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One of Husserl's Greatest Works

Packed with its visual documentation

Excellent

Excellent story from little-known authorAnyway, this story about a psychiatrist on an interstellar ship who gets marooned on a planet with an Iron-Age culture was one of my favorite SF novels of the 60's. When it becomes clear he won't be rescued immediately, he settles into local town life, and has various misadventures there, such as when a kite he makes for a young boy gets away from the boy and ends up in the local ruler's palace in a place where it shouldn't have been. The ruler isn't very happy about this, so he's briefly interrogated and tortured, then let go.
He pensively watches life around him in the village, and there's a sort of wistful nostalgia to his situation of being a 21st century earthman trapped in a more primitive culture. He finds a certain satisfaction in living the simple life, and we see the absurdities of our more complex and advanced civilization reflected in their simplicity and naivete. He observes the villagers continue to make progress in much the same way as the early Greeks and Romans must have, such as the invention of the wheel and axle, and primitive ball bearings. In some ways the inhabitants of this planet are more intelligent than humans and he's occasionally surprised by their ingenuity and intelligence.
After several years a rescue ship arrives and he's finally saved. Overall a fine story from an author who should be better known.


Very interesting!

Excellence incarnate

Excellent choice to build up cycling fitness

An excellent &highly practical crystal therapies book

Golf traveling made easy

The best of the Golden Age of British mystery(1) Edmund Crispin a.k.a. Bruce Montgomery (2) Michael Innes a.k.a. John Innes Mackintosh Stewart (3) Dorothy Sayers (4) Margery Allingham (5) Michael Innes a.k.a. John Innes Mackintosh Stewart (with a drop in rank for his mysteries that went off the surreal deep-end).
Out of my Fab Four Brits, Michael Innes and Edmund Crispin share the most similarities. They were both of Scots-Irish background, both wrote their mysteries under pseudonyms while teaching at college, and both were educated at Oxford -- Oriel College and St. John's College, respectively. They both wrote highly literate mysteries with frequent allusions to the classics (nine out of ten of which go zooming right over my head). Michael Innes has his detective, Sir John Appleby poke fun at this high-brow type of murder fiction in "Death at the Chase":
"That's why detective stories are of no interest to policemen. Their villains remain far too consistently cerebral."
Expect that even the most vicious murderer in an Edmund Crispin mystery will quote Dryden or Shakespeare at the drop of a garrote. "Frequent Hearses" is a fertile setting for this type of classical badinage, since its plot involves the making of a film based on the biography of Alexander Pope. Gervase Fen, Oxford don of English Language and Literature, and amateur detective extraordinaire is hired by the film company as a story consultant, and he is plagued throughout the book by a Scotland Yard detective who is an amateur classics scholar. Fen wants to discuss the murder. Chief Inspector Humbleby wants to talk about the Brontes and Dr. Johnson. Neither one will admit to a less than perfect understanding of either his profession or his hobby, and both despise amateurs. Their encounters keep "Frequent Hearses" sparkling along right up until its final page. Here is a sample of dialogue, wherein Inspector Humbleby deliberately misunderstands Fen's explanation of the film's subject:
"Based," Fen reiterated irritably, "on the life of Pope."
"The Pope?"
"Pope."
"Now which Pope would that be, I wonder?" said Humbleby, with the air of one who tries to take an intelligent interest in what is going forward. "Pius, or Clement, or--"
Fen stared at him. "Alexander, of course."
"You mean"---Humbleby spoke with something of an effort---"you mean the Borgia?"
All of Crispin's characters are carefully (one might say 'crisply') developed, and distinguished for the reader by a quirk or eccentric manner of speech (sometimes Crispin overplays the eccentricity at the expense of realism, especially with his main protagonist-- I do wish Fen would stop expostulating, "Oh, my fur and whiskers!"). Physical description is sketchy. If one of Crispin's characters walked past you in the street, you probably wouldn't recognize him. However, if you were to overhear his conversation with the postman---
And I don't mean to imply that "Frequent Hearses" is all dialogue and no action. There is one especially harrowing scene where a young woman chases the murderer into a maze in order to learn his identity and then (when reason returns) can't find her way back out again. By the time Fen rescues her, she has endured an experience right out of an M.R. James horror story (in fact, the young woman quotes M.R. James at length while she is traversing the maze - a typical Crispin characteristic).
The mystery surrounding the murderer's identity and motivation is as cleverly convoluted as the maze, and it is equally as hard to get to its heart. Crispin himself wrote and published at least one film script and composed music for several films, so "Frequent Hearses" is told with the knowledge of a movie industry insider.
If you like vintage British mysteries with a 'classical education' and haven't yet discovered the 'Professor Fen' novels, then you're in for a treat-- assuming you can find these out-of-print volumes. Here are all nine of the Fen mysteries plus two collections of short stories, in case you jump into 'Frequent Hearses' and want to keep going:
"The Case of the Gilded Fly" ("Obsequies at Oxford"), 1944; "Holy Disorders", 1945; "The Moving Toyshop", 1946; "Swan Song" ("Dead and Dumb"), 1947; "Love Lies Bleeding", 1948; "Buried for Pleasure", 1948; "Frequent Hearses", 1950; "The Long Divorce", 1952; "Beware of the Trains", 1953 (short stories); "The Glimpses of the Moon", 1978; "Fen Country", 1979 (short stories).