Professor Black Herman, the self-proclaimed World's Greatest Negro Magician, was born in a Zulu village, to hear him tell it, and spent his early life learning the mystic secrets of the Orient while dodging Chinese assassins, bent on revenge for his refusing to help them steal a priceless diamond from the head of a statue of Buddha. Seeing that the end was nigh, rather than deliver himself into the hands of his enemies, Black Herman drank poison and died. Many dignitaries, including the King of the Zulus, gathered to pay respects, only to gape in wonderment, as Black Herman stepped out of his coffin and back into the land of the living. Then, after a display of wonders to rival the best, Black Herman went across the seas, to try his luck at fame and fortune in the Americas.
Or, to be slightly more accurate, Benjamin Rucker was probably born in Amherst, Virginia, in 1892. He tried a number of different professions before taking up the magician's wand, but by 1906 he was well on his way. He's known to have worked with Harry Kellar, but it's his alleged association with huckster, herb doctor, and fellow Virginian Prince Herman that he's best known for. It's not entirely clear whether Rucker worked with Prince Herman or not, but Rucker said he did, and he took on Herman's stage name after Prince Herman died unexpectedly in 1909.
Rucker, then only 17, was set to conquer the world, but there was a problem: he was black, in a world where that mattered more than anything. When he worked with Prince Herman, he could perform in the South; now he was a solo act, segregation laws confined him to non-white audiences, unless he was performing in the North. So he set his sights on other audiences, and by 1918 was at the height of his talent. An absolute master of stage magic, he also mixed in a healthy dose of hoodoo and herbal remedies; for, as Rucker himself put it, he was a man who knew how to spend $1 twice over and still have change left, and fortunetelling with a healthy dose of herbal remedies were where the money was.
Hoodoo, for those unfamiliar with the term, is not voodoo. Hoodoo is an American variant on West African folklore, also known as conjure, root doctoring, or rootworking. It blends herbal remedies with Moses-as-conjuror; the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses are the core texts of this spiritualist movement. A hoodoo worker makes talismans, oils, candles and incense, to minister to every possible need or ailment. Though hoodoo has a strong element of ancestor worship, it lacks the loa that vaudon sanctifies, and also lacks the Catholic overtones of voodoo.
The man who not only can foretell the future, but also supply every possible remedy to human frailty, can make a great deal of money, which is exactly what Benjamin Rucker did.
Things went from good to better. He bought a brownstone in Harlem, NYC, where he saw all his clients. He performed across the country, and when the performances were over, he used his hoodoo skills to counsel his audience. He became a devoted friend and counselor to Marcus Garvey, leader of the Back to Africa movement, and Garvey was far from Burcker's only friend and confidante; Black Herman was probably the best-connected hoodoo man and performing magician of his day. He was an Elk, a Freemason, a Knight of Pythias. He donated to churches and worthy causes, funded scholarships, was a friend to poor man and intellectuals, politicians and power brokers. Everyone wanted to be on good terms with the man who knew how to twist the skein of fortune any way he wanted.
HIs signature performance piece was a living burial. He picked a spot, which he called his Private Graveyard, and lay in his coffin on display for all to see; it cost ten cents to check his pulse. Then he was buried, but when his coffin was disinterred a few days later he stepped out, none the worse. He used his miraculous recovery as a kick-off for his stage performance, emerging from the coffin to lead a parade to the stage. It was his boast that he returned to a venue once every seven years - a picturesque way of saying he was constantly on tour.
Things didn't always go his way. In 1927 he was arrested and sent to Sing Sing on charges of fortune telling and selling medicine without a license, but he only spent a brief time in jail. His supporters claimed a prison cell couldn't hold him; he'd walk out of there any time he liked. He wasn't in jail long in any event, and the 1929 stock market crash didn't hurt his fortune much; whatever financial losses he might have suffered were soon made back again, by telling more fortunes and selling more conjure medicine.
He died young. In 1934 he collapsed at a friend's home - some stories say it actually happened on stage - suffering massive cardiac failure. He was only 44 years old.
Even then, his admirers and well-wishers didn't believe it. Professor Black Herman, dead? The man who'd stepped out of the coffin more times than a man could count? No, never; thousands went to the funeral home to see his body, laid out in state. His assistant, Washington Reeves - later to take on Black Herman's stage name - charged money to view the corpse. But this time it didn't step out of the casket; Benjamin Rucker had enraptured his last audience.
From a gamificiation viewpoint, a hoodoo stage magician who performs throughout the 1920s and 30s, all across the United States, is a perfect NPC for Trail or Call of Cthulhu. However with that mysterious death, can he be anything other than a Timewatch agent? You can almost picture the funeral home, after everyone else is left, as Black Herman walks out of the grave one last time, and into Time itself.
With that in mind:
Recruitment Drive: TimeWatch intends to pick up Rucker at the funeral home in 1934 but, when the agents get there, he's not in the coffin any more. Instead, an aged and scarred Rucker appears at his brownstone in Harlem, witnessed by his employee and protégée Washington Reeves, who he tells to go to the funeral home and give a message to whoever he finds there. Clearly Rucker's been time travelling, but on whose dime? And was his reappearance an attempt to contact TimeWatch, knowing that TimeWatch agents would have to be in Harlem on that date? Or is this some elaborate trap?
That's it for now. Enjoy!
Showing posts with label Person of Interest. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Person of Interest. Show all posts
Sunday, 4 February 2018
Sunday, 8 October 2017
Person of Interest: Institution M (Night's Black Agents)
Earlier this week the story of Werner Mauss' tax evasion conviction, and two hundred thousand euro fine, broke, and brought the shadowy Institution M back into the international spotlight again. Since he's exactly the sort of person your Night's Black Agents players are going to want to meet, he's this week's Person of Interest.
Mauss, born in Essen in 1940, became a private investigator in the 1960s, and soon started working with the German police and intelligence services exclusively. It's not clear how this happened. His website claims he was trained by a former member of the intelligence services, and that may have given him the contacts he needed to start working with the authorities. Otherwise it's difficult to fathom how an otherwise undistinguished former agronomist and vacuum cleaner salesman in his twenties got the attention of the powers that be. He'd enjoyed success working for insurance companies, but presumably he wasn't the only private investigator in Germany with a decent success record. Reading the site gives the impression that here is a man who is neither shy nor lacking in self-promotion skills, so a certain amount of bluff may have been involved.
He began as a police spy, infiltrating criminal gangs and filtering their secrets back to the police. He claims over 2,000 arrests all told thanks to his evidence, over a forty year career, everything from diamond thieves and tracking down barrels of stolen toxic waste, to the arrest of Red Army Faction fugitives and alleged police murderer Alfred Lecki, in Spain. However from the 1980s he began his South American work, and it is at this point that things get murky.
He started by helping Mannesmann AG in Columbia with troubles it was having over an oil pipeline, but Mann soon found himself negotiating the return of hostages from the ELN. The National Liberation Army - Ejército de Liberación Nacional - has been fighting the Columbian government since 1964. Its more famous fraternal organization FARC gets all the attention, but the ELN is also a Communist group - Marxist, as distinct from FARC's brand of Marxist-Leninism - and the ELN is no laughing matter. It engages in attacks on infrastructure, like the pipeline, as well as extortion and kidnapping. At this moment it is estimated to have over two hundred people in captivity. The ELN calls it war taxes and retentions; the retentions - kidnappings - are used to encourage payment of the war taxes, or extortion.
Mauss successfully recovered retentions, which got the attention of the German government, at that time Helmut Kohl's Christian Democrat/Liberal coalition. Kohl needed a way to get German civilians back from the ELN, and Mauss was perfectly positioned to play intermediary. Soon Mauss became involved in a more ambitious project, aimed at brokering peace between the ELN and the government. From Germany's perspective this could be nothing but good news; finally the kidnappings and damage to German businesses would end.
The negotiations went reasonably well, but didn't prove as successful as everyone hoped. Moreover the Columbian government was becoming suspicious; was Mauss actually collaborating with the ELN to drive up ransoms, collecting his cut from the kidnappers for this service? He was arrested and jailed for nine months, before being cleared of all charges in 1998.
If he was being paid by the ELN, it was just one of a long list of clients. Mauss' personal fortune grew. His 40,000 acre estate, bought in the 1960s when land was probably a lot cheaper, has been built up into a fenced-off Disney World castle according to the German papers, complete with its own zoo, exotic animals, and the largest private riding hall in Germany. All of which seems reminiscent of a certain film, or possibly more than one.
The Panama Papers leak threw a little more light onto Mauss' world. He had been a busy man, helping the rich and powerful in their business dealings, and in the process built up substantial accounts in Luxembourg and the Bahamas, for which he paid no tax. Mauss claims this is because the funds were actually given him by Western intelligence agencies to help his fight against terrorism and organized crime, even Isis. He also promised a string of star witnesses at his trial, none of whom showed up - and one of whom had died five years prior. Even had all of them materialized, it would have been difficult to explain a slush fund in excess of $50 million whose stated purpose was to fund a Werner Mauss memorial museum after Institution M's demise.
Mauss claims his defense was hampered because so much of his work has to remain secret, covered in a blizzard of non disclosure agreements. All this may be so, but NDAs can also be used to cover up a mountain of bullshit, and in Mauss' case it's difficult to separate the man from the legend. Given the amounts discussed at his trial, his two year suspended sentence and fine seem remarkably lenient. The trial judge said Mauss' lifetime achievement was the reason why his sentence was so light. Clearly the judge couldn't tell the difference between Mauss, the man with $50 million in unexplained funds, and Institution M, the tireless crusader against crime.
So from a gamification perspective, what do we have?
A Night's Black Agents character, clearly. Possibly a mentor; Institution M seems an unlikely Solace. There's a certain murkiness about his whole career that just screams plant - but whose? After all, he buys that 40,000 acre estate in the 1960s, when he's just starting his private investigative career. Even in the 1960s, it's difficult to believe land was quite that cheap. A fictionalized version would have Institution M backed by some shadowy force - but whether it's Dracula or the KGB is an open question. It's easy to see why the Soviets, for example, might want an independent private investigator deeply embedded in the German intelligence apparat, particularly in the 1960s when the Cold War might get hot at any minute. Or the Americans. Or any number of foreign governments, but the Soviets or the Americans are the two most likely to have the funds and the hutzpah.
As a Node he's clearly at the National level at the very least. All those government contacts, in several different jurisdictions; all that foreign travel. He's not what you'd call a bruiser - his legend claims he's only ever fired a gun once in his entire career - but as an information gatherer he's unsurpassed. He's spent his entire career persuading people he can be trusted; someone like that can be more dangerous than an entire tank battalion, in the right circumstances. A Grima Wormtongue with significantly more panache.
It's tempting to write him into any number of stories. For example, Helmut Kohl's legacy has been tainted by the CDU donations scandal, in which cash donations to the party were swept under the rug. It's never been shown that Kohl actually took bribes or benefitted financially in any way, but it paved the way for Angela Merkel's rise. Someone had to be the go-between in the whole unsavory affair; it's not as if Kohl could attend to the matter himself. Suppose for a moment it was Mauss, a man who Kohl had come to know well at least by reputation, and perhaps personally. Or suppose that Mauss was a go-between for Karlheinz Schreiber, the arms dealer at the heart of the scandal, and that Mauss leaked the whole thing for reasons of his own, possibly to avoid prosecution, or to settle some kind of grudge. He could be fictionalized in all sorts of ways, is the point; the man who knows everybody's secrets, but who ensures nobody knows his. Did he use his go-between status to act as Kingmaker, and is now the man behind Merkel - or better yet, the Renfield behind Merkel? Did Germany's pre-war vampire project information find its way into his hands? What awful secrets does his German estate conceal? After all, 40,000 acres is a lot of ground - plenty of space to bury bodies if need be ...
That's it for this week. Enjoy!
Mauss, born in Essen in 1940, became a private investigator in the 1960s, and soon started working with the German police and intelligence services exclusively. It's not clear how this happened. His website claims he was trained by a former member of the intelligence services, and that may have given him the contacts he needed to start working with the authorities. Otherwise it's difficult to fathom how an otherwise undistinguished former agronomist and vacuum cleaner salesman in his twenties got the attention of the powers that be. He'd enjoyed success working for insurance companies, but presumably he wasn't the only private investigator in Germany with a decent success record. Reading the site gives the impression that here is a man who is neither shy nor lacking in self-promotion skills, so a certain amount of bluff may have been involved.
He began as a police spy, infiltrating criminal gangs and filtering their secrets back to the police. He claims over 2,000 arrests all told thanks to his evidence, over a forty year career, everything from diamond thieves and tracking down barrels of stolen toxic waste, to the arrest of Red Army Faction fugitives and alleged police murderer Alfred Lecki, in Spain. However from the 1980s he began his South American work, and it is at this point that things get murky.
He started by helping Mannesmann AG in Columbia with troubles it was having over an oil pipeline, but Mann soon found himself negotiating the return of hostages from the ELN. The National Liberation Army - Ejército de Liberación Nacional - has been fighting the Columbian government since 1964. Its more famous fraternal organization FARC gets all the attention, but the ELN is also a Communist group - Marxist, as distinct from FARC's brand of Marxist-Leninism - and the ELN is no laughing matter. It engages in attacks on infrastructure, like the pipeline, as well as extortion and kidnapping. At this moment it is estimated to have over two hundred people in captivity. The ELN calls it war taxes and retentions; the retentions - kidnappings - are used to encourage payment of the war taxes, or extortion.
Mauss successfully recovered retentions, which got the attention of the German government, at that time Helmut Kohl's Christian Democrat/Liberal coalition. Kohl needed a way to get German civilians back from the ELN, and Mauss was perfectly positioned to play intermediary. Soon Mauss became involved in a more ambitious project, aimed at brokering peace between the ELN and the government. From Germany's perspective this could be nothing but good news; finally the kidnappings and damage to German businesses would end.
The negotiations went reasonably well, but didn't prove as successful as everyone hoped. Moreover the Columbian government was becoming suspicious; was Mauss actually collaborating with the ELN to drive up ransoms, collecting his cut from the kidnappers for this service? He was arrested and jailed for nine months, before being cleared of all charges in 1998.
If he was being paid by the ELN, it was just one of a long list of clients. Mauss' personal fortune grew. His 40,000 acre estate, bought in the 1960s when land was probably a lot cheaper, has been built up into a fenced-off Disney World castle according to the German papers, complete with its own zoo, exotic animals, and the largest private riding hall in Germany. All of which seems reminiscent of a certain film, or possibly more than one.
The Panama Papers leak threw a little more light onto Mauss' world. He had been a busy man, helping the rich and powerful in their business dealings, and in the process built up substantial accounts in Luxembourg and the Bahamas, for which he paid no tax. Mauss claims this is because the funds were actually given him by Western intelligence agencies to help his fight against terrorism and organized crime, even Isis. He also promised a string of star witnesses at his trial, none of whom showed up - and one of whom had died five years prior. Even had all of them materialized, it would have been difficult to explain a slush fund in excess of $50 million whose stated purpose was to fund a Werner Mauss memorial museum after Institution M's demise.
Mauss claims his defense was hampered because so much of his work has to remain secret, covered in a blizzard of non disclosure agreements. All this may be so, but NDAs can also be used to cover up a mountain of bullshit, and in Mauss' case it's difficult to separate the man from the legend. Given the amounts discussed at his trial, his two year suspended sentence and fine seem remarkably lenient. The trial judge said Mauss' lifetime achievement was the reason why his sentence was so light. Clearly the judge couldn't tell the difference between Mauss, the man with $50 million in unexplained funds, and Institution M, the tireless crusader against crime.
So from a gamification perspective, what do we have?
A Night's Black Agents character, clearly. Possibly a mentor; Institution M seems an unlikely Solace. There's a certain murkiness about his whole career that just screams plant - but whose? After all, he buys that 40,000 acre estate in the 1960s, when he's just starting his private investigative career. Even in the 1960s, it's difficult to believe land was quite that cheap. A fictionalized version would have Institution M backed by some shadowy force - but whether it's Dracula or the KGB is an open question. It's easy to see why the Soviets, for example, might want an independent private investigator deeply embedded in the German intelligence apparat, particularly in the 1960s when the Cold War might get hot at any minute. Or the Americans. Or any number of foreign governments, but the Soviets or the Americans are the two most likely to have the funds and the hutzpah.
As a Node he's clearly at the National level at the very least. All those government contacts, in several different jurisdictions; all that foreign travel. He's not what you'd call a bruiser - his legend claims he's only ever fired a gun once in his entire career - but as an information gatherer he's unsurpassed. He's spent his entire career persuading people he can be trusted; someone like that can be more dangerous than an entire tank battalion, in the right circumstances. A Grima Wormtongue with significantly more panache.
It's tempting to write him into any number of stories. For example, Helmut Kohl's legacy has been tainted by the CDU donations scandal, in which cash donations to the party were swept under the rug. It's never been shown that Kohl actually took bribes or benefitted financially in any way, but it paved the way for Angela Merkel's rise. Someone had to be the go-between in the whole unsavory affair; it's not as if Kohl could attend to the matter himself. Suppose for a moment it was Mauss, a man who Kohl had come to know well at least by reputation, and perhaps personally. Or suppose that Mauss was a go-between for Karlheinz Schreiber, the arms dealer at the heart of the scandal, and that Mauss leaked the whole thing for reasons of his own, possibly to avoid prosecution, or to settle some kind of grudge. He could be fictionalized in all sorts of ways, is the point; the man who knows everybody's secrets, but who ensures nobody knows his. Did he use his go-between status to act as Kingmaker, and is now the man behind Merkel - or better yet, the Renfield behind Merkel? Did Germany's pre-war vampire project information find its way into his hands? What awful secrets does his German estate conceal? After all, 40,000 acres is a lot of ground - plenty of space to bury bodies if need be ...
That's it for this week. Enjoy!
Sunday, 16 April 2017
Person of Interest: Anna May Wong (GUMSHOE Trail, Bookhounds, One to One)
I first saw Anna May Wong in the silent British classic Piccadilly, where she plays the doomed love interest of the man who later is accused of her murder.
It's a brilliant performance, and a remarkably fun movie. At its heart it's nothing but a potboiler, set in seedy Soho clubland. Wong plays Shosho, a Chinese dishwasher in the Club kitchens who unexpectedly rockets to stardom thanks to her dancing skills, only to fall in love with the Club's owner, Wilmot. Wilmot's former lover Mabel confronts her rival in Shosho's apartment, and later the next day Shosho is found shot to death. Was it Wilmot, Mabel or someone else who killed the dancing star?
As a movie I highly recommend it first and foremost because it's a good film, and second because it's one of the few times Wong was allowed to act in a sympathetic role. As a Chinese American, she often played villain roles, and the rules of the day prevented her from ever having an on-screen kiss from a white actor, which meant she'd little chance of playing the romantic female lead.
Wong's family arrived in California in the 1850s. Her father was a prosperous laundry owner, and Wong was the second of his seven children, born in 1905 and raised in Los Angeles. It was just the right time; the moving picture business was taking its baby steps, and you couldn't walk two feet in Los Angeles at that time without seeing some poverty row film unit shooting reel for a knockabout comedy or crime drama. Wong soon became hooked on movies, spending lunch money on cinema tickets and following every film shoot she could, practicing the actors' moves when she went home.
Her parents were less than thrilled. Her father wanted her to marry a good Cantonese man and help with the family business, but Wong wanted to be a film star, and even as early as 9 years old she begged directors working in her neighborhood for film parts. Soon she was a jobbing extra, landing her first role in 1919's The Red Lantern.
By 1921 she'd dropped out of high school to pursue the dream, allowing herself ten years to make it big, or bust out. In 1922 she landed her first film lead role, and never looked back.
However she never really fit in either. She wanted to be an American, a jazz baby, a flapper. She talked the talk and danced up a storm, but to her white contemporaries she would always be Chinese. That limited the roles she'd be offered, and it only got worse as the decade went on. Early cinema was an unregulated wonderland, but in the aftermath of the Fatty Arbuckle sex scandal Hollywood became more prudish - outwardly, anyway. This meant, among other things, not even the slightest hint of miscegenation. This cost Wong several lead parts, demoting her to gangster's moll or Dragon Lady instead.
If an Asian role was the lead, it wouldn't go to Wong; it would go to a white actress, as happened later in the 1930s with Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth. Wong was bitterly disappointed to see the meaty star role go to someone who could legally kiss white lead Paul Muni, who was playing Asian character Wang Lung. Instead Wong, the only actual Asian in the cast, was offered the part of Lotus - the only unsympathetic role in a plot stuffed with Asian characters.
Incidentally for those of you shaking their head and muttering, 'God, they were so racist back then,' bear in mind that far too little has changed in the years since. We're still talking about whitewashing today, almost a century later. Asian actors working in Western film and television still have to fit a certain stereotype if they want to get parts. The only real difference is the stereotype has changed.
"We're the information givers," said Yale School of Acting graduate Pun Bandu in a 2017 article. "We're the geeks. We're the prostitutes. We're so tired of seeing ourselves in these roles."
Meanwhile back in the 1920s things weren't any better for Wong on the other side of the ocean. Chinese audiences resented her American behavior, and seethed at her public persona. Affairs with white men, like director Tod Browning - and he thirty nine years old to her tender sixteen? This wasn't the behavior of a good Chinese girl.
Frustrated at the lack of opportunity in her native California she upped sticks in the middle 1920s and went to Europe seeking her fortune. She did well in Germany with Schmutziges Geld and Pavement Butterfly, rubbing elbows with the likes of Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl. When she went across the water to England she starred on stage with Lawrence Olivier, and made Piccadilly, her last silent drama. Her first talkie was a British film, The Flame of Love (also known as Road to Dishonor) in which she finally got to kiss a white man on screen - only to have the scene cut for non-British audiences.
When Hollywood started poaching European talent in the early 1930s Wong came back to Los Angeles, only to find that things hadn't changed all that much while she'd been away. After playing a couple Dragon Lady roles she went back to Europe, only to find herself drawn to Los Angeles again at the prospect of a role in the 1937 adaptation of Pearl S. Buck's Pulitzer-winning novel about life in China prior to the Great War.
That ended in disappointment for Wong, who went to China on an extended tour only to discover that her Chinese critics were no more favorable than the American variety. To the Chinese Wong was a disgrace, a sexually charged scandal on legs. Friends with Dietrich? Then Wong must be a lesbian. Linked with older men? Then she must be a prostitute. The real problem was she was too American for Chinese audiences, and they let her know it. She eventually won over the Chinese press, but it was hard going - not that Wong was intimidated by hard going.
The war intervened, and Wong found herself in a string of patriotic B-pictures, always a heroine bashing the Japanese. She devoted herself, when not working, to war relief, sending as much money and support as possible to benefit Chinese refugees.
Later, the war over, Wong invested in real estate, and lived quietly with her surviving family. She had a minor post-war film role, in the 1949 noir B-picture Impact, and the lead in a TV detective series The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong, which was cancelled after a single season and sadly no longer exists in any format. She appeared in some documentary work and some TV roles in the 1950s, but no leads and no film work. Her last film appearance was in 1960's Portrait in Black in which she plays the maid, Tawny. She got a star on the Boardwalk in 1960, and died of a heart attack in 1961, at the age of 56.
So let's talk about gamification.
As a walk-on NPC Wong could appear in Call of Cthulhu, Trail, or any of the 1930s era settings. As she travels extensively she could as easily be part of a Dreamhounds game as Bookhounds, or be encountered en route to some exotic location, say on a cruise liner or a very famous train. She's equally at home in modest as well as luxurious circumstances, and speaks many languages.
Her main attraction to the Keeper is that she knows almost everyone, in the States and abroad. She's on first name terms with a wide variety of people, from media moguls and film directors to dancers, composers, stage managers, restauranteurs, and many more. She can be a very useful link between the player characters and the local Chinese community, which might not otherwise open its doors to interfering investigator types. She can introduce them to artists, directors, powerful men. She's hobnobbed with everyone from the Los Angeles elite to the rising stars of Hitler's Germany. She's worked with the likes of Douglas Fairbanks and Alfred Hitchcock, as well as innumerable forgotten B-actors and directors. You name it, she's done it, or been there and loved every minute.
Perhaps the most obvious setting for her to appear in is the One-to-One Dex Raymond adventures, set in 1930s Los Angeles. Wong could drift in and out of Dex's life, always on her way somewhere else hoping for her big role, always frustrated at her lack of opportunities.
There's nothing to indicate any occult or outré connections, but she took great pride in her Chinese origins and would be very knowledgeable about anything to do with Chinese history, particularly its theatrical traditions.
As a One-to-One Source her skills favor performance, language, dance and high society. She can open many doors for other people, even doors that would remain frustratingly closed to her. However she's also got a strong business sense, which means she could be helpful in Bargain tests, and her extensive knowledge of Chinese culture and history gives her some Art History or History bonuses when dealing with Chinese culture.
For that matter there are few who know the film business quite like she does; she was there, on the spot, when it was being born. Any scuttlebutt or juicy bit of gossip relating to times long past - who was sleeping with who, who made shady deals to get financing, who worked in Poverty Row but likes to pretend they didn't now they've made it - is grist to her mill.
That's it for now! Enjoy.
It's a brilliant performance, and a remarkably fun movie. At its heart it's nothing but a potboiler, set in seedy Soho clubland. Wong plays Shosho, a Chinese dishwasher in the Club kitchens who unexpectedly rockets to stardom thanks to her dancing skills, only to fall in love with the Club's owner, Wilmot. Wilmot's former lover Mabel confronts her rival in Shosho's apartment, and later the next day Shosho is found shot to death. Was it Wilmot, Mabel or someone else who killed the dancing star?
As a movie I highly recommend it first and foremost because it's a good film, and second because it's one of the few times Wong was allowed to act in a sympathetic role. As a Chinese American, she often played villain roles, and the rules of the day prevented her from ever having an on-screen kiss from a white actor, which meant she'd little chance of playing the romantic female lead.
Wong's family arrived in California in the 1850s. Her father was a prosperous laundry owner, and Wong was the second of his seven children, born in 1905 and raised in Los Angeles. It was just the right time; the moving picture business was taking its baby steps, and you couldn't walk two feet in Los Angeles at that time without seeing some poverty row film unit shooting reel for a knockabout comedy or crime drama. Wong soon became hooked on movies, spending lunch money on cinema tickets and following every film shoot she could, practicing the actors' moves when she went home.
Her parents were less than thrilled. Her father wanted her to marry a good Cantonese man and help with the family business, but Wong wanted to be a film star, and even as early as 9 years old she begged directors working in her neighborhood for film parts. Soon she was a jobbing extra, landing her first role in 1919's The Red Lantern.
By 1921 she'd dropped out of high school to pursue the dream, allowing herself ten years to make it big, or bust out. In 1922 she landed her first film lead role, and never looked back.
However she never really fit in either. She wanted to be an American, a jazz baby, a flapper. She talked the talk and danced up a storm, but to her white contemporaries she would always be Chinese. That limited the roles she'd be offered, and it only got worse as the decade went on. Early cinema was an unregulated wonderland, but in the aftermath of the Fatty Arbuckle sex scandal Hollywood became more prudish - outwardly, anyway. This meant, among other things, not even the slightest hint of miscegenation. This cost Wong several lead parts, demoting her to gangster's moll or Dragon Lady instead.
If an Asian role was the lead, it wouldn't go to Wong; it would go to a white actress, as happened later in the 1930s with Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth. Wong was bitterly disappointed to see the meaty star role go to someone who could legally kiss white lead Paul Muni, who was playing Asian character Wang Lung. Instead Wong, the only actual Asian in the cast, was offered the part of Lotus - the only unsympathetic role in a plot stuffed with Asian characters.
Incidentally for those of you shaking their head and muttering, 'God, they were so racist back then,' bear in mind that far too little has changed in the years since. We're still talking about whitewashing today, almost a century later. Asian actors working in Western film and television still have to fit a certain stereotype if they want to get parts. The only real difference is the stereotype has changed.
"We're the information givers," said Yale School of Acting graduate Pun Bandu in a 2017 article. "We're the geeks. We're the prostitutes. We're so tired of seeing ourselves in these roles."
Meanwhile back in the 1920s things weren't any better for Wong on the other side of the ocean. Chinese audiences resented her American behavior, and seethed at her public persona. Affairs with white men, like director Tod Browning - and he thirty nine years old to her tender sixteen? This wasn't the behavior of a good Chinese girl.
Frustrated at the lack of opportunity in her native California she upped sticks in the middle 1920s and went to Europe seeking her fortune. She did well in Germany with Schmutziges Geld and Pavement Butterfly, rubbing elbows with the likes of Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl. When she went across the water to England she starred on stage with Lawrence Olivier, and made Piccadilly, her last silent drama. Her first talkie was a British film, The Flame of Love (also known as Road to Dishonor) in which she finally got to kiss a white man on screen - only to have the scene cut for non-British audiences.
When Hollywood started poaching European talent in the early 1930s Wong came back to Los Angeles, only to find that things hadn't changed all that much while she'd been away. After playing a couple Dragon Lady roles she went back to Europe, only to find herself drawn to Los Angeles again at the prospect of a role in the 1937 adaptation of Pearl S. Buck's Pulitzer-winning novel about life in China prior to the Great War.
That ended in disappointment for Wong, who went to China on an extended tour only to discover that her Chinese critics were no more favorable than the American variety. To the Chinese Wong was a disgrace, a sexually charged scandal on legs. Friends with Dietrich? Then Wong must be a lesbian. Linked with older men? Then she must be a prostitute. The real problem was she was too American for Chinese audiences, and they let her know it. She eventually won over the Chinese press, but it was hard going - not that Wong was intimidated by hard going.
The war intervened, and Wong found herself in a string of patriotic B-pictures, always a heroine bashing the Japanese. She devoted herself, when not working, to war relief, sending as much money and support as possible to benefit Chinese refugees.
Later, the war over, Wong invested in real estate, and lived quietly with her surviving family. She had a minor post-war film role, in the 1949 noir B-picture Impact, and the lead in a TV detective series The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong, which was cancelled after a single season and sadly no longer exists in any format. She appeared in some documentary work and some TV roles in the 1950s, but no leads and no film work. Her last film appearance was in 1960's Portrait in Black in which she plays the maid, Tawny. She got a star on the Boardwalk in 1960, and died of a heart attack in 1961, at the age of 56.
So let's talk about gamification.
As a walk-on NPC Wong could appear in Call of Cthulhu, Trail, or any of the 1930s era settings. As she travels extensively she could as easily be part of a Dreamhounds game as Bookhounds, or be encountered en route to some exotic location, say on a cruise liner or a very famous train. She's equally at home in modest as well as luxurious circumstances, and speaks many languages.
Her main attraction to the Keeper is that she knows almost everyone, in the States and abroad. She's on first name terms with a wide variety of people, from media moguls and film directors to dancers, composers, stage managers, restauranteurs, and many more. She can be a very useful link between the player characters and the local Chinese community, which might not otherwise open its doors to interfering investigator types. She can introduce them to artists, directors, powerful men. She's hobnobbed with everyone from the Los Angeles elite to the rising stars of Hitler's Germany. She's worked with the likes of Douglas Fairbanks and Alfred Hitchcock, as well as innumerable forgotten B-actors and directors. You name it, she's done it, or been there and loved every minute.
Perhaps the most obvious setting for her to appear in is the One-to-One Dex Raymond adventures, set in 1930s Los Angeles. Wong could drift in and out of Dex's life, always on her way somewhere else hoping for her big role, always frustrated at her lack of opportunities.
There's nothing to indicate any occult or outré connections, but she took great pride in her Chinese origins and would be very knowledgeable about anything to do with Chinese history, particularly its theatrical traditions.
As a One-to-One Source her skills favor performance, language, dance and high society. She can open many doors for other people, even doors that would remain frustratingly closed to her. However she's also got a strong business sense, which means she could be helpful in Bargain tests, and her extensive knowledge of Chinese culture and history gives her some Art History or History bonuses when dealing with Chinese culture.
For that matter there are few who know the film business quite like she does; she was there, on the spot, when it was being born. Any scuttlebutt or juicy bit of gossip relating to times long past - who was sleeping with who, who made shady deals to get financing, who worked in Poverty Row but likes to pretend they didn't now they've made it - is grist to her mill.
That's it for now! Enjoy.
Monday, 22 August 2016
Person of Interest: Sir Bernard Spilsbury (Trail, Call, Bookhounds)
I thought I'd try something different and kick of what I hope will be a semi-regular column here: Person of Interest. I'll discuss the biography and gamification of important historical people, and to start us off let's have a look at the life and career of Sir Bernard Spilsbury, the Scalpel of Scotland Yard.
Spilsbury was born 1877 in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, to a sold, middle class family. His father was a chemist, and Bernard spent his early years watching his father in his laboratory, experimenting. However his family was trade and his grandmother, a very determined woman, saw no future in medicine or chemicals, insisting that Bernard's father go into business. He did so reluctantly, but made sure his son would be a doctor if he had anything to say about it.
Bernard was a solitary soul who best liked long walks, skating and other hobbies that he could enjoy by himself, without distractions. He was amenable to his father's wish that he become a doctor, and resisted his grandmother's insistence that he go into trade instead, as a draper. He was an older graduate, entering St Mary's Hospital Medical School at 23, and his contemporaries found him amiable but ordinary, certainly not marked out for greatness. He seems to have been one of those people who just got on with things, without drawing attention to himself, and was a born workaholic.
At St Mary's he fell in with some of the best and brightest pathologists of their day, who took Spilsbury under their wing once they saw that, in spite of his seeming plodding unimpressive nature, he was a prodigious worker. Soon he became Student Demonstrator of Pathology, eschewing competitions, prizes and fame for hour after hour after hour in the lab. In fact his dedication to his craft meant that he did not take on the other courses needed for a medical degree, so he graduated much later than many of his classmates.
He did so at just the right time. In years gone by the police force and public prosecutions had been a piecemeal operation, with different standards and practices applying in every county. Now things were being reorganized; there would be a central authority in charge of the police, and a Director of Public Prosecutions, under the supervision of the Attorney General. Scotland Yard, meanwhile, was being forced to update itself. Paris, New York, Berlin, Prague, all these had police laboratories; even some of the provincial British police forces had established ad-hoc relationships with private medical labs. Yet Scotland Yard had no police laboratory of its own. All this was to change, and quickly.
Then along came Crippen.
The 1910 Crippen case gripped the nation. He had murdered his wife, a stage performer, and taken up with his lover, stealing his wife's money and even clothes. Then, when suspected, the pair fled across the ocean, leaving the police to find the wife's remains in the cellar of his house. Not all of the corpse was recovered; head, limbs and skeleton were missing, but a piece of flesh remained. That flesh bore an old abdominal scar, which helped identify the remains as those of Cora Crippen. Spilsbury also found traces of scopolamine in the remains, which suggested that Crippen, a doctor himself, had used the drug to pacify Cora and make her easier to kill. The doctor and his lover were caught and returned to Britain, where Crippen was eventually hanged.
Yet it wasn't Spilsbury's medical ability - excellent though it was - that really made his reputation. It was his demeanor, as an expert witness. Well dressed, handsome, with a carnation in his button hole, he projected solid competence, an impression that was only reinforced by his detached yet determined attitude. Spilsbury would not be rattled by the prosecution, nor yet by the judge. "Here is a coming man," said spectators, and they were right.
From there Spilsbury went from strength to strength. He became the pathologist of choice for the prosecution, travelling across the country from murder site to murder site, gathering and recording evidence. No absent-minded professor he; Spilsbury was an avid record keeper and fastidious note taker. His index card collection eventually sold for several thousand pounds and is now in the Wellcome collection in London.
Spilsbury loved nothing better than to experiment and solve problems. After the Mahon case, for example, Spilsbury determined to carry out Mahon's autopsy himself, though this would normally be the prison's responsibility. Mahon had been double-hanged; the murderer had, at the last moment, tried to save himself, but instead fell backward rather than down, breaking his spine on the trapdoor as he fell, and then his neck. In most instances the autopsy would be fairly perfunctory, but Spilsbury insisted on a complete autopsy including examination of the brain, a portion of which he took away with him. It was the first judicial autopsy Spilsbury conducted but by no means the last, and eventually as a result of his examinations a recommendation was made to increase the drop by two inches on humanitarian grounds, the better to ensure a clean break of the neck.
Spilsbury also developed the Murder Bag, or collection of standard equipment to use in murder cases, and the Mahon case is the cause. This is what Spilsbury and his colleagues found at the murder site, a bungalow at the Crumbles, Eastbourne:
'On a rusty tenon saw, grease and a piece of flesh. Articles of female clothing, greasy and bloodstained, some with soot or coal-dust on them. On the cauldron-shaped coal-scuttle, two minute specks of blood. In the saucer near it, solidified fat. The two-gallon saucepan in the same fireplace was half-full of a reddish fluid, with a thick layer of grease on the surface; this contained a piece of boiled human flesh, the skin adhering to it. The metal fender was splashed with grease. There was more grease deposited in the second saucepan, and smeared in the bath and basin. In the hat-box, among soiled articles of clothing, were thirty-seven pieces of flesh, cut or sawn. All were human, and all apparently had been boiled. The big fiber trunk held four large pieces of human body, sawn apart, but not boiled. On one of those pieces, a left chest and shoulder, there was a bruise over the shoulder blade, the result of a blow inflicted before death, if only a few minutes before; it had been, in Spilsbury's opinion, a heavy blow. There was also in the trunk a biscuit tin containing various organs.' From The Life of Sir Bernard Spilsbury, 1952, by Douglas G Browne and E V Tullett.
Spilbury started work on the murder bag, full of equipment needed to properly collect and store remains, when he saw a detective using his bare hands to scoop the victim's boiled flesh into a bucket.
Spilsbury became Sir Bernard in 1923, one year before the Mahon case. He spent his entire career dissecting, studying, analyzing, and giving evidence in case after case. It's become fashionable now to downplay Spilsbury, to claim that his dogmatic and unyielding attitude on the stand led to miscarriages of justice. Just as in his university years, when he eschewed competitive examinations and prizes for ordinary lab work, in his working career he refused to engage in peer review, or to train students. Spilsbury preferred his own counsel.
Yet it must be remembered that Spilsbury did not get where he was through anything other than effort. He was and remained the persistent, meticulous workaholic who graduated late because, thanks to his dedication to pathology, he could not be bothered with distractions. He lived for the job, and never lied or prevaricated. He thought before he acted but, once he made his mind up, that was that.
It did not end well for him. He had three sons. Peter, the one following in his footsteps, became a house surgeon at St Thomas' in London. On the 13th September, 1940, the Hospital was bombed and Peter died, but the news didn't get to Spilsbury right away. He went to work as usual the next morning, performing post-mortems and giving evidence at the Coroner's Court. After finishing one case and while waiting for the other to start he went through the morning's post, only to discover a letter from a friend with condolences on the death of his son. Except the letter didn't say which son; Spilsbury had seen Alan earlier that day, so it might have been either Peter or Richard.
Eventually Spilsbury learned the truth. He was back at work the next day, but he was never the same again.
Alan, the eldest son, was a sickly soul, and Spilsbury was devoted to him. The two would spend each day together, at the Gower Street laboratory where Spilsbury worked. In November 1945 young Alan died of consumption.
By this point Spilsbury was in decline. A micromanager to the end he could not bear to have other people write his reports or fill in forms for him, yet he became increasingly incapable of doing the job himself. He took longer and longer to make decisions now, his tiring mind unable to do the work of former years.
His death was characteristic of the man. During Christmas 1947 he took care of his affairs, gave his staff their accustomed Christmas boxes, and completed his paperwork for the year. On December 17th he sent out his last post-mortem report, in time to catch the 530 post. He dined at his club, afterwards handing the key to his private cupboard back to the club steward because, he said, he no longer needed it. He went back to the Gower Street laboratory at 730, which he had kept exactly as it was since the death of Alan two years prior. At 830, one of his colleagues passed by the laboratory, smelt gas, and investigated. By then, Spilsbury was dead.
With all that in mind, let's talk gamification.
As his career spans several decades all of which are core for Call and Trail of Cthulhu, Spilsbury could easily appear in either setting. Some of his most famous cases are in the 1930s - Trail's favorite decade - but Spilsbury was already the most celebrated pathologist of his day long before 1930. Moreover unlike many specialists, who prefer staid laboratory work, Spilsbury travels all over the country, which means he can be encountered almost anywhere from John O'Groats to Land's End. He might even be encountered elsewhere within the Commonwealth; he's known to have worked in the Channel Islands, and a small amount of fictionalization could have him turn up, say, in Canada or further afield.
In Trail or Call, Spilsbury's most likely role is the expert, assisting in investigations without taking part himself. If the investigators have a medical background or any official standing, they might meet the great man himself. From a rules perspective Spilsbury's bound to have expert-level ratings in any medical or forensic discipline and, though his finances were relatively modest, thanks to his professional reputation his Credit Rating is very high. His library and note card collection would be a boon to any researcher, giving boosts to related medical or forensic abilities.
For investigators more likely to commit crimes than investigate them, Spilsbury is a very dangerous enemy. No matter how careful, clever, or resourceful the characters think they are, it's nearly impossible to outwit the Scalpel of Scotland Yard.
In a Bookhounds game, Spilsbury best fits a Sordid London setting. No amount of crime novel romanticism can disguise Spilsbury's grim and grisly world. Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers both based their crime fiction in part on Spilsbury's work, directly or indirectly. Yet their depictions are fairly bloodless, when compared to the gore, guts, and limbless torsos that made up Spilsbury's professional career. Spilsbury was no stranger to the variations of the human condition; suicide, accidental death, sexually motivated asphyxia, and a thousand other kinds of demise were his stock in trade.
If you wanted to go in an Esoterrorist direction, the obvious terror to link to Spilsbury is the Practice. This gestalt, described in The Book of Unremitting Horror, is a medical nightmare, a surgical team of the damned. If you were to link Spilsbury to it then one way would be to suggest that the Practice is haunting the site of Spilsbury's old lab at Gower Street. I'm guessing that the old lab is long gone, but it was probably part of what's now University Teaching Hospital. Maybe there's a cult of medical students seeking grim knowledge, or perhaps Spilsbury wants his index cards back from the Wellcome.
In any case, you've more than enough information now. I hope this was useful! Enjoy.
Spilsbury was born 1877 in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, to a sold, middle class family. His father was a chemist, and Bernard spent his early years watching his father in his laboratory, experimenting. However his family was trade and his grandmother, a very determined woman, saw no future in medicine or chemicals, insisting that Bernard's father go into business. He did so reluctantly, but made sure his son would be a doctor if he had anything to say about it.
Bernard was a solitary soul who best liked long walks, skating and other hobbies that he could enjoy by himself, without distractions. He was amenable to his father's wish that he become a doctor, and resisted his grandmother's insistence that he go into trade instead, as a draper. He was an older graduate, entering St Mary's Hospital Medical School at 23, and his contemporaries found him amiable but ordinary, certainly not marked out for greatness. He seems to have been one of those people who just got on with things, without drawing attention to himself, and was a born workaholic.
At St Mary's he fell in with some of the best and brightest pathologists of their day, who took Spilsbury under their wing once they saw that, in spite of his seeming plodding unimpressive nature, he was a prodigious worker. Soon he became Student Demonstrator of Pathology, eschewing competitions, prizes and fame for hour after hour after hour in the lab. In fact his dedication to his craft meant that he did not take on the other courses needed for a medical degree, so he graduated much later than many of his classmates.
He did so at just the right time. In years gone by the police force and public prosecutions had been a piecemeal operation, with different standards and practices applying in every county. Now things were being reorganized; there would be a central authority in charge of the police, and a Director of Public Prosecutions, under the supervision of the Attorney General. Scotland Yard, meanwhile, was being forced to update itself. Paris, New York, Berlin, Prague, all these had police laboratories; even some of the provincial British police forces had established ad-hoc relationships with private medical labs. Yet Scotland Yard had no police laboratory of its own. All this was to change, and quickly.
Then along came Crippen.
The 1910 Crippen case gripped the nation. He had murdered his wife, a stage performer, and taken up with his lover, stealing his wife's money and even clothes. Then, when suspected, the pair fled across the ocean, leaving the police to find the wife's remains in the cellar of his house. Not all of the corpse was recovered; head, limbs and skeleton were missing, but a piece of flesh remained. That flesh bore an old abdominal scar, which helped identify the remains as those of Cora Crippen. Spilsbury also found traces of scopolamine in the remains, which suggested that Crippen, a doctor himself, had used the drug to pacify Cora and make her easier to kill. The doctor and his lover were caught and returned to Britain, where Crippen was eventually hanged.
Yet it wasn't Spilsbury's medical ability - excellent though it was - that really made his reputation. It was his demeanor, as an expert witness. Well dressed, handsome, with a carnation in his button hole, he projected solid competence, an impression that was only reinforced by his detached yet determined attitude. Spilsbury would not be rattled by the prosecution, nor yet by the judge. "Here is a coming man," said spectators, and they were right.
From there Spilsbury went from strength to strength. He became the pathologist of choice for the prosecution, travelling across the country from murder site to murder site, gathering and recording evidence. No absent-minded professor he; Spilsbury was an avid record keeper and fastidious note taker. His index card collection eventually sold for several thousand pounds and is now in the Wellcome collection in London.
Spilsbury loved nothing better than to experiment and solve problems. After the Mahon case, for example, Spilsbury determined to carry out Mahon's autopsy himself, though this would normally be the prison's responsibility. Mahon had been double-hanged; the murderer had, at the last moment, tried to save himself, but instead fell backward rather than down, breaking his spine on the trapdoor as he fell, and then his neck. In most instances the autopsy would be fairly perfunctory, but Spilsbury insisted on a complete autopsy including examination of the brain, a portion of which he took away with him. It was the first judicial autopsy Spilsbury conducted but by no means the last, and eventually as a result of his examinations a recommendation was made to increase the drop by two inches on humanitarian grounds, the better to ensure a clean break of the neck.
Spilsbury also developed the Murder Bag, or collection of standard equipment to use in murder cases, and the Mahon case is the cause. This is what Spilsbury and his colleagues found at the murder site, a bungalow at the Crumbles, Eastbourne:
'On a rusty tenon saw, grease and a piece of flesh. Articles of female clothing, greasy and bloodstained, some with soot or coal-dust on them. On the cauldron-shaped coal-scuttle, two minute specks of blood. In the saucer near it, solidified fat. The two-gallon saucepan in the same fireplace was half-full of a reddish fluid, with a thick layer of grease on the surface; this contained a piece of boiled human flesh, the skin adhering to it. The metal fender was splashed with grease. There was more grease deposited in the second saucepan, and smeared in the bath and basin. In the hat-box, among soiled articles of clothing, were thirty-seven pieces of flesh, cut or sawn. All were human, and all apparently had been boiled. The big fiber trunk held four large pieces of human body, sawn apart, but not boiled. On one of those pieces, a left chest and shoulder, there was a bruise over the shoulder blade, the result of a blow inflicted before death, if only a few minutes before; it had been, in Spilsbury's opinion, a heavy blow. There was also in the trunk a biscuit tin containing various organs.' From The Life of Sir Bernard Spilsbury, 1952, by Douglas G Browne and E V Tullett.
Spilbury started work on the murder bag, full of equipment needed to properly collect and store remains, when he saw a detective using his bare hands to scoop the victim's boiled flesh into a bucket.
Spilsbury became Sir Bernard in 1923, one year before the Mahon case. He spent his entire career dissecting, studying, analyzing, and giving evidence in case after case. It's become fashionable now to downplay Spilsbury, to claim that his dogmatic and unyielding attitude on the stand led to miscarriages of justice. Just as in his university years, when he eschewed competitive examinations and prizes for ordinary lab work, in his working career he refused to engage in peer review, or to train students. Spilsbury preferred his own counsel.
Yet it must be remembered that Spilsbury did not get where he was through anything other than effort. He was and remained the persistent, meticulous workaholic who graduated late because, thanks to his dedication to pathology, he could not be bothered with distractions. He lived for the job, and never lied or prevaricated. He thought before he acted but, once he made his mind up, that was that.
It did not end well for him. He had three sons. Peter, the one following in his footsteps, became a house surgeon at St Thomas' in London. On the 13th September, 1940, the Hospital was bombed and Peter died, but the news didn't get to Spilsbury right away. He went to work as usual the next morning, performing post-mortems and giving evidence at the Coroner's Court. After finishing one case and while waiting for the other to start he went through the morning's post, only to discover a letter from a friend with condolences on the death of his son. Except the letter didn't say which son; Spilsbury had seen Alan earlier that day, so it might have been either Peter or Richard.
Eventually Spilsbury learned the truth. He was back at work the next day, but he was never the same again.
Alan, the eldest son, was a sickly soul, and Spilsbury was devoted to him. The two would spend each day together, at the Gower Street laboratory where Spilsbury worked. In November 1945 young Alan died of consumption.
By this point Spilsbury was in decline. A micromanager to the end he could not bear to have other people write his reports or fill in forms for him, yet he became increasingly incapable of doing the job himself. He took longer and longer to make decisions now, his tiring mind unable to do the work of former years.
His death was characteristic of the man. During Christmas 1947 he took care of his affairs, gave his staff their accustomed Christmas boxes, and completed his paperwork for the year. On December 17th he sent out his last post-mortem report, in time to catch the 530 post. He dined at his club, afterwards handing the key to his private cupboard back to the club steward because, he said, he no longer needed it. He went back to the Gower Street laboratory at 730, which he had kept exactly as it was since the death of Alan two years prior. At 830, one of his colleagues passed by the laboratory, smelt gas, and investigated. By then, Spilsbury was dead.
With all that in mind, let's talk gamification.
As his career spans several decades all of which are core for Call and Trail of Cthulhu, Spilsbury could easily appear in either setting. Some of his most famous cases are in the 1930s - Trail's favorite decade - but Spilsbury was already the most celebrated pathologist of his day long before 1930. Moreover unlike many specialists, who prefer staid laboratory work, Spilsbury travels all over the country, which means he can be encountered almost anywhere from John O'Groats to Land's End. He might even be encountered elsewhere within the Commonwealth; he's known to have worked in the Channel Islands, and a small amount of fictionalization could have him turn up, say, in Canada or further afield.
In Trail or Call, Spilsbury's most likely role is the expert, assisting in investigations without taking part himself. If the investigators have a medical background or any official standing, they might meet the great man himself. From a rules perspective Spilsbury's bound to have expert-level ratings in any medical or forensic discipline and, though his finances were relatively modest, thanks to his professional reputation his Credit Rating is very high. His library and note card collection would be a boon to any researcher, giving boosts to related medical or forensic abilities.
For investigators more likely to commit crimes than investigate them, Spilsbury is a very dangerous enemy. No matter how careful, clever, or resourceful the characters think they are, it's nearly impossible to outwit the Scalpel of Scotland Yard.
In a Bookhounds game, Spilsbury best fits a Sordid London setting. No amount of crime novel romanticism can disguise Spilsbury's grim and grisly world. Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers both based their crime fiction in part on Spilsbury's work, directly or indirectly. Yet their depictions are fairly bloodless, when compared to the gore, guts, and limbless torsos that made up Spilsbury's professional career. Spilsbury was no stranger to the variations of the human condition; suicide, accidental death, sexually motivated asphyxia, and a thousand other kinds of demise were his stock in trade.
If you wanted to go in an Esoterrorist direction, the obvious terror to link to Spilsbury is the Practice. This gestalt, described in The Book of Unremitting Horror, is a medical nightmare, a surgical team of the damned. If you were to link Spilsbury to it then one way would be to suggest that the Practice is haunting the site of Spilsbury's old lab at Gower Street. I'm guessing that the old lab is long gone, but it was probably part of what's now University Teaching Hospital. Maybe there's a cult of medical students seeking grim knowledge, or perhaps Spilsbury wants his index cards back from the Wellcome.
In any case, you've more than enough information now. I hope this was useful! Enjoy.
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