A Classic??? Dead in the Frame

 

 

DEAD IN THE FRAME

By Stephen Spotswood

Doubleday, 2025, 355 pages

★★

 

I often consult lists when I’m searching for blog themes and recently ran across one for “Classic PI Books.” I’ve already read some of them, like Dashiel Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon and Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, but I had never read Stephen Spotswold or Dead in the Frame. I was also curious how a book published in 2025 could be a classic, so I gave it whirl.

 

The skinny is that it shouldn’t be on a list of classics. I presume it was considered a classic for politically correct reasons as all of his PIs are women and the bulk of them are lesbians. That could be a unique selling point, but Spotswood’s Pentecost and Parker series is clearly set in the 1940s and, even in New York City, few would have been as out and bold as those in Dead in the Frame.

 

Lillian Pentecost is sometimes compared to Sherlock Holmes in that she’s a cerebral detective rather than a swashbuckler, but she’s actually fairly passive in this novel as she is in jail by page 8.  Proving her innocence is the task of her assistant “Will” Parker, as in Willowjean, the sexual partner of crime writer Holly Quick. Pentecost is accused of murdering Jessup Quincannon, a millionaire with the odd hobby of maintaining his “Black Museum,” a collection of murder paraphernalia and artifacts. He and Lillian have long maintained a relationship of mutual contempt for each other, but is this a motive for a rationalist such as Pentecost to eliminate him?

 

Against her better judgment Pentecost accepts an invitation to visit Quincannon and before the night is out, Jessup is dead with a bullet in his head that matches Lillian’s gun. No one else is in the room but the corpse and Lillian when the police arrive at the behest of Silas Culliver, Quincannon’s lawyer. His bodyguard, the stunning Alathea, tells police that no one else went in or out of the room once the shot was fired. Lillian is cuffed and taken off to the Women’s House of Detention on Greenwich Avenue, a once-real place famed for housing “deviants” such as transexuals and lesbians. Will is dumbfounded and knows she has to get Pentecost out soon. One of her male jailers in bent on revenge for a past case, plus she has multiple sclerosis and is growing progressively weaker.

 

A cast of other oddballs enter the case: Dr. Ryan Backstrom, a lobotomist; Judge Mathers, a lecherous friend of Quincannon’s father; Max Roberts, a pain-in-the-butt reporter; Timothy Novarro, a huckster preacher and his wife Elaine; and the elusive Billy Muffin, a (perhaps) former hitman. As if Will doesn’t have enough on her plate, Lillian insists they keep open office hours to help others in distress such as a photographer hellbent on finding his wife’s murderer and a Chinese toymaker’s widow without money who’d like to solve her husband’s demise. Several of the women also have trouble keeping their libidos in check and the office is so short-staffed that Holly takes on the role of helping Will investigate. Even one of Lillian’s investigative antagonists, Dr. Olivia Waterhouse, voices doubts that Lillian killed Quincannon.

 

As in most detective novels, odds are strong that the mystery of Quincannon’s demise will be solved. I confess, though, I did not see the solution coming. That’s due in part to the fact that Spotswood’s writing is often more convoluted than it should be, but it’s also due to too many characters dropping in and out of the narrative and a “solution” that isn’t particularly believable.

 

It would be fair to say that I didn’t care much for Dead in the Frame. I might, though, go back to Spotswood’s Fortune Favors the Dead, Book One of the Pentecost and Parker oeuvre to get a better handle on the major characters. But that’s down on my reading list for now.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

Highs and Lows of Traveling in Britain

London: "Walkie Talkie" on far left.

Canterbury

 

You’ll be reading a lot in this blog about our recent trip to England, so ‘s a brief overview. We were based in London, aside from a two-day stay in York, hence these thoughts are geographically skewed. I’ve spent more time in Scotland than in England and am more comfortable in the land of my ancestors, so this too colored my perceptions. (“If it’s nae Scottish, it’s crrrrapp,” as SNL once joked.)

It had been nearly 15 years since last we were in London and even longer since our previous visit to York. It is safe to say that a lot has changed! Change can be a mixed bag and one’s reaction to such things are often a matter of preference.

Highlights

Travel begins with people. We were not on a tour, but a definite highlight was seeing old friends. Valerie jetted over from Geneva and spent a day with us at the Victoria and Albert Museum at London. Chinwags, lunch, and warn beverages on a cool day in William Morris-styled tearooms lent a pleasant atmosphere to catching up.

We spent another day with Derek and Jenny who live just outside of London. We rendezvoused at Black Heath for a very long walk that began in the village and across the heath and Greenwich. Mist, open land, coffee and cakes at a garden house, a stroll through an instructional farm to visit critters, and a train into London’s upscale Docklands area. We gabbed, gabbed, gabbed and ended the day at a nice Indian restaurant.

We found English people unfailingly kind and polite. As older (yikes!) travelers, younger folks offered us seats on the Tube (subway), helped us work out ticket machines, and committed small acts of kindness. I’m no expert of Britain’s racist/anti-immigrant Reform Party, but London is the most multicultural city I’ve seen in recent years. There are interracial couples of all sorts and a noticeable lack of anger on the faces of English people of color. Brexit and Reform aside, their followers are spitting into the wind; immigrants are tightly woven into London culture.

The Sights:

1. If museums are a passion, London caters to so many tastes that we largely confined ourselves to art–Tate Britain, National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Tate Modern, the Tower of London–and the anthropological wonders of the British Museum.

2. Green spaces abound. Walking through St. James’s Park near Buckingham Palace was amazing. We were promptly greeted by a rather imperious white pelican, as well as magpies, moorhens, and parrots. I struck up a nice conversation with an elderly Chinese gentleman with a cloud of parrots around him. He told me he is retired and that he comes every day to feed his “friends.”

 

Feeding his friends!

 3. You can still find free house pubs serving cask ales. Be wary; not all are good.

4. An evening at Wilton’s Theatre for a singalong of Cockney, music hall, and selected pop/rock songs was a gas. Tom Carradine and his China Plates are a throwback in a positive way. Tom dresses in Victorian garb most of the time, sports a waxed mustache, and has a devoted following in a run-down venue whose condition parallels Preservation Hall in New Orleans.

5. We found (in order) Canterbury, York, and Oxford much more “charming” than London. Also, more historical and less frenetic.

  The Lows:

1. Once-familiar landmarks are now “buried” in London’s go-go building boom that pays very little attention to planning. Dizzying skyscraper complexes have Manhattanized London with insufficient attention paid to the surrounding area. The pickle-shaped “Gherkin” has been followed by the “Shard” (think Superman’s Fortress of Solitude on Ozempic), and a hulking skyscraper Londoners have dubbed “the Walkie-Talkie” and I think looks like a Bose speaker. I like bold design (though the reflections from the Gherkin have allegedly induced skin burns), but poor placement invites lampoon. The Docklands is impressive, but generic. Its web of private moorings makes mockery of where laborers and sailors once toiled. Gentrification and genericization abound. 

The "Gherkin"

 

 

 

 

 

 

From the South Bank bridge. Note how close the "Walkie Talkie" is Tower Bridge

 

 

 2. London has become unaffordable. A cup of coffee can set you back $7 when you do the conversion. A simple meat or veggie hand pie is ₤16-17 (as much as $23!). We were staying in Earls Court where each townhouse had cars such a Lamborghini, a BMW, a Rolls, or its ilk parked in the drive. Our rental was in a townhouse carved into postage stamp rooms. The galley kitchen was jammed into a hallway with cupboards that reached to the top of 12’ ceilings. The same was true of the shower, whose head would have made for a lovely fixture for someone 11’ tall.  

3. The class system is alive and well, though it is now an aristocracy of money rather than birth. Upscale stores such as Harrods and Liberty are absolutely disgusting is their worship of conspicuous consumption.  I looked at a light wool scarf in Harrods that would have set me back $600. London's main shopping district is strictly show-off stuff for the millionaires and tchotchkes from Marks and Sparks for the masses. I literally fled from Harrods.

4. There’s not much new in the theatre. Revivals everywhere, even off the Strand. 

The Hours: Virginia Woolf Done Well

 

 

 

THE HOURS (2002)

Directed by Stephen Daldry

Paramount Pictures, 144 minutes, PG-13

★★★★★

 

I recently rewatched The Hours, which is loosely based on the 1925 Virginia Woolf novel Mrs. Dalloway. Two-thirds of the movie modernizes circumstances, but fans of Mrs. Dalloway will easily pick out borrowed elements.

 

Those who adapt classic works of literature do so at their own peril, but what a team assembled for the film. The screenplay was written by David Hare based on a novel from Michael Cunningham. The Academy Award-winning score came from Philip Glass, and the cast is almost entirely A-level. Its three principals alone were a coup: Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman, who won a Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Woolf. Rather than attempt to echo Woolf’s stream of consciousness writing style, director Stephen Daldry jumps between three timelines and settings: 1920s England, 1951 suburbia, and 2001 New York City. Each period covers a single day.

 

Nicole Kidman dons a prosthetic nose and adopts a worried, dour Quaker demeanor to depict a depressed Woolf. She’s trying to get a handle on Mrs. Dalloway, is struggling, and everything that happens that day annoys her no end. She hates living in Richmond, England, then a country retreat for titled aristocrats, rich gentry, and social climbers. Woolf hates it and yearns for the hustle and bustle of London. She feels like a prisoner of her husband Leonard (Stephen Dillane), her self-appointed guardian against self-harm and impetuous behavior. Her sprawling house, her class status, Leonard, and even the servants are metaphorical wardens. A visit from her sister Vanessa Bell (Miranda Richardson) and her family drives Virginia deeper into depression. Vanessa has children, a settled family life, and devotes herself to domesticity–all things Virginia is supposed to want but doesn’t. We see her attempt to run away to London, as well as foreshadowing of Woolf’s 1941 suicide by loading her pockets with rocks and wading into the River Ouse.

 

The 1951 sequences center on Laura Brown (Moore) living in one of the instant suburbs that proliferated after World War Two. She is married to war vet Dan (John C. Reilly), a well-meaning, not-so-bright guy who buys into the dream of a ranch house, a gee-whiz son named Richie (Jack Rovello), a manicured lawn, a TV set, and dinner waiting when he gets home. Laua, however, leans on her neighbors Mrs. Latch (Margo Martindale), and Kitty (Toni Collette) because she doesn’t have a domestic bone in her body. She is bored senseless, makes a lesbian pass, and briefly runs away to a Los Angeles hotel where she contemplates suicide, but can’t do it.

The 2001 scenes are the equivalent of hyper-modernized productions of Shakespeare. We meet Clarissa Vaughan (Streep) in a shabby apartment where she is caring for her gay friend Richard (Ed Harris), a cynical gay writer covered with lesions and dying of AIDS. Clarissa is frenzied because she is throwing a big party for Richard that evening to celebrate his career achievement award. Clarissa is so manic that Richard actually calls her “Mrs. Dalloway.” Clarissa and Richard were lovers in college but she is now a lesbian in a longtime relationship with Sally (Allison Janney). Clarissa frets every detail, from where to distribute the flowers in her upscale apartment to how to seat the guests. Her daughter Julia (Clare Danes) tries to be a calming influence, but good luck with that. At the last minute the party is off. As Clarissa takes his suit over to Richard’s apartment, he swallows a few pills and jumps to his death when her back is turned. Surprise guests nonetheless turn up, including his ex-lover Louis (Jeff Daniels), and a super-surprise guest.

 

The Hours won a lot of critical acclaim in 2002, though some viewers found it depressing (duh!) and a few critics complained that female victimization was overdone (duh and doh!). Apparently, none of the complainers had ever heard of The Feminine Mystique or paid much attention to the 1951 segment. It is rare for a Hollywood film to have so many high-powered and talented actors in one film. (The usual is to have two or three “big” names as audience lures and fill in with unknowns and third-rate actors.)  The entire cast acquits themselves well, no matter the size of their roles. Though my literary friends may skewer me, it’s a rare film that surpasses the book that inspired it.

 

Rob Weir

 

For those who care, here is the River Ouse, though in York, not where Woolf killed herself.