Charcoal Joe calls on Easy Rawlins to get Seymour, a young PhD student, off on a murder charge that they know he did not commit. Easy agrees but he stumbles into more than murder. Who all is involved? Who is the murderer?

This is the first Easy Rawlins Mystery I read. I liked it a lot. I've been meaning to read this series and I am glad I did. Easy is fairly laid back. He's smart. He still gets into trouble but is able to get himself out of the trouble. I liked his daughter Feather. I also liked his partners, Saul and Whisper. They seem to bring down the bad guys and save the good ones.

I'll be looking forward to reading more of Easy and his people.

by Victor Hugo

This Classic was originally written in French and I've found that the translation does make a difference. I have a paperback copy from Penguin, translated by John Sturrock and my first impression was that the writing was very poetic, but I got the free Kindle version from Gutenberg with a different translator because it's easier for me to read on Kindle and in this one, the first chapters felt overly wordy and dragged a little.

I persisted though. I've seen various film versions of this story and didn't recognise most of the names I was reading until we finally meet Quasimodo in chapter five, followed by Esmerelda, though Gringoire who falls foul of the Paris underworld does make an appearance in the old 1939 black and white Charles Laughton version. From Quasimodo's introduction the story digressed into the history of Notre Dame Cathedral.

This one takes a little patience because there are many digressions. Life in fifteenth century Paris under Louis the XI, individual character histories and other commentaries on the times all come together to form a very thorough picture of the circumstances surrounding the familiar story line, but they do break continuity.

The extent to which Quasimodo's story intertwines with Esmerelda's was never fully expressed in the movies. I found the connections very interesting indeed! And Frollo was given a bit of undeserved bad press, especially by Disney. Movies require a villain and a priest immersed in austerity isn't a sympathetic character, but his reasons for adopting Quasimodo were based in charity, not obligation.

Quasimodo's back story is revealed in reverse, first showing us his experience with the Feast of Fools, then later revealing how he came to be ward of Frollo, and after that his origins and how he came into Frollo's path. Then later we move forward.

While the book would never get commercial publication in today's publishing market due to the extent of the digressions, the story is well told as a whole and the Classic enthusiast is likely to enjoy the fullness of the description and depiction of the time and place and how it shapes the events of the plot. I'm glad to have read it now and will look on film repeats with a more detailed knowledge of the whole of the story.

A worthwhile Classic, for those who have the patience to assimilate a fair bit of history between story events.

Twenty Thousand Leagues is science fiction in the sense that it is a work of fiction that is loaded with scientific details. Verne must have done a tremendous amount of research to prepare for this novel. He supplies so many classification details about sea life and underwater plant life and so many technical details about the oceans, seas, and currents that sometimes it starts to bog down the narrative. Verne was a great author of adventure stories, but if you want to read Twenty Thousand Leagues as an adventure you can read the first quarter of the novel and then skip to the last quarter. The middle section is a long scientific expedition, but when the action starts up again it is exciting.

The edition I read is an interesting one. Published in 1993 by the Naval Institute Press, the translator states that he restored a quarter of the 1870 French text that had been omitted from previous English translations. He says older editions emphasized the adventure aspects of the novel and edited out a lot of the scientific detail. As stated above, I have mixed feelings about the restoration. Rather than a hack translation, it may have represented some judicious editing of a text that kind of drags in the middle.

Given his own socially unconventional attitudes (he had a well-documented disdain for the institution of marriage), I think it's unlikely that the plot of this novel - ostensibly a cautionary tale about choosing the rascal over the upright man for a husband - was anything more than a convenient trope for the aging and ailing Collins. Whether that was also the case for the fellow-novelist, Walter Besant, who finished the novel from Collins' notes after the latter's 1889 death, I do not know.

My principal problem with this novel is not the young lady, Iris, who gives her heart away to the roguish Sir Harry, despite the constant supporting presence of the much more suitable (and very much enamoured) Hugh Mountjoy. My problem is that, as a rogue, Sir Harry's a vacillating weakling. Of course, in order to make him defensible as a love object for his heroine, Collins had to put him far more to the centre of the moral sliding scale than either the scheming murderer Dr. Vimpany or the rather faceless and nameless Irish rebels who go around assassinating (a) English landowners in Ireland and (b) people they conceive to have betrayed and insulted their cause. Sir Harry moves from ideological to financial crime with barely a hitch, but is unable to carry through with any particular villainy, even his own proposed fraud on a life insurance company after he goes to all the trouble of faking his own death. And one of the best moments in the novel, because it's not at all conventional, is that where Collins shows Sir Harry sitting vacillating in the presence of a medical murder, neither assisting nor interfering, and making it quite clear in the process that while that murder was always a likelihood, it had not been openly discussed with his confederate.

The break between Collins' writing and the part written by Besant is at the end of Chapter 48 (so noted in my copy), and is very noticeable. Besant doesn't seem to have made any effort to mimic Collins' fairly declarative style, and instead one immediately notices the much more broken sentences and heavy use of dashes. However, there is no floundering in moving the plot to its preordained conclusion; I just wish Besant had made a little more of the dramatic death of Doctor Vimpany in the flooding Solway Firth, a climax of the action that I vaguely feel must have been done before in 19th-century literature, possibly by Sir Walter Scott, as it was bringing up memories of a similar scene.

This is Collins at the very tail-end of his powers, and the story is incompletely realized, but I still found some interest in the proceedings. I also quite liked the three main women characters: Iris, Fanny (a fallen woman rescued by Iris, who thereafter became somewhat manically devoted to her), and Mrs. Vimpany, who was also reformed by Iris, though rather suddenly. The women, interestingly enough, are all capable of more character development than the men.

This novel came up fairly early in my reading of Collins because the title starts with the letter "B" and my collection is alphabetical. If you are reading Collins according to a more sensible plan (merit of the novels, or even chronology), you can safely leave this one to the end, but there's no need to omit it.

Walter Hubbell, the author of this curiosity, was apparently an actor with a strong interest in the paranormal, like many others in the late 19th century. The transcription I read (on Kindle) is from the "Daily News" Steam Publishing Office, Saint John, N.B., 1879, and since it is about events that took place (or ostensibly took place) in Amherst, N.S. shortly before, it falls into the Canadiana bucket, though written by an American.

How firmly it also falls into the "fiction" column depends largely on how much the reader is disposed to give any credit to Hubbell as a believer in the phenomena he describes, with his rather flat style of reportage. Myself, I find only one thing more incredible than the rolling furniture, flying matches and knives, conversation by mysterious thumps, and spontaneous fires, and that's the report here of other people's reactions to the phenomena, which appears to have been in some cases joking and complete lack of worry about physical harm. There exists a fairly lengthy article in the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychic Research (13: 89-130; 1919, Walter Franklin Pierce) examining the merits of the case from a distance of forty years. One of the its most interesting observations, in my view, is that none of the many witnesses cited by Hubbell are independently verified; even the newspaper accounts of the time appear to have got their citations from Hubbell rather than the friends and neighbours. In other words, it seems entirely likely that Hubbell, if he didn't create the narrative, shaped it to his liking. There was indeed a real Esther Cox in Amherst, and it does appear she had a reputation that was linked with strange happenings and fires (in fact, she ended up in jail for a month or two for arson).

I found it interesting that Esther's various ailments and inflictions in the narrative are directly linked by Hubbell to an incident where she was held at gunpoint in a wooded area, and though Victorian decency obscures the narrative it's pretty clear she was either raped (by a man named Bob) or was just spared that fate because her attacker was spooked by a passer-by. In any case, it's interesting to see her trauma so clearly set out as a precursor - Hubbell does not call it a cause, but he does take some pains to tell the story - to her paranormal afflictions. The principal ghost was even dubbed "Bob" by Esther and her family. It seems likely there were some inexplicable symptoms of poor Esther's trauma, that there was gossip, and that Hubbell, a self-appointed investigator, visited the family for a month as he says he did. After that - well, he sold 55,000 copies of his book to a credulous Canadian and American public (the book also had an American publisher).

I end up placing this work in the same category as "ghost-hunters" TV programs - or indeed, professional wrestling. In other words, believe it (or pretend to) if it amuses you, but there's little to no doubt it's all just so much bunk, and in this case not executed with a great deal of skill. It's fiction, but by no means deserves to be called a novel.

Poor Esther Cox. I hope she did in fact recover in a new environment, as Hubbell claims, after her fifteen minutes of celebrity (including the tour of speaking engagements he dragged her on) were over.

Here, as an appendix to my comments, is Mr. Hubbell's account of what another Esther-observer (and likely a rival, if you believe them both to be in the business of capitalizing on her) had to say about her. It reflects the fascination of the time with the newly-discovered properties of electricity. Hubbell says this about Dr. Edwin Clay, Baptist minister:

He, however, was of the opinion that through the shock her system had received the night she went riding, she had become in some mysterious manner an electric battery. His theory being, that invisible flashes of lightning left her person, and that the knocks which everybody could hear distinctly, were simply minute claps of thunder. He lectured on this theory, and drew large audiences as he always does, no matter what the subject is. Perfectly satisfied that the manifestations are genuine, he has nobly defended Esther Cox from the platform and the pulpit.