Look to the West Volume IX: The Electric Circus
- Thread starter Thande
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Thande
Donor
Slightly - it struck me that this might be an unintended consequence of a one-size-fits-all approach to minorities rather than trying to treat indigenous nations as their own separate thing.
I was more concerned about a pair of twins from Planet Zog
Zig and Zag (puppets) - Wikipedia
Kaiphranos
Donor
That's an interesting dialect we get there - I presume it is Ohio-specific (though I wonder how affected it may be as part of the speaker's stage persona...)
The speaker for this section seems to be very opinionated, but even so I wonder how a single record has become both relatively uncontroversial as the first song in a genre, and presumably well enough known that the speaker doesn't feel a need to make an argument or demonstration to support that claim.
OTL's rock and roll doesn't really have anything quite comparable- Rocket 88 is sometimes claimed to be the first rock n' roll song, but its a controversial claim and not particularly broadly known or frequently cited.
Thande
Donor
That's a good point, I should probably caveat that - what I was thinking was it was the first one to explicitly allude to the name in the lyrics (but then, OTL had songs that refer to 'rock and roll' that are earlier than rock and roll itself, due to the term changing meaning).
Seems like perfect grounds for an obscure HPoC to me! (Do Diversitarians consider differing groups of music pedants cultural groups worthy of protection? What a nightmarish vision.)
Or perhaps an indication of Diversitarian cultural norms- perhaps defining sharp categorizations of art genres with semi-official starting points is important to defending against being accused of crypto-societist culture-mixing tendencies (as opposed to good, Diversitarian culture-mixing tendencies of course).
318
Thande
Donor
Part #318: Beneath the Raptor’s Wings
REAL MANHATTAN PITTSA!
Just like Toni’s Mama Giovanna made it!
“The miracle flat cheese pie with a thousand fillings”
Check Motext page 10K-441 for all our Fredericksburg and Halo locations!
Accept no substitues – THE FLYING PITTSA COMPANY, EST. 1935
“A Little Piece of Italy in the Novamund”
*
(Dr Lombardi’s note)
Pop music is all very well, but what about something from the old country, hmm? I don’t care what that flyer Bob found says, trying to find decent pizza here is harder than escaping from the ESD back in London was...and I want to know why!
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Extract from recorded lecture on “The Golden Age of Ratiocinic Fiction” by Will Barclay, recorded October 19th, 2020—
If there is any genre of literature which has consistently captured the imagination of the public in every nation since its inception, it is that which I have chosen to devote my own career to – that of ratiocinic fiction. This continuing appeal has stymied and upset literary critics ever since Peter Fitzhugh published The Melting Pot in 1885.[1] I’m not going to get into whether The Melting Pot was truly ‘the first’ ratiocinic story, or whether it counts as fiction as it’s based on a true investigation…we will leave that question for the pedants and their letter pages on Motext. (Audience chuckles) Yes, we all know about Chinese gong’an fiction these days. It’s probably true to say the basic concept of the ratiocinic challenge to the reader has been there ever since one of our Antediluvian ancestors hit another on the head with a rock and blamed it on a sword-toothed tiger (More chuckles) but Fitzhugh certainly codified the tropes and, dare I say it, ‘rules’ of the genre.
Yes, how the critics have hated us. I won’t read out any of my rejection letters or poor reviews. Besides, I dealt with their writers in the most mature and appropriate way possible; I murdered them. (More audience laughter) Well, that is to say, I wouldn’t examine the names of some of the victims that Dale Vaughn investigates too closely…but it’s not just me. Partly it’s the usual snobbery aimed at any form of literary exercise that is popular with those whom the critics see as riff-raff and beneath their notice, and in their ideal society wouldn’t be literate at all, leaving the written word to only its appointed high priests. (Murmurs) As you may gather, I feel strongly about this. Nor are we ratiocinic fiction writers alone. Look at the pulp sequents of the masked adventurers, and more recently the films based upon them, which we are confidently told is the downfall of our civilisation. Or the love-fantasy tales sneered at as repetitive and unrealistic. I could go on, but for once, I’m not being paid by the word. (Chuckles)
The critics try to give justifications for their arrogant dismissal of the ratiocinic genre. They opine that our fascination with ratiocinic stories, in all their forms, represent an atavistic and uncouth fascination with violence and evil. They point to the recurrent driving plot thread of murder that runs throughout our tales, admittedly to an unrealistic frequency – unless one’s setting is the street outside the Star and Rattlesnake just after the Philly Stags have won the Championship. (Audience chuckles) They claim that we writers, and our readers, represent nothing more than a modern, suppressed expression of the bloodthirsty tendency of our ancestors to cheer on public executions and bid for pieces of the bloodstained rope.
Perhaps so, and there are certainly stories which glory in blood and gore, as there always have been, back to the days of Gilgamesh. But how, then, do they explain the vast swathes of the ratiocinic genre that seem to shy away from depicting the very violence whose expression they use as their driving plot thread? What of the stories in which the dead body is the result of a subtle poisoning in a country home, in which every family member seems to have a motive? Those same critics may speak contradictively out of the other side of their mouth and call us out of touch with reality. They miss the point. We are not fond of murder as a plot point because we consider murder some delightful subject, as they contend. At most, we might argue that we are merely expressing a ‘what-if’ moment, that most people have threatened to kill a family member or friend in the heat of the moment, meaning nothing by it, and to ponder the consequences if they really carried through with such a threat.
But really, murder is popular among ratiocinic writers simply because it represents the ultimate, heinous crime whose perpetrator is justified, in his or her own mind, in any action to conceal their guilt. A man who steals, whether it be a loaf of bread in the street or a million imps from a pension fund, must at some point make a judgement of whether it is best to continue a futile attempt to escape the police or to simply submit. And our story comes to a premature end, as it does with other lesser crimes. Conversely, for the murderer the only possible legal fate is life imprisonment or, historically, the rope. He will do anything to escape that fate. Importantly, it also locks him into a decaying path of descent. Morally, his first crime may be as justifiable as any crime can be; the slaying of a blackmailer who tormented him or a rival who implicated his innocent self in some other crime, perhaps. And yet we see again and again, in fiction and reality, the superficially ‘good’ man who is soon killing again and again in a desperate and futile attempt to cover up his original crime, all thought of morality forgotten. When the first murder is committed, something breaks inside our moral compass, and though on the outside we may look unchanged, inside we are no longer completely human. (Audience murmurs) I know that sort of sentiment can sound evocative of Societism, but it is very much also the justification of law and order in the nations, and the rules that underpin our civilisation.
Furthermore, in any other crime the victim is a witness, unless one adopts increasingly contrived plot devices such as having him conveniently sunk in a coma for the duration of the case. A murder victim is the purest expression of a mystery. We might not even know whom he is, or where he came from. Perhaps the body is found in an unexpected place. A packing case in the Lost Property at Empire Station, for example. Yes, sadly, that was based on a real case. (Murmurs) Maybe the body has all identifying marks carefully removed, and our forensic expert must astonish the police by identifying the victim regardless. Or our patient, plodding police detective may find the killer by sheer volume of work, eliminating all possibilities until only the truth remains. Or our hard-bitten rubbersole private investigator might begin a series of unlikely but exciting encounters with the gang secretly behind the killing.[2] As you can see, the storytelling possibilities are endless.
Finally, of course, ratiocinic fiction is unique – or at least it was, until some recent experiments in other genres – in that it is interactive. The reader is not merely experiencing a story, but pitting their wits against the author, trying to solve the mystery before the detective can. The best writers are those who make the reader think they have solved it, offer some parts which the reader was indeed correct about, but then pull the rug out from under them and reveal a twist – without, and this is crucial, that twist seeming unrealistic or pulled out of nowhere. If my readers are kicking themselves afterwards and cursing that they missed that clue on page 79, rather than calling me a hack who just makes stuff up as he goes along, I reckon I’ve done my job right. (Audience chuckles)
But enough about me and Dale Vaughn. I’m here to talk about the Golden Age of Ratiocinic Fiction, that is to say, the Third Wave, which was a long one and took place in the Second Interbellum between the Black Twenties and the Sunrise War, the Electric Circus age as some call it. A brief note on the terminology. The First Wave was, of course, that one kickstarted by The Melting Pot, where we got the birth of many of our most iconic and celebrated detectives. Carlo Matteucci, obviously; Dujardin, Macavity, Astrid Hjelje, Harris, López, and, of course, Always Wright. Mary Hill, Mary Bower as she became, wasn’t just one of the first big female writers of ratiocinic stories, important a claim to fame though that is. With the Always Wright stories, she was the first to introduce the world to the potential that New York City had as a setting for those mysteries.
New York had always had a night watch system since it was founded as New Amsterdam way back in 1625. Almost two centuries later, in 1815, the Common Council created the Amsterdam and Long Island Provincial Police. This force was heavily controlled by the Patriot Tammanite secret society and often recruited from the new German immigrant communities following the Jacobin Wars, helping to control elections and suppress rivals. Sorry if I sound dry, copied this bit out of the encyclopaedia. (Audience chuckles) It was important for our history, as the Supremacist Party grew out of anger with this corrupt situation.[3] After Howden terrorists attacked the city in the Manhattan Massacre of 1851,[4] public anger and an ensuing inquiry eventually led to the reform of the police force. The modern New York Metropolitan Police were created in 1860 after the city was first allowed to expand to encompass the surrounding boroughs, and its remit has gradually increased over time.
The reason why I mention this is that as the NYMP grew less corrupt and more focused on keeping the peace, not merely protecting the interests of the powers that be, a gap in the market opened up. New York was one of the first cities where private investigators, or ’gators in common parlance, became a widespread and well-known phenomenon. Wheres the police would only go so far, gators would patiently work to retrieve kidnapped loved ones, prove the adultery of estranged spouses, and find stolen jewels – providing their pay was maintained, of course. Naturally, the police were not very happy about the presence of gators, but their popularity with certain parts of the upper classes meant that they survived, and a licensing system was introduced in 1879. Always Wright, or Jonas Wright to give him his proper name, wasn’t the first New York rubbersole in fiction, but Mary Hill made him a nationwide, a worldwide, phenomenon.
That was the First Wave of ratiocinic fiction, cut short, of course, by the Pandoric War. The Second Wave took place in the First Interbellum – confused yet? (Audience laughter) There are plenty of revisionists today who’ll defend the Second Wave, and more power to them, but I go with the consensus that it doesn’t hold a candle to the Third or First. Too many gimmicky and derivative authors, reinventing the wheel with a new spin on it. You get stuff like A. P. Wellman’s The Quister Detective from 1909, all about an investigator who never leaves his home and solves all his crimes on the quister through mental logic alone. Fine, until you realise it’s the exact same plot as Françoise Bouvard’s The Gentleman in the Tavern from 1892, just with the quister gimmick instead of a narrator verbally bringing the clues to him. The Second Wave is full of that stuff. The best thing you can say about it is that it did start to broaden the kinds of detective we saw. In the First Wave you could set a story in China, but it was written by a Scotsman and your protagonist had to be a white outsider like Macavity. In the Second Wave we did get things like like Xu Chunxian’s Judge Bao period stories, a modern reimagining of the old Chinese gong’an genre I mentioned. To be honest, I do not find Xu’s prose very compelling – maybe it’s just the translation – but those sorts of works were an important ‘first’. Others in a similar category include Basavourage Patille’s Les nuits maisuriennes series and Belle Yorke’s Adventures of Jagun Kwaku.[5] There are many others I could mention, but we must move on to the Third Wave.
The Third Wave is called the Golden Age for a reason. It’s when writers really began to refine their craft, taking the best ideas from the earlier waves whilst quietly dropping or deconstructing the more questionable ones. Generally, if you’ve heard of a ratiocinic author or series from before the 1970s, it’ll be either one of the biggest names from the First Wave or, more probably, a Third Wave example. Even though there had been plenty of Matteucci copycats in the First Wave, it was the Third Wave that saw a real increase in the volume of ratiocinic fiction. As always, we remember the good examples – and even then, there are some forgotten gems – but forget the large quantity of derivative dross published at the time. Memory is like a sundial; it measures only the sunlit hours.
You’re probably expecting me to start with Jeanette Quentin. (Small reaction from audience) Well, there is a reason why Madame Quentin is rightly known as La reine du crime in French-speaking lands. Even in days when translations were considered inherently suspicious, readers here and around the world have continued to devour her books. Her best known stories are those involving the retired Irish chief of police, Ruairí Ó Caoimh, the man with the carrotty-red hair whose name no-one in France can either spell or pronounce – which unfortunately included Quentin’s publishers (Audience laughter) – and whose genial sagacity is shattered only when someone mistakes him for an Englishman, as they invariably do. Ó Caoimh, or O’Keeffe if I can anglicise it without being burned at the stake, was a very versatile vehicle for Quentin. He began literary life in 1930 with sensationalist plots concerning unfinished business from the recent war. However, Quentin soon hit her stride with mysteries set in anonymous, superficially peaceful rural French villages, where the locals were at each others’ throats behind the scenes and O’Keeffe’s retirement is interrupted as he must solve the latest murder. But Quentin was also able to space out these tales, and reinvent the character, by adding flashback cases from Quentin’s days on the force in Ireland, along with overseas visits to Bisnaga and Pérousie.
Yes, I could spend a long time talking about O’Keeffe and Quentin’s other, lesser-known, detective protagonists. Or indeed about the many authors who copied her formula, some of whom managed to graduate to more original creations of their own. But I’m a New Yorker who writes New York mysteries, mysteries that, I will freely acknowledge, owe a lot to those who have come before me. I’ve already talked about Mary Hill and her detective Always Wright creating the first New York of the mystery novel. But, as you probably know, their trailblazing efforts merely paved the way for the man whom I consider to be the greatest ratiocinic author of all time: Edward ‘Slim’ Havemeyer.
When Slim Havemeyer turned forty in 1930, no-one would have guessed that he’d be the next big thing in ratiocinic fiction. He was a banker, and a successful one, who had built himself up from humble roots to the point that he could choose to retire early with a sizeable fortune.[6] His brother Peter was a journalist, and Edward had begun writing himself when Peter needed a few additional items for features pages which he maintained. Biographers aren’t quite sure how he made the leap from this to pursuing fiction as a retirement hobby, but he did. Ratiocinic fiction wasn’t his first choice of genre, and The Kitchen Knife wasn’t even his first ratiocinic story – but it was the one that caught the public eye and took the bookshops by storm.
Going back to read The Kitchen Knife today is invariably a different experience to that which those first readers had back in 1931. As far as those readers were concerned, Havemeyer’s protagonist was the rubbersole detective Harold Archer, a hardbitten former NYMP copper and private investigator who’s trying to get to the bottom of the mysterious murder of the owner of Rosetti’s restaurant. In the course of his investigation, Archer is intrigued by the contributions of Marco Barone (slight reaction from audience), a chef formerly employed by the dead man. Barone rapidly proves to have a lot more depth of intelligence than initial impressions suggested, and Archer – and the reader – oscillates back and forth between hanging on his words of insight about the case, and suspecting Barone himself of being the killer. (Another audience reaction) Exactly. You know and I know that Marco Barone is the real hero of Havemeyer’s stories and Archer is merely his narrative amanuensis, a way for us to be astonished right along with him rather than being able to see into Barone’s head. But back when that first book came out, everyone was kept guessing right up to the last pages.
Havemeyer was promptly commissioned to write a sequel, and then a series. Initially, he was carefully mysterious about Barone’s past and just why had found himself in New York, then hardly a city with many Italian immigrants. Maybe this was a deliberate tactic to string out readers’ curiosity and Havemeyer had always planned out the answer, but I strongly suspect he didn’t know himself at the time.
No; the Barone series was always popular, but what turned it into a real American classic was six books in and the publication of Belteshazzar in 1944…
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Extract from recorded lecture on “The Romulan Enigma” by Dx Giulia Scerra and Anthony Strachan, recorded October 24th, 2020—
In 1926, for most Americans Italy was an unknown.[7] Even though these continents of the Novamund were discovered by an Italian, that has rarely been a part of the, ah, historical narrative taught in schools here.[8] It is not true, of course, to say that there were no Italians in the Empire before 1926, that would be a foolish lie of propagandists, yet it is frequently repeated! We have always been a part of the American story, but our voices became louder and more numerous after 1926, and there will always be some who find that threatening. I assure you that, no matter what certain films may have given you the impression of, I am not a member of the Camorra.[9] (Slightly uncertain audience laughter)
Thank you, Doctrix Scerra, I assure you, nobody was thinking that… (Coughs) Exaggerated though that claim may be, it is true to say that the vast majority of Americans in 1926 had never met or seen an Italian, except perhaps in newspaper asimcons or in films at the odeon. Italy was an exotic place on the far side of the world. People in Drakesland, for instance, were more likely to have met a Yapontsi than an Italian. (Audience murmurs) Italy was a cobelligerent of the Empire in the Black Twenties, and we dutifully hung up her flag alongside ours as we celebrated the victories of her rocket missiles against the Russians. (More murmurs) But we knew very little about the country.
But all of that changed in 1926. The Romulan takeover of Italy is not well understood outside the country, you understand. Precious few inside the country even know, and there is a reticence to ask our grandparents who remember the last years of the regime. Every family has someone whom they suspect of working for the Consulate. And so, ai, even in death, Veraldi and his foul sons continue to strangle our freedom.
Yes, yes, Doctrix. Part of what is not understood, as you correctly say, is what the Romulan regime was actually like. It has been called ‘the first modern dictatorship’ by Antoine Pasquier, who says it was the template for more familiar dictatorial states like Panchala, bringing the ideas of men like Lisieux (Audience murmur) into the modern age. Using technology and communications to realise the idea of the personality cult to a level that, yes, Lisieux could never have dreamed.
Sì, sì. I do not entirely agree with Professor Pasquier’s view…
No, nor do I, I was just say—
There is some truth to the idea that Ram Kumar and the like copied some ideas from the Romulans, yes. But the Romulans were different. They were—
I was just about to get to that, Doctrix, yes. (Coughs) There is a simple but radical thesis that unlocks the secrets of the Romulans. Put simply, they were National Societists. (Audience reaction)
Sì. ‘Societism in one country’, you might put it. And I would say, aha, that is una contraddizione assurda, no? How can one have Societism in one country when Societism is all about trying to destroy the boundaries between countries and deny their existence?
It is true, on the face of it, it makes no sense. But how many self-contradictory ideologies have we seen attempts to enact in the real world? No, in my view Romulanism – if such a term can be said to exist – was influenced by the Combine, and especially by Italy’s neighbour Danubia. To the later Romulans, it was not about trying to unite the world under the black flag. But it was about the romantic revival of Roman institutions—
Or what they thought were Roman institutions.
—yes – and promoting the Roman idea that anyone, regardless of their birth, could become a Roman citizen.
Providing they spoke Latin and adopted Roman culture, of course.
Yes. But one could argue that the Romulans were simply more honest Societists, especially the kind of Combine Societists we had before the Silent Revolution, when they were often pushing a slightly modified version of Platinean culture on the Nusantara or Africa. The Romulans wanted to rebuild the Roman Empire, not necessarily by literally reconquering the Mediterranean—
Though some did.
—yes – but by recreating the idea of Roman citizenship. Along with some other ideas like the legion of the proletariat under arms…
But this brings us to an important point. You did say ‘later’ Romulans, and you asked whether Romulanism can be said to exist as a concept. That is right. In the beginning, in 1926, things were quite different.
Yes…why don’t you go into more detail, Doctrix. (Sound of gulping glass of water)
Grazie. In 1926 there was an organisation called the Legion of Romulus, made up primarily of angry wounded veterans and bereaved family members. They felt that Antonio Orsini’s government has called upon Italians to fight on in the misery of the Polish front throughout the plague years, that Italian ingenuity has delivered the war-winning wonder weapon that had finally broken the Russian lines, and that now Italy was being betrayed by France and her allies. (Audience murmurs) I do not say that there was not some justice to some of their claims. It was clear that Italy would be cheated of any significant gains for her years of blood, sweat and tears. And the people were angry.
It remains a very contentious subject in Italy today whether the Legion of Romulus was funded by the Russians behind the scenes. Perhaps not at first, but later on…
Sì. The people demanded reforms. It was not merely la Legione at that time, but many groups, including the mainstream cobrist Alliance Party. It was a wave of anger, blaming, how do you say, the establishment for the betrayal of the courage and perseverance of the Italian people. For the first time, we felt like one people, not four states – made of many more historical states – smashed together by the whims of happenstance. Formerly, only the King had united us, but now we had united ourselves through our anger. We demanded universal suffrage and for a single national parliament, not merely ministers selected from the four national ones. And we got our way.
Yes. But the Legion, under its early figurehead Colonel Malpezzi, found itself in the electride light by a strong propaganda campaign. It could appeal to many of the new voters you mentioned, Doctrix. Malpezzi might be an officer, but with his pinned-up sleeve and eyepatch he was every family’s wounded husband, son, comrade.
Yes, yes, and he, or his shadowy backers and lieutenants who really ran the Legion, they had a simple, how do you say, prescrizione, prescription, to tackle Italy’s woes. Embrace the spirit of Romulus, of new beginnings. As Romulus slew Remus, ruthlessly turn on the French before they could betray Italy.
They even demanded part of Provence be handed over at one point—
Yes, they were not realistic, some of them. But that might have been only for internal consumption. As I was saying, a simple – prescription. Turf out the aristocrats who, they said, had had their feet up while our people had suffered and died in war and plague. Turn on the leeches who had profited from our misery.
That was sometimes—
Yes, it was sometimes a, ah, eufemismo for the Jews or other undesirables, I am sorry to say. A big, simple message that pointed the finger of blame elsewhere. The people, enough of them, embraced it, and at the election…
I should say that the Legion of Romulus was never actually the name of the political party, though the two are often confused by people outside Italy.
No, you are right. The political wing of the Legion was the, ah, Partito d’azione, the Action Party. That is a core part of what you called Romulanism, the, ah, fetish of action. Doing something is always better than doing nothing.
A simple, dangerous message, uncomfortably close to Jacobinism, but one which the public lapped up after years of misery and stagnation in their political classes.
Yes. Though even we often treat the Legion and the Action Party as, ah, synonymous, the fact that they were distinct helped the party’s appeal early on. The Legion was something from everyday life, not an, uh, ivory tower of politicians isolated from the real world. If they suggested you should vote for the Action Party, that meant more to these new voters than politicians appealing directly.
Even though it was often the same people with two different hats. Yes. The Action Party didn’t win a majority in 1926, but together with the Alliance Party…
Yes. The Frenchwoman, Signora Mercier, she guessed from the start that the Alliance Party would only be, ah, useful idiots for the Action Party. She was right. The fools thought that they could control them. That skilled, experienced politicians like themselves could run rings around the Action Party.
They soon realised their mistake. They were sidelined, and in 1928 Salvo Parrini died under – ah – questionable circumstances. The, er, finding of his body in such a way helped discredit the Alliance further and the Action Party were able to assimilate large chunks of its former supporters.
Yes. By 1931, the Action Party had gained sufficient dominance that they were able to influence substantial chunks of the electoral process, and gained a majority in their own right.
But we shouldn’t forget that the Romulans were genuinely popular with some people, especially early on.
No, no, it is true. Their cult of centralisation, when every Italian was used to the idea that things worked differently in the next town, the next valley. The war on corruption and crime. In time they fell victim to it themselves, of course, but in the short term.
Yes. The investment in railways and roadways, the financing schemes that allowed people to purchase houses and mobiles in instalments…perhaps another sign of copying from the Societist playbook.
There were also reasons to oppose them, beyond their brutality and lack of respect for free and fair elections. Many people disliked their pushing of a Roman-focused curriculum in schools and their censorship of film, newspapers and Photel. They were also conspicuously wasting money on rocket experiments that did not go anywhere, at least for the first couple of decades. And, of course, there was the Tunis War.
But that is to get ahead of ourselves.
True, but it began early on. It was an easy territorial win, when it had looked as though Orsini’s government would leave Italy with less territory than she started the Anni neri with. King Carlo had shut down Veraldi’s attempts to send troops to assist the republicans in Spain, so he moved on to another target. Some, especially in Naples where the Romulans had lower levels of support, were still bitter about Tunis having broken away in 1869 and then joined the Ottoman Empire. But now the Ottoman Empire was split in two and the Moroccans had already laid claim to Algiers. In 1929 the first Italian troops secured the city of Tunis, then over the next two years the whole of the old colony was reclaimed. We were left with vague desert borders with Moroccan Algiers and Alexandrine Tripolitania. For the next thirty years, every time the government wanted to distract from some problem at home, they would simply whip up a border conflict with one or the other nation and conscript another generation of young men to send to the front. There was never any actual goal or intention behind it. It was simply a way to control the political narrative.
Yes, and so this party that was founded by angry wounded veterans ensured that there would be a never-ending supply of angry wounded veterans in the future. (Audience reaction) I am not entirely joking, as some of the Romulans had the ideological belief that a generation untested by war would be a soft, decadent and failing one. Almost the opposite of Societism in that sense, a reaction against it.
In other way, though, you were right. The obsession with Roman history, the teaching of Latin in schools…there are parallels. But as time went on and the structure of Romulan society, based on fear and conformity, became more embedded, it was sycophancy that got rewarded, not courage.
Yes, I’ve heard it described as the Romulans having raced through Roman history like coffee-chugging athletes putting on a play depicting everything from Romulus to Romulus Augustulus. (A few slightly confused chuckles from the audience) Corruption set in early on, as you said. Only ten years after the Romulans took power, there was an attitude that it was merely enough to want to be like the Romans, and wishful thinking would do the rest. There was a halfhearted and piecemeal attitude towards plans and projects.
Sì. With exceptions like the continuing rocketry programme. But yes. Look at 1936. The Greeks take advantage of the war between the two Ottoman splinters to try to retake their mainland, the Romulans promise support, and then it never materialises.
Given the Russians were unable to get through Danubia to assist the Greeks and an Italian intervention alone would not have served Russian interests, the theory is that this proves that the Romulans were already dancing to Petrograd’s tune by this point.
Perhaps. By 1942, the people were starting to chafe under Romulan rule. It had become clear to all that the elections were being rigged. The Shock of 1934 had not affected Italy much, but then – again, perhaps to serve Russian ends – the government supported the implementation of the Passau System and the Gold Standard. This disadvantaged Neapolitan agriculturalists in particular over the ensuing years, leading to a wave of immigration overseas…
Yes, we’ll come back to that. You were talking about 1942.
Scusa, yes. Relations with the monarchy had become strained. In 1940 the Romulans had wanted to try to invade Sicily, of all places, only to be shut down by the ailing King Carlo. Battle lines were being drawn. In 1942, the King died and Prince Giuseppe came to the throne. That vile Veraldi, who was starting to lose his own grip on the party, felt he had to do something to impress the angrier, younger men in the party and reassert the Romulans' grip on Italy. Behind closed doors, Giuseppe had been a vocal critic of the regime. Veraldi audaciously organised and launched, the following year, what was named – by the Romulans themselves – La rivoluzione lucreziana.
The Lucretian Revolution, yes, named for the Rape of Lucretia which had led to the overthrow of the Roman monarchy in about 510 BC, though the history is half-legendary. I really cannot emphasise enough the point that the Romulans were – ah – today we might say interthesps.[10] (Audience laughter) No, I mean it. As we said, it was half wishful thinking to them. Playing at being Romans like children.
Except real people got killed.
Yes, yes they did. The Lucretian Revolution was far from bloodless. Veraldi accused the monarchy of being the sticking point that had held Italy back, blaming them for the fact that the Romulans had not been able to deliver all they had promised.
King Giuseppe did have supporters, of course, but the climate of fear that Veraldi and the Romulans had created worked against them. No-one was sure if a family member would not betray them to the regime. Children had been indoctrinated by the Young Action groups promoting ‘traditional’ outdoors activities like building miniature Roman forts and walls. There and then, Veraldi seemed to have more power than the King himself, and in the alienistic moment, he was able to seize absolute power. The King fled into exile in France.
If things had gone differently, he might have ended up as King of Pérousie rather than Francesco of Venice, perhaps?
You will have your little joke – our King would never have abandoned us like that.
Aydub. So now Romulan control over Italy looked absolute.
Sì, Veraldi began the bizarre policies that the Romulans have become most infamous for. Other parties were banned and the Romulan eagle appeared on the national flag.
A few years later, Party and national flags were the same. No distinction. Loyalty to the party, to the movement, was treated as synonymous with patriotism.
Sì. They abolished Parliament and recreated the Roman Senate and Consuls – though Veraldi, and later Garavaglia of course – held the real power behind the symbolic figures. Elections actually became a little freer in one way, but they were organised on a strange modern recreation of the old tribal assemblies. Constituencies were no longer geographic, but were based on vocation, with a particular cult of the businessman.[11]
Which is emblematic of later Romulanism, of course, and well-nigh contradictory to its origins, where the Romulans had railed against businessmen who had grown fat in the war while others had suffered and died.
Exactly. This is why it is so hard to pin down what the Romulans actually believed or what ‘Romulanism’ is. Another example. They began as a Catholic-supremacist group, but after the Lucretian Revolution there were actual attempts to revive Roman paganism, as absurd as that sounds, and the Pope in Rome was put under pressure to endorse the regime. Jansenism abroad got another boost, as it had when the old Popes were under Spanish pressure to deny the existence of the UPSA. Increasingly, Papal pronouncements were seen as untrustworthy.
But that’s another story. Veraldi died in 1949 and was succeeded by Garavaglia, one of the businessmen we were just discussing, as the real power behind the rotating consuls. A combination of the economic good times and the successful launch of Dedalo-1 a year later, which shocked and impressed the world, managed to keep the Romulans in control of Italy until the Crash of 1956. But as you were saying, many Italians voted with their feet and fled the country.
Yes. Emigration was not entirely new to us, of course, but this was on another level. Neapolitans in particular were looking for economic opportunities elsewhere, but many others left too out of sheer fear of the regime and its ‘praetorian’ secret police.
And, for the first time, especially after Washborough’s social reforms completing the de facto emancipation of Catholics, the Empire was a top destination for them.[12] Soon, Italians would no longer be a mysterious folk on the other side of the planet, especially for those who lived in New York City. The Bowery would soon be a place where the Italian languages were heard more than English – or German.[13]
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Extract from recorded lecture on “The Golden Age of Ratiocinic Fiction” by Will Barclay, recorded October 19th, 2020—
Now, Belteshazzar was timely. Slim Havemeyer wrote it rapidly and made some accurate, some might say cynical, guesses about where Manhattan society was headed. It debuted in 1944 just as the issues he had written about where coming to a head. The Italian King had just been overthrown and the Covenant System was in the news across the world, hinting that the Empire was a more favourable destination for Catholic immigrants than ever before. Havemeyer accurately predicted that the first groups of Italians arriving in the Bowery were only the crest of the wave, and began reshaping his Barrone-Archer novels accordingly. By the time Belteshazzar hit the shelves, the New York papers were full of stories – some true, some histrionically exaggerated – about the impact that hundreds, thousands of Italian immigrants were having on the Bowery and the city as a whole. Tensions were rising, and a powder keg of anti-immigration sentiment was about to blow. Into this situation stepped Havemeyer, like an army sapper ready to defuse a bomb.
The title Belteshazzar has been confusing to readers and critics. In the 1940s, many people still associated names from the Book of Daniel with the Wragg family from Carolina. (Audience murmurs) But Havemeyer’s real meaning was an allusion to the idea that Italians entering the Empire were faced with the same choices of Daniel. The prophet had been given the Babylonian name Belteshazzar, risen to an important position in the Babylonian government, but then had been faced with demands that he set aside his faith in God to adopt Babylonian ways. How could the Italians square the circle of trying to assimilate with an, often hostile, American population without losing their culture, identity and core beliefs? In case some readers had not got the point, Havemeyer’s follow-up on similar themes would be titled By the Rivers of Babylon.
I won’t go into too much detail about the plot of Belteshazzar, both because you should read it yourself and because, unfortunately, Photel, film and Motoscopy adaptations have proven so popular that you probably already know the twists. Suffice to say that they shocked the people of New York and beyond, and yes, perhaps Havemeyer – through Barone and Archer – made some of them rethink their prejudices about their new neighbours with their loud chatter, their hand movements and their popery. (Murmurs) I am quoting from a newspaper of the time, in case you were wondering.
The plot of By the Rivers of Babylon underlines the point, featuring Barone having to unearth an ancestral crime from the early nineteenth century which is secretly at the root of a more recent one, despite Archer’s scepticism. The earlier crime involves a German family whose patriarch is now an important figure in New York business and politics, but at that time were poor immigrants like the same Italians the character is now railing against. The hypocrisy is so obvious that Barone never even needs to bring it up. Again, Havemeyer’s work was thought-provoking. Ratiocinic fiction is looked down on because it’s popular, but that very popularity means it has the opportunity to read a wider audience and change the world, as no pontificating treatise read by three chaps with monocles ever could. (Audience chuckles)
Not everyone approved of Havemeyer’s message, of course. He received death threats and was un-invited from a number of prestigious New York social clubs, which he wore as a badge of honour; many of them have been forced to apologise, to him and the Italians, since his death. Most amusing, in a dark way, was the article in the Supremacist-supporting Manhattan Messenger which complained about the use of ‘politics’ in Havemeyer’s books, and why do detectives need to be Italian now? (Some uncertain laughs from audience) Well, exactly. Havemeyer himself wrote a rebuttal in the New York Register pointing out that the very first ratiocinic detective, Carlo Matteuci in The Melting Pot, was Italian! (More raucous audience laughter) And, of course, he had been based on a very real Italian detective in California, Aurelio Melloni, who had solved the Vixen’s Jewels case.
It would be wrong to suggest that Havemeyer – or Barone – was the sole Central Character who brought about a shift in popular attitudes towards Italian immigrants. That was brought about by the tireless work of many individuals, both Italians and homegrown Americans, who fended off the scaremongering of the Supremacists (Audience murmurs) – yes, I’ll say it, and other groups. Those who combatted misinformation, and ensured that those genuine criminals among the honest majority were brought to justice and not allowed to blacken the name of the Italian diaspora as a whole. In that case, I think it is fair to attribute the popularisation that kind of nuance to Havemeyer’s books and their film adaptations. Barone fought many fictitious Italian villains, as I said, while also saving innocent Italians from being the victims of prejudice or being scapegoated for crimes they did not commit. There was a sea change in attitudes, especially in New York City itself. The fact that we can enjoy Manhattan pittsa, or should I say pizza (A few audience chuckles) today, we can owe in part to the writings of Havemeyer.
No – despite some opposition from dunderheads, the real opinions of the people of New York about Havemeyer became clear in 1948, when he got into trouble over the novel The Poulter Heist. By this point, he had established the formula that would characterise the mid to late Barone-Archer novels. We would see everything from Archer’s point of view, but when inevitably stumped, he would go to Rosetti’s to see Barone, who by this point had graduated to the position of head chef and owner of the restaurant (helped by the fees from a few cases). Barone would make an expansive apology for being unable to leave his kitchen, of course, but would solve the case purely by giving Archer instructions and having him bring suspects and witnesses to dine in the restaurant where he could probe them with questions. By this point, the changing demographics of Manhattan were frequently referenced, with Barone often acting to defend the cause of poor Italians and refusing to charge them anything. Later on, Barone – whose ageing remarkably slowed down, as is common in such books – would also face a Camorra nemesis, Pietro Russo, who is trying to export his criminal organisation to New York. Barone is portrayed as having had run-ins with the Camorra in his mysterious past life, but his contempt for the Romulans is such that he admits to a little sympathy with Russo simply for being their opponent. Romulan Praetorian agents also occasionally appear as villains, usually as aniseed rags[14] to disguise the real perpetrator. A recurring element is Barone’s dismissal of the Praetorians when Archer suggests them, saying that no supporter of the Romulan regime has ‘an ounce of the brains’ needed to commit the crime in question. Needless to say, Havemeyer’s books were banned in Italy for years, and there is even evidence that the Romulans may have tried to have him assassinated.
I digress – back to 1948. For The Poulter Heist, Havemeyer concocted a plot involving a seemingly-impossible robbery from the fictional Poulter’s Bank, which Barone, of course, has to solve. I would say it’s not one of Havemeyer’s best books, but it’s inevitably been adapted a lot just because of the controversy. Richmond Bank, which Havemeyer had worked for as a clerk, sued him, claiming he had based Poulter’s on itself and given away secrets of the security system used there. This was a fair accusation, frankly; Havemeyer was often careless in using things from his own life in the books without disguising them sufficiently. His own defence was a simple retort that he had worked as Richmond twenty years before, and if they had not updated their security system in that time, they had done themselves more damage by telling criminals how lax they were than he ever could.
The police and the judicial system of the Confederation of New York, especially those based in New York City, were generally antagonistic to Havemeyer. The police were rarely portrayed very positively in the Barone-Archer books, and there were suspicions that Havemeyer had used thinly-disguised versions of real police investigators and judges in them. However, at the so-called ‘trial of the century’, the jury unanimously voted to acquit, much to the judge’s anger. Havemeyer, shy by nature, greeted a crowd of people protesting his indictment outside the Supreme Court of Judicature. He was signing books for so long that he joked it would have taken less time to do the prison sentence.
It soon became clear that Richmond’s case had badly backfired, to the point that the bank’s own position was imperilled by Havemeyer-reading account holders withdrawing funds and closing their accounts in protest. The board had to request an emergency recapitalisation loan from the Confederal government in order to prevent a run on the bank. Though Richmond’s did survive until a merger in 1965, it never regained its former position in the hierarchy of New York banks. Furthermore, while the Barone-Archer books had already been popular across the Empire, the trial drew attention and ironically began to popularise them across the globe, as people wondered what all the fuss was about. Translations, many versions in those days before ASN authorisation, began to appear.
And, of course, some leaked over the border into Romulan Italy. The great irony was that, while Italian-language versions were rare – there are many languages in Italy and there would be little incentive to sell them in any other country in Europe – the Romulans found them overwhelmed with various Latin and Latin-related language versions. Some had been aimed at Danubia, but others were for illicit smuggling into the UPSA; even the Societists enjoyed ratiocinic fiction, and some opined that the message of Havemeyer’s books was in line with their beliefs – which it wasn’t, of course!
But the irony, as I said, was that few in Italy would have been able to read these if the Romulans had not invested so much money in teaching children Latin…
[1] See Part #219 in Volume V.
[2] ‘Rubbersole’, like ‘gumshoe’ in OTL, refers to private investigators wearing shoes with thick, near-silent rubber soles for surreptitiously tailing a suspect or infiltrating a place by night.
[3] See Part #169 in Volume IV. The ‘Amsterdam and Long Island’ terminology reflects the fact that New York City’s municipal government did not yet cover all the areas the Patriots wanted the police to control, so the police were set up on a provincial basis.
[4] See Part #192 in Volume IV.
[5] Basouvarage Patille was a Bisnagi author (note the Frenchified spelling of the name, which would be Basavaraj Patil in OTL) and his stories are set in Mysore city (Maisur in French). Belle Yorke was a female Freedish author whose protagonist is a half-Ashanti, half-Freedish jagun (Company soldier) who ends up investigating crimes during his postings across Guinea.
[6] Havemeyer is from the same Havemeyer (Hoevemeyer) family which emigrated to New York City in 1799 in OTL; in TTL, they have not been as successful (the OTL Havemeyers built a powerful sugar empire and became politically influential) but Barclay is slightly exaggerating how humble Edward Havemeyer’s background was.
[7] Besides the differences in immigration discussed here, Italy’s nineteenth century profile in the ENA was lower than OTL’s USA because of the way Italy was united in TTL; there is no charismatic, internationally-recognised figure like Giuseppe Garibaldi. Probably the most famous contemporary Italian to Americans would be the wit (and later Grand Duke of Tuscany), Giovanni Tressino.
[8] The OTL early United States had a tendency to promote Columbus as a kind of spiritual meta-founder to create a narrative for America’s history that was not dependent on British colonisation (hence the number of cities, towns, institutions etc named Columbia or Columbus at that time). In TTL this is not the case, and Columbus remains an ‘othered’ figure in the ENA, associated only with the history of the Spanish or former Spanish-speaking parts of the Americas.
[9] There are multiple Italian criminal organisations in both OTL and TTL. In OTL the Sicilian Mafia is the one whose name has become generically used for any criminal organisation, but in TTL it is the Camorra from Campania in the old Kingdom of Naples. This is partly because Sicily is simply not part of Italy in TTL, but it’s worth noting that the Camorra was also the well-known and -feared one in the English-speaking world at one point in OTL around the turn of the twentieth century. Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola have a lot to answer for.
[10] ‘Interthesp’ short for Interactive Thespian, is a term describing a practitioner of a recent storytelling innovation in TTL. In this contexts it is used in a similarly dismissive sense that we might describe a doctrinaire communist obsessed with decades-old factional debates (say) as a ‘political LARPer’.
[11] The Romulan ‘recreation’ of the Roman system is actually greatly simplified, as the Romans had three different kinds of assemblies electing different offices.
[12] In the nineteenth century, Italian emigration in general was at a somewhat lower level than OTL (partly because Neapolitans were not as economically disadvantaged by the way Italy was united in TTL – or by the Electrum Standard as they were the Gold Standard – and Sicily is not part of Italy at all). Those Italians who did leave usually chose the UPSA as their first destination (Platinea in particular, like Argentina in OTL, always had some ancestral ties to Italy) and Pérousie or California as alternatives. The ENA was seen as too anti-Catholic by most, although some Italians did settle there, mostly in Mount-Royal or Wolfeston. So prior to the 1920s, New York City’s Italian population was very small, unlike OTL.
[13] The Bowery is an area of New York City (in both OTL and TTL) whose name is based originally on an anglicisation of the original Dutch name bouwerie, meaning farm. In TTL the term is used to take in a larger area and is more or less synonymous with OTL’s ‘Lower East Side’. In both timelines the area is associated with immigrant communities and turnover, with earlier waves of immigration leading to wealthier families who move out and are replaced with newer waves. In TTL, prior to the Black Twenties it was associated mostly with Danubian and Catholic German immigrants (rather than mostly Chinese, Italians and Eastern European Jews like OTL) distinct from the Protestant German community in Madgeborough (OTL Vinegar Hill, Brooklyn, associated with Irish immigrants) – that is, the poorer German Protestants who were not able to assimilate into New York high society like their wealthier cousins. As discussed here, from the late 1920s onwards Italians began to displace the Danubians and Catholic Germans who were able to move on to wealthier areas of the city. Note that Ashkenazi Jewish emigration to the Americas in general is lower than OTL due to the existence of the fairly Jewish-friendly state of Poland up until the Pandoric War, and the fact that the Ottoman Empire is not seen as a state in irrevocable decline and remains a more favourable destination for Ashkenazim. Also, while New York is generally not any more (or less) hostile to Jews than OTL, there are other favourable destinations in the Americas such as Mount-Royal, California and (until recently) the UPSA. The general climate of antisemitism in many nations after the Pandoric War, though it faded over time, has also played a role in the destinations of the wave of Ashkenazi emigrants fleeing Poland after the Russian takeover in 1899. Crimea remains a popular destination for ‘angry young men’, with the Russians mostly remaining behind fortress walls in their military bases and proclaiming the legal fiction that they control the whole peninsula, rather than those bases plus a few linking roads.
[14] I.e. red herrings.
REAL MANHATTAN PITTSA!
Just like Toni’s Mama Giovanna made it!
“The miracle flat cheese pie with a thousand fillings”
Check Motext page 10K-441 for all our Fredericksburg and Halo locations!
Accept no substitues – THE FLYING PITTSA COMPANY, EST. 1935
“A Little Piece of Italy in the Novamund”
- Advertising poster and flyer seen on Valentine Street, Fredericksburg, ENA.
Photographed and transcribed by Sgt Bob Mumby, December 2020
Photographed and transcribed by Sgt Bob Mumby, December 2020
*
(Dr Lombardi’s note)
Pop music is all very well, but what about something from the old country, hmm? I don’t care what that flyer Bob found says, trying to find decent pizza here is harder than escaping from the ESD back in London was...and I want to know why!
*
Extract from recorded lecture on “The Golden Age of Ratiocinic Fiction” by Will Barclay, recorded October 19th, 2020—
If there is any genre of literature which has consistently captured the imagination of the public in every nation since its inception, it is that which I have chosen to devote my own career to – that of ratiocinic fiction. This continuing appeal has stymied and upset literary critics ever since Peter Fitzhugh published The Melting Pot in 1885.[1] I’m not going to get into whether The Melting Pot was truly ‘the first’ ratiocinic story, or whether it counts as fiction as it’s based on a true investigation…we will leave that question for the pedants and their letter pages on Motext. (Audience chuckles) Yes, we all know about Chinese gong’an fiction these days. It’s probably true to say the basic concept of the ratiocinic challenge to the reader has been there ever since one of our Antediluvian ancestors hit another on the head with a rock and blamed it on a sword-toothed tiger (More chuckles) but Fitzhugh certainly codified the tropes and, dare I say it, ‘rules’ of the genre.
Yes, how the critics have hated us. I won’t read out any of my rejection letters or poor reviews. Besides, I dealt with their writers in the most mature and appropriate way possible; I murdered them. (More audience laughter) Well, that is to say, I wouldn’t examine the names of some of the victims that Dale Vaughn investigates too closely…but it’s not just me. Partly it’s the usual snobbery aimed at any form of literary exercise that is popular with those whom the critics see as riff-raff and beneath their notice, and in their ideal society wouldn’t be literate at all, leaving the written word to only its appointed high priests. (Murmurs) As you may gather, I feel strongly about this. Nor are we ratiocinic fiction writers alone. Look at the pulp sequents of the masked adventurers, and more recently the films based upon them, which we are confidently told is the downfall of our civilisation. Or the love-fantasy tales sneered at as repetitive and unrealistic. I could go on, but for once, I’m not being paid by the word. (Chuckles)
The critics try to give justifications for their arrogant dismissal of the ratiocinic genre. They opine that our fascination with ratiocinic stories, in all their forms, represent an atavistic and uncouth fascination with violence and evil. They point to the recurrent driving plot thread of murder that runs throughout our tales, admittedly to an unrealistic frequency – unless one’s setting is the street outside the Star and Rattlesnake just after the Philly Stags have won the Championship. (Audience chuckles) They claim that we writers, and our readers, represent nothing more than a modern, suppressed expression of the bloodthirsty tendency of our ancestors to cheer on public executions and bid for pieces of the bloodstained rope.
Perhaps so, and there are certainly stories which glory in blood and gore, as there always have been, back to the days of Gilgamesh. But how, then, do they explain the vast swathes of the ratiocinic genre that seem to shy away from depicting the very violence whose expression they use as their driving plot thread? What of the stories in which the dead body is the result of a subtle poisoning in a country home, in which every family member seems to have a motive? Those same critics may speak contradictively out of the other side of their mouth and call us out of touch with reality. They miss the point. We are not fond of murder as a plot point because we consider murder some delightful subject, as they contend. At most, we might argue that we are merely expressing a ‘what-if’ moment, that most people have threatened to kill a family member or friend in the heat of the moment, meaning nothing by it, and to ponder the consequences if they really carried through with such a threat.
But really, murder is popular among ratiocinic writers simply because it represents the ultimate, heinous crime whose perpetrator is justified, in his or her own mind, in any action to conceal their guilt. A man who steals, whether it be a loaf of bread in the street or a million imps from a pension fund, must at some point make a judgement of whether it is best to continue a futile attempt to escape the police or to simply submit. And our story comes to a premature end, as it does with other lesser crimes. Conversely, for the murderer the only possible legal fate is life imprisonment or, historically, the rope. He will do anything to escape that fate. Importantly, it also locks him into a decaying path of descent. Morally, his first crime may be as justifiable as any crime can be; the slaying of a blackmailer who tormented him or a rival who implicated his innocent self in some other crime, perhaps. And yet we see again and again, in fiction and reality, the superficially ‘good’ man who is soon killing again and again in a desperate and futile attempt to cover up his original crime, all thought of morality forgotten. When the first murder is committed, something breaks inside our moral compass, and though on the outside we may look unchanged, inside we are no longer completely human. (Audience murmurs) I know that sort of sentiment can sound evocative of Societism, but it is very much also the justification of law and order in the nations, and the rules that underpin our civilisation.
Furthermore, in any other crime the victim is a witness, unless one adopts increasingly contrived plot devices such as having him conveniently sunk in a coma for the duration of the case. A murder victim is the purest expression of a mystery. We might not even know whom he is, or where he came from. Perhaps the body is found in an unexpected place. A packing case in the Lost Property at Empire Station, for example. Yes, sadly, that was based on a real case. (Murmurs) Maybe the body has all identifying marks carefully removed, and our forensic expert must astonish the police by identifying the victim regardless. Or our patient, plodding police detective may find the killer by sheer volume of work, eliminating all possibilities until only the truth remains. Or our hard-bitten rubbersole private investigator might begin a series of unlikely but exciting encounters with the gang secretly behind the killing.[2] As you can see, the storytelling possibilities are endless.
Finally, of course, ratiocinic fiction is unique – or at least it was, until some recent experiments in other genres – in that it is interactive. The reader is not merely experiencing a story, but pitting their wits against the author, trying to solve the mystery before the detective can. The best writers are those who make the reader think they have solved it, offer some parts which the reader was indeed correct about, but then pull the rug out from under them and reveal a twist – without, and this is crucial, that twist seeming unrealistic or pulled out of nowhere. If my readers are kicking themselves afterwards and cursing that they missed that clue on page 79, rather than calling me a hack who just makes stuff up as he goes along, I reckon I’ve done my job right. (Audience chuckles)
But enough about me and Dale Vaughn. I’m here to talk about the Golden Age of Ratiocinic Fiction, that is to say, the Third Wave, which was a long one and took place in the Second Interbellum between the Black Twenties and the Sunrise War, the Electric Circus age as some call it. A brief note on the terminology. The First Wave was, of course, that one kickstarted by The Melting Pot, where we got the birth of many of our most iconic and celebrated detectives. Carlo Matteucci, obviously; Dujardin, Macavity, Astrid Hjelje, Harris, López, and, of course, Always Wright. Mary Hill, Mary Bower as she became, wasn’t just one of the first big female writers of ratiocinic stories, important a claim to fame though that is. With the Always Wright stories, she was the first to introduce the world to the potential that New York City had as a setting for those mysteries.
New York had always had a night watch system since it was founded as New Amsterdam way back in 1625. Almost two centuries later, in 1815, the Common Council created the Amsterdam and Long Island Provincial Police. This force was heavily controlled by the Patriot Tammanite secret society and often recruited from the new German immigrant communities following the Jacobin Wars, helping to control elections and suppress rivals. Sorry if I sound dry, copied this bit out of the encyclopaedia. (Audience chuckles) It was important for our history, as the Supremacist Party grew out of anger with this corrupt situation.[3] After Howden terrorists attacked the city in the Manhattan Massacre of 1851,[4] public anger and an ensuing inquiry eventually led to the reform of the police force. The modern New York Metropolitan Police were created in 1860 after the city was first allowed to expand to encompass the surrounding boroughs, and its remit has gradually increased over time.
The reason why I mention this is that as the NYMP grew less corrupt and more focused on keeping the peace, not merely protecting the interests of the powers that be, a gap in the market opened up. New York was one of the first cities where private investigators, or ’gators in common parlance, became a widespread and well-known phenomenon. Wheres the police would only go so far, gators would patiently work to retrieve kidnapped loved ones, prove the adultery of estranged spouses, and find stolen jewels – providing their pay was maintained, of course. Naturally, the police were not very happy about the presence of gators, but their popularity with certain parts of the upper classes meant that they survived, and a licensing system was introduced in 1879. Always Wright, or Jonas Wright to give him his proper name, wasn’t the first New York rubbersole in fiction, but Mary Hill made him a nationwide, a worldwide, phenomenon.
That was the First Wave of ratiocinic fiction, cut short, of course, by the Pandoric War. The Second Wave took place in the First Interbellum – confused yet? (Audience laughter) There are plenty of revisionists today who’ll defend the Second Wave, and more power to them, but I go with the consensus that it doesn’t hold a candle to the Third or First. Too many gimmicky and derivative authors, reinventing the wheel with a new spin on it. You get stuff like A. P. Wellman’s The Quister Detective from 1909, all about an investigator who never leaves his home and solves all his crimes on the quister through mental logic alone. Fine, until you realise it’s the exact same plot as Françoise Bouvard’s The Gentleman in the Tavern from 1892, just with the quister gimmick instead of a narrator verbally bringing the clues to him. The Second Wave is full of that stuff. The best thing you can say about it is that it did start to broaden the kinds of detective we saw. In the First Wave you could set a story in China, but it was written by a Scotsman and your protagonist had to be a white outsider like Macavity. In the Second Wave we did get things like like Xu Chunxian’s Judge Bao period stories, a modern reimagining of the old Chinese gong’an genre I mentioned. To be honest, I do not find Xu’s prose very compelling – maybe it’s just the translation – but those sorts of works were an important ‘first’. Others in a similar category include Basavourage Patille’s Les nuits maisuriennes series and Belle Yorke’s Adventures of Jagun Kwaku.[5] There are many others I could mention, but we must move on to the Third Wave.
The Third Wave is called the Golden Age for a reason. It’s when writers really began to refine their craft, taking the best ideas from the earlier waves whilst quietly dropping or deconstructing the more questionable ones. Generally, if you’ve heard of a ratiocinic author or series from before the 1970s, it’ll be either one of the biggest names from the First Wave or, more probably, a Third Wave example. Even though there had been plenty of Matteucci copycats in the First Wave, it was the Third Wave that saw a real increase in the volume of ratiocinic fiction. As always, we remember the good examples – and even then, there are some forgotten gems – but forget the large quantity of derivative dross published at the time. Memory is like a sundial; it measures only the sunlit hours.
You’re probably expecting me to start with Jeanette Quentin. (Small reaction from audience) Well, there is a reason why Madame Quentin is rightly known as La reine du crime in French-speaking lands. Even in days when translations were considered inherently suspicious, readers here and around the world have continued to devour her books. Her best known stories are those involving the retired Irish chief of police, Ruairí Ó Caoimh, the man with the carrotty-red hair whose name no-one in France can either spell or pronounce – which unfortunately included Quentin’s publishers (Audience laughter) – and whose genial sagacity is shattered only when someone mistakes him for an Englishman, as they invariably do. Ó Caoimh, or O’Keeffe if I can anglicise it without being burned at the stake, was a very versatile vehicle for Quentin. He began literary life in 1930 with sensationalist plots concerning unfinished business from the recent war. However, Quentin soon hit her stride with mysteries set in anonymous, superficially peaceful rural French villages, where the locals were at each others’ throats behind the scenes and O’Keeffe’s retirement is interrupted as he must solve the latest murder. But Quentin was also able to space out these tales, and reinvent the character, by adding flashback cases from Quentin’s days on the force in Ireland, along with overseas visits to Bisnaga and Pérousie.
Yes, I could spend a long time talking about O’Keeffe and Quentin’s other, lesser-known, detective protagonists. Or indeed about the many authors who copied her formula, some of whom managed to graduate to more original creations of their own. But I’m a New Yorker who writes New York mysteries, mysteries that, I will freely acknowledge, owe a lot to those who have come before me. I’ve already talked about Mary Hill and her detective Always Wright creating the first New York of the mystery novel. But, as you probably know, their trailblazing efforts merely paved the way for the man whom I consider to be the greatest ratiocinic author of all time: Edward ‘Slim’ Havemeyer.
When Slim Havemeyer turned forty in 1930, no-one would have guessed that he’d be the next big thing in ratiocinic fiction. He was a banker, and a successful one, who had built himself up from humble roots to the point that he could choose to retire early with a sizeable fortune.[6] His brother Peter was a journalist, and Edward had begun writing himself when Peter needed a few additional items for features pages which he maintained. Biographers aren’t quite sure how he made the leap from this to pursuing fiction as a retirement hobby, but he did. Ratiocinic fiction wasn’t his first choice of genre, and The Kitchen Knife wasn’t even his first ratiocinic story – but it was the one that caught the public eye and took the bookshops by storm.
Going back to read The Kitchen Knife today is invariably a different experience to that which those first readers had back in 1931. As far as those readers were concerned, Havemeyer’s protagonist was the rubbersole detective Harold Archer, a hardbitten former NYMP copper and private investigator who’s trying to get to the bottom of the mysterious murder of the owner of Rosetti’s restaurant. In the course of his investigation, Archer is intrigued by the contributions of Marco Barone (slight reaction from audience), a chef formerly employed by the dead man. Barone rapidly proves to have a lot more depth of intelligence than initial impressions suggested, and Archer – and the reader – oscillates back and forth between hanging on his words of insight about the case, and suspecting Barone himself of being the killer. (Another audience reaction) Exactly. You know and I know that Marco Barone is the real hero of Havemeyer’s stories and Archer is merely his narrative amanuensis, a way for us to be astonished right along with him rather than being able to see into Barone’s head. But back when that first book came out, everyone was kept guessing right up to the last pages.
Havemeyer was promptly commissioned to write a sequel, and then a series. Initially, he was carefully mysterious about Barone’s past and just why had found himself in New York, then hardly a city with many Italian immigrants. Maybe this was a deliberate tactic to string out readers’ curiosity and Havemeyer had always planned out the answer, but I strongly suspect he didn’t know himself at the time.
No; the Barone series was always popular, but what turned it into a real American classic was six books in and the publication of Belteshazzar in 1944…
*
Extract from recorded lecture on “The Romulan Enigma” by Dx Giulia Scerra and Anthony Strachan, recorded October 24th, 2020—
In 1926, for most Americans Italy was an unknown.[7] Even though these continents of the Novamund were discovered by an Italian, that has rarely been a part of the, ah, historical narrative taught in schools here.[8] It is not true, of course, to say that there were no Italians in the Empire before 1926, that would be a foolish lie of propagandists, yet it is frequently repeated! We have always been a part of the American story, but our voices became louder and more numerous after 1926, and there will always be some who find that threatening. I assure you that, no matter what certain films may have given you the impression of, I am not a member of the Camorra.[9] (Slightly uncertain audience laughter)
Thank you, Doctrix Scerra, I assure you, nobody was thinking that… (Coughs) Exaggerated though that claim may be, it is true to say that the vast majority of Americans in 1926 had never met or seen an Italian, except perhaps in newspaper asimcons or in films at the odeon. Italy was an exotic place on the far side of the world. People in Drakesland, for instance, were more likely to have met a Yapontsi than an Italian. (Audience murmurs) Italy was a cobelligerent of the Empire in the Black Twenties, and we dutifully hung up her flag alongside ours as we celebrated the victories of her rocket missiles against the Russians. (More murmurs) But we knew very little about the country.
But all of that changed in 1926. The Romulan takeover of Italy is not well understood outside the country, you understand. Precious few inside the country even know, and there is a reticence to ask our grandparents who remember the last years of the regime. Every family has someone whom they suspect of working for the Consulate. And so, ai, even in death, Veraldi and his foul sons continue to strangle our freedom.
Yes, yes, Doctrix. Part of what is not understood, as you correctly say, is what the Romulan regime was actually like. It has been called ‘the first modern dictatorship’ by Antoine Pasquier, who says it was the template for more familiar dictatorial states like Panchala, bringing the ideas of men like Lisieux (Audience murmur) into the modern age. Using technology and communications to realise the idea of the personality cult to a level that, yes, Lisieux could never have dreamed.
Sì, sì. I do not entirely agree with Professor Pasquier’s view…
No, nor do I, I was just say—
There is some truth to the idea that Ram Kumar and the like copied some ideas from the Romulans, yes. But the Romulans were different. They were—
I was just about to get to that, Doctrix, yes. (Coughs) There is a simple but radical thesis that unlocks the secrets of the Romulans. Put simply, they were National Societists. (Audience reaction)
Sì. ‘Societism in one country’, you might put it. And I would say, aha, that is una contraddizione assurda, no? How can one have Societism in one country when Societism is all about trying to destroy the boundaries between countries and deny their existence?
It is true, on the face of it, it makes no sense. But how many self-contradictory ideologies have we seen attempts to enact in the real world? No, in my view Romulanism – if such a term can be said to exist – was influenced by the Combine, and especially by Italy’s neighbour Danubia. To the later Romulans, it was not about trying to unite the world under the black flag. But it was about the romantic revival of Roman institutions—
Or what they thought were Roman institutions.
—yes – and promoting the Roman idea that anyone, regardless of their birth, could become a Roman citizen.
Providing they spoke Latin and adopted Roman culture, of course.
Yes. But one could argue that the Romulans were simply more honest Societists, especially the kind of Combine Societists we had before the Silent Revolution, when they were often pushing a slightly modified version of Platinean culture on the Nusantara or Africa. The Romulans wanted to rebuild the Roman Empire, not necessarily by literally reconquering the Mediterranean—
Though some did.
—yes – but by recreating the idea of Roman citizenship. Along with some other ideas like the legion of the proletariat under arms…
But this brings us to an important point. You did say ‘later’ Romulans, and you asked whether Romulanism can be said to exist as a concept. That is right. In the beginning, in 1926, things were quite different.
Yes…why don’t you go into more detail, Doctrix. (Sound of gulping glass of water)
Grazie. In 1926 there was an organisation called the Legion of Romulus, made up primarily of angry wounded veterans and bereaved family members. They felt that Antonio Orsini’s government has called upon Italians to fight on in the misery of the Polish front throughout the plague years, that Italian ingenuity has delivered the war-winning wonder weapon that had finally broken the Russian lines, and that now Italy was being betrayed by France and her allies. (Audience murmurs) I do not say that there was not some justice to some of their claims. It was clear that Italy would be cheated of any significant gains for her years of blood, sweat and tears. And the people were angry.
It remains a very contentious subject in Italy today whether the Legion of Romulus was funded by the Russians behind the scenes. Perhaps not at first, but later on…
Sì. The people demanded reforms. It was not merely la Legione at that time, but many groups, including the mainstream cobrist Alliance Party. It was a wave of anger, blaming, how do you say, the establishment for the betrayal of the courage and perseverance of the Italian people. For the first time, we felt like one people, not four states – made of many more historical states – smashed together by the whims of happenstance. Formerly, only the King had united us, but now we had united ourselves through our anger. We demanded universal suffrage and for a single national parliament, not merely ministers selected from the four national ones. And we got our way.
Yes. But the Legion, under its early figurehead Colonel Malpezzi, found itself in the electride light by a strong propaganda campaign. It could appeal to many of the new voters you mentioned, Doctrix. Malpezzi might be an officer, but with his pinned-up sleeve and eyepatch he was every family’s wounded husband, son, comrade.
Yes, yes, and he, or his shadowy backers and lieutenants who really ran the Legion, they had a simple, how do you say, prescrizione, prescription, to tackle Italy’s woes. Embrace the spirit of Romulus, of new beginnings. As Romulus slew Remus, ruthlessly turn on the French before they could betray Italy.
They even demanded part of Provence be handed over at one point—
Yes, they were not realistic, some of them. But that might have been only for internal consumption. As I was saying, a simple – prescription. Turf out the aristocrats who, they said, had had their feet up while our people had suffered and died in war and plague. Turn on the leeches who had profited from our misery.
That was sometimes—
Yes, it was sometimes a, ah, eufemismo for the Jews or other undesirables, I am sorry to say. A big, simple message that pointed the finger of blame elsewhere. The people, enough of them, embraced it, and at the election…
I should say that the Legion of Romulus was never actually the name of the political party, though the two are often confused by people outside Italy.
No, you are right. The political wing of the Legion was the, ah, Partito d’azione, the Action Party. That is a core part of what you called Romulanism, the, ah, fetish of action. Doing something is always better than doing nothing.
A simple, dangerous message, uncomfortably close to Jacobinism, but one which the public lapped up after years of misery and stagnation in their political classes.
Yes. Though even we often treat the Legion and the Action Party as, ah, synonymous, the fact that they were distinct helped the party’s appeal early on. The Legion was something from everyday life, not an, uh, ivory tower of politicians isolated from the real world. If they suggested you should vote for the Action Party, that meant more to these new voters than politicians appealing directly.
Even though it was often the same people with two different hats. Yes. The Action Party didn’t win a majority in 1926, but together with the Alliance Party…
Yes. The Frenchwoman, Signora Mercier, she guessed from the start that the Alliance Party would only be, ah, useful idiots for the Action Party. She was right. The fools thought that they could control them. That skilled, experienced politicians like themselves could run rings around the Action Party.
They soon realised their mistake. They were sidelined, and in 1928 Salvo Parrini died under – ah – questionable circumstances. The, er, finding of his body in such a way helped discredit the Alliance further and the Action Party were able to assimilate large chunks of its former supporters.
Yes. By 1931, the Action Party had gained sufficient dominance that they were able to influence substantial chunks of the electoral process, and gained a majority in their own right.
But we shouldn’t forget that the Romulans were genuinely popular with some people, especially early on.
No, no, it is true. Their cult of centralisation, when every Italian was used to the idea that things worked differently in the next town, the next valley. The war on corruption and crime. In time they fell victim to it themselves, of course, but in the short term.
Yes. The investment in railways and roadways, the financing schemes that allowed people to purchase houses and mobiles in instalments…perhaps another sign of copying from the Societist playbook.
There were also reasons to oppose them, beyond their brutality and lack of respect for free and fair elections. Many people disliked their pushing of a Roman-focused curriculum in schools and their censorship of film, newspapers and Photel. They were also conspicuously wasting money on rocket experiments that did not go anywhere, at least for the first couple of decades. And, of course, there was the Tunis War.
But that is to get ahead of ourselves.
True, but it began early on. It was an easy territorial win, when it had looked as though Orsini’s government would leave Italy with less territory than she started the Anni neri with. King Carlo had shut down Veraldi’s attempts to send troops to assist the republicans in Spain, so he moved on to another target. Some, especially in Naples where the Romulans had lower levels of support, were still bitter about Tunis having broken away in 1869 and then joined the Ottoman Empire. But now the Ottoman Empire was split in two and the Moroccans had already laid claim to Algiers. In 1929 the first Italian troops secured the city of Tunis, then over the next two years the whole of the old colony was reclaimed. We were left with vague desert borders with Moroccan Algiers and Alexandrine Tripolitania. For the next thirty years, every time the government wanted to distract from some problem at home, they would simply whip up a border conflict with one or the other nation and conscript another generation of young men to send to the front. There was never any actual goal or intention behind it. It was simply a way to control the political narrative.
Yes, and so this party that was founded by angry wounded veterans ensured that there would be a never-ending supply of angry wounded veterans in the future. (Audience reaction) I am not entirely joking, as some of the Romulans had the ideological belief that a generation untested by war would be a soft, decadent and failing one. Almost the opposite of Societism in that sense, a reaction against it.
In other way, though, you were right. The obsession with Roman history, the teaching of Latin in schools…there are parallels. But as time went on and the structure of Romulan society, based on fear and conformity, became more embedded, it was sycophancy that got rewarded, not courage.
Yes, I’ve heard it described as the Romulans having raced through Roman history like coffee-chugging athletes putting on a play depicting everything from Romulus to Romulus Augustulus. (A few slightly confused chuckles from the audience) Corruption set in early on, as you said. Only ten years after the Romulans took power, there was an attitude that it was merely enough to want to be like the Romans, and wishful thinking would do the rest. There was a halfhearted and piecemeal attitude towards plans and projects.
Sì. With exceptions like the continuing rocketry programme. But yes. Look at 1936. The Greeks take advantage of the war between the two Ottoman splinters to try to retake their mainland, the Romulans promise support, and then it never materialises.
Given the Russians were unable to get through Danubia to assist the Greeks and an Italian intervention alone would not have served Russian interests, the theory is that this proves that the Romulans were already dancing to Petrograd’s tune by this point.
Perhaps. By 1942, the people were starting to chafe under Romulan rule. It had become clear to all that the elections were being rigged. The Shock of 1934 had not affected Italy much, but then – again, perhaps to serve Russian ends – the government supported the implementation of the Passau System and the Gold Standard. This disadvantaged Neapolitan agriculturalists in particular over the ensuing years, leading to a wave of immigration overseas…
Yes, we’ll come back to that. You were talking about 1942.
Scusa, yes. Relations with the monarchy had become strained. In 1940 the Romulans had wanted to try to invade Sicily, of all places, only to be shut down by the ailing King Carlo. Battle lines were being drawn. In 1942, the King died and Prince Giuseppe came to the throne. That vile Veraldi, who was starting to lose his own grip on the party, felt he had to do something to impress the angrier, younger men in the party and reassert the Romulans' grip on Italy. Behind closed doors, Giuseppe had been a vocal critic of the regime. Veraldi audaciously organised and launched, the following year, what was named – by the Romulans themselves – La rivoluzione lucreziana.
The Lucretian Revolution, yes, named for the Rape of Lucretia which had led to the overthrow of the Roman monarchy in about 510 BC, though the history is half-legendary. I really cannot emphasise enough the point that the Romulans were – ah – today we might say interthesps.[10] (Audience laughter) No, I mean it. As we said, it was half wishful thinking to them. Playing at being Romans like children.
Except real people got killed.
Yes, yes they did. The Lucretian Revolution was far from bloodless. Veraldi accused the monarchy of being the sticking point that had held Italy back, blaming them for the fact that the Romulans had not been able to deliver all they had promised.
King Giuseppe did have supporters, of course, but the climate of fear that Veraldi and the Romulans had created worked against them. No-one was sure if a family member would not betray them to the regime. Children had been indoctrinated by the Young Action groups promoting ‘traditional’ outdoors activities like building miniature Roman forts and walls. There and then, Veraldi seemed to have more power than the King himself, and in the alienistic moment, he was able to seize absolute power. The King fled into exile in France.
If things had gone differently, he might have ended up as King of Pérousie rather than Francesco of Venice, perhaps?
You will have your little joke – our King would never have abandoned us like that.
Aydub. So now Romulan control over Italy looked absolute.
Sì, Veraldi began the bizarre policies that the Romulans have become most infamous for. Other parties were banned and the Romulan eagle appeared on the national flag.
A few years later, Party and national flags were the same. No distinction. Loyalty to the party, to the movement, was treated as synonymous with patriotism.
Sì. They abolished Parliament and recreated the Roman Senate and Consuls – though Veraldi, and later Garavaglia of course – held the real power behind the symbolic figures. Elections actually became a little freer in one way, but they were organised on a strange modern recreation of the old tribal assemblies. Constituencies were no longer geographic, but were based on vocation, with a particular cult of the businessman.[11]
Which is emblematic of later Romulanism, of course, and well-nigh contradictory to its origins, where the Romulans had railed against businessmen who had grown fat in the war while others had suffered and died.
Exactly. This is why it is so hard to pin down what the Romulans actually believed or what ‘Romulanism’ is. Another example. They began as a Catholic-supremacist group, but after the Lucretian Revolution there were actual attempts to revive Roman paganism, as absurd as that sounds, and the Pope in Rome was put under pressure to endorse the regime. Jansenism abroad got another boost, as it had when the old Popes were under Spanish pressure to deny the existence of the UPSA. Increasingly, Papal pronouncements were seen as untrustworthy.
But that’s another story. Veraldi died in 1949 and was succeeded by Garavaglia, one of the businessmen we were just discussing, as the real power behind the rotating consuls. A combination of the economic good times and the successful launch of Dedalo-1 a year later, which shocked and impressed the world, managed to keep the Romulans in control of Italy until the Crash of 1956. But as you were saying, many Italians voted with their feet and fled the country.
Yes. Emigration was not entirely new to us, of course, but this was on another level. Neapolitans in particular were looking for economic opportunities elsewhere, but many others left too out of sheer fear of the regime and its ‘praetorian’ secret police.
And, for the first time, especially after Washborough’s social reforms completing the de facto emancipation of Catholics, the Empire was a top destination for them.[12] Soon, Italians would no longer be a mysterious folk on the other side of the planet, especially for those who lived in New York City. The Bowery would soon be a place where the Italian languages were heard more than English – or German.[13]
*
Extract from recorded lecture on “The Golden Age of Ratiocinic Fiction” by Will Barclay, recorded October 19th, 2020—
Now, Belteshazzar was timely. Slim Havemeyer wrote it rapidly and made some accurate, some might say cynical, guesses about where Manhattan society was headed. It debuted in 1944 just as the issues he had written about where coming to a head. The Italian King had just been overthrown and the Covenant System was in the news across the world, hinting that the Empire was a more favourable destination for Catholic immigrants than ever before. Havemeyer accurately predicted that the first groups of Italians arriving in the Bowery were only the crest of the wave, and began reshaping his Barrone-Archer novels accordingly. By the time Belteshazzar hit the shelves, the New York papers were full of stories – some true, some histrionically exaggerated – about the impact that hundreds, thousands of Italian immigrants were having on the Bowery and the city as a whole. Tensions were rising, and a powder keg of anti-immigration sentiment was about to blow. Into this situation stepped Havemeyer, like an army sapper ready to defuse a bomb.
The title Belteshazzar has been confusing to readers and critics. In the 1940s, many people still associated names from the Book of Daniel with the Wragg family from Carolina. (Audience murmurs) But Havemeyer’s real meaning was an allusion to the idea that Italians entering the Empire were faced with the same choices of Daniel. The prophet had been given the Babylonian name Belteshazzar, risen to an important position in the Babylonian government, but then had been faced with demands that he set aside his faith in God to adopt Babylonian ways. How could the Italians square the circle of trying to assimilate with an, often hostile, American population without losing their culture, identity and core beliefs? In case some readers had not got the point, Havemeyer’s follow-up on similar themes would be titled By the Rivers of Babylon.
I won’t go into too much detail about the plot of Belteshazzar, both because you should read it yourself and because, unfortunately, Photel, film and Motoscopy adaptations have proven so popular that you probably already know the twists. Suffice to say that they shocked the people of New York and beyond, and yes, perhaps Havemeyer – through Barone and Archer – made some of them rethink their prejudices about their new neighbours with their loud chatter, their hand movements and their popery. (Murmurs) I am quoting from a newspaper of the time, in case you were wondering.
The plot of By the Rivers of Babylon underlines the point, featuring Barone having to unearth an ancestral crime from the early nineteenth century which is secretly at the root of a more recent one, despite Archer’s scepticism. The earlier crime involves a German family whose patriarch is now an important figure in New York business and politics, but at that time were poor immigrants like the same Italians the character is now railing against. The hypocrisy is so obvious that Barone never even needs to bring it up. Again, Havemeyer’s work was thought-provoking. Ratiocinic fiction is looked down on because it’s popular, but that very popularity means it has the opportunity to read a wider audience and change the world, as no pontificating treatise read by three chaps with monocles ever could. (Audience chuckles)
Not everyone approved of Havemeyer’s message, of course. He received death threats and was un-invited from a number of prestigious New York social clubs, which he wore as a badge of honour; many of them have been forced to apologise, to him and the Italians, since his death. Most amusing, in a dark way, was the article in the Supremacist-supporting Manhattan Messenger which complained about the use of ‘politics’ in Havemeyer’s books, and why do detectives need to be Italian now? (Some uncertain laughs from audience) Well, exactly. Havemeyer himself wrote a rebuttal in the New York Register pointing out that the very first ratiocinic detective, Carlo Matteuci in The Melting Pot, was Italian! (More raucous audience laughter) And, of course, he had been based on a very real Italian detective in California, Aurelio Melloni, who had solved the Vixen’s Jewels case.
It would be wrong to suggest that Havemeyer – or Barone – was the sole Central Character who brought about a shift in popular attitudes towards Italian immigrants. That was brought about by the tireless work of many individuals, both Italians and homegrown Americans, who fended off the scaremongering of the Supremacists (Audience murmurs) – yes, I’ll say it, and other groups. Those who combatted misinformation, and ensured that those genuine criminals among the honest majority were brought to justice and not allowed to blacken the name of the Italian diaspora as a whole. In that case, I think it is fair to attribute the popularisation that kind of nuance to Havemeyer’s books and their film adaptations. Barone fought many fictitious Italian villains, as I said, while also saving innocent Italians from being the victims of prejudice or being scapegoated for crimes they did not commit. There was a sea change in attitudes, especially in New York City itself. The fact that we can enjoy Manhattan pittsa, or should I say pizza (A few audience chuckles) today, we can owe in part to the writings of Havemeyer.
No – despite some opposition from dunderheads, the real opinions of the people of New York about Havemeyer became clear in 1948, when he got into trouble over the novel The Poulter Heist. By this point, he had established the formula that would characterise the mid to late Barone-Archer novels. We would see everything from Archer’s point of view, but when inevitably stumped, he would go to Rosetti’s to see Barone, who by this point had graduated to the position of head chef and owner of the restaurant (helped by the fees from a few cases). Barone would make an expansive apology for being unable to leave his kitchen, of course, but would solve the case purely by giving Archer instructions and having him bring suspects and witnesses to dine in the restaurant where he could probe them with questions. By this point, the changing demographics of Manhattan were frequently referenced, with Barone often acting to defend the cause of poor Italians and refusing to charge them anything. Later on, Barone – whose ageing remarkably slowed down, as is common in such books – would also face a Camorra nemesis, Pietro Russo, who is trying to export his criminal organisation to New York. Barone is portrayed as having had run-ins with the Camorra in his mysterious past life, but his contempt for the Romulans is such that he admits to a little sympathy with Russo simply for being their opponent. Romulan Praetorian agents also occasionally appear as villains, usually as aniseed rags[14] to disguise the real perpetrator. A recurring element is Barone’s dismissal of the Praetorians when Archer suggests them, saying that no supporter of the Romulan regime has ‘an ounce of the brains’ needed to commit the crime in question. Needless to say, Havemeyer’s books were banned in Italy for years, and there is even evidence that the Romulans may have tried to have him assassinated.
I digress – back to 1948. For The Poulter Heist, Havemeyer concocted a plot involving a seemingly-impossible robbery from the fictional Poulter’s Bank, which Barone, of course, has to solve. I would say it’s not one of Havemeyer’s best books, but it’s inevitably been adapted a lot just because of the controversy. Richmond Bank, which Havemeyer had worked for as a clerk, sued him, claiming he had based Poulter’s on itself and given away secrets of the security system used there. This was a fair accusation, frankly; Havemeyer was often careless in using things from his own life in the books without disguising them sufficiently. His own defence was a simple retort that he had worked as Richmond twenty years before, and if they had not updated their security system in that time, they had done themselves more damage by telling criminals how lax they were than he ever could.
The police and the judicial system of the Confederation of New York, especially those based in New York City, were generally antagonistic to Havemeyer. The police were rarely portrayed very positively in the Barone-Archer books, and there were suspicions that Havemeyer had used thinly-disguised versions of real police investigators and judges in them. However, at the so-called ‘trial of the century’, the jury unanimously voted to acquit, much to the judge’s anger. Havemeyer, shy by nature, greeted a crowd of people protesting his indictment outside the Supreme Court of Judicature. He was signing books for so long that he joked it would have taken less time to do the prison sentence.
It soon became clear that Richmond’s case had badly backfired, to the point that the bank’s own position was imperilled by Havemeyer-reading account holders withdrawing funds and closing their accounts in protest. The board had to request an emergency recapitalisation loan from the Confederal government in order to prevent a run on the bank. Though Richmond’s did survive until a merger in 1965, it never regained its former position in the hierarchy of New York banks. Furthermore, while the Barone-Archer books had already been popular across the Empire, the trial drew attention and ironically began to popularise them across the globe, as people wondered what all the fuss was about. Translations, many versions in those days before ASN authorisation, began to appear.
And, of course, some leaked over the border into Romulan Italy. The great irony was that, while Italian-language versions were rare – there are many languages in Italy and there would be little incentive to sell them in any other country in Europe – the Romulans found them overwhelmed with various Latin and Latin-related language versions. Some had been aimed at Danubia, but others were for illicit smuggling into the UPSA; even the Societists enjoyed ratiocinic fiction, and some opined that the message of Havemeyer’s books was in line with their beliefs – which it wasn’t, of course!
But the irony, as I said, was that few in Italy would have been able to read these if the Romulans had not invested so much money in teaching children Latin…
[1] See Part #219 in Volume V.
[2] ‘Rubbersole’, like ‘gumshoe’ in OTL, refers to private investigators wearing shoes with thick, near-silent rubber soles for surreptitiously tailing a suspect or infiltrating a place by night.
[3] See Part #169 in Volume IV. The ‘Amsterdam and Long Island’ terminology reflects the fact that New York City’s municipal government did not yet cover all the areas the Patriots wanted the police to control, so the police were set up on a provincial basis.
[4] See Part #192 in Volume IV.
[5] Basouvarage Patille was a Bisnagi author (note the Frenchified spelling of the name, which would be Basavaraj Patil in OTL) and his stories are set in Mysore city (Maisur in French). Belle Yorke was a female Freedish author whose protagonist is a half-Ashanti, half-Freedish jagun (Company soldier) who ends up investigating crimes during his postings across Guinea.
[6] Havemeyer is from the same Havemeyer (Hoevemeyer) family which emigrated to New York City in 1799 in OTL; in TTL, they have not been as successful (the OTL Havemeyers built a powerful sugar empire and became politically influential) but Barclay is slightly exaggerating how humble Edward Havemeyer’s background was.
[7] Besides the differences in immigration discussed here, Italy’s nineteenth century profile in the ENA was lower than OTL’s USA because of the way Italy was united in TTL; there is no charismatic, internationally-recognised figure like Giuseppe Garibaldi. Probably the most famous contemporary Italian to Americans would be the wit (and later Grand Duke of Tuscany), Giovanni Tressino.
[8] The OTL early United States had a tendency to promote Columbus as a kind of spiritual meta-founder to create a narrative for America’s history that was not dependent on British colonisation (hence the number of cities, towns, institutions etc named Columbia or Columbus at that time). In TTL this is not the case, and Columbus remains an ‘othered’ figure in the ENA, associated only with the history of the Spanish or former Spanish-speaking parts of the Americas.
[9] There are multiple Italian criminal organisations in both OTL and TTL. In OTL the Sicilian Mafia is the one whose name has become generically used for any criminal organisation, but in TTL it is the Camorra from Campania in the old Kingdom of Naples. This is partly because Sicily is simply not part of Italy in TTL, but it’s worth noting that the Camorra was also the well-known and -feared one in the English-speaking world at one point in OTL around the turn of the twentieth century. Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola have a lot to answer for.
[10] ‘Interthesp’ short for Interactive Thespian, is a term describing a practitioner of a recent storytelling innovation in TTL. In this contexts it is used in a similarly dismissive sense that we might describe a doctrinaire communist obsessed with decades-old factional debates (say) as a ‘political LARPer’.
[11] The Romulan ‘recreation’ of the Roman system is actually greatly simplified, as the Romans had three different kinds of assemblies electing different offices.
[12] In the nineteenth century, Italian emigration in general was at a somewhat lower level than OTL (partly because Neapolitans were not as economically disadvantaged by the way Italy was united in TTL – or by the Electrum Standard as they were the Gold Standard – and Sicily is not part of Italy at all). Those Italians who did leave usually chose the UPSA as their first destination (Platinea in particular, like Argentina in OTL, always had some ancestral ties to Italy) and Pérousie or California as alternatives. The ENA was seen as too anti-Catholic by most, although some Italians did settle there, mostly in Mount-Royal or Wolfeston. So prior to the 1920s, New York City’s Italian population was very small, unlike OTL.
[13] The Bowery is an area of New York City (in both OTL and TTL) whose name is based originally on an anglicisation of the original Dutch name bouwerie, meaning farm. In TTL the term is used to take in a larger area and is more or less synonymous with OTL’s ‘Lower East Side’. In both timelines the area is associated with immigrant communities and turnover, with earlier waves of immigration leading to wealthier families who move out and are replaced with newer waves. In TTL, prior to the Black Twenties it was associated mostly with Danubian and Catholic German immigrants (rather than mostly Chinese, Italians and Eastern European Jews like OTL) distinct from the Protestant German community in Madgeborough (OTL Vinegar Hill, Brooklyn, associated with Irish immigrants) – that is, the poorer German Protestants who were not able to assimilate into New York high society like their wealthier cousins. As discussed here, from the late 1920s onwards Italians began to displace the Danubians and Catholic Germans who were able to move on to wealthier areas of the city. Note that Ashkenazi Jewish emigration to the Americas in general is lower than OTL due to the existence of the fairly Jewish-friendly state of Poland up until the Pandoric War, and the fact that the Ottoman Empire is not seen as a state in irrevocable decline and remains a more favourable destination for Ashkenazim. Also, while New York is generally not any more (or less) hostile to Jews than OTL, there are other favourable destinations in the Americas such as Mount-Royal, California and (until recently) the UPSA. The general climate of antisemitism in many nations after the Pandoric War, though it faded over time, has also played a role in the destinations of the wave of Ashkenazi emigrants fleeing Poland after the Russian takeover in 1899. Crimea remains a popular destination for ‘angry young men’, with the Russians mostly remaining behind fortress walls in their military bases and proclaiming the legal fiction that they control the whole peninsula, rather than those bases plus a few linking roads.
[14] I.e. red herrings.
A few questions
1. How does Romulanism interact with the population of its Arab and African population? The possibility of assimilated Africans and Arabs becoming Action Party members
2. Egypt being referred to as the “Alexandrine” Empire past 1959 implies control of Arab West-Asia until then if not beyond, but the mention of Egypt implies loss of those territories once the Russians leave Eastern Anatolia following the Sunrise War. Does that make sense?
1. How does Romulanism interact with the population of its Arab and African population? The possibility of assimilated Africans and Arabs becoming Action Party members
2. Egypt being referred to as the “Alexandrine” Empire past 1959 implies control of Arab West-Asia until then if not beyond, but the mention of Egypt implies loss of those territories once the Russians leave Eastern Anatolia following the Sunrise War. Does that make sense?
Why do the Romulan Party's script graphics look a lot like they are inspired by some variant of the Syriac abjad?
Also, "Pizza" sounds exactly like "Pittsa" - while misspelling the word might be offence comparable to putting pineapple slices over the thing*, nobody would really be able to hear this orthographic difference in correct Italian.
*We would contact our Embassy so that they may take care of the appropriate diplomatic steps to protect our national honour.
Also, "Pizza" sounds exactly like "Pittsa" - while misspelling the word might be offence comparable to putting pineapple slices over the thing*, nobody would really be able to hear this orthographic difference in correct Italian.
*We would contact our Embassy so that they may take care of the appropriate diplomatic steps to protect our national honour.
I suppose they may be quite similar - I' be more much more surprised that Novalatina could have much intelligibility with either, given how horribly mangled it is.
Be careful, the Threefold Eye sees your seditious, blasphemous, anti-human, nationalistically blinded, baseless speculation and will take your offspring to the proper care of good Amicae in the Liberated Zones accordingly.
Kaiphranos
Donor
The written versions might be more mutually comprehensible than whatever is actually being spoken.
Since these people are speaking English, not Italian, I'd assume Barclay can differentiate them readily by pronouncing "pittsa" with two lax vowels and "pizza" with two tense vowels.