San Quentin And The Lofotens

Murder Bound.

Waller has been in San Quentin. (viii, p. 70) I have heard of it, of course. See At San Quentin.

Hugo Heiss's criminal activities "...did ramify widely." (viii, p. 71)

Ramify: neat verb. I think that I have only encountered the noun before.

Torvald is from the Lofotens. Yamamura has read Johan Bojer whose "'...dialect is beautiful.'" (ix, p. 78) Torvald says that Norwegians will "'...end all speaking the same Oslomal.'" (ix, p. 79) (?) See Norwegian language. He refers to:

"'The Gokstad and Oseberg craft in the museum...'" (ibid.)

It was obviously much more difficult to appreciate such a text fully before the Internet.

Torvald suddenly refers to "'...the handicapped...'" (ibid.) and insists, against Yamamura, that mental problems are environmental, not hereditary, in origin. Where did this argument come from? I might have to reread Anderson's account of their previous confrontation.

Legends

Murder Bound, viii.

When Trygve Yamamura, private detective, presents his card to Judith Mendel, she responds:

"'Goodness! This is a surprise. I've heard about you, the way you solved that Samurai sword case. Do come in. There's coffee on the stove, or would you prefer tea? I never thought I'd entertain a legend.'" (p. 74)

We have had the tea or coffee discussion on the blog. See here.

Judith exaggerates. The Samurai sword case had been in the newspapers "'...last year...'" (p. 77) so Yamamura is not yet a legend although maybe he will become one?

This passage confirms SM Stirling's comment in an earlier combox that the three Yamamura novels cover only a couple of years, especially since Perish By The Sword is the first and Murder Bound is the third. By contrast, Anderson's Dominic Flandry series covers its central character's entire career.

Anderson's Nicholas van Rijn is definitely a legend in his own lunch time. See:

An Organization And A Myth?
Mirkheim, Chapter XIX

In fact, we have discussed legends quite a lot. See the blog search result for legend.

Bagman, Bouncer...

Murder Bound, viii.

Walling has worked for Hugo Heiss as:

bagman
bouncer (I know what a bouncer is)
shill
badger game
muscling into a union

In a London side street, a guy started selling high quality goods, urging us to buy them quickly because they were stolen. A woman standing beside me urged me to buy them because they were a good bargain. She must of been a shill. I just laughed at the entertainment. (Replacing "have" with "of" is another feature of spoken English.)

"Yamamura remained quiet. The wind and the water sounded louder." (p. 71)

Yamamura remains calm under threat but - pathetic fallacy - wind and water sound louder as if adding to the threat.

"Headlights glared as a car passed. The beams didn't touch him." (ibid.)

City life continues although, temporarily, Yamamura is isolated and cannot be helped by the car driver or by anyone else nearby.

"Mist blurred the starpoints that were Berkeley homes." (ibid.)

Yamamura lives across the Bay in Berkeley but, now, might not be able to return there. Threatened with a gun, he does a good job of buying time by pretending that he will wind down his investigation while he is in fact being given excellent reasons to continue it.

Another difference of perspective: Conrad Lauring is a younger man so Yamamura thinks of him as a "...boy..." (p. 72) which is certainly not how we see him when the narrative is presented from his pov.

Reflexes And Sensations

Murder Bound, viii.

Waller is holding a gun on Yamamura:

"Judoka reflexes were so deeply ingrained that they operated without thought." (p. 69)

Of course. We do not take time to think when we need to jump aside. But we might freeze or panic when faced with a gun.

"Yamamura remained balanced on his feet, at physical ease." (ibid.)

Physically at ease, mentally alert. We learn this in meditation even though most of us do not apply it to martial arts.

"His heartbeat jumped once, then resumed a slow rhythm which expected nothing and therefore was ready for anything." (ibid.)

See What We Expect.

"The conscious part of him focused past the gun muzzle, onto the gunman's bovine face." (ibid.)

The man is the threat, not his gun.

"Peripherally, he sensed..." (ibid.)

I will present Yamamura's peripheral sensations as a list:

wind;
water hitting pilings;
tar and gasoline fumes;
broadly spaced lamps;
darkness between them;
sheds;
Fisherman's Wharf;
autumn tourists leaving restaurants, buying seashells and postcards;
neon flares.

Wind felt and heard, water heard, fumes smelled, lamps and flares seen.

"But he didn't stop to consider them. For him there was only this darkness." (ibid.)

Darkness both outer and inner.

And that completes an analysis of the opening paragraph of Chapter viii.

Mountain Villages And Boiled Sea Water

Would you Adam and Eve it? No sooner do I post about surnames than I post about surnames.

Yamamura means "mountain village." In Poul Anderson's Murder Bound, the Japanese-Norwegian private detective, Trygve Yamamura, is hassled by a guy called Waller. Did Wallers build walls? No, they boiled sea water. Well, further research reveals that they might have:

lived near a wall;
built walls;
lived by a spring or stream (well);
boiled sea water;
been cheerful.
(See Surname Database.)

Our Telephone Directory displays Walley, Walling, Wallis and Walls but I am damned if I am going to chase all those derivations. In fact, I had better stop googling characters' surnames.

"He fled down the companionway in search of the detective." (v, p. 47)

"As he came down again, Yamamura saw a man approach with stumbling haste." (vi, p. 54)

These two sentences are a good example of one narrative point of view segueing into another. Lauring flees in search of Yamamura who sees Lauring hastening towards him but, of course, we do not read both povs in a single sentence or passage. Now I must return to Yamamura's second confrontation with Walling.

Trades, Names And Messes

See An Archer God, which is mainly about trades like "archer" becoming surnames, thus "Archer" etc.

In Poul Anderson's Murder Bound, the Norwegian ship, the Valborg, has an "'...oiler...'" (vi, p. 48) There are no Oilers in the Lancaster and South Cumbria Telephone Directory. (I once read a book review of a new Telephone Directory. It said, "All our old friends are here," then listed some well obscure surnames.)

The Valborg's owners have done business with a "'...ship chandler...'" (vi, p. 57) called Perlmutter. We have three Chandlers. A "perlmutter" was probably a worker with pearls. See House of Names. We have no Perlmutters.

While the Valborg is in port, its "black gang," including the oiler, are on watch, keeping the generator going. The black and deck gangs "'...work different places and keep separate messes.'" (p. 48) I never knew that. (Armed forces, elaborately hierarchical, keep three keep three separate messes: officers, NCOs, privates.)

Reading Poul Anderson is an education.

Off-Stage Characters And A Writing Career

Yamamura's wife is mentioned again in Murder Bound but is she one of those fictional characters who remain permanently off-stage and how many of those are there? Sometimes in a play, the characters expect another character but we know from the cast list that he will not arrive.

Is Richard Telford a character in the novel? He remains off-stage but is mentioned twice and described once.
-copied from here.
 
(And the author, CS Lewis, puts Telford to good use.)

Coronation Street had a handful of permanently off-stage characters and then, I was told, one of them appeared.

The blurb for Poul Anderson's first detective novel, Perish By The Sword, describes the author as:

"Already well established as a science fiction writer..."

- whereas the blurb for his third detective novel, Murder Bound, describes him as:

"A familiar figure in the mystery field..."

- but then he found that he could earn more as an sf writer!  

But he could also write richer and more varied narratives in sf. This blog would not exist if Anderson had written mostly mystery novels.

WWII, Norway

In Poul Anderson's Murder Bound, iv, pp. 38-40 present a flashback to an incident during World War II in Norway. Thus, three works by Poul Anderson each include a brief scene set during World War II:

Murder Bound;
Three Hearts And Three Lions;
"Time Patrol."

These works represent three distinct genres:

detective fiction;
fantasy;
sf.

Further, "Time Patrol" represents the sub-genre of historical sf.

The incident in Murder Bound occurs in Jotunheimen, an evocative name for anyone interested either in Norse mythology or in Poul Anderson's works. See here.

Anderson describes:

a red globe setting behind the mountains;
a green sky;
golden snow on luminous eastern peaks;
slate-colored crags and cliffs;
a glacier blinking;
blue shadows;
a cold breeze;
ice dust -

- and why does anyone have to wage war?

Scandinavia

"'I gather [the Scandinavian countries]'re actually about the most up-to-date nations on the planet. In real progress, I mean, education, science, industry, art, law.'"
-Murder Bound, iii, p. 29.

Because Poul Anderson's Murder Bound is about the crew of a Norwegian ship and Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy is set in Sweden, I have googled Scandinavian countries and learned that:

Norway has at different times been united with Denmark and with Sweden;

each Scandinavian country has its own version of the Nordic model (see also here).

Questions And Comments
(i) Is the Nordic model what one character in Murder Bound means by "real progress"?

(ii) The "corporatist system" -

- a corporatist system involving a tripartite arrangement where representatives of labour and employers negotiate wages and labour market policy mediated by the government
-copied from here

- sounds like what Andrea has told me of Mussolini's fascism.

(iii) A welfare state is sustainable by taxation when the free market is expanding but not, or at least not as easily, when it is contracting.

Lauring says that, although "'Norwegians have plenty of personal freedom...'" (ibid.), he values the American request not to walk on the grass as against the European prohibition of walking on the grass and adds:

"'A lot of little things like that.'" (ibid.)

That is a very little thing. I would like to have read what the "'...lot of...'" other things were.

I like Sweden as Stieg Larsson describes it although it has military service. It seems to have a refreshing multiplicity of political parties, which is confirmed here.

Italics

When I was at secondary school in the 1960s, a fellow pupil who had borrowed Guardians Of Time, asked me, "Who says this?" and pointed at a short italicized passage. I explained that it was a thought and added that Anderson always italicized thoughts so that the meaning was always clear to the reader. I think that it should (usually) be clear even on a first reading. When Everard says:

"'...you two were newly married.'"
-Poul Anderson, "Brave To Be A King" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 55-112 AT 1, p. 57 -

- this is immediately followed by:

"After I introduced you..."
-op. cit., p. 58.

Sometimes it is even clearer:

"Sure, thought Everard, the best man got the girl."
-op. cit., p. 59.

Over the page, a paragraph describing the role of Time Patrol Specialists like Keith Denison is followed by:

"Besides all of which, Keith was a friend of mine.
"Everard took the pipe from his mouth."
-op. cit, p. 60.

Again, a consecutive reader should readily understand that Everard thinks the italicized sentence.

However, italicized thoughts were a practice of Poul Anderson. We were not taught it in English lessons at school and other authors do not observe it.

"...Vanger knew just how shaky things were when he first contacted Berger. What sort of game was he playing?"
-Stieg Larsson, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, trans., Reg Keeland (London, 2008), CHAPTER 17, 292.

Is the question italicized for emphasis or because the viewpoint character, Blomkvist, thinks it in those words? Maybe "...Vanger knew..." (etc) is a fact on which he has just reflected but not a word-for-word thought?

"The report questioned Blomkvist's refusal to comment during the trial. Smart woman."
-ibid.

Same comments.

"But Salander had used his original wording. He glanced again at the cover of the report. It was dated three days before Blomkvist was sentenced. That was impossible."
-ibid.

In this passage:

if the first sentence were a thought by Blomkvist, then it should have read, "But Salander used my original wording...";

the second sentence describes an action, not a thought;

the third sentence describes a fact that he notices;

the fourth sentence, if a thought, should have read, "That is impossible."

"You've been in my computer, Froken Salander, he said aloud. You're a fucking hacker."
-ibid.

Sentences spoken aloud should have been printed inside inverted commas and not in italics.