THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, October 19 - 20, 2019 |C11
MYSTERIES
TOMNOLANBOOKS
‘The difference between life and the movies is that a script has to make sense, and life doesn’t.’—JOSEPH L. MANKIEWICZ
CHILDREN’S
BOOKS
MEGHAN
COXGURDONTHOUGH THE YEARis not
specified, it’s clearly 2018 in the
estimable John le Carré’s
espionage thriller“Agent Running
in the Field” (Viking, 281 pages,
$29). England is experiencing a
record heat wave, Trump and
Putin are standing side by side at
Helsinki, and the book’s 47-year-
old narrator, Nat, after a long tenure in his
country’s Secret Intelligence Service, fears he’s
about to get the chop.
Instead, he’s asked to take over a substation in
outer London called the Haven: “a dumping
ground,” in Nat’s sour assessment, “for resettled
defectors of nil value and fifth-rate informants on
the skids.” As it happens, the Haven does harbor
one young agent of promise, Florence, who has
gotten close to the unhappy mistress of a London-
based Ukrainian oligarch with “well-documented
links to...Moscow Centre.” Florence’s proposed
operation to bug this fellow’s premises becomes
the Haven’s priority—until the plan is abruptly
nixed by a peeress who is CEO of a wealth-manage-
ment firm catering to
Ukrainian oligarchs.
An irate Florence quits
the Service and finds
solace in the company of
Ed, a badminton acquain-
tance of Nat’s whose
outspoken political gripes
mesh well with her own.
More and more distressed
by what he sees as mortal
threats to “liberal democ-
racy across the entire
world,” Ed (whom Nat
has taken for a harmless media researcher) seems
determined to become a player in Nat’s secret
world of terrorists and traitors—a development
with serious repercussions for all involved.
Superb writing, precise portraiture, clever tricks
of tradecraft—all of Mr. le Carré’s hallmarks are
present in this swift, surprising, bittersweet story.
Harry Bosch, the diligent Los Angeles crime
fighter in Michael Connelly’s long-running series
of best-selling novels, is back in“The Night Fire”
(Little, Brown, 405 pages, $29). Once again he
is paired with his unofficial partner, Det. Renée
Ballard, who works the night shift on Hollywood’s
meaner streets. Bosch himself is retired from the
LAPD, hobbled by a replacement knee and
diagnosed with low-level leukemia. But somehow
he’s as busy as ever, working cold cases and driving
ahead with an undiminished sense of duty: “Take
every case personally,” he says. “It builds a fire.
It gives you the edge you need to go the distance.”
That MO was instilled in Bosch by his recently
deceased mentor, John Jack Thompson. After
Thompson’s funeral, Bosch takes possession
(from the dead man’s widow) of the “murder book”
detailing an unsolved homicide that Thompson
had been obsessed with for decades. The victim
was a 24-year-old ex-convict shot to death in the
front seat of his car in a Hollywood alley in 1990.
Bosch asks Ballard to help him finish his mentor’s
mission: “Because you have that thing....
That fire.”
But Ballard’s official duties have her investi-
gating a more literal blaze: an arson incident that
caused the death of a homeless man. At first the
fatality seems accidental, but video footage shows
the purchase of a bottle of vodka used to incapaci-
tate the eventual victim. Meanwhile, Bosch also
helps with an unrelated matter: assisting his half-
brother, a defense lawyer, who is fighting for the
acquittal of a schizophrenic man charged with the
murder of a superior court judge. Yet Bosch and
Ballard do make time to collaborate on solving
that 1990 slaying: “a pedestrian murder,” thinks
Ballard, “if there was such a thing,” but one
whose ramifications shake Bosch to the core.
The titular figures in“The Guardians”
(Doubleday, 375 pages, $29.95), John Grisham’s
33rd novel, are a group of lawyers and investiga-
tors based in Savannah, Ga., who spend all their
time in the service of freeing wrongly convicted
prisoners. The employees of Guardian Ministries
(not faith-based per se) work in mostly Southern
states from North Carolina to Texas—a stretch of
land that narrator Cullen Post, in a nod to capital-
punishment venues, calls “the Death Belt.” Post
(an Episcopal priest as well as a lawyer) and his
Guardian colleagues have gotten eight people
exonerated in the 12-year history of their
organization. They’re driven to save more.
We meet several clients and candidates in the
course of Mr. Grisham’s book, but the principal
case occupying Post is that of Quincy Miller,
a black man convicted of the murder of a white
lawyer in Florida on the basis of perjured testi-
mony, pre-DNA evidence and the machinations of
a corrupt sheriff. For 22 years, Miller has served
a sentence of life with no parole. “Exonerating
Quincy Miller is our goal,” says Post. “Finding the
real killer is not a priority.” But dodging the real
killer (who may be connected with drug smugglers)
will become a necessity.
In the meantime, Post and his crew contend
with career snitches, fearful witnesses and
intransigent local authorities, who, in Post’s
experience, “Stonewall. Hide evidence. Fight me
like hell....Thestakesaretoohigh and the
mistakes are too egregious for anyone to admit
they were wrong.” Post uses all the legal savvy
and street smarts at his command, but some-
times they are not enough. “I pray for you guys,”
he tells a fellow Guardian. She responds:
“And we pray for you.”Of Shuttlecocks
And
Oligarchs
THIS WEEK
Agent Running
in the Field
By John le CarréThe Night Fire
By Michael ConnellyThe Guardians
By John GrishamPigs can
fly, henscanchase
foxes and
aboycan
have the
run of a
great
museum.A WEEK ISa long time in
politics. In childhood, five
minutes can be an eternity—
or a maddeningly brief flash.
Liz Garton Scanlon and
Audrey Vernick play around
with this perplexity in
“Five Minutes” (Putnam,
30 pages, $16.99), a picture-
book validation for any child
who has ever chafed at be-
ing told “five more minutes”
before the end of a fun
activity, or groaned at
prolonged unpleasantness
for the same span.
Olivier Tallec’s cheerful,
pencil-and-paint illustrations
show the time-related joys
and vexations of a small boy
with his parents. Five min-
utes is “too soon” when he’s
waiting to see the dentist
and “not soon enough” when
he’s in the dentist’s chair
and longing to be out of it.
Five minutes is “a lifetime”
when he’s waiting in line at
an amusement park, but it
“flies by” when he’s on the
roller coaster (see below).
As for the book itself, well,
in five minutes you can read
it to 3- to 5-year-olds—twice.
Vivid collage illustrations
give visual oomph to
a barnyard drama in
“One Fox” (Peachtree,
30 pages, $16.95),
a “counting book
thriller” by
Kate Read. As
typically
happens
withcounting books, we start low
and go high—though how
high will come as a surprise
to readers ages 3-5. It cer-
tainly comes as a shock to
the “one famished fox” that
sets out to find his dinner in
a henhouse. The fox’s “two
sly eyes” have spied “three
plump hens” pecking at
worms on the ground. Later,
he approaches the chicken
coop on “four padding
paws.” Inside are “five snug
eggs” toward which he takes
“six silent steps.” Counting
on, we reach the moment of
apparent triumph as the fox
throws back his head to
reveal “ten sharp teeth.” But
what is this? Suddenly, the
predator has to flee like prey
from an army of angry birds
in a book of which, we are
assured, “no hens or foxes
were harmed in the making.”
In picture books, anything
can happen. Pigs can fly,
hens can chase foxes, and
a boy can spend all day
running after an airborne
toy through the galleries
of a great museum without
once getting told off by a
guard. This last scenario—
implausible in the real
world, where adults seem
to relish any opportunity
to suppress exuberant chil-
dren—brings about all sorts
of interactions in Matthew
Cordell’s mostly wordless
picture book,“Explorers”
(Feiwel & Friends,
40 pages, $18.99).Ininky,loose-lined drawings, daubed
with watercolor and full of
heart, we follow a boy with
his little sister and their
parents on an autumn outing
to a big-city museum. They
stop first for hot dogs, andthe boy sees a mystical
vendor selling bird-like flying
toys. Having bought one, he
sends it soaring with a flick
of his fingers, “KSSSSHH.”
This game goes on as the
family enters the museum:
It’s flick and catch past the
dinosaur displays and
through the somber effigies
of Egypt. When another boy
catches the whizzing toy,
its owner angrily snatches
it back, earning himself the
day’s first real parental
reprimand. Soon the toy
zooms off again, but this
time, in pursuit, the boy
manages to lose both it
and his family. It’s a fraughtmoment that ends with toy-
retrieval, boy-reconciliation
and a new cross-cultural
friendship.
Randy Cecil tells a fanciful
tale of interconnectedness
in the picture-book pages
of“Douglas” (Candlewick,
120 pages, $19.99),a
companion to 2016’s “Lucy.”
Thestorytakesplaceinthe
same early-20th-century city
of Bloomville, and Mr. Cecil
again presents his soft-
edged monochrome
drawings in circles, as if
showing them through the
lens of a camera. Our
heroine is a little mouse who
lives at the town cinema,
where she dines on dropped
popcorn and thrills to the
swashbuckling adventures
projected on the silent
screen. One day, she slips
into the sweater pocket of
a young moviegoer and falls
asleep. Upon waking, the
mouse finds herself being
carried through the streets
and drawing what turns out
to be sustained interest from
a terrifying six-toed cat.
Once in the girl’s house, the
mouse displays such gallant
athleticism that the child
dresses her “in a dashing
vest taken from one of her
dolls” and names her after
the actor Douglas Fairbanks.
Soon our Douglas, like her
namesake, is swishing off
on grand rescues and
adventures in this satisfying
tale for readers ages 5-9.Anything Can Happen!
THIS WEEK
Five Minutes
By Liz Garton Scanlon
and Audrey Vernick
IllustratedbyOlivierTallecOne Fox
By Kate ReadExplorers
By Matthew CordellDouglas
By Randy CecilPUTNAMThe Brothers Mankiewicz
By Sydney Ladensohn Stern
Mississippi, 468 pages, $35
BYSCOTTEYMAN
W
HEN Herman
Mankiewicz
died in1953, he
was a classic
burnt-out case,
one of those gifted men who fritter
their lives away in alcoholism and
witty conversation. Herman had
produced some of the early Marx
Brothers pictures and co-wrote
“Citizen Kane.” This, along with a
grab-bag of credits that included
“The Pride of the Yankees,” made
him seem erratic even by the stan-
dards of Hollywood drunks.
Nobody was more aware of his
problems than Herman Mankie-
wicz. As he wrote 10 years before
his death, “I seem to become more
andmoreofaratinatrapofmy
own construction, a trap that I
regularly repair whenever there
seems to be danger of some open-
ing that will enable me to escape.
I haven’t decided yet about making
it bomb proof. It would seem to
involve a lot of unnecessary labor
and expense.” Yet Herman was sin-
cerely mourned by everyone who
knew him. “He saw everything
with clarity,” said Orson Welles of
Herman. “No matter how odd or
how right or how marvelous his
point of view was, it was always
diamond white. Nothing muzzy.”
Herman’s younger (by 11 years)
brother, Joe, had a far more dis-
tinguished career, producing “The
Philadelphia Story,” directing “The
Ghost and Mrs. Muir” and writing
and directing “A Letter to Three
Wives” and “All About Eve,” both
of which won him a pair of Oscars
for writing and directing. In 1951
“All About Eve” amassed 14 Oscar
nominations, a record equalled
only by “Titanic” in 1997 and “La
La Land” in 2017.
Yet, for all of Joe’s undoubted
accomplishments, it is Herman
Mankiewicz who is the warming
fire in Sydney Ladensohn Stern’s
beautifully researched and deftly
structured dual biography, “The
Brothers Mankiewicz.” Herman
possessed qualities his brother
completely lacked: self-awareness
and a gift for intimacy. As the au-
thor writes: “Herman could laugh
at himself. Joe could not.”
On some level, failure softened
Herman, while success nudged Joe
into arrogance—he became an
intellectual bully, one of those
people who have to win every
argument. His third wife referred
to his behavior as “steamrolling.”
Joe’s kindness, said a niece,
“[came] out of a faucet. He seeks
adulation.”
Both brothers labored beneath
the sniffy attitude of their father,
Franz Mankiewicz—a scholar, a
Mankiewicz wrote it but it’s Or-
son’s picture just as ‘Stagecoach’ is
John Ford’s picture even though
Dudley Nichols wrote it.”
Joe Mankiewicz’s married life
was less successful than his
movies. His second wife, Rose, was
an emotionally fragile actress de-
stabilized by her husband’s serial
philandering, generally with youn-
ger actresses. Joe played Henry
Higgins with women as varied as
Joan Crawford, Judy Garland, Gene
Tierney and Linda Darnell. Rose
Stradner Mankiewicz committed
suicide in 1958.
After his triumph with “All
About Eve,” Joe followed an ambi-
tious but erratic path: creditable
efforts such as the Marlon Brando
version of “Julius Caesar,” an en-
tertaining take on Frank Loesser’s
musical “Guys and Dolls,” and the
flamboyantly surreal “Suddenly,
Last Summer.” On the debit side
were the overwritten and underfelt
“The Barefoot Contessa” and a
botched adaptation of Graham
Greene’s “The Quiet American”
starring, for no rational reason,
Audie Murphy.
And then came “Cleopatra.”
For all of Joe’s skill with dia-
logue and actors, nothing in his
résumé suggested he had the
visual skills to energize a spectacle
of ancient Rome. Which is not to
say he didn’t have reasons to make
the picture: After the lawyers were
through haggling, hiring Joe
Mankiewicz cost Fox at least $3
million before he shot a foot of
film.
It was a lamentable experience,
with the director popping pills to
maintain an impossible regimen of
writing scenes the night before
they were to be shot. Elizabeth
Taylor was preoccupied by her
affair with Richard Burton—she
delivered one of her few perfunc-
tory performances—while Burton
relied on vocal calisthenics instead
of acting. Only Rex Harrison’s Cae-
sar carried any imperial charge.
The film emerged as an intermina-
ble slog, and its director was never
the same afterward, struggling
with depression, drug dependency
and writer’s block. His follow-ups
included the unwatchably arch
“The Honey Pot” and the flaccid
“ThereWasaCrookedMan...”
Only his last film, 1972’s “Sleuth,”
was creditable. After that he was
afraid to press his luck. Joe
Mankiewicz died in 1993.
This model biography tells a
story of two gifted brothers, only
one of whom exceeded expecta-
tions. But underneath the surface
wit and brio, “The Brothers
Mankiewicz” is a harrowing tale of
a subtly lethal sibling rivalry that
ultimately strangled them both.Mr. Eyman’s biography of Cary
Grant will be published next
year by Simon & Schuster.friend of Albert Einstein’s, a pro-
fessor at City College, USC and
UCLA. Herman went to Hollywood
in 1926, after stints at the New
York Times and the New Yorker,
and did American movies a great
favor by convincing Ben Hecht to
join him. Joe arrived three years
later. Then and afterward Franz
thought movies should be beneath
the notice of the culturally civi-
lized, and he never stopped urging
his sons to do something more
important.
In 1942 Herman Mankiewicz
and Orson Welles would win Os-
cars for the script of “Citizen
Kane,” which did nothing to slowHerman’s alcoholic decline. Ms.
Stern’s take on the enduring squab-
ble about who deserves proper
credit for the screenplay follows
that of scholar Robert Carringer,
who estimated that Herman was
responsible for about 60% of the
script—that is to say, “the story
frame, a cast of characters, various
individual scenes, and a good share
of the dialogue...Welles added
the narrative brilliance.” In other
words, Herman’s first position
credit was entirely justified.
That said, John Houseman’s re-
sponse to the controversy seems
correct: “The whole thing is idiotic;
it’s not worth discussing. HermanASteamroller
And a Mensch
HAT TRICKSJoe Mankiewicz directing Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra;
Herman dressed as three Marx brothers at once.GETTY IMAGES; THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY