Verifiable Proof of Englishness: my Citizenship ‘Associative Reaction’ Test Probes an Allusive Incomplete V.R.

As a Sussex-bred child, I’m sure I never imagined that – when we used to walk along the Weald ridgeway from the little village of Streat, past Plumpton Racecourse, to East Chiltington churchyard – I’d be entering a future where memories of that splendid grandstand view of the South Downs would prompt sombre ruminations on the values of cultural identity.

As it was, any apprehensions of today’s polarising debates on what it means to be English I’m sure were far from my mind because what entranced me most was the thought that the massive sylvan hanger that clung to the escarpment above Streat was the very embodiment of the Victorian mystery fiction I nightly devoured, thanks to a number of my grandfather’s bound volumes of the Strand Magazine I had made my own.

Explain? The massive ‘V’ on the Downs above Streat was planted in 1887 to mark Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee. Composed of Scotch pine, spruce, larch, beech, sycamore and lime, this living monument to a queen regnant raised by a loyal yeoman farmer required 3060 plants at a cost of 12 pounds, 10 shillings and four pence, not including 38 pounds for labour. The outside measurement of each arm is 165 yards in length.  The width of each arm is 22 yards – that time-honoured distance, the twentieth of a quarter of a mile, the length of a cricket pitch (Sussex is the birthplace of adult cricket, cited in the early 1600s). The ‘V’ is one of the most loved landmarks within the South Downs National Park.

Local legend, I recall, had it that such were the fears of ever mounting expenditure the farmer abandoned his intention to complete the V.R. (Victoria Regina) of his original scheme, and settled for the pure symmetry of a commanding ‘V’, for which a future generation of austere minimalists is profoundly grateful.

Writ large.

It’s easy to guess why I was entranced. The incomplete ‘V’ reminded me of nothing so much as that characteristic passage in the case book of Sherlock Holmes I’d read so eagerly in the Strand Magazine for 1893, published six years after the farmer’s celebrations yet sharing the impulse towards the expression of an unquestioning monarchial devotion writ large with the means closest to hand . . . saplings in the farmer’s case, and in the case of Sherlock Holmes  . . .
  

[Watson deplores Holmes’s marksmanship.] I have always held, too, that pistol practice should be distinctly an open-air pastime; and when Holmes, in one of his queer humours, would sit in an arm-chair with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges, and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V. R. done in bullet-pocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it.

The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual

(The Strand Magazine 1893)

Yet, in my maturity, I begin to wonder whether my loyal citizenship test of Englishness does not require, after all, the further validation of an ‘Enhanced Positive Vetting’*, because I must confess my knee-high view of classic Victorian crime literature is now revealed to me to be simply the fancy of a purblind innocent who, unlike the jingoistic Holmes, hadn’t completely joined up the dots . . . . . .

Toffs as Drifters: Holmes and Raffles in the Strand.

The fog-cloaked London of the Strand Magazine’s crime fiction in the 1890s, as Sherlockians will be aware, harboured both the exploits of the private detective, Holmes, and the escapades of the notorious (yet also jingoistic) Raffles, gentleman thief, the incomparable protagonists created respectively by brothers-in-law Arthur Conan Doyle and E. W. Hornung. Yet, now with 20/20 hindsight, as I have hinted, isn’t it about time we took to task these two fictive toffs for masquerading as members of the Deserving Poor – ‘hansom cab-runners’, to be precise – to thus deny indigent workers their honest wage? 

The flippancy of their offence is all the more egregious when you consider that an unflinching social realist of the same decade, George Gissing, was also a stablemate of these feted authors at the Strand and, by contrast, had an entirely clear-eyed and empathetic view of the penniless drifters who followed cabs. A cab-runner** in those days was regarded as roughly identical with a criminal of the worst sort.  

As to the cold-blooded cynicism of Holmes and Raffles, I invite you to consider these extracts from their adventures in the guise of ‘horsey men out of work’, a subterfuge that exploited the advantages of cabmen as confidants. First, Holmes reveals to Watson his ‘amazing powers in the use of disguises’:   

‘I left the house a little after eight o’clock this morning in the character of a groom out of work. There is a wonderful sympathy and freemasonry among horsey men. Be one of them, and you will know all that there is to know . . . I then lounged down the street . . . and lent the ostlers a hand in rubbing down their horses, and received in exchange tuppence . . . I was still balancing the matter in my mind . . .  when up the lane came a neat little landau . . . It hadn’t pulled up before she [Irene Adler] shot out of the hall door and into it. I only caught a glimpse of her at the moment, but she was a lovely woman, with a face that a man might die for . . . “The Church of St. Monica, John,” she cried, “and half a sovereign if you reach it in twenty minutes.” This was quite too good to lose, Watson. I was just balancing whether I should run for it, or whether I should perch behind her landau when a cab came through the street.’ 

A Scandal in Bohemia
(The Strand 1891) 

A cab-runner in those days was regarded as
roughly identical with a criminal of the worst sort. 

‘Whip behind!’ 

Had Sherlock Holmes perched behind Irene’s landau, we wonder, would a street urchin have cried, ‘Whip behind!’ This, after all, was the customary exposure of free rides by stowaways on horse cabs. In the event, Holmes reverted to toff, flourished half a sovereign, and followed Irene in a cab. 

The rather more athletic A. J. Raffles, on the other hand, demonstrates, an even deeper immersion in the character of a ‘cab follower’, according to faithful sidekick, Bunny Manders:   

‘But surely you get some exercise? ’ I asked; for he was leading me at a good rate through the leafy byways of Campden Hill; and his step was as springy and as light as ever.                                                                                       ‘The best exercise I ever had in my life,’ said Raffles; ‘and you would never live to guess what it is. It’s one of the reasons why I went in for this seedy kit. I follow cabs. Yes, Bunny, I turn out about dusk and meet the expresses at Euston or King’s Cross; that is, of course, I loaf outside and pick my cab, and often run my three or four miles for a bob or less.  And it not only keeps you in the very pink: if you’re good they let you carry the trunks upstairs; and I’ve taken notes from the inside of more than one commodious residence which will come in useful in the autumn.’ 

The Rest Cure
(1905) 

‘V’ for le vice anglais?

A shilling or less!  Well, before you dismiss my notion of a certain blinkered condescension on the part of celebrated toffs playing at charades with the livelihoods of a desperate underclass, please consider the intriguing fact that Oscar Wilde, Conan Doyle and Hornung were close acquaintances, and Wilde was the reviled Accused at the centre of a cause célèbre of a notoriety that saw ‘illiterate boys’ called as witnesses in a trial in which Wilde was prosecuted on charges of gross indecency, mostly procured sexual encounters with young grooms and valets. From the witness-box the court heard the nature of Wilde’s inducements to those ‘illiterate boys’ to share debauches that indulged his taste for ‘feasting with panthers’, reportedly: ‘Bring your friends; they are my friends; I will not enquire too closely whether they come from the stables or the kitchen.’ 

Does the ‘V’ of my meditation on Englishness of this sort, then, stand for le vice anglais?

In fact, the often epigrammatic wit of both Holmes and Raffles is said to be founded by their authors on the quick tongue of Wilde yet, despite this brilliance, the unconscionable exploitation of London’s underclass in the fictions of Conan Doyle and Hornung casts a dismal shadow to remind us how fin-de-siècle decadence can pervade popular literature when a prosperous middle class readership conspires in suspending disbelief. As I have pointed out elsewhere, is not A Study in in Scarlet, 1886 (the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes), a title par excellence for the Decadent Movement, never mind the Whistlerian connotations?

Conversely, George Gissing, writing in his characteristic vein of socio-cultural observation of the poor, owed much, I suspect, to the findings of that guiding spirit of his youth, the social researcher and reformer, Henry Mayhew. 

So I must conclude that the measure of my Englishness is now most likely reduced to this: In the case of the Holmesian Übermensch versus the Mayhevian Untermenschen whose side do I take?  The Infallible Polymath or the Ruined Boys?

Just to earn a few pence. 

There were 1.2 million poor living in extreme squalor in the London of the 1890s, with malnutrition a scourge condemning nearly 500 of London’s poorest to starve to death in the capital annually . . .  so, when I think of the Baker Street Irregulars, those ragged, hungering, lice-ridden, barefoot street urchins (‘like so many rats’) engaged for a few pence by Holmes as his snitches, I believe I know the answer: 

‘V’ = Vanquished

•

*For an account of the rigours of ‘Enhanced Positive Vetting’, see A Singular Answer: Memories of an Interview with the Grey Men . . .  
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/a-singular-answer-memories-of-interview.html

**For a character sketch of cab-runners from George Gissing’s socio-cultural perspective, see . . . 
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/a-theory-of-literary-reincarnation.html

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 
and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

Killers Slipping Through the Net: Murder in a Paranoid Nanny State . . . Christina James’s Fair of Face.

It will strike discerning readers of Fair of Face that the central problem confronting the major incident team, in Christina James’s new and totally gripping torn-from-the-front-page thriller of a double murder on a Lincolnshire sink estate, is their resigned surrender to compassion fatigue induced by the conduct of any number of unconscionable dependants of Benefits Britain they encounter within today’s dystopian underclass. 

‘Don’t be nesh,’ a suspect cautions an apparent accomplice who’s reluctant to enter the crime scene but, before this compelling account of seemingly motiveless malignancy is ended, the reader may be sure they too will share the cold dread that comes from uncommon knowledge of macabre and incomprehensible crimes . . . the killing of a sleeping infant and mother, and a mindless family massacre.

‘We cannot see into the mind of another,’ a celebrated Scottish judge once concluded before sentencing the accused to be hanged for an unusually inhuman murder. ‘The springs of action are hidden. Human personality is such a mysterious thing that one person can never enter into the personality of another. All we can do is judge them by their acts and conduct and by surrounding circumstance.’

His bleak summing-up can be taken as almost a formula for the psychological police-procedural crime novel, which as a genre withholds moral judgement and shuns an authorial point of view with no glib answers forthcoming in denouements that very often, far from unknotting the narrative, tighten the mystery with a further series of unexpected twists. In short, if we consider the prime suspect in any superior suspense novel as a notional conflicted ‘analysand’ in an unresolved case of psychotherapy, then the crime novelists who emerge as the most distinguished open-minded documentarians of contemporary anomic murder will be found to be adherents of that student of early psychiatry, Dr Chekhov, a literary social scientist who declared he had no ideology and no convictions yet denied he was an indifferentist.

Specifically, the objective yet compassionate Chekhovian crime novelist adheres to this author’s belief that what is obligatory for the writer ‘is not solving a problem, but stating a problem correctly.’ So . . . when the reader is faced with a vicious crime (described relativistically and not by an omniscient narrator), can one be certain of one’s own moral compass to judge?

Self-deception in a speckled mirror.

Such a novelist is Christina James, whose forensically scrupulous prose in her latest DI Yates novel, Fair of Face, the sixth in her crime thrillers, features a methodology that imitates the split-screen effect of diverse testimonies from both the crime team and their suspects and witnesses, all to some degree the depositions of unreliable narrators who are wanting in self knowledge. Even Detective Inspector Tim Yates is revealed as blinkered to his own bad habit of taking the credit for the successes of his loyal Detective Sergeant, Juliet, his ‘unofficial Girl Friday’ cast in ‘the nice tea lady role’, for whom equally there dawns a recognition of damaging character flaws, ‘I stare at my face in the speckled little mirror that hangs over the sink . . . I’m thirty-five years old and I’ve never understood less what I’m doing with my life.’ Loyal readers recognise that James is an astute anatomist of the dynamics of command.

These character flaws not only impede the investigation but are further exemplified by the blundering actions (‘mealy-mouthed do-gooding’) of a number of do-gooders from the Social Services, whose  prickly demarcation disputes between departments compound a bien pensant bureaucratic correctness that amounts to a virtual paranoia consuming the Nanny State. These passages of the novel are social satire of a high order, as if from the pen of a latter-day Zola to skewer petty officialdom’s buck-passing, which in this case fatally sets in motion the final tragedy. The character sketches of a professional child psychologist are the most acute: ‘She’s wearing a mid-calf dirndl skirt and a broderie anglaise blouse with huge puffed sleeves. Her thick blonde hair has been tied back with a piece of embroidered ribbon. She could pass for a very generously-proportioned Coppélia . . .  with an aggressive brand of altruism.’ 

It is to be this fierce self-deluding altruism of the ‘Responsible Adult’ that hinders the investigative interviewing and blinds the investigators in their race to identify the true criminal intent behind the crime.  

Crucially, the DS, Juliet, protests to the child psychologist: ‘You know I’ll have to interview her again. I’d be grateful if you could let me get through it without interrupting. You can see how important it is . . .’
[Child psychologist] ‘My job is to protect her interests.’ She’s gripping the iron bannister rail. Her knuckles are white. ‘If I think the interview is distressing her too much, or causing her to incriminate herself unfairly, I shall insist that you stop.’

(How vivid! The child psychologist ‘was wearing a floor-length red cotton tartan skirt and a jacket with a nipped-in waist (insofar as it was possible to nip in her waist) in a clashing tartan of purple and blue.’ A note to movie producers (and their costume department): the depth and quality of Fair of Face as a suspense drama is positively filmic, as is the intensely sharp focus on its dramatis personae. And for set designers the mise en scène of the death scene is a marvel of concision. ‘There’s not much furniture in the room besides the double bed and a small old wardrobe with an oval mirror set in the door. Otherwise, just a chair with a rounded back that might have started life in a pub. It’s heaped with clothes.’ Started life in a pub. A Jamesian line that fully expresses the desperate hardscrabble times and familial dysfunctionalism of her Provincial Noir milieu. Feckless ‘on-off fathers who wouldn’t take responsibility for their children.’)

In many ways this mapping of tensions between the individual and a paranoid society reminds one of certain polemical works of fiction by Heinrich Böll, his Brechtian-styled political critiques of governmental dogma and the herd mentality of state functionaries . . . in this instance, a paranoid bureaucracy of exhausted, overworked and often demoralised social workers, a breeding ground, as frequent headlines tell us, for errors to multiply. Certainly James’s austere but muscular prose recalls the calculated intention of Böll’s devastatingly incisive reporting style.

James’s striving for objectivity, with multiple viewpoints, deconstructing events with documentary footage, as it were, brings these societal tensions to life with a naturalism that mirrors the inconclusiveness and mysteriousness of quotidian existence and the violent psychical forces that can be unexpectedly unleashed at an underclass’s Ground Zero. 

Lessons will be learnt?

Mercifully, we do not hear the emollient cliché in this novel so often broadcast after tragedies of the gravity explored in James’s fiction; she, as a social realist disdaining sententiousness, leaves it unsaid. (‘It is better to say not enough than to say too much.’ Chekhov.) In real life, after such failures of the Social Services documented in Fair of Face, we are told that ‘lessons will be learnt’, but James’s ‘mealy-mouthed do-gooder’, in his defence, has this to say:  

‘That’s the problem, isn’t it? Every one of the people you mention was responsible for her physical or mental safety, or her day-to-day care, or some other fragment of her life, but no-one wanted to take on board what she had become.’

In other words, too much altruism makes do-gooders blind. It’s smother love. The Nanny State, in smothering, inadvertently kills. 

Predictive plotting.

Astonishingly, the events of James’s novel all too faithfully mirror certain notorious crimes recorded in the British tabloids (Sussex 1985 and Lincolnshire 2016) in so far as her narrative exhibits a very strange aspect indeed . . . the unexplained manifestation of predictive plotting. How is it, readers are going to ask, how is it that the grim epicentre of James’s crime novel – Spalding in South Lincs – was anticipated as the crime scene for a callow nihilistic murder in 2016 of a mother and child while they slept? Given that the gestation of a complex novel of some 300 pages, one would think, can be no less than eighteen months, never mind its production to publication (October 2017), how were the fictive crimes of Fair of Face foreseen, when the double murderers dubbed the ‘Twilight Killers’ killed in actuality in a remarkably similar manner in Spalding in April 2016? 

They say that you can make your own luck, but – the question remains – can a place make a crime? If this is the case, I would not want to be a denizen of Spalding with Christina James as my bard. Like Chekhov’s world, one enters a dimension of no neat answers.

•

For a view of the first of Christina James’s crime novels, In the Family (2012), the welcome debut of her Detective Inspector Yates series, see Eisner’s blog-post at:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/christina-james-telling-detail-of-her.html

See also, ‘I am a Serial Killer Diarist’ . . . Unremarked Clues to Two Notorious Crime Sprees (John George Haigh and Colin Ireland) . . .

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/i-am-serial-killer-diarist-unremarked.html

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 
and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

The Mental Age of Hollywoodland . . . a Beginner’s Guide.

Mr. Sam Silberstein, one of Hollywood’s leading producers, regarded him curiously.

    ‘The title of that movie I had altered. I couldn’t spell it, and anything I can’t spell our public can’t understand.’

    ‘Ah, of course, Mr. Silberstein, I have always understood that Hollywood films aimed at a public of a mental age of fifteen.’

    ‘Quite wrong! Any company which aimed at an age like that . . . it might just as well commit Mata Hari . . .  No, in our show we aim at a public of the mental age of twelve and a half. And if there’s any argument, we think of twelve years and five months rather than twelve and seven.’

(Later, the director of Mr. Silberstein’s film confides his view of the great producer’s imperious demands.)

    ‘The cinema is absurdly restricted by artificial limitations, from the Hays Office to the National League of Decency. The Hays Office issues a list of forbidden subjects, and of sacred and sexual problems that must never be mentioned. It decides how much of a girl’s legs shall be shown, and what proportion of her breasts shall be visible when she bends down. The effect is to limit production to a list of twenty or thirty subjects – Boy meets Girl, Fop hit by Custard Pie, Mother-love, Animals, Babies, Sex, Crime, Danger – obviously faked, yet pretending to be real.

    ‘We are hamstrung. And all the time we are catering for a great range of people.  I have to tell the same story to Americans, Europeans and Asiatics. Their ages range from one extreme to the other, physically and mentally. They are educated and illiterate. Thus, you see, I must stick to simple human emotions, which are understood by everybody.

    ‘Sam Silberstein talks about a mental age of twelve and half! If it was as high as that I would be happy.’*

Bernard Newman

The Spy in the Brown Derby

1946

* In January 1945, in a British court, the American military neuro-psychiatrist, Colonel Leopold Alexander, pronounced on GIs in Britain with this verdict: ‘The average mental age in the US Army today is about fourteen, excluding officers and NCOs. In World War One it was twelve.’

Correction Notice : Soviet Weekly January 17 1946 . . . an ‘Exchange of Information’ Restored . . .

Owing to constraints of space, the following second-lead report on the front page of the Soviet Weekly for January 17 1946 was deficient of certain testimonies from demobilised soldiers returning from the Manchzhurskaya Strategicheskaya Nastupatelnaya Operaciya (Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation) of August of the previous year. You’ll note that, in the report, the demobbed soldiers from the front were asked ‘to explain when and how they won their decorations.’ 

Regrettably, though, the report of Comrade Belikov, far from recording the Soviet warriors’ colourful bellicosities, confines his account to valiantly immodest declarations from a number of Stakhanovist Workers — Heroes and Heroines of the Soviet Home Front – while his editor omits the Red Army squaddies’ eyewitness statements altogether.

We are pleased, therefore – albeit some seven decades later – to redress this deficiency and the words of Soviet soldiery, once unaccountably editorially spiked, are now faithfully recorded as an addendum to the original press story. See Addendum : the Testimony  of  Sergeant Leonid Volkovich, below:

ЗА ПОБЕДУ НАД ЯПОНИЕИ
FOR VICTORY OVER JAPAN

WHAT PEOPLE CAN DO

by V. Belikov.   

During my recent stay in the Siberian town of Barnaul, I attended an interesting meeting. A train arrived bringing demobilised soldiers from Manchuria, and the municipal authorities arranged a meeting between the soldiers and the local workers and collective farmers.

The ex-servicemen were showered with questions about their life at the front. They had to explain when and how they won their decorations. The soldiers in turn were interested in the changes that had taken place in the area since they were called up. 

One local worker after another got up and reported to the soldiers on what has been achieved.

Here is a short summary of what I heard. The first speaker was Elena Bogacheva, a weaver of the Barnaul Textile Mills, decorated for war work. She alone had produced 1,500,000 yards of cloth, enough for nearly 500,000 army uniforms. 

Semyon Piatnitsa, a well-known combine operator of the Budyonny Machine and Tractor Station, reported that he had harvested an area of 37,600 acres during the war years. The station agronomist added to this that it would take 4,712 people using 930 horses, 112 simple harvesters, 112 threshers, 112 winnowing machines and 115 sorting machines to do the job accomplished by Piatnitsa with his one combine-harvester. If no machinery were used, 9,424 people would be needed to do this work. The combine operator also saved 15 tons of fuel during the war.  

Felt boots for 1,563,890 soldiers were produced by a team of six women at the Gorky Factory at Barnaul. This information was revealed by Matrena Trimaskina, head of the team.

Ivan Balyuk, shepherd of the Siberian Merino Collective Farm since 1928, who also wore a Government decoration, had this to report : about 9,000 merino sheep raised since 1928, and 2,402 during the war (without a single loss, or case of sickness); the 30,000 lb. of wool shorn from his flock was sufficient for over 20,000 yards of fabrics, and, consequently, for 7,000 suits. This, too, was the result of the labour of one man. 

The ‘Exchange of Information’ continued, and Alexandra Moshchinskaya of the Tomsk  Railway asked for the floor.  She had transported more than 50,000 tons of freight (about 2,510 carloads) during the war, loading or unloading an average of two cars daily. In her one year of work at the Barnaul Sheepskin Coat Factory, Yekaterina Yushchenko, a young worker, dressed 273,000 skins, or 102,000 in excess of her quota, enough to make 19,000 coats. 

I will conclude with citing the facts revealed by Stepan Gostev, leader of a tractor team. His team exceeded the region’s average quota per wheel tractor (which is quite high) by seven times, every tractor employed by the team ploughing 6,280 acres.

Red propaganda laid on a bit too thick?

Addendum : the Testimony  of  Sergeant Leonid Volkovich.

[The Report resumes.] Rising to his feet – and to the occasion – Sergeant Leonid Volkovich was cheered to the echo by his comrades-in-arms as he began his own deposition. 

‘Comrade Elena,’ he addressed the weaver Elena Bogacheva in an insultingly mocking pitying tone, ‘my dear feeble-minded mousekin, the real, ferocious and merciless character of war is best hidden from you! Hahaha! But let it be known! Your half million uniforms are now steeped in the blood of the devilish barbarous makaki! [Pejorative: Japanese monkeys.] Not forgetting Matrena’s wonder-working pairs of boots (laughter), trampling on one hundred thousand corpses.’

(Both women shuddered.)

The sergeant then gave vent to a few inarticulate roars and lowered his head like a mad bull ready to attack the weaver, who drew back more in confusion than fear. ‘You have no head to imagine our night attacks – storming ladders and naked weapons, murder and conflagration – scorched earth to Sakhalin. 

‘Who could question our orders?  “Soldiers, the town is yours for three days,” they said. The slaughter begins; torch and bayonet perform their business you may be certain. In the streets streams of blood and wine. A splendid festival of our men fighting like tigers among the bleeding dying, smoking ruins, and beautiful, naked, weeping women dragged by their hair to the feet of their conquerors!’

The demobilised troops war-whooped with merriment at this vivid memory. The sergeant grinned wolfishly, revealing broken front teeth, then raised his hand for silence to continue:

‘Why take prisoners and waste time and strength for them? Madness! Grand and glorious days! What fights! Eye-to-eye with the makaki and hand-to-hand. Slaughter without cease for hours, till our cold-blooded, invincible fury brought victory. 

‘Cold-blooded, I say! Yes. Cold-bloodedness reigned.  An entire village – men, women, children, babes-in-arms – were chased into a river and drowned. Children belonging to a village headman had their brains dashed out before his face; after which we threw the mother into a river, and she was drowned. One raiding party obliged many young men to force their aged parents to that river, where they were drowned. Captured wives even assisted in hanging their husbands; and mothers compelled to cut the throats of their children.’

(Elena Bogacheva, at this point in the sergeant’s recital of events, visibly paled, gave a choked cry and ran from the assembly hall. The welcoming committee had grown restless, faces grim.)

Unperturbed, Volkovich hardly raised his voice as he approached his peroration.  

‘Bullets we rationed, of course, so this is the way of it. We’d compel a captured young man to kill his father, and then we’d immediately hang him. Or, after we’d done with a housewife, we’d force her to kill her husband, then oblige the son to kill her, and afterwards shoot him through the head. One bullet, see? Very often two thousand killed for the price of 500 bullets (Sergeant Volkovich winked) and unequalled in all state records for productivity!’

A crowd of ex-soldiers now flocked around the sergeant, considerably stirred by the gusto of his rhetoric. So aroused were they, it almost seemed they had fallen under the spell of a mass hallucination, as though they were still skirmishing, in the midst of havoc and death, in those remembered streets awash with blood and wine.

Suddenly, a giant Siberiak roared, straining every nerve to make himself heard: ‘More liquor now! Or we won’t trust ourselves! We will have blood!’ Very soon other voices from the demobbed soldiers took up the cry ‘We will have blood! Blood! Blood! We must have blood!’

Above the clamour, the harsher voice of the sergeant could be distinguished addressing the welcoming committee. ‘Give them liquor or this day we won’t answer for our deeds.’

(The meeting for the ‘Exchange of Information’ was swiftly brought to a close by the arrival of the local militia, who escorted the valorous returnees to the Refreshments tent without further incident.)

Да здравствует сталинская конституция!
Long Live the Stalinist Constitution!

‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.’ 

If this belated addendum should strike the tender-hearted reader as too pitilessly cynical, it should not be forgotten that Olimpiy Kvitkin, the Chief Statistician in charge of the 1937 Census, which was devised to count every citizen in the Soviet Union, was shot on 28 September 1937 on the orders of Stalin, because Kvitkin’s census identified 6 million fewer persons than the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party had projected, an inadmissible shortfall due to the brutal purges and extermination by hunger directed by the Bolsheviks to crush dissent in allegedly rebellious elements of the population.

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See also, Red Spies’ Century-Old Creeping Barrage into Woolwich Arsenal.
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/stoneburgh-spy-campus-pt-8-red-spies.html

See also, Hushed Up Chekhov. In the centennial of Chekhov's death, this essay was published in the Jewish Chronicle (December 24 2004), in which is identified the anti-Semitic aspects of Chekhov's correspondence and writings and drama, airbrushed out of Soviet history books.
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/hushed-up-chekhov.html

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Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 
and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

A Web Link to Catherine Eisner’s published works . . .

Publishers of Catherine Eisner, Salt is one of UK’s foremost independent publishers, committed to the publication of contemporary British literature. Salt Publishing was founded in 1999. 

    For more information :

    https://www.saltpublishing.com/collections/author-catherine-eisner

Les Activistes de la Cause Anti-Brexit : Banalistes Monumentales revisited . . .

My devoted correspondent, Johanna Behrendt, informs me that my mild rant decrying the trend towards the monumental kitsch of the ‘. . . Banalistes Monumentales, whose facile artefacts are no more than consumer commodities fatuously scaled up with a pantograph . . .’  has demonstrated once again how Life (in this case contemporary political grandstanding) is imitated by ‘Art’.

See: http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/banalistes-monumentales-jadedness-of.html
I’m told by Hanni that, according to a recent Parisian news report, the New Banalism of the Supersize School of Art is to profane the Champs-Élysées with a Brobdingnagian monument to Defeated Brexit, gleefully proposed by the assembleur-installationiste, Patrice Robeaud, to discountenance the emissaries from La Perfide Angleterre with a snarl-up of impenetrable red tape.

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Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html

and A Bad Case (2015)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

Schrödinger’s Second Paradox . . . ? Unexpected Deaths

As the great forensic pathologist and criminologist Professor Francis Camps remarked, when investigating Unexpected Deaths: 

‘A death which may be expected to take place can still be of unexpected causation. It is for this reason that any fallacy in thinking, such as acceptance of the obvious or lack of true critical approach . . . may well become closely allied to self-deception . . .’

The startled cat, a detail from
Olympia by Édouard Manet
first exhibited at the 1865 Paris Salon. 

Simultaneously live and dead. 

Professor Camps then goes on the consider deaths by electrocution . . .

‘The minimum current to kill from electrocution is stated to be about 65 milliamperes. Death from electrocution can occur in two ways, either by a sudden shock causing vagal inhibition or by true electrocution which produces ventricular fibrillation or respiratory failure. Although the importance of the element of surprise should not be over-emphasised, cases have been recorded in which death has occurred from touching a wire which was believed to be live but which was, in fact, dead.’

For more on precocity in forensic pathology (Francis Camps was, according to my mother, a child prodigy in the advancing of the forensic sciences as the keystone of criminal justice) see An Unreined Mind : 
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/the-skinner-principle-seminal-sp5-case.html

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Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html
and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html