C&C 85: The Theater of the Mind (Temporarily Closed)

On books that I’ve read aloud, which I won’t be doing for a while, and revisiting QUIZ SHOW

Division of labor is a critical issue in any partnership, especially a marriage. And there may be no thornier domestic labor question than the preparation of dinner.

The position that Rosemarie and I took evolved over time and can be summarized thusly: she does the cooking. We both plan the meals, I do the shopping and pitch in on cleanup, but she handles the food prep.

My responsibility during that time is to serve as entertainment director. While Rosemarie cooks, I read aloud to her. I can’t remember how this practice began, but it’s been in place almost as long as we’ve been married. Selections have included biographies that are of interest to both of us and Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club books, but our preferred material is Golden Age mysteries; we’re working our way through Ngaio Marsh’s Inspector Alleyn series. I throw myself into every performance, doing sound effects, accents, voices. Give me a martinet colonel or a barrister with a superiority complex and I will go full C. Aubrey Smith on the character. Occasionally I will make a celebrity casting decision that I stick with to the bitter end: “In this production, the role of the dissolute physician will be played by James Mason.” It’s fun. We assess clues and theorize who the killer might be while we dine.

Alas, our little theater company is on extended sabbatical. Last month Rosemarie took a tumble, courtesy of some uneven pavement. The spill happened while she was at work, so I only bore witness to the aftermath: one fractured elbow and twenty-four stitches underneath her chin, temporarily giving her a scar worthy of a roller-derby queen.¹ Rest assured, she is already well on the way to recovery.² At some point during our eight-hour ordeal in the emergency room, the thought idly occurred to me: Shit, I’m gonna have to cook dinner, aren’t I?

I am pleased to report that I have risen to the challenge, because Rosemarie is on hand to coach me. I have baked salmon, unraveled the conundrum of the air fryer, and served multiple meals involving pork resulting in zero (0) cases of trichinosis. It has been a learning experience. But the change in routine has gotten me thinking about some of the novels that I read aloud in 2025.

Ridiculous solutions be damned, I’m a sucker for a locked-room mystery. Christianna Brand’s Suddenly at His Residence (1946), also known as The Crooked Wreath, is routinely hailed as an exemplar of the form. British Library Crime Classics reprinted it last year. The set-up is familiar: Sir Richard Marsh summons his relatives to the family estate in the waning days of World War II and harrumphs ominously about disinheriting the lot of them, only to be murdered in seemingly impossible fashion. Inspector Cockrill, memorably portrayed by Alastair Sim in the Brand adaptation Green for Danger (1946), arrives to see justice done. The solution? Ridiculous, as promised. But while many locked-room tales focus on the puzzle at the expense of the characters, here the cast is vividly drawn as they hurl accusations at one another; the Marshes do more detecting than Cockrill does. The mood fuses Brideshead Revisited with Rebecca as the specter of Sir Richard’s late first wife hangs over the proceedings, the house, and the entire clan. And the ending, with the war coming home to Swanswater Manor in unexpected fashion, left an impression I won’t soon forget.

An unplanned festival of nautical mysteries earlier this year prompted a mini version featuring trains. C. Daly King’s oddball Obelists En Route (1934) takes place on the debut outing of the Transcontinental Express from New York to San Francisco, the festivities dampened when a big-wheel banker is fished out of the train’s swimming pool. Already I had questions: a train with a swimming pool? If the engineer slams on the brakes at a junction outside Omaha, won’t the water slosh into the club car? That mystery goes unsolved. King, a psychologist as well as a novelist,³ loads the passenger manifest with headshrinkers, each an adherent of a different school of thought that they apply to the case in language that makes sense only to them.

“It was no mere Dominance phenomenon, that murder, but a subtly managed affair, and there is a subtle, complicated personality behind it. A Duplex personality, not a straight-forward Appetitive one, I’ll wager.”

Thanks for that insight, Doc. I see our hour is up.

The introduction to the new edition offers a helpful warning that there are long-winded lectures about economics irrelevant to the plot that can be safely skipped. There’s also a bibliography, a “Clue Finder” cataloging every piece of information provided to the reader in the interest of fair play, and racist descriptions of railroad porters. Still, the contained setting and luxe atmosphere kept us reading.

Tetsuya Ayukawa’s The Black Swan Mystery (1959) at times veers close to the Monty Python sketch about a murder play built entirely around railway timetables. A corporate executive is found dead next to a train line. Ayukawa introduces several compelling elements that bear on the case, like a labor dispute and a shady religion, which are too often neglected in favor of more mundane ones like the railway timetables reproduced in the book. Ayukawa also regularly upsets expectations; new lead detectives are abruptly introduced partway through the book, and there are several jarring plot twists, the title itself being one. The milieu and overall mood, reminiscent of Akira Kurosawa films like The Bad Sleep Well (1960) and High and Low (1963), offer a fascinating glimpse into a Japanese society still haunted by the war. And the solution satisfies.

I may have leaned a little hard on the New England accents I encountered during my college years in Boston while reading Phoebe Atwood Taylor’s The Mystery of the Cape Cod Players (1933). It’s a delightful twist on the theatrical murder as a widow recuperating from pneumonia on the Cape opens her vacation home to an itinerant troupe whose booking in the area seems to have been a ruse. When the company’s magician is murdered, it’s Asey Mayo, the “Codfish Sherlock Holmes,” to the rescue. He’s the inverse of S.S. Van Dine’s Philo Vance, a man modest about his many gifts. Taylor writes with a light comic touch, and the in-plain-sight answer to the mystery is one I should have figured out on my own.

Easily the favorite of all of our dinnertime reads, The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929) by Anthony Berkeley displays the ingenuity and playfulness of Golden Age authors even as mystery fiction was still rounding into form. Berkeley’s amateur sleuth Roger Sheringham has convened the “Crimes Circle” to hear evidence in a murder that has stumped Scotland Yard, one involving the tasty title confections (made with the liqueurs kummel, kirsch, and maraschino). The members of the Circle then undertake their own investigations and present their findings to the group. What we get, then, are a half-dozen solutions to the same mystery, each of which holds water. Later editions of the novel include additional proposed outcomes from Christianna Brand and Martin Edwards, the contemporary crime writer who has written extensively about Golden Age authors. I went with the OG version and its note-perfect ending.

Rosemarie has improved enough that we’re now tag-teaming dinner prep, a state of affairs that will likely continue for the foreseeable future. Still, I miss reading aloud. I’ve been wondering what Inspector Alleyn is up to.⁴

What I’m Watching

This week we attended a SIFF screening of Quiz Show (1994) introduced by none other than Jeopardy! host and Seattle resident Ken Jennings. The event had been scheduled prior to the September death of the film’s director Robert Redford, making the timing particularly poignant. In discussing the quiz show scandals of the 1950s, Ken—I can’t call him Jennings given how often I watch him on TV—touched on the overall significance of these programs. They promote the concept of cultural literacy, an idea that has lost currency as people have become specialists, not generalists. He said that the collapse of the monoculture, which was admittedly not representative or inclusive, contributed to our current polarization. He also lamented that Jeopardy! was frequently dismissed as being about trivia when it is dedicated to facts, saying “you can’t do your own research” on the show and that you couldn’t answer a question about the moon landing with, “What is it never happened, Ken?” Rosemarie told me that during the orientation process when she was a contestant in the Alex Trebek era, it was repeatedly stressed that Jeopardy! was not a trivia show but a general knowledge one.

I hadn’t seen Quiz Show in twenty-something years, but by God does it hold up. Redford won his directorial Oscar for Ordinary People (1980) but Quiz Show is his masterpiece, the tragedy of a golden boy to whom everything came too easily. Paul Attanasio’s script is studded with dialogue that I quote to this day (“Queens is not New York”). It may legitimately be one of the best-cast films ever made. Of course the lead performances—John Turturro as the everyman contestant on Twenty-One cast aside in favor of Ralph Fiennes’ straight-from-Central-Casting Charles Van Doren⁵—shine, and Martin Scorsese plays a more menacing version of Lucifer here than Robert De Niro did in Angel Heart (1987). But everywhere you look, there’s someone on the way up. That guy outside a phone booth hassling Van Doren for an autograph? Mario Cantone. The smitten coed who wants to ask about “Ode to a Grecian Urn” is Calista Flockhart. On this viewing, I noticed that the NBC stage manager who utters a single line during the titles is beloved character actor William Fichtner.

Quiz Show was a Best Picture nominee alongside Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and eventual winner Forrest Gump, so it’s astonishing the extent to which the film has largely been memory-holed; Ken pointed out it’s never been released on Blu-ray. In 1994, the movie looked back almost four decades to a time when a rigged quiz show prompted a national reckoning on integrity. Thirty years later, it’s a reminder of another era, when a film about that subject would be made by a major studio, released in theaters, and completely taken for granted.

1. If you have to injure yourself on the job, might I suggest employment at a world-class cancer research center, where qualified physicians will tend to you before the ambulance arrives.

2. Here’s how tough she is. She took her fall on a Thursday. That Saturday, she was slated to compete in an online crossword puzzle competition. She did the entire tournament left-handed and didn’t get a single answer wrong.

3. King’s life might make good reading material; he dedicated this novel to friend and colleague William Moulton Marston, who created Wonder Woman.

4. Yes, I know we could listen to audiobooks, but it’s not the same thing.

5. Ken’s thoughts on cultural literacy hit with renewed force whenever someone in the movie said of Fiennes’ character, “Van Doren? As in Van Doren Van Doren?,” a literary family being celebrities in the 1950s.