Tracey Slaughter: Conventional Weapons

Bronwyn Lloyd: Tracey & Jack (9-5-19)

So Bronwyn and I drove down last night, after my midday class, to attend Tracey's booklaunch in Hamilton. It was great! The crowd could hardly fit into the space - the refurbished Poppies Bookshop, one block back from Victoria Street - so they were gathering outside as well as in. The drink flowed free, and the catering was splendid.

Bronwyn Lloyd: Crowd Scene (9-5-19)

Here's my launch speech for the book (which - of course - doesn't begin to do it justice, but one must at least try to fix an impression):

Tracey Slaughter: Conventional Weapons (Wellington: VUP, 2019)

I think that the thing I’d like to stress to begin with is that I first knew Tracey as a poet, long before I knew about her short stories. It was, in fact, her feature in Poetry NZ 25 (2002), which really woke me up to her as a writer.

Poetry NZ 25 (2002)

Just reading the titles of those poems now is very evocative, I must say: “Lone Wolf goes to her Reunion”, “Anatomy of dancing with your Future Wife,” as well as the terrifying “Rules for Teachers (1915).”

Nor do you have to hunt out old issues of Poetry NZ to see them, either. These – and many more – were included in her first book, the wonderful – and revelatory – Her body rises: stories & poems (2005).

Tracey Slaughter: Her body rises (Auckland: Random House, 2005)

Over the years I’ve been privileged to see a lot more of Tracey’s poems – as a friend, but particularly as an editor. She’s always been very generous to my requests for more material from her. One of the poems in the present book, Conventional Weapons, first appeared in my guest-issue of brief #50 (2014).

In fact, that whole issue was bookended by two long Tracey Slaughter poems, “31 reasons not to hear a heartbeat” at the beginning, and her fascinatingly disproportionate Victorian monologue “The Box of Phantoms” at the end. That one isn’t in this book, alas, but you can look it up in the issue.

brief 50 (2014)

So while it is technically true that this is Tracey’s first stand-alone poetry collection, it’s very misleading to see her as any kind of newcomer to the game. She’s been publishing poetry for more than two decades now, and it’s high time that we started to see her, like Raymond Carver, as someone equally adept at poetry and the short story.

But what kind of a poet is she? Words like ‘bodily,’ ‘visceral’, ‘grimy and dirty’ have frequently been used to characterise her work, and particularly these poems. There is a lot of sex in them. There’s also lot of desperation, pain, and sheer horror of the void. As Hera Lindsay Bird remarked on the dust jacket of another recent VUP book, Therese Lloyd’s The Facts, ‘it won’t make you feel better.’

But all that implies a kind of shock value: a quest for extremity for its own sake. But you have to read deeper and better than that if you want to begin to understand some of the many things Tracey is trying to do in these poems.

As always, she’s extremely, wonderfully literary. Mike Mathers’ Stuff article about this book states that: “If the collection had an overarching theme, it would be one of giving voice to a group of strong female characters of different ages.”

I mentioned before the long Victorian monologue in that old issue of brief magazine. In many ways this collection is a tip of the hat to Robert Browning’s Dramatis Personae (1864): to his idea of embodying complex and subtle character portraits in dramatic monologues – a precedent followed by his disciple Ezra Pound in Personae (1909).

It’s a mistake to think that poets are mostly concerned with self-revelation, leaving fiction writers to concern themselves with the delineation and analysis of character. Perhaps, in fact, it’s Robert’s wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning who’s the stronger influence here: particularly her wonderfully rich and complex verse novel Aurora Leigh (1856).

Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936)

Tracey understood long since that to be a good writer you also have to be an insightful reader, and I was particularly delighted to hear the echoes of Federico Garcia Lorca’s great ‘Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias,’ with its repeated refrain of ‘a las cinco de la tarde’ [at five in the afternoon] in her own poem ‘breather’ (which came second in the 2018 International Peter Porter Poetry Prize).

Here’s Lorca:

A coffin on wheels is his bed
at five in the afternoon.
Bones and flutes resound in his ears
at five in the afternoon.
Now the bull was bellowing through his forehead
at five in the afternoon.
The room was iridescent with agony
at five in the afternoon.

Here’s Tracey:

Call your wife, leave a message at the sob. Call your wife, she is learning the hard way. Call your wife, the histology is back. Call your wife, her lipstick is audible. Call your wife, she’s on her third bottle & the kids are starting to look like stars. Call your wife, she remembers the colour of the wallpaper in neonatal. Call your wife, she is talking to you with her head tipped back so you don’t hear the asphyxia. [83]

It’s not that Tracey is imitating Lorca’s heart-broken lament for his doomed friend, the dead bullfighter, but she certainly seems to be channelling it somehow. The love trysts in cheap hotels which occur so often in this collection of poems have become a kind of underlying motif or background music, like Lorca’s Andalusian folk traditions and gypsy ballads.

The mention of music brings me to another major theme in Tracey’s work. She is herself an accomplished rock & roll drummer, and has performed for many years as the lead singer in a local covers band. In fact one of the original titles for this book was ‘Covers’ – which does tend to confirm that the complex relations between poetry and music are never very far away for her.

If Lorca, and all he represents, constitutes one pole of her inspiration, then, the sad, frail, whip-thin and radioactively talented Karen Carpenter might be said to embody the other.

Karen Carpenter (1950-1983)

Her long sequence ‘it was the seventies when me & Karen Carpenter hung out’, which covers almost twenty pages of the book, underlines this relationship in all its dangerous, flamboyant glamour. KC, or Kace, was a drummer like Tracey. Like Tracey she fought the pressure to come out from behind her drums. Unlike Tracey, she gave in.

A single review mentioning the word ‘plump’ was enough to set off the nightmarish anorexia which eventually took the star’s life – and it’s that aspect that Tracey’s narrator in the poem explores in all its painful detail. Painful, yes, but also funny with a kind of gallows humour:

the feet
of me & KC
glue our dreams
like trophies
to the cork-tile
kitchen. When we get
there the cupboards bulge
with Instants
bright in their toxic
brands. Our
tongues are caked
with calories, all for
our mothers’
convenience. You can
just get so lovesick
for puke. [53]

So, while I do continue to hear Lorca’s immortal elegy when I read Tracey Slaughter, I also hear Karen Carpenter’s late, great song ‘Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft’ – or rather, see the video for that song, with KC’s eyes bugging out of her face, and the jumpsuit emphasising every absent curve.

If life wasn’t like that – if young girls didn’t set out to starve themselves to death in the name of a false image of perfection; if desperate souls didn’t get themselves fucked in anonymous hotel rooms in random acts of adultery, then it might not be necessary to write about it.

Tracey has the courage to do so. More importantly, she also has the skill and the depth of poetic knowledge to write it in such a way that we have to go back to her poems again and again to tease out their corners, work out the angles, learn – each time – a little more about the sheer strangeness and beauty of human beings. Buy this book. You won’t regret it.

Tracey Slaughter

The Mysteries of Rotorua

List of Strange Occurrences
(Unless otherwise noted, all photographs by Bronwyn Lloyd: 24-26/4/19)

Bronwyn and I had a very mysterious time of it on our recent excursion to Rotorua. This was not intended as a ghost-hunting expedition, but it certainly ended up that way. We seemed to be plagued the whole time by strange portents and coincidences ...

Bonze

Here's the first (and mildest) of them. If you look carefully at the car above, you can see the word 'Bonze' written on the back. 'Bonze' happens to be Bronwyn's childhood nickname (as well, of course, as an old name for a Buddhist priest).

Bonze (detail)

Our plan was to drive down via Cambridge, as we'd heard from a friend that there was a good antique shop there, with lots of books and other treasures. The shop, Colonial Heritage Antiques was located at 40 Duke Street. Unfortunately google maps interpreted this as Duke St, Frankton (just outside Hamilton), so led us on a wild goose chase through the city.

Nothing daunted, we drove on towards Cambridge:

Jack outside Cambridge shop

Here I am outside Colonial Heritage Antiques (and, yes, I did pick up one or two books in there). You'll notice the strange orb-like illumination in the middle of my forehead.

Jack with orb

I've included this detail of the shot to emphasise that this seems to me a fairly normal visual phenomenon - not at all like the one further down in this post ...

Cambridge tree

We spent a pleasant evening in Rotorua on arrival there. Only one slightly strange thing happened. As we were sitting in the restaurant waiting for our meal, a woman came up to us and told Bronwyn what a lovely smile she had, and how it 'lit up the room.'

This was very nice of her, of course, but the point is that it has never happened before, and - but you'll have to wait for further comments on this event below.

Taniwha

We decided to do some sightseeing among the lakes, and stopped to take this rather suggestive shot of Lake Rotoiti as we were driving alongside it.

As she got out of the car, Bronwyn remarked on the little buoy visible in the picture, claiming that it looked like a taniwha, and could easily be made into a picture of Nessie or some other lake monster.

At that moment a motorboat roared by towing a water skier, and I said that if we waited for the wake to reach the buoy, it would look as if the little dark object was causing the waves.

Glade beside Lake Rotoiti

Now I'd like you to look at the picture above very carefully. It was taken a moment after we noticed the bones.

I'd seen that there was a small stack of bones beside one of the trees when we arrived at the rest area (more of a pulling-over place, really). Now I began to see that they were quite large leg bones, and had definitely been gnawed by someone or something.

Bronwyn was standing a bit higher to take her shot, and she said that she could see a large ribcage, with some bits of fur and meat on it. It was much larger than a sheep's. We wondered if it might be a cow, or even a deer? It was about now that we were hit by the smell.

Glade with orb

Bronwyn was reluctant to photograph the bones themselves. A slight feeling of wrongness was already in the air for both of us. We felt like intruders in this place of death, and felt a definite anxiety to get away. It wasn't until much later in the day that we noticed the orb at the bottom of the photo.

Glade (detail)

So what is an orb, exactly? Anyone who's ever watched any ghost shows on TV will be familiar with these small visible disturbances on video and still photographic images.

Sceptics claim these are due solely to backscatter and other natural side-effects of photographic flash. Believers see them as the earliest intimation of an apparition or presence.

Certainly it's a little odd that this is the only one we've ever recorded (discounting the one above, outside the Cambridge shop), and that it was taken in one of the creepiest places we've been to.

Orb (detail)

If you look at it closely, it really is quite an odd thing. It looks almost as if something was trying to come through the picture at that moment.

At first we thought that someone might have stopped for a barbecue or a midnight feast at the spot, but there were no signs of fire, and the bones had definitely been chewed by teeth.

Green Lake

Here's another shot of the green lake, Rotokakahi, a bit further down the road. As you can see, there's nothing odd in the shot - though we did almost get taken out by one of the incredibly aggressive local drivers who was tailgating me at the time.

It was almost, at times, as if they wanted to run us off the road, rather than simply to let us pull over and allow them to pass ...

Whakatane & White Island

Having gone so far, we decided to head on to the coast and check out Whakatane. Here's a shot from a little jetty and children's playground along the foreshore.

What it doesn't show is the omnipresent plague of wasps. Nobody else seemed to notice or react to them at all, but the moment we pulled up, they were buzzing around us, and (seemingly) trying to get into the car with us.

White Island (detail)

We decided instead to drive a bit further along the coast and check out what's billed locally as "NZ's favourite beach", Ohope.

Ohope 1

Here's the view looking north.

Ohope 2

And here's the view looking south.

Once again, the camera hasn't picked up the ubiquitous wasps. We rejected the idea of stopping for a coffee, and instead headed back to the big smoke, Rotorua.

On the way back we were looking out for the place where we'd seen those strange bones. Sure enough, just before we reached it, a black cat ran out across the road in front of us (narrowly avoiding a collision with the car in front). I know that that's good luck in some places, but it's bad luck in others.

Perhaps he was the one who'd been gnawing at them so assiduously.

Freemasons 1

Everything was closed in Rotorua. True, it was Anzac Day, but we'd hoped that a few shops might open in the afternoon, as they do elsewhere. No such luck. In particular, Atlantis Books, which I'd hoped to scope out, was clearly shut for the day.

Which brings me to another curious incident. Before leaving Whakatane, we saw online that there was a branch of Atlantis Books located there. We followed the directions, and got to the listed address, only to find - nothing.

For the second time in two days, our Australian-accented guide at google maps (whom we've nicknamed Kylie) had led us wrong. But she's hardly ever done so before - and never in so significant and patterned a way.

Freemasons 2

The blank spot in this sign could be deciphered as once having advertised a'Geyserland Daylight Lodge'. I wonder just why it closed, and why all evidence of it had to be scrubbed out in this way?

Freemasons 3

With no shops open, we continued to wander. But Bronwyn had already fallen and skinned her knee when we set out to get some lunch, so we couldn't go too far.

There was a tiny pebble on the footpath which we concluded must have been the culprit - but really, it was as if she'd been pushed over by somebody, she went down so fast and hard.

The Government Gardens

The gardens were (and are) somewhat spooky - even in the daytime. They're surrounded by lake weed and boiling mud pools, and seem as if they're only precariously maintaining their place on the foreshore.

The animate tree

And some of the trees look positively alive.

The split tree

Though it's hard to see how this one continues to survive.

Inside the gap

What's lurking in there, I wonder?

Atlantis Books

Next day we duly went along to Atlantis Books, and had a high old time. As I was buying a stack of books at the counter, though, the owner asked me if I was in the trade?

'No, just a bibliophile,' I replied. 'I do teach literature, though.'

'At Massey?' he asked.

'Yes."

"Aren't you a poet?'

'Yes.' (That doesn't happen very often - getting spotted).

'I was looking at your picture online last night!'

'What do you mean?'

'I've been thinking of doing some more study, and I was checking out the Massey website. And I saw you there.'

Just a coincidence, of course (and a very pleasant one), but there did seem to have been an awful lot of coincidences over the past couple of days. First someone came up and complimented Brownyn, and now someone claimed to recognise me from the internet ...

I don't know how familiar most of you are with Jung's theory of Synchronicity. Wikipedia defines it as:

a concept, first introduced by analytical psychologist Carl Jung, which holds that events are "meaningful coincidences" if they occur with no causal relationship yet seem to be meaningfully related.

Let's look a bit more carefully at our two days in and about Rotorua, at the heart of that mysterious region where not only thermal phenomena but pyschic ones, too, seem so close to the surface of things - a place of strange portals and openings into other realms:

• Two abortive bookshop searches (Hamilton & Whakatane)
• Two orbs (Cambridge & Lake Rotoiti): one fairly 'natural', the other far less so
• Two strange encounters at the site of those bones (orb & black cat)
• Two wasp encounters (Whakatane & Ohope)
• Two recognitions (Fat Dog Restaurant & Atlantis Books)

Then there's the fact that I was sure I'd seen a shadowy figure in the corner of our room the first night, while Bronwyn felt that I'd taken off my shirt in the middle of the night (I can't have done, though, because it was on next morning). Was there someone else lying there in my place at some point?

For what it's worth, I feel a kind of a shadow came down over the day after we'd pulled over - and talked so frivolously and cheekily about 'taniwhas' and monsters - at that strange death-site. It was almost as if there were a tapu over the place, which we'd inadvertently offended against.

I hope that we worked it off in the course of the day. By next morning, everything seemed lighter, somehow. And our intentions were perfectly innocent. I'll be watching out for wasps and sudden falls over the next wee while, though.

And I'd counsel in general showing a certain respect in that area of the North Island. It is a genuinely strange place, and the superficial overlay of tourist sites has not really touched its atmosphere of old bloodshed and restless ghosts.

'NZ's Favourite Beach'

Geoffrey Trease: from the 5-Year Plan to Bannerdale

Dawn of the Unread (1909-1998)

It's rather a strange story, really. In 1933 a young man called Geoffrey Trease came across a book called Moscow has a Plan, in which (as wikipedia helpfully informs us):

a Soviet author dramatised the first Five-year plan for young readers

Despite his bourgeois origins, Trease had rejected the class-based teaching he'd encountered during his first year of a Classics degree at Oxford, and had moved to London determined to find some other way of becoming a writer.

Now, inspired by the Russian book, he wrote a 'revisionist' children's book about Robin Hood entitled Bows against the Barons (1934), which not only included a left-wing political agenda, but also an unusual - for the time - emphasis on strong characters, both female and male, from a variety of social backgrounds, and an insistence on using contemporary rather than Wardour-Street ("Tush, varlet ... Gadzooks", etc.) English.

George Orwell on Geoffrey Trease

His specifically communist leanings may have faded over time (the great Stalinist purges of the 1930s were a bit of a disincentive to fellow travellers everywhere), but Geoffrey Trease remained throughout his career a strong proponent of progressive values - in distinct contrast to most of his predecessors (and many of his contemporaries) in children's writing.

Not that he was only a children's writer - or only a writer of historical fiction, for that matter. That was the field in which he achieved greatest distinction, but he also wrote adult novels, non-fiction (including three volumes of memoirs), and even literary criticism.

For more on all these subjects, I recommend his autobiography, the first two volumes of which I bought from a library throwing-out table a few years ago:

Geoffrey Trease: A Whiff of Burnt Boats (1971)



1. A Whiff of Burnt Boats: An Early Autobiography. St. Martin’s Press. London: Macmillan & Co., 1971.




Geoffrey Trease: Laughter at the Door (1974)



2. Laughter at the Door: A Continued Autobiography. London: Macmillan London Ltd., 1974.

Where my own interests come in is with his most famous series of books, the Bannerdale novels, which began with No Boats on Bannermere in 1949, and concluded with The Gates of Bannerdale in 1956. Here they are in order of publication (and chronological sequence):

Richard Kennedy: cover for No Boats on Bannermere (1949)



1. No Boats on Bannermere. Illustrated by Richard Kennedy. Bannerdale series, 1. 1949. London: Heinemann, 1963.




Geoffrey Trease: Under Black Banner (1951)



2. Under Black Banner. Illustrated by Richard Kennedy. Bannerdale series, 2. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1951.




Geoffrey Trease: Black Banner Players (1952)



3. Black Banner Players. Illustrated by Richard Kennedy. Bannerdale series, 3. 1952. Coleford, Radstock, Somerset: Girls Gone By Publishers, 2005.




Geoffrey Trease: Black Banner Abroad (1954)



4. Black Banner Abroad. Bannerdale series, 4. 1954. The New Windmill Series. Ed. Anne & Ian Serraillier. London: Heinemann, 1962.




Geoffrey Trease: The Gates of Bannerdale (1956)



5. The Gates of Bannerdale. Bannerdale series, 5. 1956. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1965.

As a group, I suppose they were inspired mainly by Trease's own residence in the Lake District from the 1940s on. One can't, however, avoid the suspicion that they were also designed as a kind of antidote to an even more famous series of books, Arthur Ransome's 12 Swallows and Amazons books, set on an unnamed lake a little like Windermere, though with features borrowed from various other lakes nearby.

Arthur Ransome: Swallows and Amazons (1930)

1. Swallows and Amazons (1930)
2. Swallowdale (1931)
3. Peter Duck (1932)
4. Winter Holiday (1933)
5. Coot Club (1934)
6. Pigeon Post (1936)
7. We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea (1937)
8. Secret Water (1939)
9. The Big Six (1940)
10. Missee Lee (1941)
11. The Picts And The Martyrs: or Not Welcome At All (1943)
12. Great Northern? (1947)

Arthur Ransome: Autobiography (1884-1967)

Ransome was by no means a reactionary. He had in fact been suspected of espionage for the Soviets at the time of the Revolution in 1917, and was close to Lenin and Trotsky at that time (he ended up marrying the latter's secretary, Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina). He made a valiant attempt to portray some working class characters in Coot Club and its various sequels, but for the most part his children do live in a kind of fairyland of complete behavioural licence and freedom from economic pressure.

When the children decide to go off and camp on an island in the middle of the lake in the first of the books, for instance, their father's telegram of permission famously reads: "BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WON'T DROWN."

R. M. Ballantyne: The Coral Island (1858)

For Trease, they appear to have acted a little like R. M. Ballantyne's Coral Island did for William Golding's Lord of the Flies. The delightful (or irritating, depending on your point of view) lack of reality in the Swallows and Amazons books may have spurred him into wondering what it would be like if some child characters really did have to deal with modern life in a more-or-less unadorned form?

William Golding: Lord of the Flies (1954)

Which is not to say that No Boats on Bannermere (1949) is not an exciting adventure story. Published almost twenty years after the first of Ransome's Lake District romances, it also deals with a mysterious island, boating adventures, and a host of picturesque characters. The difference is that the children's mother is divorced, has to make money doing 'teas' for visitors, and that a basic pragmatism and verisimilitude underlies all their doings.

Lake Windermere

Trease has also learned that readers can be interested just as easily by the everyday details of life in a North Country cottage as by buried treasure or ancient skeletons. But he doesn't really stint on either. Seventy years after it was published, No Boats on Bannermere now gives an agreeably distant feeling of post-war Britain, complete with rationing, housing restrictions, and other - now fascinating - details of life in that era.

Its sequels go on to flesh out the picture with subjects such as the need to reclaim confiscated - but no longer needed - land from the War Office, the complex politics of local drama groups, the challenges of going abroad on limited funds, and - finally - the realities of life as a first year undergraduate.

In each case one feels that not only does Geoffrey Trease know exactly what he's talking about, but that the mechanics of such everyday dilemmas are, finally, far more interesting than - say - the fantasy worlds of Ransome's Peter Duck or Missee Lee. A rattling good yarn can far more readily be written, he appears to imply, from the day-to-day details of one's own suburb or village than from some half-baked otherwhere.

The Radcliffe Camera (Oxford)

I liked all of the books, but the last one, The Gates of Bannerdale, where Bill Melbury finally leaves his tiny village to go to Oxford, was definitely my favourite. Heightened, packed with incident, certainly - but basically plausible: that was the hallmark of all of Geoffrey Trease's books.

Funnily enough, my father only owned four of the five novels in the series, so the third, Black Banner Players, remained a mystery to us. There were enough references to it in the remaining two books to deduce what it was about, but I didn't read it until I myself went off to university in the UK.

The National Library of Scotland (Edinburgh)

In my first year at Edinburgh university, I'd got into the habit of ordering up piles of books from the stacks from my desk in the National Library of Scotland. One day it occurred to me that, given it was one of Britain's major copyright libraries, they might well have a copy of Black Banner Players. As it turned out, they did, and so that's where I first encountered it.

I didn't like it. The conditions were not particularly conducive to relaxed reading: and it seemed to me to contain too much of a concentration on one of Trease's obsessions: shoplifting (which recurs in his later Maythorn series). That would be a good thirty years ago now, and I've recently re-read the book with very different feelings. It now seems to me every bit as good as the others, and in fact a very satisfactory addition to the series.

It's still by far the most difficult of the books to find second-hand, so I was forced to buy a paperback reprint by a firm called "Girls Gone By," specialising in forgotten children's books. Even that wasn't cheap. So if you ever see a hardback copy in good condition lying around, I'd suggest getting down on it pretty quickly.

And, if you haven't read any of them, you might well feel like giving Geoffrey Trease's books a go. The innovations he pioneered are now pretty universally accepted, so they're unlikely to strike you as particularly modern or revisionist - but the man hailed by George Orwell as "that creature we have long been needing, a ‘light’ Left-wing writer, rebellious but human" is unlikely ever to fade into complete obscurity.

Here's a list of the unfortunately very limited number of books by him I own. They do include some interesting curiosities, though. As well as his two 'Maythorn' books, I also have the pair he wrote about Garibaldi, as well as his novels about Greek drama - The Hills of Varna and The Crown of Violet:

Geoffrey Trease

Robert Geoffrey Trease
(1909-1998)

1. Cue for Treason. 1940. Illustrated by Zena Flax. Puffin Books. 1965. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.


2. The Hills of Varna. Illustrated by Treyer Evans. 1948. London: Macmillan & Co Ltd., 1956.


3. The Crown of Violet. 1952. Illustrated by C. Walter Hodges. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.


4. The Maythorn Story. Illustrated by Robert Hodgson. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1960.


5. Change at Maythorn. Illustrated by Robert Hodgson. 1962. London: The Children’s Book Club, 1963.


6. Follow My Black Plume. 1963. Illustrated by Brian Wildsmith. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.


7. A Thousand for Sicily. Illustrated by Brian Wildsmith. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1964.


8. The Red Towers of Granada. 1966. Illustrated by Charles Keeping. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.

Geoffrey Trease: Cue for Treason (1940)