Month: February 2023

The Mid-Atlantic Companion – David Frost & Michael Shea

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A friend is off to New York for the first time so it occurred to me to dig out this funny guide to the differences between America and the UK which originally came out in 1986. My copy is the first paperback edition from 1987, which is when I started regularly crossing the Atlantic to see my then girlfriend and found this full of handy hints. At the time David Frost was presenting TV programmes in both countries and commuted each week between London and New York, Michael Shea was a diplomat and Director of British Information Services in New York but when he wrote this book with Frost he was Press Secretary to Queen Elizabeth II. Both men therefore had extensive experience of the differences that you only appreciate really when you live in the country you are not native to.

The joy of this book is it’s not just the linguistic differences that they highlight but history, politics, food etc. are covered, if not comprehensively then at least enough to give a warning to the unwary. Back in 1887 Oscar Wilde said “We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.” and it is still very true today. I remember back in the early 1980’s Jane Fonda’s first workout video came out which included the surprising, to British female watchers at least, instruction to sit on the floor and bounce around on your fannies. Americans who don’t know what is wrong with that should know that a fanny moves from behind in America to the front and female only in the UK.

That passage gives some idea of the differences and fortunately the book is not as relentless as that all the way through, the book is equally fair, or unfair if you prefer, in dealing out warnings both for Brits going to America or Americans going to the UK so Brits are warned about the huge size of portions and the sweetness that pervades a lot of American food whilst Americans are equally warned about a lot of British food and heartily recommended to have breakfast three times a day. There are also specific chapters on London and, usefully for my friend, New York which includes a comment on street crime that “they even had a bank robber who got mugged on the way to the getaway car”. As for the cab drivers “Help wanted ads in NY papers claim you can get a cabby’s licence in three days. Most people are surprised they have been driving that long”.

Of course the book has dated, it is after all getting on for forty years old, however as both authors have been dead for a log time, Shea died in 2009 and Frost in 2013 there is no chance of an updated version. There are still enormous differences in language and culture between the UK and USA a lot of which are in this book and still relevant but there are new pitfalls for the unwary traveller to fall into and a new guide is probably called for.

A final thought from the politics section, which still seems relevant, at least in Donald Trump’s mind:

When the President does it, that means it’s not illegal

Richard Nixon

Dangerous Curves – Peter Cheyney

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It’s three months since I last reviewed a crime book so definitely time for another one. In August 1949 Penguin Books published five of British writer’s Peter Cheyney crime books, of which I have four. This apparent keenness however clearly didn’t pay off as they don’t seem to have ever published any more of the at least forty more works by him and the five they did publish are long out of print. As I own four books but have never opened any of them it is definitely time to see what they are like and it turns out they chose across his styles, two books about American private detective Lemmy Caution, two about a London based private investigator named Slim Callaghan and one from what is known as his ‘Dark’ series which features various different lead characters. The first one I picked up was ‘Can Ladies Kill?’ one of the Lemmy Caution books but after around thirty pages I gave up on it. Caution is a cut price Philip Marlowe written in a poor version of ‘ American’ slang and consequently almost unreadable’

I like Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe stories and this was so obviously a bad knock-off that I almost gave up on Cheyney all together but decided to give him another chance and next on the shelf was ‘Dangerous Curves’ and this time it was a Slim Callaghan novel. Now Callaghan is still very much a Philip Marlowe character but transplanted into London so the terrible Americanish language of the Caution books is dropped, although women are habitually referred to as ‘dames’ and other Americanisms keep appearing. The change of language style makes it somewhat more a bearable read but despite his obvious popularity from the mid 1930’s until the 1950’s (Cheyney died in 1951 and his books largely died with him) Cheyney is not a great writer, being seemingly stuck in formulaic styles both in language and plots. I did however finish ‘Dangerous Curves’.

This time I stuck at it and was glad I did. Yes the characters are mainly ciphers based on the works of better writers but the plot was certainly original and had enough twists and turns to make the 256 pages it takes up worth reading. One thing that should be pointed out from the start though is the misogynistic nature of Cheyney’s writing. With the possible sole exception of Effe, Callaghan’s long suffering secretary and office receptionist, all the female characters are treated as dumb beings merely there for Callaghan to twist round his fingers and to do what he wants with. Effe does seem however to have some independence of character but even she is at Callaghans’ beck and call seemingly no matter what hour of day he needs her. The story line of ‘Dangerous Curves’ is quite complex and I’m not about to reveal it here but Callaghan definitely feels more like an American private investigator out of place in London but with all the contacts that you would expect to be in his home town. Who has been taking ‘The Mug’ for all his money and feeding him cocaine and heroin to keep him quiet whilst doing so? Eighty thousand pounds in the 1930’s was a huge sum to lose so no wonder The Mug’s father was interested in finding out, then all of a sudden The Mug (yes that is how he is referred to throughout the book) is found on a boat shot through the lung with the man who has been bleeding his bank balance dry dead at the desk opposite. What happened and why? And equally important when? These are the questions Callaghan needs to solve quickly and with enough proof to hand it over to Scotland Yard. As for the title of the book, the Dangerous Curves are those of The Mug’s young stepmother which so attract Callaghan that he also plans to bed her whilst sorting out the case. I told you Cheyney had a downer on his female characters…

Peter Cheyney has, mainly deservedly, been long out of print but in 2022 Dean Street Press published twenty four of his titles with 1940’s/50’s pulp paperback style covers. I can’t say I recommend them however, especially not the Lemmy Caution ones, there are far better crime writers than Cheyney and if you want the hard-boiled American detective just read the original and best, Raymond Chandler.

Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman! – Richard Feynman

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Well this book was a complete surprise when I finally pulled it off the shelf where it has sat, largely undisturbed, for over ten years. The year before buying it I had read Six Easy Pieces and Six Not so Easy Pieces which were sections lifted from the Feynman Lectures on Physics and whilst I had enjoyed them I never felt in the mood to see which topics were included in this volume. In fact this isn’t a physics textbook but a stab at autobiography based on taped conversations between Feynman and Ralph Leighton largely done over a seven year period whilst they were drumming together, Feynman was a keen bongo player. The short pieces that make up the book are arranged in a rough chronological order from his childhood to getting his degree in physics at MIT in the first section, his time getting his PhD at Princeton University in the second. Part three covers his time at Los Alamos working on the Manhattan Project which developed the first atomic bomb during WWII whilst part four has him working as professor of physics at Caltech and Cornell universities and the final section has some fairly random stories in it. This potentially sounds rather dry but it is far from it, what we actually get is a total of forty anecdotes a lot of which have nothing to do with physics at all. As well as being one of the outstanding physicists of the twentieth century Feynman loved an anecdote and also stretching his brain doing things that had nothing to do with his career such as learning to do safe-cracking and taking it upon himself to translate Mayan pictographs relating to mathematical problems, both of which are covered in this book.

The stories are often humorous such as the first one concerning his Princeton years, which is also where the title of the book comes from. On arrival to start work on his doctorate he was invited to the rooms of the head of college for tea and being a young man from a Jewish background in New York he hadn’t come across this decidedly English concept which was popular amongst the academic elite at Princeton so didn’t really know what to expect. On being asked if he wanted lemon or milk in his tea he replied ‘both’ leading the lady pouring the tea to exclaim ‘Surely you’re joking, Mr Feynman!’ One of the funniest stories is his battle with the censors working at Los Alamos, now technically they weren’t allowed to censor mail within America but clearly they were going to because of the nature of the work on the Manhattan Project, However Feynman liked to keep his mind sharp so had already started having his correspondence with his father and his wife include codes without giving him a hint as to the key so that he had to crack the codes and the censors really didn’t like that aspect of his letters. Eventually they settled on having the letter writer include on a separate piece of paper how to crack the code and the censors would remove the solution before passing it onto Feynman. All I can say is he must have been a tricky person to work with and indeed his long time collaborator, Freeman Dyson, described him as ‘half genius, half buffoon’ which he later updated as ‘all genius, all buffoon’.

By its very nature the book is somewhat bitty, there are little, if any, links between the various stories included and you quite often want to know more and it leaves out large chunks of his life including his work on the report into the space shuttle Challenger disaster which helped bring him to wider public recognition outside of the world of physicists and academia. However the fact that it is forty largely self contained tales means it can be just dropped into wherever you feel making it ideal for reading when you just have short periods of time available and it is definitely worth reading, even if Feynman does come over as a pain in the ass at times. My copy was published by The Folio Society in 2012, twenty seven years after it first came out and is beautifully illustrated with numerous photographs along with drawings by Aude van Ryn.

Round Ireland with a Fridge – Tony Hawks

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British comedian Tony Hawks was first in Ireland back in 1989 as the writer of a song entered for an ill fated attempt at an international song contest, but whilst he was there he saw something odd on his way to the contest; a man hitch-hiking with a fridge. What was even odder, at least to Tony was the complete way that this was regarded as normal by his Irish companions. Over the years this became a favourite tale for Tony to bring up at parties until late in the nineteen nineties he got particularly drunk at a friends house and…

Now both men knew in their heart of hearts that a bet made when neither of them could remember it being set because they were both too drunk does not have to be honoured, but this one niggled at Hawks for a while until he decided to go for it and I’m very glad he did because the trip and the subsequent book are very funny. I first read the book soon after it came out in 1999 and loved it then so it was with a little trepidation that I got it off the shelf for a reread, would I still think it as good as I did then? I needn’t have worried the tale is still as brilliantly daft as I remembered it to be.

Hawks arrived in Dublin having done minimal preparation other than badly packing a rucksack and arranging with a friend in Ireland to be met at the airport by a friend of this friend along with his travelling companion for the next month. It was whilst explaining to this person, that he had never before, what he was planning on doing that the economic idiocy of the adventure starts to come clear. As he pays him the £130 for the fridge it is obvious that even if he succeeds he is already £30 down not counting the flights, accommodation costs, food etc that he will have to pay for on his journey but he had not counted on the friendliness of the Irish. At a suggestion of his friend he drops a note round at RTE, the national broadcaster, for Gerry Ryan who is the host of the popular breakfast radio show on the basis that breakfast radio is a perfect place to talk about hitch-hiking round Ireland with a fridge as this sort of programme is always looking for offbeat stories to fill up some time. Instead of just a short chat with Ryan on his show it turns into a regular feature with the radio programme regularly calling to find out where he had got to since they last spoke and before he had even got half way round Hawks was mildly famous as ‘Fridge Man’ throughout Ireland and people were waiting to see him turn up in their town and he was being covered by local papers across the country.

The book is not just funny though, in his tale Hawks introduces people who helped and the stories of their lives that he briefly touches on, people start signing the fridge and by the time he gets back to Dublin there is no room left of the two foot cube that had made it all the way round. On the way, the pair of them did all sorts of things including going surfing, fortunately there is photographic evidence of this to prove it, the fridge also got christened and became a folk hero, they even spent a night in a dog kennel when there was no room anywhere else. The book is a joy to read and I’m so glad I picked it back up again after more than twenty years. Hawks has written several books since this one, often with a theme of travelling with a specific purpose such as ‘Playing the Moldovans at Tennis’ where he tries to persuade all eleven members of the national football team to play him at tennis. Or ‘One Hit Wonderland’ where he travels around the world trying to have a second hit record, he had his first, and only previous success back in 1988 with ‘Stutter Rap’ which made the British top ten back in 1988. If you like your travelogues with an eccentric edge Tony Hawks is the man for you.