Crabs, Spade, Hammett, Hog
Adam's Notes for February 23, 2024
Some news this week: I sold a story! Looks like I’ll be in Crab Tales Magazine, issue 2, date of publication to be determined.
You might remember that this publication was the subject of a previous newsletter.
Alas, Crab Tales only publishes what falls under the category of ‘microfiction,’ stories of less than 250 words, so I’m at risk of writing more here about the story than what it’s actually in the story. So I’ll stop now, except to say that I’ll link to it in the newsletter whenever it comes out.
In others news, I’ve been doing a lot of writing lately. A lot. I feel more energetic lately—maybe the worst of the winter darkness has passed. It feels like I’ve discovered a new hour in the evening. Part of that must be that Twitter (I can’t bring myself to call it X) has been a bit slow lately, so I don’t feel its distracting pull as much.
I’ve got a handful of short stories I’m working on, hoping to send them to various genre magazines, and I’ve got a couple already out on submission. We’ll see. I’ve got my novel torn open, too. The opening doesn’t work, so I’m trying to figure out if I should write a new beginning or just start the novel three chapters in, like Hemingway did with The Sun Also Rises. Not that I’m comparing myself to Hem.
Although speaking of guys who like it hardboiled, have you been watching Monsieur Spade? I had a kneejerk bad reaction when I first heard the premise: Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, of The Maltese Falcon, a detective synonymous with 1940s San Francisco, has retired to southern France in the 1960s. But the show is actually really good, and Clive Owen is great as Spade. He’s up against OAS goons and a CIA priest, it’s a lot of fun, although I also kind of wish there was less spy stuff and it was more about criminals—Hammett wasn’t a spy writer. There’s a bunch of stuff on the French war in Algeria too, which surprised me that they’d include it.
There’s also a lot of great callbacks to Hammett’s writing. He tells the Flitcraft parable to the woman he falls in love with, although she ends up leaving him by dying of cancer. Also, it took me a while to realize, but the girl’s mother is Brigid, the femme fatale from The Maltese Falcon.
Guess I was always more of a Continental Op guy. Red Harvest is, by far, my favourite Hammett work. It really is a masterpiece, the best of his five novels. It actually kind of bugs that although the story gets used a lot (most famously in Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, and Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars) there’s never been a faithful adaptation. I remember a while back reading that it was in the public domain, and spending a lot of time daydreaming about doing a straight adaptation, only setting it in the former Cape Breton mining town where I grew up instead of the semi-fictional Montanan mining town of the original. Alas, what talents I have lie elsewhere.
I have a big book of Hammett’s short stories I’m hoping to get to soon, and I read an interesting biography of him last year, about his early days in the Pinkertons, when he was allegedly offered $5000 by a union-busting mining company to assassinate union leader Frank Little. Hammett turned down the offer and he quit the Pinkertons, eventually becoming an antifascist activist, getting blacklisted spending six months in jail during McCarthyism for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. It’s really one of the greatest face turns in American literature. Supposedly there was a piece of metal embedded in the palm of his hand, the tip of a knife someone had attacked him with.
Pepys Show
With a new king comes new fashion, and so on February 1 Pepys has his sword refurbished and on the third he wears it in public for the first time, as is now the style. Also on the third he hears some new musique at Whitehall: trumpets and kettle drums and some other kind of drum, “which are much cried up.” He thinks it dull and vulgar. That night, Pepys’ patron Edward Montague, Lord of Sandwich, tells him that one of his buddy Sir Thomas Crew’s guys got into a fight last night. Pedro and two more of Crew’s guys killed one of four soldiers who were quarreling with them in the dead of night, and now Pedro is hiding with Montague, hoping to escape at night. Some real Three Musketeers shit, shame he doesn’t follow up on it.
You gotta wonder if all this sword wearing is causing more fights. Because on the 7th, Lord Sandwich and Lord Buckingham (the same Buckingham from The Three Musketeers, right?) have a falling out over a game of cards. And the next day, “my Lord sent for Sir R. Stayner and sent him the next morning to the Duke, to know whether he did remember what he said last night, and whether he would own it with his sword and a second; which he said he would, and so both sides agreed.” But the Queen Mother and some other lords put a stop to any fight.
Some more hot goss: “I observed one story, how my Lord of Northwich, at a public audience before the King of France, made the Duke of Anjou cry, by making ugly faces as he was stepping to the King, but undiscovered.” A footnote tells us the Duke of Anjou was then four years old, and “frightened by the English nobleman’s ugly faces.”
On the 8th he goes drinking with various sea commanders and captains, and they regale him with stories of slavery in Algiers, two of them having been slaves there for many years:
(They) did make me fully acquainted with their condition there: as, how they eat nothing but bread and water. At their redemption they pay so much for the water they drink at the public fountaynes, during their being slaves. How they are beat upon the soles of their feet and bellies at the liberty of their padron. How they are all, at night, called into their master’s Bagnard; and there they lie. How the poorest men do use their slaves best. How some rogues do live well, if they do invent to bring their masters in so much a week by their industry or theft; and then they are put to no other work at all. And theft there is counted no great crime at all.
Lent is approaching, and there’s a proclamation from the king saying that he wants to get back to a serious, catholic-style, no meat lent, but Pepys says everyone is talking about whether or not it will be enforced, as the poor can’t afford to buy fish. This strikes me as the well off trying to put the harsher form of the tradition behind them: isn’t it usually the other way around, that the poor can afford fish but not meat? And since when have Pepys and co really bothered themselves with the poor, anyway?
The other great subject of town gossip is the king’s upcoming coronation, and his marriage. There’s a rumour that the king is already married “to the niece of the Prince de Ligne and that he hath two sons already by her: which I am sorry to hear” but that’s better, in Pepys’ mind, than the crown eventually going to the king’s brother, as the Duke of York and his family are “professed friends of the catholiques.”
A day later, he gets to see “the stamps of the King’s new coyne; which is strange to see, how good they are in the stamp and bad in the money, for lack of skill to make them.” Better yet, after a meeting with the navy comptroller and Parliament, Pepys is assured that the king is not yet married, that it’s just a rumour. At a dinner with family and friends on the 22nd, he tries to convince them that the story about the king being married is fake news. It must’ve been a really contentious topic because he says he spent all afternoon talking about it.
The 23rd is Pepys birthday, he’s now 28.
On the 26th, Shrove Tuesday, he leaves his wife in bed, she being indisposed “by reason of ceux–là.” While at Jane Turner’s (the affluent cousin he feels fond of because she cared for him after his surgery) he has the best fritters of his life and out the window he sees people throwing rocks at roosters––apparently a cruelty that’s long been an English Shrove Tuesday custom. He does a lot of drinking all evening, and when he gets home he has one of his famous indiscretions:
there after a quart or two of wine, we home, and I to bed … [and yet again some remark is censored out by Rev. Wheatly D.W.] [where (God forgive me) I did please myself by strength of fancy with the young country Segnora that was at dinner with us today. – L&M]
The commentaries seem to think he’s not actually cranking hog so much as just thinking about her and becoming aroused. Which, maybe. I don’t know.
Let’s let Pepys close this one out in his own words:
This month ends with two great secrets under dispute but yet known to very few: first, Who the King will marry; and What the meaning of this fleet is which we are now sheathing to set out for the southward. Most think against Algier against the Turk, or to the East Indys against the Dutch who, we hear, are setting out a great fleet thither.
(Quick reminder that Old Moon Quarterly 6, which contains my short story “Diary of the Wolf,” is out now, available in ebook and paperback.)
Thanks for reading, especially if you’ve made it this far. This has been Adam’s Notes for February 13, 2024. My name is Adam McPhee, and you can find me on Twitter, Bluesky, Letterboxd, and Goodreads.
concrabulations!
Keep procrastinating and putting the wrong date on these, lmao