructor for all the Heralds–she’s the best at riding a Companion and teaches equitation.  She’s strong and skilled.  And….she happens to be married to another woman named Ylsa.

In the books I read as wee Vom, lesbians didn’t show up.  If they did show up, they usually died or got turned evil or whatever.  Nobody got to be a friend or a hero or a mentor and just happen to be lesbian.

Certainly they sure as hell never got to be master teachers of any kind of warrior prowess.

I mean really.

You can’t just have queer ladies going around doing normal hero mentor stuff, that’d be…weird.  Or something.  But this actually happens and happens more than once in Lackey’s world.

As a young woman, confused and kind of queer and stuck in the sticks….these books were a fucking revelation.  Yes, I know Talia isn’t queer.  But that wasn’t even the whole of the trope-overturning that Talia gets to do.  Talia gets to lose her virginity to the hottest guy in the series and then decide, you know, that’s not actually the guy I want.  Anyone who has read a lot of fantasy or romance or even, hell, watched TV will realize that this is not normally how that story goes.  What do you mean the heroine of her own story gets to try out sex just for fun?  That’s–that’s—quick, we can’t allow that!

But she does.  And she ends up with the guy she likes.  Who’s actually pretty homely.  Did I mention that while Talia is attractive, she’s also kind of normal looking?  Reddish brown curly hair, brown eyes.  Normal.

There’s probably a law against making fairly normal looking girls excel at saving the world via traditional female skills like being a good listener or knowing how to deal with a toddler’s temper tantrums.  Fortunately, Lackey never bothered to read that particular rule book.

Since this is already ridiculously long, I will add a few final notes:

The prose itself is often kind of bad.  Lackey is very fond of putting italics in her sentences for emphasis–it wouldn’t be so bad if the italics weren’t so damn random.  Also, people talking in Mindspeech use italics, and she uses regular text for reverse italic-emphasis and it all gets kind of Oh Dear.  There’s also plenty of embarrassing levels of Id-fic.  They’re shining white magical horses with sapphire eyes!  Heralds wear Whites!  And so on.  We’re talking genre genre genre here.  Sometimes Lackey forgets how to spell her own characters’ names or screws up on small bits of continuity.  The middle book of the series lags, as many middle books do.  The villain is kind of predictable, and the final book includes some really upsetting sexual violence.  Not all of Lackey’s trope-overturnings are effective and as a youngster, I wasn’t always savvy to the difference between Historical Accuracy of Ye Olden Times and what the author might have believed to be a good idea.

Her other series that I love, the Vanyel series, is something I will need a whole separate essay to discuss.

To end, these books are not perfect.  Far from it.  But for the eighties, when I read them, they were fucking amazing.  They’re still pretty amazing to me now.  I love them.  If you’ve never read them and you enjoy id-fic fantasy with sparkly-hooved spirit horses, give them a try.

Vom Marlowe on Wonder Woman, Bondage, and Princess Leia

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Vom Marlowe had a short, thoughtful comment on Trina’s post, which I thought I’d highlight here.
 

I think that plenty of women notice the bondage–I certainly did. I think it’s part of the Marston/Peters charm. But it’s not the bondage itself that is the charm, it’s the way the kink is handled that made early WW so successful.

For a more modern version, I always loved the scene in Return of the Jedi when Leia strangles Jabba The Hut with the literal chains of the patriarchy. There she is, in the absurd bikini, and instead of just being this pretty cheesecake, she uses her bonds to save the day and get herself the biggest of the big guns. If she was just stuck there and then got rescued, well, I’d have hated it.

Same thing with WW. Old school WW is always getting tied up and then freeing herself, and tying up other people, and it’s all good clean kink. I’m sure some women (and men) don’t notice the bondage or ignore it in favor of other aspects of the character–such as her love of peace, or her invisible plane or whatever.

But WW is awesome in part because being female is awesome; I mean, to me that’s what Marston/Peters is all about. Being female saves the day–there aren’t many stories like that whatever the format. I think modern writers often write WW as being female as something that has to be overcome or is weird, like green hair–to me, that’s the trouble with all the reboots. The writers can’t figure out a way to tell a story that makes her successful because of her femininity (and I suspect that maybe they don’t even try, as in A/C’s version).

The index for the roundtable on Wonder Woman #28 is here.

Canadian Steampunk: Murdoch Mysteries

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photo of main characters (Murdoch, Crabtree, Ogden, Brackenreid)

I had finished yet another cozy (this one with not-quite lesbian gardeners) and was waiting for more discs to arrive, so I moodily poked around Netflix’s Watch Instantly Options.  And this time, it turned out rather well.

Murdoch Mysteries is a little different from the British shows I’ve been watching.  First of all, it’s set in Victorian-era Toronto.  Not a real Toronto, of course, but a much more Steampunk, brown and gray, scientifically-minded, Ye Olde Fashioned Toronto, full of interesting mysteries solved by thoughtful men in serious suits.  And a female coroner in a series of very fine hats.

This is not a plausible show, OK?

It’s more like a Dr Who or Star Trek.  Interesting ideas, fun acting, but you’re never going to worry that the main character will perish.

Also like those shows, each episode of Murdoch Mysteries focuses on some aspect of history or science (often forensic science) to solve the murder of the week.  In the first episode, an electric company–but no.  It’s too complicated and I can’t stop giggling over Nikolai Tesla’s ridiculous “accent” enough to type. (Not only is there Tesla, but also an adorable ancient golden retriever.  Just go with it.)

Let’s take the episode Body Double instead (season one, episode seven, in case anyone cares).  This particular episode is about the theater–Inspector Brackenreid attends a performance of Macbeth and during one of the crucial scenes a body falls from the ceiling and wham! right onto the stage.

In another TV show, the body would be fresh and gruesome, but not in Murdoch Mystery land.  This corpse is long dead and decomposed and the episode revolves around solving the identity of the corpse and figuring out how (and why) there was a dead guy in the ceiling of the local theater.

Naturally, plenty of time is spent on how the theater worked during that time period, what kinds of plays were performed, how profits were made, etc.  But the nifty part of this episode is that Doctor Ogden, the pathologist, decides to try a new technique.  Using anatomy books, rulers, measured pins, and a few simple tools, she carefully layers modeling clay onto the skull in order to create a sort of mockup of what the dead man would have looked like, starting with various ligaments and gruesome muscle bits and working out to the skin.

Yeah, yeah, a Victorian-era pathologist probably wouldn’t have succeeded in creating an exact life replica of a dead man their first time out.  Like I said, this show isn’t about realism per se.  It’s more about learning how things could have been done, using simple ingredients you could find in your own cupboard and a sound understanding of our good friend, Captain Science.

Some of the semi-historical forensics are more believable than others.   The size of blood droplets can determine the nature of a wound, apparently, and I had a good time watching long-suffering Constable Crabtree get roped into shooting an already dead pig’s head with a gun at various distances to see how and where the blood would get on his clothes.

In addition to these techniques, the show tosses in historical figures.  Prince Albert, for example (yes, the one in the can…) shows up, as does Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Tesla, and Buffalo Bill Cody.  These historical figures are often used for comic effect or to illustrate interesting historical issues.

Which brings to me one aspect of the show that I don’t really enjoy as much.  In a somewhat Star Trekish fashion, Murdoch Mysteries attempts to explore Important Sensitive Issues of that Time.  For instance, one show is set in Chinatown and some of the police constables treat the Chinese immigrants like dirt.  (Our plucky detective shows them that’s wrong, of course.)  Did the show also show the Chinese as big gamblers?  Yes, of course it did.

In a similar vein, does the Temperance League appear in this series?  Yes of course it does.  Does the show address the very real issue of alcoholism during that time or does it make the Temperance Leaguers seem like annoying teatollers?  (Or, ahem, S&M practicing sexual deviant murders…..yes, really.)

One show, about the insular Jewish community, gave me a heck of an eye twitch.  It portrayed the police constables as doing their best to convince those pesky Jews to let the police do their jobs (showing the rabbi as being unwilling to allow an autopsy, various people as unwilling to talk to the cops about the crime, a wall of silence, and so on).  The villain (also Jewish, who runs a tailoring and clothing sweatshop, no less) complains that the investigation into the murder is all persecution and antisemitism.  The police are shown as being thoughtful, considerate, kind….the Jews as insular, difficult, weird, and money grubbing.  Did I mention the money grubbing? Not only was there the main (insular) Jewish community, there was also the more acceptable (but still annoying) powerful and political Jewish family with old money.  The rabbi of the community ends up betraying one member of his community in order to gain money for the greater good and says he’d do it again.   And so on.  Some of the Jewish characters are given more depth (one is a union organizer, one is a young woman who spends the whole time ill and unable to say much) but it’s not by much.  Considering how genuinely awful police treatment of various minorities was in real history (and today, ahem), I found the episode in somewhat bad taste.  Yes, Murdoch might not be mean to someone just because they’re of a different religion (he’s Catholic), but come on.  It’s not just that particular episode that irritated me.  The episode about Indians/First Nations did discuss some Indian issues…..but also had an Indian villain.  Etc.

Personally, I just decided to peek at the synopsis and skip the episodes I thought would make me cranky, but I wanted to mention it for the unwary.  I’ve certainly seen worse, and it doesn’t render the whole show unwatchable, but….I’m sure as heck not going to watch the episode about abortion.

But setting that aside, the main purpose of the show is tone and setting.  The overall theme is a bit more comedic than dramatic.  Episodes often contain joking references to modern day inventions (like Scotch tape).  Others show how circus performers do tricks or how one of the tricks in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show would have been performed (using fake bullets, cigarettes, and sleight of tongue).

William Murdoch is the main character, and he’s fairly entertaining.  A scientific and eccentric man, he was raised by Jesuits.  He often reads odd books and decides to try newfangled ideas and logical approaches to problems.  His boss, Inspector Brackenried, is more savvy about people and more heavily muscled.  Brackenried, while he often thinks Murdoch is a bit loony, lets him approach problems in his own way, and is usually fond and proud when his odd subordinate succeeds.  Constable Crabtree is Murdoch’s earnest but not too bright assistant.  He provides comic relief and is kind and sweet.  Dr Julia Ogden is Murdoch’s love interest, brainstorming partner, and the police station’s pathologist.  She’s usually seen up to her elbows in a corpse.

There are minor throughlines, such as a romance/flirtation between Detective Murdoch and Dr Ogden, and marital troubles between Inspector Brackenried and his wife over his drinking, some conspiracy theories/political machinations of various governments (usually involving brash and hawklike Americans!), and some recurring side characters such as the alienist (psychiatrist) who Murdoch consults about troubled minds.  Mostly, however, the show is more episodic and I’ve skipped around without running into any trouble.

What can I say?  Great hats, awesome costumes, witty banter, beautiful settings.

A fine show to watch while folding laundry or getting over a cold.

Who knew cottage gardens were such dangerous places? Midsomer Murders

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So I’ve spent most of January and February plagued with some kind of….plague.  It’s horrible, but it does mean I get to catch up on all the TV I’ve missed in the past couple decades.  I blew through New Tricks earlier, then I watched Murder in Suburbia (not bad, really, and I liked Ash, though I usually guessed who dunnit in the first ten minutes) and then, for reasons known only to itself, Netflix suggested I might like a garden gnome musical and I had to have a soothing lie down*.

When I came back, I was armed with another friend’s suggestion: Midsomer Murders.  Supposed to be the best acting evah.  Which actually it really kind of is.  John Nettles, who plays the lead detective, can do more with his eyebrow than most actors can do when chewing the scenery and screaming.

The basic premise of the show is this: DCI Tom Barnaby is a police detective in Midsomer, a pretend county in England that’s filled with picturesque but extremely violent villages.  Barnaby always has a sergeant or factotum.  In the early series, it’s Sergeant Troy, a handsome young man with even fewer brains than Barnaby.  I quite like Troy, even if he is rather homophobic and kind of a jerk at times, he’s very kind and has a good heart.  Troy eventually grows up to be his own detective and after five or so years, we get another sergeant, Dan Scott, who is a city-slicker lower-class modern-thinking twatwaffle.  Er.  Not that I dislike him or anything.  Fortunately, Scott is eventually replaced by a much nicer, quite brilliant extremely kind, canny, and earnest Ben Jones, who started as a beat cop and got drafted by Barnaby.

So a crime will happen and then Barnaby will show up with his assistant and begin detecting.  In between detecting (and sometimes during), we’ll occasionally get glimpses of Barnaby’s wife, Joyce, and adult daughter, Cully.  Joyce is a gourmand who can’t cook and has a passionate love of acting and art.  She’s got a kind heart and often is volunteering in various causes to save the world.  Cully is an actress, but she has a bit more of her dad’s practical streak.

The charm of this show is in the setting and characters, the absurd cottage cozy murder plots, and in the fine wordplay.  This is not a show to watch if you’re looking for realism in your motivations and villainy.  It’s not about that.  It’s also not about accurate police procedures–during most shows, Barnaby shows up to talk to important witnesses, who nearly always are:

  • Conveniently called away on the phone, by a visitor or relative, or realize they’re late for an appointment.  If I was the copper, I’d say, “Look, this is murder.  You can be late to the annual orchid grower society meeting.  Answer my questions fully or I’ll haul you to the nick.”  Barnaby nearly always lets them go, and they’re often killed before their next appointment with him.
  • Extremely shifty, to even the most oblivious eye.  “What were you doing on Tuesday the thirteenth at 7 pm?” Suspect’s eyes dart around the room, “At home.  Alone.  Watching telly.”  Does Barnaby ever ask what they were watching, to see if he can catch them in a lie?  No, he does not.
  • Basically barking mad.  (Practically everyone on the show is.)  “I couldn’t have been murdering anyone!  I was preparing for the annual bell-ringing competition and nothing can get in the way of that!”
  • Standing in their living rooms, in pub common rooms, or in the center of a church aisle, surrounded by other interested listeners.  It’s not unusual for him to question several people, in a group, at the same time.  “What were you doing on Tuesday the thirteenth at 7 pm?” he’ll ask the husband.  “We were watching telly together.  We had a quiet night in, didn’t we, dear?” says the wife.   And her husband will nod.  Even though the wife was out shagging the vicar and the husband was practicing skeet shooting.  Or murdering someone.  Only at the end of the show does Barnaby ever notice that this might not be the Best Interrogation Technique Evah. And since he asks the questions in public places, there’s always convenient eavesdroppers who can tattle to the village gossip or the local murderous fiend.  Or who are the local murderous fiend.

It doesn’t do great things for Barnaby’s detecting, but it does up the body count, which is part of the fun.

Most of these shows have a pile of corpses at the end.  A murderer will thwap someone to death with a shovel over a thousand year blood feud and then have to kill six other people to cover it up.  Nobody’s ever a serial killer, although there are occasionally people who suffer fits of hereditary madness which drives them to various Foul Deeds.

So I’ve burbled on about how silly the detecting is, but let me give a glimpse of the charm of the show (because honestly, it does have plenty of charm!).

So as not to spoil lots and lots of episodes, we’ll start with the pilot, which should give everyone a decent feel of the show.  It begins with two aged spinsters who compete to see who can find a Super Special Sekrit Orchid (I told you-flowers are dangerous!) in the local woods.  Whichever one of them discovers the orchid proves it by marking it with a stake and then taking a photograph.  Spinster One, whose name I have already forgotten, bicycles out to the woods with her basket and camera and special stakes.  While out there, she finds the orchid, and while photographing it, discovers something shocking.

She races home, slams the door, makes two short phonecalls, and then dies.  Suspiciously.  Her friend and neighbor, Spinster Two, tells DCI Barnaby that it couldn’t have been an accident and that it was murder.  Dun, dun, dun.

So Barnaby heads off to investigate.

There’s a local landowner who’s marrying his ward, a batty sister-in-law, the ward’s troubled artist brother, and the undertaker and his mother.  The undertaker is My Very Favorite.  He dresses like a Victorian gentleman, right down to a coat with tails and a little black ribbon in his hair, and he serves deeply troubling tea cakes on a very fancy cart.  He’s gay as a spring morning and he and his mother have been blackmailing the entire village.

Of course, this eventually gets them brutally slaughtered, but since they show up looking exactly the same in another village ten seasons later, I’ve decided that they were sneaky enough to fake their own deaths and escape.  According to the show, it’s just that they’re cousins or something, but I know Deep In My Heart that they survive.

Ahem.

So anyway.

There’s quite a few different suspects.  The sister-in-law of the local lord, who thinks she shot her own sister with a rifle during some kind of pidgeon slaughtering party.  The local ineffectual country doctor whose wife is having an affair with the local lord’s estate manager (and he’s very pretty–I can see why she strayed).  The straying wife, who is worried about being caught.  The daughter of the doctor who is having a fling with the mad artist (who always wears a truly tragic pair of denim overalls and chews the scenery like he got a degree in emo artist.)  The waif like ward.  The waif like ward’s artist brother.  And some other people, who I forget.

While Barnaby wanders around interviewing people, you get to see lots of gorgeous scenery and cottage gardens and English shooting parties and quiet country lanes.  Barnaby does have a very thoughtful mien and a quiet way about him.  I suspect that dogs would curl up happily at his feet–good stillness.  Troy, the current sergeant, is like a young overexhuberant bull, brashing his way through undergrowth and making rash assumptions about whodunnit and generally being kind of a homophobic jerk.

Much of the mystery, as many of the mysteries in this show are, is concerned with who was having naughty fun times in the woods on a blanket with whom.

As soon as I’d figured out that this was the big mystery, I suggested to my mom that obviously it was the brother and sister, because the whole show had a Greek/Shakespearean tragedy feel to it, and what better tragedy than random incest?

And so it proved.

Barnaby eventually figures it all out by contacting the now-adult childrens’ nanny and things are revealed and the wedding gets called off and the two young lovers commit suicide in the wood via shotgun. You know, as people do.

There’s some clever clues, phone calls, obscure words, etc. in the grand tradition of cozies everywhere.  I’ve lost track of the number of times people get shot to death with arrows in Midsomer county, but it’s a lot.  There’s psychics and witchcraft, the second sight, new age weirdos, writers’ societies, art fraud, retellings of Hamlet, shoutouts to Dorothy Sayers, poisoning by mushroom, hemlock, and various other dodgy substances, as well as a couple of deaths via pitchfork.  Not to mention those being driven to suicide, mistaken identities, Meaningful Messages With Flowers on corpses, and so on.  There’s a great episode where the local theater troup puts on Amadeus and the plot of the play and the retelling of the mystery weave together–it includes a truly horrible guy committing accidental suicide via razor on stage during the dress rehearsal.

Tiny intense hobbies take up peoples’ worlds, as they do in real life, and those often form the basis of the plot.  Villains are just as likely to kill over who was prouder of their rose bushes as they are to get an inheritance.  Small town dances, choir rehearsal, bell ringing, book groups, local history library photo retrospectives, fly fishing, magic tricks, Masonic societies (including the silly aprons), and more.

If you’re tired of watching ultra-realistic grim urban crime about the destruction of society that reminds you too much of yesterday, give this a try.  My favorite so far is probably the revenge plot where the villain stakes a guy in a croquet circle and then catapaults the oenophile to death with vintage wines using a small siege engine (Season 8, Episode 6).

These are currently streaming on Netflix or Amazon Prime.

 

* Someone here suggested I continue What The Hell Did I Just Watch into a regular feature.  Maybe Netflix thought so, too.  If you all feel the need for a garden gnome musical review, I’ll take it under advisement, but I may also need suitable bribes.  Liquor.  Brownies.  Exotic drawing ink.  A large wall against which to thwap my head until the images leave it.  You know.  The usual.

I’m actually glad I watched this: New Tricks (BBC)

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picture of the cast

As longterm readers of HU know, I refuse to pay for cable and generally rely on Amazon and Netflix instead.  This sometimes results in rather unfortunate viewing experiences, but this time, I was caught up, rapt, watching episode after episode, grumbling fiercely when the disk arrived a day later than expected and ordering whole seasons on Amazon with reckless abandon.

But why, you might ask, has this show seized the (ultra picky) Vom by the heart and held on?

Because it is good.  Really, really good.

The premise of the show is this: An up and coming cop named Sandra Pullman is put in charge of a small squad (called UCOS) of retired ex-coppers.  They take on old and unsolved cases, working for the police but coloring a little outside the lines.

There’s Sandra, who has given up her life to be a copper, a beautiful woman in a man’s world where they expect her to serve the coffee and get patted on the butt.  She’s very alone.  I love Sandra like burning.  She is also a very dominant woman–in the pilot, there’s a small brawl and you get to see Sandra punch several people out.  She’s stuck heading this team because she’d been on a big case and then screwed up publicly.  The brass reassigned her in a kind of lose-lose way–if she screwed up again, no big deal, you’re fired.  If she succeeded, they could take the credit for a new, exciting initiative.  The political machinations inside the police force (and in other aspects of life) is a major theme of the show. Sandra uses modern police methods (DNA testing, forensics, modern procedures) and has a very honorable, rule-following nature, as well as being tough and no-nonsense.  She is my very favorite.  She also happens to be smoking hot, which is a bonus.  My goodness she looks good when she glares.  *insert happy little VM sigh here*

There are three retired ex-coppers
There’s Gerry, who loves good food, gambling, and the pleasures of the earth.  He has three ex-wives and many daughters–he’s a bit of a chauvinist and most of the force assume he’s bent as a corkscrew, but he has more morals than most people, even if he sometimes screws up.  A bit Yohji-ish at times, if Yohji was paunchy and balding slightly.  He’s still friends with all his ex-wives and they all have dinner together, visit him in flocks at his bedside when he’s in hospital, and generally make his life….interesting.  When his loved ones get ill, he cooks at them.  (I can totally relate to this, as I have a strong urge to make casseroles, pies, or soup at people.)

There’s Brian Lane, who is neurotic as a shaved weasel and probably has more brainpower than the average building full of supercomputers.  He reminds me a little of the Pookster, actually.  He’s twitchy and sensitive, very smart, and kind of crazy.  But he is also the empathetic of them and has a way with witnesses that sometimes makes me cry.  He’s so gentle and kind, it’s hard to watch.  He can be tough, too, but he feels very deeply.  He is a recovering alcoholic and is deeply devoted to his wife, Esther, who takes good care of him, and to his dogs, first Scruffy and then Scampi.

Finally, there’s Jack Halford, who is Sandra’s old boss.  He’s the hard hitting Sam Vimes-ish character.  Brilliant at understanding how people work, he can get results when everyone else fails.  He knows people from way back and he’s quite tough.  He worked in internal affairs, investigating bent coppers for a while.  One his mottos from the pilot is: do you want to get results or do you want to look nice.  Jack is also a drinker and is deeply devoted to his dead wife.  He spends a certain amount of time sitting at her grave (in their back garden) drinking and talking to her.  She (silently) often provides the insights he needs.

All three of the ex-coppers are cynical bastards and I love them for it.  They’re Very Nearly Criminals quite frequently.  They lie, cheat, and make shit up.  They gamble (Gerry), drink like a fish (Jack), and act crazy (Brian).  One of the recurring in-jokes on the show is that they all record their conversations on secret tape recorders, which is against the law.  But only if you’re police, they like to gleefully point out.

It drives Sandra nuts.  They drive Sandra nuts.

But their encyclopedic knowledge of the criminals active in London and environs over the past decades, combined with their sneaky minds, gives them the ability to solve cases that have been dead and buried for thirty years.

The show is like any mystery TV series–one case per episode, but unlike some of the lesser shows, it continues to develop characters and themes over the course of the series, and also unlike American TV most of the time, criminals or others policemen or family members continue to show up from time to time, as appropriate.  Over several seasons, the mystery of who hurt Jack’s wife is solved, although the mystery of what happened to the man Brian Lane was watching on his last active case for the police never is.  Some of the mysteries do not end happily–the criminals get away, or the cops have their hands tied by procedure.

What’s so wonderful is that both sides of them, the modern tough Sandra and the cynical old men, learn from each other.  They care for each other, each others’ families (what’s left of them after being coppers drives people apart), and they create their own little family.

The mysteries themselves are generally clever and unexpected.  Since it’s a British show, the seasons are quite short, but there are eight seasons so far and they’ve begun working on a ninth.  Highly recommended.

The Celebrated Rubber Chickens of Dingo Dizmal and Ms. Olive Rootbeer

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I am not sure how I came to this. It may be that I should blame the friend of mine who first told me about litho prints of poetry off Etsy. Or maybe I should blame the person who insisted I go into librarianship and thus installed in me a fondness for searching into strange nooks and corners, looking for bookshaped objects. Or maybe I should just blame Noah. Yes, let’s do that. It’s Noah’s fault that I am here today, writing to you about rubber chicken comic book art. Yes.

Ha. Let us blame Noah.

See, several years ago, I wandered off to ALA’s national conference. If you’ve never been to ALA before, it’s a bit strange. You get a wonking great conference hall and fill it with booths and stock the booths full of free books.  Not just any books, but beautiful, well-made interesting books that have been newly published or just won awards.  And then you tell a bunch of book-junkies librarians that they can enter.

It is not unlike those Christmas store shopping rampages on Black Friday where people want Cabbage Patch Dolls.

Except that all the shoppers have about three advanced degrees and pretty much everyone is wearing glasses and sensible shoes.

In any case.  So there I was, a young librarian on her first ALA National Conference, and I went into the exhibit hall with shining eyes and a hopeful heart.  I was certain that I’d be able to find something for work, perhaps learn about some new non-fic, but I was also hoping to find a few new comics.  The brochure that I clutched tightly to my chest mentioned that several comics publishers would be there.

I worked my way slowly through the exhibit hall (I had to detour around a whole block of booths where I suspect an award winner of being), being accidentally elbowed by cheerful women who had stacks of books so high they had to peer around them.

And then I got to the comics section.  Hurray, I thought, I have arrived!

Now let me be clear.  The purpose of all this free loot is not to make a lot of random booklovers happy, the purpose is to get samples into the hands of the people who have the power to acquire the goods.  Free books at ALA are the grease in the wheels of publishing capitalism.  Because librarians don’t just buy books, we talk about them, a lot, to everyone.  The biggest marketing tool for books is word of mouth, and that can’t happen unless some first person, somewhere, acquires a copy.

While I was at ALA, I saw not just marketing people in the publishing booths, but also big name editors.  See, the other thing that greases the wheels of capitalism is knowledge about consumer desires.  So an editor can talk to a circulations manager, who might tell her that the line for the latest Siamese Kitten book is two months long.  Or that right now, SciFi books are being culled for lack of readers.  Or whatever.

In between the passing around of ARCs, there’s a lot of questions.  Some booths had surveys, some did things more informally, but everywhere it was like a mutual explosion of book pimping and lit glee.

I quite enjoyed it.

Until I got to the comics section, where suddenly I was expected to actually pay for anything.  Want a brochure?  Pay.  Want a sample?  Pay.  Want a keychain?  Pay.  Mug?  Pay.  Pay pay pay.

And I know that this stuff ain’t cheap, but that really wasn’t the point.  I didn’t mind paying.  In fact, several times I did try to pay, but the booth folks wouldn’t look up from their internal conversations.  (The ones at Viz were very nice, though.  I had a very nice talk with them–they recommended a bunch of new manga to me, that I ended up either trying or buying, as well as giving me a few free ones to try.  And I note, by the way, that Viz?  Is still in business.  Ahem.)

I did eventually get a brochure for a comics collective thing, but the stuff inside didn’t give me enough information about whether I’d want to buy it or not.  And I’m sorry, but I’m not splashing out twenty or thirty bucks on a brand new work that’s never been reviewed and which may or may not be any good.  I want to, well, at least check it out from the library first.  See it online.  View it off youtube. See a sample chapter.

I finally staggered out of the exhibit hall with three free cloth bags full of free books.  Or maybe it was four bags.  I forget.

What I do remember, besides Chicago’s inexplicable habit of naming every restaurant with single-syllable words (Toast, Fresh, something else) was Noah’s complete lack of surprise at the horrible way that comics was marketed.  He even looked gloomily at the few small flyers I’d managed to get and said that they’d probably have only gotten Jeff Brown to do the covers (one of them had).

But before I left, he gave me a bunch of small-press comics, mostly published the old way with a xerox machine.

That’s not nearly as nice as some of the beautifully produced advanced readers copies I’d gotten off the big guys, but it was plenty to give me a taste and let me know whether I’d want the whole entree.

And that’s all I needed.  Of course I enjoyed having free books (who wouldn’t?), but what I really wanted was new-to-me joys that I wouldn’t have discovered any other way.  Or to read, and love, and tell others about them so that they could have a joyful new book-crush and go out and buy the second volume and the third and so on and so forth, spreading out the happiness like some kind of literary artistic oil spill.  Or virus.  Yeast bowl?  Whatever.  You know what I mean.

But the publishers of comics mostly did not want to give me such joy, either because it had never worked for them or because they liked having a teeny tiny market of books practically nobody buys, I’m not sure.

The thing is though that I still wanted new comics like that.  Wanted to find new comics the way I’d come across a strange but pretty funny kids book that I’d never have bought.  I’d done my own work in small press comics, helping tone a manga some friends did, but beyond getting lots of recs for big press stuff everyone was discussing, I didn’t meet a lot of small press comic makers who were doing things I really wanted to read.

I’ve been keeping a sharp eye out, though.  During some discussion of how people can find small-press comics, I poked around Etsy (because of the aforementioned friend who buys her litho’d small press poems there).

And I discovered The Celebrated Rubber Chickens of Dingo Dizmal and Ms. Olive Rootbeer. A Coloring Book.  2010.

It’s only sixteen pages long, so I’m only showing the cover, but it is awesome.  Yes, yes, it is about rubber chickens.

But they are awesome rubber chickens.

I don’t remember the last time I read a comic book and actually laughed.  Usually, it’s either a tired joke told in a dull way that leaves behind a feeling of sadness and ennui or it’s actually a volume of Peanuts and I’ve read it before.

This comic is both irreverent (as you can see, the chicken is peeing on the fire hydrant) and charming.  There are some strange artistic statements, like the gladiator with the rubber chicken shield or the pilgrim-hatted (and turkey looking) rubber chickens in a boat at what might be Plymouth Rock (but if so is labeled with the wrong year).

The illustrations are well-done.  Linework varies beautifully, as a good coloring book should, with a nice balance between blocked in shapes and spaces where there’s more detail.

And because it’s a coloring book, it’s interactive.  I don’t just get to read the rubber chickens, I get to muck about with them.  (I have decided, by the way, that my rubber chickens will be purple and you cannot stop me.  Their waddlez may be orange or blue or magenta, I have not yet decided.) It’s so utterly different from the longboxophobia of comicdom that I’m used to that it’s a relief.

Some of the images, such as the snail of life rubber chicken, don’t have words.  Other images, such as the sad looking guy and the mummified rubber chicken do, “If “Ramontep fucks up the mummification of another one of the pharoh’s chickens  ….it was commanded he be entombed with it.  Being constantly watched and never trained didn’t help.”  [sic]

My favorite, of course, is the fronticepiece where two rubber chickens, ridden by paladins, joust.

The thing is, I have no idea who Dingo Dizmal is.  No clue about Ms. Olive Rootbeer.  I do not now nor have I ever owned a rubber chicken.  I’d never seen this artwork before I stumbled upon it.  I’ve got no ties to the artist or the publisher (which was probably Kinkos).  I’m not sure what terms I even entered into the Etsy search box, besides maybe ‘comic’ and even that might be in the sense of comedic.

And yet I found it and I bought it and I read it.

This is exactly what I’d hoped for from that ALA booth.  It took me several years to find, granted, but in the end, I managed it. New, funny, smart, well-inked.

The Rubber Chickens of Dingo Dizmal and Ms. Olive Rootbeer, a Coloring Book, is only four dollars, with two additional for shipping and handling.  I commend it to your attention.

And now I really must find where I put my crayons….