Reading (on and off) the Baby Farmers by Annie Cossins

Grim

Set in Sydney, late 1800s

Anyone who thinks it was better back in the Good Old Days should read books based in that era and their minds would change fast

Example:  young couple, both working.  Couldn't afford to get married.  Had a child out of wedlock.  Handed it to an older couple of baby-farmers to take care of.  The young couple paid the older couple and went to visit their child on weekends, taking little gifts for it, etc.  If it had become known that they'd had a child out of wedlock, they would have lost their jobs

The older couple basically starved the poor infant to death. Then took money from the child's parents for a funeral, after which they buried the child in the backyard of the dump in which they (older couple) were living.  Twelve more babies were buried by the older couple in various locations, usually in inner Sydney

and that's how it goes, with graphically described conditions under which a large proportion of Sydney's inhabitants were living at the time

Also dipping into Render Unto Rome -- the Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church

and Niall Ferguson's The Square and the Tower -- Networks, Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power

the latter is fascinating.  Who knew that Nathan Rothschild began his career in the UK by buying cloth (which he claimed was incredibly cheap) from England's north and reselling it in Germany -- and doing it personally in no-frills style

but my eyes aren't up to it the way they used to be, unfortunately, even with magnifying glasses.  Wish I could smash books' contents straight into my skull instead of squinting to read

Frank wrote on Dec 5^th, 2019 at 9:21pm:



Gee, thanks, Frank 

Is anyone a James Ellroy fan? Brilliant interview in The Spectator:
FEATURES

‘I was a tortured, obviously brilliant child’: James Ellroy interviewed
The crime writer on God, drugs and his mother’s murder
Sam Leith

21 December 2019

James Ellroy is occasionally quoted as saying he’s the greatest American crime novelist ever. The man sometimes called the ‘demon dog of American letters’ has no hesitation in affirming it when he arrives in The Spectator’s London offices to record a podcast. ‘Oh yes, I think that’s been proven,’ he says matter-of-factly. Has he always thought that? ‘When I finished the LA Quartet. I knew there was nobody like me and there wasn’t.’

Ellroy’s new book, This Storm, is the second novel in a projected set of prequels to his LA Quartet (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential and White Jazz) set between LA and the Baja peninsula in Mexico in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. America is going to war, Japanese citizens are being interned, and the characters pick their bloody way through a whole stew of fascists and communists, Japanese sub-marine incursions, stolen gold, fifth columnists and racketeers.

It’s classic Ellroy stuff: dark and dense as hell, told staccato in jazzy period slang peppered with old-time tabloid alliteration, casual racial invective and spiced with interludes of staggering brutality. He says he decided to do the prequels ‘to deepen the characters, differentiate the overall action and densify on an historical level’.

‘When this quartet is completed a couple of years from now, I will have written a total of 11 novels that cover LA, my hometown, America, my country, 31 years 1941 to 1972. No one has ever done anything like this and I’m proud of the work I’ve done.’

His novels are notoriously long and complex — he maps his plots out in minute detail in advance, and says of the ‘my characters tell me what to do’ school of writing: ‘That’s a crock of poo.’ This Storm is no exception. ‘I love big pieces of art. I love symphonic music, I love the Bruckner symphonies, the Mahler symphonies, the Shostakovich symphonies. I love history and my great theme is the secret infrastructure of large public events. When I was a kid going to junior high school and reading fiendishly, the books were never big enough, long enough… I think psychologically what I’m doing is trying to replicate my early reading experience by giving readers around the world what I didn’t get as a place.’

A lot of what Ellroy writes and the world he writes about is rooted in childhood experience. He’s adamant that 1972 is as far forward as he’s interested in going in terms of historical setting: ‘History is a blast. A blast.’ And he had quite a childhood. His mother, Geneva Hillroy Elliker — an avatar of whom appears in this book as Joan Conville — was raped and murdered when he was ten; it was a trauma that he processed through his obsession with another unsolved rape-killing, the so-called Black Dahlia case, his novelisation of which was his professional breakthrough.

‘I grew up in what I would call the freewheeling, egalitarian Los Angeles,’ he says. ‘My mother was a hard-drinking, good–looking, tall, red-headed, poo-kicking registered nurse and she would wet-nurse alcoholic film stars like ZaSu Pitts. My dad, who was much older than my mother, was a big handsome bullshitter who had a 20-inch-long wang. All his friends talked about it: this is not a kid’s whacked-out reminiscence of his dad, some trauma of seeing the beast unsheathed — all his friends talked about my old man’s wang.

‘I was a tortured, obviously brilliant but messed-up only child and I loved history and I loved to read. The old man taught me to read when I was three and a half and after my mother’s death, I was about 11, my dad said to me apropos of nothing: “Hey kid, I buggered Rita Hayworth.” “Dad, you lie like a rug, you did not bugger Rita Hayworth.” (We talked that way to each other, my dad and me.)

‘Then, lo and behold, ten years after my father’s death in ’65 I saw a Hayworth biography in a bookstore in LA and I looked the old man’s name up in the index and yeah, it didn’t say whether he — err-err — with her, but he was her business manager in the late ’40s right at the time of my birth. So there you go, it’s that kind of LA.’

That kind of LA. As in Ellroy’s previous books, This Storm jumbles in with its fiction real events and figures (some obscure, some less so) from the historical record. Orson Welles features prominently and far from flatteringly. ‘I never liked Orson Welles and I never liked his movies,’ Ellroy says. ‘I think Citizen Kane is a crock of poo. I don’t think it’s the great American movie and I always considered Welles a shitbird and a blowhard. I don’t like him, I don’t dig him, so I trashed him in the book. He’s dead, he’s not going sue me.’

Wow Frank.  You've made a fan of me with those excerpts

I can relate

---

Not currently reading as I only picked it up today: 'Merchants of Menace' - The True Story of the Nugan Hand Bank Scandal

Back cover blurb

' Guns, Drug Money and the CIA -- These were not your average bankers.  This was not your average bank

In 1980, following the mysterious death of Australian merchant banker, Frank Nugan, his New York-born business partner, Michael Hand, brazenly ordered the destruction of the bank's records.  Hand then disappeared from Sydney and hasn't been seen since

Among the ruins of the Nugan Hand global financial empire, investigators uncovered astonishing evidence of gunrunning, money laundering for drug traffickers and connections to the CIA.

When the FBI and a Royal Commission failed to join the dots, those intimately involved with the case suspected a cover up.

Brimming with chilling new evidence and powerful testimonies, Merchants of Menace cracks open the sensational Nugan Hand story and goes on the hunt for the world's most elusive corporate fugitive ….


If I get around to reading it and if it's any good, I'll report back

Finishing up my reading of "The Silence of the Lambs" by Thomas Harris. Much better than the movie.

FIRE the story of the Westralia by kathryn Spurling

First Casualty by Phillip Knightley. Should be required high school reading.