Guilt By Association

Whoa…time to blow the cobwebs off my copy of C&P.  This weekend I have watched two movies (Arbitrage and Rope) where the protagonist(s) is the purveyor of a crime.  As I watched Richard Gere fleece Graydon Carter and Farley Granger sweat under the disappointed moue of Jimmy Stewart I realized I’d been neglecting the goings-on of that other protagonistic criminal, Roskolnikov, and decided to find my copy of the book.

One quick side note about Rope….John Dall looks a lot like the actor Ben Affleck.  I found it distracting.  I just kept thinking “Wow, Ben Affleck could play John Dall in the The John Dall Story!”

One more side note about Rope…Constance Collier and Cedric Hardwicke walk away with that film…so good.

But I digress about Rope…back to books.  Much of section two has focused largely on Roskolnikov in bed.  So far we’ve had about forty solid pages of hallucinatory lying about.  My working hypothesis is that this is where Dostoevsky metes out Punishment to the reader (Our crime?  Undisclosed, but I’m betting it’s “hope”).  But things have started to pick up now that Roskolnikov’s friend (?) Razumihin (I know I haven’t read this book for a while…but where did this character come from??) recounts the latest developments in “The Case of the Murdered Pawnbroker” to Roskolnikov as he lolls.

In this recounting we learn that the head of the Investigation Department is Porfiry Petrovich.  This was also the first name and patronymic of the protagonist of a series of mysteries I read in high school Stuart M. Kaminsky‘s Rostnikov novels (well worth a read!–I’m thinking I’ll re-familiarize myself with those soon)…so that was a pleasant literary daisy chain! (for me…possibly boring for you).

A tall dark stranger just entered the text when I stopped reading this afternoon…so I’m thinking (and, for the love of goodness, hoping) that the action is going to pick up.  I’ll keep you posted.

Jon