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China’s Woes

The decline in China’s economy has occupied the economic press lately. Fifty years ago, I studied more in classical Chinese than English. I was working on a PhD. thesis on China of the Confucian era. Many of the basic tenets of traditional Chinese government and economics go back to Confucius and his followers in the Yellow River Valley, like much of western tradition goes back to Athens and Jerusalem of classical antiquity, which was roughly contemporaneous with Confucius. Maybe sunspots or a burst of cosmic radiation spurred civilization onward, although that ignores the great civilizations of Africa and the Americas.

It grieves me that I can’t say “I told you so,” to those who thought China would never get beyond the chaos of Mao because I didn’t tell anyone.

That bit of personal history has shaped my views of China. In the 1970s, China was in the bitter throes of the cultural revolution, but I concluded that China, if it could ever shake off its legacy of western colonial oppression and poverty, was a better platform for 20th century western market-driven capitalism than Max Weber’s characterization of the protestant ethic.

I wish I had published those views to refer to now, but I didn’t, so you will have to take my word for them. Herrlee Creel, my mentor at the University of Chicago, hinted at this view in his bestseller of 1949, Confucius: The Man and the Myth, in which he argued that Confucius held democratic ideals. I do not entirely agree with my mentor on that, but Joseph Needham’s encyclopedic Science and Civilization in China convinces most readers that traditional Chinese society fostered scientific and technical innovation. I assert that Confucian world view fostered individual initiative bolstered by a vigorous familial system. A budding entrepreneur in traditional China was more likely to receive encouragement and financial support than a western protestant in recent centuries.

The last decade of the 20th century and the first two decades of the 21st century have proved me right. Family support of entrepreneurship has helped the contemporary rise of the Chinese economy. It grieves me that I can’t say “I told you so,” to those who thought China would never get beyond the chaos of Mao because I didn’t tell anyone.

A common trope is a Chinese gangster who starts firing a weapon and can’t stop until the magazine is empty. The trope is pure xenophobia and racism, but it reminds me of the Chinese official policies on Covid-19.

I read a lot of popular American detective and mystery fiction written in the 1930s and 40s. A common trope is a Chinese gangster who starts firing a weapon and can’t stop until the magazine is empty. The trope is pure xenophobia and racism, but it reminds me of the Chinese official policies on Covid-19.

China’s initial reaction to Covid-19 was a crackdown: mandatory masks, draconian quarantines, workers locked in factories, and whole cities shutdown over scattered cases of the virus. The policy was successful. China kept their death toll down and their economy led the world in the early years of the pandemic.

But like the gangster with the machine gun, the CCP could not take its finger off the trigger until the gun was empty; the rest of the world was in recovery and Covid-19 restrictions were holding China back when Emperor Xi Jinping let up and abruptly tossed the zero-Covid weapon aside; Covid-19 roared back. Death tolls rose and China’s internal economy suffered.

Information on current events in China passes through many filters. Closest to the ground, reports are tailored for a favorable response from the next level up in the government. The Chinese government filters and massages published information to shore up their position. Then western agendas kick into gear and add their own layers of distortion. And finally, your lowly servant here is picking and choosing to tell a story that will keep your interest.

I won’t go into the details of China’s current economic woes. I suggest reading The Economist on the subject or any business publication for more information. Most are gloating over the inherent weakness of authoritarian governments.

I agree that authoritarians are weak, I won’t go into why I think that, but I haven’t seen that the commentators have taken into consideration the peculiar nature of traditional China’s authoritarian empire, which has failed, recovered, and triumphed over and over for the last two thousand years. A more resilient empire than the Romans or the British.

There’s an old Chinese saying: The mountains are high and the emperor is distant. (Shān gāo, huángdì yuǎn.) It’s used in many situations, but slow, unreliable communication in the empire frequently served as a buffer between alternate centers of power and culture and the sometimes inept central government located wherever the emperor happened to sit.

I am forced to wonder if the flattened mountains and shortened roads of twenty-first century communications and transportation have worsened China’s current economic woes. The west has a century of experience with rapid communications and a well-informed populace. China does not.

I am watching carefully.

Hold fast. Be patient. Keep trying.

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Sam Spade Mug Shot

My friend Bill sent me a link to a Huffpost on the meme frenzy following posting of P01135809’s mug shot in Atlanta. Here’s another collection. Most of the memes are amusing, even side-splitting, but none of them notices the Sam Spade-Maltese Falcon connection, which happens to delight me.

P01135809’s mug shot is a study in Vs, like Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade of the Maltese Falcon:

“Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down—from high flat temples—in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.”

I imagine P01135809 working on his pose in front of a mirror, modeling himself on Sam Spade. P01135809’s pale brown hair is flounced into a v and the v of his forehead lines, brows, and eyes meet at the point of another v that comes up from twin creases aimed toward the bridge of his nose. His lipless mouth and round chin underline the v’s pointing to his leering eyes.

P01135809 does not look ” rather pleasantly like a blond satan,” He has the “this ain’t nice” leer of someone who thinks he may have hatched a hemorrhoid or realized that his partner was killed by the bimbo with whom he thought he was falling in love.

I consider The Maltese Falcon to be a masterwork, but I also see it as close to the light touch of Hammett’s most popularly successful work, The Thin Man, not the detective stories he wrote previously. I don’t see Sam Spade as the swashbuckling and justice-seeking hero he is often made out to be.

The pursuit of the falcon is massive joke, a cavalcade of characters, portrayed comically in the 1941 John Huston movie by the geniuses of Mary Astor, Sidney Greenstreet, and Peter Lore. The global wild goose chase draws Spade in, only to dump him when the bird is revealed to be a fraud. In the end, Spade loses the falcon and sacrifices the femme fatale he may have loved only to avenge his dismal two-timing partner, Miles Archer, whom he didn’t much like.

Nice choice of models, P01135809.

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Rex Stout and Truth

“I think people actually love truth a lot more than a lot of people think they do. I think that people really want truth and love truth, and in a detective story, the truth is the hero of the story.”

Rex Stout discussing the popularity of mystery stories with Eleanor Roosevelt on radio, July 30, 1951. https://blogs.loc.gov/now-see-hear/2020/10/rex-stout-on-the-air/

Periodically, I take a deep dive into the world of the mystery writer, Rex Stout, to re-experience the Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin stories. My PhD advisor and great mentor Herrlee Creel once told me my thesis was coming along okay, but I’d do better in life if I wrote it in readable English. He told me to read Rex Stout and write like him. I’ve been trying ever since.

The list of authors, literary critics, academics, and statesmen who have praised the Nero Wolfe-Archie Goodwin stories ranges from John Le Care to Jaques Barzun, all the way to Henry Kissinger. Stout is read on many levels: sheer escapism, social commentary, and the study of human nature are among the reasons. I read the stories to discover the sources of Stout’s greatness; not only to learn the tricks of his trade, but also to examine his insight into the world he lived in.

Stout and Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald

Stout is not cynically realistic like Hammett, nor is he lyrical like Raymond Chandler, and he is certainly not deeply psychological like Ross Macdonald. Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald are firmly rooted in the west coast, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Stout is a New Yorker from the Midwest. The west coast bunch surveys humanity with clear cold eyes; on the surface, Stout is only a short step above an “Oh Gosh Golly, how sophisticated” recent arrival to the big city.

Just when I think I have pushed a pin through Stout’s chest and mounted him under glass, I notice that Stout’s Inspector Cramer has more depth in his admiration-tainted frustration with Wolfe and Goodwin’s antics than any of the Dickensian caricatures who populate Chandler’s LA, or that Archie’s wise cracks have wheels within wheels.

In Chandler, Hammett, and Macdonald’s California the police and city governments are often venal and corrupt. In Stout’s New York, Wolfe revels in luxury. He connives for big fees and repeatedly skirts ethical boundaries. Murderers whom Wolfe thinks may get off in court are forced into suicide. He lies for his own purposes. He snatches the choice bits off the serving platter ahead of his dinner guests. Honest and stolid Inspector Cramer knows all this, yet he, and we poor readers, admire Wolfe, a force for justice that transcends quotidian ethics.

This Dive

My latest dive has been into three books: Target Practice, a compilation of pre-Nero short stories; Fer-de-Lance, the first Nero Wolfe novel, published in 1934; and And Be a Villain, a post WWII novel published in 1948.

I had a purpose in mind: the Nero Wolfe novels are often said to have sprung to life fully mature in Fer-de-Lance. Was that true? I set out to compare Wolfe’s debut with Stout before and after Wolfe.

Target Practice

Target Practice is a collection of short stories published between 1914 and 1917, roughly twenty years prior to Fer-de-Lance. Frankly, I didn’t enjoy them. The words on the page were good: clear, concise, to the point. But the plots felt contrived, disconnected from the characters, and almost all the endings were more like general social comments than the inevitable consequences of the stories themselves.

Stout’s switch to writing mysteries in the mid-1930s conveniently solved his story ending issues. Mystery writers have an advantage: the ending is set. When hidden truth is revealed, the mystery is resolved and the story is over. Mysteries can still fail in many ways, but finding a resolution is seldom a challenge.

The two stories in Target that I liked best were mysteries with strong endings: “Justice Ends At Home” and “Heels of Fate.”

“Justice” has been described as proto-Archie-Wolfe. An office boy and a lawyer who work together in the story are said to be prototypes for Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe. I see the similarity, but the duo in “Justice” are bland compared to Archie and Nero. However, Stout showed much of his later flair for the tension through carefully paced revelation of the truth of deception and crime at the heart of the story.

In “Heels of Fate,” I saw more of the future Nero Wolfe. In this story, a livery stable owner has the Nero role; a country lawyer plays the Archie-narrator. The lawyer has none of Archie’s panache. The livery stable owner is decidedly not an arrogant epicure like Nero, but he sizes up a situation and schemes to deal out justice without regard to conventional ethics. “Heels” is a tight and absorbing story and, unlike most of the other stories in Target, the ending is both startling and satisfying.

Fer-de-Lance

When I began to read Fer-de-Lance, I was surprised. Archie and Nero are there, but not fully formed. Archie’s wit and style show only rare hints of what is to come. Nero is crafty, claims to be an artist and a genius, but he is not the great man he becomes in the ensuing books.

The iconic brownstone house and office doesn’t have the rich texture that appears later. There’s no red chair for Wolfe’s client or the huge custom chair for Wolfe’s bulk. The giant globe is still to come. The Wolfe posse is present, but barely. Fred Durkin, Saul Panzer, and Orrie Cather appear, but no Inspector Cramer. Purley Stebbins is a name only. There’s a newspaperman, but he’s not Lon Cohen. The posse has few of the enduring characteristics they take on later. Saul Panzer, New York’s greatest freelance operative, is not a freelance. He’s on retainer with Wolfe.

Most surprising was the writing itself. Raymond Chandler is known for his startling similes. For example, “a face like a building superintendent was watching the work and looking as if it was breaking his heart,” from the first paragraph of The Lady in the Lake. Much of the humor in Archie and Nero comes from Archie’s apparent non-sequiturs that reflect deep knowledge.

The arch non-sequiturs are largely absent from Stout’s pre-Nero era, but appear in Fer-de-Lance. An example: “the house was brand-new, wood with panels and a high steep slate roof, one of the styles I lumped all together and called Queen William.” That’s Archie talking.

Both Stout’s Archie and Chandler’s Marlowe twist our sensibilities. Marlowe flaunts his jaded vision while Archie mocks his own knowledge and taste.

Many of Wolfe’s characteristics appear in Fer-de-Lance. Throughout the series, Archie is the detective who digs out evidence, passing on information, evidence, witnesses, and suspects to Wolfe, who is the active hunter, directing the search, manipulating evidence, setting traps, and, in many cases, meting out judgement and punishment. Ultimately, a Nero Wolfe novel is a recount of Wolfe’s quest for truth from evidence that Archie gathers.

To my taste, Stout’s word craft, characterization, and scene construction in Fer-de-Lance took a step back from the quality of the short stories, although the overall construction is better and Stout’s sure hand with dramatic tension moves the story on. Stout said he changed his entire approach to writing with Fer-de-Lance. Maybe he had to relearn some of his style.

And Be a Villain

I won’t say much about And Be a Villain. During WWII Stout vigorously supported the war effort on radio and the Writer’s War Board and devoted less time to writing mysteries. And Be a Villain is a product of Stout’s post-war burst of stories. It is the first of the Arnold Zeck trilogy in which Archie and Wolfe confront and eventually defeat Zeck, a coldly calculating gangster with a vast organization.

Villain has all the features of a fully realized Wolfe novel. Wolfe’s posse appears in full regalia. The brownstone is complete. Archie wise cracks his way through a mess of unpleasant characters and awkward situations. Wolfe is high-handed. He ignores Zeck’s threats; when the truth comes out, Wolfe sidesteps Zeck’s wrath.

Stout’s statement to Eleanor Roosevelt quoted above is a great insight into the success of the Wolfe-Archie mysteries. Stout’s relatable characters help, the wit and humor that touches almost every page contribute, but Wolfe’s intent pursuit of truth is the principal attraction.