Maps and More in the Fall 2024 Baum Bugle

The latest triennial issue of the International Wizard of Oz Club’s Baum Bugle is the 200th. It’s arriving, wrapped in seasonal colors, at club members’ houses now.

I’m honored to be one of the contributors to this issue, in the midst of many Oz experts I like and admire:

• Ruth Berman on the launch of the club and its journal.
• Scott Cummings on a stage show that would have reunited L. Frank Baum with his first illustrator, the since-famous artist Maxfield Parrish.
• Peter Hanff on the work of longtime Bugle editor and art director Dick Martin, with more samples of Martin’s work from David Maxine.
• Memories of editing the Bugle in different periods from Bill Stillman, Michael Gessell, and John Fricke.

My article is about the maps of Oz and its neighbors published in Tik-Tok of Oz in 1914—how they came about and how they affected Baum’s storytelling in the novels that followed. Up until that book, Baum had never mentioned any maps. Afterwards, every book alluded to the map of Oz in one way or another.

That essay owed a lot to two studies of Oz and its representations. First, Michael O. Riley’s Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum (University Press of Kansas, 1997) snapped me out of the childhood habit of thinking of Oz as a stable place that the books gradually revealed and empowered me to think of Baum making it up as he went along. To be sure, by the time I read that book I’d studied literature in college, edited books for a decade, and even published my own fiction. But old habits stick around. Now I find it more interesting to analyze the fairyland from multiple perspectives.

Starting in 2012, David Maxine has shared a series of essays about the maps of Oz through the Hungry Tiger Press blog. This analysis starts with the earliest map, made for a theatrical presentation and now lost, and has worked its way to the Oz Club’s 1960s publication of maps that incorporated locations from the whole series and other Baum books as well.

Like other Oz fans, I enjoyed looking at the 1914 maps I first saw in Michael Patrick Hearn’s The Annotated Wizard of Oz. I had the Oz Club’s maps pinned on the bulletin board in my room for years. As many other fantasy authors and publishers discovered after Baum, there’s nothing like a map to make a fairyland seem more real.

“Finding Friendships: Middle Grade Comics” Panel at MICE 2024

The Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo (MICE) takes place this weekend in the Fuller Building at Boston University, 808 Commonwealth Avenue.

MICE has been in that building for the past few years, but this is the latest the show has been scheduled, in the gift-buying season.

On Saturday, 7 December, I’m going to moderate a panel discussion at MICE titled “Finding Friendships: Middle Grade Comics.”

The four panelists are, in alphabetical order with their middle-grade books:

• Johnnie Christmas, Gamerville and Swim Team.
• Debbie Fong, Next Stop.
• Emma Hunsinger, How It All Ends.
• Shaina Lu, Noodle & Bao.

One thing that struck me in reading these creators’ work is how they all came to middle-grade storytelling from different directions.

Christmas was one of Margaret Atwood’s collaborators on Angel Catbird and drew or wrote other adventure comics for adults like Tartarus and Alien 3. Fong illustrated prose books for young people, including the YA anthology Banned Together. Hunsinger was best known for her short comic “How to Draw a Horse,” published in The New Yorker. She’s also co-created a picture book, My Parents Won’t Stop Talking. Lu is an educator here in greater Boston whose projects included a community mural in Chinatown.

It’s usually easy to see connections from these artists’ earlier work to their new books. For instance, Lu’s Noodle & Bao is about gentrification in an urban neighborhood. Hunsinger’s How It All Ends and “How to Draw a Horse” both start with sharing adjoining desks in a high-school class.

I interpret this confluence as a sign of the strength of the market for middle-grade graphic novels in recent years. Agents and publishers drew in talent from all directions, and we have a wider range of stories as a result.

“You can’t throw pies in comedies anymore!”

Laurel and Hardy’s “The Battle of the Century” didn’t immediately rehabilitate the pie fight in Hollywood at the end of 1927. But here are three data points that show the trope moving back to acceptance, if never full respectability.

Sometime in the late 1920s the Weiss brothers’ Artclass company produced a short featuring young actors Bobby Nelson (1922–1978) and Albert Schaefer (1916–1942) and a pie fight. This picture was obviously made on the cheap, shot outdoors to avoid having to build sets. It shows no logic in character, plot, or basic physics.

This movie survives in a German print, in loose footage, and in the Weiss Brothers Collection at UCLA. I’m guessing at the date based on the apparent age of Bobby Nelson, between his waifish appearances in “The Doughboy” (1926), “Sunshine of Paradise Alley” (1926), and “Perils of the Jungle“ (1927) and his post-haircut westerns.

The only title I’ve found linked to this footage is “Bobby’s Pie Fight”—“Bobby’s Kuchenschlacht” in Germany and “Il combattimento di Bobby” in Italy. However, that title might have been attached when the Weiss brothers recut their 1920s films for television syndication in the series Chuckle Heads.

Unfortunately, the Weiss brothers were near the bottom of the barrel among Hollywood producers. They saved money by skipping such steps as registering copyrights and screening movies for critics. As a result, scholars can’t even say when most of their movies were released. “Bobby’s Pie Fight” has no IMDB listing, so I can’t confirm its original title or date.

Assuming that “Bobby’s Pie Fight” was the title, that shows Artclass believed that subject would attract rather than turn off its target audience. At the same time, the company made sure the pie wagon was crudely labeled “Hokum Pie Co.” to signal to adults that they knew they were slinging an old joke. This pie fight was just for the kids.

Next comes the Our Gang comedy “Shivering Shakespeare,” directed by Anthony Mack in 1929 and released in January 1930 (IMDB; YouTube; Lucky Corner; Lord Heath).

Like several other early talking pictures in the series, this was a remix of silent films from a few years before. As in “Stage Fright” (1923), it showed the gang being dragooned into putting on a play set during Nero’s reign. As in “Uncle Tom’s Uncle” (1926), the kids in the audience pelt the kids on the stage with food.

“Uncle Tom’s Uncle” (and its direct remake, “Spanky” [1932]) showed the audience throwing vegetables. For “Shivering Shakespeare,” in contrast, the theatergoers are supplied with two booths full of pies, apparently from a fundraising bake sale. Furthermore, that audience includes both kids (rowdies led by Jack McHugh) and dignified-looking adults.

The result is a pie fight much like “The Battle of the Century”—the first in a talking picture, some scholars posit. As in that earlier Roach studio film, there’s a gradual build-up of pie-throwing, trying to make the action meaningful instead of just messy. Mack filmed some of that action in slow motion, leaving those shots with no sound. The result isn’t entirely satisfactory, but five years earlier no respected studio would have even tried such hokum.

Finally, in 1931 Educational Films released “The Lure of Hollywood,” part of the Hollywood Girls series (IMDB; YouTube). These were definitely movies about and for adults, not children.

In “The Lure of Hollywood” a mix-up leads a young studio props man to think that a movie star is hitting on his hopeful-starlet girlfriend. During the filming of a big musical number on the theme of custard pies, therefore, the props man throws a pie at the movie star. That devolves into a pie fight, the two cameras still rolling.

A studio executive bustles onto the set and shouts: “You can’t throw pies in comedies anymore! The public won’t laugh at it.” That was, of course, the standard wisdom of movie makers and critics for a decade from the late 1910s to the late 1920s.

The film’s heroines leave Los Angeles in a cheap used car, their Hollywood dreams in ruins. But then the studio staff views the rushes from that supposedly ruined scene. The screening room erupts in laughter. The same executive says: “That’s the funniest thing we’ve ever photographed. We should have gone in for that pie-throwing long ago!”

Pie-throwing thus appears restored to its status as a Hollywood gag—a classic gag, in fact. Being able to depict that turnaround was undoubtedly gratifying for the director of “The Lure of Hollywood”: credited as William Goodrich, that was actually the Keystone veteran Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle.

The Significance of “Playin’ Hookey”

“Playin’ Hookey,” credited to director Anthony Mack (IMDB; YouTube; The Lucky Corner; Dave Lord Heath), is not one of the more inspired Our Gang comedies. Like a number of the series’ other silent shorts, it feels like two half-developed stories with only a loose connection between them.

In the first half, Joe Cobb’s dog Pansy gets blamed for scaring chickens and destroying property. Pansy’s misbehavior is actually the fault of Joe’s little brother Wheezer, played by Bobby Hutchins. In this stretch of the series, Wheezer was an unstoppable engine of chaos.

Joe’s dad prepares to kill the dog with a shotgun. [Kids’ comedy, folks!] But Joe unloads the gun and tells Pansy to play dead. He sneaks her away and tries to find her refuge with Farina and his little sister, portrayed by Sunny and Jannie Hoskins. Jannie’s character is called Zuccini because almost all the series’ black kids got assigned food names; usually Farina’s sister was named Mango, but other exceptions were Arnica and Trellis.

Then a police chase happens nearby. All the big kids run to see. That action turns out to be a scene from a movie being filmed on the streets of Culver City. By a stroke of luck, the movie crew is looking for a dog that can play dead. Joe offers to bring Pansy to the studio for $5. His pals sneak in after him.

In fact, the gang sneaks into the All-American Studios by pretending to be dummies in a truck, the exact same way the gang got into the West Coast Studios in “Dogs of War” (1923). That short also began as one story—an elaborate parody of trench warfare—and turned into a romp through movie sets. William Gillespie appeared in both films, in the first as a harried director and in the second as a harried actor.

For the rest of “Playin’ Hookey,” the kids and dog run around the studio, disrupt scenes being filmed in a variety of genres, and tangle with actors and security guards. At one odd moment we see the Triceratops costume from Laurel and Hardy’s “Flying Elephants,” filmed in early May 1927. Indeed, that Triceratops gets more screen time in “Playin’ Hookey” than in the surviving “Flying Elephants.”

Eventually, the action shifts to a set in a kitchen filled with custard pies and buns, the latter for some reason being filled with gunpowder. Charlie Hall plays a comedian made up to look as much like Chaplin as possible without risking a lawsuit. There’s a line of cops in old-fashioned helmets and long coats, looking nothing like the police officers earlier in this film. In short, we’ve entered a travesty of the Keystone Studio as it was more than a decade before.

The kids run onto that set. They see the comedian being chased by a knife-wielding chef. The gang’s current freckled boy—skinny, bespectacled Jay R. Smith—picks up a pie and throws it at the chef. Soon the other kids are tossing pies, as well as those exploding buns. Chaos ensues, but not hilarity.

Critics might quibble that this isn’t a full pie fight since nobody throws anything back at the kids. But the action does include the usual detail of pastry flying wild and hitting people not part of the initial conflict. Among the adults struck with pies are those Keystone-style cops, an actress played by Dorothy Coburn, and her hairdresser played by Edith Fortier (usually on set as the Hoskinses’s aunt and chaperone).

Eventually the studio security team led by Tiny Sandford catches the gang and literally throws them out of the studio. We never learn what will happen to Pansy. That concern was back in the first half of the movie, after all.

“Playin’ Hookey” isn’t a very interesting film. Even the backstage look at the Roach lot is unrevealing since the set-ups are so artificial; “Dogs of War” shows more. But “Playin’ Hookey” is significant as an example of a pie fight shortly before Laurel and Hardy’s lauded “Battle of the Century,” reflecting how the studio viewed that trope (IMDB; YouTube).

But wait! you say. “The Battle of the Century” is a 1927 film. “Playin’ Hookey” is listed as from 1928.

Quite true, I reply. But “Playin’ Hookey” was made in the summer of 1927 while “The Battle of the Century” went into production on 5 October. (For a complex discussion of when “Playin’ Hookey” was made, see its page at the Lucky Corner. For equivalent information about “The Battle of the Century,” see Dave Lord Heath’s page.)

MGM released “The Battle of the Century” on the very last day of 1927. Roach’s previous distributor, Pathé, had the rights to “Playin’ Hookey,” and it held that picture back until the first day of 1928. As a result, its significance has been masked.

“The Battle of the Century” starts as a boxing movie, inspired by the Gene Tunney–Jack Dempsey fight of 22 Sept 1927. In talking about where to go from there, someone on the writing staff suggested a pie fight.

The Hal Roach Studio was small and friendly. Hall, Coburn, Sandford, and other players in the Our Gang picture also acted in Laurel and Hardy movies that summer. Stan Laurel and his fellow writers had to have known about the making of “Playin’ Hookey.”

That picture reflected the dominant industry thinking about pie fights at the time: they were hokum, a relic of the previous decade, entertaining only for kids. A couple of years later, Laurel told Philip K. Scheuer of the Los Angeles Times that simply throwing pies “really had passed out with Keystone”—exactly as depicted in the Our Gang film.

Looking for something new, Laurel rethought the trope. “We made every one of the pies count,” he said. The scene wasn’t just messy chaos. It was messy chaos that built up gradually from character interactions. “The Battle of the Century” was a hit, and it resurrected the pie fight as nostalgic fun.

COMING UP: A changed Hollywood.

“Real honest to goodness…pie slinging contests”

Mass pie-tossing definitely returned to American movies in 1927, and not just in Laurel and Hardy’s “Battle of the Century,” released in December.

The surviving examples appeared first in a particular type of movie: the kid gang comedy. That makes sense because the core viewers of those movies were so young they weren’t:

• tired of the Keystone-style comedy of the previous decade, given that they had probably never seen those films.
• influenced by what the press deemed properly funny for modern audiences.

In May 1927, the Bray Studios registered a short called “The Big Pie Raid,” directed by Stan De Lay (IMDB; YouTube; clearer extract on YouTube). This was part of the McDougall Alley series, running from 1926 to 1928—an obvious imitation of the Our Gang comedies, but with even more blatant racism.

The Library of Congress filing for “The Big Pie Raid” summarized its plot like this:

The two gangs are having it out on the football field. The winning team has been promised a party by one of the girl spectators. Oatmeal, a little colored lad, wins the day for his side and the result is that the team goes down to enjoy the blowout. After much ice cream and cake and speech making they adjourn to the lawn to play games.

The losers of the football game however are on the job and attack the party with mud pies. Real honest to goodness mud pie slinging contests ensue with the victors of the morning coming out victorious but not until all the pies of a bakery wagon had been used and not until Oatmeal had come to the rescue with his little friend Farina [sic—Fatima], that gasser of animals, the skunk.

At around the twelve-minute mark, a wagon helpfully labeled PIES loses a wheel near the kids’ mud fight. That leads to a “Real honest to goodness” pie fight, with combatants and one spectator hit. Since Bray named the movie after that part of the scenario, the studio clearly saw the pie fight as an attraction for its target audience.

The typographical error inserting the name Farina into the synopsis of “The Big Pie Raid” shows how much the makers of this series had the Our Gang movies on their minds. McDougall Alley featured a little black child called Oatmeal, played by Hannah Washington. Just as the character of Farina was variously identified as a girl or a boy in early years, “The Big Pie Raid” presents Oatmeal as a boy so that he can play in the football game.

Even though Oatmeal is the hero of both the football game and the subsequent fight, he and his Chinese-stereotype friend Free-Gin have to be snuck into the older white kids’ party. One difference between this movie and the typical Our Gang shorts is that the McDougall Alley kids are more bourgeois than their rivals rather than poorer.

In December 1927, Fox released “Wild Puppies,” directed by Clyde Carruth (IMDB; YouTube; Library of Congress shot list). Like “The Big Pie Raid,” this short comedy moves from a football game to a gang fight that parodies trench warfare. However, its special effects are more elaborate and amusing. While most of the missiles are vegetable, ultimately fat boy Albert Schaefer throws pies down onto three members of the rival gang. The climactic bits show the bad guys trying to escape a lion, scenes that actor Coy Watson, Jr., wrote about in The Keystone Kid.

In both “The Big Pie Raid” and “Wild Puppies,” the leader of the rival gang, and the person whose face takes the most mess, was Jack McHugh. He’d been the center of an earlier kid gang series from Century before being upstaged by Malcolm Sebastian as “Big Boy,” his little brother.

McHugh would make one appearance in an Our Gang film: “Shivering Shakespeare” (1930). Once again, he played a rival gang leader who starts a pie fight. It seems to have been a specialty.

COMING UP: But that wasn’t the first pie-throwing in an Our Gang movie.

“Extracted from a pie slinging episode”

In 1916 Charlie Chaplin released a movie called “Behind the Screen,” in which his character worked in the props department of a movie studio (IMDB; YouTube).

At the time Chaplin was under contract with Mutual, having moved on from Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios. In this movie he made fun of one of Keystone’s trademarks, the thrown pie, with a scene labeled “The comedy department rehearsing a new idea.”

That involved a Keystone-style cop throwing pies incompetently, then Chaplin throwing a lot of pies at big Eric Campbell while ducking most of the pies thrown back at him. It went well beyond what surviving Keystone movies show, leaving that studio with no new territory to explore.

If Chaplin wanted to convey that pie-throwing was now old hat, some critics were already ahead of him on that score. The Moving Picture World review of “Behind the Screen” said:

There is throughout a distinct vein of vulgarity which is unnecessary, even in slapstick comedy. A great deal of comedy is intended to be extracted from a pie slinging episode which occurs during the rehearsal of a couple of scenes in a moving picture studio.

Soon Hollywood filmmakers were assuring people they had moved beyond pie-throwing. The comedian Lloyd Hamilton wrote in an essay in Motography in 1918:

There is not one phase in the production of motion picture comedies today that isn’t a great improvement over the fun film of the past. Of course everyone has his opinion as to the cause of the great improvement. The biggest reason is the public or fans themselves. They have become tired of the old hokum comedy, the poor sets, hideous make-ups and other stuff such as throwing pies. A year or two an audience would scream if someone was hit in the face with a pie–but today the kids are the only ones who seem to enjoy it…

In addition to quoting that essay, Silentology also showed an advertisement for a 1918 Eddie Lyons and Lee Moran movie that promised “No pie throwing.”

Over the next several years, many newspapers and magazines used “pie throwing” or “pie fight” as a synecdoche for all old-fashioned comic gags that sophisticated modern moviegoers would surely shun.

This despite the fact that there had been few to no fights with pies (as opposed to a pastry thrown singly) in movies aside from “Behind the Screen.” Like “bra burning,” the “pie fight” went straight from one isolated example to cliché without ever actually having been common.

The silent movie musician and scholar Ben Modell has written:

The confusing thing about the custard pie equivalent of a snowball fight is that it appears nowhere in silent movies except in this short [“Behind the Screen”] and in [Laurel and Hardy’s] “Battle of the Century” (1927). There are individual pies thrown in Keystone films, but no pie fights. Are all the pie fights in films from the Nickelodeon era…and are all lost films?

In fact, at least a couple of Hollywood pie fights appeared shortly before “Battle of the Century,” one filmed at the same Hal Roach Studio. How did they slip past critical opprobrium? The answer lies in that Lloyd Hamilton quotation above.

TOMORROW: “the kids are the only ones who seem to enjoy it.”

Integrating Our Gang’s Schools

The Hal Roach Studio’s Our Gang series was notable from the beginning in showing black and white kids playing together on a mostly equal basis.

However, they didn’t go to school with each other—not for years.

Many American school systems were segregated in the early 1920s, either by law or (as in Los Angeles) by a combination of real-estate covenants and administrative moves that shuttled most black, Mexican, and Asian kids into certain schools.

At first the Hal Roach Studio’s school for its young actors replicated that situation, though it’s not clear if that was ever a goal. Ernie Morrison had been under contract for years when the series started, and he had a private tutor. Judging by photos like the one above from 1923, that tutor was a black woman.

In September 1922, having become responsible for educating more kids, Hal Roach hired Fern Carter (1893–1961) to run a school within the studio. She’s the woman standing in this publicity photo next to director Robert McGowan. She remained the teacher for the series’ main cast for more than twenty years.

Ernie Morrison continued to study with his tutor, however. It’s possible that race had no bearing on that arrangement. He and his father might have preferred that individual attention. It’s also quite conceivable that race was a factor. The Morrisons might have wanted to preserve that woman’s job, for instance, while the studio or other kids’ parents couldn’t imagine hiring her to teach the whole group. Or segregated schooling might simply have seemed like the norm. 

In those same early years, almost all of the Our Gang shorts were about children outside of school. Titles like “Saturday Morning,” “July Days,” and “Sunday Calm” reflect the focus on kids having free time to get into trouble. Physical comedy worked better when the cast wasn’t stuck to their desks.

Every so often, however, a movie showed the gang in a classroom. “Boys to Board” (1923) was set at a small boarding school, orphans preferred. “Lodge Night” (1923) showed little Joe Cobb as the new kid in a one-room school before shifting to other locations. Eventually all of “Commencement Day” (1924) took place in and around such a school.

And in all three of those movies, Ernie Morrison’s character isn’t in class with the white kids. He—and his little sibling Farina—still play with the white boys. In “Lodge Night” all the boys are part of a club spoofing the KKK. In “Commencement Day” Ernie has set up a merry-go-round near the school, charging kids some of their lunch for a ride.

In “Boys to Board” Ernie runs a delivery service, bringing Joe to the boarding school. That puts him in the position to rescue the white boys, so his outsider status actually makes him a hero. But it also appears that Ernie’s character doesn’t go to school at all.

As a result, those movies didn’t challenge audiences of the time with the sight of black and white kids in a classroom together. For some Americans, of course, that would have seemed normal, or at least unremarkable. But other white viewers might have objected.

During those years, Allen “Sunny” Hoskins was too young to go to school, and so was his character Farina. But eventually he grew up. In “Seeing the World” (1927), Farina is conspicuous among the students under teacher James Finlayson.

From then on, whenever audiences saw Our Gang in a classroom, that school was integrated. Starting in the early 1930s, more stories took place in school, and Farina, Stymie, Buckwheat, and other black kids (one even played by Dorothy Dandridge) were always on an equal basis with the white kids.

Likewise, behind the scenes Sunny Hoskins and his successors attended Fern Carter’s classes alongside their white cast mates. In fact, Carter described Sunny as her brightest student. And he, like most of the Our Gang alumni, recalled her fondly.

Falling for Farina

As related back here, Hal Roach and the makers of the Our Gang comedies modeled the character of Farina, played by Allen “Sunny” Hoskins, on the pickaninny stereotype.

Gloria Lee writes in Our Gang: A Racial History of the Little Rascals:

His hair was tied in pigtails and white ribbons. He ate watermelons, fell into vats of flour, and smoked a corncob pipe. He wore the clownlike, oversized shoes of a minstrel. . . .

Farina became the vehicle of all the most hackneyed and racist sight gags. He appeared in whiteface while his white friends appeared in blackface. When he got the measles, white spots were painted on his face instead of black ones. He clutched voodoo amulets and was terrified of ghosts. He was called “Shine” while Mickey was called “Freckles” or “Speck” and Joe Cobb was called “Fatty.”

But something strange started to happen. Despite his genesis in the flattest of stereotypes, Farina started to become—how else to put it?—human. He went through the minstrel motions, but even the narrowness of his scripted roles couldn’t suppress his outsized personality. The public fell in love with him.

Just as rival studios needed an equivalent of Ernie Morrison in their kid gangs, many also had a younger black child in this stereotypical form. In the McDougall Alley Kids and Buster Brown series that counterpart was a girl named “Oatmeal,” played by Hannah Washington.

One manifestation of public interest the character, and of recognizing that a real child played the role, was the demand to know if Farina was a boy or a girl. For a while the movies were ambiguous, as were newspaper stories. Roach milked the question, playing coy in press releases.

Eventually, however, the studio acknowledged that “Sunny” Hoskins and the character of Farina were little boys. The costume changed to have pants, but it retained a couple of the pickaninny traits. Sunny wore one pair of shoes inside another because Farina had flat oversized feet. He kept his hair long enough for pigtails for years. Farina continued to suffer a disproportionate amount of mess and rough treatment.

From 1925 to 1931 Farina was the series’ main black character. In several films he was clearly the lead: “Your Own Back Yard,” “One Wild Ride” (1925), “Monkey Business” (1926), “Love My Dog,” “Chicken Feed” (1927), “Spook-Spoofing,” “The Smile Wins” (1928), “Election Day,” “Fast Freight” (1929). In some movies Sunny’s sister Jannie played Farina’s little sister, often called Mango.

Sunny made the transition to talkies while some other Our Gang kids struggled. Lee notes that one issue in that shift was that he’d been born in Boston and grown up in Los Angeles, so he didn’t speak in the broad “Southern” dialect the intertitles had assigned to Farina. It looks like he figured out how to deliver those lines for the microphones not quite as broadly but still with enough rural character to please the public.

Ultimately, Sunny Hoskins outlasted a second generation of fellow players. His seniority in the series matched his line deliveries, which projected a long-suffering personality. Having started as a toddler, he ended up appearing in more Our Gang movies than any other actor.

This series of postings started by noting the roots of the Farina persona in the character of Topsy in stage productions and parodies of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Farina actually played Topsy in the 1926 short “Uncle Tom’s Uncle,” when the gang put on their own version of the show. Pudgy Joe Cobb portrayed the title character in blackface, his mom repeatedly telling him to wash his face and do his chores. That reflected the ongoing influence of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel on American culture.

Who Could Replace “Sunshine Sammy”?

Ernie “Sunshine Sammy” Morrison was the Hal Roach Studio’s first child star and the highest-paid of the original Our Gang cast. All the more remarkable since Ernie was a black kid in 1920s America.

After a couple of years of those movies being increasingly successful, Ernie’s father asked for a raise. Hal Roach didn’t renew the Morrisons’ contract.

In early 1924, Ernie went off to make more money in vaudeville, though he returned that summer to complete “Fast Company,” a short started the previous year but delayed by the director’s injury.

Roach’s competitors appear to have seen Ernie as a key to the appeal of Our Gang. Many of the rival series that sprang up in this period also featured an African-American boy of the same age.

For example, James Berry played “Bubbles” in some of the Century Kids films—made up in one with white lipstick to look like a minstrel-show caricature. His brother Ananias appeared in the rival McDougall Alley Kids shorts. The Mickey Maguire series featured Jimmy Robinson as “Hambone Johnson,” the hero’s closest friend.

Roach himself recognized Ernie Morrison’s value by trying to replace him. Later in 1924 “The Sun Down Limited” introduced Flemon Miller as “Powder-Puff.” I can’t help but think there was some knowing irony in how that character appeared with the intertitle, “He wanted to join the ‘Gang’—But the quota was exhausted.” Flemon lasted for only one more film, “Every Man for Himself.”

The studio then hired Eugene Jackson from the competing Reg’lar Kids series, at first as “Snowball.” Roach renamed him “Pineapple” after someone combed his hair so it stood up like pineapple leaves—i.e., he was made to look like a joke. Like Ernie Morrison, “Pineapple” was usually older brother to “Farina.” Gene made six shorts from the middle of 1924 to the start of 1925 and went on to a long show-biz career.

After letting Gene Jackson go, the studio’s next Our Gang film was “Official Officers.” Its gang included a black boy played by Todd Roark, who had won a Los Angeles Evening Express Baby Contest with the prize of one week’s work in an Our Gang movie for $100. Todd didn’t stand out, but it’s interesting that the studio brought him on as a gang member, not an incidental extra.

In this same period, George “Sonny Boy” Warde played Sing Joy, a Chinese boy in the gang, over nine shorts. Sonny Boy’s own ancestry was Japanese and French, though there are questions even about that; later he adopted the stage name Luis Cordova before shifting back to Sonny Loy. The point is that the Hal Roach Studio appears to have been trying to present Our Gang as racially inclusive, even while presenting the non-white kids in stereotypical forms.

Meanwhile, every one of those mid-1920s shorts included Allen “Sunny” Hoskins as “Farina,” then four and five years old. In a couple of those movies he was the only black kid. And it turned out he was Ernie Morrison’s replacement all along.

From Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Our Gang

As influential as Uncle Tom’s Cabin was on ante-bellum American culture and politics, stage adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel continued to shape popular culture for the next century.

In the theater, both straight and parodic, the novel’s black characters turned into racist caricatures. The Uncle Tom of the novel resists cruelty, dispenses moral wisdom, and becomes a martyr. In plays for post-Civil War white audiences and in minstrel-show offshoots, that character became old, feeble, and subservient.

The novel also included a young black girl named Topsy. In those dramatic adaptations, and especially in minstrelsy, Topsy became a comic grotesque, the prototype of the racist caricature of a pickaninny. In her book Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights Robin Bernstein writes:

The pickaninny was an imagined, subhuman black juvenile [with…] dark or sometimes jet-black skin, exaggerated eyes and mouth, the action of gorging (especially on watermelon), and the state of being threatened or attacked by animals (especially alligators, geese, dogs, pigs, or tigers). Pickaninnies often wear ragged clothes (which suggest parental neglect) and are sometimes partially or fully naked. . . . the figure is always juvenile, always of color, and always resistant if not immune to pain.

The shadow of the theatrical Uncle Tom’s Cabin falls on Hal Roach’s Our Gang comedies—despite those movies being relatively progressive in showing black and white children playing together.

Racial inclusion was part of Roach’s plan for the movies from the start. In 1921 he built a short movie around one of his studio’s most popular supporting players, nine-year-old Ernie “Sunshine Sammy” Morrison. That movie was called “The Pickaninny” even though Ernie didn’t conform to that stereotype in his looks or persona. It didn’t do well enough for the distributor to want a series, perhaps because of resistance from Southern cinemas.

Roach then assembled a team of kids around Morrison, calling them his “Rascals.” The industry instead took the title of the first release, “Our Gang,” as the name of the series. From the start in 1922, those movies featured a bunch of white kids plus Ernie—usually from a poorer family, but always welcomed as a playmate and sometimes as a leader. At times his character would be called something cliché like “Booker T.,” but more often he was just “Ernie,” like the other actors using their own names.

Later in the spring of 1922, the Our Gang series brought on Allen “Sunny” Hoskins, less than two years old. His character, named “Farina,” was designed to match the pickaninny type: pigtails, shapeless sack dress, and oversized flat shoes. For months the movies presented Farina as Ernie’s baby sister, thus closer to Topsy.

The white filmmakers gave Farina other traits based on racist stereotypes. In “Giants vs. Yanks” (1923) toddler Farina carries a straight razor, as so many black men supposedly did, according to the cliché of the time. “One Wild Ride” (1925) ends with Farina literally buried in watermelons. The intertitles rendered his lines in a broad dialect with more malapropisms than the other gang members. 

Most troubling, there’s a pattern of Farina enduring more physical punishment and mess than the other kids, reflecting the notion that pickaninnies didn’t feel as much pain. Of course these are slapstick comedies, so the whole cast fell about, but “Sunny” Hoskins went through more than others.

The Our Gang movies never made a direct connection between Farina and Topsy, but they didn’t have to. Minstrel-show stereotypes were pervasive in early-20th-century American culture. In “The Big Show!” (1923), the gang acts out famous movies, several of the kids impersonating older movie stars of the day. What role was there for Ernie Morrison? He played Uncle Tom.

“The Dorothy Paintings” and More in South Yarmouth

The Cultural Center of Cape Cod is hosting a summer celebration of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

The executive director of the institution, Molly Demeulenaere, says: “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is more than just a story; it's a timeless exploration of what it means to find and appreciate the complex emotions around the concept of home. Dorothy’s journey, alongside her wonderfully loyal and caring friends, mirrors the universal quest for belonging and self-discovery, making it a story that truly resonates across generations.”

Its description of the event says:

At the beating heart of this enchanting exhibition is Christina Schlesinger’s “The Dorothy Paintings.” This compelling collection of thirteen mural-sized canvases reimagines Dorothy’s adventures with a freshness of perspective that aptly portrays her as the symbol of youthful resilience and independence. Schlesinger’s work demands attention while simultaneously depicting a delicateness and vulnerability rarely seen successfully in combination.

Some of Schlesinger’s paintings can be seen here. The Cape Cod Times offers additional photographs of the space, showing how there are hands-on activities for families, inside and out.

This exhibit will be at the center’s Flagship Bass River Campus, 307 Old Main Street in South Yarmouth. The gallery is open Tuesday through Friday from 10 to 5, and Saturday from 10 to 3. The show will run through 7 September.

The Mystery of “Honeymoon Hardships”

In his memoir, The Keystone Kid: Tales of Early Hollywood, Coy Watson, Jr., devoted considerable space to the Mack Sennett Comedies short “Honeymoon Hardships” (1925).

That section, headed “The Craziest Picture I Ever Worked On,” runs for nine pages, longer than any other in the book.

About half those pages are about learning to swim, which young Coy did in order to work on that movie safely. The rest describe the filming, limited of course to the scenes Coy himself appeared in.

Watson recalled two scenes in detail: a dinner party interrupted by the explosion of a water heater upstairs and a car full of relatives driving into and out of a lake.

According to Watson, the dinner party involved some pratfalls and gags with mashed potatoes, followed by the rain of lots of debris. The drive into the lake was performed in a disguised swimming pool, and the principal difficulty was getting all the cast, including plump actress Sunshine Hart, to fully submerge. On top of it all, some of the cast (including young Coy) were to find this all extremely laughable while others acted aghast and dead-pan.

“Honeymoon Hardships” can now be viewed on Youtube and the Internet Archive. It contains neither of those scenes.

Some other details of the movie don’t match what Watson wrote. He recalled the director as Del Lord. Modern references credit Ralph Ceder. Watson described his fellow child actors, the White triplets, as playing “city kids”; they appear to be from another country family. He dated the film to 1924, which was when he worked on it, but it was released in January 1925.

Filmographers have found inaccuracies in The Keystone Kid, not surprising in a memoir about working as a child in a poorly documented industry decades earlier.

In this case, however, Watson’s book offers two stills taken on the set, clearly showing him interacting with the White triplets and the movie’s adult cast: Hart, Billy Bevan, Alice Day, Raymond McKee, and so on.

Coy, Jr., barely appears in the surviving print, but he can be glimpsed in a couple of scenes—as the family decides to go fishing and then piles into their car, there are four boys instead of just three. So he was there.

Furthermore, the dynamic Watson described with a rural family laughing at one disaster after another while visiting honeymooners try to endure is indeed the main theme of the movie. The scenes Watson recalled could easily fit into the scenario on screen. He also wrote about his father working on special effects for those scenes, and we know Coy Watson, Sr., had that specialty.

My first thought about this discrepancy is that the 21-minute version on the web had been edited down from a longer original to fit the needs of a reissue or for television. However, an advertisement for “Honeymoon Hardships” said it was two reels, or about 20 minutes long. In all likelihood, we’re seeing what Sennett released to theaters.

I therefore conclude that the scenes Coy Watson, Jr., worked on so hard and remembered so vividly decades later were left out of the final cut.

The Sennett studio may have felt the movie needed a stronger climax. “Honeymoon Hardships” now ends with a train chase and the husband rescuing his new wife from a charging cow, with a hint that they’re never going back to their country cousins. That provides an ending to the story arc. Maybe Del Lord filmed the original scenes and Ralph Ceder oversaw the reshoots, thus getting final credit for the picture.

However it happened, there’s a version of “Honeymoon Hardships” with some elaborate special-effect scenes that survived only in Coy Watson, Jr.’s memories.

The Missing Princess of the Marvelous Land

I’ve been thinking about how The Marvelous Land of Oz could be more of a mystery. As it is, the book is a roller-coaster ride of political events. Every so often it raises the question of who should rule the Emerald City. But the book doesn’t give us all the clues to its ultimate answer until quite late.

Baum and his colleagues had introduced the character of Pastoria, former king of Oz, in the 1902 stage extravaganza The Wizard of Oz. Therefore, when the Scarecrow mentions his name in the sixteenth chapter of Land, it wouldn’t have been a complete surprise to all readers.

Nonetheless, that was two-thirds of the way through the book. Furthermore, Glinda doesn’t drop the bombshell that Pastoria left a missing daughter until four chapters later. That means readers have only three chapters to be thinking about this mystery, on which the conclusion of the story will hinge.

There are plenty of signs that Baum didn’t like going back to revise. He occasionally excised whole chapters or inserted new passages, but his surviving manuscripts and correspondence show none of the fiddling with details that other writers regularly performed.

I don’t think it would have taken much revising to cue readers into thinking about Pastoria and his daughter for much of the book. Here are some slightly rewritten passages in which characters discuss the history of Oz.

In Chapter 3, the boy Tip is trying to orient his creation, Jack Pumpkinhead:

“Where are we going?” asked Jack, when they had resumed their journey.

“I’m not exactly sure,” said the boy; “but I believe we are headed South, and that will bring us, sooner or later, to the Emerald City.”

“What city is that?” enquired the Pumpkinhead.

“Why, it’s the center of the Land of Oz, and the biggest town in all the country. I’ve never been there, myself, but I’ve heard all about its history. It was built by a mighty and wonderful Wizard named Oz, around the estate of the former king Pastoria, and [later] . . . the people of the Emerald City invited the Scarecrow to rule them.”

“Dear me!” said Jack. “I’m getting confused with all this history. Who is the Scarecrow?”

“Another friend of Dorothy’s,” replied Tip.

“And who is Dorothy?”

“She was a girl that came here from Kansas, a place in the big, outside World. She got blown to the Land of Oz by a cyclone, and while she was here the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman accompanied her on her travels.”

“And where is she now?” inquired the Pumpkinhead.

“Glinda the Good, who rules the Quadlings, sent her home again,” said the boy.

“Oh. And what became of the Scarecrow?”

“I told you. He rules the Emerald City,” answered Tip.

“I thought you said it was ruled by a wonderful Wizard,” objected Jack, seeming more and more confused.

“Well, so I did. Now, pay attention, and I’ll explain it,” said Tip, speaking slowly and looking the smiling Pumpkinhead squarely in the eye. “Around the time King Pastoria vanished, the Wizard came and built the Emerald City and ruled for many years. Dorothy went to the Emerald City to ask the Wizard to send her back to Kansas; and the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman went with her. But the Wizard couldn’t send her back, because he wasn’t so much of a Wizard as he might have been. And then they got angry at the Wizard, and threatened to expose him; so the Wizard made a big balloon and escaped in it, and no one has ever seen him since.”

“Now, that is very interesting history,” said Jack, well pleased; “and I understand it perfectly all but the explanation.”

After Jack and Tip get separated, the boy meets a pretty young woman in a colorful military uniform. With a little tweaking, this conversation could have been part of that Chapter 8:

“I am General Jinjur,” was the brief reply.

“Oh!” said the boy surprised. “What sort of a General?”

“I command the Army of Revolt in this war,” answered the General, with unnecessary sharpness.

“Oh!” he again exclaimed. “I didn’t know there was a war.”

“You were not supposed to know it,” she returned, “for we have kept it a secret; and considering that our army is composed entirely of girls,” she added, with some pride, “it is surely a remarkable thing that our Revolt is not yet discovered.”

“It is, indeed,” acknowledged Tip. “But where is your army?”

“About a mile from here,” said General Jinjur. “The forces have assembled from all parts of the Land of Oz, at my express command. For this is the day we are to conquer His Majesty the Scarecrow, and wrest from him the throne. The Army of Revolt only awaits my coming to march upon the Emerald City.”

“Well!” declared Tip, drawing a long breath, “this is certainly a surprising thing! May I ask why you wish to conquer His Majesty the Scarecrow?”

“Because the Emerald City has been ruled by men long enough, for one reason,” said the girl. “Before the Scarecrow there was the Wizard, and before the Wizard, or even the city as it stands today, there was King Pastoria. Some people say Pastoria had a daughter who was meant to rule over us, meaning that we should have had a girl ruler by this time, but no one has seen that child for years.”

That lost heir was not part of the history of Oz that Tip had heard from Mombi. He puzzled over this rumor as Jinjur went on:

“Moreover, the City glitters with beautiful gems, which might far better be used for rings, bracelets and necklaces; and there is enough money in the King’s treasury to buy every girl in our Army a dozen new gowns. So we intend to conquer the City and run the government to suit ourselves.”

Tip and Jack Pumpkinhead reunite in the Scarecrow’s palace, only for General Jinjur to seize the Emerald City. Later the Scarecrow seizes the palace back with the help of his close friend, the Tin Woodman. But at that point in Chapter 16, the straw-man ruler is ready to abdicate:

Tip soon cut the stitches that had fastened the crown to the Scarecrow’s head, and the former monarch of the Emerald City removed it with a sigh of relief and hung it on a peg beside the throne.

“That is my last memento of royalty,” said he; “and I’m glad to get rid of it. The former King of this City, who was named Pastoria, lost the crown to the Wonderful Wizard, who passed it on to me. Now the girl Jinjur claims it, and I sincerely hope it will not give her a headache.”

“A kindly thought, which I greatly admire,” said the Tin Woodman, nodding approvingly.

“Have you ever heard,” Tip asked the straw man, “that King Pastoria had a daughter who disappeared?”

“Some people do say that,” answered the Scarecrow, “and some say otherwise. That happened well before my time, so I cannot say anything about it. Why—do you think General Jinjur is this lost heir to Pastoria?”

Tip shook his head. After all, Jinjur was the person who had first told him about the missing princess, and she had made no claim to rule the Emerald City other than by force and cunning.

“Well, now I will indulge in a quiet think,” continued the Scarecrow, lying back in the throne.

Finally, the Scarecrow and his supporters reach Glinda’s palace in Chapter 20:

“Therefore I have come to beg your assistance,” resumed the Scarecrow, “for I believe you are always glad to succor the unfortunate and oppressed.”

“That is true,” replied the Sorceress, slowly. “But the Emerald City is now ruled by General Jinjur, who has caused herself to be proclaimed Queen. What right have I to oppose her?”

“Why, she stole the throne from me,” said the Scarecrow.

“And how came you to possess the throne?” asked Glinda.

“I got it from the Wizard of Oz, and by the choice of the people,” returned the Scarecrow, uneasy at such questioning.

“And where did the Wizard get it?” she continued gravely.

“I am told he took it after Pastoria, the former King, had not been heard from for some time,” said the Scarecrow, becoming confused under the intent look of the Sorceress.

“Then,” declared Glinda, “the throne of the Emerald City belongs neither to you nor to Jinjur, but to this Pastoria from whom the Wizard usurped it.”

“That is true,” acknowledged the Scarecrow, humbly; “but Pastoria has been gone for many years now, and some one must rule in his place.”

“Pastoria had a daughter, who is the rightful heir to the throne of the Emerald City. Did you know that?” questioned the Sorceress.

“Not for certain,” replied the Scarecrow. “But if that girl still lives I will not stand in her way. It will satisfy me as well to have Jinjur turned out, as an impostor, as to regain the throne myself. In fact, it isn’t much fun to be King, especially if one has good brains. I have known for some time that I am fitted to occupy a far more exalted position. But where is the girl who owns the throne, and what is her name?”

“Her name is Ozma,” answered Glinda. “But where she is I have tried in vain to discover. For the Wizard of Oz, when he stole the throne from Ozma’s father, hid the girl in some secret place; and by means of a magical trick with which I am not familiar he also managed to prevent her being discovered—even by so experienced a Sorceress as myself.”

By that point, readers would have been thinking about the Emerald City’s deep history for most of the book, and the mystery of the missing heir for a dozen chapters. Where could that child be?

OzCon 2024 Getting into the Game

This July’s OzCon International in Pomona will be the sixtieth annual Oz fan convention on the west coast. OzCon started as the Winkie Convention, for people who lived in the western quadrant of the USA.

These days, OzCon attracts people from all over. Co-director Colin Ayres is from Shropshire, I’m from New England, and one of this year’s guests is from Australia.

Once again I’ve been helping to plan the program. I’ll speak briefly, moderate a panel on what stories the manuscripts of the Oz books can tell us, and help with other tasks.

As the graphic above from convention co-director Jay Davis says, the schedule is up now at OzConInternational.

“Outside the Box” Opening Reception in Jamaica Plain, 21 April

With friends from the Boston Comics Roundtable, I’m helping to organize an exhibit of comics art in the gallery of the Footlight Club, America’s oldest continuously running community theater. It’s on Eliot Street in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston.

A few weeks back, a volunteer at that theater contacted our group about assembling a show. Its current production is Tuck Everlasting, a family musical based on Natalie Babbitt’s novel, so he wanted to showcase art that would appeal to kids.

Many B.C.R. members have created comics for kids, and co-founder Dan Mazur published Boston Powers, a comic book with short, local superhero stories. So there was a good talent pool to choose from.

The exhibit has ended up featuring thirteen artists, including Boston Powers contributors, folks publishing on their own on paper or the web, a couple of graphic novelists (Jonathan Todd, Jerel Dye), and even a picture-book artist who works in comics form (Lindsay Leigh).

I’m represented through the work of Brendan Tobin, with pages from our “Stupendo and Secret Girl” collaboration.

This Sunday, 21 April, at 1:00 PM we’ll have a reception to celebrate the exhibit before a matinee performance of the musical. The art will remain up before, during, and after every show for families to enjoy. 

The Characters of Oz “a real treat”

In the latest Baum Bugle from the International Wizard of Oz Club, Scott Cummings calls The Characters of Oz “a real treat and a fresh addition to the Oz reference shelf.”

I’m flattered by the review’s praise for my essay on the Wizard himself, especially how the “insightful comment that ‘Baum built most of his characters around contradictions’ casts a valuable light on the entire volume.” I’d been looking for a place to install that comment in Oz commentary. Those paragraphs got some extra airing back here.

Part of the brief for contributors to this collection was to examine the characters through multiple forms of the Oz mythos. The story has long sprawled across stage, screen, comics, and other media. Thanks to the public domain, there has been an explosion of adaptations in the last few decades, though only a few have really embedded themselves deep in the culture.

I could have applied my lens of “a good man but a bad wizard” to such later retellings as The Wiz, Wicked, and Oz the Great and Powerful. But I felt on surer ground looking at the Wizard as he appeared in the first forty years, from the original book to the MGM movie. That allowed for a more manageable narrative, and narrative is how I naturally think.

That choice evidently worked out, with Cummings calling that chapter, “Perhaps because of the tighter focus,…especially successful.”

Looking back, I see that approach paralleled how I looked at the first thirty years of Dick Grayson for another collection from the same publisher. So I guess that’s what I like.

On the Road to CharlOz, Sept. 26–29

On September 26-29, 2024, the city of Charlotte, North Carolina; the University of North Carolina at Charlotte; and other local and national organizations will host CharlOz, a stretching over four days to explore the Oz mythos and its cultural legacy.

I’ll be there, speaking at two events on the schedule for Friday, 27 September:

• a panel discussion of the new essay collection The Characters of Oz, featuring editor Dina Massachi and fellow contributors Mark West, Katharine Kittredge, Walter Squire, Paige Gray, Angelica Shirley Carpenter, and Gita Dorothy Morena.
• a talk later that afternoon titled “‘My! what a lot of Kings and Queens!’: The Meanings of Monarchy in L. Frank Baum’s Fantasies.”

The schedule of CharlOz events includes many other speakers and presentations, including:

• an opening keynote speech by novelist Gregory Maguire.
• presentations by comics artists Eric Shanower and Janet R. Lee, puppeteer and director James Ortiz, and film restorer Nate Barlow.
• talks by scholars Ryan Bunch, Angelica Shirley Carpenter, Atticus Gannaway, Judy Bieber, Anastasia Rose Hyden, Brady Schwind, Paige Gray, Katharine Kittredge, and many more.
• a Saturday full of family programming.
• theatrical, cinematic, and gallery interpretations of Oz.

The International Wizard of Oz Club will also have its national convention in Charlotte coinciding with this festival.

“Historic Children’s Voices” Coming from American Antiquarian Society

The American Antiquarian Society in Worcester will launch a website on “Historic Children’s Voices, 1799-1899.”

Its introductory page explains: “The holdings to be digitized are not children’s literature, i.e., works created BY adults FOR children, but rather are direct testimony as well as imaginative works created BY children. As such, they constitute an archive of historical evidence not previously accessible.”

The materials to be digitized include diaries, letters, stories, poems, and the AAS’s “large amateur newspaper collection—most printed on home parlor presses.” There will be 15,000 pages of content in all.

Those presses were very popular in the late 1800s. When L. Frank Baum issued the Rose Lawn Home Journal and later self-published works on stamp collecting and chicken farming, he was among thousands of young people working their own small presses.

Accompanying the website, the AAS will host an in-person and online symposium on 2–3 May featuring panel discussions on “Authentic Children’s Voices,” “Archival Silences,” “Visual Culture of Children’s Production,” and “Hearing the Child’s Voice.”

On 5–9 August, the AAS will host an institute for K-12 teachers on the subject, with hands-on workshops using the collection and a field trip to Lowell National Historical Park.

Detecting Style

“Red Eye” is a short story by Michael Connelly and Dennis Lehane. It was published in Face Off and then in The Best American Mystery Stories 2015, where I read it.

David Baldacci, the editor of Face Off, invited established crime writers to write short stories that brought their lead characters together. In “Red Eye,” Connolly’s L.A. police detective Harry Bosch meets Lehane’s Boston private eye Patrick Kenzie.

It looks like Connolly and Lehane traded sections, Connolly writing those parts told by following Bosch and Lehane those tracking Kenzie. Usually Kenzie is the narrator of the novels that feature him, but to match Connolly Lehane wrote in the close third person.

Even beyond the central characters, the sections are easily distinguished by the authors’ styles. Connolly is stripped down, short sentences and terse observations.

Lehane’s sections, in contrast, are full of sentence fragments, aphroisms, metaphors. It’s still hard-boiled prose, but it’s not afraid of style.

The contrast reminds me of the difference between Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon and Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. And I like a little more ornament in my prose.