I saw that.
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Excellent, thanks.
I just had a headslap moment. You may remember my post wherein I shared The Long Divorceâs mention of âDr Thorndykeâ? Iâve read The Moving Toyshop and Holy Disorders by Edmund Crispin as well, both mysteries have a character Chief Constable Richard Freeman, as in Richard Austin Freeman. Iâd not have caught onto this if you hadnât mentioned Freeman!
No screen adaptations, but someone generously uploaded to Archive.org a few weeks ago sound files of BBC Four Extraâs radio reading of Edmund Crispinâs Frequent Hearses.
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I was trying for the latter, as in I envy the discovery.
I grew up on Conan Doyle, Christie, and even Rex Stout, and Freeman blew me away. I got every story I could lay my hands on, which is why I am so touchy about the Thames adaptations. I can understand how if people had only those for reference, they would shy away from the books. But the actual stories are amazing.
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Anything by Kurt Vonnegut. Thereâs a few of his works I havenât readâŚyetâŚ
grins
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My father grew up on a farm in rural Manitoba. He got his primary education in a one-room school, never went beyond Grade 11, and rode the rails across western Canada during the Depression looking for work as a labourer. He was remarkably well-read and well-spoken.
It certainly helped that his parents, immigrants from big-city England, were reasonably well educated, but I think people who value education find a way of getting it.
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This guy, too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Pollard
A great book, and the movie adaptation was decent.
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I have to admit that Highsmith leaves me as cold as Dan Brown, and thatâs very cold indeed. But then I donât like thrillers or puzzle books, so YMMV.
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Player Piano is remarkably prophetic. So is Pohl & Kornbluthâs The Space Merchants. Read either of them and you realise that what was an horrific dystopia after WW2 is now just business as usual.
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I have relatives who never got to finish elementary school because of the war, but were voracious readers. They also watched a lot of documentary/educational TV. Even when they watched sitcoms/dramas, they preferred shows where the performers needed some skill to get the job done. Variety shows were favourites because of this.
I remember we watched a charity special where Hal Linden played clarinet, and an older relative remarking it was a pity his Barney Miller character couldnât have been an amateur musician.
If you have a natural curiosity, like to read, and have access to a decent public library/educational television, you can self-educate without access to formal classes.
Iâm not sure how often this happens in the internet age, though, with the Facebook vortex sucking up so much time.
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Could I ask which war and in which country (genuine question)?
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Heresy!
If you donât, that could explain why you think Highsmith and Dan Brown are similar. Some people donât deal well with a certain style of book or music or whatever. If you donât like thrillers that much, it wouldnât matter if youâre reading a good thriller or a bad one.
I had a book of puzzles by Henry Ernest Dudeney. Brilliant book of old-school math and critical thinking puzzles. I canât find it for the life of me. I hope it didnât end up with my parents, because they pitched it if it did.
Iâm sure thatâs not what you meant though. You probably meant mystery novels that the reader is supposed to solve. I donât like those, because the hints are usually too obvious.
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WWII, the Netherlands and what is now Croatia. On the Croatian side especially it seems school was at best dodgy during the occupation.
By the time the war ended, they were old enough to work, and when they emigrated they had to work to help keep the family afloat in the new country. Some of them went to night school and eventually got a high school diploma; others were given incorrect information about credit equivalents (ie: credits awarded for life experience and education completed outside of Canada) and told they had to work up from halfway through elementary school, so they gave up.
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Like Encyclopedia Brown or The Three Investigators? I read a ton of those as a kid, but thatâs exactly why they bugged me â either the hints were way too obvious or so impossible that they could only be solved by looking at the answers.
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No, I wasnât clear. Highsmith writes thrillers, which I personally donât care for. Dan Brown writes what are supposed to be thrillers cum puzzle books. Quite honestly, anyone who can write that sort of stuff after Umberto Eco kicked it into touch/hit it out of the stadium with Foucaultâs Pendulum I do not know.
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Sounds like lateral thinking puzzles. The answers are usually so ridiculously specific and improbable that actual lateral thinking is useless to solve the problems.
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I couldnât stand that book
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Thank you for that, and indulging my curiosity.
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The English translation isnât the best (and there are annoying errors in the English translation of the one about monks). But what particularly could you not stand? Just curious. Ecoâs taking apart of conspiracy theorists, vanity publishers and the like seems to be to be quite entertaining as well as instructive (maybe because I really do belong to the Bavarian Illuminati 
). But I am by nature an ikonoklast and I also enjoy Pratchettâs putting the boot massively into Tolkien - more subtle than the Russian guy who did it before him and showing how Tolkienâs world collapses the moment we start asking awkward questions about ethics and the life of ordinary people.
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The way it was written. I picked it up in college, but the book quickly hammered home that I wasnât smart enough or worldly enough to enjoy it. I liked the premise, which is why I wanted to read it in the first place.
I still have it somewhere, so I could try it again. My judgment is pretty good about these things, so maybe I was right the first time.
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Exactly. Inevitably, every Encyclopedia Brown book would have puzzles along the lines of:
Encyclopedia Brown puzzled on the problem his dad presented him. He asked, âDad, were there really big footprints at the scene?â When his surprised father nodded, he said âThen it was Bugs Meany.â HOW DID HE SOLVE IT?
Answer: If youâll recall, in a completely separate book published ten years ago, Bugs Meany mentioned that he wore size 13 shoes.
Thatâs not a âpuzzleâ, itâs asking me to be Encyclopedia Brown and know things he knows.
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