“The Living Shadow” (part fourteen)

The meeting between Johnny English and Ezekiel Bingham to exchange the jewels that the story really should have put some effort into making me care about is imminent. English escaped the Shadow by making a last minute change of plans and hoping aboard a private plane whose pilot, like everyone else in New York, owed him one. However, Harry is getting close to finding Bingham's trail on Long Island, and it looks like we're getting back to his POV with this next chapter.

Too bad I still really don't care about the jewels though.

30. Trail's End​

Harry's been following Bingham, consulting gas station attendants and other traffic-watchers to follow his car and taking advantage of the recent rainfall to check the side-roads for fresh tire tracks. There's a lengthy description of him talking to one gas station guy who tells him about another gas station guy further ahead who takes down the license plates of passerby for marketing purposes. Then, there's a lengthy description of Harry talking to the other gas station guy who the first one told him about. A bribe of ten dollars gets Harry the information he needs to isolate the direction and time of Bingham's passing. The day before yesterday, and along a branching back-country road system that kind of circles back in on itself.

Harry drives around searching, and realizes that his radiator is running dangerously low. He pulls over at a creek to get some water, and happens to spot some suspicious offroad tire tracks going off along the riverbank and around a turn out of sight. Well, will you look at that! Another vital clue throwing itself right into Harry's hand through next to no effort or intentionality of his own!

He locks the car and creeps along after the tracks by the winding creek. They quickly bring him to what looks like an abandoned hunting lodge, which has Bingham's car parked in back and the old man himself smoking a cigarette on the porch. End chapter.


That took up four pages, reading it felt more like eight, and nothing happened in it that a paragraph of retrospective summary couldn't have covered.

Well, next chapter.

31. Harry's Message

With Bingham's location confirmed, Harry runs back to the car and opens the box in the back. Inside, he finds a cage containing an adorable tan-and-white pigeon with a collar that says "Coocoo" on it, along with an archaic roll of parchment, ink, and quill. Following the instructions left on a note taped to the side of the cage, Harry takes Coocoo out, feeds him some breadcrumbs left over from the sandwich he had for lunch, and then scrivens out the message including Bingham's location and a request for further instructions.

Actually, it's just a radio transmitter set with an instruction manual. That Harry spends a page tinkering with.

...

I know I keep complaining about how much page space is spent describing mundane actions, and objectively it's really not THAT many words. These chapters are short, after all. The problem is really that in better prose, these dry, mechanical descriptions would be intermixed with inner monologues and thoughts, quirks and habits that make the character distinctive, or at least some atmospheric (or tense or funny or something) descriptive language. The closest that this story ever comes to that during these mechanical "Harry does a thing" sequences is throwing in something like this bit from the end of the radio scene:

“Would the message be received? Would it be understood? Would it bring The Shadow to this place?

These questions raced through Vincent’s brain. He wondered also how The Shadow had discovered his knowledge of wireless.

The sky was growing dark. It was nearly six o’clock. What should he do next?”

Hell, it doesn't even go into how Harry came by his radio experience. Was that established in a previous chapter that I just forgot about? Maybe?

The story isn't *technically* going slower than most stories would, in terms of pages spent describing the actions. It's just that a lot of stories make much better use of these sorts of pages and use a range of techniques to make them fun to read. "The Living Shadow" is very bad about this, so my mind is just randomly conjuring up messenger pigeons named Coocoo out of boredom while I grind through the empty prose.

...

With Coocoo on his way, Harry relocates the car to a more hidden spot before sneaking back toward Bingham's lair. He isn't detected, and when he returns to the old hunting lodge he finds that the growing dusk has driven Bingham inside, where he's conversing with an Italian mob stereotype. Harry can't hear what they're saying, but he just hides near the window and waits, and eventually the mafia guy opens the window for some fresh air. Harry keeps himself hidden, and he can now eavesdrop.

Bingham is asking Tony (lol, it was going to be either Tony or Vinny. You KNOW it was going to be one of those two names) if he's sure it's a good idea to leave the lights on and windows open when they're trying to avoid attracting attention. Tony laughs these concerns off, and tells Bingham that there's nobody out here except his own security detail, and that if anyone else DID come out here his security detail will be sure to catch them. Hmm. They're not doing a terribly good job so far, I must say. Maybe he's just bullshitting Bingham to put him at ease, and it's really just Tony here by himself.

We then treated to some more of the criminal network's power dynamics, by way of Bingham's compulsive urge for gloating and villain speeches. This is already the second time that Harry has learned everything about his methods just by happening to start eavesdropping on him while he's evilly chewing the scenery at an underling. Which implies pretty strongly that Bingham is evilly chewing the scenery most of the time. How the hell has this blabbermouth not gotten himself caught yet?

““Well,” he said, “I deserve my share. I pulled the job.”

The old lawyer chuckled. “Yes,” he said, “you pulled the last part of it − the easiest of all. You’re a great one, Tony, to take credit for the job.”

”Why did you pick me, then?”

”You know why. Because I have you like that.” The lawyer snapped his thumb and forefinger together with an emphatic gesture.

”You’re a wise man, Mr. Bingham,” Tony said. “You have the goods on everybody. You could make them work for nothing, and they’d have to do it. Instead of that you give every one of us a fair piece of the swag.”

”That’s what counts, Tony.”

”There’s only one thing that gets me, Mr. Bingham. How did you fix Burgess?”

The old lawyer looked suddenly about the room. “Say nothing about that, Tony,” he ordered. “I only told you because you were afraid of the Laidlow house on account of the murder. I wanted you to be sure that I knew who did it.””

In addition to how comically easy Bingham makes himself to incriminate via eavesdropping, I feel like going out into the middle of the wilderness without telling anyone where you are or when to expect you back, accompanied only by people you've blackmailed, might not be the safest move. Just a feeling. He obviously has dead man's switches in place to release the evidence against these people if they kill him, but how can he be sure no one's found them when he puts himself in these kinds of highly vulnerable situations?

Anyway, Tony apparently recovered the gems from the hidden library safe after Bingham had that other guy crack the code. I still wonder how Burgess ended up taking a bullet, as he was (according to Bingham) the one who shot Laidlow himself. If not for that, Bingham would have obviously had Burgess do this part himself.

Also, Bingham blabs some other details about the operation until now. As a neighbor and occasional legal advisor of Laidlow's, Bingham happened to hear about his gem collection, and also to learn (or at least suspect) that Burgess was embezzling money from his employer. According to Bingham, killing Laidlow had actually been Burgess' own idea, as he was fearful of his role in the gem robbery and string of thefts up until then being discovered in the investigation. Still no word on how he ended up getting shot himself, though.

Then, some of Tony's men who apparently really were patrolling the area FINALLY spot the guy literally putting his ear to the window of the room that the boss is in. Harry tries to fight them off, but he quickly gets dogpiled, beaten unconscious, and dragged into the house, where Bingham (fortunately not recognizing Harry from any brief interactions they might have had in Holmwood) tells them to restrain him for questioning.

Well, at least this time the story had him get a radio message out to justify whatever bullshit rescue the Shadow is about to pull off, instead of having him show up out of nowhere as a deus ex machina. End chapter.


Is it just me, or are there really an awful lot of people involved in this simple task of "bring stolen jewels from Laidlow's house to Wang Fu's shop?" Like, what is Johnny English even for? Why didn't Bingham just have Tony bring the gems straight to Wang? Or, hell, he could have had whatsisname the cryptographer guy do it without needing Tony OR Johnny.

I like the nuance of Bingham being a somewhat sensible crime lord who makes sure that each of his minions has both a carrot and a stick keeping them loyal. Though at the same time, I still think he's kind of dumb for disappearing into the wilderness with some of those minions without telling anyone where he is.

...actually, hold the fuck on. Why does BINGHAM even need to be here? Even if, for whatever reason, he needed one person to steal the gems from the safe and then another person to sell them to Wang Fu, why couldn't he just have Tony and Johnny make the exchange on their own without needing his physical presence?

Maybe he just wants to see the gems himself to make sure he knows what they're worth before he sends them on? Does he actually have the know-how to appraise gems with any degree of accuracy? Either way, he's going to have to trust Wang to be willing to pay what they're worth, AND to trust Johnny to make the transaction without pocketing half of it, so I don't see how him being here in the hunting lodge makes him any less susceptible to being cheated out of his share of the loot.

Honestly, the biggest fifth wheel in all this is Johnny. He hasn't actually DONE anything to do with the gems yet, and it doesn't seem like there should be anything for him TO do either. I feel like the author may have just invented Tony and Co at the last minute because he realized that Harry needs to be able to spy on Bingham talking to someone before Johnny arrived.

Maybe I'm wrong. We'll see.

On another note, it kind of amuses me that the author made sure to squeeze Italian gangsters AND Chinese gangsters into the same heist, not to mention the nondescript Anglo-American baddies like Bingham and Johnny. Really going for a pulp detective completionist run with this one.

32. English Johnny Arrives​

The chapter title is also the chapter summary.

Like, seriously. The two guys who jumped Harry Vincent are named as Spotter and Jake, and we get some random bits of extremely mundane biographical information about them. Spotter (who gets his nickname from his great memory for names and faces) just knows that Harry is neither a known police operative or a known criminal competitor, so they decide he's just some rando local.

Then English Johnny arrives, and the chapter ends before he can say or do anything. It's not really a cliffhanger, because we already knew that he was inbound and due to arrive very shortly. And, while he obviously is going to recognize Harry, he doesn't get to look at him before the chapter abruptly ends.

That's it.


I'll break it here. Probably just two more posts until I finish the book.