The Secret of the Pointed Tower (1937) by Pierre Véry

Last year, I reviewed the short story "Le mystére de la chambre verte" ("The Mystery of the Green Room," 1936) by Pierre Véry, "novelist of adventure, novelist of the fantastic," who believed in saving "what has been able to remain in us as the child that we were" ("...full of flaws, of changes of heart, of shadow and mystery") – essentially wrote fairy tales for grown-ups. One of his few works to be translated into English is L'assassinat du Pére Noël (The Murder of Father Christmas, 1934) and is a fine example of Véry's home blend of the formal, 1930s detective story with his brand of gentle surrealism.

I mentioned in the review that the few translations like the previously mentioned seasonal mystery novel and the now even rarer English edition of Le thé des vieilles dames (The Old Ladies' Tea Party, 1937) have since gone out-of-print. There seemed to be no plans or rumors swirling around at the time to translate Véry's other celebrated novels such as Le testament de Basil Crookes (The Testament of Basil Crookes, 1930) and Les quatre vipères (The Four Vipers, 1934). Little did I know that Crippen & Landru was putting the finishing touches to a brand new translation that was published back in December.

Renaissance man and author of Death and the Conjuror (2022), The Murder Wheel (2023) and the upcoming Cabaret Macabre (2024), Tom Mead, translated Véry's famous collection of short stories, Les veillées de la Tour Pointue (The Secret of the Pointed Tower, 1937) – which at the time caught the attention of Ellery Queen. This first English edition opens with a photocopy of a handwritten letter from Frederic Dannay to Véry thanking him for sending a copy of Les veillées de la Tour Pointue and hoped to see some of the short stories published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Something that would not happen until "The Mystery of the Green Room" appeared in the August, 2011, issue of EQMM. More than sixty years after Dannay wrote the letter and now we have the whole collection.

In addition to translating this collection, Tom Mead penned insightful introduction that presented Pierre Véry as a writer who a "unique path" through the Golden Age of the French detective story. A mystery writer enjoying "the distinction of being both an exponent and a critic of the Golden Age" whose tales of mystery and imagination "often existed outside of the strict parameters of the conventional whodunit." Véry's mystery output consists of everything ranging from everything subversive reimaginings and parodies to the traditional locked room mystery, but always distinguishable by their "often-eccentric blending of genres" and his "taste for the surreal or fantastical."

Before diving into this collection of short stories, I should note that the Crippen & Landru edition neglected to list the original French titles and publication dates. I found the original French titles, but have no idea when, or where, they first published. So, lacking the publication information, this one is going to be slightly less autistic pedantic than most short story collection reviews that can be found on this blog.

The Secret of the Pointed Tower begins with a short chapter, "A Message to the Reader," in which Pierre Véry himself is roaming the streets of nighttime Paris in search of somewhere, anywhere, to hang a man ("such is the morbid fate of mystery writers...") when he accidentally discovered a secret passage – revealing a dark, narrow passage. A passage leading to a hidden attic room in the pointed tower of the police headquarters, on the Quai des Orfevres, where he finds a pile of handwritten reports on "all kinds of crimes, burglaries, mysteries, enigmas." But written down as dry, clinical reports. These are full-fledged stories that Véry immediately began to copy to present to his audience under the title The Secret of the Pointed Tower. A near, simple little framing device to tie these vastly different stories together.

"Le menton d'Urbin" ("Urbin's Chin") is the first of these short stories following a so-called book-taker, "specialist in the theft of rare tomes," named Simonet. A bibliophile book-taker with designs on "a renowned collection of literary rarities" tucked away in the private library of a collector, Urbin. Simonet's carefully prepared burglary goes entirely wrong when coming across the bloodied, curled up remains of Urbin inside a crate, which is how the gardener finds him and the police believe him guilty. Simonet uses his imprisonment to work out whom of the potentially five suspects killed Urbin ("...by keeping quiet I might just be able to turn a decent profit out of this"). This is a fun little mystery caper and solid opening story that reads like a direct ancestor of the Bernie Rhodenbarr series by Lawrence Block. Loved it!

"Police technique" (no translation needed) concerns the murder of Yvette Lemoine and the
problem her death poses the police. Only person who appears to have had the opportunity to deliver the fatal blows is her cousin, Marcel, but he claims to be innocent and has no motive. Then the police are called the bedside of Yvette who says with her dying breath, "my uncles," but both men have "indisputable alibis." Another possible interpretation of those dying words implicates her fiancé, which again leads the police into a dead end. It's not until Véry's lawyer and sometimes detective, Prosper Lepicq, appears to confront the murderer that the case gets solved, but not in the way Lepicq had hoped. I think this story is more interesting for the style than the plot as it pulls a potential locked room mystery, dying message, unbreakable alibis and even some forensic shenanigans from the old bag of tricks – before ending as a dark, psychological crime story. Lepicq actions at the end echoes some of the practices of his American counterparts like Perry Mason and John J. Malone.

The next story "Le disparition of d'Emmeline Poke" ("The Disappearance of Emmeline Poke") is about the disappearance Miss Emmeline Poke. She was last seen by two witnesses walking home through the woods, in the company of her brother, but she never arrived home. Her brothers were both arrested, the ground around their shed dug up and the woods comb through. Not a trace of the body. A problem arises when one of the investigators points out that one of the witnesses is hard of hearing, while the other is extremely long-sighted. So what did they really see in the woods? And what happened to the body, if there's a body? This could have been a good story, but the actions of one of the characters killed it for me. I suppose the moral of the story is (ROT13) qba'g unir nppbzcyvprf jura pbzzvggvat zheqre, rfcrpvnyyl jura gurl'er fghcvq.

"Police montée," translated here as "The Tale of a Tartlet," is one of my favorite stories from this collection. A charming, playful and excellent take on both the classical whodunit and inverted mysteries. Léon Petitquartier is the seventeen year old son of a pastry chef and an arachnid collector who had been given the unpleasant task of euthanizing the old family dog, Vega ("...the animal was quite literally dying on its feet"). Léon poisoned a honey tartlet with cyanide as a final meal for Vega, but, while being distracted for a few minutes, the poisoned tartlet disappears from the kitchen table. So now Léon has to wait nervously for the news to break that someone has been mysteriously poisoned, but the events doesn't quite play out like the teenager expected. This story really benefited from being longest story in the collection and particularly liked how the village community reacted to the news or simply the simple, but excellent, explanation to the whole mystery.

"La multiplication des négres," re-titled for this collection as "The Salvation of Maxim Zapyrov," tails a penniless Russian in Paris, "stumbling from weariness and weeping with hunger, desperate and begging," who believes a black policeman is hunting for him – which has to do with a "detestable thing" that happened in a dark, narrow street. Maxim Zapyrov tells his unusual story to a M. Paul. A crime story with a predictable twist and not really my poison, but not bad for what it is.

"Le prisonnier espagnol" ("The Spanish Prisoner") is modeled on the classic and titular confidence trick, which is still around today, but changed and adapted along with the times. You might know it as the Nigerian Prince email scam. In this story, the poor Celestin Lainé who surprisingly receives a letter from someone imprisoned in Spain and needs help to collect a trunk containing nearly two million francs. However, Lainé has four very rich friends and they decide to respond to the letter with somewhat predictable results. The key word there's somewhat, because the devil is always in the details and the end result is a good, solid and fun scam story. I love good scam story and the next one is even better.

"Les 700,000 radis roses" ("The 700,000 Pink Radishes") is not a locked room mystery or impossible crime, of any kind, but this story has a delightful, utterly bizarre plot and premise that will be appreciated by fans of John Dickson Carr and Paul Halter. The great Parisian publisher M. Hippolyte Gour keeps receiving a baffling, one-sided correspondence about the purchase of 700,000 pink radishes ("they are guaranteed fresh and free of worm bites") and an equal amount of radish leaves ("these will be dispatched to your personal address"). And, before long, his personal secretaries either get attacked or kidnapped. The case kicked up so much dust that it attracted "the attention of a band of popular mystery novelists" who "were trying to apply the method of their fictional detectives," but the problem of the 700,000 pink radishes seriously tasked their wits. Until they had their storybook moment, "where the police failed, the amateur sleuths succeeded," which comes with a small, delightful twist at the end. More importantly, this is one of those few detective story that manages to do something meaningful with a kidnapping plot (of sorts).

The next short story is "La soupe du pape" ("Soupe du Pape") and reads like Véry tried to recapture the magic of "Les 700,000 radis roses" without much success. A policeman finds a dozen pearls while shelling peas. So has to figure out where the pearls came from, how they ended up in his bag of peas and who stole them. This story did nothing for me.

The next two short stories are the previously mentioned "The Mystery of the Green Room" and "L'assassin" ("The Killer"), but have already reviewed the former (see link above) and the latter is a short-short barely covering two full pages. Fortunately, The Secret of the Pointed Tower concludes with an absolute banger!

"Cours d'instruction criminelle" ("A Lesson in Crime") is not really a mystery short story, but a science-fiction musing on the distant future, somewhere around the year 2500, where crime fiction "gradually took precedence over all other forms of literature" – until they all "fell into disrepute and then obscurity." In those future years, the great mystery writers of the early twentieth century have become the classics school children study from seventh grade onward. The study and history of the traditional detective story is central in every classroom ("if locked-room Y is shaped like an isosceles triangle ABC and locked-room Z is a hexagon MNOPQR, calculate...") and children ask their mothers how they would poison their dad or quiz their father on how he would snuff out his mistress! The ending is both humorous and very perceptive as it's something I can see happening under those circumstances, but Véry's vision of the year twenty-five hundred nonetheless feels like home. But I'm stuck with you lot. What can you do?

The Secret of the Pointed Tower ends with a parting message to the reader from Véry, "when I have more stories, you will be the first to know," but no idea if a second collection ever materialized. Tom Mead also included several pages of explanatory notes, which I always enjoy to find in translated mystery novels or collections.

So, all in all, the short stories collected in The Secret of the Pointed Tower perfectly demonstrates why Véry considered the detective story to be "the brother of the fairy tale." When blended with Véry's home brewed brand of surrealism, you don't always get the most orthodox or traditionally-styled detective stories. You can hardly call any of the short stories traditional, Golden Age-style mysteries, but that doesn't mean the quality isn't there. "The Tale of the Tartlet," "The 700,000 Pink Radishes," "The Mystery of the Green Room" and "A Lesson in Crime" are all first-rate for variously different reasons. "Urbin's Chin" and "The Spanish Prisoner" are simply good, solid stories. "Police Technique" is not quite as good, or solid, but interesting in how it played with different styles and tropes. Only "The Disappearance of Emmeline Poke," "The Salvation of Maxim Zapyrov" and "Soupe du Pape" were off the mark. Not much can be said about the two-page short-short. That's not a bad return for a collection as varied as The Secret of the Pointed Tower. More importantly, the fact that it was translated by Tom Mead is very hopeful for the future. John Pugmire is no longer alone in bringing these French-language novels and short stories to an international audience and the changes of getting a translation of Véry's legendary locked room mystery novel The Four Vipers sooner rather than later has gone up! In short, The Secret of the Pointed Tower is indeed something of a lost classic and comes highly recommended to fans of the short crime fiction.

The Other Way Around: "The Mystery of the Green Room" (1936) by Pierre Véry

Pierre Véry was a French mystery writer, "novelist of adventure, novelist of the fantastic," who believed in preserving "what has been able to remain in us as the child that we were" so "full of flaws, of changes of heart, of shadow and mystery" – describing his own work as fairytales for grown-ups. While steeped in gentle surrealism, Véry was one of the Big Four of the French Golden Age mystery novel. Xavier Lechard, of At the Villa Rose, warns that "anyone expecting to find Christie-like deceptions will be sorely disappointed," but "Véry was quite able to manage brilliant tricks when he wanted" and pointed out Les quatre vipères (The Four Vipers, 1934) as "arguably one of the best locked room mysteries ever written." So, regrettably, only a tiny sampling of Véry's detective fiction has made it into translation.

Back in 2008, Alan Grimes translated and self-published a handful of Véry's whimsical mysteries that included two Prosper Lepicq novels, L'assassinat du Pére Noël (The Murder of Father Christmas, 1934) and Le thé des vieilles dames (The Old Ladies' Tea Party, 1937). The translations have since gone out-of-print, out-of-stock and secondhand copies are now difficult to find. Three years later, John Pugmire translated Véry's pastiche of Gaston Leroux's Le mystère de la chambre jaune (The Mystery of the Yellow Room, 1907). And that short story is not difficult to find.

Pugmire's translation of "Le mystére de la chambre verte" ("The Mystery of the Green Room," 1936) appeared in the August, 2011, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and anthologized in Foreign Bodies (2018). "The Mystery of the Green Room" is an inspired and immensely enjoyable take on Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room, but, let the reader be warned, you should not read Véry's pastiche without having read Leroux's historic genre milestone – whose solution is integral to the plot of "The Mystery of the Green Room." A plot concerning an otherwise ordinary-looking burglary and robbery, where it not for a very peculiar feature.

Madame Emilienne de Rouvres is attacked in her own home, gagged and bound to a chair, while a masked individual ransacked the place. This person helped himself to the silverware, a small clock and several thousands francs from the wall safe, but these were meager pickings compared to Madame de Rouvres jewelry. A pearl necklace and a string of diamonds, "estimated to be worth eight hundred thousand francs," which were kept in the drawer of a bedside table in the green room ("I imagine safes attract burglars like bears to honey"). However, the thief only poked his head in from the doorway, but never stepped into the bedroom. So the small fortune lying there for the picking remained untouched. Marcel Fermier, private insurance investigator, remarks to the Inspector Jean Martin that the green room puzzle is exactly the same as the yellow room puzzle from Gaston Leroux's famous locked room mystery "in the sense that it's the precise opposite." An open-room puzzle. The thief had every opportunity to have gone into the green room, take jewelry and come out again. So why didn't he?

"The Mystery of the Green Room" was published in the same year as Leo Bruce's Case for Three Detectives (1936) and you can draw similarities between the two with their rivaling detectives ("while the policeman looked for clues, Fermier tried to determine the motive"), humor, false-solutions and cleverly spoofing Leroux – modeling the correct solution on "a parallelism of opposition" between the green and yellow room puzzles. And it worked so incredibly well! A tiny gemstone of the detective pastiche and a wonderfully done, immensely enjoyable homage to one of the most famous locked room mysteries of the 20th century that's actually not a locked room mystery itself. And, again, it worked! Highly recommended! Hopefully, this is not the last we have seen of Véry on this side of the language barrier. Le testament de Basil Crookes (The Testament of Basil Crookes, 1930) and The Four Vipers sound too good not to be exposed to a wider, international audience.

The Murder of Father Christmas (1934) by Pierre Véry

Last week, I reviewed Paul Halter's L'Homme qui aimait les nuages (The Man Who Loved Clouds, 1999). An enchanting detective story with a dreamy, fairy tale-like quality that reminded me of another French mystery novelist, Pierre Véry, who once said that "what counts for an author," and a person, "is to save what has been able to remain in us as the child that we were" – of that person "full of flaws, of changes of heart, of shadows and mystery." Véry would probably have defined The Man Who Loved Clouds as "a fairy tale for grown-ups" and of his few mysteries to be translated into English can described exactly like that.

L'Assassinat du Père Noël (The Murder of Father Christmas, 1934) was translated by Alan Grimes and published in 2008 by Troubadour Publications, which came with a brief, but insightful, introduction by Roger Giron.

Véry was "a bookseller in rue Monsieur-le-Prince" and this period in his life inspired him to write Léonard ou les délices du bouquiniste (Léonard or the Delights of the Second-Hand Bookseller, 1946), "a charming novella," which made him a visitor to the genre from mainstream fiction. A literary visitor who, according to Xavier Lechard, brought "whimsy and gentle surrealism" to our genre and his first foray was "a pastiche of the English detective novel," entitled Le testament de Basil Crookes (The Testament of Basil Crookes, 1930), but also penned a couple of locked room mysteries – Les quatre vipères (The Four Vipers, 1934) is one of them. Hopefully, The Four Vipers will eventually be translated into English (are you reading this, Pugmire?).

Until that day comes, we have to help ourselves with what we have and that is a mildly surrealistic, Christmas-themed mystery novel that reads like a fairy tale for grown-ups.

The Murder of Father Christmas takes place in Mortefont, a large town in the county of Meurthe-et-Moselle, where the parish priest, Father Jérôme Fuchs, becomes the victim of an attempted burglary in early December. Father Fuchs had just locked away the reliquary of Saint Nicholas, patron saint of the region, when the incident happened, but the intruder miraculously got away from his pursuer.

Somehow, the burglar escaped from "the room on the first floor of the sacristy" without "going back by the staircase" or by "leaving footprints on the muddy earth in the garden" underneath the open window. And this attempt is complemented by an anonymous letter warning the priest "a gang of burglars is preparing to plunder the churches of our region." So they decide to enlist the help of discreet, private-investigator. Enter Prosper Lepicq, Barrister at the Paris Law Court.

Lepicq holds office in modest apartment overlooking the courtyard on the ground floor of a building in rue de Valois in Paris. The office has a room with three large armchairs, a large table stacked with papers and filing cabinets, labeled A to Z, line the wall, but this is only a facade – because "the files were stuffed with blank paper" and "the filing cabinets were full of old newspapers." Lepicq is two months behind on his rent and has a secretary who feverishly began to write gibberish to simulate hard work when their client came to visit them. So pretty much a low-rent Arthur Crook, but this was undoubtedly the most memorable scene of the whole story.

Lepicq immediately disappears from the stage and his place is taken by a Portuguese nobleman, the Marquis de Santa Claus. The children of Mortefont begin to believe he has come to their town to search for an ancient, long-lost relic, the Golden Arm of King René of Anjou, which is rumored to be buried somewhere in the ruined abbey of Gondrange or a nearby castle. One legend says that if "you ask the evening star, you will find the hidden Golden Arm," but this hidden treasure is only a minor plot-thread to give a magical or romantic touch to the story.

Meanwhile, there are two gems stolen from the relic of Saint Nicholas under seemingly impossible circumstances from the locked vault and a German-looking stranger is found murdered near the entrance of an underground passage close to the castle – clad in a Santa Claus custom! So who was the victim and who had been the second Santa Claus? I first read The Murder of Father Christmas nearly a decade ago and was surprised upon my second read to discover the plot was far more consistent than I remember it.

My recollection was that the story was written as one of Gladys Mitchell's imaginative flights of fancies, such as The Rising of the Moon (1945), but the plot here provided answers. And there's logic to all of the madness. Even if it's "the logic of tales of the fantastic." So it was more in line with G.K. Chesterton's "The Flying Stars" (collected in The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911).

The explanation to the impossible escape from the sacristy was silly, at best, but was nicely tied to the inexplicable theft of the gem-stones, which showed a glimmer of ingenuity in its simplicity. This brace of impossibilities are also very minor aspects of the plot with most of the plotting work being put into the murders. I suppose this was, combined with the fairy tale atmosphere of the story, why Halter's The Man Who Loved Clouds reminded me so much of Véry's The Murder of Father Christmas. Two very different detective stories cut from the same magical cloth.

So, in closing, The Murder of Father Christmas is a charming, spiritedly written mystery novel and perfect as a holiday read during those long, dark, but cozy, days of December. As long as you don't expect a stone-cold classic. But highly recommended, if you like to read Christmas-themed (detective) fiction during this time of year.

Lastly, I want to warn readers who want to read The Murder of Father Christmas to hurry with procuring a copy, because the book has been out-of-print for years and secondhand copies appear to be scarce, which are already being offered at exorbitant prices – going all the way up to several hundred dollars or pounds. There are, however, still a few affordable copies floating around. So you better be quick about it.

The Naughty List: A Modest Selection of Lesser-Known Holiday Mysteries

"But where are the snows of yester-year?"

- F. Villon.

I have an irregular tradition of reading holiday and winter themed mysteries around this time of the year, depending on what's easily available and how far I planned this ahead of time, and this could've been one of those off-years were it not for a few new releases and a lucky purchase. Simon de Waal and Appie Baantjer's Een licht in de duisternis (A Light in the Darkness, 2012), M.P.O. Books' Dodelijke hobby (Deadly Hobby, 2012) and Mike Resnick's, Stalking the Unicorn: A Fable of Tonight (1987), taking place on New Year's Eve in an alternate Manhattan, were well written nuggets of criminal ingenuity wrapped up in the magic of the season – making this officially not an off-year. I have my wish list of Christmas mysteries not yet fully worked through, but that's something for when the New Year begins to wane.

So, what then is the purpose of this blog post? Well, the idea is to compile a list of seasonal yarns of suspense and mystery that aren't all that well known, and perhaps offer one or two alternatives to (re-reading) Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot's Christmas (1938) and Ngaio Marsh's Tied Up in Tinsel (1972).

Pierre Véry's L'Assassinat du père Noël (The Murder of Father Christmas, 1934) was ferried across the language barrier in 2008 and this entry on the GADWiki, penned by fellow blogger Xavier Lechard from At the Villa Rose, identifies Véry as a literary visitor from the mainstream – who nonetheless preferred gentle surrealism over cold, stark realism. The Murder of Father Christmas attests his opinion that "what counts for an author (and for a person) is to save what has been able to remain in us as a child that we were, of that person full of flaws, of changes of heart, of shadows and mystery" and the story unfolds like grim, but benevolent, fairytale involving stolen gems, missing relics, Cinderella’s slipper and a murdered man in a Father Christmas costume. A lawyer on hard times, Prosper Lepicq, only two months behind on his rent for an office space crammed with impressive looking filing cabinets filled with blank dossiers and old newspapers, is requested to look into the mess. The Murder of Father Christmas has a magical, fairy tale-like quality reminiscent of Gladys Mitchell's most imaginative tales, but also their weaknesses. On the other hand, this was obviously not written as an affair of cold reasoning, but an attempt at enticing the reader to participate in a delightfully childish game of Who-dun-it? in the snow. 

DeKok en het lijk in de kerstnacht (DeKok and the Corpse on Christmas Eve, 1965) is an early (and translated) entry from A.C. Baantjer's long-running DeKok series and dribs, more than usually, with influences from Georges Simenon – making it notably different in tone and structure from the rest of the series. It’s a straight up, character-driven crime story that swirls into motion when the body of a woman emerges from the cold, murky undercurrents of the Herengracht on Christmas Eve. A grumpy DeKok, wrapped in his rumpled raincoat and formless head, joins his then even younger and more inexperienced partner, Vledder, to stalk the deserted, lantern-lit streets of Amsterdam on Christmas Eve to find the killer who ended the life of a young woman and her unborn child. Baantjer advances the plot here through character sketches, police interviews and posing moral problems, which resulted in one particular Christmas scene when DeKok has a sober (and possibly illegal) Christmas diner with a prostitute, a criminal and his victim. It's a darker story than Véry's benevolent pipedream, but if you like crime novels with a human element than you might want to pick this one up. But take note, it's not representative of the series.

The next title on the list was reviewed on here this past summer, but it was nonetheless a mystery novel draped in the traditions of the Yuletide season – mixed up with rural legends, folks dancing and ghost yarns. Gladys Mitchell's Dead Men's Morris (1936) packs everything her fans have come to love about her imaginary tales and wrapped everything up more neatly than usual. Mrs. Beatrice Lestrange Bradley travels to Oxfordshire to spend the holidays at the pig farm of her nephew, Carey Lestrange, where a local country-lawyer of ill repute was apparently hounded to death by the local legend – a headless horseman known as the Sandford Ghost. It's nearly always a guarantee that you're getting something different from Mitchell, but when the plot is as clear as the writing, it becomes a rare treat indeed!

An English Murder (1951) is a standalone effort from "Cyril Hare," a penname for Judge Alfred Gordon Clarke, who drew on his knowledge and experience to pen a stack of detective novels. His series detectives were Inspector Mallett and the barrister Francis Pettigrew, but in An English Murder, also published as The Christmas Murder, it's a Hungarian historian, named Dr. Bottwink, who has to unravel what appears to be a fairly typical, British drawing room murder. The only real drawback I have found in Hare's books is that his plots tend to hinge on obscure laws or nearly forgotten passages of history, making it harder to completely solve them before the detective does.

Finally, I want to recommend Paul Halter's Night of the Wolf (2006), a collection of short stories, as it offers quite a few stories set during dead of winter. "The Flower Girl" and "The Abominable Snowman" are perhaps the best of the lot, entailing a homicidal snowman killing in front of witnesses and Santa Claus who may have used his magic to bump of an unpleasant, Scrooge-like figure, but also includes "The Golden Ghost" and the titular story – all set during those dark, snowy days of December.

I could extend this list further, but Micheal Innes' Lament for a Maker (1938) and Nicholas Blake's Thou Shell of Death (1937) and The Corpse in the Snowman (1941) are probably well-known titles among the readers of this blog – and how much can you order and read in less than two weeks. Hm. Perhaps I should've put this one up a lot sooner.