MISADVENTURES IN PARADISE

It's one-way to Tahiti and non-stop once you arrive.

South Seas adventure tales represent a vast sub-genre of mid-century popular fiction, even garnering a Pulitzer Prize for James Michener’s 1942 collection of stories Tales of the South Pacific. We watched the movie Tiara Tahiti a couple of years ago but didn’t read the book by Geoffrey Cotterell due to its minimal availability at that time. We like stories set in the South Seas, though, and were interested in details that might have been omitted by the filmmakers, so when we had a chance we grabbed a copy. It was a paperback from Four Square Books with an interesting rendering of co-star Rosenda Monteros on the cover.

The book isn’t wildly different from the film. It’s still about two British officers who clash during the war, randomly meet again on Tahiti, and resume their conflict with a potential hotel project at its core. The characters, however, were radically altered for the film. The central figure Brett, affably played by James Mason, is “grossly fat” in the novel and unpleasant to his Tahitian wife. The wife (a girlfriend in the film), played by Monteros, hates him and is carrying on an affair with a boat captain she hopes will spirit her far from Tahiti. Crucially, in the film she was not fully cognizant of a plot to murder her husband, but in the novel she’s right in the middle of it.

We expected and duly recieved a good read. Cotterell provides no fully sympathetic characters, instead reaching directly into the seven deadly sins to give each grand flaws—foremost among them Brett, who is gluttonous and slothful. Envy drives his wife Belle Annie to seek escape from the island, while lust drives the murder plot. Cotterell may be making a statement about how only certain types of weak or ridiculous foreigners can thrive in a place like Tahiti. If so, that strikes us as a facile assessment.

Northerners who emigrate to tropical islands are often different by constitution. We’ve personally seen it over and over. Our girlfriends would say we are it. Everyone wants to hear the surf when they go to sleep, but unless you’re rich, sacrifices are needed to get there. Usually what’s sacrificed are stable jobs and a future that can be confidently mapped. Only a subset of people are willing to live with such uncertainty. That’s what novels like Tiara Tahiti capture at their best—for expats on the islands, amongst many of whom precarity is already routine, any crazy thing can happen at any time. Cotterell gets that part correct, entertainingly so, even if he may have a low opinion of those who flee the North.

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1933—Franklin Roosevelt Survives Assassination Attempt

In Miami, Florida, Giuseppe Zangara attempts to shoot President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, but is restrained by a crowd and, in the course of firing five wild shots, hits five people, including Chicago, Illinois Mayor Anton J. Cermak, who dies of his wounds three weeks later. Zangara is quickly tried and sentenced to eighty years in jail for attempted murder, but is later convicted of murder when Cermak dies. Zangara is sentenced to death and executed in Florida’s electric chair.

1929—Seven Men Shot Dead in Chicago

Seven people, six of them gangster rivals of Al Capone’s South Side gang, are machine gunned to death in Chicago, Illinois, in an event that would become known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Because two of the shooters were dressed as police officers, it was initially thought that police might have been responsible, but an investigation soon proved the killings were gang related. The slaughter exceeded anything yet seen in the United States at that time.

1935—Jury Finds Hauptmann Guilty

A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the son of Charles Lindbergh. Hauptmann is sentenced to death and executed in 1936. For decades, his widow Anna, fights to have his named cleared, claiming that Hauptmann did not commit the crime, and was instead a victim of prosecutorial misconduct, but her claims are ultimately dismissed in 1984 after the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to address the case.

1961—Soviets Launch Venus Probe

The U.S.S.R. launches the spacecraft Venera 1, equipped with scientific instruments to measure solar wind, micrometeorites, and cosmic radiation, towards planet Venus. The craft is the first modern planetary probe. Among its many achievements, it confirms the presence of solar wind in deep space, but overheats due to the failure of a sensor before its Venus mission is completed.

1994—Thieves Steal Munch Masterpiece

In Oslo, Norway, a pair of art thieves steal one of the world’s best-known paintings, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” from a gallery in the Norwegian capital. The two men take less than a minute to climb a ladder, smash through a window of the National Art Museum, and remove the painting from the wall with wire cutters. After a ransom demand the museum refuses to pay, police manage to locate the painting in May, and the two thieves, as well as two accomplices, are arrested.

Cover art by Roswell Keller for the 1948 Pocket Books edition of Ramona Stewart's Desert Town.
Rare Argentinian cover art for The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

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