Losing my body with one ancient word

Rabbit, rabbit, belatedly! I entered my birthday month in a state of technological snafu such that I wrote my most recent review entirely on someone else's computer using a widget apparently meant to replicate the effect of Post-It notes. I feel smug about succeeding, but also slightly as though the finished product should have been held together with thumbtacks and red string. The snafu itself has been sufficiently resolved that I can use my own beloved and tenacious machine again and the process consumed almost all of the previous day. In the late afternoon I finally read Eric Ambler's Epitaph for a Spy (1938), which I had encountered a few years ago through its semi-faithful film version Hotel Reserve (1944); the novel is much funnier in that its narrator makes about as good a counterintelligence agent as can be expected of your average mild-mannered teacher of languages legally blackmailed into the job—he's a shambles and knows it, fantasizing his way into investigations and facepalming back out of them—and much scarier in that it never forgets that for all the farce of his amateur spycraft, Josef Vadassy is a stateless refugee whose papers are never in order and whose home is wherever he can make it in the margins of the country that hassles him the least and therefore while the political consequences of failing to catch the real spy at the Hôtel de la Réserve remain traditionally, ominously vague, the personal cost of being deported back to the regime that shot his family for dissidence is immediate and acute and his state of nerves throughout the entire affair is not, even when the character is ruefully taking stock of his failures with lines like "I may be unlucky, but I find that my enterprises never proceed along classical lines," really funny at all. The film follows on Hitchcock, the novel on Kafka. The Treaty of Trianon gets name-checked once again. Vadassy comes from Szabadka, which became Subotica, where Emeric Pressburger had family before the Holocaust. Man, I hope Vadassy made it through WWII. Have some links.

1. Stephen Fry on Georgette Heyer: "If Bridgerton and other less strait-laced and tightly bodiced dramas and novels can give us the style of the Regency without its abominable injustices and stifling hierarchies, and with lots of extra romping and fizz, why do we need a writer like Georgette Heyer, whose diligent, almost academically precise researches and immaculate ear for language, custom and historical detail result in texts that are so much denser and more demanding of concentration and memory than the lighter, less substantial fare now on offer elsewhere?" I do not actually disagree with his answer, because I like it best myself when the author does the research, but I do have a couple of contemporary Regencies I want to send him.

2. Laura Kern on Three Cases of Murder (1955). I kept wanting to write about that film for years just for Wendy Toye's "The Picture," so I am glad someone did.

3. Ian McDowell interviews Edward Burlando: "In the closet days, homosexuals called themselves Friends of Dorothy. I was briefly a literal friend, or at least acquaintance, of Dorothy, although I didn't actually know Miss Garland as well as I knew Miss Hamilton."

This upcoming week is going to be full of early-morning doctor's appointments, which I resent on multiple levels.