The Pale Blue Eye

Speaking of breaking the basic rules of fair play in a whodunit, my first fiction read of 2023 was the historical mystery thriller The Pale Blue Eye, by Louis Bayard. I first heard of this novel late last year when the teaser for the Netflix film adaptation arrived. A lifelong Poe devotee, I was immediately intrigued. I dithered over whether to read the novel as I have had some of my own Poe-related fiction simmering for a few years, but as I don’t have Netflix and the basic premise wouldn’t leave me alone, I decided to go for it.

I read it in just a few days right after the New Year. I’ve been thinking about and reconsidering it ever since.

The film has been out a while now so the broad outlines of the story should be familiar. Retired New York City constable Gus Landor is called one fine autumn day to meet with the commandant of the United States Military Academy at West Point. The commandant, Sylvanus Thayer, tells Landor that one of the Academy’s cadets has been found hanged. Thayer has already ruled out suicide, as after the victim was discovered his body was cut down and his heart cut out. The corpse they removed to the infirmary. The heart has yet to be found. Thayer asks Landor to investigate, both to find the killer and to protect the Academy, which is still new, untested, and the object of suspicion among some citizens of the young republic.

Landor, a consumptive who lives continuously aware of his impending death, agrees to his request with some strict conditions and begins. He questions witnesses, examines the body, searches the barracks, and goes over the grounds of the Academy and the place near the Hudson where the body was found. In the course of his searches he meets a first-year cadet from Virginia, one Edgar A Poe, who offers Landor one sharp bit of advice and disappears. His curiosity piqued, Landor later seeks Poe out at a local tavern and the two strike up an odd partnership built around solving the crime—part crime-fighting duo, part mentor-protégé, part estranged father and orphaned son.

Their partnership is deepened and tested when more cadets are murdered and, even more disturbingly, evidence mounts of some kind of satanic worship extending right into the ranks of the Academy itself.

I don’t want to give much more away, as the unfolding of the investigation, the accumulation of clues, and the working relationship between Landor and Poe is one of The Pale Blue Eye’s great joys. It is also, as it turns out, one of its great frustrations.

Before I get into the one major spoiler, let me praise the two best features of the novel. First, the narrative voice: wry, sardonic, blunt and straightforward but with a finely honed poetic edge, Landor tells his story in such a way that a reader is guaranteed to be hooked. Even when the story’s pacing flagged—as it does in a few places near the middle—I was drawn along by Landor’s narration, which never lost my interest.

The other strength of The Pale Blue Eye is its portrait of young Poe. His semester and a half at West Point is often passed over as a biographical curiosity, but Bayard gives Poe’s time there a central place in his life story and brings this young man, burdened with a hard background and self-sabotaging flaws but buoyed by a tremendous trust in his own gifts, to vibrant life. (Bayard’s interpretation owes too much to Poe biographer Kenneth Silverman, who psychologized and pathologized and autobiographized Poe’s work to death, but that angle is probably only discernible to the enthusiast.) I’ve seen some readers complain that the novel is dull whenever Poe is “offscreen”; I disagree, but it does take on an irresistible energy whenever he appears.

That said, I’ve been reflecting on The Pale Blue Eye ever since I finished it not only because I enjoyed it so much, but because its conclusion, its climactic revelation, was such a cheat: it turns out that the first murdered cadet was killed by Landor himself.

In my post about Glass Onion’s failure to play fair with its audience, I mentioned Ronald Knox’s ten commandments of detective fiction. Knox’s rules had been on my mind because of that movie and I sought out the specific rules again because of this novel. In the case of The Pale Blue Eye, rules seven and eight are broken: “The detective himself must not commit the crime” and “The detective is bound to declare any clues he may discover.”

Given the structure and narration of The Pale Blue Eye, violating the one necessitates violating the other. Landor, having already murdered the first victim when the novel begins, withholds key information—namely, that the cadet had been one of several who had gangraped Landor’s daughter, an act that drove her to suicide. Instead, Landor misleads, telling everyone he meets and us, the readers, directly, that his daughter has left him. This is left as vague as possible: perhaps she ran off with a man, perhaps she died… somehow. Landor’s own tuberculosis offers the reader a red herring by association. His tragic backstory, when it is alluded to, is only a tragic backstory, presented with no apparent connection to the events at the Academy because Landor never gives any specifics regrading what happened to his daughter.

The point is that, until Landor explains precisely what happened in the final pages of the book, the reader could never have guessed at these relationships or events. Even when, about halfway through, I first darkly suspected that Landor was involved in the first murder I told myself it couldn’t be—there was nothing to base that suspicion on. Once Landor confesses to Poe and the reader, it recasts not only the meaning of every event in the book like a good twist should, but the very premise of the story itself. It just doesn’t work. The reader rejects it. The revelation is meant to be a tragic surprise but feels like a betrayal, a betrayal compounded in the last few pages by absurdity as Landor, somehow, narrates throwing himself over the same cliffs where his daughter killed herself.

As I mentioned last time, rules are made to be broken, and I didn’t look up Knox’s rules to hold The Pale Blue Eye accountable for some minor breach of protocol. I despise that use of rules for fiction. (Here’s the worst offender, an utterly arbitrary and stupid measure that many readers take as gospel.) But rules like Knox’s exist for a reason. Think of them less as an imposition of external standards on how to tell a story and more an empirical record of what doesn’t work.

A master, fully cognizant of the rules and of the risks he runs in purposefully breaking one, might get away with it. I’ve mentioned Agatha Christie in this connection before. But more often you will get a novel like this one.

The Pale Blue Eye is a case study in taking such risks and failing. It is brilliantly and often poetically written, full of well-realized characters, spooky gothic atmosphere, evocative and realistic Jacksonian-era period details, and a striking portrait of a real person at a formative moment in his life. But its final twist undermines the entire novel up to that point, making the reader doubt whether it was worth the investigation at all.

Devotion and Glass Onion

Jonathan Majors and Glen Powell as Jesse Brown and Tom Hudner in Devotion, and Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc in Glass Onion

My family’s Thanksgiving Break arrived just in time this year, giving both my wife and I some much-needed rest and our kids a lot of good time at home, all together. As an added bonus, the break started off well for me when my father-in-law took me to see a movie, and then my wife and I spent the evening of Black Friday on a date that included steaks and another movie. And what is more, both movies were good. After months of nothing interesting in cinemas, this has been a good couple of days.

The films are Devotion and Glass Onion. I intended to review Devotion the morning after seeing it, but just because I’m on break doesn’t mean I’m not busy. After seeing Glass Onion last night with my wife and wanting to review that, too, I decided to put together a joint review of both. I hope one or both of these will sound appealing to y’all, and that you’ll find something here to enjoy.

Devotion

Devotion, based on the book by Adam Makos, tells the true story of Ensign Jesse Brown and Lieutenant Tom Hudner, naval aviators who saw action in the Korean War. The movie transpires over the course of 1950, when Hudner was transferred to a naval air station in Rhode Island and met Brown, the first African-American naval aviator and therefore still a curiosity to outsiders despite being mostly accepted by his fellow pilots. When their commander assigns them as wingmen for fighter training, Hudner and Brown test each other in skill and daring, slaloming through the masts of sailboats and buzzing a house in the nearest town. It’s friendly and professional, but they’re also clearly feeling each other out.

The early tensions of the Cold War loom in the background, and after their squadron is issued powerful and dangerous new aircraft—the F4U Corsair—Brown and Hudner deploy to the Mediterranean and finally to Korea. Here, late in the year, after the Chinese intervene and stream across the Yalu River into North Korea, overrunning American and UN positions and surrounding and pinning down Marine units at the Chosin Reservoir, Brown and Hudner provide close air support, attacking ground targets, strafing Chinese units as they mass for attack, blowing up bridges. It’s facing MiGs and anti-aircraft fire in Korea that will most sorely test Brown and Hudner’s skills and friendship.

As played by Jonathan Majors and Glen Powell (also of Top Gun: Maverick, making this his second naval aviation role this year), Brown and Hudner are a study in contrasts. Brown is stolid, stoic, but with something simmering just below the surface; Hudner is gregarious and upbeat but by no means naïve. Brown is a married family man and a teetotaler; Hudner is single, on the prowl, and doesn’t mind throwing one back with the boys.

One could call this standard buddy movie material but Majors and Powell play it with great skill and subtlety, making Brown and Hudner feel like real men with real depth to them, and so what begins as a professional relationship with some low-key rivalry grows into a friendship that takes on great weight and meaning by the end. The more they get to know each other, the more each grows. Iron sharpeneth iron.

The acting is good across the board, especially Majors and Powell but also Christina Jackson as Brown’s wife Daisy, who takes the usually thankless role of the wife waiting for her husband back home and gives it serious heart. As strong as Brown and Hudner’s relationship becomes over the course of Devotion, it’s Hudner’s relationship with Daisy that gives the film is greatest emotional weight. Fittingly, they have a coda together.

The main draws for me were the aviation and the Korean War setting. Both are excellently done in Devotion. Korea doesn’t get much attention nowadays—it has really earned its nickname of “The Forgotten War”—and I’m glad to see a good film that provides a small but clear window into the topic. The film stresses both the continuities of this conflict with World War II (having fought in that war gives an aviator an authority that even rank doesn’t) and change (the integration of the armed forces, most obviously, as well as a change in opponents). The handful of battle scenes showing the ground conflict are well-executed—a nighttime attack in which more and more and more Chinese troops appear in the flickering, wavering light of flares was even scary.

The aviation also proved excellent. I’ve learned since watching Devotion that director JD Dillard insisted on practical effects, real aircraft, and real flying wherever possible, and the film has a strong sense of verisimilitude and authenticity as a result. The filmmakers’ painstaking attention to detail makes everything feel real. Devotion’s flying sequences may not have quite the palpable sensory thrill of Top Gun: Maverick, but they’re close, and for the same reasons. The combination of practical effects and real planes with Erik Messerschmidt’s rich, moody, classically styled cinematography also means that Devotion looks great, far better than a comparable film like Midway.

Furthermore, the aviators in this film act and talk like real pilots, worrying over things like weather, visibility, maintenance, windspeed and direction, the approach when landing on an aircraft carrier, and more. Brown, for example, excels in his F8F Bearcat but worries about the overwhelming torque and limited cockpit visibility in the Corsair. This is not just about verisimilitude, but sets up important events later in the movie. It’s just good, solid filmmaking.

I have not yet read Makos’s book and can’t vouch for the truthfulness or accuracy of every detail of Devotion’s story. Certainly some aspects of the film feel like stock Hollywood elements, especially a racist Marine who keeps reappearing and challenging Brown. But the rest strikes me as true to the source material. I especially liked that a crucial moment in the plot is motivated by the respect Brown and a white aviator have for each other because they’re both Southerners. The respect afforded all the characters in all their particularity gives the film a complexity that makes not only the action but the situation feel real.

Devotion’s refusal to make sweeping statements, avoiding political grandstanding or simplistic caricature in favor of closely examining the friendship between two wingmen, makes it a more subtle, nuanced, mature examination of racial division and healing—not to mention comradeship, courage, professionalism, and love—than I’ve seen anywhere in a long time. But more than that, it’s a well-crafted and moving telling of an important true story, and that alone makes it worth seeing.

Glass Onion

Following up my review of Devotion with a review of Glass Onion means going from the sublime to the ridiculous. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Glass Onion opens (in May 2020, the last halcyon days of the pandemic before society started eating itself) with a series of oddballs receiving an elaborate puzzle box. Communicating with each other by phone, they work their way through the puzzles to receive a signed invitation to a private island getaway from an old acquaintance, tech billionaire Miles Bron (Ed Norton). They convene in Greece for the boat ride to the Glass Onion, Miles’s elaborate, showoffy mansion where he keeps a Porsche on display on the roof (since there are no roads on the island) and has rented the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. The guests are Claire (Kathryn Hahn), an annoying liberal politician from New England; Birdie (Kate Hudson), an annoying fashionista with a talent for saying stupidly offensive things and is being kept from her phone by her assistant (Jessica Henwick); Duke (Dave Bautista), an annoying manosphere Twitch streamer who arrives with his girlfriend, Whiskey (Madelyn Cline); and Lionel (Leslie Odom Jr), who is just a scientist.

But two unexpected guests arrive as well. One is Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), who has no connection with Miles but has dark forebodings about unexplained invitations to gatherings like this. The other is Andi (Janelle Monáe), a cofounder of Miles’s tech company who was elbowed out of her leadership role, her fortune, and more. She was invited, but it was clearly pro forma. No one expected her to come, and they are disturbed that she has. Blanc notes, observes, hypothesizes.

Blanc is also greatly bothered. Miles has planned this get-together as a murder mystery roleplaying game. Why would he suggest the idea of himself, murdered, to a house full of people who wouldn’t mind doing exactly that?

I can’t write much more without giving anything away, and I certainly don’t want to do that. But a clue as to what to expect from Glass Onion arrives early, delivered by Yo-Yo Ma, of all people, at a bizarre Covid party held at Birdie’s penthouse apartment. When a music box in Miles’s puzzle begins playing a classical tune, Yo-Yo Ma explains that the tune is Bach’s Little Fugue in G Minor, a fugue being a seemingly simple tune that, when played back and layered over itself, changes, revealing extraordinary complexity and unexpected surprises. The central metaphor of a glass onion, which is both layered and clear at the same time, also suggests a great deal about the way the film works.

And that is one of the joys of Glass Onion—the complexity, the careful construction, the doubling back and revelation. It had a lot of genuine surprises and was brilliantly crafted. I’d even rate its plotting as better than Knives Out. The other joy is the humor. Glass Onion is hilarious from beginning to end, with a lot of well-earned laughs deriving from character and well-executed setups and punchlines, not just references and allusions as in a lot of other comedy these days. There’s also plenty of pure silliness, but the fact that a lot of the jokes also work as plot points or signposts for the viewer points back to the quality of the film’s construction.

The cinematography is good, the costumes and sets are great, and the performances—cartoonish as the characters are—are good. Craig is especially good as Blanc. In the first half of the movie I wondered why Blanc, who was mostly cool and collected in Knives Out, was so befuddled and buffoonish in this one. But in the second half… And Janelle Monáe, whose natural sanctimony I usually find off-putting, was truly brilliant in a role that turns out to be a bit of a fugue or glass onion itself.

I did have a few misgivings about Glass Onion. The setup and middle act were brilliant, but the film missteps tonally in the end. Some of the climactic action is bothersomely childish. Again, I can’t elaborate without giving too much away. And while the characters were all wildly entertaining and well-performed, they were still broad caricatures whose foibles and flaws felt like familiar types and some of the jokes at their expense were low-hanging fruit. Dave Bautista’s manosphere influencer, for instance, rants about masculinity and is obsessed with guns but lives at home with his mom. Got it. One suspects Rian Johnson spends way too much time online. Fortunately, almost all of the characaters reveal more about themselves as the film goes on, doubling back, layering.

But these are minor problems. Knives Out, the first Benoit Blanc mystery, was one of my favorite movies of the year when it came out in 2019. I wrote that it “was the most fun I’ve had at the movies this year.” That’s probably also true of Glass Onion.

Conclusion

I’m glad to say that after a long cinematic dry spell this year, I’ve gotten to see two good films in just a matter of days. Devotion and Glass Onion are solid, well-constructed movies and well worth seeing in theatres. Glass Onion in particular is a Netflix film and as far as I know will only be in theatres for a week. I hope y’all will check it and Devotion out.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Striding Folly

This week I read a little collection of Lord Peter Wimsey stories I picked up at Mr. K's in Asheville, Striding Folly. This book includes only three stories, but its still appealing for two reasons: Lord Peter is always fun, and these are the last three Lord Peter stories Sayers wrote. One of them, "Talboys," was not even published during her lifetime.

The title story, "Striding Folly," is an odd little puzzle. An elderly chess enthusiast, tormented by a strange dream about the folly on a nearby hillside, has a mysterious foreign-sounding visitor on the night he usually expects to play chess with the local landowner. Later that night, the old man, guided by his dream, wanders up to the tower and finds the landowner murdered. The crime scene has been arranged to cast suspicion on him, and no one will believe his alibi. Lord Peter shows up in, quite literally, the last two pages to sort things out. 

"Striding Folly" is a strange story but has some wonderfully gothic, apocalyptic atmosphere, and that will (almost) always win me over.

The second story, "The Haunted Policeman," begins with Lord Peter and his wife Harriet welcoming their first baby, a son named Bredon, into the world. Peter is then shooed away, after the fashion of that era, and finds himself lounging around outside their London flat, where he meets a policeman who has just had a strange experience that, like the elderly chess player, no one will believe. 

The solution to this mystery is a bit pat for my taste, but the increasing intoxication of both Lord Peter and the policeman as the latter recounts his story is immensely entertaining.

The last story, "Talboys," written in 1942 but not published until the 1970s, was my favorite. The mystery is minor—a farmer near Lord Peter's country seat complaining about stolen peaches—but the story is a lot of fun. Lord Peter, Harriet, and their now three boys are hosting Miss Quirk, a guest sent to them by relatives. Miss Quirk and Harriet have a number of humorous exchanges about childrearing and corporal punishment, Miss Quirk being a childless expert on children thanks to her reading about all the latest theories. You know the type. 

A lot of the story consists of Lord Peter trying to investigate the peach incident and corral his oldest son, who loves peaches and has been behaving suspiciously, without provoking know-it-all commentary from Miss Quirk. The ending brings these plot threads together in a hilarious and satisfying punchline.

Definitely check out Striding Folly if you enjoy short mysteries of the more genteel variety, especially if you like them with a good dash of wry humor. It may help if you're already familiar with other Wimsey stories (I've listened to Gaudy Night on a roadtrip, which is my sole past experience with Lord Peter and Harriet's relationship), but if not they should still be thoroughly enjoyable.