Mini-quiz and mystery

[indri]

Question

In a room, locked from the inside, you find a dead man collapsed upon an Egyptian mummy case. You learn that the first person to enter the room after the man's death saw "a green mist" and subsequently fell ill. Another man, employed by the household and of Chinese nationality, is found dead in an adjacent room. Do you:

(a) Remain completely mystified as to the cause of the deaths,
(b) Presume that they died by supernatural agency because of an ancient Egyptian curse,
(c) Declare that the dead Chinese man was part of a vast conspiracy to raise the yellow races above the white man and that there must have been a tiny murderer hidden inside the sarcophagus, or
(d) Figure it was poison gas and then read the next couple of chapters with desperate boredom until the novel's protagonist works it out.

If you answered

(a) You are the narrator. Dr Petrie. You have a medical degree and no brain. No wonder you never seem to have any patients.
(b) You are the Orientalist and explorer Sir Lionel Barton. You are headstrong and loud. You probably look like Brian Blessed.
(c) You are Nayland Smith, hero of the Empire. You are probably suffering from a form of paranoid schizophrenia. Wear the tinfoil hat and go with the nice medical gentlemen in the van. They may be able to make you well.
(d) You are Indri. You are simultaneously a Scot living in Australia and a kind of lemur. Your forehead is covered in strange bruises from where you have been banging your head in frustration against the wall. Why are reading The Insidious Fu-Manchu again?

My apology

Sorry to inflict this on you. I'm going to stop going on about this book now. Next up is Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea a book I actually enjoyed the first time around.

Comments

[rahirah]

If it's any consolation, you've convinced ME never to read The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu. And I like potboiling adventure novels from that general era--Conan Doyle and Burroughs and Haggard and such. (Though some of them do get fairly squicky in parts; Albert Payson Terhune's otherwise innocuous stories about brave, plucky dogs are laced with the vilest kind of race and class prejudice. What makes it weird is that the prejudice is aimed at such persons as Italians and migrant laborers, which makes it alien and strange and shows just how stupid the whole thing is.)

[indri]

I am glad to have spared you. I'm a fan of gaslight and weird Victorian and Edwardian fiction, but so far this does not seem to be a great example. But it's hard for me to tell to what extent I'd be happy to play along with the sillier aspects if it weren't for the racism.

What makes it weird is that the prejudice is aimed at such persons as Italians and migrant laborers, which makes it alien and strange and shows just how stupid the whole thing is.

I have two lovely friends from Yugoslavia, who are married to each other. One is Croation and one is Serbian. I, of course, can't tell which is which and can never remember and yet this distinction was so important that they had to flee their home country with two small kids across half the globe.

Mind you, I did encounter a fair amount of racism against immigrant Italians as a kid. They were called "Eye-ties" and were, until more recent immigration from Pakistan and India, about as exotic as anyone got in Lowland Scotland, where everyone else was very northern European, Scots/English with maybe a bit of Scandanavian thrown in.

I surely can't be the only person who didn't find the Italian woman's attitude to gypsies funny in The Girl in Question even though I did enjoy the rest of it. The Romany are not having a happy time of it in Europe at the moment. But then, I can comfort myself with the thought that it was a clear sign that W&H Italia is evil.