No Fear of the Future

As is usually the way with Wikipedia, its entry on George B. Cressey (1896-1963) has the basics but not the good stuff. To paraphrase Mark Twain, when rebuked by his wife for swearing (she repeated every word back to him), Wikipedia has the notes but not the music.

I recently finished Julia Lovell's The Great Wall: China Against the World, 1000 B.C. - A.D. 2000 (2007), which entertained and (more importantly) told me a number of things I didn't know. I'll post some other excerpts from the book a little while down the road, but today's excerpt, about Cressey, will give you a taste, as well as hint at how easily anyone, even an owlish, scholarly geographer, could play the pulp role.

On the Braes Bayou hike and bike trail, I was passed by a fellow on what looked like a cross between a skateboard and a Nordic Track. He was striding on it and making excellent headway – uphill. Whatever it is, it’s ingenious locomotion.

That reminded me of something I heard about at ArmadilloCon last weekend: air jellies, which are lighter-than-air balloons with jellyfishlike appendages that hover around in interesting ways under radio control: a video is on YouTube.

And that reminded me of something I read this summer in somebody else’s copy of White Trash Cooking. (It is an actual cookbook with authentic recipes of which I recognize some from the church socials of my youth.) There was a pudding recipe that called for a double boiler “or else rig something up.” Heh. There’s been a lot of rigging in Southern kitchens over the years. Then earlier this week I composed an e-mail and shortly after I mentioned “attached” in the body of the e- mail but before I actually attached it, Thunderbird ingeniously asked me if I had forgotten something! This could save a lot of us from the embarrassment of shooting attachment blanks.

Homo Sapiens – Wise Man – is certainly a misnomer for our species. Maybe Homo Ingenious. I see courtesy of Google that the phrase has occurred to others, including radio essayist Richard handler in a 2007 piece about how the ingenious human mind wants to fix everything, including its own suffering; but meditative acceptance of suffering, as in Buddhism, can be a better way.

Our ingenuity can be stymied by politics, policies, the seven deadly sins, the Buddhist Three Cardinal Faults and on and on. And in finding invention highly attractive we may give it more weight than it deserves in the annals of history. I’m reading a book with that thesis: The shock of the old : technology and global history since 1900 by David Edgerton. Perhaps we are truly (this is a widely occurring variant) Homo Fabricans – Man the Maker - with the proviso that the making includes mischief and delusions, war and love, and all kinds of desires and devices, not just technological ones. We would just like to be all Homo Ingenious all the time.

Over the past few weeks, as I biked through the intersection of 53rd and Clarkson in the hours after sunset, I noticed a couple of guys standing out in a parking lot, staring at the sky. Night after night, they were out there, just standing. I thought they were birdwatchers, enjoying the nighthawks who fly in and out of the billboard floodlights.

But I didn't see anything in the direction they were staring. So I biked up Wednesday night and asked them what they were doing. This is Austin. It's still the sort of town where complete strangers sometimes talk to each other.

It wasn't birds. They were on the lookout for UFOs. The two gentlemen identified themselves by their Youtube usernames, HardmanChris and JKL9149.






Apparently the area is lousy with aliens. I got the spiel for twenty minutes. Together they have over 200 videos of UFOs up on Youtube. Mainly the UFOs take the form of glowing balls of energy thirty feet across. There's a curve of light that comes off the top, but otherwise they are orbs. Because they derive their energy from a completely different source than our conventional engines, they zoom and dip around the sky with hardly any sound at all.

They taped this UFO as it flew above Airport Boulevard.
[埋込みオブジェクト:http://www.youtube.com/v/pcYK9AfPN9I?fs=1&hl=en_US]

I showed them a picture I drew of a UFO that flew over my house exactly at midnight a year ago, and JKL9149 said he'd seen ones like that before.



But the flying triangles he saw zipped around and hovered.

In their stories the UFOs do a lot of zipping. They zoom down, they hover. They come within a few hundred feet. They play hide and seek with military scout planes and airtraffic control at Bergstrom airport. The nearby Leif Johnson car dealership features prominently in the stories. The UFOs like to hover just above, their lights off, waiting to be startled.

One night they woke up and the UFOs had turned on all the appliances in the apartment and the skies seethed with lights. Although typically, the UFOs appear between 7pm and 9pm, and then there's a lull, and there's more between 6am and 8am.

They told me about a woman who was walking her pitbull nearby when she saw a little man crouching behind a bush. He stood a little over four feet tall. He was bald, without ears. His arms and fingers were abnormally long, and he wore a red jump suit.

I was told that I might not see UFOs that evening because of the partial cloud cover. Usually you need to see all the way up into space.

"Believe it or not, you can call them down by flicking your lighter," JKL9149 tells me. JKL9149 prefers to use an LED lightsaber. But in HardmanChris's videos you can hear him working that flint, luring the aliens like a man calling a cat by using the can opener.
[埋込みオブジェクト:http://www.youtube.com/v/zAUwN5c6t5I?fs=1&hl=en_US]
They tried signalling the UFOs with a laser pointer once, but that scared them away for a whole week.

Theirs is a very personal universe. The aliens care if you're watching. They are coy and flirtatious in turns.

After I saw their videos and completely failed to see the lights change directions or swoop down over Airport Boulevard, certain bits and pieces of the story stood out: You need a clear night, and they are most common in the hour or two around sunrise and sunset.

So I have a working theory of what they've been videotaping with their nightvision camcorders. But I can't test it out until next Sunday at 8:45pm (with a brief, yet entertaining visitation at 8:16), and I'm not even sure I want to find out for certain. Which is better, being right about an obscure fact, or being wrong about something mysterious?

The superiority of life to art lies in the fact that life doesn't need to be "coherent" or even "believable." It doesn't need to make sense. It doesn't need to follow anyone's rules--not the Aristotelian unities or anything else. And it isn't constrained by the limits of human imagination.

One of the best examples of this is the following, which is entirely true. I haven't made up a single word of it.

Walburga “Dolly” Oesterreich (1880-1961) made, shall we say, a mistake in marrying Fred Oesterreich. Fred, a textile manufacturer, was certainly wealthy, and life with him was a big step up from Dolly’s hardscrabble existence growing up in rural Wisconsin. Fred’s mansion in Milwaukee was one of the biggest in the city—textile manufacturing was a profitable business in 1913—and Dolly’s life with Fred was posh.

But Fred, well, he liked to drink. A lot. Liked to hang out with the boys at night. Liked to hunt. And he liked to drink. And Dolly, well, she was always a bit sensitive about her looks, and easily wounded by the charges of being a gold-digger, and she wanted affection from Fred, and he didn’t seem to have provided her with much or made her feel better about herself.

Also, she liked sex. Lots and lots and lots of sex. And Fred, he hung out with the boys at the bar, and drank a lot, and either underperformed with Dolly or just didn’t perform at all.

So in 1913, when Dolly met a cute 17-year-old, Otto Sanhuber, who actually paid some attention to her, and made her feel attractive, it was understandable and perhaps even inevitable that she'd make a run at him. Otto worked as a sewing machine repairman at Fred's factory, so one day Dolly told Fred that her sewing machine needed repairing. Fred sent Otto to the house. Dolly met him at the door wearing stockings, a silk robe, and nothing else. The two would take up together--more explicitly, they went at it like crazed weasels, for eight to ten hour stretches.

At first they trysted at Otto's room in a boarding house or at a nearby hotel, but soon enough they began using the marital bed at the Oesterreichs’ home. Initially Dolly allayed the neighbors’ suspicions by telling them that Otto was her “vagabond half-brother,” but Otto was around so often that Dolly’s excuse wore thin after a couple of weeks.

So Dolly took the next logical step—and this is where the story of Dolly and Fred goes from being just another sad marital affair to being entertainingly pulpy and absolutely true.

Dolly told Otto to quit his job and move in with her. The Oesterreichs’ home had a large attic, and Fred never went up there. Otto would be close to Dolly, they wouldn’t have to sneak around for their hook-ups, and he could (while not romping with Dolly) write the pulp stories he loved—his dream was to write for the pulps.

That was in 1913. In 1918, Otto was still living in the attic, still spending four to eight hours a day having sex with Dolly, and still unknown to Fred, who had come close to visiting the attic in the past five years but never quite managed it.

In 1918 Fred wanted to move to Los Angeles to broaden his business. Dolly didn’t want her idyll to be interrupted, so she snuck Otto out of the house and sent him to Los Angeles to wait for her. She persuaded Fred that what she really wanted was a house with an attic, and Fred fell for it, so once the Oesterreichs were moved in to the new house Dolly snuck Otto into the house and got him settled into the attic, and then resumed her carnal sport with him.

Dolly slowly grew dissatisfied with her marriage and began fighting with Fred. It wasn’t until 1922—

--at which point Otto had been living in the attic for nine years—

--that the fights became bad enough for Otto to worry—he could hear everything from the attic. On August 22, during one fight, Otto began to fear for Dolly’s safety, and he ran down from the attic, a gun in each hand. He shot Fred three times, killing him.

There’s no particular evidence that what happened next was pre-meditated, but it would surprise no one if Dolly and/or Otto hadn’t fantasized about what they would do if one of them murdered Fred.

They rigged the murder scene to look like a burglary gone wrong. Otto took Fred’s diamond watch, and Dolly went into a closet, which Otto locked from the outside. Otto snuck back to the attic, and Dolly started screaming. The neighbors had called the police when Otto shot Fred, but by the time the police arrived Otto was snug in his attic apartment and Dolly was locked into the closet.

The police had no idea that there was anyone living in the attic. Dolly had a coherent story to tell, and the closet she was in was locked from the outside, so obviously she couldn’t have done it. So the police filed the report as a botched burglary turned murderous, and Dolly inherited Fred’s millions.

The perfect murder? Not really. The police didn’t have enough to arrest Dolly, not then, but they were suspicious of her—Otto had shot Fred with .25 caliber revolvers, which were not the usual weapons of house-robbers.

Dolly sold the house and moved into another one in the neighborhood, again installing Otto in her attic. Dolly meanwhile took up with her attorney, Herman Shapiro. And here Dolly made her first mistake: she gave Herman Fred’s diamond watch, the one supposedly taken during the robbery. Herman recognized the watch, but Dolly said she’d found it under a seat cushion in the house and didn’t think she needed to tell anyone about it. Herman, perhaps not wanting to spoil his relationship with a rich widow, said nothing, but then Dolly asked her third lover, a businessman named Roy Klumb, to dispose of a .25 caliber revolver. Klumb did so (in the La Brea Tar Pits), and when Dolly asked a neighbor to dispose of another .25, he buried it under some rose bushes.

But by July, 1923, the police had learned that Herman had the watch, and Roy, after breaking up with Dolly, told the police about how he’d tossed one of her guns into the tar pits. The police got the gun out of the tar pits and began talking to the papers about the still-unsolved murder of Fred. This prompted the neighbor who’d buried the gun to dig it out and give it to the police. That was enough for the police, so they arrested Dolly.

But! Means, motive, and opportunity. Dolly only had the first. How did she murder her husband while locked in a closet? And why would she do such a thing? The police never did figure either of those out, and so, after months of hearings, Dolly left jail a free woman.

During the hearings Dolly had told Herman about Otto (her “vagabond half-brother,” remember) and had Herman bring Otto some food. The two began talking, and Otto told Herman most of the story. For some reason Herman didn’t make the logical leap that Otto had killed Fred, but Herman didn’t want competition for Dolly’s affections, and threw Otto out of the house.

Dolly and Herman moved in together. But their relationship was never particularly smooth, and in 1930 Herman moved out. As soon as he did, he told the police about Otto, who had moved to Canada after being tossed out of the house but had recently returned to Los Angeles. The police arrested both Dolly and Otto. But…it was now eight years since the murder, and because Otto was only convicted of manslaughter, and the statute of limitations for manslaughter was seven years…Otto went free. Dolly’s trial (for conspiracy) ended in a hung trial, as Dolly proved to be a very sympathetic suspect. The police, lacking conclusive evidence, declined to try Dolly again.

Dolly found a new lover and stayed with him for the next thirty years. Otto left Los Angeles and disappeared. Roger Wilkes' The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes claims that Otto became a successful writer for the pulps around 1915 or 1916, mostly of adventure stories set in "the South Seas or the Orient." No trace of any of Otto's stories has been found in the pulps, under his name or under the pseudonyms (Otto Weir, Walter Klein) Wilkes provides. But then, as I wrote here a while back, there are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of pulp issues whose contents will never be known, so it's quite possible Otto was a successful pulp writer.

Otto did achieve a sort of immortality, though: he was the model for Neil Patrick Harris' character in The Man In The Attic (1995).

As far as I'm concerned, this story has it all. It's sexy, it's sad, and it's creepy. What more can we ask for from life or from fiction?

From the Kansas City Star, reprinted in the Japan Advertiser, 28 Aug. 1921:

WOMEN MAKE BETTER SLEUTHS THAN MEN, SAYS AGENCY HEAD

"Marvelous, Dr. Holmes. But I do not yet understand how you discovered the murderer."

"Really, Watson, at times you make me despair," the great detective replied, as she whisked on her evening gloves. "The murderer is one of my best friends. She told me everything at tea."

The detective story of the future will read like this, according to the predictions of officials of one of London's noted private detective agencies, whose success in employing women detectives has raised the following question:

Are women cleverer detectives than men?

Although almost every hero of a detective story from Sherlock Holmes to Craig Kennedy has been a man is it possible that this attribute of the man, like so many others, is to be unceremoniously snatched from him?

Girl Solves Tangles

Is the legendary Holmes, smoking his pipe in the firelight of a Baker street flat, in temper a misogynist and inexorably following out the cold, dry processes of his reasoning, to the dismay of the underworld, to be supplanted by the figure of a brisk, attractive young woman who detects a criminal as she would a bad dancer?

London, home of Sherlock Holmes, calmly faces these questions at the present moment, owing to the recent achievements of the agency which was unraveled a number of enigmas which had baffled some of the leading criminologists of Europe. A girl detective, 17 years old, has far surpassed the feats of the detective story heroes, or, for that matter, of Scotland Yard. In a recent divorce case she knew more of the complication than either respondent or co-respondent. In less than a fortnight she solved the problem of a series of thefts in a London college, which had stumped a man investigator there for months. Disguised as a student, she ferreted out the thief and the hiding place of the stolen goods. In every stage of the case she was aided by a team of women detectives.

The agency for which she works employs men, but the bulk of the work--all of it except the unpleasant task of shadowing--is performed by the girl detectives.

Intuition Helps

Miss Maud West, chief of the agency, is an advocate of the theory that women, gifted with intuition, is endowed with a finer sort of detective ability than man. Seated at her desk and adjusting a yellow chrysanthemum in a tall vase, in an office with 2-inch deep carpet, Prussian papered walls and New Art statuettes, which would conspire to disarm the too clever criminal who visited it in pursuit of Poe's Purloined Letter theory of hiding, Miss West stated the hypothesis on which she has tracked down hundreds of criminals.

"I employ women," said Miss West, "in every investigation requiring subtlety, craft, guesswork, diplomatic conversation or plain common sense. In cases demanding patient shadowing, or strict adherence to tradition, I use men.

"For the finer and more delicate work I invariably find that a woman is able to clear up a case in much less time than a man. She has more tact, quicker perception, and an equally vivid imagination. Of course they are not able to shadow a criminal. A woman cannot stand in one place without attracting attention to herself, and she hasn't the same physical endurance."

Women's Methods

Miss West told of a recent case in which a wife had run away from her husband. A woman detective ascertained that she had a confidential friend who lived on the Continent. going abroad, she became this woman's bosom confidante. One day she led the conversation to the disappearance of Mrs. Smith and obtained the address at which she was living in England, in a private hotel.

Another woman detective went as a guest to the hotel and amused the company by telling fortunes with cards. When Mrs. Smith's turn came she listened in amazement to secrets which only one woman knew--fresh from the agency's card-filing index system.

Quite obviously no man could have proceeded by this simple and direct route. Instead, acting on scientific principles, and proceeding by clews, he would have had to follow Mrs. Smith from hotel to hotel, city to city, employing an army of watchers and spies who would have been constantly exposed to danger.

Derides Fiction

As to the other type of man detective, the deductive type, who sits by the fireside and, nonchalantly inhaling the smoke from a meerschaum, solves the murders and finds precious necklaces, Miss West is inclined to think he doesn't exist, and that he is the creation of highly romantic minds outside the detective business.

"Do you never read detective stories?" I asked.

"Never," she replied. "No detective does. It never is the reflective, fireside type of detective who does anything really, while the one who employs unromantic, common sense methods is successful. Not a girl in this agency would solve a case if she followed fiction methods."

The truth is, according to Miss West, that theories are of little value in the detective's business, while common sense is valuable. And the Bernard Shaw theory, if any, applied to the detective profession, accounts for women's success in it--viz., that she intuitively adheres to common sense instead of plodding after romantic chimeras.

Following up on yesterday's entry, here's an excerpt from an article of the Japan Advertiser, 12 Jan. 1922, on female private detectives:

"Extreme eagerness has been manifested by the modern young women of Japan in taking up the profession of the detective. The 'Shritzu Tantei Sha,' a private detective bureau of Imairi-cho, Shiba-ku, is proud of having two able female detectives, Miss Yaeko Nakuhara and Miss Tsuruoko Sato, and on average two dozen young women apply to this bureau a month for employment. Most of them, though, fail to qualify through lack of will power, observation or ability to reason. [sic] The two successful ones are paid to possess all these qualitifications besides good looks and tact, and many difficult cases have been solved by them. Miss Nakahara said: 'Recently I went into the home of a wealthy gentleman as a servant girl and removed a long-standing trouble by detecting the secret of the wife, who had deserted from the path of virtue.'"

That advertisement appeared in The Japan Advertiser of Tokyo, 20 October, 1921. As far as I can tell, the Iwai Agency existed in Tokyo since 1886, and I've found ads for it in various European papers of the 1910s and 1920s.

Which, to me, is extremely interesting. A private detective agency operating in Tokyo beginning in 1886? A number of Japanese mystery writers created historical Japanese private detectives--two of the more notable were Okamoto Kido's Hanshichi and Kodo Nomura's Zenigata Heiji--but an actual, historical private detective agency in Tokyo, during the Meiji period? Private detectives walking the streets next to samurai? Japanese private detectives active into the 1920s, in fascist Japan? Something as inherently individualistic as a private detective, or something only slightly less individualistic as a private detective agency, operating in a communal society like Meiji Japan?

You all see the potential here, don't you?

(Of course, the "business connections in all the principal cities of the world" quite likely means that the Iwai Agency was just another unofficial branch of the Japanese intelligence service, who were, recall, extremely active in the United States, Europe, China and Russia from the turn of the 20th century. But "hardboiled samurai private eye" is a lot cooler than "spy posing as a private detective.")