Cortically Magnified

In a previous blog post, I reviewed Ellery Queen’s classic detective novel The Greek Coffin Mystery (1932), which manages to involve color blindness in its puzzles. But I am not done yet! I have a couple more. On one hand, it feels to me that color blindness is gimmicky as a plot device. A mystery writer must be quite desperate for new ideas if she or he has to turn to perceptual psychology (or any branch of specialized knowledge, for that matter).

I don’t think mystery novels by Ellery Queen are popular in western countries anymore, but they are still read in Asia. When I was a PhD student, every time I had to travel from my home country Taiwan to the USA, I would buy an Ellery Queen novel at the airport bookstore. This way, I could land in LAX with a solved mystery. Ellery Queen novels are substantial books with very complex plots - perfect for long flights because uninterrupted concentration is needed to tackle them.

I’ve been reading two books about hacking. Interestingly, both books make references to the novel The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. The first book is Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell by Phil Lapsley. In an interview of Ron Rosenbaum, whose article Secrets of the Little Blue Box (published in Esquire Magazine in 1971) brought phone phreaking into the awareness of the public, Rosenbaum said that his vision of the phone phreaks of the 60’s and the 70’s was influenced by the underground communication networks described in the novel.

During the lockdown, I finally found the time to read the first volume of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories. In general, I can’t say I like them as detective stories, because what I am looking for in this genre is brilliant deduction, and Father Brown doesn’t do that kind of thing. However, I was very impressed by a story titled The Sign of the Broken Sword. It’s a very unusual detective story, in which Father Brown analyzed the accepted narrative of a (fictional) historical event, and concluded that the overlooked inconsistencies could only mean one thing: the narrative was manufactured to cover up a deeper, tragic truth.

Thomas Pynchon likes to talk about Godzilla in his novels. In Inherent Vice, there is a funny scene where the main character Doc told his girlfriend Penny that the 1964 Japanese movie Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster was a remake of the 1953 romantic comedy Roman Holiday. Later that night, Doc caught Penny sobbing at the TV, because she watched the Japanese monster movie as a romance. Pynchon is good at writing this type of plot that is ridiculous but oddly touching.