Preface: This review was started on September 14th, 2002, a full month before the 10/14/02 U.S. release date of Short and Tall Tales. I happened to get my hands on a prerelease preview proof sent out by Putnam to editors and reviewers - not through some benevolent Putnam PR exec admitting me to that exclusive list, but through that great populist equalizer, eBay. (The final price turned out to be $6.54; not bad, eh?) The proof edition is fronted by the following disclaimer: "In quoting from this book for reviews or any other purposes, it is essential that the final printed book be referred to, since the author may make changes to this manuscript before this book goes to press"; that said, based on the nature of the material and the table of contents for the finished version provided to Amazon and bn.com (apparently posted the very same day the proof arrived in my mailbox, coincidentally), I doubt that the proof differs significantly from the finished version.
One big yet ultimately surface difference, however - the proof numbers 97 pages (using the same size font as in the series, on a 5 1/4" x 8 1/4" page), while the final release is touted as being 144. Judging from the "official", final table of contents, though, the stories appear to be the same proportionate length, and whereas the proof presents the individual tales one right after another, relentlessly page-after-page, each story in the finished version begins on an odd-numbered (right-hand) page - presumably for presentation purposes, so that the title page for each tale (containing a title, a teaser sub-header, and a short introduction by Qwilleran) is faced by a clean, blank page, as the chapters in the hardbacks are divided nowadays. With twenty-seven separate "chapters" in Short and Tall Tales, the blank-page filler quickly adds up, and the possible use of a larger font or wider spacing could account for the rest of the discrepancy. (The prospect of the powers that be gracing us with illustrations is tantalizing but doubtful.)
I will also note, for those of us keeping track of such matters, that the proof is littered with punctuation and capitalization errors (not to mention Qwill's name being misspelled on the front cover), far more so that the average Cat Who.. new-release hardback. This seems to indicate that the recent books are not published completely unspellchecked as we thought, though the inclusion of any typos in material taken from sources that have already been through the correction and editing process is quite a feat.
Short and Tall Tales is the first book out of Qwilleran since he settled 400 miles north of everywhere years ago with the intention of churning an entirely different tome to while away the five years till his estate passed out of trust. Qwill (and, by implication, LJB) said he wanted to hold off on its publication till he had "enough tall tales to make a decent showing - not just a 'slender volume', as the reviewers say", and, as a (albeit self-appointed) reviewer, I must report: it is a slender volume, the tales are far shorter than they are tall, and furthermore, you've read most of them before. A good eighteen of the twenty-seven stories - a full two-thirds of a quite thin book - are lifted verbatim from previous Cat Who... mysteries (with the perspective sometimes altered, though this practice is not employed with a consistent logic, and occasional minor rewordings), and four are reworkings of old material; only five can be truly considered new.
That important disclaimer posted, before I venture further, I'd like to expound a bit on how unique Short and Tall Tales is, in its nature if not in its material. First off, of course, is how it enjoys publication both in the make-believe realm of Moose County and in our own, flesh-and-blood world, and moreover how drastically this phenomenon turns the tables on the usual arrangement - instead of a real book popping up in passing mention in a work of fiction, we have a fictional book, written by a fictional character, chronicling the folk history of his fictional home, brought into reality - treated as reality, as as much a nonfiction account as it would be considered in Moose County itself - as a tangible, purchasable product to fill megamediastore shelves. And we will take home our fictional book written by a fictional character and read it and discuss it amongst ourselves and then, a few months later, in the latest volume of the Cat Who... adventures, we will read of this very book's publication in Pickax and what the author's fellow fictional characters think of it. What a remarkable Möbius-strip of a meta experience.
Secondly unique and remarkable is the marketing decision itself involved in such an undertaking; someone along the line, either a publisher or the author herself, decided that Braun's Moose County setting had grown into so rich and textured (not to mention popular) a creation over the course of almost twenty books that it could stand on its own two feet outside of its (theoretically, at least) subservient role to the Cat Who... whodunit framework. Granted, Short and Tall Tales is still (albeit largely unadmittedly) a spin-off of a popular series, and the short-story anthology format isn't, at this point, much of a stretch from that series itself, which has in recent years developed from a succession of mysteries with a strong sense of character and place into a string of isolated anecdotes that're either chronicled in the book's present by the narrative and star the Cat Who... cast members or are related through flashbacks by various raconteurs. To dispense with the pretense and name brand, though, and base an entire book on an aspect that is a traditionally viewed as such a small sliver of the whole requires a great deal of confidence. In the past couple years of Companions and cookbooks, the appearance of yet another Cat Who... merchandising spin-off is not surprising - but its appearance in this particular form somewhat is.
So I can see, and applaud, the ideas behind this book's inception. It is the finished product, however, which I must judge, and I'm not sure how wise a marketing strategy this verbatim approach can be; Cat Who... fans are already familiar with this material, and while it's sorta neat to have the tales collected all in one volume, to ask them to pay over twenty dollars for the convenience is rather (among other adjectives) bold, especially when you've teased your audience for six consecutive books and are about to spring on them the post-purchase surprise that the tease is pretty much all there is - that there's very little in Short and Tall Tales beyond what we saw being assembled in the series. On the other hand, newcomers, this crossover audience to whom the publishers might daring to reach out, would probably be not only put off by this particular book but mightily confused as well; this is an extremely bare-bones tome that does not succeed in drawing the reader into its world or providing an accurate reflection of its author.
Examples: a brief account of the work and life of country doctors in turn-of-the-century Moose County mentions their reliance on intriguing folk remedies like goose grease and onion poultices but doesn't fill us in on their individual applications. The opener, "The Legend of the Rubbish Heap" from Went up a Creek, merely skims over the contrasting and fluctuating fortunes of the Klingenschoen and Limburger families and empires, which really is an incredible tale, even if you simply count the part about eccentric Aunt Fanny and her unsuspecting heir (which is, naturally, all but omitted from SaTT). The account of Ephraim Goodwinter's nefarious activities, circumspect "death", and infamous funeral and the annual dusklight miners' march is extremely condensed for such rich, spooky material, relegated to a little less than a page's worth of text. (It's skillfully condensed, like the exposition to a nimbly-written newspaper article, but unduly condensed for a book of folk tales - and the story itself seems to exist solely for another, rather cheap purpose, discussed below.) In my preview copy, which is set in a reasonably-sized yet still slightly large typeface, the chapters rarely exceed three pages in length. Bluntly put, most of the tales could do with a good bit of fleshing out - they read like plot-outline sketches rather than the stories themselves. (In fact, it might be a neat fanfic challenge to develop some of the more skeletal tales into meaty stories; any takers?) The material is kept at arm's length for lack of detail and fails to come alive as it should; Braun's masterful ability to evoke setting is completely unused, and the uninitiated might be left wondering what we fans see in this talented writer.
It is also problematic that many of the tales are taken from the latter, weaker and unfocused books, which have demonstrated a slipping grasp of Moose County themselves, and that many of them were written for the purpose of being included in Short and Tall Tales - that is, written with the express purpose of being colorful and zany, two qualities that, I think, cannot be achieved through a wholly conscious effort. These stories instead seem rather forced and inauthentic and not as clever as the author thinks they are. ("Phineas Ford's Fabulous Collection", which concludes SaTT, is perhaps exemplary of this affliction.) Those few selections from the older, sturdier volumes fare a bit better, though some odd editing choices prove a bit debilitating - Emma Wimsey's recollections of her cat Punkin are "cleaned up" from her drifting interview with Qwilleran in Underground and stuffed into a more coherent and blasé narrative; the decision deprives the story of its narrator's presence and character, of the endearingness and poignancy of the tale of an elderly woman and her cherished memories of her beloved pet and friend that remain vibrant in a faltering mind. (The editing proves a quite big problem all-around here, in fact; though all are mentioned in passing in the book, it's never explained, for example, what the K Fund or Squunk water is, or, at first, who the Visitors are. The lazy approach of lifting passages from a larger, involved story without the benefit of additional explication when necessary poses problems the publishers have no excuse for not anticipating.)
The new tales are all right, but, numbering a mere five among twenty-seven, the book's success is not going to rise or fall on their merits alone. "Milo the Potato Farmer" is yet another yarn about someone from Thornton's family's past and their encounters with moonshiners; so similar is it to Thornton's father's adventures in stillcraft (related here in "Tale of Two Tombstones"), with how a honest-working blue-collar joe gives his dirt-poor family a more comfortable life through naughty dealings with the rumrunners while still plugging away at his chosen profession, that one might think it a first draft of the tale scooped off the cutting-room floor. Braun finds much greater success with "The Pork-and-Beans Incident at Foggy Bottom", based a throwaway line from Polly in Talked to Ghosts used to explain a plot point - she spins the incident that was given a brief, passing mention into a fun, well-paced story that, while as short as the other chapters, provides a welcome sizable amount of detail within its small frame. "Foggy Bottom" sets modest goals but attains them nicely - and is, in how it lends a vivid, human face to a snippet of local lore, exemplary of what this book should have been.
"At Last, a Hospital in the Wilderness" recounts the various fund-raising undertakings of the Pickax Hospital Ladies' Auxiliary in the early 1900's; even though it's not really a tall tale, it's quite pleasantly fascinating, and I would have liked to have seen the group's activities expounded upon at length in a proper Cat Who.... The eponymous account of "How Pleasant Street Got Its Name" proves perfectly inoffensive, though its insistence on describing as "wedding-cake" houses that were always previously alluded to as "gingerbread" raises an eyebrow. "Those Pushy Moose County Blueberries", which deals with Mildred's familial struggles with some persistent blueberry bushes, is fairly "eh" on its own merits; more entertaining is the in-joke it provides - we discover that Mildred's great-grandfather came from Maine, which is itself famed for its blueberries, and the whole tale might be construed as a wink toward those persistently self-perpetuating rumors of Moose County being located in Maine. (One might wonder, in fact, if Short and Tall Tales takes advantage of its format for some cross-dimensional, so to speak, in-jokes. Not much new material is introduced with which to play around in that respect, but in addition to the blueberry story, there's a neat jab in Qwill's "About the Author" foreward biography, which establishes his credentials as a big-city reporter before he fled "the anonymity of the megalopolis" - Down Below, which has been ever-nebulous identity-wise. Heh.)
Now, due to Short and Tall Tales's unique nature, on top of its chops as a stand-alone book, it must also be evaluated as an addition to the mythos of an ongoing series; we must judge the new background info the book brings to the table, and we must think of how the publication itself reflects upon and affects Moose County and those therein. The most obvious consideration in the latter realm would be how the book reflects upon Qwilleran's writing talents. As one might guess from the above, I do not believe the stories as a whole bear very well upon him (and the K Fund/Visitors/Squunk water lapses mentioned above do not speak for his skills in historical documentation), although, with many, he is working with personal accounts related by imperfect narrators (in which cases, it would be Qwill's editing skills which would I would call into question). It is Qwill's short introductions (two or three sentences long) prefacing each chapter which are perhaps the book's best parts; they both communicate and pique genuine interest in the story ahead and lend the tale an authentic (or should we perhaps say "authentically dubious"?) provenance, and the little subtitles are satisfyingly sensational ("My Great-Grandmother's Coal Mine: She Wore a Little White Lace Collar and Carried a Shotgun"). They're the work of a listener, authentically Qwilleran.
We are, however, treated to a sad resurfacing of Qwilleran the Jerk, after his absence from Went up the Creek made me think we were happily rid of him. He's included Bushy's tale of his grandfather's supposed abduction aboard a fishing boat and his own avowal of belief in the Visitors, the format of the original Bushy-Qwill conversation from Saw Stars preserved; in that book, the scene was a funny study of someone trying to be politely receptive in the face of a friend's incredible claims, attempting to little avail to wind things down to a merciful end. Here, though, not only is the perceptive comedy absent, but the ending is entirely changed, Qwilleran instead tossing off a snippy, preemptory comment about him having to get home to feed the cats to underline the "this guy's INSANE!" message for the audience; the funnily desperate "here I am in the middle of a lake with a crazy guy! Watch it!" mental note is enough. Furthermore, the touching story of the supposed ghost of Emmaline, Kristi Fugtree's grandmother, and of Mitch and Qwill's failure to see her, a richly emotional tale in Ghosts resonant with the book's themes and material, is related very sketchily and tersely within the space of a little over a page and ended by a dismissive and disinterested "did you see her?" "not really" exchange that the narrator seems to think the be-all, end-all of the story; Qwilleran has here completely missed the point. (And someone unfamiliar with Ghosts might see _no_ point to this version - "Well, if your only goal was to determine whether or not Emmaline was 'real', and you concluded that the ghost was a figment of some woman's imagination, then what on earth is the story still doing in your book?") And one must ask: how would Bushy and Kristi take to Qwill making such fun of them in county-wide print?
This brings us to the former consideration, the new historical matter introduced into the county records - and, as there is not much new material here, one would think that consideration very brief indeed. In this respect, however, the tale which touches upon the Ephraim Goodwinter saga, the tallest and grandest of Moose County's folk tales, which deserves particular attnetion in two lights. One might wonder if Qwilleran has divulged what he learned of Ephraim's fate from Adam Dingleberry in Talked to Ghosts, information that at the time he deemed too divisive to let loose upon Moose County. And the answer is yes - the truth of the matter casually slipped in amongst an enumeration of the prevailing theories out there which opens the tale, where, in its novelty, it will surely draw attention from Moose County residents obsessed with the case. Qwilleran's reasoning is beautiful - all he needed to do to dispense the truth was to start a new rumor. That was smart.
What isn't smart is the story's total retcon of the nature of The Noble Sons of the Noose, a group which had to a certain degree for me evoked - with the noose-and-hood imagery, the sinister secrecy surrounding the group's arcane rituals, activities, and membership, the dark and grisly purpose behind its founding, its pride in its accomplishments in the field of lynching, its support and brotherhood among some of the townsfolk's most upstanding citizens - Moose County's own version of the Ku Klux Klan. (Now, I am not arguing, let me stress, that the Noble Sons are anywhere near the magnitude of evil of the KKK or that they share its racist agenda, or even that their activities in the present are anything actively malevolent - Braun was, wisely, willing to go only so far in creating a secret society that would presumably include much of a supporting cast she wanted us to look upon with affection, and certainly drew the line far short of the absolutely irredeemable. In atmosphere, however, and somewhat in presence, yes, I believe parallels are drawn between the two groups, and I think there's little question that the Noble Sons, despite most assuredly counting many of our beloved characters among their number, definitely fall on the dark side of life in the county.) After the aforementioned very brief outline of the Noble Sons' founding and purpose, the piece chirps an update about the clan's supposed modern image - that they're repurposed themselves into a volunteer group for the Saturday Dads program and we're all supposed to be happy and proud, because they're Good Guys now no more dangerous than the Shriners. Well, count me as unsmiling. The Noble Sons of the Noose has, for about a hundred years, fed upon keeping a hateful memory alive, upon a certain elitist thrill in belonging to an exclusive, cloak-and-dagger club of those descending from the legendary vigilantes who supposedly sent a big man to his grave - upon poisonous emotions in good people. That some members would undertake such charitable work as a Big Brother/Big Sister program individually is plausible, but for the group to out of the blue about-face and claim such charity as its raison d'être is ludicrous. My professional workload has hampered me in writing a long-overdue piece about the ridiculous polarization of good and evil in Moose County - how in previous books characters were actually allowed to be conflicted, like normal people (Larry and Susan's tolerance of Vince Boswell's extortion and other misdeeds in Ghosts that is fueled by nothing but snobbish pride, for example, or Joanna Trupp from Underground running a pitiful one-woman hospital for wounded animals, or Courtney Hampton, not a full-fledged villain but surely no friend of the protagonists, whose never-fulfilled desire to be looked up to is still regarded with sympathy and pity), whereas now they must be either forever on the side of the angels or moustache-twirlingly rotten to the core, with absolutely no in-between allowed - and the little vignette here about the Noble Sons of the Noose might have just hastened it. (I might also note that, as there can't be that many Saturday Dads in an area Moose County's size, Qwilleran has effectively completely blown the Noble Sons' cover. Add that to how he's divulged the truth that the group was founded on a big lie - that, whoops, guess Ephraim wasn't really hanged after all - and Qwilleran needs to watch out, lest the Noble Sons return to their rope-happy roots.)
There's much I was surprised wasn't included in this book: anything further about the Goodwinters. Anything about Francesca Klingenschoen herself, alone. Anything about the shafthouses, considering how prominent they've been in recent books. Or anything about the shipwrecks Roger was so disappointed to learn that he didn't receive funding to investigate at the end of Played Brahms - well, that's not such a big surprise, but I really would've liked to have seen a story or two beyond Tess Harper's horseradish-barge piracy yarn from Stars.
Basically, though it was a great idea, this book simply needed much more effort expended upon it; in its present state, it's unengaging and flat and relies too much on the reader's familiarity with the Cat Who... world to fill in the many blanks the bare-bones storytelling leaves. I don't know if LJB simply ran out of time or interest or steam or what (she mentions in the new Companion interview that she was planning a tale on the Goodwinter curse for the book, yet nothing such ever came to pass in the finished volume), but, no matter what the cause, the publishers shouldn't have released it in this state. It's absolutely not worth the $21.95 list price (even at the 30%-40% bestseller discount many chains will offer); I'd probably recommend you borrow this from the library, just so that you can feel safe at truly not having missed anything, and to those who seek a truly satisfying, intriguing, well-spun dose of Moose County folklore, I would recommend The Cat Who Talked to Ghosts instead. I just expected more out of this book - certainly more than the print equivalent of a clip show. How about one of the tales being a lead-up to the Brought Down the House? How about some self-referential to a Siamese who solves mysteries through supernatural communication with his human? Now, there's a tall tale.
A Short and Tall Tales overview, story by story:
1. "The Legend of the Rubbish Heap" - The Otto Limburger/Karl Klingernschoen story, Went up the Creek, Ch. 1. You don't even have to visit Amazon or bn.com to read the publicity preview excerpt.
2. "Secret of the Blacksmith's Wife" - The retcon of the supposed origins of the Smith family fortune, Smelled a Rat, Chapter 7.
3. "Housecalls on Horseback" - Kind of half-way to original but not quite there; it's a simple sketch of the life of a country doctor in the second half of the nineteenth century, condensed from various oral accounts given by Moose County doctors and doctors' relatives throughout the series, but without the flavor of those more specialized recollections. (I might also note the opening "hook" incident (patient: "Doctor, come quick! My wife - she's got the fever! She's ravin' like a madwoman!") sounds less like authentic experience and more like dialogue culled from a Grizzly Adams episode.)
4. "Hilda the Clipper" - Crazy old Hilda with the hedge clippers, Chapter 10, Tailed a Thief.
5. "Milo the Potato Farmer" - Original story; someone from Thornton's family's past and the moonshiners, take 2.
6. "The Little Old Man in the Woods" - Bruce Abernethy's flying green German midget yarn, Went up the Creek, Chapter 4.
7. "My Great-Grandmother's Coal Mine" - The Bridget Borleston "Ain't no one gonna blow up MY mine!!" story related by Maggie Sprenkle from Robbed the Bank, Chapter 6.
8. "The True (?) History of Squunk Water" - Land surveyor Haley Babcock's dubious account of how his grandfather discovered Squunk water, Chapter 12, Saw Stars.
9. "Whooping It Up with the Loggers" - An amalgam of the publicity material for, Qwill's conversations with the participants about, and the story reenacted in the Saturday Night Brawl in Creek. Curious for this tale to be included in a collection of obscure local lore (particularly as it is told here, as a maybe-this-happened...and-maybe-it-didn't affair); wouldn't the gist of the story be rather widely known after the Brawl?
10. "'The Princess' and the Pirates" - A tale of a horseradish cargo ship vs. a band of marauding pirates related by Wetherby Goode's corvidologist sister, Chapter 14, Saw Stars.
11. "Wildcattin' with an Old Hog" - Qwilleran's word-for-word interview with Ozzie Penn about his engineer days from Chapter 11 of Blew the Whistle. Wouldn't how Ozzie chose to meet his end make an even taller tale - even if Derek's folk song from the end of Whistle were simply transcribed word-for-word?
12. "The Scratching Under the Door" - Emma Wimsey's tale of her cat Punkin's supernatural interventions from Went Underground. In addition to the aforementioned cleaned-up narrative, Emma's line in the tale's postscript is changed from the original "I hear scratching under the door" to "I hear Punkin scratching under the door", which lessens the impact somewhat.
13. "The Dimsdale Jinx" - The pasty poisioning case which wiped out the town of Dimsdale, Chapter 8, Tailed a Thief. The mother's scot-free escape is as infuriating as ever.
14. "The Mystery of Dank Hollow" - This's from Chapter 13 of Tailed a Thief. You might not remember it; it concerns a farmer walking to his brother's funeral in a distant town and ending up next in the grave himself courtesy of a trip through the Bog of Death. The tale concludes with the curious detail of the victim's clothes all being on inside-out, a common complaint among supposed UFO abductees; as the farmer also saw mysterious visions before he died and met his fate in a spot where others were known to have vanished, is Braun deliberately trying to draw a parallel? (It would've been more apparent had it been done in Stars.))
15. "Tale of Two Tombstones" - Thornton Haggis's father and the moonshiners, Sang for the Birds, Chapter 7; mostly verbatim, though the ending is slightly reworded (though the content is unchanged). A noteworthy detail: the name of the main moonshiner, Bert Coggin (husband to "mound her own business" Mary), is changed to "Ben Dibble" - to protect the not-so-innocent? For fear of reprisal? Qwill doesn't show much concern for the privacy or anonymity of his other sources...
16. "The Pork-and-Beans Incident at Boggy Bottom" - Original; it involves a young up-and-coming pitcher vs. a ghostly apparition and expounds upon a small snippet of expository dialogue from Polly in Chapter 13 of Talked to Ghosts. A glmpse of what the book should've been.
17. "At Last, a Hospital in the Wilderness" - Original; the activities of the Pickax Hospital Ladies' Auxiliary in the early 1900's.
18. "Emmaline and the Spiral Staircase" - Kristi Fugtree's ghostly grandmother, Talked to Ghosts. This is one of the few previously-established tales in the book which is not plucked verbatim from its source, and yet it suffers for it; why is Emmaline given short shrift and the German midget given rapt attention?
19. "The Curious Fate of the Jenny Lee" - Bushy Bushland's grandfather's encounter with the Visitors, famously related by Bushland grandfils ("here I am in the middle of a lake with a crazy guy! Watch it!") in Chapter 9 of Saw Stars, with Qwilleran's reactions altered.
20. "A Scary Experience on a Covered Bridge" - Emma Wimsey's eponymous encounter from her written memoirs, Went Underground. Emma herself originally titled it "The Face at the Bridge".
21. "A Cat Tale: Holy Terror and the Bishop" - From Chapter 6 of Came to Breakfast, Domino Inn guest Reverend Arledge Harding's racontre of his cat Holy Terror's reign of terror during a visit from an important bishop. Since the Reverend is from Indiana, does this really qualify for inclusion in a collection of Moose County local lore?
22. "Those Pushy Moose County Blueberries" - Original; Mildred's familial struggles with a bunch of persistent blueberry bushes.
23. "The Curse on the Apple Orchard" - Homer Tibbitt's Knew a Cardinal. I'm surprised Qwill didn't exploit Dennis Hough's demise for the tale, considering the insensitivity he shows elsewhere in the book.
24. "Matilda, a Family Heroine" - Lisa Compton's forebearer, Matilda, and how Lisa learned of her heroics. I know this's from a previous book (and a recent one, based on the mention of Thornton), but I can't find the tale.
25. "How Pleasant Street Got Its Name" - Original; the title is self-explanatory.
26. "The Noble Sons of the Noose" - Very short account of the Noble Sons' history more notable for the update discussed above.
27. "Phineas Ford's Fabulous Collection" - Farmer Ford's eponymous collection of scamadiddles, Chapter 12, Smelled a Rat.
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