DEPARTMENT OF ODD SOCKS – VI

by Rob Lopresti

When you get your mitts on the current, March issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, be certain to spare an hour for the Mystery Classic department which features a tale selected and introduced by yours truly. It is “The Shape of the Sword,” by Jorge Luis Borges. I have written about Borges here before, but for Hitchcock — drum roll, please — I actually researched him. Crazy, I know.

It’s a great story, one of three he churned out in a couple of months just after turning forty. The other two were “The Garden of Forking Paths” and “Death and the Compass.” We could all use a midlife crisis like that one.

And speaking of magazines

If you read this blog regularly you are probably a fan of our genre, so you likely subscribe to Mystery Scene. But if you need another reason to do so, be aware: that Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Lawrence Block has just started a column in the magazine. He is writing memoirs of his writing career, issue by issue. How can you not want to read that? The first piece is mostly about Stanley Ellin, one of the greatest writers of mystery short stories of all time.

The Very Good Wife

A few months into the new TV season and there is only one rookie series I am still watching. It is far better than anything the major nets introduced the previous season.

Reviewers enjoy The Good Wife but they find it difficult to categorize. It’s a Law show. Well, yes, but it’s a Political drama. And a Family story.

Here’s the dirty little secret: it’s a Mystery.

Julianna Margulies plays Alicia Florrick, whose life has just fallen apart. Her husband (Chris Noth), the States Attorney for Chicago, has been convicted of using government funds to pay prostitutes. He denies the official funds part; but can’t deny the prostitutes because the videos are all over the web. While he sits in prison Alicia goes to work as a junior associate at a friend’s big law firm to support the family.

Some legal shows are mostly about brilliant cross-examination and eloquent arguments to the jury, but in this series Alicia and the law firm’s investigator are constantly digging for lying witnesses, hidden evidence, and so on. Like I said, a mystery.

The show is also about the misery of being prime meat in the grinder of a 24/7 news cycle. “You know what I miss?” Alicia says in one episode. “Privacy.” She first learned of her husband’s infidelity from cable news while standing in line at a dry cleaners.

The cast is terrific. Even (so far) minor parts are portrayed by two of my favorite actors, Joe Morton and Peter Riegert. Margulies plays Alicia with an almost passive vulnerability, until – pow! – she shows us the steel under the silk. Highly recommended.

The Gun Seller

Speaking of TV, one of the best detective shows these days is, of course, House. It’s a medical mystery, with the hero loosely modeled on Sherlock Holmes. But did you know that the star, Hugh Laurie, wrote an excellent comic crime novel? Here is the opening of The Gun Seller.

Imagine that you have to break someone’s arm.

Right or left, doesn’t matter. the point is that you have to break it, because if you don’t… well, that doesn’t matter either. let’s just say bad things will happen if you don’t.

Now, my question goes like this: do you break the arm quickly – snap, whoops, sorry, here let me help you with that improvised splint – or do you drag the whole business out for a good eight minutes, every now and then increasing the pressure in the tiniest of increments, until the pain becomes pink and green and hot and cold and altogether howlingly unbearable?