Moaning Wind

"For a while, we sat in silence, broken only by the moan of a rising wind at the casements and the short sharp panting of the dying man's breath."

-Adrian Conan Doyle, "The Adventure of Arnsworth Castle" IN Richard Lancelyn Green (Ed.), The Further Adventures Of  Sherlock Holmes (London, 1985), pp. 148-168 AT p. 164.

Pathetic Fallacy: the wind not only rises but even moans as a man is dying. Also, it underlines or emphasizes the silence that intervenes in the dialogue.

See:

The Ever-Howling Wind

- and also many other references to wind on the Poul Anderson Appreciation blog.

Adrian Conan Doyle writes a good pastiche, even including:

"'Elementary, my dear Watson.'" (p. 149) (See The Birth of a Quotation.)

Happy New Year.

(The woman in our corner shop is a Hindu and told me that their New Year is some time in March.)

Chandos Books

See Dornford Yates. Also here and here.

There are eight listed Chandos Books:

Blind Corner

Perishable Goods

Blood Royal

Fire Below

She Fell Among Thieves

An Eye For A Tooth

Red In The Morning

Cost Price

Richard Chandos is the central character and narrator of every volume. However, Red In The Morning is a sequel to Gale Warning which also features Chandos and his friend, Jonathan Mansel, as major characters. Furthermore, the later Ne'er-Do-Well is narrated by Chandos and also features both him and Mansel. Thus, there are ten volumes with Chandos in them. These ten divide into a five-volume "Hanbury" sequence and a five-volume "Jenny" sequence.

Chandos and George Hanbury were friends before they met and accepted the leadership of the older Mansel in Blind Corner. Hanbury, Hanbury's wife and Chandos' first wife have died at the beginning of She Fell Among Thieves but Chandos meets and marries Jenny who appears in subsequent volumes, including Gale Warning and Ne'er-Do-Well. Thus, Blind Corner is a beginning, We Fell Among Thieves is a turning point and Ner-Do-Well is a conclusion.

The Chandos series is a sequence of sequels:

Perishable Goods is a sequel to Blind Corner;

Fire Below is a sequel to Blood Royal;

An Eye For A Tooth turns out to be another sequel to Blind Corner, set immediately after the first novel, thus with Hanbury still alive;

She Fell Among Thieves is a sequel to the "Hanbury" sequence;

the last two novels feature Jenny and thus are sequels to She Fell Among Thieves;

Red In The Morning is a sequel to Gale Warning and also to Adele And Co.;

Cost Price is a sequel to Safe Custody.

A Criticism Of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy

See also Three Criticisms Of Stieg Larsson's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

Lisbeth Salander is convinced that there is a connection between Zalachenko and Bjurman and therefore sets out to find evidence for such a connection because she has no such evidence as yet in which case why is she so convinced that there is a connection? This is a contradiction. We, the readers, do not initially notice the contradiction because we already know that there is a connection between Zala and Bjurman and we expect Salander to be on the trail but she has to have something to start with. Knowing that Zala is involved with prostitution, knowing that prostitution involves bikers and learning that Bjurman has met someone who then met a biker, she might start to hypothesize a connection between Zala and Bjurman but at that stage it would only be a hypothesis. In terms of the plot, she has to mention a (possible) Zala-Bjurman connection to Dag in order to set in motion the murders of Bjurman, Dag and Mia.

Two Cars

Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played With Fire (London, 2010.

Blomkvist drives to Gosseberga in a hired car, later retrieved by the police, whereas Salander drives there in a borrowed Milton Security car which is neither retrieved nor even mentioned again. On arrival, she:

"...parked behind a barn in a clump of trees about a hundred metres north of the driveway." (p. 534)

When Blomkvist arrived later, he:

"...parked next to a barn on a forest road a hundred metres to the north... He found fresh tyre tracks in the mud and decided that another car had been parked in the same place earlier, but he did not stop to consider what that might mean." (p. 568)

Why should he have considered it? But we need to. Was the Milton Security car stolen between her and his arrivals?

Chronology In Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy

Stieg Larsson, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (London, 2008).

"'Mikael Blomkvist was born on 18 January, 1960, which makes him forty-three years old.'" (p. 44)

This chapter, CHAPTER 2, like CHAPTER 1, is dated:

"Friday, 20.xii" (p. 29)

- so it is set in 2003.

CHAPTER 10 is dated:

"Thursday, 9.i - Friday, 31,i" (p. 165)

It follows that Blomkvist's forty-fourth birthday falls during this chapter although it is not mentioned.

EPILOGUE: FINAL AUDIT is dated:

"27.xi - 30.xii" (p. 513)

Thus, the novel ends on the second last day of 2004.

Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played With Fire (London, 2010).

CHAPTER 1 is dated:

"Thursday, 16.xii - Friday, 17.xii" (p. 7)

This is December, 2005. It follows that Blomkvist is now forty-five and, in just over a month, will be forty-six.

CHAPTER 2 is dated:

"Friday 17.xii" (p. 30)

In this chapter, Blomkvist says:

"'I'm going to be forty-five any day now.'" (p. 35)

Inconsistency.

Roseland

I think that any screen adaptation of a novel should be a serial.

Ian Fleming, From Russia, With Love (London, 1964):

PART ONE: THE PLAN, pp. 7-77.

CHAPTERs 1-10, about Bond's enemies in Russia.

 

PART TWO: THE EXECUTION, pp. 78-208.

CHAPTERs 11-28, beginning with Bond waking up and ending with his apparent death above the words, "THE END"

 

CHAPTER 1, "ROSELAND," CHAPTER 2, "THE SLAUGHTERER," and CHAPTER 3, "POST-GRADUATE STUDIES," summarize the life and career of Donovan Grant, Chief Executioner of SMERSH, and would make a good film, "Roseland," to precede dramatizations of subsequent chapters.

Problems

 Testing:

I had better give notice here that, since "Blogger" changed, I have been having problems with posting. Currently, if I click to create a new post on any of my other blogs, the screen changes to allow me to create a post on this, the Poul Anderson Appreciation, blog, not on the blog where I want to post. If this situation persists, then I will not, for example, be able to transfer articles to the Poul Anderson: Contributor Articles blog. I have, of course, gone onto a "Help" page and tried to communicate the problem but am not sure whether my message has been sent and, in any case, based on past experience, do not expect any reply. I am taking this opportunity to inform blog readers that there are problems just in case the problems get worse and I become unable to post here as well. I will switch the lap top off for a while and switch back on again later for what that is worth.

Two Spies In Green Hats

"...he took off his hat, a narrow-brimmed, dark-green English felt hat..."

-Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest (London, 2007), CHAPTER 5, p. 195.

 

Thus, two fictional spies wear a green hat, one in THRUSH, the other in Swedish Internal Security.

 

Did Larsson have this UNCLE film in mind?

Chandos, Mansel And Others

Nine novels by Dornford Yates are narrated by Richard Chandos and seven of them also feature Jonathan Mansel.

Gale Warning, narrated by John Bagot, features both Chandos and Mansel.

Shoal Water, narrated by Jeremy Solon, features Mansel.

Three other thrillers by Yates, She Painted Her Face, Safe Custody and Storm Music, feature neither Chandos nor Mansel but are connected in other ways

Mansel is in the Berry Books and elsewhere as "Jonah."

Three Heroes

Historical: John Sanders' Nicholas Pym, like a 17th century James Bond.

Contemporary (at the time of writing): Ian Fleming's James Bond.

Futuristic: Poul Anderson's Dominic Flandry, like an interstellar James Bond, although the first Flandry story predates the first Bond novel.

The order of the creation of these characters is the reverse of their fictional chronological order.

A meeting of buccaneers on Tortuga, attended by Pym, parallels Goldfinger's "Hoods' Congress," attended by Bond. The Mafia and SMERSH are represented at the Hoods' Congress. Real historical buccaneers attend the meeting in Tortuga. In both cases, a man is murdered leaving the meeting.

In such series, a heroine is usually a single-volume character to be disposed of between volumes. See The Structure Of A Series: Ian Fleming. (Scroll down to the section on "Heroines.")

In the Pym series:

the heroine of Volume I has died in childbirth before the beginning of Volume II;

despite her association with Pym, the heroine of Volume II remains a Royalist and Pym shoots her when she tries to assassinate Cromwell;

if I remember right, Pym meets someone at the end of Volume III whom he marries in Volume IV;

Volume V, which I have not read, is a flashback to a time earlier in Pym's career so we already know that its heroine, if any, will not be around later.

Equality In The Bible And Dornford Yates

A character asks why the Bible does not command equality. Because there was a smaller surplus of wealth when it was written. Also, the Bible contains many barbaric laws which we rightly ignore.

Socialists know that their doctrine is unnatural, therefore wrong? No, sir, they disagree with you about it, which is a different matter.

Books That Exist Within Dornford Yates' Universe

The History Of The Pleydell Family by Vandy Pleydell.
White Ladies, the history of the Pleydells' ancestral home.
Berry Pleydell's Memoirs.
the "Dornford Yates" books, written by Boy Pleydell.

Thus, three Pleydells are authors. White Ladies may be written by a government appointee since the house has been handed over to the nation.

We have the "Dornford Yates" books but not the other volumes.

Since the Epilogue to the tenth and last Berry Book is a letter written by one of the servants, we at last learn the first name of Jonah's servant, Carson.

Berry And Co.

My copy of Berry And Co. by Dornford Yates, which looks like this:

not like various other editions (see here):

was printed without a publication date;
begins with a dedicatory letter dated November, 1920;
was given as a present at Christmas, 1929;
does not have the Pleydell family tree;
contradicts that tree in its text. (See Other Cousins.)

White Ladies

Henry the Eighth suppressed a very rich abbey in Hampshire. However, when his men arrived, the Abbey plate (gold chalices, platters, flagons etc) was not to be found so the King's men burned the abbey to the ground and hanged the Abbess from an oak. Five years later, some time in the 1540s, White Ladies was built on the site and was given an oak front door which was still in place in the early twentieth century at which time a dowser discovered that the Abbey plate had been buried in the large wine cellars which were still in use.

The Pleydells owned White Ladies from an early date, possibly from the beginning, because:

in 1652, Nicholas Pleydell was succeeded by his only child, William.
-copied from here.

In 1663, a sun-dial bearing the year date and the initials, W.P., was erected in the garden of the old dower-house, which passed out of the hands of the family in the early nineteenth century.

In 1937, Berry Pleydell and his family became unable to maintain White Ladies and handed it over to the nation to be used as an official retreat for the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. An era ended. 

Other Cousins

This family tree appears in most editions of Dornford Yates's ten Berry Books, except that it is wrong as shown here. Daphne Pleydell marries Jonathan Mansel. That is correct. However, the family tree as shown here makes Jonathan Mansel a son of Bertram Pleydell and does not show Daphne as a daughter of Bertram, which is obviously wrong. 

As I wrote in The Five, Boy winds up married to Jill and there are no great-grandchildren of the first Bertram listed here.

In And Berry Came Too, CHAPTER VI, Berry claims that he himself bears the name of a great-great-uncle, Bertram, although the family tree shows us that he also bears the names of his own father and grandfather. Thus, he, Berry, should be listed as Bertram/"Berry." Otherwise, "Berry" might have been construed not as an abbreviation of Bertram but as an independent name. See here. Similarly, the texts of the books confirm that "Jonah" is an abbreviation of "Jonathan."

Thus:

Berry bears the name of his father, grandfather and great-great-uncle;
Berry's first cousin and wife, Daphne, bears the name of her aunt;
Daphne's brother, Boy, bears a name that reads like a shortened version of his own father's name, Bois;
their first cousin, Jonathan/"Jonah," bears the name of his father.

In Berry And Co., CHAPTER VI, Boy, the narrator, has another cousin, Madrigal.

In Berry And Co., CHAPTER X:

Boy, the narrator, describes Berry and Daphne as second cousins;
there is yet another set of cousins, Vandy and his sisters, Emma and May;
Vandy and Co. would have inherited White Ladies if not for the birth of Berry;
Vandy wrote The History Of The Pleydell Family;
in 1652, Nicholas Pleydell was succeeded by his only child, William.

The Five

By the end of Dornford Yates's Berry series, Boy Pleydell is both first cousin and brother-in-law to both Berry Pleydell and Jonathan "Jonah" Mansel. Jonah's sister, Jill, has married Boy whose sister, Daphne, is married to Berry. Thus, these five grandchildren of Bertram Pleydell comprise:

two brother and sister pairs;
two married couples;
one bachelor -

- yet remain just five people.

They have no children. The family turns in on itself and ends. They also consider that the world in which society has changed and in which they have been unable to maintain their ancestral country mansion is not worth living in. 

Dornford Yates' Universe

This post will mean nearly nothing to almost anyone. Its purpose is, as far as possible, to re-arrange Dornford Yates's interconnected titles into chronological order of fictional events. Some revisions will be necessary.

The Brother Of Daphne (before Adele) 
The Courts Of Idleness (Boy meets Adele)
Berry And Co. (Boy becomes engaged to Adele)
And Berry Came Too (set earlier, before Adele) 
Anthony Lyveden (Boy engaged to Adele)
Valerie French (Lyveden marries Valerie) 
Jonah And Co. (Boy and Adele married; Eulalie; Jill becomes engaged)

Blind Corner (Mansel with Chandos and Hanbury, not with Berry, Boy etc; "Rose" Noble; Punter) 
An Eye For A Tooth (direct sequel to Blind Corner; Mansel; Chandos; Hanbury) 
Perishable Goods (Adele's affair with Mansel; Chandos; Hanbury; "Rose" Noble; Punter) 
Blood Royal (Chandos marries; Hanbury) 
Fire Below (Hanbury marries; Chandos) 
She Fell Among Thieves (the Hanburys dead; Chandos, widowed, marries Jenny; Mansel)

Maiden Stakes (a collection; Chandos Books are fiction written by Boy!; Toby Rage) 
As Other Men Are (a collection; Simon and Patricia Beaulieu; the Master) 
She Painted Her Face (Porus Bureau) 
Shoal Water (the Wet Flag; Mansel) 
The Stolen March (the Beaulieus; the Master; Auntie Emma; Eulalie; Porus Bureau) 
Adele And Co. (Boy and Adele still married; Jill married with children; Auntie Emma; the Wet Flag)
Gale Warning (Mansel, Chandos and Bagot) 
Red In The Morning (sequel to Adele And Co. and Gale Warning; Mansel; Chandos; Bagot; Jenny; Auntie Emma; Punter; Toby Rage; Falcon) 
Safe Custody (Punter; Bugle) 
Storm Music (Bugle) 
Cost Price (sequel to Safe Custody; Mansel; Chandos; Jenny; Punter)

And Five Were Foolish (a collection) 
Period Stuff (a collection, including four Falcon stories) 
The House That Berry Built (Mansel helps Falcon; Jill, widowed, marries Boy) 
The Berry Scene (Adele's departure mentioned; the Beaulieus; the Lyvedens; Toby Rage; Jenny)
Ne'er-Do-Well (Falcon reports back to Mansel, Chandos and Jenny) 
This Publican (written by Boy before As Berry And I Were Saying) 
Lower than Vermin (also written by Boy before As Berry And I Were Saying) 
As Berry And I were Saying (all "Dornford Yates" books are written by Boy) 
B-Berry And I Look Back (sequel to As Berry And I Were Saying) 
Wife Apparent (written by Boy during B-Berry And I Look Back)

Dornford Yates' Characters' Interactions

This post will be subject to revision as more books are read or reread.

Simon Beaulieu interacts with the Master in "Simon" in As Other Men Are and again in The Stolen March and then with the Pleydells in The Berry Scene.

Eulalie interacts with the Pleydells in Jonah And Co. and with the Beaulieus in The Stolen March and is mentioned by Boy Pleydell in Adele And Co.

Porus Bureau makes minor appearances in The Stolen March and She Painted Her Face.

Toby Rage appears in:

"Toby" in As Other Men Are;
"Childish Things" in Maiden Stakes;
the Chandos novel, Red In The Morning;
the Berry collection, The Berry Scene.

Richard Falcon appears in:

the collection, Period Stuff;
the Berry novel, The House That Berry Built;
the Chandos novel, Cost Price;
Ne'er-Do-Well, narrated by Chandos.

John Bagot narrates Gale Warning, which features Richard Chandos who narrates nine novels, including Red In The Morning, which features John Bagot.

Jonathan Mansel is:

"Jonah" in the ten Berry books and in "Letters Patent" in Maiden Stakes;
"Mansel" in six of the eight listed Chandos books and in three other novels.

Richard Chandos:

appears in ten novels;
narrates nine, although only eight are listed as "Chandos books";
is mentioned in The Berry Scene where his wife, Jenny, appears.

Anthony Lyveden and Valerie French:

are each the title character of a novel;
marry;
are mentioned by Simon Beaulieu in "Simon";
appear in The Berry Scene.

The criminal nicknamed "Auntie Emma":

appears in The Stolen March;
is defeated by Mansel and the Pleydells in Adele And Co.;
is killed by Chandos in Red In The Morning.

For the sequence of novels featuring the criminal, Punter, see:

The Structure Of A Series: Dornford Yates II

Predictions

HG Wells wrote:

Anticipations;
Mind At The End Of Its Tether.

I thought that a character in a novel by Aldous Huxley published in 1919 said that the next big social crash would come in about twenty years... but I cannot find a novel with that year of publication in Huxley's bibliography.

"'If you ask me,' said Berry, 'we're doomed,'..."
-Dornford Yates, And Berry Came Too (London, 1936), CHAPTER III, p. 94.

"'...my opinion is that, before many years have gone by, this civilization of ours is going to come to an end.'"
-Dornford Yates, The Berry Scene (London, 1947), CHAPTER VIII, p. 223.

"'The end of this civilization is overdue.'"
-Dornford Yates, Ne'er-Do-Well (Cornwall, 2001), p. 9.

Yates and his characters decried the passing away of the kind of society in which they had been happy whereas I disagree with them and applaud many of the social changes that happened in the twentieth century. However, did Yates possess some deeper insight into the nature of the current civilization?

The Berry Scene

I enjoy fiction by authors that I disagree with, like Poul Anderson, but right now Dornford Yates is getting me down:

class-hatred is promoted by self-interested politicians;
Communists are bad people;
the beating up of a Communist is a source of amusement.

As long as it is not too badly affected by climate change, the English countryside remains to be appreciated whether or not society continues to be divided in the way eulogized by Yates.