Category: everyday musings

Book review/recommendation: The Ivory Dagger by Patricia Wentworth

On By Lisa R. HowelerIn book reviews, books and reading, everyday musings6 Comments

The Ivory Dagger was my first Patricia Wentworth book so it was also my first Miss Silver Mystery as well.

This was number 18 in the series and it didn’t matter that I had not read the previous 17 books. I was able to catch on with the characters and their backgrounds very quickly. Wentworth was a British Mystery writer who published books between the 1920s and the 1960s. The Ivory Dagger was written in 1953.

 I liked Maud Silver, the elderly woman called in to help solve the crime, immediately. I also liked Detective Inspector Frank Abbott immediately.

It was made clear, without too much supposition on past cases, that these two had worked together before and had a very teasing and affectionate relationship because of that.

I absolutely loved their interactions.

Let’s go back and grab a description of the book from online, though:

Bill Waring, collecting his wits in hospital after a train crash, receives only one letter from Lila Dryden, his fiancée. When he discovers Lady Dryden, Lila’s guardian, has pressured her into an engagement with Herbert Whitall, he is furious.
Herbert Whitall is aggressive, with a cold-hearted possessiveness that expands past the bounds of his ivory collection he can’t bear to lose. His employees hate him, Lila is terrified of him and it appears he has a hold on Lady Dryden.
When a dagger in Whitall’s collection becomes the instrument of his own death there are many suspects. Maud Silver must see that justice is done, not merely to punish the guilty, but to protect the innocent.

One thing left out of this particular description, but is in others, is that Lila becomes the prime suspect because she is found standing over his body, holding an ivory dagger that belonged to him.

She has a history of sleep walking, though, and this seems to be another one of those incidents. Could she have killed Herbert in her sleep? Even she is worried about that.

I won’t lie – I wasn’t a big fan of Lila through parts of this book. She was pretty weak and cruel to Bill and others at times, but, then, she was also very young and inexperienced at life.

It’s Lady Dryden who calls in Miss Silver because she has heard about the previous cases Miss Silver has solved.

Miss Silver doesn’t know when she comes to the mansion, that Frank Abbott has been assigned the case but she is pleasantly surprised. Frank is pleasantly surprised with her appearance as well.

“Frank Abbott took the hand and reciprocated the smile. Adrian Gray having mentioned that there was a Miss Silver staying in the house, he was by no means unprepared for the appearance of the lady who he had been known in moments of expansion to address as Revered Preceptress. They were, all jesting apart, on a footing of deep attachment, and, upon Frank’s side, of a most unfeigned respect.”

Miss Silver knows that the focus is on Lila but there is a list of people who didn’t like Whitall, so she must look at them all. She doesn’t think Lila is guilty. Neither does Frank so they will need to join their efforts to find out who really is guilty.

Miss Silver reminds me of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and has similar hobbies and mannerisms. Miss Silver also has similar great comebacks or lines as Miss Marple.

They both appear to be innocent old ladies just sitting and knitting away while they are actually listening in to solve the crime. In this one, Miss Silver is knitting a vest for a great niece or relative, I can’t remember which. Wentworth likes to remind us she’s just simply knitting along with such lines as, “The crocket hook went in and out, making a delicate shell pattern about the neck of little Josephine’s vest.”

One difference between Miss Silver and Miss Marple is that Miss Silver is an actual private investigator and Miss Marple is simply a spinster living in a small town who becomes involved in solving crimes.

If you’re curious  which one came first, it was Miss Marple by a year. Her first story was published as a short story in 1927. The first Miss Silver book came out in 1928.

If you would like to know more about the similarities and differences, I recommend this great blog post from the blog Promoting Crime. https://promotingcrime.blogspot.com/2014/10/miss-marple-and-miss-silvera-comparison.html

What I like about Wentworth’s writing is that she is light on description of characters, scenery, and other aspects of the story, but still heavier than Christie. She provides more literary imagery to draw from to create an image in the readers mind of the main characters and the surroundings than Christie does. This doesn’t mean that one is better than the other. Christie was a brilliant stripped back storyteller and Wentworth is also a wonderful storyteller who simply adds a bit more personality and description to her characters.

Wentworth’s writing reminded me more of Margery Allingham, another Golden Age mystery writer, than Agatha’s. Both Wentworth and Allingham were great at creating engaging and well-written sentences or paragraphs that left you wanting to read it again, highlight it, or write it down.

“They sat facing one another. Feature and expression were hidden by the darkness, yet each knew the other so well that his darkness was only a black screen upon which memory could throw its pictures. Bill holding doggedly to what he had said and saying it all over again, as if battering repetition was an argument in itself. Ray on the defensive – quick thrust and parry to met his bludgeon blows, eyes wide and the colour in her cheeks like flame.”

Though this wasn’t the first book in the series, it was a good introduction for me and I am looking forward to reading more.

If you write book reviews or book-related blog posts, don’t forget that Erin, Cat, and I host the A Good Book and A Cup of Tea Monthly Bookish Blog Party. You can learn more about it here.

On Thursdays, I am part of the Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot blog link party. You can find the latest one in the sidebar to the right under recent posts.

Notice: This post may contain affiiate links. If you purchase the product from these links I will receive a small compensation at no extra charge to you.

Hello! Welcome to my blog. I am a blogger, homeschool mom, and I write cozy mysteries.

You can find my Gladwynn Grant Mystery series HERE.

You can also find me on Instagram and YouTube and Facebook.

If you would like to be the first to get news about my books or just have access to special posts for supporters, you can do so here for $2.99 a month https://lisahoweler.com/support-my-writing/

You are not hearing the full version of The Star Spangled Banner at all your sporting events. The history of the United States National Anthem.

On By Lisa R. HowelerIn everyday musings5 Comments

Did you know that there are actually four verses to The Star Spangled Banner, also known as the United States’ National Anthem?

Many of you probably do know that already, but it wasn’t until about five or six years ago that I learned Francis Scott Key actually wrote four verses, but we only sing the first. I mean, it would take a lot longer to get to the game if we had to sing four verses, right?

Many Americans know the  history of the song, but for those who don’t, or for any who aren’t Americans, who want to know its history — here is the short version.

The Star Spangled Banner was written in 1814 during the war of 1812 (which in the end was not won by either side).

Francis Scott Key was an American lawyer and amateur poet. He was among many who were not happy with the U.S. attacking Great Britain. They felt that declaring war on the British war machine was a poor decision. Great Britain was the biggest trading partner of the U.S. at that time.

Source: The Kennedy Center

It wasn’t until 1814 when British forces raided Washington, D.C.  and burned down the White House, the buildings that housed Congress, and several other government buildings, that Scott Key and others got behind the U.S. and started to get fired up about the war.

According to The Kennedy Center website: “On September 13, 1814, Key and a U.S. official rowed over to a British warship at the mouth of the Patapsco River outside of Baltimore, Maryland. Their mission was to seek the release of some American prisoners.

The meeting with the British officers went well, and they even dined together. But when it came time for Key and his companions to paddle home, their hosts said hold your rowboats. The Americans had seen too much. British ships were moving into position to blast the daylights out of Fort McHenry, about eight miles away. Once they captured the fort, British troops would then raid the city, like they had in Washington. The British could not let Key and the others report on what they had seen.”

Key and his friends were kept as prisoners and were made to watch the British forces send more than 1,500 canons at Fort  McHenry.

When morning came, Key was sure he would look through the smoke and see the British flag, but instead the American flag was still there, waving proudly.

Photo by Lisa R. Howeler

Once released, he pulled out an envelope, or found one, and began to write a poem.

Source: The Kennedy Center

That poem was sent to the Baltimore Patriot and The American newspaper with a note to sing it to a certain tune.

What was that tune?

Ironically, the lyrics were set to the tune of a British drinking song, “To Anacreon in Heaven,” written by British composer John Stafford Smith, when it was first sung and the tune stuck. 

It was Key’s brother-in-law, Joseph H. Nicholson, who recognized the lyrics would work with song.  Hmmm…I wonder why he knew that. *wink*

You can hear that song here: https://www.kennedy-center.org/education/resources-for-educators/classroom-resources/media-and-interactives/media/music/story-behind-the-song/the-story-behind-the-song/the-star-spangled-banner/

Only a week after the battle the poem was printed under Key’s title, “Defence of Fort McHenry” in several newspapers all over the country. A music printer named Thomas Carr, of the Carr Music Store in Baltimore, put the music and lyrics together and rechristened it The Star-Spangled Banner.

The song did not become the national anthem until 1931 when Congressed passed the bill to make it  the national anthem.

Since then there have been plenty of complaints about it — mainly that it is too hard for the average person to sing. Another complaint is that celebrates war and should only be sung at military ceremonies.

Some suggested replacements have been America the Beautiful, God Bless America, and This Land is Your Land.

Why do we play the first verse at sporting events? Thank, or blame, Major League Baseball, which started performing It before games during World War II.

And, finally, in case you are wondering, here are all four verses, as Key wrote them:

O say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
⁠What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
⁠O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,
⁠O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
⁠Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
⁠As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines on the stream:
‘Tis the star-spangled banner, O long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
⁠That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more?
⁠Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave,
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave,
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

O thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand,
⁠Between their loved home and the war’s desolation,
Blessed with vict’ry and peace, may the heav’n rescued land,
⁠Praise the power that hath made and preserved us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust.”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave,
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

In 1861, poet Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. penned an unofficial fifth verse during the beginning of the American Civil War, looking hopefully at the emancipation of slaves.

When our land is illumed with Liberty’s smile,
If a foe from within strikes a blow at her glory,
Down, down with the traitor who dares to defile
The flag of her stars and the page of her story!
By the millions unchained when our birthright was gained,
We will keep her bright blazon forever unstained!
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
While the land of the free is the home of the brave!

If you have time, you might enjoy this video — I can not find who is narrating it but it sounds like Paul Harvey. As noted on the video, there some historical inaccuracies but people like the message behind it:


You might also want to listen to one of the most amazing versions by singer Sandi Patty, which includes a special second verse composed by Claire Clonninger for the Statue of Liberty Centennial Celebration in 1986. A note: when you think she can’t get her voice any higher – she does. Brace yourself.

Here is another iconic performance by Whitney Houston:




And another by Natalie Grant (notable here is she did it acapella):

One last, unique, one by Chris Stapleton:

There is your American History lesson for today.

And happy 250th America!

Sources:

The Star-Spangled Banner: The story behind the song

https://www.kennedy-center.org/education/resources-for-educators/classroom-resources/media-and-interactives/media/music/story-behind-the-song/the-story-behind-the-song/the-star-spangled-banner

Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star-Spangled_Banner

Classic Movie Impressions: The Thin Man Goes Home

On By Lisa R. HowelerIn everyday musings7 Comments

If you’ve been following along I have been watching The Thin Man movies with William Powell and Myrna Loy.

We are now up to the fifth movie in this six movie series, The Thin Man Goes Home, which was released in 1944, ten years after the first one.

You can find my recaps/reviews of the previous four movies here: https://lisahoweler.com/the-thin-man-movies/

In this installment, Nick Charles returns home to where he grew up and where his father thinks he’s a failure and roaring drink.  He is a not a failure, but he has, many times throughout this series, been a roaring drunk.

His father, played by Harry Davenport (I love him in anything I see him in) has not been impressed by his son’s detective endeavors. He wanted his son to become a doctor. Nick is attempting to change at least  his drinking ways, which is why on the train to see his parents he is drinking apple cider instead of whiskey, or whatever it is he usually has in his flask.

While home, Nick, of course, gets mixed up in a mystery, which puts his job on full display for his disapproving father.

Lucile Watson joined Davenport, portraying Nick’s mother. 

TCM describes the Thin Man movies as being about a “sophisticated married couple with a knack for solving murders,” and I guess that works but they are so much more. There is witty banter between Nick and his heiress wife Nora, quirky characters, a cute and funny dog, slapstick comedy, and quick little quips that sometimes make you gasp from the audacity of the writers to slip that in there.

This was a fun movie, even though they wrote Nick Jr. out of it by saying he had to stay home to attend kindergarten.

I read a quote from Myrna Loy that the movies after the second weren’t very good, but I actually liked this movie more than the third. Adding Nick’s parents in was a good decision and added a new dynamic and new life to the franchise, in my opinion.

The jokes about Nick’s alcoholism were rich in this one, especially when he arrives home and tries to fix an old desk for his mother while his father is out. Part of the desk falls, hitting him on the head, and knocking him down on his face on the floor. Of course at that moment, his father and believes he’s been on yet another drunken binge.

There are always jokes in these movies about Nick drinking too much but this time around his family is appalled by the drinking, instead of encouraging it, which Nora tends to do.

We start the film on the train with Nick, Nora, and Asta on their way to New England to see Nick’s parents and celebrate his birthday.

The reunion is full of funny moments and the funny continues as people in town start to hear that Nick is home and circulate rumors that he’s there to solve a case.

Edgar Draque even tells his wife Helena that they must leave town immediately after she goes and acquires painting by local artist Peter Berton. It won’t be until much later that we find out why that painting is important and not until Nora buys the painting for Nick’s birthday before Helena can get there. Nora thinks the painting, which features a windmill outside of town, will remind Nick of good times he had at the windmill as a child.

The artist of the painting arrives at the Charles’s home that night, starts to confess something, but is shot in the back before he can finish his sentence.

Things roll on into total chaos from there and I found that chaos a lot of fun. It was a complex case with a solution that was actually very ahead of it’s time, in my humble opinion.

The woman who played Crazy Mary (Anne Revere)  was amazing, by the way. There is a scene where she talks about something very emotional that happened to her and she blew me way. It was one of the few serious moments of the film and it had tears welling up in my eyes. She was the mother in National Velvet and was in a ton of other movies, in case you have never heard of her. She was an amazing actress.

This was the first of the series not to be directed by W.S. Van Dyke, since he died in 1943. Instead, Richard Thorpe directed it and was familiar with William and Myrna after directing them in Double Wedding in 1937.

I watched Double Wedding this past weekend and didn’t enjoy it as much as their other films, but that’s probably because I am so used to seeing them as Nick and Nora.

Myrna had been away from the screen for three years when the suggestion to make the film came up. She had been busy with the home-front war effort and a marriage to car-rental heir John Hertz in New York. Thin Man fans wanted another film and were horrified when studio executives let it slip they might replace Myrna with Irene Dunne.

“The fans wanted Myrna, and they didn’t want anyone else,” Powell later recalled. “And I wanted Myrna, too. Besides the favorable reception our pictures always received, I must say it was certainly a pleasure to work with her.”

The cast and crew was pleased to see her too, William said.

“I’ve never seen a girl so popular with so many people,” he said. “Everybody from wardrobe was over the set, everybody from makeup, everybody from property, everybody from miles around, it looked like.”

While the characters were based on Dashiell Hammet’s characters, the screenplay was written by Robert Riskin, Dwight Taylor, from story by Riskin and Harry Kurnitz.

The couple’s dog, Asta (real name Skippy), was back for the movie and provided his usual comedic relief.

Up next I will be watching the final movie in the series, The Song of the Thin Man.

Sources/Additional Resources:

https://www.tcm.com/articles/81422/the-thin-man-goes-home

https://www.deepfocusreview.com/reviews/the-thin-man-goes-home/

Classic Movie Impressions. Spring of Bette Davis: The Petrified Forest (1936)

On By Lisa R. HowelerIn classic movie impressions, everyday musings, Movie Impresssions5 Comments

I have been watching Bette Davis movies for the last couple of months and today I am writing about the final one in the list I made for myself for this feature — The Petrified Forest.

It  took all those Bette Davis movies all those online lists said were “must watches” to get to one I liked the most (other than Jezebel).

I know why they suggested the others — they highlight Bette’s talents more than this one does.  She was the star in  most of the other movies I watched, while in this one it was Humphrey Bogart and Leslie Howard who were the stars — well, actually Leslie Howard was the big star at that time.

Dialogue-wise, though, I preferred this movie over them all (except for Jezebel).

This movie is based on a hit Broadway play of the same name written by Robert Sherwood.

First, let’s give you a description of the movie from Google: “In this film adaptation of the Robert E. Sherwood play, a drifter, a waitress and a notorious gangster cross paths in the Petrified Forest region of Arizona. Alan Squire (Leslie Howard), a destitute writer, goes into the diner where Gabrielle Maple (Bette Davis) works. Gabrielle dreams of studying art, and she and Alan connect as they talk about Europe, and she tells him her ambition. But gangster Duke Mantee (Humphrey Bogart) shows up and takes the customers hostage.”

I read before that there was some friction between Bette and Leslie during filming, (their second together after Of Human Bondage) but I thought that the chemistry between them worked very well here, maybe because Leslie was so good in this one.

Gabrielle works as a waitress at her father’s diner in the desert.  Employee, beefy former football player, Boze Hertzlinger (Dick Foran) is smitten with her but is very pushy and borders on an aggressor who forces a kiss onto her at the same moment Alan wanders on scene after crossing the desert.

She’s not really interested in Boze and when she starts talking to Alan, she realizes there are much better fish in the sea. She talks to him about the poetry she is reading, her paintings, and just life in general.

“The problem with me Gabrielle, is that I belong to a vanishing race,” he tells her. “I’m one of the intellectuals. Brains without purpose. Noise without sound. Faith without substance.”

Gabrielle’s father has gone to a meeting of the something or other reenactment guard before Alan arrives. Her grandfather has been rambling on about Duke Mantee being on the loose to anyone who will listen.

With all this foreshadowing, we viewers, of course, start to assume we will see Duke at some point.

That will come after Alan bids farewell to Gabrielle with a quick kiss and Mr. and Mrs. Chisholm arrive in their fancy car looking for directions and a drink. Their black chauffeur is driving them. His race will come into play later in the movie so I did not mention it for no reason.

Alan decides he’s going to leave, much to Gabrielle’s disappointment so she arranges for him to travel with the Chisholms.

The Chisholms and Alan don’t get too far, though, before they find a group of men broken down on the road who wave them down. As soon as they pull over, Duke raises a gun and orders them out so he can take their car. It’s here we learn the couple isn’t exactly having a great marriage journey, especially when Mr. Chisholm does nothing to stand up for his wife and she calls him out as soon as Duke and his men leave.

Mr. Chisholm says he didn’t stand up to him because that was Duke Mantee, the gangster they heard about on the radio who was responsible for killing a bunch of people.

Alan hears Duke’s name, which he knows about because of Gabrielle’s chatty grandfather, and worries he’s headed toward Gabrielle, so he starts walking back to the café.

This is not a high-action film until the end. The movie takes place mainly in one place, and while Bogart plays a gangster, this movie is more cerebral than active.

Almost the entire film was filmed on a soundstage in Hollywood, but I didn’t even think about it because the dialogue and the performances were the main stars, in my opinion.

While Jeremy Arnold, a writer for TCM, believed the dialogue was a bit “stagy” but writes that, “unlike other films for which such qualities are the kiss of death, The Petrified Forest is vital and engaging, partly due to the strength of the play itself and partly due to its first-rate performances. All the actors underplay their roles quite effectively. (Even Bette Davis, as the The New York Times reviewer noted: “Davis demonstrates that she does not have to be hysterical to give a grand portrayal.”)”

Earlier, I mentioned that the race of the chauffeur, Joseph, would come into play in the movie and it does when Slim, Duke’s black member shows up. He is one of the gang, not a servant, as he points out to Joseph when he offers him a drink, and the chauffeur asks permission from Mr. Chisholm first.

“Listen to him,” Slim mocks. “Is it alright, Mr. Chisholm? Ain’t you hear about the big liberation? Come on, take your drink, Weasel.”

This was Bogart’s breakout movie, and he had Howard to thank for it.

When the studio said Bogart wasn’t good enough for the role, especially since he hadn’t been a big hit at all yet, and probably never would, Howard said if they wouldn’t hire Bogart, then he was out too.

Bogart, according to author Eric Lax, knew who had given him his first chance and as a tribute named his second daughter with Lauren Bacall, Leslie, after Howard.

It helped Bogart that he looked a lot like John Dillinger because the play’s author based the character Duke Mantee on Dillinger, who was wanted by police in 1936. Bogart reportedly studied film footage of Dillinger to perfect his mannerisms and when moviegoers found out he was doing a Dillinger impression, they flocked to the movie to see Bogart’s version.

There are some great quotes in this one, thanks to the writer of the play and screenwriters Charles Kenyon and Delmer Daves, who adapted it.

Alan Squier: Tell us, Duke, what kind of a life have you had?

Duke Mantee: What do you think? I spent most of my time since I grew up in jail. And it looks like I’ll spend the rest of my life dead.

***

Gabrielle Maple: Petrified forest is a lot of dead trees in the desert that have turned to stone. Here’s a good specimen.

Alan Squier: So that was once a tree? Hmmm. Petrified forest, eh? Suitable haven for me. Well, perhaps that’s what I’m destined to become, an interesting fossil for future study.

***

Alan Squier: I’ve never kidded anybody, outside of myself.

***

Bette asks Leslie at one point, “What are you looking for?”

He ponders this question and says, “I don’t know. I suppose I was looking for something to believe in. Something worth living for, worth dying for.”

***

Mrs. Chisholm: I was married to this pillar of the mortgage loan and trust. He took my soul and stenciled it on a card and filed. And that’s where I’ve been ever since, in an odd metal cabinet.

***

Duke to Alan: “You can talk sitting down. I heard you doing it.”

Alan Squier: ‘The Hollow Men’… refers to the intellectuals who thought they’d conquered nature. They damned it up and used its waters to irrigate the wastelands. They built streamlined monstrosities to penetrate its resistance. They wrapped it up in cellophane and sold it in drugstores. They were so certain they had it subdued. And, now- ? Do you realize what it is that’s causing world chaos? Well, I’m probably the only living man who can tell you. It’s nature hitting back. She’s fighting with new instruments called neuroses. She’s deliberately afflicting mankind with the jitters. Nature’s proving that she can’t be beaten, not by the likes of us. She’s taking the world away from the intellectuals and giving it back to the apes.

***

Alan Squier: You better come with me, Duke. I’m planning to buried in the Petrified Forest. I’ve formed a theory about that that would interest you. It’s the graveyard of the civilization that’s shot from under us. The world of outmoded ideas. They’re all so many dead stumps in the desert. That’s where I belong. And so do you, Duke. For you’re the last great apostle of rugged individualism.

I’m taking a break from an actor-themed movie marathon for the rest of the summer, but in the fall I’ll be watching Jimmy Stewart movies.

This summer, I will be finishing up my rewatches and blog posts about The Thin Man movies and also writing about some other old movies I’ve watched or will be watching.

Thank you for coming along on this Bette Davis marathon with me.

If you would like to read about the other movies I watched this spring, you can find the list here:

Sources and additional resources:

https://www.tcm.com/articles/31568/the-petrified-forest

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0028096/quotes

If you want to find clips and thoughts about vintage movies and TV, you can visit me on Instagram on my Nostalgically Thinking Account (https://www.instagram.com/nostalgically_thinking/) or on my YouTube account Nostalgically and Bookishly Thinking here: https://www.youtube.com/@nostaglicandbookish

You can also find me on Instagram and YouTube and Facebook.

Notice: This post may contain affiiate links. If you purchase the product from these links I will receive a small compensation at no extra charge to you.

What I Read in Spring

On By Lisa R. HowelerIn everyday musings4 Comments

My reading was not as extensive as I hoped this spring, but I still read a few books and enjoyed the majority of them.

The books I read this spring were:

The Tower Treasure by Franklin W. Dixon (Hardy Boys Mystery)

The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery (a reread)

Whispering Walls by Mildred Wirt (A Penny Parker Mystery from the 1940s. Juvenile genre.)

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

Crooked House by Agatha Christie

Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien

The Singing Tree by Kate Seredy

Heidi by Johanna Spyri

Damsel in Distress by P.G. Wodehouse

The Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Arnim.

A Caribbean Mystery by Agatha Christie

Nancy’s Mysterious Letter by Carolyn Keene

Murder, She Wrote: Aloha Betrayed by Jessica Fletcher and Donald Bain

The Labours of Hercules by Agatha Christie

The Cat Who Brought Down the House by Lilian Jackson Braun

Out of this list, these were my favorites:

A Caribbean Mystery

The Enchanted April

Damsel in Distress

Return of the King

Murder on the Orient Express

Crooked House

The Blue Castle

Have you read any interesting books lately?

If you write book reviews or book-related blog posts, don’t forget that Erin and I host the A Good Book and A Cup of Tea Monthly Bookish Blog Party. You can learn more about it here.

On Thursdays, I am part of the Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot blog link party. You can find the latest one in the sidebar to the right under recent posts.

Notice: This post may contain affiiate links. If you purchase the product from these links I will receive a small compensation at no extra charge to you.

Hello! Welcome to my blog. I am a blogger, homeschool mom, and I write cozy mysteries.

You can find my Gladwynn Grant Mystery series HERE.

You can also find me on Instagram and YouTube and Facebook.

If you would like to be the first to get news about my books or just have access to special posts for supporters, you can do so here for $2.99 a month https://lisahoweler.com/support-my-writing/

Classic movie impressions: Spring of Bette Of Human Bondage (1934)

On By Lisa R. HowelerIn everyday musings3 Comments

I’ve been watching Bette Davis movies for spring and I’m stretching a bit into summer.

So what can I say about this week’s Bette Davis movie for my Spring of Bette feature?

“I watched this movie so you can just watch the clips of Bette Davis’s better parts.”

I’m kidding. Sort of. Is this a bad movie? No. It’s just not as good as others I have watched and, for me, it really dragged, partially because Leslie Howard’s character was such a wimp with no self respect who spent the whole movie whining and mooning over a woman who was truly evil and psycho.

The movie, released in 1934, is called Of Human Bondage.

Bette did play her part well – so well I literally hated her character. Honestly, I hated both characters. They were pathetic and that was how they were supposed to be. Two pathetic people ruining their whole lives and the lives of those around them because they created visions of each other that weren’t reality.

Blah.

I felt like shaking them!

An easy description for this movie is that a man with a club foot who has no self-respect, has White Knight Syndrome and thinks he can save Bette Davis’s character, who is simply a horrible, horrible person, so he keeps going back to her or letting her come to him.

Critics called this movie Bette’s breakout role and I can see why it was. At first, I hated the movie and her and couldn’t see why critics thought it was so good, but then I realized I hated her so much because she was playing the role so well.

This was Bette’s first movie with Leslie Howard, who I found out this week died young at the age of 50 while working for the war effort during World War II. There is a whole crazy story to that which I need to write about at some point. Nazi plot to take out a beloved British actor? Maybe….or maybe it was the Winston Churchill look alike that was on the plane.

But, I digress…let’s get back to the movie.

Leslie portrays Philip Carey, a man who was told he wasn’t good enough to be an artist so he left Paris and came back to London to become a doctor.

He meets Bette’s character, Mildred Rogers, in a diner when his friend has a crush on her but can’t get anywhere with her. I will warn you up front that Bette attempts a Cockney accent and it’s pretty awful. Like Dick Van Dyke level.

Philip becomes obsessed with Mildred and I think it is because she keeps playing hard to get. It’s more than that, though. She’s simply a person who likes to toy with the hearts and feelings of others and she’s loving watching… spin in the wind.

Plus she looks at his club foot in disgust. She can’t be with someone with a deformed foot…right?

Who she can be with, though, are married men who leave her in very bad positions and every time she gets in a bad situation she runs to Philip who always bails her out, hoping against hope she will truly fall in love with him.

He rejects relationships with good, caring women, always going back to the slop that is a relationship with Mildred.

The movie is based on a book by W. Somerset Maugham and was remade two times — once in 1946 and once in 1964.

Critics loved the 1934 film, but didn’t care so much for the remakes.

TCM put it well about Bette and her desire to have the role: “Mildred was manipulative and sadistic, raw and fascinating, and Davis wanted to play her more than anything in the world.”

Davis was working for Warner Brothers at the time and Of Human Bondage was an RKO production, but Bette desperately wanted to be a part of it. Back then the actors and actresses had contracts with certain studios and weren’t supposed to work with other ones but Bette didn’t like the movies she was being put in by Warner Brothers. She felt they were inconsequential and begged Warner to let her be loaned out for the movie.

Warner refused because he said the role, an unglamorous one, would ruin her image. Katharine Hepburn, Irene Dunne, and Ann Harding had already turned the roles down for that reason.

Maybe the role ruined Bette’s image as a stylized, glamorous star, but it opened her world to meatier roles.

“I begged, implored, cajoled,” Bette later recalled. “I haunted Jack Warner’s office. Every single day, I arrived at his door with the shoeshine boy. The part of Mildred was something I had to have. J.L. could not possibly understand any actress who would want to play such a part. I spent six months in supplication and drove Mr. Warner to the point of desperation – desperate enough to say ‘yes’ – anything to get rid of me… If my memory is correct, he said, ‘Go and hang yourself.'” 

Maugham approved of Bette, which was a huge endorsement since he had poured so much of himself into the story, which was semi-autobiographical — mainly the part about being orphaned, relying on family, and having to struggle to get himself a career.

Leslie apparently was not too thrilled with an American playing Mildred’s part.

“When Davis shot her close-ups Howard would feed lines to her as he read a book off-camera, totally detached from the process,” Jeremy Arnold wrote for TCM.com. “But when he realized that she was giving a great performance and was on her way to stealing the picture, he shaped up instantly and committed himself fully to working with her. They would pair up twice more, notably in The Petrified Forest (1936).”

I’m watching The Petrified Forest, next, incidentally, but will be writing about Now, Voyageur first, which I watched a couple of weeks ago.

The lack of an Oscar nomination for Bette for this movie is what lead to a change in how nominations were made and voting was done for the Oscars.

Claudette Colbert won for Best Actress for It Happened One Night in 1934 and though she was great, some said fraud had occurred that left Bette even out of the nominations. Because of this brouhaha, write-in votes were no longer used and the accounting firm Price Waterhouse (now called Pricewaterehouse Coopers) took over the voting process and has done so ever since.

For those who are curious about what I have watched for the Spring of Bette so far, this is my list:

It’s Love I’m After 

The  Working Man 

Another Man’s Poison 

Dark Victory

Jezebel 

Dangerous

The Letter

Of Human Bondage (June 2)

Now, Voyager (June 5)              

The Petrified Forrest (June 11)

Sources:

https://www.tcm.com/articles/31567/of-human-bondage-1934

https://garbolaughs.wordpress.com/2011/01/26/of-human-bondage-1934/

Saturday Chat Link Up: Fake summer, recovering cat, hero sister-in-law

On By Lisa R. HowelerIn everyday musings7 Comments

Welcome to the new Saturday Chat Link Up where you can share a post about your week or a post you want to get more eyes on. The post went live late today, on its debut, but normally, the post will go live Saturday morning

Last week we thought summer was here, so The Husband bought a small, inflatable pool for Little Miss.

It didn’t fill well because we didn’t do all we needed to do to make the bottom of it flat, but Little Miss and her friend had a ton of fun playing in it last Sunday anyhow. They slid down the Slip N’ Slide The Husband bought, jumped up at the end and flung themselves into the pool over and over again.

Sadly, we hadn’t gotten the air conditioners in yet, so we sweated a couple of days and then managed to get one in Tuesday night in Little Miss’s room, which is the hottest room in the house. We have those weird rollout windows so we have to use portable air conditioners with a window cover and a hose pushed out through it.

Before we put them in, they have to be washed out and this year the covers we previously used were wearing out so we had to order new ones.

Little Miss and I do not do well in the heat so we were very cranky the night without AC.

Once we had the AC in, we were much more pleasant to be around.

We only needed it a couple of nights, though, because our temperatures plummeted the next night and as I am starting this post (on Friday night) it is 53 degrees outside. I like being able to cuddle up under my blanket so I am enjoying the chillier temps for now.

I spent a lot of my week not knowing if there would be a good outcome with our oldest cat, who came home last week after being missing for three days but then continued to be very sick. We took her to the vet on Wednesday but are still waiting to see if she will improve. She ate some food and drank after she came back from the vet (where she was treated for a high fever and dehydration) but Thursday and yesterday she refused to drink and eat again.

Then this morning, she found a burst of energy and jumped up on the bed with me and laid on my side. I fell asleep with her there, afraid to move and disturb her, and she stayed with me for an hour and a half before I had to get up to use the bathroom and stretch out my tightened sciatica.

When our second-oldest cat, Scout, was treated for this same virus a couple of weeks ago, she was also very tired and lethargic for about another week, so I am trying to remind myself of that.

Pixel is even more stubborn than Scout. There is a reason I consider her my spirit animal after all.

Our youngest cat, Cass, wants to go outside today but it is 44 degrees and raining and we’ve decided we’ve had enough sick cats for a while so he’s not being allowed out.

All of this drama with our cats had my mom and I reminiscing about the time one of the cats my family had when I was a child got hit by a car.

I should start this story by explaining that my mom is allergic to cats so all of our cats had to live outdoors. (Unlike our cats, who are indoor/outdoor cats). Because of her allergies she thought she really didn’t like cats, but I knew she did because she would talk to them in a sweet Southern accent, and encourage us to pet them and keep an eye on them.

She also realized how much she cared about cats when one of our cats came to her for help.

His name was Marvin, and he was one of two brothers. They used to sit on either side of our front door like two little, cute gargoyles.

The one brother, Morris, had been hit by a car years before, I believe, and now Marvin had been hit and he’d dragged himself home.

My mom saw him suffering in the backyard, and since my brother and I were at school and dad was at work so she found a rug to wrap him in, somehow got him up and to the car and drove him to the veterinarian in the town I now live in. It was just one man (his son is now our neighbor) and when he saw Marvin he told Mom she should try the vet hospital in a town 45-minutes away (the same place we take our pets now and in the town where we used to live). Mom thinks he didn’t want to tell her Marvin wasn’t going to make it. So Mom drove 45-minutes, crying the whole way over this cat she supposedly didn’t like, her face probably itching like crazy.

Marvin ended up having surgery on a broken leg and it cost my parents $300, which is an amount they never could have afforded so I don’t know how they did it.

I would like to say that Marvin survived, but, sadly, he lingered at our house, in the sunroom, for a week or so before contracting tetanus and passing away. My dad cared for that cat and faithfully put medicine on the leg and gave him antibiotics but still felt like he failed him.

Even though Marvin didn’t make it, I’ll always remember how hard Mom fought for him, and how it showed me, and herself, that she truly did love our cats,  she just couldn’t pet them because of the terrible itching they caused. When I say itching, it is more like torture for my mom. She’s always had an itching issue, possibly caused by some autoimmune issues, and she just doesn’t itch in one spot, she itches everywhere, including in between her fingers and toes, in her mouth, nose and ears, and even inside her chest. She has to permanently take allergy medicine to make it stop.

One other part of this story involves how Mom always forbad me from telling my grandmother, her mother-in-law, how much we spent on Marvin. My grandmother grew up during the Depression and they used to drown cats so they didn’t have to feed them. (I’m not going to speak on how horrible this is…it was a difficult time and it was apparently kittens they put in a pillowcase and threw in a pond one time. I don’t think it was Grandma that did it…she just knew it happened.)

Still, I have a feeling that if Grandma had been faced with the same situation, with Marvin asking her to help him, she would have done the same thing.

During the uncertainty over our cat, the kids found some joy one night by going outside to look at the tiny sliver of the moon. For some reason it was very bright that night and it caught The Boy’s attention. He called out his sister and they oohed and aahed over it for a bit. It was nice to see them enjoying it together and having a bit of a break from the stress of the week.

Some good news has happened in the midst of all our cat drama — my sister-in-law saved a couple of lives in the last couple of weeks as a 911 dispatcher in a small county near ours.

Over a decade ago she saved the life of a newborn when the baby was born in a bathtub. The baby wasn’t breathing and she walked the father through helping the baby breathe while the ambulance was on its way.

She won a state award for this call and while she didn’t want the attention, her boss asked her to speak about it after she won the award so it would remind people to not simply call 911 and hang up but instead stay on the line because the dispatchers can help them while the ambulance is on its way.

My sister-in-law is a former EMT so there is a lot she can help someone with when they are in an emergency.

Anyhow, recently, another mother delivered a baby at home and my sister-in-law helped the woman until the ambulance could get there. This time the baby was already breathing on his/her own.

In another situation, my sister-in-law helped a young woman in a mental health crisis.

Our family is quite proud of her and what she does.

I hope you are all having a nice Memorial Day weekend (even if it is raining like it is here), if you are in the U.S. and just having a nice weekend if you are not.

How was your week last week?

If you write book reviews or book-related blog posts, don’t forget that Erin and I host the A Good Book and A Cup of Tea Monthly Bookish Blog Party. You can learn more about it here.

On Thursdays, I am part of the Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot blog link party. You can find the latest one in the sidebar to the right under recent posts.

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Hello! Welcome to my blog. I am a blogger, homeschool mom, and I write cozy mysteries.

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A totally baffling update on my missing cat –

On By Lisa R. HowelerIn everyday musings18 Comments

On Tuesday, I wrote this post, which detailed my oldest cat being missing since Sunday morning and me deciding she was dead….for various reasons.

Because Pixel rarely wanders from our property (she is an indoor/outdoor cat), and had been sick before this happened (catching it from the other two cats), I truly felt she had gone off somewhere to die.

To get to the point, she did not die but instead showed up on our porch this morning, sitting there like nothing had happened at all.

I promise I am not becoming a cat blog -not that those are bad because I like them, but I probably won’t write much about my cats again after this. Still, I felt I owed an update to readers who had been following the saga of my cats that started with the youngest getting sprayed, developing an eye infection (which turned out to be a virus, I guess), the middle cat getting sick and having a 104 degree fever, and then the third coming down with it last week.

When you live in a rural area, it’s not unusual for cats to wander off for a couple of days and show back up but in this case, Pixel has never wandered off for a long period of time. She might be gone part of a day, but even then she’s usually lounging somewhere near our house. She’s a bit afraid of loud noises — lawn mowers, hammering going as the neighbors renovate, that type of thing, so she will run back toward the house when anything like that is going on.

Our other cat, Scout, has wandered off overnight, one time in below freezing temps. Each time she’d show back up and we figured she found someone to take her in, like our elderly neighbor who has a cat door and is hard of hearing so it’s hard to get an answer from him if the cats are in there or not.

My Dad’s cat has wandered off into the woods for over a week and then returned as well, but he’s a semi-feral cat.

On Sunday, when my husband discovered the cat, he thought was getting better but too weak to go far was not under the bush she’d been under before, he asked our neighbor if she’d wandered in to his enclosed porch to get out of the rain, but our neighbor said he hadn’t seen her.

None of the neighbors had and we couldn’t find her hiding anywhere. I thoroughly convinced myself she’d wandered off to die because that’s what two of my childhood cats did (though I was older when they did.). This was heartbreaking to me and I cried every day for three days, imagining how cold and scared she’d been to crawl off somewhere to die alone. I kept trying to figure out where else to look for her and saying to myself how I didn’t understand why she’d wandered off. I was going to be taking her to the vet and felt she’d recover. My OCD kicked and I started checking the ring cameras every couple of hours, night and day.

In the back of my mind, I thought how stupid I would feel if she showed up in a few days or a week, but there was no way that was going to happen. Not with this cat.

So, imagine my surprise when I looked on the ring camera this morning to check another notification and saw her sitting in loaf position on our back porch.

Screenshot

I honestly didn’t believe it and just kept thinking how weird it was that our youngest cat (also black) looked so fat today.

I was half asleep, upstairs in bed still, and kept zooming in on the image. Then I turned on the mic and made this whispering sound I make to get her to come to me and she turned her head to look for me.

I still wasn’t convinced it was her. See, I’d just woke up from a weird dream where I was petting a cat in our house but wasn’t paying attention to what cat it was because I was talking to my daughter and suddenly realized the cat was Pixel.

I said to Little Miss (in the dream), “Oh my gosh..do you see who this is? She’s been here the whole time.”

I didn’t even remember that dream until I let Pixel in the house…she took her good ole time walking in too.

She’s still sick from what we can tell, but better than she was.

It took Scout a full two weeks to feel and act better. Last night she returned to jumping up on my chest to be held while I sit with Little Miss while she takes a shower (she doesn’t actually need me in there but likes to chat during her shower). Today she cuddled me again. Saturday night she came in from a brief trip outside and ran straight to me and climbed on my lap, which she doesn’t usually do right away when she comes in from outside.

So, there we are, the story of my missing cat who came home. What a crazy story.

What is also crazy is that this is the third story of a missing cat who came home that I’ve heard in two days.

It may sound very weird for me to say this, but I feel like our house is complete again with her home.

I’m so happy but still in total shock about it all, like I’ll wake up and the dream was actually her coming home and instead she’s still lost.

Oh, and she’s going to be an inside cat for at least the next month. I’m not going through that again.