Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

Hard-boiled carnage with no one to care about

Red Harvest, published in 1929, is the debut novel by Dashiell Hammett, who would soon after author The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, which both became classic American films. Hammett is the author most associated with the genre of American noir crime and detective fiction, with the possible exception of Raymond Chandler, who came along a decade later. Red Harvest may very well be the inaugural novel in that genre. France’s leading noir author, Georges Simenon, didn’t start cranking out books until a year later.

Red Harvest is narrated by an unnamed agent of the San Francisco office of the Continental Detective Agency. He is engaged by a client—Donald Wilsson, a newspaper editor—to come out to Personville, a mining town so rough it’s nicknamed Poisonville. It’s a city of 40,000 people, and judging by this novel, most of them are criminals. The exact location of Personville is never specified, but it seems to be roughly in the vicinity of where Utah, Nevada, and Idaho meet. When the operative arrives in Personville, he finds that his client has been murdered, before the two could even meet to discuss why the detective’s services were needed. As he looks into Wilsson’s untimely demise, the detective discovers a network of organized crime and corruption. He decides to clean up this rat’s nest, and he finds another client who will pay him to do it.

This novel is about as hard-boiled as they come, and for that I admire it. Most gangster stories from the pulp fiction era read as watered-down or phony compared to Red Harvest. In this novel, if a killer wants to kill somebody, he’ll actually kill them (or try to); he won’t talk their ear off before shooting at them. There is a refreshing realism to the book’s utter lack of morality or restraint. Criminals act like criminals.

The problem with that approach, however, is that there is no one or nothing to really care about in this novel. The hero has no name and very little personality. The only woman in the book is a greedy, sleazy whore. The villains are all nondescript thugs who differ in name only. Hammett constructs this very complex web of intrigue in which all these characters blackmail, double-cross, or rat on each other. It’s all very confusing, and the reader doesn’t care enough to want to figure it all out. Never at any time did I understand why the detective was pursuing all these criminals. He has no reasonable motivation. There’s some money involved, but it’s treated almost as an afterthought. What does he really get out of this, other than the triumph of good over evil, law over corruption, which is totally antithetical to everything that happens in the book?

Red Harvest has never been formally adapted into film. A film noir version might have been more successful than the book, since some charismatic actors might actually convince you to care about these characters. One can easily see Humphrey Bogart or John Garfield in the lead. Red Harvest was likely one of the influences behind Akira Kurosawa’s samurai film Yojimbo, which in turn set the template for many subsequent gangster thrillers, from Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars to Walter Hill’s Last Man Standing. The latter film is the one that most obviously resembles the novel. It takes place in the 1920s in a Western town (but Texas), the Bruce Willis character very much resembles Hammett’s nameless detective, and the plot consists mostly of gratuitous mayhem and violence. Both that film and this novel have a direct-to-video feel about them. If this genre is your jam, however, then by all means read Red Harvest. For better or worse, it’s the Homer’s Odyssey of hard-boiled crime fiction.

Logic Machines and Diagrams by Martin Gardner

Early graphic representations of mathematical reasoning

For almost a quarter of a century, Martin Gardner (1914–2010) wrote a column in Scientific American magazine entitled Mathematical Games, in which he would present all sorts of math curiosities, puzzles, and brain teasers. These columns were assembled into many collected volumes that were popular with general math-curious readers. He also wrote plenty of books outside of that series on topics concerning math, science, and magic (card tricks and other forms of prestidigitation). Logic Machines and Diagrams, published in 1958, is one of Gardner’s earlier works, written when he had just started with Scientific American. In regards to its particular subject, the book has a sort of master’s-thesis feel to it, but it is still written very accessibly for curious non-mathematicians.

A logic diagram is a graph or chart that helps illustrate or prove the veracity and validity of a series of logical propositions. The most obvious and commonly known example of a logic diagram is the Venn diagram composed of interlocking circles, introduced by English mathematician John Venn in the 1880s. Gardner covers these as well as more complicated forms of logic diagrams. If one takes such diagrams and converts them into a three-dimensional analog—with levers and gears, for instance—then you have a logic machine. The structure of logical propositions can also be translated into electronic circuitry, thus creating an electric logic machine. From there, one naturally progresses to digital logic machines like the precursors to today’s computers. (In 1958 personal computers as we know them today did not exist, but there were giant industrial and military computers like ENIAC.) To solve problems and learn, the “AI” systems that we use today employ the same laws of logic that were explicated by Aristotle, George Boole, and others, just as human brains constantly use these same logical laws without consciously thinking about them.

Perhaps because I’m a graphic designer, the diagrams interested me far more than the machines. I found the first few chapters of this book really fascinating. First, Gardner introduces us to Ramón Lull (or Llull), a 13th century Spanish philosopher who devised a series of complicated diagrams with moving parts in the form of rotating paper wheels. These weren’t so useful for logic, as Gardner points out, but rather they amounted to a sort of Western European I Ching used to inspire philosophical contemplation and intellectual creativity. In Chapter 2, Gardner discusses Venn and other logical diagrammists like him, including the author/mathematician Lewis Carroll of Alice in Wonderland fame. In Chapter 3, Gardner presents his own system of logical diagrams designed to move beyond the computational capabilities of Venn diagrams.

At about the halfway point of the book, Gardner turns his attention to logic machines—mechanical, electronic, and digital. He ends up admitting, however, that none of these machines were as effective as a decent diagramming system, and they amounted to little more than experimental novelties perhaps useful as classroom learning tools. In his final chapter, Gardner speculates about the future of logic machines. Much of what he predicts about computing are things that we now take for granted every day with our desktop computers, tablets, smart phones, and other electronic devices.

For over half a century, Gardner was mathematics’ most charming and prolific ambassador to the general public. The subject matter of Logic Machines and Diagrams isn’t as deliberately fun as Gardner’s Mathematical Games columns, but it will still appeal to the same audience—anyone interested in mathematical “mental floss.”

Mysteries by Knut Hamsun

Inside the erratic mind of an eccentric outsider

Norwegian author Knut Hamsun’s literary career spanned seven decades, during which time he produced a plethora of novels, plays, stories, poetry, and essays, not all of which have been translated into English. Hamsun, who won the 1920 Nobel Prize in Literature, was an innovative literary pioneer who had a profound influence on modernist literature, not just in Norway but worldwide. His first novel, Hunger, published in 1890, is probably still his most renowned and widely read work. His second novel, Mysteries, published in 1892, is not as well known.

The title Mysteries is as generic as it sounds. It could pertain to anything or nothing going on in the story. Like many of Hamsun’s novels, it is difficult to summarize the plot of Mysteries in a couple of sentences. The plot just kind of meanders from scene to scene, without any overt agenda, much like real life itself. The novel follows Johan Nagel, an eccentric outsider who shows up one day at a small coastal Norwegian town and decides to settle there. Nagel states his profession as agronomist, but although only about thirty years of age, he seems to have inherited a sufficient sum of money so as to be no longer required to work for a living. Upon arriving in the unnamed town in which the novel is set, he takes a room at a main-street hotel and decides to stay indefinitely, as something of a retiree.

Nagel may be a stranger, but he’s no recluse, and he soon becomes involved in the social life of the town. He gets to know some of the citizens, both the fashionable set and some of the lower classes. He attends parties, where he is both a popular attraction and a gauche curiosity. Nagel has a habit of saying whatever’s on his mind, whether it’s socially appropriate or not. He talks a mile a minute and often runs on into extended stories and soliloquies. He will regale a crowd of partygoers, for example, by recounting the details of a dream he has had. This hardly seems realistic among polite society, but his audience listens enrapt while the dream goes on for several pages. Being socially active in his new hometown, it’s not surprising that Nagel would fall in love. His choice of soulmate is a complicated one, however, and their relationship is anything but easy and smooth.

Early in his literary career, Hamsun had an antipathy towards realist and naturalist literature. He is considered the leader of a neo-Romantic resurgence in Norwegian and Western European fiction. Mysteries is realistic in the sense of this is what provincial Norway was like in the 1890s. The story touches on political and social issues of the time, but not so much as to be obtrusive to ignorant outsiders unfamiliar with Norwegian history. The novel is predominantly Romantic, however, because it’s almost entirely concerned with what’s going on inside Nagel’s noggin: his struggle for love and self-actualization. Through the love story that arises, Nagel eventually develops into a modern variation on Goethe’s Young Werther.

In addition to Nagel’s extensive and revealing blatherings, Hamsun employs some early use of stream of consciousness narrative. Such interior monologues do not venture into the abstract excesses of later modernist authors but rather quite brilliantly capture the authentic imaginary conversations that we all engage in from time to time. Hamsun’s work reads as if influenced by the psychological studies of Sigmund Freud, but Mysteries actually precedes by a few years almost all of Freud’s published works. Nagel’s dreams and interior monologues show that Hamsun is clearly interested in the power of subconscious thought on human behavior. By exploring both the subconscious and conscious components of Nagel’s mind, Hamsun constructs a character that is much deeper and more multidimensional than the typical literary protagonists of his era.

Hamsun’s writing was years ahead of its time, and his work is still far and above most of today’s literature. He has become one of my go-to authors. I’ve never read a bad book by him, I can always count on him for a thought-provoking read, and I intend to eventually read my way through his complete output of novels. Growth of the Soil is my favorite thus far.   

The Three Impostors by Arthur Machen

Brilliantly constructed web of horror

Welsh author Arthur Machen (1863–1947) is a recent discovery of mine, and I have been greatly impressed by everything of his that I’ve read thus far. Machen primarily wrote in the horror and fantasy genres, but his work has the quality of great literature that transcends genre fiction. His writing is somewhat analogous to Edgar Allan Poe’s horror work, but Machen’s books, written from the 1890s to the 1930s, are naturally more modern in style. Readers of today will be surprised by how Machen’s novels and stories were ahead of their time. His horror fiction is still scary, and he’s admired by many contemporary writers in that genre, like Stephen King and Peter Straub.

Machen’s novel The Three Impostors was published in 1895. The table of contents might give the impression that this is a collection of short fiction. The chapters have names like “The Novel of the Black Seal” and “The Adventure of the Missing Brother.” These are not stand-alone stories, however. All the elements of the book fit together like an ingeniously integrated puzzle. The stories don’t necessarily follow a linear chronology, and the various scenes are intertwined in unexpected ways. The way the story unfolds is somewhat reminiscent of the circular narrative structure of the film Pulp Fiction.

The novel opens with a prologue in which three shady characters appear to be leaving the scene of a murder—a murder that they have collaboratively committed, at least that’s what we gather from their conversation. At about the same time, two gentlemen bystanders happen upon the scene, Mr. Dyson and Mr. Phillipps. What follows is a series of stories, each more imaginative and brilliantly crafted than the last, in which these five characters—as well as the alleged murder victim, making an even half dozen—are continually brought together in a series of terrifying and suspenseful situations. The characters are all well-drawn, and the dialogue captivating. There’s also a mysterious gold coin involved that unites the various narrative threads (calling to mind Pulp Fiction’s briefcase).

Although The Three Impostors is one unified novel, it has enough creepy content and sick shit to fill up five or six novellas. Torture, murder, mob violence, cults, witchcraft, ancient demons, and monsters all make an appearance. What I like about Machen’s writing is that he presents macabre material in a way that is, for lack of a better word, realistic. His characters are skeptics, and he assumes his readers are skeptics, so he explains bizarre phenomena in a manner that has a scientific feel to it, drawing from concepts of evolution, anthropology, religious studies, and more. Though written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Machen’s books call to mind some of the classic horror films of the 1960s and ‘70s, like Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen, The Exorcist, The Wicker Man, The Dunwich Horror, and The Shining (except some of those examples have to do with The Devil, while this book does not). Yet much like Poe’s work, the stories are lusciously narrated in the intelligent voice of an erudite gentleman of a century ago.

The Three Impostors is really a remarkable read. Machen grabbed my attention at the first page and kept me enthralled all the way through. The way all the parts fit together is really brilliantly conceived. Upon finishing the book, I want to read it again just to catch any details I might have missed. If it sounds like Machen might be up your alley, also check out The Great God Pan and The Terror.

Enlightening Symbols: A Short History of Mathematical Notation and Its Hidden Powers by Joseph Mazur

Disorderly presentation of a complex subject

My attraction to arcane knowledge sometimes leads me to read a book that’s somewhat over my head. Such is the case with Joseph Mazur’s Enlightening Symbols, published in 2014. Mazur is a mathematician and considers himself a “mathematics journalist.” He has published several books on mathematics that appear to be aimed at a general trade audience, but this book may be for a more specialized audience.

Enlightening Symbols is a history of mathematics, in particular the history of how symbols have been created and adopted for various mathematical operations, functions, and concepts. As the subtitle indicates, much of the book is concerned with notation—such as, where did we get +, -, ×, and ÷—but that’s not the whole story. In the early portions of the book, Mazur talks about counting with fingers, sticks, and stones, and the use of the abacus. Ancient mathematicians didn’t even have numerals, at least not widely accepted ones. Early math texts, such as Euclid’s Elements, are written entirely in words. Mazur details how Arabic numerals spread and came to be accepted in Europe—except they’re not really Arabic numerals; they’re of Indian or Hindu origin. The book then goes into the history of algebra and how certain Greek and Latin letters came to be used in equations. Who was the first to decide the mathematical meaning of pi (π), for example?

I read quite a few books on the history of science, which has led to an interest in the history of mathematics. I’m also quite interested in different written languages, to which the subject of mathematical notation pertains. I wish this book would have stuck a little closer to its subtitle and focused more on notation. Mazur, however, keeps venturing into symbology and semiotics—how we process and interpret symbols. Towards the end of the book, he summarizes various psychological experiments concerning mathematical thought, and he gives his own epistemological theories about how the mind works. It’s a subject that clearly fascinates him, but that psychological content was far less interesting to me than the math history.

As a history, however, Enlightening Symbols does have its problems. While the table of contents indicates the book is organized roughly chronologically, Mazur jumps all over the place temporally. No matter what century he’s talking about, he constantly flashes back to earlier figures like Brahmagupta (c. 598–c. 668) and Al-Khwarizmi (c. 789–c. 850), creating a tangled narrative that’s really difficult to follow. In examining who was the first to introduce Indian numerals to Western Europe, Mazur seems to propose about 17 answers to that question. Some he disproves, but I couldn’t even tell you whom he finally settled on. I kept hoping for a chart, but when I finally got one, halfway through the book, it was still confusing. A simple timeline in list or table form would have been most helpful.

You don’t really need to know a whole lot of math to appreciate the history in Enlightening Symbols. I’m not up on calculus, but I could still roughly follow what Mazur had to say about the history of calculus notation. Some interest in linguistics helps. I’ll admit that I’m probably not qualified to review this book. If you’re reading this review at my blog, however, rather than reading a review in the Journal of Mathematics, then you’re probably in the same boat I am. I provide my layman’s perspective of the book, for what it’s worth, to help you decide if you want to read it.

Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini

The unentertaining oxymoron of the gentleman pirate

Rafael Sabatini (1875–1950) was an Italian-British writer of adventure novels. His books often feature swashbuckling heroes who would go on to be played by the likes of Errol Flynn, Tyrone Power, and Stewart Granger in Hollywood film adaptations. One such novel (and a film role for Flynn) is Captain Blood, published in 1922.

The auspiciously named Peter Blood is a middle-aged Irish-born ex-soldier and -adventurer who now plies the gentler trade of physician in the English town of Bridgewater. In the 1680s, when rebels supporting James Scott, the Duke of Monmouth, rose up against the English King James II, Blood could care less about the politics, but one of his neighbors, a Monmouth rebel, is injured in the fighting, and Blood dutifully tends his wounds. For this service, Blood is arrested by royal forces for aiding and abetting the rebellion. Under normal circumstances, he would be hanged, but instead James sentences a number of prisoners, Blood included, to slavery on the English plantations of Barbados. Even as a slave, Blood manages to gain a reputation as a physician in Barbados, but needless to say, slavery is not to his liking. He escapes his captors, commandeers a ship, and assumes the role of a pirate.

As a pirate story, Captain Blood has its enjoyable moments. The scenes of naval battles and sword duels are well-done and exciting but few and far between. The problem with Captain Blood is that Sabatini constantly wants to emphasize that Blood is a gentleman and only a reluctant pirate. This preoccupation with gentlemanliness, so common to English literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, takes almost all the fun out of the story. One might hope for a Han Solo-type scoundrel-with-a-heart-of-gold, but no, that’s not what you’re getting here. Instead, Captain Blood is a dull, smug, self-righteous prig.

Sabatini clearly wants to hold Blood up as the exemplar of manhood, and in doing so he makes the character practically flawless. Blood is the smartest mind in every argument, the most skillful sword in every fight, and the wiliest strategician in every naval engagement. When you think about memorable heroes, they often lose before they can win. We like to see them struggle to earn their victories, but Blood never struggles for anything because he’s perfection incarnate. The only area in which Sabatini allows the character any vulnerability is his heart. Blood develops an unwise and unrealistic infatuation for a beautiful young woman who happens to be the daughter of the slavemaster who owns him. Contrary to his martial heroics, in emotional matters Blood is an absolute milquetoast, and it’s difficult to admire his abjectly submissive way with women.

In between the few action scenes, Captain Blood consists mostly of conversations in which honor is debated at length. Each character asserts: I live by a code of honor. My actions are honorable; yours are not. These are the qualities of a gentleman; you sir, are not a gentleman. In addition, there are the familiar tropes of sworn enemies who “give their word” that they won’t attack their adversaries or try to escape captivity—as usual, that comes across as unrealistic and silly. Again, this English obsession with nobility and gentlemanliness. Credit to the French where it’s due: you won’t find these tedious debates in The Three Musketeers. Instead of wasting so many words on honor, just show us the definition of honor through your character’s behaviors. Alas, Captain Blood could have been a much more compelling book without all this sanctimonious posing. The plot of this novel would have made a good adventure novel along the lines of Alexandre Dumas’s or Robert Louis Stevenson’s work, but the telling is tiresome and reduces this story to a middling pirate tale at best.

Marthe by Joris-Karl Huysmans

Nana’s little sister

French author Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) published about two dozen books over the course of his literary career, but less than half of those have been translated into English. His first novel, Marthe: The Story of a Girl, was published in 1876. Huysmans writes in a naturalist style, a form of anti-romantic social realism that stresses unflinching descriptive detail. The Naturalist school of literature was founded by Emile Zola, who, upon reading Marthe, took Huysmans under his wing and mentored his early career. Of all of Zola’s protégés and imitators, Huysmans is the writer whose style most closely matches the master, at least for the first several years of his career. Judging by this impressive debut novel, Huysmans had already found his mature naturalist literary style before availing himself of Zola’s mentorship.

Marthe is born in Paris, the daughter of a painter and a factory worker. By the age of 15, both of her parents have died, leaving Marthe to care for herself. Like her mother before her, she works in an artificial pearl factory, crafting the fake jewels from powdered fish scales and glue. The pay is poor, the job is bad for her health, and she is surrounded by young women coworkers who regale her with tales of their dissolute lifestyles and licentious activities. She is discovered by a cabaret impresario who invites her to join the showgirls at a sleazy local theatre, and it is not long before Marthe learns that she can make a living by selling her body. From there, Marthe’s career runs the sexworker gamut from burlesque dancer to literal prostitute to a kept woman, the mistress of a sugar daddy. Along the way she meets Léo, a struggling poet and journalist, and the pair embark on a roller-coaster romance. Portions of the book are based on Huysmans’s own youthful love affair with a lady of the night.

Not long after Marthe, Zola published his own novel about a Parisian harlot, the classic Nana (1880). Zola’s novel is much more epic in scale and grander in scope than Marthe, which is a very short novel and intimate in its focus, similar to Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893). Zola makes Nana the high-class of whore of Babylon who has all the powerful men of Paris wrapped around her finger, while Marthe is a more realistic garden-variety prostitute, the girl next door gone bad like so many poverty-stricken urban women of her age. Despite Naturalism’s pretensions of brutally scientific realism, Zola would exaggerate elements of his novels for dramatic effect. Huysmans, on the other hand, would exaggerate elements of his novels for repulsive effect. In the three books I’ve read by him, he seems to go out of his way to disgust, put off, and offend his audience. In Marthe, for example, Huysmans’s descriptions of a low-rent flophouse and a sleazy back alley are so loaded with sordid detail you might want to put the Kindle down and sanitize your hands. There are also some pretty racy sex scenes in this book, not too graphic by today’s standards but enough to be considered pornographic in the 1870s. Not surprisingly, the book was banned. Charged with obscenity in France, Huysmans had the book published in the more free-wheeling Belgium.

Among English-language audiences, Huysmans is better-known for his novels Au Rebours (Against Nature or Against the Grain) and Là-Bas (Down There or The Damned, a novel about Satan worship), but I found Marthe superior to them both. As an unromanticized depiction of social ills, this is a superb naturalist novel. Huysmans pulls no punches, and his prose is strikingly brilliant (at least in English translation). This is not a pleasant story, but Huysmans succeeds in viscerally immersing the reader into this sordid and squalid world. Zola is my favorite author, and I’m always look for other writers of a similar philosophy and style. Marthe is one novel in which one of the so-called lesser naturalists actually gives Maître Zola a run for his money.