Animal Farm (1945) - George Orwell

 

George Orwell’s Animal Farm should still be required reading in middle schools and high schools across the world, but based upon the current embracement of socialism and communism by the young people in this country, I would guess that that’s not generally the case anymore. Animal Farm is the perfect political book for young adult readers. It is a short, satiric fable that uses talking animals to teach a moral lesson, the kind of layered story whose message is clear and hard to forget. 

On its surface, Animal Farm is the story of a bunch of mistreated farm animals belonging to Mr. Jones. With an exception or two, none of the animals on the farm are happy about the way that Mr. Jones treats them, and they are growing unhappier by the day, so when an old boar called Old Major calls for an animal takeover of the Jones farm, the rest of the animals are eager to sign up for the overthrow. The revolution is successful, and the animals rename the farm Animal Farm and vow to live by the “Seven Commandments of Animalism.” Their key commandment is “All animals are equal.”

At first, that seems to be true. But the pigs, because they are the smartest animals on the farm, easily take the lead in setting the farm agenda and allocating work to the other animal types. Soon, the pigs have bent the commandments in their favor, and it gets harder and harder for the working animals to tell the pigs from humans like Mr. Jones. In the end, the pigs have started walking on two legs, they are wearing the clothing Mr. Jones was forced to leave behind, they are sleeping in his bed, they are drinking up the man's liquor, and they are cutting secret deals with neighboring human farmers. 

Animal Farm is a savage take on social revolutions, and how all too often they end up only replacing one set of tyrants for a fresh set of tyrants. All too soon, the animals of Animal Farm learn that the truth is more that “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Orwell makes plain that once leaders decide to prioritize their own personal comforts over the political principles they once so adamantly preached, it is the masses that will suffer, all the while being told that it is all for their own good. Orwell wrote Animal Farm during parts of 1943 and 1944, but the novel was not published until 1945 - Stalin being a key World War II ally of Britain and the U.S. - because it was such an obvious criticism of how Stalinism betrayed the Russian Revolution. 

At first, Animal Farm is fun, if maybe a little too cute at times, but as Old Major begins to manipulate the farm animals and consolidate his power, the true horrors of life on Animal Farm strike the reader hard. The book conveys a complex lesson in simple, straightforward way, and that makes what it has to say about the creep of communism all the more difficult to forget. 

Yes, Animal Farm should still be required reading in schools. The book’s lesson has stuck in my head for at least fifty years now, so I can personally attest to both its approach and its overall brilliance.  

The Case of the Empty Tin - Erle Stanley Gardner

 

The Case of the Empty Tin is Erle Stanley Gardner's nineteenth Perry Mason novel, so you would think that by this point, having now had so much experience writing Mason and all the other recurring series characters, that the books would be consistently satisfying ones. Well, think again. This novel is actually so bad that I may never see Perry Mason, the character, in a positive light again. So let me count the ways/reasons I so much dislike The Case of the Empty Tin:

1. It is overly complicated, and almost as soon as one possible scenario or solution to the crime is presented, it is immediately shot down by the all-knowing Perry Mason.
2. After a while, it seems like the theories will be added to forever, needlessly complicating an already farfetched plot.
3. There are way too many peripheral characters too keep up with without following your own detailed character cheatsheet. 
4. Perry Mason is most famous for having been one of the best defense attorneys of his day - and yet he does not enter a courtroom even once in this tedious tale.
5. As a lawyer, Mason would be subject to an Ethics Code or Rules of Professional Conduct if he wanted to stay licensed - but here he takes great delight in creating false evidence, leads, and alibis. 
6. Della Street seems to exist only so that Mason can ridicule her and explain to her (and to all the confused readers) what has just happened a few pages earlier - over and over again.
7. If the numerous explanations to Della were not already bad enough, the novel ends with Della reading a multi-page, detailed confession from the killer - an excuse for a long recap to explain to frustrated and confused readers all the clues they have probably missed.
8. The plot is a bore because not much ever seems to happen, and the characters are pretty much all so laughable that it's difficult to take any of them seriously.
9. Mason is dumb enough to implicate himself and Della in murder by investigating murder scenes before the police know that anything has even happened.
10. Perry Mason is so unethical that it's more fun to pull for his nemesis Lt. Tragg than it is for the "good guy" - and Della Street is an air-head willing to do anything and everything her "handsome" boss tells her to do.

And I won't even hold it against Gardner that The Case of the Empty Tin is as sexist and racist as any novel of the 1940s I've read in recent years. That's not a surprise, really, because Gardner is simply reflecting the thinking of the times. But what I do detest is being talked down to by an author who apparently didn't think his readers could figure this one out on their own without several pages of dry confessionary prose to explain what they had just spent several hours reading. It took me forever to read Perry Mason No. 19 because I could barely force myself to keep picking it up even when only 50 or so pages still remained to be read. I think it will be a while before I pick up another Perry Mason mystery - and that really irritates me. It also makes me sad.

The Ox-Bow Incident - Walter Van Tilburg Clark

As it turns out, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, who was a thirty-one-year-old English teacher at the time, struck literary gold in 1940 with the publication of his debut novel The Ox-Bow Incident. The novel was made into a major motion picture starring Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, and Harry Morgan in 1943, and today Tilburg’s novel is considered a classic of its type. 

Most readers will be familiar with plots similar to the story Clark tells in The Ox-Bow Incident even before they pick up the book for the first time. Tales about a group of cattle rustlers being chased down and lynched by a posse of local vigilantes have been played out in countless novels, movies, and television shows for near one hundred years now. The stories are usually rather gut-wrenching ones even when those being hanged from the nearest big tree really are the bad guys. But when mistakes are made, and innocent men are rashly killed by a mob of executioners, the stories truly are heartbreaking.

What makes The Ox-Bow Incident so different from most of the others is the emphasis Clark places on the motivations of the twenty-eight men who band together to chase down the men they believe have killed a local ranch hand while in the process of running off with forty head of cattle. The novel is both a character study and a hard look into the power of a mob to carry men to places they would never otherwise be willing to go. Even as the posse is being pulled together, the novel’s narrator makes this observation:

“Most men are more afraid of being thought cowards than of anything else, and a lot more afraid of being thought physical cowards than moral ones. There are a lot of loud arguments to cover moral cowardice, but even an animal will know if you’re scared.”

Then, a few pages later, the narrator points out how the local men are being pushed into riding with the posse by having it pulled together out in front of the local saloon rather than inside it:

“…a lot of these men must be fixed so that nothing could turn them off unless it could save their faces. The women were as stirred up as the men, and though a lot of them would have been glad if they could keep their own men out of it, that didn’t make any difference. When a man’s put on his grim business face, and hauled out a gun he maybe hasn’t used for years, except for jack rabbits, he doesn’t want to go back without a good excuse.”

It is inevitable. Twenty-eight men, led by two or three bloodthirsty types who always enjoy bullying and fighting anyway, are going to risk their own lives to chase three or four unidentified men into the blizzard that is fast descending upon them all. Most of them don’t really want to be part of a lynching, but only the town’s two preachers (one of them white, the other black) have the courage to speak up about what they are doing. The riders already assume the guilt of those they are chasing, and they do not intend to bring them back to town for a jury trial. The posse will be judge, jury, and executioner — and no one is going to stop them. Guilty or not, someone has to die tonight.

Bottom Line: While Clark’s moral arguments can get a little longwinded and a little repetitive as several of his characters attempt to find the moral courage to refuse to join the posse and to persuade others to do the same, the pace with which the posse finally forms helps build the tremendous tension readers feel as the book reaches its climax. What happens at that point, and what happens in its immediate aftermath, is heartbreaking for all concerned. Walter Van Tilburg Clark hit a home run his first time at bat.

Walter Van Tilburg Clark

Not Quite Dead Enough - Rex Stout

For a number of reasons, Not Quite Dead Enough, comprised of two novellas published under a single title, is probably the most fascinating Nero Wolfe book that I’ve read. The first of the  two novellas, Not Quite Dead Enough, was originally published in 1942 in an abridged format in the December edition of The American Magazine, and the second, Booby Trap, was abridged for the same magazine in August 1944. But the most fun thing about the novellas is that, because they were written and published in the midst of World War II, Stout decides to remove Wolfe from his NYC apartment cocoon and force him to cope (which he does rather effectively) in the real world.

Not Quite Dead Enough begins with Archie Goodwin, now a newly promoted Army major, tasked with convincing his old boss Nero Wolfe that Wolfe should apply his investigatory talents to furthering America’s war efforts — free of charge, of course. Archie agrees to give it a try, but receives the shock of his life when he attempts to surprise Wolfe by showing up at Wolfe’s apartment unannounced. Neither Wolfe nor Fritz (the cook) are anywhere to be seen; every surface in the apartment is dusty, piles of unopened mail are on Wolfe’s desk, and even Wolfe’s beloved orchids are being ignored. Are the two men dead or have they been kidnapped? Neither, as it turns out. 

Even more amazingly, Wolfe (a World War I veteran) and Fritz are getting themselves in shape to join the army so that, as Wolfe puts it, they can “kill Germans.” Archie, though, has the perfect way to get Wolfe back in the game: a dead woman who moves around even after she quits breathing. 

By the time that novella number two, Booby Trap, begins, Wolfe has agreed to help the army investigate the murder of an officer who may have been involved in a plan to profit from advanced weapons technology being readied for battlefield deployment. Either the dead colonel was in the middle of the scheme or he knew too much about it to be allowed to live another minute. Either way, Wolfe considers everyone involved to be traitors to the country during a time of war, and he badly wants to nail them. 

Bottom Line: The two novellas in Not Quite Dead Enough give Nero Wolfe the chance to show a different side of his personality. In both novellas, readers get a glimpse of a patriotic, much less self-absorbed, and much more ruthless Nero Wolfe than they expected ever to see. Wolfe has always been willing to be both “judge and jury” during his investigations. Now the question is whether he is also willing to be “executioner.” 

Rex Stout

And Be a Villain - Rex Stout

Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe series is the first detective series I remember getting myself hooked on. The good news back then (the mid-sixties) was discovering that the series had started years before I was born (with 1934’s Fer-de-Lance), so there were already lots of Nero Wolfe books for me to enjoy. Even better, Stout kept writing new ones every couple of years right up until his death in 1975, so for a long time there was always another new Nero Wolf story to look forward to. And as I’ve just been reminded, author Robert Goldsborough added another sixteen Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin books between 1986 and 2021, meaning I have even more Nero Wolfe material to explore now than I ever imagined. 

As I began And Be a Villain, I had vivid memories of the Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin characters and the amusing relationship that developed between them over the years. Theirs was/is much more than an employer/employee relationship; the men respect each other, care for each other, and are real friends. That, in fact, is part of what makes their verbal sparring so much fun. But even though this is not the first time I’ve read And Be a Villain, I remembered very little about it’s actual plot, so reading it now was almost like reading it for the first time.

Nero Wolfe is almost literally an “armchair detective” — and he’s a good one. Wolfe is a large man (I picture him as someone approaching a weight of 300 pounds) who refuses to leave his New York City apartment for any reason. Archie Goodwin, considerably younger than Wolfe, and a whole lot more agile, does all of the leg work involved in a Nero Wolfe investigation. In the meantime, Wolfe happily follows his own schedule of meals at specific times and two daily sessions with his beloved orchids. 

This time around, popular radio talk show host Madeline Fraser has had the unthinkable happen during one of her live broadcasts. A guest has dropped dead on-air after taking a sip of  from a soda provided by one of the show’s sponsors. All the police know for certain is that someone slipped cyanide into one of the bottles, and that this particular guest drew the unlucky bottle. It is exactly the kind of case that appeals to Wolfe, and because he has a large tax bill due just when his cash flow is at a low point, he offers his services to the radio network and the show’s sponsors on a contingent basis. If he solves the case before the police do it — or if the police solve it only because of a Wolfe-provided clue — he cashes their $20,000 check. If he fails, they get the check back.

But when Wolfe gathers up all the principals involved with Madeline Fraser’s radio show, he makes his first discovery: they are all lying — maybe not all for the same reason, but each and every one of them is holding something back. And that’s a fatal mistake, because now Nero Wolfe is ticked.

Bottom Line: And Be a Villain (1948) is the thirteenth Nero Wolfe mystery, and by this time fans of the series were familiar with the Wolfe and Goodwin characters. Feature films based on the Rex Stout characters had been produced by 1948, and television was going to make Nero Wolfe a household name in various TV series over the coming decades. The Nero Wolfe novels are usually not very long, but they are always satisfying. Fans of character-driven mysteries will particularly enjoy them, I think, but the mysteries are always solidly constructed ones that readers will also enjoy trying to solve before Wolfe gives them all the answers. 

Rex Stout

Dark Passage - David Goodis

David Goodis’s 1946 novel Dark Passage could not possibly be more aptly named than it is because this is one of the darkest novels imaginable. According to the Library of America, Dark Passage is the novel that gave Goodis the little bit of fame that he enjoyed during his lifetime, and that was primarily because the book was turned into a popular movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Other than that relatively brief moment, it appears that his work was kept alive  mostly by what LOA calls an “international cult following” which included several prominent European film directors who adapted Goodis’s work for the screen. 

The story begins with Vincent Parry escaping San Quinton Prison where he has been jailed for the murder of his wife. Parry, though, is one of those rarities among a prison population that never stops protesting its innocence - he really is innocent. He did not kill his wife, and he was convicted of the crime almost entirely based upon the trial testimony of a friend of his wife’s. Now, recognizing the perfect set of circumstances that have come together, Parry makes his escape and heads for San Francisco where he hopes to hide out long enough to figure his next step.

Parry’s luck bizarrely continues long enough for him to reach the city. And that’s where his real problems begin.

With Vincent Parry, David Goodis created one of the most paranoid characters imaginable, a man who cannot afford to be wrong about any of the people he encounters in the city while he tries to figure out how to disappear forever. He is paranoid, but he is justifiably paranoid, and Goodis places the reader inside the man’s head for pages at a time, eerily allowing readers to experience that feeing of paranoia for themselves. We literally hear, word-by-word, what is going on inside Vincent Parry’s head as he faces one critical situation after another.

Dark Passage is not a long novel, coming in at around 200 pages depending on which edition you read, but it paints a picture of 1940s San Francisco that is hard to forget. This is a city where life is lived in the shadows and after dark, a place where every one (including the cops) seems to have angle, a place where nothing is exactly as it seems and no stranger should be trusted. It is a city whose underbelly is not confined to only a few blocks, and as Parry moves through it, searching for a safe way out, things begin to happen to him. People die, people fall in love or think they fall in love, and several of them expose the blackness of their own hearts to the world. 

Bottom Line: Dark Passage shows clearly why David Goodis has come to be known as somewhat of a pioneer of American noir novels. His distinctive style, and his feel for troubled characters and city streets, make his writing stand out even in a genre filled with more famous writers. The Library of America volume of five novels, in which this is the first entry, also includes: Nightfall (1947), The Burglar (1953), The Moon in the Gutter (1953), and Street of No Return (1954). 

David Goodis

Shane - Jack Schaefer

For a lot of legitimate reasons western novels get as little respect as romance novels, and, in fact, I’ve several times seen westerns characterized disparagingly as “romance novels for men.” But for a lot of equally legitimate reasons, westerns and romance novels, when they are approached in a serious manner by their authors, deserve the same respect granted to their supposedly more sophisticated cousins. Jack Schaefer’s 1949 novel Shane is most definitely a western that stands tall for good reason. 

Shane certainly has its share of fistfights, and even includes a memorable gunfight between two of the fastest gunslingers passing through the state of Wyoming. But it also features a young couple trying to teach their son Bob (the novel’s narrator) right from wrong to provide him with a proper moral code he can live by for the rest of his life. It features a man so conflicted by his past that he struggles to keep himself under control even when violence is the only way to protect himself and those he loves. And it even explores one of the sweetest love-triangles I’ve ever encountered in a novel. Shane may not be the perfect western novel, but it comes as close as any to meeting that standard. 

     “He rode easily, relaxed in the saddle, leaning his weight lazily into the stirrups. Yet even in this easiness was a suggestion of tension. It was the easiness of a coiled spring, of a trap set.” 

That’s the impression that Shane gave Bob when the two first set eyes on each other as Shane rides up to the Starrett farm. From that first moment, the boy senses something different about Shane, something very dangerous to anyone who might dare cross him for the wrong reason. Shane arrives just about the time that half-a-dozen small farmers are being coerced by a rich cattleman to walk away from the homesteads upon which they depend for a living. The man wants to drive large herds of cattle through the territory, but he cannot do that if he has to bypass all the fenced-off farms adjoining his own property. And after receiving a big government contract to supply as much beef as he can come up with, he will do whatever it takes to destroy the farms in his way. 

 Shane has to choose a side or ride away...he doesn’t ride away. 

Soon enough, Shane becomes a symbol of resistance to both sides of the fence dispute, something that he both regrets and accepts: 

     “In some strange fashion the feeling was abroad that Shane was a marked man. Attention was on him as a sort of symbol. By taking him on father had accepted in a way a challenge from the big ranch across the river. What had happened to Morley had been a warning and father had deliberately answered it. The long unpleasantness was sharpened now after the summer lull. The issue in our valley was plain and would in time have to be pushed to a showdown. If Shane could be driven out, there would be a break in the homestead rank, a defeat going beyond the loss of a man into the realm of prestige and morale. It could be the crack in the dam that weakens the whole structure and finally less through the flood.” 

Neither Shane, nor the Starretts, are willing to let that happen. 

Bottom Line: Shane is filled with memorable characters, heroes and villains, alike. One of the most memorable is Marian Starrett, a woman strong enough to support her husband in his fight to save their livelihood from the man who wants to steal it from them. The complicated relationship between Joe Starrett, his wife Marian, and Shane is one that Schaefer handles perfectly in this, his debut novel. Shane is so good that I can only imagine the pressure that Schaefer must have felt for the rest of his life to match it.

Jack Schaefer

The Big Clock

The Big Clock is considered to be a classic representation of American Noir and, in many ways, I agree with that assessment. It has all of the elements that reflect that style of writing: a dark atmosphere, hardboiled narration, crime, suspense, obsessive passions, guilt ridden individuals caught up in circumstances beyond their control, etc. But this 1946 Kenneth Fearing novel fell flat for me and I can't say that I much enjoyed it. George Stroud, one of the novel's several first-person narrators, works at a major publishing corporation and has a nice little life going for himself. His world includes a wife by the name of Georgette and a little girl called Georgia, a family that seems to genuinely enjoy calling each other by the name "George" in casual conversation. But all is not what it appears to be. George Stroud has cheated on his wife in the past and he makes little effort to change that habit, even going so far as to start an affair with the mistress of the founder of the company that employs him, one Earl Janoth. Circumstances catch up with Stroud at the end of one weekend spent with this mistress of both men when, upon returning her to her apartment, he is glimpsed by Earl Janoth who has unexpectedly shown up at the apartment house. The brief encounter with Janoth becomes a threat to Stroud's very life after Janoth, in a sudden fit of rage, strikes the young woman a death blow with the wine decanter from which they were drinking before he confronted her about the mystery man he had seen with her. The novel takes a Hitchcockian twist when Stroud is called into Earl Janoth's office and is placed in charge of a massive project to identify the mysterious man who might have the power to place Janoth at the murder scene. Stroud, of course, has to appear to be making the most of the company's massive resources to find the man while, at the same time, trying to make sure that he is never identified as being that man himself. Author Kenneth Fearing still had me up to this point. I enjoyed watching Stroud squirm as he tried so desperately to appear to be the hound rather than the rabbit. The suspense level continued to build nicely and I wondered if he was going to avoid the goons who wanted to kill him or if he was going to have to finally confront them directly. But the timing involved in Fearing's solution is just so improbable that it ruined the novel for me and I wonder why the book is considered to be such a classic of its type. The book did translate well to film and has been made into two movies, The Big Clock starring Ray Milland and No Way Out, a Kevin Costner film. Rated at: 2.5

I Married a Dead Man

The first version of I Married a Dead Man appeared as a novella in the April 1946 issue of Today's Woman. By 1948, when the book was published under the pseudonym William Irish, Cornell Woolrich had expanded his novella and completely rewritten its ending, resulting in a fine American Noir novel that has been filmed at least three times. The best known movie version of I Married a Dead Man is the 1950 film starring Barbara Stanwyck for which the title was changed to No Man of Her Own. The movie is an excellent representation of the film noir of the period although it was somewhat weakened by the studio's decision to use the original ending of the novella rather than the stronger, more compelling, ending of the novel itself. Helen, a very young woman, finds herself seven months pregnant and abandoned by the father of her child. All that the father of her child has left her is a five dollar bill and train tickets from New York to the West Coast where she hopes to start a new life for herself and her baby. By the time that she is seen struggling to find a place for herself and her one suitcase on an overcrowded train, Helen is down to her last seventeen cents and is near despair. But fate has a surprise in store for Helen and the young couple who befriend her on the train, a surprise that offers Helen the chance to provide her child with the kind of life she never dreamed possible. Does she have the nerve required to snatch that chance when she recognizes it? Is her love for her new baby so strong that she will do anything to ensure the child's future? By the time that Helen has to answer those questions for herself, she finds that circumstances completely beyond her control have made it possible for her to live a life she never dreamed possible if only she keeps her mouth shut. But of course, fate is not that kind, nor is life that simple. That's the rest of the story, a story that would have made Alfred Hitchcock smile, and one that I'm not going to spoil for you. Cornell Woolrich deserves to be better known than he is today. He was a contemporary of Dashiell Hammett, James Cain and Raymond Chandler, all of whom have remained largely in print for the last 60 or 70 years. But despite the fact that during the period between 1940 and 1948 alone, Woolrich produced six novels under his own name, four as William Irish and one using the name George Hopley, his work is not easily found today. Woolrich has been called "the Hitchcock of the written word" and, in fact, between 1938 and 1950 Hollywood producers turned some 15 of his stories into movies, the most famous of which is Hitchcock's own Rear Window, a film based on the 1942 Woolrich novella It Had to Be Murder. So if you are a fan of Cain, Hammett and Chandler but have read all of their work, Cornell Woolrich is a name you need to remember. Finding his work will require some extra effort, but Woolrich is a worthy addition to anyone's American Noir collection.