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Trying to post while logged in, when behind a VPN. (But this post went through just fine.)

Hercule Poirot 

No.

La mystérieuse affaire de Styles is the name of the episode, yes – it is very loosely based on the book – but the series has a different name. Should not be hard to find out at this point.

I'm back to getting blocked by CleanTalk when I'm behind a VPN.

This isn't an entry, since it is generated with Midjourney as a test:

(Edit: Image removed since it is not an entry)

A discussion in another thread made me ask myself if an AI bot could convincingly compete in the Background Blitz on its own, and decided to test it. Spoiler: Probably not at present, without some human help.

First, here's the result, on the topic "spooky":



I think that looks decent enough. But I found that I had to perform human intervention at several steps along the way to achieve this.

Spoiler

I first thought I would just feed the Blitz topic as a prompt to one of the image generating neural nets, like Dall-E or Midjourney. But since the topic this month is just "a spooky background," I decided I needed something more detailed, so I used GPT-3 to generate a short text from the prompt:

Write a description of a spooky painting from a point-and-click adventure game.

This was its initial response:

This painting is of a dark and spooky forest, with black trees and a red moon. There is a small path leading into the forest, and it is said that if you follow it, you will be lost forever.

As you can tell, It tended to go off into storytelling mode rather than a description, so I had to cut out digressions, add in "hooks" for further elaboration ("There is also...") and ask it to try again a couple of times to produce this:

This painting is of a dark and spooky forest, with black trees and a red moon. There is a small path leading into the forest. There is also a small hut in the distance, with a light shining from the window. There is a feeling of something evil lurking within the painting.

I edited this a little further to give the Midjourney prompt:

renaissance painting oil on canvas 2.5d of a dark and spooky forest at night, with black trees and a red moon. A small path leads into the forest. There is a small hut in the distance, with a light shining from the window. There is a feeling of something evil lurking within the painting. --ar 16:9

The style descriptions are based on the tips in this article. That produced this:



I also tried "modernist art," which also gave interesting results:

Spoiler

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Then I chose one of the results to upscale to full resolution, which I in turn ran through another upscaler to get an HD image. The "oil painting" look resulted in a lot of white specks in the image (spotlight reflections in the paint), and I decided to run a "Dust & Scratches" filter on it in Photoshop to remove these. I also cropped the edges a little to get rid of "edge of canvas" artifacts. Then I scaled it down and reduced the colors to 256 to try to give it more of a game background look.

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Love to hear it!

The Mittens that got canceled in 2020 was planned for the Cotswolds, England. Do we want another try at that, or open it up to other possibilities?

That should be enough clues.

The Sinner had passed entirely under my radar. Thanks!

As a rule I don't have a high tolerance for pointless secrets and other plot-necessary idiotic behavior in mysteries. (One of the Wimsey-Vane mysteries, I think Gaudy Night, has a subplot about the difficulty of creating a psychologically plausible motivation for the heroine to not simply reveal all she knows at once; a snag that eventually forces Vane to rewrite the whole story, turning it from a standard puzzle mystery into a "serious" novel.) But if it's done satirically or with a purpose I would find it easier to tolerate, I think.

From the same era, I seem to recall that The Notting Hill Mystery (1862–63, often credited as the first detective novel in English) deals with similar themes of female disempowerment, and that, incidentally, it also prefigures the villain of Trilby, "Svengali." In fact, I just now discovered that the author of Trilby, George du Maurier—grandfather of Daphne—did the illustrations for The Notting Hill Mystery. It's all connected!

If you haven't read The Notting Hill Mystery, it's an odd beast, since it reads like a proto-detective novel that hasn't quite figured out how the genre is supposed to work—natural enough as one of the first of its kind. There's some very neat stuff with witnesses and forensic evidence, but the chosen format is a kind of legal brief against a known culprit, which is rather awkward from a storytelling point-of-view: it first tells you the answers, and then explains how they were found. (Yet it's not quite an inverted detective story either.)

Another two...

Someone – I think maybe @AGA? – lent me The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, or, The Murder at Road Hill House during a Mittens years ago, a true-crime account of the case that inspired Wilkie Collins's Sergeant Cuff. That book also inspired me to read the novel, as well as The Woman in White.

It is of course a prominent early example – perhaps the originator – of the extremely tiresome Orientalist trope of the gemstone from some exotic outpost of the British Empire which mysterious, sinister foreigners seek to recover by any means. Conan Doyle, Christie, and Sayers all used it at various times, as did countless others. I recently read another example among the Dr. Thorndyke stories by R. Austin Freeman: "The Mandarin's Pearl."

It always makes me cringe (even though the sinister foreigners are often portrayed as being in the right, morally if not legally, and are rarely the actual murderers), and in fact, as early as 1929 Ronald Knox banned the appearance of mysterious Orientals as part of his 10 Commandments for detective stories: "if you are turning over the pages of an unknown romance in a bookstore, and come across some mention of the narrow, slit-like eyes of Chin Loo, avoid that story; it is bad."

Still, it's natural enough that a book from the nineteenth century should contain some outdated attitudes, and I suppose we cannot blame Collins for what his imitators ran into the ground.

No, it's fine. We've probably had close to a thousand entries in the thread so far, and I only remember this one because it was one of mine.

This one might be a little tricky, so to speed it up I'll do two screens at a time:

It really grinds my gears when people use the archaic "-eth" verb ending humorously without any regard for (or, more likely, awareness of) grammar. I just came across "Fucketh thee around, findeth thee out." 

Kingdom

We've had it before in the thread.

In terms of classic films, have Les Diaboliques and Rebecca come up yet?

Rebecca is deservedly a classic, of course, though I like the book even better. Really the paragon of this sort of neo-gothic psychological thriller/mystery.

I watched Les Diaboliques (1955) last night in part because of your recommendation.

Like The Mousetrap (which opened three years before it), it features a plea at the end not to give any spoilers to people who haven't seen it, so I'll put even my general comments behind spoiler tags.

General comments

I like how it seems to shift genre throughout, starting off by making you think it will be an inverted detective story (the Columbo model, where you first see a crime committed and then follow how the detective finds and puts together the clues left by the criminal—there's even a rumpled detective who seems likely to fill the role), due to the camera lingering on all the potential witnesses.* Then with the twist halfway through it becomes a mystery and psychological thriller, and finally veers towards supernatural horror. I'm not sure to what extent that's deliberate (certainly in part it must be), versus just because the genre tropes were less well-defined at the time.

In any case, its influence on a host of other movies and stories is very apparent throughout, calling dozens of later examples to mind.

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If you haven't seen the movie and have any intention to, don't read this:

Explicit spoilers

[* For example, witnesses like the boy who sees the two of them take the soporific, the neighbor who notes down the time they fill the bathtub, the woman M. Delasalle flirts with on the train, etc.]

Unfortunately, I have probably seen and read too many stories that rip off the twist (or at least use a similar one), because I spotted "one of the partners-in-crime is secretly in kahoots with the apparent victim" and "he's not really dead" as possibilities from the start, and once the body disappeared and the two women started turning on each other I became more and more convinced that must be the case.

Towards the end it didn't seem like there was any other real possibility, and clear that Mm. Delasalle must be the mark, so for me all the spookiness didn't really make much of an impact since I knew what was going on. The "drowned" body of Michel Delasalle slowly getting out of the bathtub should be terrifying, like the ghost in the Overlook's Room 237, but I just kept thinking how difficult it would be to time it right, especially while underwater and with those contacts covering your eyes.

I also found the passivity of the retired Commissioner rather baffling. Mm. Delasalle tells him what happened, and he seems to know that M. Delasalle is not actually dead and suspect the plot against her. And he hides out to catch them. But then he just... lets it play out, waiting until they've killed her before intervening?

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So while I could appreciate it as a well-made movie and classic, my personal experience of it was rather tame.

That Elon Musk owns Twitter.

'Cause yeah, I actually enjoy Twitter. I keep my feed pretty well curated (and set to newest) with comedians, artists and sensible people, so my Twitter experience is more whimsy than doomscrolling or all the other things people dislike about the bird app.

But with the changes Musk has indicated he's making to loosen the already lax rules against hate speech, and just the whole platform being beholden to the caprice of the richest man in the world, I don't think I can in good conscience keep using it.

Sooo... the era of lockdowns appears to be over—regardless of whether the actual pandemic is. We've missed three years of Mittenses; is there any interest in resuming the tradition next year?

Yeah, I also enjoyed An Inspector Calls, regardless of it not really being a murder mystery. The twist/explanation offered by the fiancé near the end is very elegant—it feels a bit like the ending of The Usual Suspects (and then the second twist reminds me of John Dickson Carr's The Burning Court, or perhaps its photographic negative). And I really liked David Thewlis as the inspector. I'd never really noticed him before (though I'd seen him in a bunch of things), but this was a real powerhouse performance—and then of course he showed up in a major part in The Sandman on Netflix soon after I watched this.

Thanks for the Foyle's War and Truth of Murder tips!

I just came back from seeing See How They Run. Underwhelming. The comedy is alright but mild, while the murder mystery is very run-of-the-mill; like an average episode of an average detective show. And I almost regret refreshing my memory of The Mousetrap right beforehand, even though it helped me spot some in-jokes and references, because it made the liberties the movie takes with the play-within-the-film stick out.

Spoiler

I think they must not have had the rights to show any part of Christie's play verbatim, because every scene or line of dialogue has been modified slightly (or greatly) from the real thing. But even beyond that, they play very fast and loose with it. For example, a recurring joke in SHTR is that the movie director who is to adapt the play keeps complaining that there isn't a murder in the first ten minutes of the script, while in fact the play opens with a murder right away—presented in audio before the lights even come up.

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Also, I'm not one who complains about "race-blind" casting for hobbits or Bridgertons or mermaids or whatever, but I have to say I find it weird to portray Max Mallowan (Agatha Christie's archeologist husband) as a Black man. It feels to me like an attempt to white-wash the racism of the period... and Christie herself.

I saw The Mousetrap in London as a teenager decades ago. I remember it as half mystery, half farce. Enjoyable, but very slight.

In preparation for See How They Run, I decided to try and watch a recording of it to refresh my memory. (The failure to make a film adaptation—at least an English-language film adaptation—of the play apparently figures into the plot of the film.)

There are a lot of versions on YouTube, all of them apparently by high school or amateur dramatic societies. Having tried out a bunch of them, I settled on this one:

Uh, it's not great, is it? Probably a stronger cast could bring out the comedy more. I think it needs it, because the characters are much too broad to work in any serious dramatic scenes.