In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

This is another Hammer film, this time a straightforward murder mystery. I wanted to watch it primarily because Bernard Robinson's set designs for Dracula's castle in the 1958 film, as made available in Peveril Publishing's book Hammer's Grand Designs, show that one of the windows in the main hall set (also reconfigured as the library) was taken from The Snorkel. This is the set design in question (in full and then closer up to show the label), as well as the window itself, as shown after being reconfigured into the library set complete with stained glass designs of people in chains and bones.






Even purely on a Dracula set design geekery level, the watch very much paid off. I did it as a synchro-watch with lady_lugosi1313, who is as much of a Hammer geek as me, and between us we quickly realised that far more than the window had been reused. The film includes substantial scenes set inside an Italian villa, where the murder around which the main plot revolves takes place, and almost everything within this villa had either already appeared in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and / or was about to do so in Dracula (1958). We recognised not only the window but all of the doors, the fireplace and much of the furniture.

But The Snorkel had much more to offer beyond set design details. I am not going to try to claim it is revolutionary or a work of high cinematic art, but it is a really nicely plotted and paced murder mystery which achieves plenty of tension and atmosphere including one scene which genuinely made us both jump. It was also shot on a pretty high budget for Hammer in this era (£100,000), using it to deliver on-location Italian settings for all of the exterior footage, lovely late 1950s dresses, and excellent lighting and cinematography by Jack Asher which brought everything off to good effect. Even its day-for-night footage was easily forgivable in the black and white medium, while there was some lovely atmospheric use of creepy statuary looming in a darkened villa garden.

Probably the film's biggest flaw is Mandy Miller, then fourteen years old, playing the role of Candy (short for Candace) Brown. Candy is central to the plot, since we see her step-father murdering her mother in a manner designed to look like suicide in the opening scenes, but she is the only one who suspects foul play. We also learn over the course of the film that this is largely because she already saw him drowning her father some years earlier, while he meanwhile goes on to kill Candy's dog and attempt to kill her. This means she has a lot of trauma, frustration and fear to convey in the film, both in response to these terrible events and in response to none of the adults around her believing her when she tries to tell them what is going on. Unfortunately, her acting skills weren't really up to this, so that she either under- or over-reacted to almost everything, rather undermining the story. We agreed early on that she needed a metaphorical slap, and also noted that Hammer being Hammer, she might well literally get one. Indeed, much later, she did.

This was all rather a pity, as the character of Candy and her narrative arc throughout the film was actually very powerfully thought out. She is not only disbelieved but actively gaslit and pathologised by the adults around her throughout, including her step-father Paul who is busy trying to divert suspicion, but also her governess / companion, the police and the local consul. They all tell her she is being over-dramatic and imaginative, implicitly threatening her with being committed to a 'mental institution' if she doesn't stop saying Paul has murdered her father, mother and dog and is trying to murder her. Ultimately, of course, Paul decides she needs to be silenced altogether, so arranges to murder her in the same manner as her mother - drugging her, sealing her and himself into a locked room, fitting himself with a snorkel connected to tubes allowing him to breathe external air, turning on all the gas and then hiding under the floorboards.

Luckily for her, the police chief and her governess prevent the murder this time by breaking into the room looking for her, but they still believe she was trying to take her own life, and only agree to search the room for Paul in order to 'prove' to her that he isn't there. In the process, they move a heavy cupboard over the trapdoor he has used to get under the floorboards, and then leave it there when they all go, with Candy having admitted that Paul is nowhere to be found. We then see Paul discovering he is trapped, followed by Candy insisting on going back to the room just one more time to double-check Paul isn't there. This time she hears him calling out for help, but in response merely knits her brows and declares, "It's just my imagination".

What's really nice about how this is set up is that as a viewer we can't be sure whether she has finally accepted the message which every adult in the film has been giving her throughout, and really believes this (so that Paul is about to die as a direct result of his contribution to gaslighting and pathologising her), or knows full well that it really is Paul and that he's trapped, and is saying it as a way of mocking him and letting him know that she is damn well going to leave him there to die. Either way, it is a grim and bleak place for the plot to have taken us to, and I would quite have liked the film to end there for that reason. Maybe that wasn't considered acceptable for 1958 audiences, though, as we next see Candy asking her governess and the consul to stop the car as they drive away through the local Italian town, so that she can go into the police station and tell them to go and look under the floorboards in the villa, where they will see that she was right. The police chief reacts by getting up and putting on his hat, so I guess Paul will be rescued after all, but it's still a pretty good ending as Candy's emphasis on the police finding out she was right tells us one more thing about her character - that what she really wanted all along was to be believed, rather than to salve her conscience about Paul.

An honourable mention in all this should go to Toto, Candy's dog, who was played by a very well trained canine actor. Toto is onto Paul from the start, pulling at the carpet above the trap-door where he is hiding when his wife's body is discovered, and then later picking the snorkel mask which he used out of Paul's wardrobe and dropping it at Candy's feet. Sadly, she doesn't catch on, but Paul does, leading to Toto's untimely demise and presumably a listing for this film somewhere on the Does The Dog Die? website. But we enjoyed him while he lasted.

I swore to myself I wasn't going to write about this one this evening, as I'm dog-tired and I need to work tomorrow. But it was just too good to resist...

( Spoilery as hell again )

Back in April I got a request via a friend who works in the British Library to translate a few words and sentences into Latin for Ben Aaronovitch's latest Rivers of London book (LJ / DW). I knew squat all about the series then, but agreed to the assignment and, with help from a couple of colleagues, supplied the requisite text. A few weeks later, a signed copy of the first novel in the series arrived with thanks from Ben's agent, and now I have read it.


It's very good, as I know many friends who have been reading them for years are already well aware. The basic premise of the universe is that magic is real, and in Britain was codified and systematised by Isaac Newton in the 1770s. In the present day, a magical institution resides in a building called The Folly on Russell Square, and although it has no official standing or even openly acknowledged existence, in practice the Metropolitan Police work with its enigmatic Master, Thomas Nightingale, on cases involving supernatural beings. We, the readers, are introduced to all of this through the eyes of Peter Grant, the book's main character, a trainee police officer who meets a ghost one night and shortly thereafter finds himself signed up as Nightingale's apprentice. He spends the rest of the novel painstakingly learning basic magic while trying to solve a bizarre string of paranormal murders and intercede between the two major gods (each with a coterie of secondary water-spirits) whom he learns have charge of the Thames - Old Father Thames for the upper, rural stretches and Mama Thames for the lower, urban-coastal ones.

I could probably have taken or left the actual plot, which turned out to be about a sort of revenant possessing people and making them commit violent acts. For all that this was packaged up as a murderous retelling of the story of Punch and Judy, it could have been any old Big Bad really, and it was probably a mistake to take on this, the feud between the river gods and the initial world-building of an opening novel in one go. If the feud between the river gods had somehow underpinned the revenant plot, causing the problem through the disharmony between them, it might have worked better, but I don't think that was the case - although I may have missed something to that effect, as it all got quite complicated and surreal towards the end.

The world-building was good, though, belonging squarely to my favourite genre of fantasy - that is, where magic and the supernatural are real, but still directly connected to the world we actually live in. And of course Ben Aaronovitch being who he is - i.e. a British cult / SF writer whose CV includes Doctor Who - there were plenty of references neatly calculated to make a reader like me go 'squee!'. I believe my favourite was the following, coming as Peter Grant first encounters The Folly:

Russell Square lies a kilometre north of Covent Garden on the other side of the British Museum. According to Nightingale, it was at the heart of a literary and philosophical movement in the early years of the last century, but I remember it because of an old horror movie about cannibals living in the Underground system.

Yes, yes, Bloomsbury Group etc., but more importantly, Death Line! He's talking about Death Line, which is one of my absolute favourite horror films in the history of ever (LJ / DW). There are references to midichlorians and John Polidori, too, but that was the one I enjoyed most.

Peter himself is mixed race, which created some useful space to show up some of the on-going structural flaws with the police. There's one direct reference to the Macpherson report, reminding us that the Met has only fairly recently become an environment Peter can comfortably work in, and in the present day of the novel (its 2011 publication date) he still needs to navigate various micro-aggressions. In much the same way that the characters in Being Human were all very real as well as supernatural Others (the vampire was Irish, the werewolf Jewish and the ghost mixed race), it also reflects his liminal position with one foot each in the ordinary human world and the magical underworld, as well as putting him in the perfect position to mediate credibly between Old Father Thames (who is white) and Mama Thames (who is black).

As a female reader, though, it did irritate me that Peter seemed barely able to look at half of the female characters in the book without appraising them sexually. I mean, maybe that's just an inevitable part of a young male character's internal viewpoint, and it doesn't necessarily mean he can't respect their intelligence or professionalism as well, but it was just so relentless and indiscriminate that it got kind of tedious. I don't really want to have to sit on a character's shoulder watching them objectify every woman they come across - and especially not when that included Mama Thames, a literal goddess. Again, I get that you might want to convey the experience of a goddess' immense power partly in terms of sexual allure, but what we get is Peter narrating how much he wants to put his face between her breasts and gets so hard he finds it difficult to sit down by the time she offers him a chair. Even within the book, she and her coterie laugh at him for the inappropriateness of this, but I'd have preferred not to go there in the first place.

In the end, my own favourite character was Molly, a being of indeterminate nature (when Peter asks Nightingale what she is, he just replies "Indispensable") who lives in the Folly and appears to be its entire domestic staff. She never speaks, Peter catches her at one point eating dripping chunks of raw meat in the middle of the night, and she has a brilliant scene at the end where she comes over for all the world like Sadako out of Ringu and bites him in the neck as a way of sending him backwards through time so that he can defeat the troublesome revenant. But she is a model of efficiency around the Folly, and clearly fiercely loyal to Nightingale and his endeavours.

I will probably read some more of these books in due course, and rather wish I'd done so before I attempted to translate the Latin I was given in the first place. I certainly understand much better now some of the things which puzzled me as I struggled with the initial text, such as why Father Thames seemed also to be called Tiberius Claudius Verica. I'd like to know more about his back-story, as well as Molly's. That said, I've got two entire bookshelves' worth of unread books in my house at the moment, none of which are Rivers of London books, and at my current average rate of no more than ten leisure books per year, it's going to take me a while to get through all those. :-( So it may be some time before I'm back in this particular world.

This is a novelisation of the Hammer film Brides of Dracula (1960), which is bloody great and which I've reviewed in its own right here: LJ / DW. I've read and reviewed two other Hammer Dracula novelisations before – John Burke (1967), Dracula, Prince of Darkness (LJ / DW) and Angus Hall (1971), Scars of Dracula (LJ / DW) – and from comparing the Scars one in particular with a copy of the shooting script, I'm confident that it was normal practice for the authors to write them from these scripts. That makes them fascinating reading, especially in cases where I can't access the script itself, mainly for what they reveal about the creative decisions made during production but also to some extent because they can clarify and flesh out details which were intended by the original scriptwriter but didn't really come through in the final film. In addition, they can add extra details supplied by the novelist which I am at liberty either to incorporate into my personal Hammer Dracula head-canon or to reject (according to preference), and when they are well-written they are just good and enjoyable takes on stories I love anyway.

Unfortunately, this one isn't particularly well-written. In fact, it is a particularly egregious example of a male writer writing for a male audience without the faintest notion that women are sentient human creatures who might potentially pick up and read the novel as well, and wish not to be portrayed as male playthings within it. We're all familiar by now with the classic 'breasted boobily' caricature of such writing:


Well, here is Marianne, the main female character, being introduced on the first page as the carriage in which she is travelling thunders through dark Carpathian forests:


Her trajectory through the story is largely the same as in the film, but at almost every step the extra detail which the novelist adds is utterly skeevy in tone. A series of male characters tell her that a girl as pretty as she is shouldn't be travelling alone in this part of the world, size her up to see if she actually is as pretty as they thought, and contrive to get their paws all over those curves we heard about when we first met her. Shockingly to anyone familiar with Peter Cushing's utterly gentlemanly performance in the actual film, this includes Van Helsing himself, who full-on shags her within two pages of bringing her back to the Running Boar after finding her unconscious and (again unlike the film) half-naked in the forest. Those who have any respect for women, and particularly those who are also Peter Cushing fans, may wish to skip over the following passage, but I feel compelled to share it nonetheless just to demonstrate that I am not making it up – although the absence of either character's name from the passage also rather suggests that it is actually a generic sex-scene which the writer had stored away waiting for next time he would need one.


Don't get me wrong – Hammer also very definitely sexualised and objectified their female lead characters. But because they were British and had to respect the rulings of the censors in order to ensure a general release, they did it all with rather more decorum and style than this. So far as I can tell, this novelisation was written and published by an American company for an American market, and I would hazard a guess that the author had never actually seen a Hammer film. After all, they were only just establishing their reputation for gothic period horror at the point when he must have written it. So it is a bit of an oddity and comes across much less like a precious supplement to the film and much more like a badly-mangled version of it compared to the Prince and Scars novelisations. But then again it does have an awesome pulp fiction cover (again bearing no relation to the film), so there's that:


Meanwhile, somewhere beneath the surface of this misogynistic and off-tone novelisation still lies ( the shooting script that I'm really interested in )

Alas, of the Hammer Dracula films only this, Prince and Scars were ever novelised, so I have read them all now and it's a pity to have ended up on this one which is a) badly written and b) reveals at more or less every step of the way how much better the final film was than the pre-production shooting script. However, that's interesting to know and makes me appreciate what the production team did all the more. Apart from the slight weirdness of Marianne getting engaged to the Baron when she ought to know he's mixed up in some pretty weird business and might well be a murderer, the film is one of Hammer's strongest, and the characterisation of the Baroness, the existential threat posed by the Baron and the business with both Gina's coffin-clasps and what she says to Marianne after she has come out of it all contribute a great deal to that. Thank goodness for the creative drive towards perfectionism which everyone who worked at Hammer seems to have subscribed to at this point!

This was my self-assigned homework ahead of going on this holiday to the Czech Republic with the Dracula Society in May / June. The holiday was themed around the legend of the Golem of Prague, but as I had only a passing acquaintance with golems of any kind before I booked my place, I decided to do something about that for the sake of enriching my holiday.

I started with the Wikipedia page on golems, from which I learnt that the idea of the golem is rooted in the Bible, and receives occasional mentions in both ancient and medieval Jewish literature, but really came into its own in the early modern period. What seems to have happened is that stories grew up in the 17th century about how a real historical Rabbi from the 16th century had made a golem in order to protect the Jewish community of the town of Chelm in Poland. But by the mid-19th century, those stories had shifted location to Prague and attached themselves instead to Rabbi Judah Loew, a different real historical person from the 16th century who was a major public figure and prolific scholar. So the Prague legends as we have them now actually consist of the 17th-century Chelm stories, retrojected by 19th-century authors into 16th-century Prague.

That understood, I was ready to hit the library. I wasn't about to take on German-language novels for my leisure reading, but as it happened that didn't really matter, because the only relevant material was held in the form of English translations anyway. I started out with two fairly traditional tellings of the Prague legends, one in print and one on film, and then moved forwards to more modernist authors playing around with and developing the mythos. As it happens, one of the modernist tellings (Meyrink's novel from 1914) was actually published before the more traditional one I read (Bloch's from 1917), but that is largely because Bloch sought to reassert the traditional form of the stories, as they already been circulating in the mid-19th century, in reponse to Meyrink's modernism. So it made sense to read Bloch first, even though he postdates Meyrink, in order to understand (if indirectly) the sort of material which Meyrink had been building on.

( 9. Chayim Bloch (1917), The Golem: Legends of the Ghetto of Prague )

( 5. The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920), dir. Paul Wegener )

( 10. Gustav Meyrink (1914), The Golem )

( 1. Terry Pratchett (1996), Feet of Clay )

As for the holiday itself, it was blissful, but I never did get round to writing it up here. For me in practice it was more about awesome Bohemian / Czech castles and beautiful turn-of-the-century architecture than it was about golems really, especially given that most of Prague's Jewish quarter was demolished over a century ago, so we couldn't see the world in which the stories were set. But I can share these two final pictures of the Altneu Synagogue (where some version of the stories claim that the golem's remains were laid to rest after it was deactivated) and of me holding hands with a fibreglass golem outside a shop:




I can also proudly report that I won a bat keyring by dint of coming first in the DracSoc holiday quiz, basically because I had done all the homework outlined here, and that is exactly what the quiz was about. Sometimes it pays to be a swot!

Two weeks ago, I had an eye test, and last week, I went to pick up my new specs.

I really like the way they look. But there's a problem: the prescription for the right lens is too weak.

Double trouble: I had the glasses made up by a different optician from the one who did the eye test.

My problem now is that I've been sold something which doesn't meet my needs, but I don't really know what rights or liabilities I have in this situation. The fault clearly lies with the lady who did the original eye test - but I only paid £5 to her for that privilege. Meanwhile, I spent a lot more money than that on having spectacles made up from her prescription, but the opticians who made up those spectacles did so on perfectly good faith, and I have no reason to believe they did anything wrong. Getting the £5 back for the original eye test won't really do much to off-set the cost of having the incorrect lens replaced, but it seems to me that I can hardly expect the second optician to absorb the cost of replacing it either.

Did I accept liability for this situation when I voluntarily chose to go to another optician to have the glasses made up? Or do I have any kind of protection against the consequences of having paid rather a lot of money for an incorrect lens? I surely can't be the only person who's ended up in this situation, but I haven't been able to bring up any very suitable advice by Googling. The best I could find was this, which is someone reporting the same situation - but I'm not at all clear that any of the people advising him(?) have any real expertise in the matter, or indeed whether their comments would apply in the UK.

( Further stuff about it, no longer really relevant to the issue of whose fault this was )

Anyway, if anyone has been in this situation, or knows anything about what my rights are, please do comment. And if not, I guess I've just got more inconvenience and another hefty bill coming up...

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A couple of weeks ago, ms_siobhan and I spent a day in Saltaire, with the particular aim of checking out an antiques dealer with a bit of a line in Art Deco furniture on the top floor of Salt's Mill. I was looking in particular for a largish sideboard / cabinet to go in an alcove next to my fireplace, and I'd hardly got inside the shop when I saw an absolutely wonderful example, in a golden maple-wood finish with a bowed front and lots of lovely storage capacity. The price was high enough that I had to spend quite a bit of time thinking it over and psyching myself up before I took the plunge - but eventually I did, and it was delivered today.

( This is what was previously in the alcove which it now occupies )

Perfectly all right, but not really making the best use of the space. What I needed was something that would look good and allow me to stash lots of crap inside it!

( So this is what I have now )

Meanwhile, the old low-level beechwood sideboard which used to stand in its place is now surplus to my requirements, and therefore for sale to anyone who might be interested. It's good solid wood furniture, with a lovely spicy smell when you open the drawers, and ( there are a couple of pictures here if you want a closer look )

In other news, I spent this last weekend in Birmingham visiting the parents. Mum is still doing pretty well - enough to go to a jazz concert on Friday, have my sister and fiancé (!) round on Saturday, and then go and visit some local gardens which were having an open afternoon on Sunday. While there, I also stocked up on floaty purple skirts at The Oasis, because (despite the rain today) there is clearly no way I am going to make it through the summer without a good selection of light-weight medieval princess skirts that ripple around my ankles when I walk. I also spent Saturday afternoon reading in dappled shade on a deck-chair in my parents' gloriously beautiful garden while my sister and fiancé (!) planned wedding stuff, my Dad made random observations about the state of the world and my Mum sat in the summer-house. It was a perfect slice of English summer, and I hope there will be more in the same vein over the next couple of months.

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For at least the last twelve years of my life - possibly slightly longer - I have worn, every single day, the pendant shown below:

( Eye of Horus pendant )

If you have ever met me IRL, you'll have seen it. Or if you didn't, it will only have been because I was wearing a high-necked top and it was tucked underneath. I will have been wearing it - I guarantee.

( That pendant's history and significance )

( Why I need a new one )

( Gravitating towards a TARDIS key )

But I liked the idea of the key very much, and I began to feel that a smaller, more feminine version of the same thing, made nicely out of proper silver, would actually be a very worthy replacement for my old Eye of Horus. And this is where nalsa comes into the story.

( Nalsa's handiwork )

It is, quite frankly, awesome. It's just exactly what I wanted - light-weight, and feminine, and in fact able to pass quite readily as a piece of interesting abstract jewellery to anyone who didn't know what it actually was. I can wear it to conferences, I can wear it to teach in, I can wear it out to dinner. But to me, and to anyone else who's geeky enough, it is in fact also a compelling emblem of fantasy, and adventure, and one man's quiet battle to make the Universe a better place. If I can trust any small piece of metal to keep me safe, help me access the past, help me journey on into my future, and help me find my way back home again if I ever get lost - then this is it.

The history and experience I've written into my old pendant can't just be thrown aside lightly, though. Perhaps there are some things it's witnessed that it's best to leave behind now, and stop carrying around with me. It may be time anyway, even if it weren't for the worn old silver, to move forwards, and let the new pendant receive an impression of the present and future me. But the present me has been forged by the past me, and for that reason I need to keep my connection with the old pendant, too.

So, right now, downstairs in my fire-place a candle is burning, and in front of it the two pendants lie, back-to-back - one facing into the past, and one facing into the future, just like the god Janus (see icon). Once the candle burns down, the 'transfer' will be complete, and I'll be able to leave the old pendant behind and move into the future with the new one. I'm not quite sure what I'll do with the old one after that - but as glitzfrau said the other night in the pub, the right thing will come to me.

How about you?

( First, various pictures of furniture and fittings I've now installed in my house. Plus bonus irises and amarylis. )

( Second, my TARDIS Easter Egg. )

( Third, one of the foxes who live at the top of my next-door neighbours' garden, seen here in the snow in January. )

( And finally, my parents' breath-takingly beautiful cat, Aspasia, in some pictures I took at Christmas. )

Continuing on last night's theme of the adulation of male sopranos, let it be recorded that today is (amongst other things, of course) the birthday of Alessandro Moreschi. Were he still alive, he would be 149 today (so a big anniversary next year - whoop!).

Last year, I marked the day by posting about the pilgrimage to the Sistine Chapel which I had undertaken in his honour in June of 2006. This year, I'm celebrating by posting up a series of pictures of him - in fact, all the ones that are in existence as far as I know. Most lead to larger versions if you click on them - sometimes much larger.

( Moreschi - a life in pictures )



And between all of those, I was able to make this colour bar early in 2006 - which still graces my userinfo page to this day, and is not going anywhere any time soon. The Sistine Chapel photograph isn't really worth including, as you can't really tell it's him anyway, and I'd be the first to admit that some of the others are moot points. But eight photographs of any person who lived when he did is pretty good going. And I'd like to think that somewhere, in archives or in private collections, there are more waiting.