This is an account of the training — and, later, the deployment — of a regiment of Scottish soldiers, and basically it does everything right. The humor works without Hay having to sacrifice detail, and I ended up with a much clearer idea than I’d had before about how the British Army was trained, and especially about how things worked once the troops got to the trenches.

My favorite bit, though, is “Olympus,” the chapter on the military bureaucracy, which I’m struggling to figure out how to describe without just pasting in a bunch of text. For one thing, it includes the concept of “losing a life” in a game long before video games were thought of. Mostly, though, it’s just funny — a complicated kind of funny that can’t be condensed into one-liners.

Basically, The First Hundred Thousand is humorous without being flippant, sad but not intrusively so, and very frequently clever. Several thumbs up.

Maybe it’s like this: most novels have plots. Some other books have themes. Good Old Anna looks like it has a plot, but really it has a theme, and the theme is Things That Happen to People When World War I Starts.

The person that the most of these things happen to is Mary Otway a widow living in the cathedral town of Witanbury with her barely-grown daughter Rose and her servant Anna, and the first thing that happens to her when war is declared is that her friend and neighbor Miss Forsyth calls her attention the the fact that, in spite of her twenty years in England, Anna is very German, and that maybe Mrs. Otway ought to think about sending her back to the Fatherland. But Mrs. Otway is pretty dependent on Anna, and, being a Germanophile, she’s unconvinced when Miss Forsyth says that xenophobia will soon be on the rise.

Miss Forsyth is right, of course. That’s why naturalized German grocer Manfred Hegner immediately changes his name to Alfred Head. Not that anyone ever forgets that he’s German, or that he bears a strong resemblance to the Kaiser, but perhaps it’s helpful to him when he’s spying on England for Germany. Meanwhile, we get to know Anna a little better and learn that, yeah, she’s very German, and considerably less attached to England than Mrs. Otway believes. Not so much that she’d spy for Germany on purpose, but enough that she’ll happily spy for Germany by accident.

And then there’s the romance. Or rather, romances. The two Otway women have eerily similar ones with friends-turned-lovers who are among the first soldiers to go to Belgium, both of whom are wounded within the first few weeks of the war. The romances also show up the looseness of the plot — what there is of it. The same things are happening to both the mother and the daughter and yet somehow those things seem entirely unrelated. We keep being told how devoted Anna is to Rose, but mostly it hardly feels like they know each other, and that goes double for Rose and her mother. I think Rose and Mrs. Otway having more page time together would have made the entire book a lot more solid. On the other hand, it might also have made it clear that they’re having the exact same romance with different people, so. There’s that.

In a way, though, the scattered feeling works out well, because we get to see how the war affects a bunch of different people, and it makes sense that the war is the only thing they have in common besides living in the same town — or the same book. Usually the characters make or break a book for me,  but here they were forgettable, and it was the play by play of the early days of the war as seen in England that wasn’t. In the end, I think this is a really good book, but not for any of the usual reasons.

I looked into the face of my brother. There was no face there, only a red interior. This thing had been done to my brother, the Belgian, by my brother, the German. He had sent a splinter of shell through five miles of sunlight, hoping it would do some such thing as this.

That, oddly enough, is an entire chapter. The italicized meditations on war and death are all pretty short, but they’re distracting. Not that the main narrative is much less grim. And apparently both the interludes and the story are largely true, and based on Arthur Gleason’s experiences in Belgium in the first year or so of the war. Hilda is, I think, a stand in for Gleason’s wife. The book was published in 1915, and mostly subtly but sometimes explicitly pleads for American sympathies and support.

What’s impressive is the way Gleason manages to maintain a storybook quality in the face of all the grimness. Hilda is smart and intrepid and caring, and she races around in a fast car rescuing people, and her boss Mrs. Bracher is all those things and more capable than everyone and maybe my new hero, and none of that stops bad things from happening. It’s more idealistic than realistic, but not by much.

For more information about Gleason, who corresponded with everyone from G.K. Chesterton to Eugene Debs, check out the finding guide to his papers at the Library of Congress.

But that’s not to say that the stories aren’t a lot of fun. Barring a few missteps and a dead dog, they are. All the stories revolve around the titular square, which is never named but is apparently located in New York City somewhere east of and considerably less bohemian than Washington Square. It’s not a slum, but it’s surrounded by them, and it’s not wealthy, but it is home to a couple of small mansions. It’s populated by a rotating cast of characters. Dominie, an elderly scholar, narrates the stories. The Bonnie Lassie is a well known sculptor and the benevolent ruler of Our Square, and Cyrus the Gaunt is her husband. Then there’s The Little Red Doctor (whose name describes him perfectly), Terry the Cop and McLachan the tailor. Polyglot Elsa is the waitress in the local restaurant. Madam Rachel Pinckney Pemberton Tallafferr is a transplanted remnant of the plantation aristocracy. Wolfe Tone Hanrahan is “the Human Judge.” Most of the other inhabitants only show up once or twice.

I’ve tried to pick out some favorites, but in looking at the tables of contents I find that the stories run together quite a bit. The first story, “Our Square” is fun, and necessary reading if you want to know who the Bonnie Lassie and Cyrus the Gaunt are, and I really enjoyed the first and longest story in the second book, “A Patroness of Art.” “The House of the Silvery Voices” is the one with the dead dog, so I have a hard time with it. “For Mayme, Read Mary” is the one with the Weeping Scion, and also World War I. “The Great Peacemaker” also revolves around the war, and is sad but adorable and also contains a lot of Polyglot Elsa. “MacLachan of Our Square” and “The Little Red Doctor of Our Square” deserve better than they get. I think my favorites, though are the following: “The Guardian of God’s Acre,” which is about a clash between a sexton with too rigid a conception of sin and a “sporting gentleman” who is a lot more of a person that you would expect, and “The Meanest Man in our Square,” which pits the local miser against a lawyer who preys on the poor and features one of the several enjoyable appearances of Wolfe Tone Hanrahan, the Human Judge.

And that’s why I had a hard time enjoying Lord John in New York. It’s mostly typical Williamsons charm, but watching the title character treating his leaning tower of flimsy assumptions as if it could stand on its own without the artificial prop of authorial intent was torture. And, as if that weren’t enough, he’s also a moron. Look: when your girlfriend is being held in isolation by evil nuns and you’re worried that the typewritten letters you’ve been getting from her are fake, and then the typewritten letter you find on the dead body of her friend tells you to go meet her at an out-of-the-way train station, you don’t go. Especially if the friend’s chainmail-clad murderer has had time to, say, exchange the letter she’s supposed to be bringing you with another one. And even if the “detective ability” you keep talking about fails you — as it usually does — and you decide to show up at the train station, when the sinister man who’s come to meet you claims to be the brother of the guy you were expecting — a guy who you’ve been told has one sister and no other family — you run. Unless you’re Lord John Hasle, apparently.

It reminds me of a bit in Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees* where he talks about clues in 1890s detective fiction. As Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories became popular, other authors realized that readers wanted clues in their detective stories. So they started putting in lines like, “If only we had a clue,” and having their detective characters discover footprints and dropped handkerchiefs. But these authors didn’t actually know how to use the clues, so, I don’t know, they’d talk a lot about how significant the handkerchief was and then it wouldn’t actually play a part in solving the mystery. Lord John in New York is like that — Lord John keeps finding out all these pieces of information, but they don’t connect in a way that makes sense, and he doesn’t deduce things; he floats along on a wave a hazy conjecture that, irritatingly, lands him at a solution to the wildly implausible mystery and gets him the girl — neither of which he deserves. The villain offers this very clear-sighted comment: “Lord John fancies himself a detective—but it’s luck, more than skill, which has favoured him so far.”

That said, I liked the first chapter, which seems to have been written as a freestanding short story, or at least a freestanding basis for a silent film. Sure, Lord John still makes deductions that seem to be based on information he doesn’t have yet, but he hasn’t yet shown himself to be a moron, and the plot has a very Williamsons-ish snappiness to it, even if no one is traveling incognito. Lord John has written a successful mystery novel and his friend Carr Price has adapted it into a play, which is all set to be equally successful, except that American financier Roger Odell has some kind of grudge against Lord John and is going to screw things up somehow.  So Lord John arranges to be on the same ship to New York as Odell, discovers the source of the grudge (John’s brother is an asshole, basically) and realizes that if he solves the mystery that prevents Odell from marrying Grace Callender, Odell will owe him one — and, as it turns out, become his new best friend. So that’s what he does. It’s only after Grace and Odell are married and Price’s play opens that he falls in love at first sight with Odell’s sister Maida (is there a more Williamson-ish name than “Maida Odell”?) and is launched on a larger, more nonsensical adventure involving Egyptian artifacts and evil nuns and airplanes.

An alternative version of my review might go like this:  Williamsons, mysterious Egyptian artifacts, evil nuns, and a pining telepathic camel. You get the idea. But the Williamsons did Egypt much better in It Happened in Egypt and English or Irish aristocrats in America better in…oh, probably half a dozen other books.

*I’m paraphrasing, and I haven’t read the chapter in question for a couple of years, so I don’t know how accurately I’m reporting Moretti’s argument. But also: best book of literary theory ever. Run, don’t walk, etc.

Jess Nevins is doing a series on io9 in which he speculates about what science fiction and fantasy novels and stories might have won Hugos if the award had been established in 1885 rather than 1953. Nevins knows a lot about science fiction, he’s got an open mind, and I think he does a really amazing job of showing what the SFF writing/reading/publishing scene was like in the 1880s. I’m not much of a sci fi reader, so I really appreciate having a rundown of what’s good and what isn’t, and familiar names pop up on Nevins’ shortlists more often that I would have thought. The Victorian Hugos series is now up to 1889.

There’s a very cool article by Jennifer L. Brady at the online journal Common-Place that discusses letters sent to Susan Warner by fans of The Wide, Wide World. As someone with fond memories of reading the book, the article gave me warm and fuzzy feelings–as well as making some interesting suggestions  about the way people read sentimental novels and about 19th century fandom.  It’s called “Loving The Wide, Wide World.”

This is probably the meanest book review I’ve ever read, and while I understand that it might give an aspiring author nightmares, as a reviewer I find it to be a delight. The book is The Book of Kings, by James Thackera, and the reviewer is Philip Hensher.

Angelina Terry is an older woman who’s pretty much on board with the “Bah, humbug” view of Christmas. When the story starts, she’s busy ignoring her brother Tom’s request for a Christmas reconciliation (we never find out what they originally fought about) and making fun of the Christmas spirit. As if that weren’t enough, she decides to spend the evening burning toys, which probably rates just below kicking puppies on the Everybody Hates You Now scale. Then she decides that no, she’ll burn most of them, but she’ll keep aside her favorites to perform weird social experiments. She’ll put the toys out on the sidewalk one by one, and people will come along and show how selfish and un-Christmas spirit-y they are.

This is a story about learning not to underestimate the Christmas spirit, but it’s also a story about the evils of theorizing ahead of data.

On toy gets picked up by a couple of Jewish newsboys who immediately start fighting over it. A stuffed dog is kicked into the street by a fashionable young man. Miss Terry looks on, practically cackling to herself over their lack of Christmas spirit.  She can’t quite bring herself to toss Miranda, her old doll, into the street, so she wraps her up in paper and leaves the package on her own front step. A girl, Mary, finds the package and concludes that it must belong to someone in the house, but when she feels it she can tell it’s a doll, so she takes it anyway. Miss Terry gleefully brands her a thief.

Then she gets a visit from the Christmas angel, who shows her what really happened after the people picked up the toys, Christmas Carol style. You’ve probably already noticed this, but you could tag “Christmas Carol style” onto pretty much everything that happens in this story and not be far off. Anyway, it turns out that the quarreling news boys were fighting over who would have the privilege of bringing their toy — a jack-in-the-box — to a sick friend. The guy who kicked the toy into the street risks his life to save the kid who goes after it from an oncoming car.  And the girl who “stole” the doll decides to bring it back the next day.

Then Miss Terry’s brother returns and they make up, and when the girl comes back with the doll they decide to adopt her, with very little ceremony. They sort of have the Christmas angel’s blessing for that, but I found myself wondering how well the Christmas angel knew Tom, because he seemed a bit creepy on the subject of little girls.

That’s a nitpick, though. The Christmas Angel isn’t particularly special in any way, but it’s a perfectly satisfactory Christmas story, and it had its moments. I suspect that what it really needed was to be fleshed out more.

I wish she had a better grasp of her subject matter, though.  I’m not talking about stories like “Adam Floyd,” a straightforward but tense religious romance, or “John Logan,” a fairly cute story of a young couple renovating their house that could do with some more hijinks. I don’t know that I’m even talking about “Red-Bird,” the story of a Floridian bird who, after being captured and caged for a year, returns home to find that her family and friends have moved on with their lives. There was a bit of Christmas in that one, but I don’t know if it’s meant to  be a Christmas story — and that’s kind of the problem with the ones that are meant to be Christmas stories. It seems a little bit as if Holmes, when she said “Christmas stories,” meant “stories with Christmas in them,” which isn’t the same thing at all.

By my count, two of the eight stories in the book really succeed as Christmas stories. Then we’ve got the three stories that probably aren’t meant to be about Christmas, and three that maybe sort of are: First there’s  “Alice and Adelaide,” a typically Mary Jane Holmesian story of reversals in fortune and a conniving woman. I worry that the moral of this, the longest story in the book, is that trying to attract a man is evil. It made me a little bit uncomfortable. Then there’s a story that claims to be true — “The Christmas Font” — and one that doesn’t, but probably is: “The Passion-Play at Oberammergau”.  The latter is a travelogue-y description of (unsurprisingly) the Oberammergau  Passion Play, while the former tells the story of a fundraiser put on by some Sunday School kids. I guess it’s because it’s true that Holmes felt the need to shoehorn in some bits about dead kids, but they were the most Christmas story-ish thing about it.

“Ruth and Rena” and “Benny’s Christmas” were genuine, proper Christmas stories, with lots of proper Christmas story tropes, like long lost family members (“Ruth and Rena”), angelic invalids (“Benny’s Christmas”), and starving poor children (both). Not to mention lots of confused childish interpretations of Biblical stories. They both have everything they ought to have, including the Unity of Christmastimes, and “Benny’s Christmas” even made me tear up a bit. I liked “Ruth and Rena” best, though, because a) no dead kids, and b)it was so spectacularly absurd to have three parts of one family living in one house, none of them realizing that they were related to the others.

On the whole, though, Mary Jane Holmes writing about pious people being nice to each other is pretty boring, and not what I want to see from her. You get little tastes of what Holmes is like in her novels — Adelaide’s plotting in “Alice and Adelaide,” long lost family members in “Ruth and Rena” and Anna’s efforts to be less evil/fickle in “Adam Floyd” — but not enough. It’s not just that Holmes doesn’t really do justice to the Christmas story. It’s that she doesn’t do justice to herself.

Oh, and here’s the link: Christmas Stories at Google Books.

Have you ever read Strong Poison, by Dorothy Sayers? This starts a lot like that, with a young woman on trial for murder. He’s her husband rather than her ex-boyfriend, but you’ve got the discussion of the evidence, the samples of popular opinion, and the faithfully attending onlooker whose main interest is in the accused. It’s similar enough — more in the way it’s described than in the details of the story — that I think Sayers must have read it, and been inspired by it.

The similarities end with the trial. Rachel Minchin is acquitted of the murder of her husband, but she finds, on her release from prison, that she has nowhere to go. The public believes her guilty, and a mob attacks her house. Not that she can stay there anyway — all her stuff’s been cleared out. She has no friends, and no one believes in her innocence. That’s when the mysterious Mr. James Buchanan Steel shows up, doing an excellent job at walking the fine line between kindly benefactor and creepy stalker. She vaguely remembers him from the trial, and she finds him kind of fascinating, so eventually she agrees to his proposal of marriage.

When Steel takes Rachel to his home in the country, after marrying her abroad, he tells her that they’re going to pretend the past never happened, and that no one will recognize her as someone who has been on trial for murder. It pretty quickly becomes clear that this isn’t true — that it’s only a matter of time before her identity is revealed to her neighbors. At the same time, Rachel is simultaneously getting to know Steel better and learning disturbing things about him. The mystery of who actually killed Rachel’s husband isn’t investigated until surprisingly late in the book, when a writer who falls in love with Rachel vows to clear her name. The twists that follow are a bit unconvincing — especially the resolution of the romance plot, which kind of negates a lot of the fun, creepy gothic stuff that had been going on.

I would have liked The Shadow of the Rope a lot more if it had done what I thought it was going to do from about halfway through the book, but it’s hard to argue with the way Hornung complicates the plot. I did think the ending was weak, but I liked the attempt to mix things up and sidestep expectations. The Shadow of the Rope was better than I thought it would be, but I almost wish it hadn’t been. Only almost, though.

“After all, Margolius,” Feigenbaum commented as he lit an all-tobacco cigarette on their way down the front stoop of the Goldblatt residence—”after all, she ain’t such a bad-looking woman. I seen it lots worser, Margolius.”

“That’s nothing what we got it this evening,” Philip said as they started off for the subway; “you should taste the Kreploch what that girl makes it.”

“I’m going to,” Feigenbaum said; “they asked me I should come to dinner to-morrow night.”

But Philip knew from his own experience that the glamour engendered of Fannie’s gefüllte Fische would soon be dispelled, and then Henry Feigenbaum would hie him to the northern-tier counties of Pennsylvania, leaving Philip’s love affair in worse condition than before.

Philip is the protagonist, who’s got a bit of a Taming of the Shrew situation on his hands, and is trying to set his friend Feigenbaum up with Fannie Goldblatt so that he can marry her sister Birdie. Fannie’s temper isn’t a problem — she’s just really unattractive. But her cooking maybe makes up for it.

The draw here isn’t the story, but the turn of the century New York Jewish characters. It’s the speech patterns and the bits of Yiddish that had me passing my kindle down our row of airplane seats and making my mother and brother read the good bits.