Where is your Darwin Now?

Twelve-year-old Tertius challenges science:

"How can I be 95% ape when I'm 75% water?"

Well, it is a Steinway.

Tertius picking out simple tunes on the piano. Nails "Mary Had a Little Lamb."

"How does that other one go? You know, 'Croissants.'"

"'Croissants?'" I echo.

"Isn't it 'Croissants'?"

Pause for thought. Then it clicks. "Ah, you mean 'Hot Cross Buns.'"

Who else are you wearing?

It's the last full day of sixth grade for Tertius. As he gets ready to leave, I compliment him again on his sneakers (because I like these silver-gray Nikes with red trim, and not because I'm trying to reinforce his satisfaction with shoes that cost less than $100 a pair).

He looks into them. "I've just noticed that the insole is red, too," he comments. "That means everywhere I go, I'm walking on red carpet."

What Would Clooney Do?

In Murdering Ministers, I had Oliver silently sum up a new acquaintance, a mother in her thirties, by guessing she'd never owned a pair of jeans in her life. The judgment was meant to be shorthand for the kind of restricted English upbringing that Joan Quarterboy had been condemned to by her puritan, lower-middle-class parents.

Now my Dad never owned a pair of jeans in his life either. His casual pants were strictly gray flannel, identical to the ones he wore to his factory job. He never owned a polo shirt or a tee-shirt either, his only concession to the elusive English summer being a "sports shirt," a short-sleeved version of the collared dress shirts he wore all year. On Saturdays, maybe a v-neck pullover would replace the weekday sports jacket and tie, always visible at the neckline of his overalls. Sundays meant Church. Church meant a suit.

Me aged 10, Dad aged 49. At home. Ignore bad haircut.

When I was born, Dad was already older than the perennially thirty-ish Joan, frozen by fiction. But he came two generations before her, and my jeans comment is, in his case, a matter of social history. (Dad would have been 98 this year.) When I was a teenager in West London, all the men of his age wore the same uniform. You'd see them in flannels and Marks and Spencer windcheaters, wearing ties to go to the supermarket. "Casual" was a shelf of light-weight clothes that might as well have lived in their suitcases, because they were only sported during those two-week vacations on the South Coast. Of England. The rest of the time, the only casual was business casual. There was no dressing down, only dressing up.

Why bring this up? Well, the prodigiously funny and thoroughly naughty Amy Schumer did a skit in her Comedy Central show a week or so ago about a group of women solemnly visiting the Museum of Boyfriend Wardrobe Atrocities ("Heather dated Mark in his bowling shirt for two years" begins the downbeat audio tour.) It culminates with a display of 5,200 pairs of Crocs. "Did this really happen?" asks a horrified little girl, whose coat stays bright red as the rest of the image fades to black and white.

Here's my problem. The camera scans down one exhibit -- woolly hat, Beats, red striped polo, roomy black khakis, red Converse sneakers. "What you see before you may not look so bad," says the narration, so far confirming my opinion (although the hat is mistake, as hats usually are), "until you know that it was worn by Simon . . . aged fifty-five."

Gasps of horror from the mainly female museum-goers. Gasp of horror from a middle-aged male member of the viewing audience, too. Okay, I mentioned the hat, I use buds,not Beats, and my polos are never crested. But as for the rest . . . (I have a pair of purple Converse, I use them to accessorize a black suit.)

Just add purple Converse . . .

I'm north of fifty-five. All my post-teen life, I've stuck to the narrow pathway of The Gap, never veering into parachute pants or butt-cleavage baring baggies or pastel T-shirts under Armani. My very occasional baseball caps are never worn backwards. I'm a winter. My biggest fashion dilemma in thirty years has been pleated v. flat front.

But it seems even this level of caution is not enough. So now what do I do?

I can't dress like a 20-year-old.

I can't dress the way I did when I was 20.

I can't dress the way my Dad did when he was my age.

What do baby boomers switch to, when their hair also goes winter and their reading glasses stay on all the time?

Where do we go to learn this stuff, Amy?

The Daily Insult Rides Again.

Over the dinner table this evening, I express my ignorance of some flimsy piece of teenage slang, which Secundus explains before warning me never to use it.

"You're a good dad," he says, "but not a cool dad."

I take this as a great compliment. Two compliments in fact, because parents simply shouldn't be cool, even if they are. (Hint: they aren't.) But then S. elaborates. "With your British accent and your gray hair, you come across to my friends as my laid-back grandfather."

Uh-huh. Still, with those attributes, I'm apparently two-thirds of the way to qualifying as a wizard in their eyes. I just lack the beard.

Of course, at Christmas, I did have the beginnings of the necessary facial fungus, but I shaved it off before the new year. Just think, I could have been Dumbledore if it weren't for the itchiness.

In beagle years, I'm over four hundred.

To White Plains this morning for my seventh appearance at the annual Young Authors Conference, this year bringing in about 250 talented students from eighteen high schools around Westchester county. Our hosts were the nice people of Pace University, because our customary haunt in Valhalla was being used for something else.

But as if looking at all those bright teenage faces wasn't enough of a reminder of my advancing years, there was a jarring lesson in my workshop.

To set up a prompt for a writing exercise -- come up with an intriguing and magnetic opening line for a story -- I put up a slide with this immortal phrase:

"It was a dark and stormy night."

Now I'm aware not one of them is going to know that its first major appearance was on page one of the 1830 novel Paul Clifford by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. (I only know because I have to.) 

These days, we remember Bulwer-Lytton best because of the annual bad writing awards named in his honor. But in his time, he was a best-selling author who grew phenomenally rich from his work and gave us the phrases "the pen is mightier than the sword" and "the almighty dollar." Edward was also an English member of parliament, ended up in the House of Lords, and is buried in Westminster Abbey, so no slouch. He had his ex-wife committed to a lunatic asylum because she wouldn't stop slanging him off, even after their divorce (although public opinion released her), and in 1862 he was offered the crown of Greece, when the previous King Otto abdicated. (He demurred.)

Anyway, as I said, I didn't expect Bulwer-Lytton's name to be thrown out when I casually asked if any of my young audience had come across the phrase before.

But surely, surely, at least one of them recognizes the work of Snoopy?

Not so. I feel old.


P.S. Happy birthday, Gilly.

Lewis and me.

Not what it seems. Read on.

This year, we're celebrating the 150th anniversary of the publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

I love Lewis Carroll. My first published mystery opens in the middle of a Snark Hunt. This Private Plot uses both "Tweedledum and Tweedledee" and the Hatter's rendition of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" as clues. I composed a setting of "The Walrus and the Carpenter," and as a student, I adapted and acted in Alice's Adventures (and I insisted on including the elusive "Adventures") for Oxford's University Players. Good Lord, I've even read to the end of Sylvie and Bruno Concluded.

But even a fan and apologist such as myself can't escape the fact there was something a little, well, questionable about Charles Dodgson's relationship with children, an issue thoughtfully and sensitively covered in a recent BBC television program "The Secret Life of Lewis Carroll," hosted by Martha Kearney. Now, I'm not going to rehash all the biography and psychology here -- even the very distinguished clutch of Carrolleans interviewed for the program couldn't agree on a characterization of Dodgson's interest in little girls, or indeed if his chosen companions were as "little" as we've assumed.*

And that's because the latest wave of LC/CD research is now seeking to undo the glib generalizations washed over us by earlier Freudian waves and other schools of thought that encouraged us to leer up Victoria's voluminous skirts. Dodgson's too-easy branding as a pedophile is now rightly seen as short-changing a unique and highly complex character, and may even be based on incorrect assumptions and biographical data. (And sometimes a rabbit-hole is just a rabbit-hole.)

Since my own interest in Carroll goes back to my teenage years, I've heard a lot of that knee-jerk labeling over the years -- "Lewis Carroll liked little girls, nudge nudge" -- usually from jerks who are suspiciously keen to rush to a prurient judgment.

So what do you make of this? Google "Lewis Carroll." Go to images. I guarantee that, not too far down, you'll see the picture at the top of this post. "Carroll-and-Alice-kissing" is its file name. The image seems to have first appeared on Pinterest, but has been picked up by more than one blog, completely at face value. An innocent moment of Victoriana or something a little more revealing?

It doesn't matter. Because the picture is a fake, and a remarkably bad one for something that's frequently reproduced with no comment.

Here's the original of Dodgson, a self-portrait, flopped for the forgery, although he noted that, since he asked Alice Liddell's older sister Lorina to uncap and then recap the lens, Ina claimed she was the true photographer in this instance.

Now, here's the source of Alice. Carroll's group shot of the three Liddell sisters (hence the pun in the three "little" sisters of the Dormouse's sleepy tale) in a tableau called "Open Your Mouth." Alice's mouth is open, not for a salacious smooch with an Oxford don, but for the cherries that Ina is dangling, their poses stiff and awkward because of the long exposures required by mid-nineteenth century photography. (Younger sister Edith looks on.)

I'm not going to attempt to identify the source of Carroll's claw-like hand that was Photoshopped into the fake. The whole exercise is disturbing enough.

But this isn't the only case. Take a look at this image, also found on Google images, again of Dodgson and Alice, in a marginally less scandalous arrangement. At least he's keeping his visible hands to himself this time.

Another fake, of course. (There are very few pictures of Dodgson, who protected his privacy and tried to hide his alter ego from the adult world, and only one or two that include him with other people.) Here's the original:

It's a picture by Dodgson of a fellow clergyman, nursing a small child that, according to the record, is oddly no relation whatsoever to the man of the cloth. The face of Alice that's been badly pasted over the other girl seems to be a flopped cut-out from this picture of the three girls.** (Dodgson's face clearly comes from the same self-portrait, shown above.)

Is any of this frankly too-easy research going to stop the proliferation of these concocted images? Of course not. The same deeply unpleasant impetus that led to their creation is going to keep them circulating around the internet for years, no doubt joined in time by dozens of suspiciously "rediscovered" pictures of nude girls, supposedly taken by Lewis Carroll, that notorious child-molester and pervert. Ah, what a world. We're all so bloody sophisticated, aren't we?

 *Nonsense. Of course I'm going to throw in my own observations. First, a biographical note that is rarely given enough weight. Charles was the third child of the family. He had two older sisters and was followed by two further girls before the next boy emerged. He grew up surrounded and worshiped by little girls, and as the oldest boy and his father's namesake was very much the leader in play and family entertainments. He acknowledged his rural childhood as idyllic, but the final step into adulthood -- his permanent relocation to starchy, celibate, serious Oxford when he was a stammering 19-year-old -- coincided almost to the day with the sudden death of his beloved mother. Surely then, the company of young children, especially girls, was as much a connection to a childhood curtailed by tragedy as any suppression of a newly discovered sexuality.

Second, the BBC program brought up the observation that Carroll/Dodgson's first biographer, his nephew Stuart Collingwood, may have stressed his uncle's fascination with younger girls in order to draw attention away from his interest in older girls. The famous rift with the Liddells seemed to revolve around his attention to Lorina, not Alice -- Ina was no longer considered a "child," being past the age of consent. Whether or not a contemporary photograph turns out to be Dodgson's nude study of the teenage Ina, which was freshly considered in the BBC program, his later diaries are full of smug references to his habit of inviting unchaperoned "child-friends" who were actually in their late teens and twenties -- but still far less than half his age at the time -- to visit him at Oxford or stay in his lodgings during his summer vacations in Eastbourne. Even his spinster sisters berated him about the appearances of this behavior, but he boasted that he was defiant of popular moral convention, which he personified as "Mrs. Grundy."

Scandalous maybe -- and to say that none of these young ladies ever reported any misbehavior may not cut it in the days of Operation Yewtree and Cosby -- but a different sin from the one people have been trying to pin on him, and a an alternative viewpoint that's been well covered by some recent biographies.

**In an earlier version of this blog, I thought Alice's face came from a picture of Alice alone, posed in her best clothes in the Deanery garden, a companion image to the familiar portrait of her as a beggar. I've changed my mind.

A Word to Husbands
by Ogden Nash

To keep your marriage brimming
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you're wrong, admit it;
Whenever you're right, shut up.











Patient followers of this blog (and, look, sorry about the hiatus, but stuff happened) will know of my adoration of Ogden Nash, not merely because of his wit, dexterity, and rampant humanity (which, as he might have said, is devoid of hue-vanity), but because he's a native of Rye, New York, my current dwelling place.

So judge of my delight when I just discovered that, following a refurbishment last year, our local library, the Rye Free Reading Room, now has an Ogden Nash "Quiet Study" Room. And I'm sitting in it as I write this, in a sun-drenched corner of the building's second floor, overlooking the town square, with City Hall to the right and our historic Square House to the left. (George Washington did sleep there. Twice.)

Alas, although a framed calligraphy version of one of ON's verses hangs just inside the main entrance to this building, the room itself as yet bears no tribute to the great man. Unless, of course, you count the admonition: "Please, no talking and no audio," which might be a modernist rephrasing of the above advice for husbands. Hmmm. . . .

To avert assault and battery,
With words profane and bawdy, oh
Do refrain from chattery
And playing any audio.

Oh, I don't care. Look, one of the best days of my recent life was when I got to take Ogden's daughter Linell and his granddaughter Frances to lunch, just before they appeared at a celebration of ON at Rye's Arts Center. Frances was kind enough to say that the poem I'd blogged about my dog, Leila, was "Nashian" and that she was sure her grandfather would agree. Which is all the excuse I need for re-running it, here, as I sit in the Ogden Nash Quiet Study Room.

Our dog
Is not a possum.
When bigger dogs diss her in the street, she doesn't lie down and play dead till they go away, thinking she's just put one across 'em.
She fearlessly barks right back, which makes her
Ossum.

Wanna see something really scary? Look at the calendar.

Halloween tomorrow, huh? I'll tell you what's scary.

I'm irritated by the speed of Hollywood "reboots." You know, Bryan Singer's Superman Returns (2006)¹ didn't exactly set the box office in fire, so we have to start the saga all over again with Zack Snyders' Man of Steel² last year. Or the Spider-man trilogy begun by Zack Raimi only wrapped up in 2007³, but a mere five years later we're heading back to the trough with the new Amazing Spider-Man series.⁴ Short-attention-span movie-making.⁵ (Ah well, at least it gives employment to all those British actors playing American icons.)

So I'm sharing my frustration with Primus on the way to school, this time in the context of this year's Godzilla,⁷ which in my opinion seems to have appeared before the ink was fully dry on the well-deserved death notices for the previous version starring Matthew Broderick.⁸

"Too soon?" echoes Primus. "Dad, that version came out before I was born."

Shit, he's right. What the hell happened? But on the other hand, sixteen years still isn't long enough to shake off the vision of a nest of dinosaur eggs in the middle of Madison Square Garden.

¹Didn't see it.
²Didn't see it.
³Saw all three.
⁴Didn't see it.
⁵Okay, I know, I know, it's not without precedent: Bogart's 1941 The Maltese Falcon came only ten years after the first, overshadowed version of Hammett's novel, starring Ricardo Cortez as Sam Spade. Still, a good movie and worth a look. Dwight Frye of both Dracula and Frankenstein⁶ plays the gunsel Wilmer, portrayed by Elisha Cooke, Jr. in the later movie.
⁶See how I brought this Halloween-inspired rant about aging back to classic horror?
⁷Didn't see it.
⁸Saw it. Almost, but not entirely, a waste of time. But try to see the superb original 1954 Japanese film⁹, not the Americanized version which has a lot of Raymond Burr staring upwards.
⁹Did it again. You're welcome.

Big Brother is bothering me.

Phone rings. Long Island number. I pick up and mutter a "hello." Long pause and fuzzy background. Then a distant, accented voice says its "hello," as if it hadn't heard me.

"Yes?" I snap, now completely convinced that this is an illicit marketing call -- I am firmly on the Do Not Call register and these scofflaws piss me off.

"This is Winston Smith, may I speak to the homeowner?"

Aha, rookie mistake, Mr. Telemarketer, giving me the chance to say "no." So I say no and hang up. Ha! I could, of course, vent or string him along, but really, it's not his fault that his employer breaks the law and pushes him into firing line. If that's the only job he could find, he's already having a bad enough day. But my point is that these calls --

Hang on.

"Winston Smith"?

Winston Smith?

Makes me wonder now what he was trying to sell me. Surveillance cameras? Rodent spray? I mean, I know these guys use assumed names, but am I now going to be interrupted on a daily basis by a stream of characters from 20th century British fiction? Mrs. Dalloway doing kids' birthday parties? Leopold Bloom offering package tours to Dublin? Constance Chatterley plugging her live webcam?

If the next one claims to be Bertie Wooster, I'm staying on the line. I could use Jeeves's hangover cure.

What makes you think I live for these moments?

"A riveting and entertaining read by a master of the mystery genre, Alan Beechey's "This Private Plot" is highly recommended . . ." (Julie Summers, Midwest Book Review)

Wow. Okay, that's gotta be my title from now on. I'm off to get new business cards printed.

Necessary roughness?

Yesterday, the Rye Garnets met the Harrison Huskies for the 84th time in the annual football game that's been described as Westchester county's "premier high school rivalry." (Rye beat Harrison 24-13, thanks for asking.)

The game was played at Rye High School's Nugent stadium, with the visiting Harrison supporters wisely directed to stands on the opposite side of the field from the home team's noisy fans (myself and Tertius included).

Before the kick-off, we have the usual introductions, including the presentation of an award to an outstanding scholar from each team, named in honor of a Rye resident who died on one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center. This is dutifully followed by a few moments of respectful contemplation of 9/11, fresh in all our minds from the anniversary a couple of days earlier. Silence falls.

Well, not quite. A few Harrison kids in the faraway stands didn't seem to get the message, keeping up the pre-game whoops. There's a swift flurry of  "shushes" from their neighbors that don't get an immediate reaction. And then one exasperated male voice, clearly heard across the entire width of the hushed field: "Shut . . . the fuck . . . up!"

From an earlier year, the Garnets celebrate a victory over the Huskies with the traditional jump into the Blind Brook, which runs beside the High School's sports field. (Used without the photographer's permission, but she won't mind.)

Dark side? What dark side?

My late mother always told me not to show off. So having posted a set of glowing reviews of This Private Plot yesterday, I'm now required by upbringing, personality, culture, and nationality to appease the universe by trashing myself.

The only trouble is (he said cautiously, fearing the lightning strike from beyond), the reviews have been pretty exclusively, uh, positive.

What do to then to be gloomy and British and self-deprecating? What all publicists do -- take the words out of context!

“Alan Beechey may not win the Pulitzer Prize for This Private Plot."¹

Reviewing the Evidence 

"Snarky."²

Booklist

"It's easy to forget that there is a potential crime to investigate."³

Mysterious Reviews

"Tangled with twists and odd revelations."⁴

Joseph’s Reviews

"You'll be wondering about the recesses of the author's mind."⁵

Reader’s Favorite

"Tangled."⁶
"It was the first one I’ve read and worked very well as a stand-alone mystery."⁷

Laura Hartman for Oswego Patch and other blogs

"He has littered his writing trail with breadcrumbs."⁸
"Bizarre . . . does it work?"⁹

Feathered Quill

"The wit gets supercilious at times."¹⁰
"As far as literacy is concerned, reading the book is like playing hide-and-go-seek with Shakespearean quotes . . . The constant quoting gets a bit old after a while."¹¹

I Love a Mystery

"Outlandish. Convoluted."¹²

Long and Short Reviews

"I get a lot of books to review and some are more enjoyable than others. This one I rationed."¹³

New Mystery Reader

"Awkward,  mentally meandering."¹⁴

Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine

"Twisty. Absurd. Silly. A bit dim."¹⁵

Rambles.net

¹Meredith was referring to the long gap between the second and third novels. "Much has been made of Donna Tartt's decades between novels, but The Goldfinch, while slow in arriving, ended up winning the Pulitzer Prize. So what, then, of a novel that has been fifteen years in the making? Alan Beechey may not win the Pulitzer Prize for This Private Plot, but Oliver Swithin fans won't be disappointed."

²“. . . . This snarky cozy is full of humor and British quirkiness. Agatha Christie meets Monty Python.”

³"An abundance of wry humor and clever wordplay sprinkled throughout, so much so that at times it's easy to forget that there is a potential crime to investigate."

⁴"Artfully tangled with twists and odd revelations."

⁵"You'll be wondering about the recesses of the author's mind as you tease yourself to solve the ongoing mystery." I love this comment.

⁶"Deliciously tangled plot that is perfectly tied up by the end of the book, with a beautiful, unexpected twist at the end."

⁷So you needn't bother to read the earlier ones, I guess.

⁸"He has littered his writing trail with breadcrumbs and is confident his readers will gobble them up."

⁹"Bizarre, perhaps; but does it work? Absolutely!"

¹⁰A quite genuine negative criticism.

¹¹It's this book's puzzle within a puzzle. As Simon Brett once memorably said: "Well done, you spotted it."

¹²"The whole story is full of outlandish secrets (that really aren’t secrets to anyone except Oliver) and a very convoluted path to the person who finally got tired of Uncle Dennis and tried to clear the path to money and marriage."

¹³"This one I rationed to make it last longer."

¹⁴"If the situation weren’t already awkward enough, the unclothed group discover the body of a well-known BBC storyteller hanging from a tree. Thus begins the third Oliver Swithin mystery featuring the sneezing, mentally meandering, Wodehouseian hero."

¹⁵"The plot is nice and twisty, and mostly character-driven. The absurd moments are very absurd. . .  There were silly situations that yet proceeded naturally from the course of events, and there were twists that I didn't call at all -- and I've read enough mysteries that I can generally predict the main twists. . . . Our hero, Oliver, is a nice but occasionally a bit dim chap . . ."

Nope, modesty does NOT forbid.

Some well-chosen snippets from recent reviews of This Private Plot:

“Witty, entertaining, and highly recommended.”

Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine 

“Entertaining . . . . colorful . . . riotous . . . suspenseful.”

Publisher’s Weekly 

“Delightfully entertaining. A very enjoyable mystery all around, one that's highly recommended.”

 Mysterious Reviews 

“Greatly superior to the average formulaic cozy. Recommended”

 I Love a Mystery 

 “A great mystery. Interesting plot twists . . . keep the pages turning and the reader guessing.”

Reviewing the Evidence 

“What a fun read! a great mystery filled with secrets and British shenanigans!”

Mysteries, Etc. 

“Imagine that Caroline Graham, author of the intricately-plotted ‘Midsomer Murders’ series got together with P G Wodehouse to write a murder mystery. . . . A really amusing and charming book.”

New Mystery Reader 

 “A subtle humor floats through the story, bringing a touch of whimsy to a serious plot. Delightful.”

Bookloons 

“The book is full of believable and interesting people. Beechey has created an entertaining puzzle.”

Roberta Alexander – syndicated in the San Jose Mercury and other California newspapers. 

“. . . . This snarky cozy is full of humor and British quirkiness. Agatha Christie meets Monty Python.”

Booklist

“Artfully tangled with twists and odd revelations. Highly recommended.”

Joseph’s Reviews

“Thoroughly enjoyable British humor abounds in this delightful novel.”

Reader’s Favorite

“A wonderful romp. . . Wonderfully British in the spirit of Agatha Christie with the humor of P.G. Wodehouse.”

Laura Hartman for Oswego Patch and other blogs

“Solid entertainment . . . Beechey anchors the reader’s heart with the whimsy of Swithin and the reader is intrigued to turn the page and learn more.”

Feathered Quill

“The author writes a good book with some tongue-in-cheek jokes, plenty of action and a good flow to the story. I was impressed.”

Long and Short Reviews

“I loved it. Oliver’s girlfriend rocks!”

Rambles.net

Twist, Martext, Cromwell, Hardy, Reed, North, Goldsmith, Wendell Homes . . .

My lead character, Oliver Swithin, is not a fictional version of me, although I'm vaguely aware that he voices a lot of my opinions and prejudices. I will, however, grudgingly allow that he may be living somewhere along one of my own roads not taken.

That forename stuck in my head after a vacation reading of Dickens's Oliver Twist in the incongrous surroundings of sun-soaked Majorca. We don't even have any Olivers in the family.

Or so I thought.

But a recent burst of family tree research has turned one up at last. Yep, I have a 13th great-grandfather called Oliver Chadwick, direct ancestor of pompous Victorian poet and all-round mountebank "Professor" Richard Sheldon Chadwick, whose dubious doings have graced these pages before. I don't have any dates for Oliver, but his son Nicholas, my 12th great, was born in 1550 in Staffordshire, England.

Mathematically, I've inherited an average of 0.000031% of Oliver's genes. That means we have about one in 32,000 genes in common. And since the Genome Project has estimated that humans have only about 24,000 genes, this particular generation gap crosses the line where -- in terms of DNA, anyway -- Oliver's ancestry becomes completely irrelevant to me, and I'm no more related to him by blood than I would to any other sixteenth-century English citizen from the Midlands, such as, oh, William Shakespeare.

Unless, of course, Oliver's name eventually pops up more than once in my lineage, which is increasingly likely the further back you go, with twice as many branches for each generation and a fewer people around to sit on them. At Oliver's level there are already about 16,000 slots to be filled. (Effie Strongitharm has more to say about this stuff in This Private Plot. Just thought I'd mention that. If you're interested.)

"If Agatha Christie and P.G. Wodehouse had a child, he'd have written this book."

Okay, if you know me by now (get to know me!), you'll know that's probably the best imaginable headline for a review of one of my books, ever. (Well, maybe "Spielberg offers half a billion for movie rights to mystery series" might just cap it.)

So special thanks to Laura Hartman, reviewer for Patch in the Oswego area, for all her enthusiasm. And for a magnificent piece of wordplay.

You see, I have a character in This Private Plot called "Lesbia Weguelin," and Laura speculates that it's a double-entendre for something like "let's be a wiggling."  

I love this. It's entirely appropriate in a book that includes a character whose name is the Swedish word for penis. (Quilt-Hogg and Mormal also have dubious etymologies, and An Embarrassment of Corpses includes a company called "Woodcock and Oakhampton." So far, nobody's spotted the filthy joke behind that one.)

Unfortunately, the wiggling is entirely accidental. Here's the true story.

I'm a devotee of the early 20th century "English musical renaissance," and I have quite an extensive collection of CDs by British composers from this period. Hyperion is one of several recording companies that have done an outstanding job of reviving the works of many lesser known composers, with well-chosen artwork for the CD covers. Back in the dark times when we indulged in CDs.

Lesbia - Weguelin. (See?)

For several recordings of big works by Sir Granville Bantock (1868-1946), Hyperion astutely chose paintings by contemporaneous neo-classical artists -- you know, all Mediterranean sunlight, diaphanous gowns, and a marked absence of underwear. But this was okay for the Victorians, because the young ladies thus depicted were (a) foreign and (b) from classical literature, so it was educational. Besides, you could always blindfold the piano legs.

And for Sir GB's 1906 hour-long orchestral song cycle "Sappho," coupled with his "Sapphic Poem" -- I'm not making this up -- the selected image was an 1878 picture called "Lesbia" by John Reinhard Weguelin (1849-1927), an English artist despite his name.

You might think this pairing coyly matched the implied sexual theme. You'd be wrong. The real Lesbia was a pseudonym for a former mistress of Catallus, the first-centry BCE Roman poet, and from what was said of her at the time, she was decidedly heterosexual and seemed intent on proving it to as many famous men as possible. A good sport, we might say euphemistically. Well, if you looked anything like Weguelin's slice of Victorian soft-core porn -- history lesson, I mean -- you wouldn't keep it to yourself, would you?

Where was I? Oh yes. I don't have this particular CD, but I saw it a while ago in the Hyperion catalogue with a credit for the cover art abbreviated to "Lesbia Weguelin." And I knew immediately that I had to invent a character with that name.

Boring stuff this, eh? Let's pretend instead that Laura was right all along . . .

"Knock knock."

"Who's there?"

"Lesbia Weguelin."

 "Lesbia Weguelin who?"

"Lesbia Weguelin, Miley, your fifteen minutes are nearly up."

Incidentally, were Agatha and PGW to have paired, they'd have been one of those rare couples to have received name-changing honors quite independently. (The wife of a knight get to be called "Lady Whatever" anyway, but in this case, the damehood would be in Agatha's own right.) Other examples are Dame Cleo Laine and the late Sir John Dankworth and Dame Agatha herself, whose second husband, Max Mallowan, had been knighted for services to archeology. Alas, Dame A and Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse could not have sired me, since poor PGW was apparently unable to have children, possibly because of a childhood case of mumps. Oddly enough, I read a 1934 comic story by Agatha last week called "The Girl in the Train" (it's in The Listerdale Mystery collection) that was clearly inspired by PGW and could almost have been written by him on one of his off days. I guess there's more than one way to reproduce.

The Daily Insult . . . the adventure continues.

Secundus -- born in Manhattan, schooled in the Westchester burbs -- does a very fine English accent, although he's reluctant to demonstrate it in public.

"Do you get it from listening to me?" I ask. "Or from all the British shows you watch?"

"Actually, I don't notice that you have a different accent," he answers. "That's probably because, in all my life, you're the person I've heard talking the most. Ever."

"Call that a silly walk, Hercule?"

Reviews for This Private Plot are coming in. Here's what Booklist said:

"This snarky cozy is full of humor and British quirkiness. Agatha Christie meets Monty Python."

Yup. Nailed three of my teenage influences right there, if you include the implied Lewis Carroll reference. It's like she knows me.

Hmm. What if Agatha really did meet Monty Python . . .

"Look, why did the parrot fall flat on his back the moment I got him home?"

"The Norwegian Blue prefers kipping on its back. Remarkable bird, innit, Squire? Beautiful plumage. It's probably pining for the fjords."

"Pining for the fjords? It's not pining, it's passed on. This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! He's expired and gone to meet his maker! He's a stiff! Bereft of life, he rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed him to the perch, he'd be pushing up the daisies! His metabolic processes are now history! He's off the twig! He's kicked the bucket, he's shuffled off his mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible! This . . . is an ex-par--"

Mr. Praline broke off as the door to the pet shop opened suddenly. Silhouetted in the doorway was a man whose erect stance and air of dignity made you instantly overlook his lack of height. The newcomer took a couple of paces forward, a slight limp now noticeable, until the harsh fluorescent lighting fully revealed the dandified neatness of his appearance, from his dapper shoes to the freshly brushed Homburg that crowned his egg-like head. His military moustache seemed to twitch as the odor of the dirty cages reached him, and he plucked irritably at sudden stray feather that had floated onto the impeccable cloth of his sleeve.

"One moment, mon ami,"  he cautioned, in an accent that the little Belgian knew would be mistaken for French once again. These cloth-eared English! "I put it to you, M'sieur Praline, that the parrot has not merely expired, as you put it. He was  . . . murdered!"

"Murdered!" gasped the two men on either side of the counter.

"Murdered," confirmed the detective. "He was, 'ow you say, whack-ed. Rubbed out. Bumped off. Dispatched. Iced. Wasted, pasted, wetworked. He's been given a Chicago overcoat. He sleeps with the fishes. He was taken for a ride to the 'appy 'unting ground. He was made to walk the plank, with malice aforethought and extreme prejudice. Polished off and toe-tagged, he has bitten the dust while the fat lady sang. He said no to an offer he couldn't refuse. This . . . is a DOA parrot."

He took another dainty step forward. "Mais oui, mes amis," he continued, glaring at the remains of the blue parrot on the floor in front of his highly polished toecaps. "It is murder, certainment. Murder most foul!"

See you on the radio.

The title of this post is what 11-year-old Tertius said as he waved me off on yesterday's expedition to the wild and untamed badlands of Greenwich, Connecticut, there to be interviewed by the two wittiest and most talented radio hosts in the business, Kim Burns and Bonnie Levison. (At least he didn't tell me I had a face for radio.)

Kim's a stand-up comic and a writer (and an old friend), Bonnie's also a stand-up and teaches storytelling in connection with New York's the Moth. Their show, "Anything Goes," features on Greenwich's WCGN, and the whole procedure was a delight and relatively painless. My doctor says I should be able to walk again within a week or so, although I may need eschew shorts for the time being.

Listen for yourself [Click here] to some of Kim and Bonnie's earlier podcasts. Go on, you know you haven't got anything better to do, or you wouldn't be here.

Is this the world's rudest woman?

Everybody read the previous (i.e., older) post? Good. The scene is set.

I go into Arcade to buy Didi's book. Proprietor Patrick is deep in conversation with what seems to be a self-published author seeking shelf space. So I patiently station myself in front of the counter to signal that, for once, my intentions go beyond that of another author craving validation and sales estimates. I am, ahem, a paying customer.

A few seconds later, Patrick's assistant Aly emerges from the rear office. Simultaneously, the front door is flung open and a woman comes in, talking loudly and angrily on her cell phone about something to do with a renovation that doesn't seem to be going to her satisfaction. She pushes past me, takes up a position at the counter, and without breaking her phone conversation for a second or lowering her voice, thrusts her platinum American Express card at Aly.

(Well, I say pushes past me, but that would suggest she was even slightly aware of my existence.)

Aly, puzzled, looks to Patrick for help. He's forced to interrupt his chat and suggests that the woman might have a book on order. The woman is still half-screaming at a contractor, still flapping the charge card, without making eye contact. Aly reads the name on the card, finds it in the order book, and is able to retrieve the volume. She charges it, gets the woman's signature, and hands her the purchase. Still without acknowledging her surroundings, the woman grabs the book and stomps out of the store, not even pausing for a thank you.

In An Embarrassment of Corpses (now in paperback, did I mention that?), Superintendent Mallard reveals that he keeps a mental list of the people who, in his personal opinion, deserve punishment even if they haven't technically broken the law. Guess who's just gone to the top of my own list?