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 ..read more

“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 ..read more

This month I read two British murder mysteries, published twenty years apart, in which the culprit turned out to be the local bigwig killing someone who was blackmailing him. (I’m withholding the names of those books to protect the dénouements.) Now I’m trying to figure out if that trope suggests an ingrained suspicion of privilege, showing that the local wealthy squire is not to be trusted. Or do those books reinforce social hierarchies, since both these murderers had risen from the lower classes to their high places in society through blackmailable methods ..read more

The California Gold Rush made San Francisco a boom town. It attracted Americans from the East Coast, of course, and also people from southern China. Within a couple of decades, some Americans of northern European backgrounds began to view Chinese immigration as a problem. In particular, they pointed to violent male criminals who trafficked young women and fought men from other organizations. To label that type of criminal, newspaper editors and government officials reached back several decades. The Weekly Alta California for 5 Feb 1870 referred to a ring of Chinese immigrants as “a gang of ..read more

As I recounted here, the term “High-binder” or “hide-binder” appeared in the New York press in late 1806 and early 1807 after disturbances in the streets around Christmas. At first it referred to a particular set of anti-Catholic rowdies. Soon it was being slapped on working-class Catholics instead. In subsequent newspaper items, we can see the term spread outside of New York, though still tied to that place of origin. The 28 Apr 1813 Tickler of Philadelphia described the neighborhood of “Gotham, (New York,)” as: “Here the sailor, the ropemaker, the cookey boys and hide-binders resort to en ..read more

I’ve been reading about San Francisco before the big earthquake of 1906, and one word that comes up a lot is “highbinder.” Merriam-Webster defines that as “a professional killer operating in the Chinese quarter of an American city,” or alternatively “a corrupt politician.” There were plenty of corrupt politicians in Gilded-Age San Francisco, but in the newspapers of the time and in histories since the term “highbinder” definitely meant a thug of Chinese extraction. I wondered what the etymology of that term was. What were those men binding, and how high? Was is something to do with queues ..read more

In The Road to Oz (1909), L. Frank Baum wrote: “Money! Money in Oz!” cried the Tin Woodman. “What a queer idea! Did you suppose we are so vulgar as to use money here?” . . . “If we used money to buy things with, instead of love and kindness and the desire to please one another, then we should be no better than the rest of the world,” declared the Tin Woodman. “Fortunately money is not known in the Land of Oz at all. We have no rich, and no poor; for what one wishes the others all try to give him, in order to make him happy, and no one in all Oz cares to have more than he can use.” That contr ..read more

At lunch today, a friend and I invoked the line “There are no second acts in American life,” and then weren’t sure where it came from. We thought it was F. Scott Fitzgerald, but how, and what did he mean? So this afternoon I looked it up. The line did come from Fitzgerald. But the source and meaning are debatable. Around 1935 Fitzgerald wrote an autobiographical essay called “My Lost City” that said: “I once thought there were no second acts in American lives, but there was certainly to be a second act to New York’s boom days.” In 1945 that text was published in the posthumous collection Th ..read more

Back in 2005, the International Wizard of Oz Club’s journal, The Baum Bugle, published my article “Dorothy the Conqueror.” It discussed the character of Dorothy Gale as L. Frank Baum developed her, from a little girl who called herself “small and meek” into a bold adventurer. That boldness had always been part of her character, but after her first trip to Oz she knew it. By the end of Baum’s series, she was happy to set out for unknown parts of Oz because “all excitement is fun.” The article also points out ways that the MGM movie’s treatment of Dorothy doesn’t reflect that character, espec ..read more

On September 27-29, 2024, the city of Charlotte, North Carolina; the University of North Carolina at Charlotte; and other organizations, local and national, will host CharlOz, a three-day festival exploring The Wonderful World of Oz and its cultural legacy. The event is now open to proposals for presentations on almost any aspect of Oz, particularly: History and Culture: Oz’s reflection of American history and/or culture Social and Economic: Aspects of Oz relating to race, class, disability, or childhood Visual and Performing Arts: Analysis of the visual or performing arts as they relate to ..read more