Say "Murder" and Smile: Group Photos in Glass Onion, Last of Sheila & Rising Tide

Murder disrupts a reunion of sixty-somethings who've retreated to the same beach house since they were teens.

That's the premise of The Rising Tide (Minotaur, 2022) by Ann Cleeves. The author sets up the situation from different points of view, involving us with tensions among friends that will lead to the crime. Cleeves kept me turning pages and guessing wrong through to the end. Her detective Vera Stanhope is a charismatic character, the rare detective who seems to enjoy what she's doing. As often happens in novels by Cleeves, our sympathies are engaged even more in the detective's seconds. Junior officers Holly Clarke and Joe Ashworth bring this novel to an especially strong conclusion.

But it was page 129, when Vera shows Holly and Joe a photo from the 1970s, before I was moved to write in the margin I'm enjoying this! Not that I liked the preceding pages less, but that the photo snapped layers of time into focus at a glance, ramping up the energy of the story. 

Because a similar photo is important to the recent film The Glass Onion, I will veer away from Vera to consider the group photo as a trope of crime fiction.

Group Photos in Rising Tide and Glass OnionLooking at the photo in Rising Tide, Joe recognizes the "short, skinny one" who became both a TV celebrity and a murder victim, observing, "He'd have been bullied at our school, looking like that," and guessing that two dour young men staring at the camera would've been "the ones doing the bullying." When the detectives identify a stylish young woman as the one who would later drown in the eponymous high tide at the group's first reunion, Vera speaks directly to the photo, "Eh lass, let's find out why you died."

In Glass Onion, a group of characters now prominent in their fields appear in a photograph taken at a club "The Glass Onion" when they were geeky thirty-somethings. When we see that photo, the friends smiling with their arms around each other, we're already aware of the reasons all of them have to resent "Miles Bron," the man smiling at center. His hand is on the shoulder of the one person who isn't mugging for the camera -- the one he will betray, abetted by the others.

In both Tide and Onion, there's a shiver of irony as we compare the best friends forever of the past with the resentful rivals of the present. In Onion, there's also humor, as the characters' public personae are undercut by this photo of their nerdy and goofy young selves.

Sondheim and the Trope of the Group Photo

A group photo figures prominently in The Last of Sheila (1973), a film that must have inspired Onion's writer/director Rian Johnson. I deduce this because Stephen Sondheim, who co-wrote Sheila with actor Anthony Perkins, is one of two dedicatees of the film.

[In Onion, Sondheim makes a cameo appearance with Angela Lansbury (star of both Murder, She Wrote on TV and Sondheim's Sweeney Todd on Broadway). Onion is dedicated to both Sondheim and Lansbury, "who taught us so much."]

Another clue is that Onion tracks Sheila pretty closely during the set-up. In the first several minutes of both films (after a prologue in Sheila), we see each character receive their invitation to join a millionaire-host.  Characters in both films gather on a yacht in the vicinity of Greece. The host in each movie introduces a mystery-themed party game before the stories diverge.

In Sheila, the host poses his guests on the dock for a photo. He's fussy about who stands where. In the background is the yacht named for his late wife Sheila, killed by a careening car as she fled a party where these same people were guests. As secrets are revealed and recriminations begin, the carefree poses of the photo become ironic.

Sondheim and Perkins also use the photo to tease. The host tacks it beside the score card for his game, remarking that the solution to the mystery is in plain sight. In Onion, we hear the same words spoken where that group photo is displayed.

Any Other Examples?I haven't thought of any more examples from movies or books, but I myself used the group photo for effect in a murder mystery.

My 8th grade students created the story of Under the Surface through improvised encounters between characters. Like Onion and Rising Tide, the premise is a reunion. The characters, in college now, attend a memorial for their friend Lily, who presumably drowned the previous summer, though her body hasn't been found.

We created a group photo for which the actors dressed like kids in summer camp, to have a visual aid for exposition. The audience was close enough to the stage to see the photo while college-aged characters reminisced about summer gatherings going back to middle school days.

Group photo in Under the Surface six years before enmity and murder break up the group. This was the cast for a revival of the play produced when the ones who wrote it were high school seniors.

 

The photo also gave us an eerie and effective tableau for the end. The penultimate scene of the play climaxed in a suicide-murder: the criminal, cornered by his accuser, has doused the cabin with gasoline. He lights a match. "Fire!" a boy screamed off-stage as, simultaneously, the lights blacked out. Running in from behind the audience, the boy drew attention away from the stage where the actors quickly exited.

Lights came up as he hit the stage screaming, "It's the bonfire!" The characters chatted as they entered for the group photo, and, knowing how it will all end, we hear the stirrings of personal resentments "under the surface." They smiled and froze: slow fade.

Irony, pathos, and some classic misdirection: they made a great conclusion.

The group photo is not a murder-mystery cliché -- yet. I recommend the technique.

More Connections

• At least two bits of dialogue in The Glass Onion come from Sondheim's songs for Merrily We Roll Along - "Now You Know" and "Our Time." The show relates, being about the dissolution of old friendships.
• My blogpost Sondheim's Murder Mysteries tells more about Sheila and traces numerous connections between Sondheim and Knives Out, the previous film in the Onion domain.
• See a curated list of links to my reflections on other novels by Ann Cleeves.

The Vision of the Detective's Boy in "Tamarack County"

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Stephen, a teenaged boy of the Ojibwe tribe, follows an elder's direction to sit all day in a meadow by a lake:

Mosquitoes and blackflies plagued him, and the sun was hot, and he grew thirsty, but still he sat. A wind came up, and the grass bent. The wind died, and the grass grew still. A couple of turkey vultures circled on the thermals above him, spiraling upward until they were like small ashes against that great hearth in which the sun burned.

There's a lot going on in Stephen's life, as we know because his father is detective Cork O'Connor, and this is Tamarack County, 13th book in the series by William Kent Krueger. Stephen is deeply involved with his girlfriend Marlee whose family has been targeted by a stalker who killed her dog; his dad is looking for a missing woman, wife of a retired judge; and the two cases may be related to a prisoner's wrongful conviction brought to light by another prisoner who happens to be Marlee's uncle. Add to all this that Stephen's sister Annie, a nun-in-training, has come home from college angry, depressed, and determined to leave the Church. Stephen is conflicted about something he learns when Annie's college friend Skye appears at the family home in Minnesota.

Stephen may be the most compelling of all Krueger's continuing characters, if only because we've watched him grow from a needy little boy to a courageous young man, through family love and conflict, physical danger, and loss. This memory of the day in the meadow, coming in the middle of this exciting book, seems to be an important step in his growth. Krueger, whose descriptions of nature often bend into poetry, continues:

Because he didn't know the reason he was there, had no purpose that he could understand, his mind was filled with a flood of debris -- pieces of thoughts, drifting images, half-formed questions.

Near the end of the day, his eyelids grew heavy and his mind grew quiet and he saw something he had not seen before. He saw that he was no longer sitting in the place he'd sat that morning. He hadn't moved, yet nothing around him was the same. He realized it had been that way all day. In every moment, everything had abandoned what it had been in the moment before and had become something new. He was looking at a different meadow, a different lake, a different sky. These things were very familiar to him, and yet they were not. He was keenly aware of each scent as if he'd never smelled it before, each new sound, new breath or wind, new ripple in this new universe. (128-9)

By coincidence, the morning after I read that page, I came across this passage from a collection of essays called Living in the World as if It were Home (1999) by Canadian poet Tim Lilburn:

Look at a meadow long enough and your bearings vanish. The world seen deeply eludes all names; it is not like anything; it is not the sign of something else. It is itself. It is a towering strangeness.

That's Stephen's experience, right there!

The excerpt appears among poems and prose in the anthology Home (2021), edited by Christian Wiman. The context is Lilburn's critique of "some contemplative writers" whose vision of nature "travels into the world only far enough to grasp the presence it anticipates." Quick to draw conclusions and connections to their own worldviews, they miss the world.

Lilburn and Krueger might be writing directly to me. Whatever else happens in Tamarack County, I'm already taking away something to keep in my heart. I recommend the novel and the anthology by Wiman. I may have to look into the works of Lilburn, too.

Addendum: I finished the book yesterday. The story builds to an action-packed hunt and a cathartic confrontation that draws together strong emotions, a moral dilemma, and a (temporary) resolution of spiritual conflicts in the story. Cork's circle of loved ones seems to be growing wider. Today I bought the next three novels in the series.

[See my responses to other Krueger books]

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"Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman" by Lucy Worsley

In Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman, author Lucy Worsley wraps the story of the writer's life around a fair appraisal of her work.

The novelist, born Agatha Miller, wrote because she had to. Writing was a compulsion. Having seen the "chaos" of ideas in Christie's notebooks, Worsley was touched to see the old lady working on a plot right up to the end of her life. Also, Christie had to write because she needed the money. She had a privileged childhood on the kind of estate where she set so many of her novels, until her father's mismanagement plunged the family into a precarious existence, moving around Europe to elude creditors. Even as a world-famous novelist, Agatha signed some disadvantageous contracts before she found a publisher she could trust, she spent too much on properties, and she was burdened by debt and unpaid taxes in the UK and US.

Groomed to be a proper lady and a wife, she didn't identify with the "modern" working woman that she expemplified. At the start of the Great War, she married Archie Christie, an incompetent pilot but "a hottie" according to Worsley. During his absence, young Mrs. Christie volunteered at the army hospital where she saw horrific injuries and learned a lot of useful facts about poisons. After the war, her writing career took off.

So her disappearance in December 1926 was an international sensation. She left her little daughter Rosalind with a nanny, drove all night, ran her car off the road, and vanished. When she turned up weeks later, she had been living at a resort under an assumed name. She claimed to have no memory of who she was and how she got there.

Whole decades fly by in single chapters elsewhere in the book, but Worsley gives this incident five chapters. She recounts modern examples of "dissociative fugue" to establish that an amnesiac response to unbearable stress is real. Christie had just experienced the death of her mother and had discovered Archie's affair with Nancy Neele, an acquaintance of hers.

"The great injustice of Agatha Christie's life" wasn't the infidelity, Worsley writes. "It was the fact that she was shamed for her illness in the nation's newspapers in such a public way that people ever since have suspected her of duplicity and lies" (136). Her biographers, "notably her male biographers," have accepted the conclusions of police and newsmen of the time that it was a publicity stunt or a scheme to frame her unfaithful husband for murder. Worsley does undercut her advocacy for her subject when she notes that Agatha's alias "Teresa Neele" combines the surname of Archie's mistress with an anagram for "teaser" -- coincidence, or a clue that the puzzle-writer couldn't resist planting?

Max Mallowan, a little archaeologist ten years her junior, became the abiding love of her life. Traveling with him to digs in the Middle East opened up new settings for Agatha's stories, and she wrote much of her best work in the first ten years of her marriage, before the second World War.

Worsley appreciates Christie's work without fawning. She admits that she herself first encountered Agatha Christie through "cosy, cleaned-up versions of her stories on television." The TV series transposed all her stories to the years between the wars, making her work seem to be nostalgic.

But the original novels were a product of a twentieth century that had broken with the past. Christie herself lived a 'modern' life; she went surfing in Hawaii; she loved fast cars; she was intrigued by the new science of psychology. And when her books were published, they were thrillingly, scintillatingly 'modern' too (xvi).

The plotting can be "algebraic," Worsley admits, and certain "Christie tricks" repeat in her novels. A man and woman who despise each other turn out to have been lovers; an important clue is hidden in plain sight; description of a character's appearance is misleading. Christie pioneered the sub-genre of serial murders with The ABC Murders, in which authorities come to perceive a pattern in seemingly random killings -- overlooking a different connection. The plots have overshadowed "the dialogue, the characters and the humour of her best books" (217).

Christie experimented in some other books. She enjoyed writing Gothic romances as "Mary Westmacott." As Freud's theories entered the culture, Christie introduced "psychological deductions" to crime-solving (212). With Five Little Pigs, she gave her detective Poirot a "cold case" from a decade before, enriching the story with layers of memory [see my blogpost Worst Title for Best Book (03/2017)]. A story of murder in the time of the Pharaohs was less successful. Considering the long runs of Christie's numerous stage plays, Worsley is indignant that a survey of British drama mentions Agatha Christie only as she was parodied by Tom Stoppard.

Worsley dings Christie for blatant anti-Semitism and for the way her disapproval of modern trends and lax youth marred her later books. The zeitgeist after the second war was what one historian called a "paranoid watchfulness," evinced in Christie's fiction: "Fifteen years ago," Miss Marple says, "one knew who everybody was" (281). Christie's personal age by then was weighing on her, maybe more than her family knew. She has been posthumously diagnosed with Alzheimer's, as researchers find a marked decline in her vocabulary over the last decade of her career, along with such mistakes as assigning the same name to four different minor characters in one novel (330-334). As the quality of Christie's work declined, her defensiveness ramped up. Worsley calls Christie's six-page rant to her editor "a stinker."

Early in the book, we read that Christie's "writing binges" were "powerfully felt times for her, times during which she'd feel close to God" (74). Late in the book, her bereaved husband thinks that "her inner spirit lived in near sympathy with Christ" (345). In between, there's hardly a word about faith. Worsley does paraphrase a portion of Christie's autobiography about an influential teacher who taught that "the essence of Christianity was the defeat of despair" (130). But that's a bland takeaway from Christie's passionate words about a believer's relationship to Christ, quoted in my article What Mr. Suchet Saw: Christ in Agatha Christie (10/2014).

The biography helps a reader to appreciate Dame Agatha's works in context and shares a quality with its subject's best writing: I couldn't put it down.

Lay Delegate Reflects on the 116th Council of the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta

Delegate Scott Smoot with verger Jessica Kirchner, participant in Scott's EfM class

 

The Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta's 116th council took place in the main gym of Holy Innocents Episcopal School, established in 1959 by the Episcopal church of the same name. Scott's mother taught there from the early 1970s to the early 2000s. Here's a photo of the same location, then and now.

At a presentation by The Office of Congregational Vitality (vitality@episcopal.org), Scott joined Sue and Sharon, co-mentors of the morning EfM group at St. James. The presenters advertised services offered to congregations regarding stewardship, leadership, and congregational discernment.

There we participated in an exercise based on the late John Westerhoff's list of Anglican characteristics. Stations were set up along the walls of the room for the "temperaments" centered on aesthetics, nature, history, moderation, intuition, comfort with ambiguity, open-mindedness, catholicity, and politics (but not "partisanship" -- one participant told us that a round-table discussion of the Scripture "Behold, I am doing a new thing" earlier in the day had turned ugly when partisanship got involved). The other stations identified Anglican "spiritualities" described as mystical, pastoral, sacramental, communial, and liturgical.

We were asked to stand by one of these that excited us personally and to share our experiences with anyone else who joined us at that station.

When we were asked to identify one of these that's strong at our church and one that's pretty weak, we began to understand how this might be a useful tool for congregations in setting goals.

One of the resources available from the Center is "MapDash," which analyzes data from the church's surrounding neighborhood for the purpose of discerning needs and resources.

The Bishop's sermon drew on a poem about the "minutes" of our lives, and a bit of Isaiah. Before the prophet talks about "a new thing," there's a passage of remembrance of God's great deeds. Then Isaiah tells us to forget about all that -- Bishop Wright called that a "what the--?" move. The Bishop guessed that some of us might be anxious wondering what "new thing" we might have to do and reminded us that it's God who's doing something.

The music was provided by a "flaming Baptist" who led a gospel choir of diverse make-up, young and old, black, white, Hispanic, lay and ordained. The keyboardist accompanied some spoken word parts of the service when we're accustomed to silence. For example, the Psalm was spoken -- alternating high voices and low voices -- with accompaniment. All joined in singing a swinging refrain after every few verses. The Bishop called this an experiment that might inspire us to try something new and appropriate in our parishes.

Saturday

Worship on Saturday was led by youth from the Diocese. The speaker was one of the seniors from my church, St. James, Marietta. Evie Hague spoke of mustard seeds and the mustard plant she grew in Miss Nancy's Sunday school cloass. She told us that the noun "faith" is more properly thought of as a verb, e.g. I faith Jesus. "The grammar may be painful," she said, "but the theology is true."

We used our handy electronic clickers to vote for a few resolutions. Yes, the Council's handling of COVID was retroactively ratified and proactively authorized in the case of another emergency. Yes, parishes are strongly encouraged to make new buildings carbon-neutral according to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards and to make plantings environmentally-friendly. Yes, the Diocese will continue to bless same sex marriages even if, hypothetically, these would not be recognized by the state. Deacons can sit on the Standing Committee (that sounds like a joke), and they'll be paid something -- that's new -- but only the minimum needed for them to qualify for benefits, so as not to burden the needy churches they serve.

When business was done and we were ready to bolt, Bishop Diana Akiyama of the Diocese of West Oregon won from us several minutes of rapt attention as she reflected on what she had seen and heard at our council.

She spoke of our "elasticity," seeing evidence of deep listening, respect, prayer, and vibrant ministries. Our other characteristic is "curiosity," for she had wandered around the room during debate, and witnessed leaning in, the "caution and courage" that are needed to be curious. She did wonder if our energy put into legislation might be a way to avoid "heavier" work.

Of the youth presentation, she said that youth ministry is just a "discretionary" item of the budget in many dioceses; obviously not so in Atlanta, and concentrating on raising youth in the faith is imperative.

A traditionalist in Episcopal music, she said that her first thought yesterday when she saw a drum set on the dais was "Shit." But she learned from the worship service. She had heard us sing thanks before we got to controversy, and saw that gratitude "creates a space where you can deal with things that hurt."

These bishops are high-powered people who earn the respect we give them. I also was very impressed by some clergy who came to the mic a lot -- "frequent fliers," Bishop Wright called them -- Father Ben Day was one; State Representative and Priest Kim Jackson was another. Canon George Maxwell and Dean Sam Candler, both of the Cathedral, spoke eloquently, wisely, and graciously to controversial questions.

[Of related interest: See a curated list of my blogposts about the faith and institution of the Episcopal Church at my page Those Crazy Episcopalians]

Buon Appetito from Milano

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Scott Smoot at the Duomo in Milan, Italy, virtually

 I saw something at a restaurant in Milan that changed my life: fathers waiting tables alongside their grown sons.

That's why I'm revisiting Milan for my world tour of places I've lived or loved. Since October 7, I've biked 537 miles on trails around Atlanta, the equivalent distance to Milan from my last stop in Paris. In the photo, I'm at the Duomo, the only site I recall from touring Milan with Mom and Dad in January 1991: Rome, Venice, and Florence were more memorable. But seeing those fathers and sons gave me second thoughts about a secret ambition.

I'd learned in France a decade before that dining can be so much more than a meal. [See My Spiritual Encounter with French Asparagus (09/2018)]. I thought I might learn to make something besides hamburgers and microwaved enchiladas if I got part-time work in a fine restaurant. But I hesitated a long time.

I explained why to 8th graders in my American History course. When Americans bucked the traditional class system, they took on the pressure of earning their own status.  In Italy, where class is inherited, the son of a waiter can be proud to serve tables the rest of his life. In America, guys in their teens and twenties can be respectable servers and line cooks, but any thirty-something in an apron has failed to "make something" of himself, unless he owns the business. That was my father's perception, and I imbibed it. I confessed to my students that I'd be embarrassed if they or their parents saw me working weekends at a restaurant.

The kids urged me to go for my dream, so I did. For more than two years, I worked weekends and summers at Jackson MS's fashionable BRAVO restaurant. I prepared salads and sandwiches and I plated desserts, supervised by employees younger than me, some half my age. I was proud to earn a place on the hot line after a few months of training.

Dad was down with that. Milano, as he called it, was where he developed an appreciation for fine food, expensive wine, and grappa. He was mentored in that by Alfredo Berato, a Milanese entrepreneur who formed a cross-Atlantic partnership with him. After Dad befriended Alfredo, he said buon appetito as a blessing to every meal.

One result of my side gig at BRAVO was the extra income I saved to pay off my house in Mississippi so I could move back to my family in Atlanta.

Another result was a series of inter-connected stories that I wrote to earn my Master's in Professional Writing. Twenty years before the popular series The Bear, my stories focused on different employees of a single restaurant, their artistry, personal drama, and the intensity of their work. With that degree, I earned enough to -- well, "make something of myself."

And since I learned how to prepare food like a professional, I haven't microwaved any more frozen enchiladas.

PS - On Halloween, I stopped about 370 miles south of Paris at Montpellier, France to see the eponymous castle -- a stop on the town's ghost tour, naturellement.

←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow the entire bike tour from the start.