Woody Haut's Blog

Savages by Don Winslow

2012-01-24T16:32:00.001Z

I've long been an admirer of Don Winslow's crime fiction. One of the things I like about his work is that, no matter how light or entertaining his novels appear to be, one comes away from them having learned something. For example, California Power and Light is a veritable degree course in fire insurance investigation. I've used bits of information gleaned from that book on a number of occasions. While in Power of the Dog- one of the best crime novels to appear over the last two decades- you learn pretty much everything you need to know about Mexican drug cartels and their relationship to law enforcement in the US and south of the border.

Which brings me to Savages. I was really looking forward to this one, having heard it combined his two prime subjects- surfers/slackers and Mexican drug cartels. That it does, and even though it noir to the core, I was disappointed. Savages centers on two guys- one a hardcore, former soldier, the other a green-minded son of two psychotherapists- who make a very good living producing and selling high quality weed, until, that is, they run afoul of the Mexican drug cartel. They have an off and on menage-a-trois with a young woman, not quite an airhead but not far from being one. The head of the cartel- a woman with a daughter not unlike the young woman living with our two drug dealers- wants to horn in on the action of our two protagonists. Of course, she has to watch her back when it comes to rivals within the cartel. Nothing wrong with the plot or the politics of the novel. The problem comes with the way both are executed. Because, for me, Savages came across as a comic-book version of Winslow's two favorite concerns, and ends up being far too lightweight and frivolous, when compared with Power of the Dog. Moreover, it lacks the informative background material I have to expect from Winslow's fiction.

There's also the matter of Winslow writing style which I have also long admired, particularly his use of short, cryptic chapters, that can sometimes seem like something close to poetry. But in Savages he uses that style throughout the book, mixed with a vocabulary which mirrors and often mocks his characters. Not that Savages isn't entertaining- I read it on the train from London to Paris, which made the trip pass in no time at all- but I expected more from the novel. Still, I'm not going to let one disappointing novel put me off reading him in the future. I hope Savages is simply Winslow biding his time before he drops his next epic novel on his readers.

A Handbook of American Prayer by Lucius Shepard

2011-12-27T14:19:00.000Z

This is yet another excellent Concord Press free book (in exchange for a donation to your favorite charity). A perceptive writer and original stylist, Shepard, over the years, has ventured into various genres, describing the lives of those on the margins of the culture. Considering the role religion still plays in American politics and public life, A Handbook of American Prayer is as relevant a novel as one is going to read this year. It's a dark tale that revolves around Stuart Wardlin, a violent brawler yet strangely innocent, who, while serving a prison sentence for murder, writes a best-selling, self-help book about something called prayerstyle- a DIY style of prayer that combines poetry and wish-fulfillment. While inside he corresponds with a woman whom he eventually marries, and the two of them move to nowhere, Arizona. Having mellowed, Wardlin becomes, in no time at all, a cult hero, but one who can't escape the product and celebrity status he's created. Of course, in rejecting God and organized religion, prayerstyle falls foul of the representatives of God Inc.. Wardlin, who, as Shepard has said, cons himself in order to con others, is eventually visited by a character from his own prayerstyle, the Lord of Loneliness who functions as a 21st century Grand Inquisitor. The plot, though sounding far-fetched, is, as Russell Banks says in his introduction, all too plausible. My favorite passage might be when Wardlin is visited by his own metaphorical creation, who explains to Wardlin his entropic theory:

"Neolithic culture, they didn't have time or the wherewithal to produce anything except what they needed to survive...Maybe they carved toys for the kids. Toy mammoths and shit. That's about it. But as societies grew more sophisticated, more technologically competent, the more trivial, whimsical objects they produced. Now we're in the Golden Age of the trivial and the whimsical. Eventually society will produce nothing but trinkets. Everything will have been trivialized. Every resource trashed, every idea reduced to a slogan, every boulderlike edifice crumbled into rubble. We'll inhabit a landscape of lizard-shaped ashtrays and digital crickets and Harry Potter oven mittens. Art will be manufactured, not ripped from the soul. Greatness defined by merchandisers. Love that once inspired poetry, novels, symphonies, and inspires pop songs...it'll inspire some even more vapid form of insignificance. Hell, we're almost there. Your book's perfect example. You've taken that whole burning-bush, heavenly-glory thing and marketed it as your basic build-a-Jehovah kit. That's why I admire it so much. It's cutting-edge."

Shepard not only savages the role of religion, celebrity culture and the need for easy answers, if not instant gratification, but addresses issues of masculinity, and the mis-use of language, as well as the relationship between between prayer and poetry. Whether we're in the final stage of the age of me or not, Lucius Shepard has again written another provocative, entertaining and important novel.

Los Angeles Stories by Ry Cooder

2011-11-19T16:26:00.001Z

Ry Cooder the writer might not be as incisive and exact as Ry Cooder the musician, but, for me, the near-amateurish quality of Los Angeles Stories constitutes part of its charm. Not that it's badly written, it's just that those who've covered other aspects of this terrain- Cain, Chandler, Ellroy, Fante, Mike Davis, Joan Didion, DJ Waldie- have set the bar extraordinarily high. Still, Los Angeles Stories is more than admirable, coming across as the work of someone trying not only to resurrect the past, but to make sense of it, while, at the same time, looking for a way to tell a story, trying things out on the page. That Ry has long been able to mix musical styles with tasteful flourishes only adds to the mix, generating its own demand and interest.

For me, these stories, whatever their surface deficiencies, function like a memory theater, conjuring up an LA of fifty to sixty years ago, with its anti-Communist witch-hunts, Red Cars, City Directory, Bunker Hill rooming houses, downtown burlesque houses, bowling alleys and, of course, music, whether country, jazz or Mexican. It was a time when Town Hall Party was on TV every Saturday night, Jazz Man record store was still situated on W. Pico, Pershing Square rang out with gospel singers, preachers and Oakie wannabes, radio stations like KGFJ and KXLA blasted across the airwaves, Chavez Ravine was little more than a dusty neighborhood and Angel Annie's voice could be heard behind third base at Wrigley Field. Ry writes about that time, centering on ordinary and forgotten, people, whether jobbing musicians, dental technicians, petty criminals and scam artists. Then there are those who make peripheral appearances, like d.j. Hunter Hancock, legendary guitar honchos Merle Travis and Joe Maphis, and the infamous cross-gender pianist and band-leader Billy Tipton. I found myself wishing Cooder had written more about Tipton, who undoubtedly deserves a novel all her own.

Like Ry, I grew up in the twilight years of that period and rarely a day passes when I don't travel back there in my mind. So even though Los Angeles Stories might be something of a one-trick pony, it has charm and no small amount of historical value. Likewise, it doesn't surprise me that Cooder should have branched off into story writing. Because this book also works as an addendum to Cooder's recent albums Chavez Ravine, I, Flathead and Pull Up Some Dust, which exists as texts in their own right. Los Angeles Stories reflects the fact that Cooder's music has become increasingly narrative and political. But then Ry's a product of the Ash Grove, where the civil rights movement and the Peace and Freedom Party rubbed shoulders with Lightnin Hopkins, Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers, Stu Jamieson and Sleepy John Estes. As anyone who was there can attest, it was a time and place from which no one escaped unscathed.

Give + Take by Stona Fitch

2011-11-18T08:49:00.001Z

Judging by what's out there, writing a decent crime/noir novel about music must be difficult. In fact, you can probably count the good ones on one hand and still have a couple fingers leftover to pluck out Blue Monk on the piano. Which is strange since crime/noir fiction and music, or, at any rate, jazz, have always been inextricably linked. In his latest novel Give +Take (published by Two Ravens Press), Stona Fitch manages to carry it off and then some. This isn't just an excellent novel about a working jazz musician- in this instance, Ross Clifton, a lounge piano player schooled in the likes of Monk, James P. Johnson and the Great American Songbook- it's also about a working thief who, when not improvising on melodies, steals BMW's from rich motorists and diamonds from wealthy women. A talented but, in the end, pedestrian musician with gifted hands, Clifton is anything but an ordinary thief. After all, this is someone goes out of his way to give away what he makes from his one man blitz on conspicuous consumption, stuffing any profits into anonymous mailboxes, dumping it in trashcans or throwing it on side of the road. Meanwhile, Ross' brother, who makes his living as a counterfeiter, sends his sixteen year old son, Cray, to his uncle mostly to put some of those ersatz bills into circulation. The idea being if we live by a fiat currency, then counterfeiting becomes something close to a legitimate business. Though reckless, immature, and forever driving his uncle up the wall, Cray is no fool, but intelligent enough to comment to his uncle that, although his financial contributions might be making people happy in the short-term, eventually the money will run out that they will have to return to their miserable lives.

As well as being a fast-moving, dark and often humorous novel that focuses on the politics of crime in our present economic climate, Give+Take is also something of a road novel. So Ross moves from town to town, playing various types of establishments, always with an eye out as to how to play the crowd, milking them for all their worth, extracting from them whatever he wants, whether applause, or getting them to part with their money. His never-ending itinerary, arranged by his agent provocateur, Malcolm, invariably overlaps with jazz torch singer Marianne London. When the two finally meet they immediately fall for one another, only for Ross to discover that Marianne has her own line in scams, preying on elderly rich men just as he preys on rich women. But together, giving as well as taking, they discover that everything comes at a cost, and even the best laid scams can sometimes go astray.

This is no simplistic anti-capitalist screed, but a novel that examines what it takes to get by in a world under economic siege, while questioning the ethics of the black economy, and considering where work ends and crime begins. Certainly, anyone who enjoyed the knife-edge quality of Fitch's earlier fiction, in particular the nerve-jangling Senseless, will want to read Give+Take. If you haven''t read Senseless, with its anti-globalist theme, you'll want to once you've finished this book. Both are intelligent crime novels with incisive social commentaries written by one of the best practitioners of the genre around. But there is even more to Fitch than his critique of the culture. Because this former jobbing musician has recently put his money where his pen often strays, with the establishment of Concord Press (stonafitch.com) which gives away its high quality books by formidable writers like Scott Phillips and Lucious Sheppard, in exchange for a charity donation (a concept that fits perfectly with the title Give+Take) and the promise the book on to someone else. In this day of corporate publishing, celebrity-oriented lists, and the pursuit of profit margins over literary quality, we need more publishers like Concord Press and more books like Give+Take.

Jew Boy by Simon Blumenfield

2011-10-26T16:33:00.000+01:00

"The rich Jews would soon find a compromise with Fascism. So long as their profits were safe, they didn't mind who was in the saddle, but when their fat bellies were hurt, they squeaked, they marched, they shouted; in a year, two years, they'd raise some other red herring. Last time, the Arabs were the villains, now the Germans. But this contingent wasn't being fooled. Their quarrel was not with the German workers or the Arab workers. Their enemies were the bosses, whatever their religion, whatever their language."

The provocatively titled Jew Boy was first published in the UK in 1935 and, a year later, in the US under the more acceptable title The Iron Garden. I first came across it in the late 1980s, when it was reprinted by Lawrence & Wishart. At the time, thanks to Compendium bibliophiles like Nick Kimberly, Mike Hart, and historian Ken Worpole, whose Dockers and Detectives was an illuminating and groundbreaking work, I was obsessed by the "London novel" both in the past and the present. I think I also must have heard about the novel through the timely exhibition, 20,000 Streets Under the Sky- the London Novel, sponsored by the GLC at the Royal Festival Hall, which featured London writers I'd read, like Patrick Hamilton and Norman Collins, as well as those that, at the time, I'd never heard of, like Emmanuel Litminov, Ashley Smith, James Curtis, Alexander Baron and Mark Benney. At the time I tried to get hold of various books mentioned in the exhibition, and Worpole's book, particularly those set in London's East End. At the time one of the most interesting titles was Jew Boy by Simon Blumenfeld.

When I got around to reading Jew Boy, it definitely did not disappoint. Blumenfeld's first novel (he would write three other novels: Phineas Kahn in 1937, Doctor of the Lost in 1938 and They Won't Let You Live in 1939) is a political as well as coming of age narrative. Blumenfeld obviously draws upon upon his early days in the East End. The book's protagonist, Alec, though drawn to the Communist party, is looking for a way out of his claustrophobic East End community, and moves to Hackney to live with a "shiksa." Yet he returns to join the Communist Party and the book end with a note of revolutionary triumphalism, all the more poignant for its failure. I not only liked the narrative, but the way Blumenfeld, born in 1907, sought to turn a derogatory term into a badge of honor, not dissimilar from the way Tottenham Hotspurs would call themselves the yids as a way to identify with the same anti-fascist movement that Blumenfeld was part of. Jew Boy, if nothing else, is a wonderful portrait of pre-war East End Jewish life, populated by recent arrivals from Russia and Poland, with its tenements, sweat shops, boxers, anarchists, Yiddish theatre and discussion groups, so well depicted by in William Fishman's The Streets of East London. It was a culture that produced writers and intellectuals politically well to the left, who preferred Marx to Theodore Herzl, a socialist Britain to a future Israel.

As customary with London Books, Jew Boy comes with an excellent introduction, this one from the aforementioned Ken Worpole. From it we learn that Blumenfeld was the son of a cap-maker. Before becoming a writer, he worked as a chicken-slaughterer, cap-maker, presser, and street-market trader. In the evenings he liked to box and talk politics with his friends. During his early days he wrote a play in Yiddish, performed at the Grand Palais on Commercial Road, of the last performances of its kind in Europe. Though he wouldn't publish any more fiction after 1939, he did write a drama about the Aldgate boxer Danny Mendoza and another, The Battle of Cable Street, which was performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 1987. A lifelong Marxist, he worked for the New Left Review and was one of the founders of what would become the Unity Theatre in King's Cross for which he wrote two plays, as well as the Workers Theatre Movement. Until shortly before his death in 2005, Blumenfeld was still contributing a weekly column in Stage magazine. But it's Jew Boy for which Blumenfeld will no doubt be best remembered. A companion novel to John Summerfield's excellent May Day, also published by London Books, Blumenfeld's novel, even though it depicts a past that's gone forever, still packs a powerful personal and political punch that has present day reverberations. No wonder the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers helped support the publication of the book. Jew Boy is yet another true London classic.

The Outlaw Album by Daniel Woodrell

2011-09-30T14:12:00.003+01:00

There are only a handful of writers whose work I've read more or less in its entirety. Daniel Woodrell is one of them. The Outlaw Album is his long-awaited book of short-stories. Long awaited by me and all those who over the years have become hopelessly addicted to Woodrell's fiction. Published in various periodicals, the stories more or less take up where novels like Winter's Bone and The Death of Sweet Mister and Tomato Red leave off, and are set, as one might expect, in and around the Ozarks. Mostly they are about the people- mostly men- who scratch out a living in the region, many of whom, whether by circumstance or desire, do their best to stay on the cultural margins. One gets the impression that it's in the short story format that Woodrell is best able to experiment with words, perspective and narrative voices. Therefore these stories cover a range of topics and depict people in various states of dissolution: a man kills a neighbor not just once but whenever the spirit moves him; a woman who teaches writing in prison tries to convince a disbelieving father that their son is a talented poet rather than simply a good for nothing thief; a young woman finds herself caring for her rapist uncle; a man is threatened with death because in his youth he saw and rejected a beautiful girl; a man attempts to come to terms with his daughter's disappearance; a man kills a disturbed intruder who happens to be the son of his oldest friend; another man drives his disturbed girlfriend off a cliff. Then there is the seemingly autobiographical story about a horse, a jockey and the father of Daniel-the-narrator, which reads like a personal investigation of the region's recent past. And another story, Woe to Live On, is quite likely the original story on which Woodrell based his novel of the same name. In all, the stories might be geographically similar, but they vary greatly in subject and style. As disturbing as some are, these stories are multi-layered and lyrical, invariably rendered with dignity and a touch of humor. I've never before taken seriously comparisons between Woodrell and Faulkner, mainly because I find it difficult to compare anyone with Faulkner. But, for the first time, I have to admit the notion has some merit. If you like Woodrell's novels, you'll love this book. And if you don't know his work, then you've been missing something special, so you might as well start here.

The Angel and The Cuckoo

2011-09-28T17:45:00.000+01:00

Gerald Kersh has long been one of my favorite British writers. Night and the City, later made into a classic film noir by Jules Dassin, Fowler's End, about a cinema in north London, are two of my particular favorites. Kersh is capable of transporting the reader back to an era that London barely exists any more, but is instantly recognizable, before exploring it as few others have done. In fact, one of the pleasures of reading Kersh is to follow not only his intertwining narratives but where those narratives take often the reader geographically. Like Patrick Hamilton, Norman Collins, the late Emmanuel Litminov and Alexander Baron, Kersh's books are hymns to London, not the obvious places but its seedy cafes, cinemas and suburbs.

The Angel and the Cuckoo is probably Kersh's most dense book, yet it is arguably his funniest- its humor invariably dark- taking place as it does in a pre-WW2 demi-monde with artists, criminals, conmen, singers, film people and writers rubbing shoulders. It's comprised of three love stories, linked by Steve Zobrany, the proprietor of The Angel and the Cuckoo, a cafe at the end of Carnaby Street which is frequented by the characters degrees of loucheness, including Zobrany’s compatriot Gèza Cseh, who starts a busboy in Vienna, but mutates into Baron Cseh, then goes to Hollywood; Tom Henceforth (“Henceforth henceforth,” he announces proudly), "an artist without an art" who has an affection for various illegal activities; Perp, the godfather of the Brighton underworld; and a variety of crooks, tarts, con-men, and a hack writing an in-depth article entitled “Would I Live My Life Over Again?” While geographically the novel takes the reader from Poland Street in Soho through to Oxford Street, south to Blackfriars, to the Farringdon Road, then back to Carnaby Street.

This is another fine publication from London Books which comes with an informative introduction by Kersh biographer Paul Duncan, which alone is almost worth the price of the book. From it we learn that Kersh, who originally called the novel Poor Tom Henceforth, hoped the book, which he started writing in 1963, would be a success in America. In fact, he hadn't published a novel in the States since Fowler's End in 1957. This novel, his nineteenth, would be finished three years later, in 1966, and Kersh sent finished copies to the likes of Henry Miller, William Saroyan, Ellery Queen, JB Priestly, John Steinbeck and, strangely enough, Jane Fonda. However, even though Night and the City had sold over a million copies, The Angel and the Cuckoo would sell something like two-thousand. Yet it did receive a modicum of critical acclaim. Less than two years later Kersh would die from the cancer that had been eating away at him for some time. Long out of print, The Angel and the Cuckoo, though evoking a bygone era, has stood the test of time and, with its anarchic drift, so much more.

The Killer is Dying by James Sallis

2011-09-25T17:02:00.000+01:00

It's a good time for James Sallis. Drive, adapted from his novel, has hit the screens, and his new book, The Killer Is Dying has arrived in bookshops. I haven't seen Drive (I'll wait until the hype turns into a pleasant buzz), but The Killer... is exactly what one would expect but more so from this always excellent novelist. Tersely hard-boiled, literary, soulful and filled with surprises. it's, for me, a step up from his last couple outings in which Sallis was, I thought, marking time, no matter that the time he was marking was still as original as it was interesting.

Invariably a man who likes his narratives to retain more than a small amount of internal mystery, Sallis, as usual, makes no excuses for that mystery, by which I really mean narrative complexity. Here, without revealing his hand too soon, Sallis intertwines three world-weary narratives, allowing them to compete with one another before becoming almost indistinguishable. Likewise, dream and reality, and everything becomes dependent on everything else: an ageing detective whose wife is dying, a young boy struggling to survive on his own, and a hit man looking for the person who beat him to his target. The boy is left with the hit-man's dreams, while the hit-man leaves messages for the cop who is tracking him down. They all have their own story, fragments of lost lives that reveal their vulnerability, their sense of mortality, and their latent desire to connect.

The Killer... is also a novel about the southwest, that crazy place where politicians are shot, immigrants are suspect, and the sun, which eats into the skin, puts everyone on edge, and makes skin cancer merely a chapeau away. But that makes the place only fractionally more crazy or dangerous than anywhere else. It helps, though barely explains Sallis's fondness for approaching things at an odd angle, or for someone who searches for their nemesis only to find it's their spiritual double. As one cop says to an older cop, "It would help if we had some idea what we're looking for." The older cops answers, "And how often does that happen, that we know what we're looking for?" Not often, is all one can say, because The Killer is about coming to terms with things, whether disillusionment, compromise or the mysteries of life: "Maybe we have to [lose the dream], to go on. Or maybe we only displace it, as we do so much else. Is that why we are all so sad? Are we? Sad? How can we be with life so full around us, with so very much of the world to engage in? But always the bad ending. Is the ending what matters?" To which one can only add, no, it's not at all, it's not the ending that matters, but how one arrives at it; it's the process that counts, and that's something Sallis and the characters in the The Killer... know all too well.

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS | Snappy and Reckless

2011-07-29T10:52:00.002+01:00

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS | Snappy and Reckless
My article on Eric Knight/Richard Hallas's You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up.

Fever: Little Willie John- A Fast Life, Mysterious Death and the Birth of Soul by Susan Whitall

2011-07-12T13:46:00.000+01:00

Any musically conscious person who grew up during the 1950s and early 1960s will no doubt have Little Willie John embedded in their personal soundtrack of the era. From the often-heard Fever and Grits Ain't Groceries to blues-soaked ballads like My Love Is and his ill-fated Capitol session, LWJ, with a remarkable range and soulful voice- Bobby Bland crossed Jackie Wilson, with some Jimmy Scott thrown in for good measure- was not only one of the best soul singers, but was the equal of, if not better than, most jazz singers, then or now. Moreover, John, who stood at 5'3", and looked younger than his years, produced some of his most memorable recordings while still a teenager.

In Fever, Veteran Detroit rock journalist (Creem magazine, Women of Motown) Susan Whitall, with help from LWJ's son, Kevin, follows John from his early days on the streets of Detroit, through the ups and downs of his career, to the nightmare of those final days, including the controversial incident which led to his incarceration and, ultimately, to his death. In fact, stories of his drinking, drugs, bravado, confrontations and intermittent bouts of violence, only make John, who did his best to stylize himself on Sinatra, even more complex and human. Though he sought a party wherever he went, John was also a family man. Yet in an era of unscrupulous promoters and racist attitudes, John wasn't about to be intimidated or ripped-off by anyone. Having interviewed family, friends and fellow artists, Whitall is perceptive not only about the music, but about the culture that created it, whether the migration of African Americans to find work in the north, which led to a vibrant Detroit club and music scene, or the stormy politics of the 1960s.

Of course it's LWJ's music that matters. And anyone reading this well-researched book will inevitably want to dig out those old records and cds. Too bad in this age of YouTube there isn't any footage around of LWJ singing. But those recordings sounds as fresh and entrancing as they did when they first appeared. For me, Fever might well be the most interesting music biography I've read this year, and maybe longer.

The End of Everything by Megan Abbott

2011-07-04T14:40:00.000+01:00

These days there are so many varities of noir that it can be mind-boggling. Way back whenever, it was easy; the genre was pretty much divided between urban and rural noir, while, with the exception of writers like Andrew Coburn, suburban noir hardly entered into it. Similarly, other than stories written specifically for the teenage market, not much noir fiction has centered specifically on children. What makes Megan Abbott's The End of Everything unique is that it's set in suburbia and it's about childhood. Moreover, it affirms that both can be extremely dark places. After all, who knows what evil lurks behind those curtains. Likewise, who really knows what goes on in the mind of a child, particularly during what's commonly called the latency period, between childhood and adolescence, with its high-drama, longing, obsessions and confusion.

The plot of The End of Everything revolves around the disappearance of Evie, a thirteen year old, and is narrated by Evie's best friend, Lizzie, herself on the cusp of puberty, though not quite as precocious as her friend. Both are in awe of Evie's older sister, Dusty, a beautiful but hard-edged seventeen year old. But Lizzie is also infatuated by Evie and Dusty's father. Distorted through Lizzie's view of things, the novel is, as the title suggests, about the end of childhood and the final days of that heightened and circumscribed state of awareness that accompanies it, terrifingly perfect, to which one can never return.

Abbott has already been responsible for a handful of excellent novels- influenced by Hollywood film noir and set mostly during the mid-20th century- but I think this could be her best. At any rate, it's her most daring. Reading it, I was reminded of the Swedish horror film, Let the Right One In as well as Rian Johnson's strangely evocative Brick. They, like Abbott's novel, portray young people as existing in a world of their own, separate from adults, trapped in an in-between existence. The only possible disconnect here is that the reader has to suspend disbelief when it comes to Lizzie, who, at thirteen, is able to articulate what isn't often articulated. Wearing her emotions as well as her misperceptions on her sleeve, Lizzie is particularly adept at describing the physical, including her own body, which she regards with with fascination as well as dread. Fortunately, Abbott's prose is as seamless as it is fevered, resulting in something that reads like a nightmare in which reality is flimsy yet hyper-real. Accordingly, Lizzie's uncertainties are transferred to the reader. Is the neighbor's father a perv? Is her mother's boyfriend the voyeur? Is her friend's sister involved in an incestuous relationship with her dad? These are just a few of the mysteries that may or may not be revealed.

Actually, I'm not sure Picador, the book's British publisher, has the right line when it comes to marketing such an evocative and intelligent novel. Comparisons to The Virgin Suicides and The Lovely Bones are, for me, slightly wide of the mark. In fact, it sells The End of Everything short. Because Abbott's novel is not only more believable, but closer to the edge, while the other two are literary products, more concerned with presentation and style than substance. But even if I'm wrong, it still points to the fact that Abbott has entered a genre that still barely exists, no matter that young adults have been reading a version (Lois Duncan, Robert Cormier, S.E. Hinton, VC Andrews) for some time. Abbott's book might be set in suburbia and about childhood, but, by investigating obsession, sex and everything else associated with the unexamined life, it goes straight to the heart of what noir fiction is about, while, at the same time, helping to reset its parameters.

Before I Go to Sleep by SJ Watson

2011-06-03T16:42:00.000+01:00

Watson's impressive first novel is about creating narratives, and the relationship between narrative and memory. In the tradition of Borges and Philip K. Dick, but on a suburban level, with a touch of Groundhog Day and Memento thrown in for good measure, Watson's novel centers on Chrissie, a woman in her forties who believes her amnesia is the result of a car accident. Her amnesia means that each day she has to re-remember her life. On the advice of a psychiatrist, she begins to keep a journal. This allows her to gradually piece together her past, and realizes that her husband, Ben, is withholding various things from her. It makes her wonder if he really is a compassionate carer or someone out to manipulate her in some way. It's the structure of this novel, and its concentration on the trivial, that make it so nerve-jangling. No grand gesture or demonic prose here, just the daily grind of trying to piece together a personality, a past and a history.

An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War by J. Hoberman

2011-05-20T17:13:00.000+01:00

These days J. Hoberman is one of the few film critics I read with any interest. It's not only that he's perceptive and political without being doctrinaire, but he can write about a range of genres, and able to put them all within a historical context. This is apparent in his journalism and in the books he's written, withsubjects like early Yiddish cinema, Film Culture experimenters like Jack Smith, film noir, independent film-makers, and the media. Since I've always found myself in a minority when it comes to bridging genres, particularly when it comes to justifying an interest in 1960s New American Cinema film-makers and film noir, I've always though there's at least one critic to back me up.

His latest work, An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War, is Hoberman at his best, putting his finger on the pulse of history, matching events with the films- westerns, apocolyptic sci-fi, biblical spectaculars or film noir- they represent or, at any rate, with which they coincide. The prequel to Hoberman's previous book, the impressive The Dream Life: Movies, Media and the Mythology of the Sixties, Array of Phantoms starts at the beginning of the war, works its way through the McCarthy era, and ends with Ike's second term and the release of Kazan's Face In the Crowd ("a political horror film").

Because it covers such a range of sub-headings- exemplified by such chapter titles as Aliens Among Us, Fighting For Truth, Justice and the American Way, Redskin Menace From Outer Space, America On the Road- Hoberman's prose can be both dazzling and sometimes a bit daunting. There are moments when An Army of Phantoms feels more like a roller coaster ride through history, with various bits of baggage thrown in for good measure, be they film reviews from the era, including those David Platt's in the Daily Worker, or newspaper reports of significant events. At other times, the reader might sometimes feel they are getting more than they bargained for, though, with a book like this, that probably comes with the territory. Still the deluge does produce the occasional lapse, for the most part insignificant, like calling the site of a 1948 Henry Wallace Hollywood rally, Gilmore Stadium, home of professional football and midget car racing, rather than Gilmore Field, the home of the Pacific Coast League team the Hollywood Stars (as well as midget car racing), and where the 1949 Stratton Story, starring James Steward and June Allyson would be filmed. Niggling, of course, but nagging all the same, if only because it makes one wonder what other minutiae he might have got wrong.

As Hoberman points out, most of the films produced during this period reflect the dominant narrative, there are examples (Kiss Me Deadly, Invasion of the Body Snatchers) of work that, consciously or not, subvert the prevailing political line and media machine. Or films that create a new narrative, such as John Ford's The Searchers. Army of Phantoms, like Dream Life, might bear the mark of Richard Slotkin's monumental work, Gunfighter Nation, but Hoberman's film-as-political history books are more readable and not as dense. In fact, Army of Phantom's introduction alone, with its notes and commentary on Wellman's The Next Voice You Hear ("a study in terror"), is alone probably worth the price of the book. In the end, Array of Phantoms might well be the most comprehensive book yet on the post-war era and the relationship between film and the culture surrounding it. Though I don't think many would argue against the notion that it's impossible to understand the texts and subtexts of American films without understanding American policies at home and abroad. However, it's easier to state the case than to demonstrate it, much less as ably as Hoberman does here. For me, Army of Phantoms, along with Dream Life, deserve a place alongside politically-tinged film books like Gerald Horne's Class Struggle In Hollywood and Thomas Douherty's Pre-Code Hollywood. Apparently, Hoberman is at work on a third volume, Found Illusions: The Romance of the Remake and the Triumph of Reaganocracy. I, for one, eagerly await its arrival.

One Last Mad Embrace by Jack Trevor Story

2011-05-06T11:25:00.003+01:00

I first came across Jack Trevor Story's writing in the Guardian during the 1970s. Those columns, in which the narrator seemed perpetually trying to win back his wayward girlfriend Maggie, would later be collected in Letters to an Intimate Stranger. When I first read them, I enjoyed, and was happily perplexed by, the way those articles blurred the line between autobiography and fiction. I would later learn it was more the former than the latter. Michael Moorcock, who calls Story "a working class Proust," insists that the wilder bits in Story's writing are invariably autobiographical, while the more mundane parts are those he's made up. Though referencing Proust might be accurate regarding the manner in which Story documents Britain during the last half of the 20th century, it hardly describes his writing style, which is invariably straight-forward, filled nevertheless with playful asides and narrative interjections.

When I first read Story I was also unaware that he had not only written the novel and script for Hitchcock's Trouble With Harry (for which Hitch paid him all of £150), but had authored under his own name as well as under various pseudonyms, a number of other books, including some Sexton Blake novels and a handful of westerns. Influenced by Saroyan, as well as Orwell and Arnold Bennett, Story was a cross between an American pulp writer and a modernist. Yet for many years his work was most often found in the bargain bins of UK charity shops and secondhand bookstores. Surely it was only a matter of time before he would be read again. After all, he has championed by the likes of Moorcock and Iain Sinclair. And Story definitely deserves to appreciated, though I doubt if the Guardian would publish his work today as it did in the 1970s, so politically incorrect and irreverent is Story's humour and perspective.

But there is also a dark edge to Story's fiction, as seen not only in One Last Mad Embrace, but going back to The Trouble With Harry. Always anti-authoritarian, Story moves from portraying the police as bumbling idiots, PC Plods, less malicious than incompetent. According to Moorcock, this changes in the late 1960s due to a personal encounter with the authorities. Story's world is also filled with malign and sometimes inexplicable forces engendered by the state, or those who side with the state in letter or spirit of the state, or the corrupt.

Like much of his other work, One Last Made Embrace starts as an absurdist comedy, but gradually drifts into surreal farce. Along the way we meet a cast of characters some of whom have populated previous Fenton novels. Set in the early 1970s, Fenton, thrice married, drives a white Capri, occupies a Hampstead flat with four nurses and is involved Ariadne, the foul-mouthed daughter of a fading star, who might be 12, 14 or 17, and who might even be someone else altogether, depending on which way the narrative is moving at any particular moment. The story involves a search for £5m, a back-from-the-dead film producer, the staging of a new BBC drama series about an unmarried mother, anonymous postcards and phone-calls, wronged husbands out for revenge, a vigilante student group, a crucifixion, a threesome, an abortion, a car chase to Scotland, a dead sheep, a novel written on a toilet roll by a lunatic, and a clairvoyant landlady who sleeps on a coffin. One Last Mad Embrace is just the most recent Story novel to be republished. Hopefully others will follow. Certainly, Story has gone unread, or read by only a dedicated few, for too long. And if you can find them, all his books, the Argyle novels- Live Now, Pay Later, Something for Nothing and The Urban District Lover)- as well as the Horace Spurgeon Fenton books- One Last Made Embrace, but I Sit in Hanger Lane and Hitler Needs You- are all worth checking out.

Baby Godiva by Mar(t)y Holland

2011-04-16T12:05:00.000+01:00

Mary Hauenstein, aka Marty Holland, aka Mary Holland, is best known for writing the novel and the story on which two classic examples of film noir are based: Otto Preminger's 1946 Fallen Angel, and Robert Siodmak's 1950 The File On Thelma Jordan. Both films feature two memorable noir femmes fatales: Linda Darnell in the former film and Barbara Stanwyck in the latter. Other than Fallen Angel (also published as Blonde Baggage, which French critics Mesplede and Schleret describe as Jim Thompson crossed with Barbara Cartland), Holland, from Beaverdam, Ohio, who began her Hollywood career as a studio script typist, is credited with writing two other novels: The Glass Heart (also published as Private Passions) and Night Must Fall. In October, 1946, Kay Kirby announced in her Hollywood gossip column, Chatterbox, that Robert Montgomery was intending to adapt The Glass Heart, but, instead, he chose to make Lady in the Lake, followed by Ride the Pink Horse. Holland was no Chandler, nor prolific, like her friend Steve Fisher, but, with narratives that invariably feature a strong, sexy and and precocious female, she at the very least ranks with the likes of Dorothy B. Hughes as an important writer who, for one reason or another, inhabited the margins of Hollywood culture. Even though Holland changed her first name to make it sound more masculine, and therefore more acceptable to publishers, that certainly did not affect the sexual politics of her fiction, which, in many ways, was ahead of her time. In fact, it's likely that she changed her name because of the sexual politics of her fiction.

Baby Godiva was found in manuscript form by relatives following Holland's death from cancer in 1971. Here the femme fatale, if one can call her that, is Godie a sexually mature but emotionally-challenged fourteen year old, the daughter of an encrazed and abusive preacher. In this claustrophobic, 1950s southern town, Godie befriends Carly, an uneducated eighteen year old farm worker who works unceasingly for his drunken step-father. Accused of assaulting and raping Godiva, Carly is arrested. The extenuating circumstances soon become clear as the novel moves from the young couple's strange friendship to the courtroom and beyond, focusing not only on Godie and Carly, but those connected to the crime. Holland's novel- "Kill a Mockingbird meets Lolita"- is about race and class as it manifests itself through the legal system, prison and capital punishment, and the prevailing attitudes of the era. Delving into the lives of not only Godie but the wife and mistress of the judge trying the case, it's also about the sexual politics of the time, the curse of beauty and how society can so easily manipulate the emotionally immature and uneducated. Though Baby Godiva might not be as tightly constructed as Fallen Angel and Glass Heart, it's a more ambitious effort. This is a novel not only for those interested in forgotten Hollywood writers, but for those who like fiction from an era when noir was for real. Reading Baby Godiva I couldn't help but wonder what Mary Holland might have gone on to write had she lived through the next wave of feminism that would arrive in the years following her death.

Joseph Losey's The Prowler

2011-03-08T12:25:00.000Z

James Ellroy, in the documentary included with this DVD, calls Joseph Losey's1951 The Prowler "perv-noir." And he might well be right. From the opening shot of his long unavailable film- Evelyn Keyes pulling down a blind after she notices a prowler looking at her through her bathroom window- the viewer is implicated in the film's voyeurism as well as its politics. Not only do we look at Keyes from the outside, just as any prowler would, but we are also meant to take a long hard look at America's materialistic post-WW2 culture. In that sense The Prowler is akin to, though more blatantly political than, that other paean to voyeurism, Powell and Pressburger's Peeping Tom.

The film was originally titled The Cost of Living, and that pretty much sums up what the movie is about. As the Keyes' husband and radio d.j. voice ( the blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo who ghosted the script) says, "Good news. The cost of living is going down." Though ultimately it's not such good news for Webb, a rookie cop who hates his job and yearns for something better, played by Van Heflin, nor for Susan, played by Evelyn Keyes. Responding to Susan's call about the prowler, Webb takes one look at Susan and, sensing her loneliness, vulnerability and relative wealth, realizes the good life that he yearns for might be within touching distance. He figures all he has to do is ensnare her. This is a world of surface values and material objects. On the other hand, Susan, trapped in a house filled with those objects, and a husband who is both impotent and domineering, longs for something more and so falls easily and hard for Webb. This is a pre-Mad Men world where appearances are everything, women are kept in their place, everyone wants a piece of the post-war middle-class pie and are willing to do whatever it takes to get it.

The Prowler might also be as close as film noir gets to a perfect film, however minor its parameters. Made for Horizon an independent studio, and produced by Spiegel and John Huston, it was released just prior to the blacklist when noir could afford to be political and sexually suggestive, just so it didn't contravene the Production Code. It would also be Losey's final American film before the blacklist brought him to Britain where, with the exception of The Criminal, he would never return to the genre, nor make films equalling the likes of The Boy With Green Hair, M, and The Lawless.

Losey, here assisted by the future director of Kiss Me Deadly Robert Aldrich, gets an outstanding, if unsettling, performance from Van Heflin, who plays a truly repulsive and amoral individual. His body language and gaze- sitting down in Keyes' living room without being asked, hitching his trousers, scratching himself, lustily checking out a woman checking into his hotel- convey menace, acquisitiveness and envy, his shallowness and boorish behavior betrayed in his every move. Keyes gives an equally remarkable performance, one of those actors able to alter her demeanor within seconds, going from homely to beautiful, from passionate to cold and clueless. Susan is multi-dimensional, not very intelligent, but at sea in her enclosed world. Mostly relying on studio interiors, Arthur Miller's photography is as claustrophobic as it is dark, pinning the two protagonists against a backdrop of socio-economic signifiers, or, according to critic Manny Farber, "hitherto untouched items like motels, athletic nostalgia, the impact of nouveau riche furnishings." But after various proscenium scenes of domestic upheaval, Miller opens every angle, making the desert too light and difficult to negotiate. All this helps Losey as he seeks to meld Ibsen and Camus with Brecht and James M. Cain, reaching a finale in Webb's escape attempt in which he takes an eternity to climb a towering sand pile. It's two handful forwards, one handful backwards, in a nightmare that can only end in failure.

Yet every jewel has to have flaws, and here they come dressed as inconsistencies. Of course, Susan could have had an abortion when she discovers she's pregnant, though that would have been a no-go area as far as the Production Code was concerned. However, why does Webb still have his badge after he has quite the police force? Or has he not heard the movie cliche about handing-in badge and gun. And, other than for its metaphorical and thematic value does Webb climb that huge sand pile instead of simply going around it? Or is that a kind of lateral thinking that poor Webb is incapable of implementing.

But these are minor points which only add to the film's Brechtian qualities. Finally, it should also be mentioned that the DVD comes with a documentary on the making of The Prowler that, amongst others, includes Ellroy, Denise Hamilton, Eddie Muller and Alan Rode, on the making of the movie, as well as a short film on the Film Noir Foundations work restoring film noir, and an interview with the always interesting Bertrand Tavernier who extols the virtues of the film and Van Heflin as an actor. In all this is a movie, and DVD package, that anyone interested in film noir, or for that matter "perv-noir," will definitely want to see.

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin

2011-02-22T16:27:00.000Z

So far I think I've read everything Tom Franklin has published. To me he's one of the shining lights of contemporary fiction. Though I have to admit that I didn't care much for his previous novel Smonk, though, of course, it could be a case that I just didn't get it. For me, it was readable and entertaining, but it was also mindlessly violent, which, of course, might have been the point; but, if so, so what? However, I'm glad to say that Franklin is definitely back to his best in Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter. It's a literary crime novel that dares to venture outside the usual parameters of the genre. It is also, as the title suggests, a novel that deals with recent Mississippi history- the crooked latter referring to the spelling of the name of the state- in all its glory and degradation. As Dr Cornel West likes to point out Mississippi has given America some of its greatest artists- Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Jimmie Rodgers, Elvis, Charlie Patton, Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Richard Wright, etc.. Today there are a surfeit of novelists from the state, not only Franklin, but late and lamented writers like Larry Brown and Barry Hannah. What they have in common is a deep knowledge of the landscape and its people, the literary equivalent of the Deep Blues that Robert Palmer describes in his book of that name. Accordingly, Broken Letter, Broken Letter not only portrays the relationship between the races, but, in doing so, investigates the way in which the past haunts the present and predicts the future. In a sense this these are concerns that other southern writers have examined, but not all that often within the context of a crime novel.

The story is set in rural Mississippi where two boys- Silas, sports-minded and black, and Larry, bookish, introverted and white- become friends. The former is brought up by his mother, while the latter belongs to an only child in a lower middle class family. When, as teenagers, a white girl disappears, suspicion falls on Larry which, though he isn't charged with the crime, turns him into the town outcast. Meanwhile Silas moves away and comes back as the town's only law-enforcement officer. Then another girl disappears and, though years later, suspicion once again falls on Larry.

What some readers might not be so sure about here is the portrayal, now something of a cliche, that another bookish introvert is tagged as a potential killer. But Franklin plays with that cliche to great effect, while, at the same time, making sure no one is one-dimensional, much less completely innocent.

Not only does the narrative, shifting from present to past and back again, never veer from its goal, but there are any number of poetic passages, like the following:

"When he left, Larry amid his machines, thinking of Silas, how time packs new years over the old but those old years are still in there, like the earliest, tightest rings centering a tree, the most hidden, enclosed in darkness and shielded from weather. But then a saw screams in and the tree topples and the circles are stricken by the sun and the sap glistens and the stump is laid open for the world to see."

I don't know what it is about southern writers, but I seem to be reading more of them than ever: not just the likes of Franklin and Brown but William Gay and Tim Gautreaux, not to mention my recent foray into the world of Peter Taylor. But read Tom Franklin's Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter. You won't regret it.

Winter's Bone

2011-02-15T16:06:00.000Z

I've read and liked just about everything Daniel Woodrell has written. Winter's Bone might be his finest book; but, then again, maybe not. Because they're all very good. But, then, I'm a sucker for regional writers, especially those from the south or anything about the southern mountains. However, it's not Daniel Woodrell that I want to write about. It's Debra Granik's adaptation, which I finally got around to seeing (better late than never), and was so impressed by. Jennifer Lawrence as seventeen year old Ree is magnificent, as is John Hawkes who plays her uncle Teardrop. There are few if any films that portray Ozark culture, much less portray it so well. There are many touching moments in the film, not least a birthday party that Ree crashes to get information about the whereabouts of her father. A group musicians play a mountain tune, while the camera fixes for a very brief moment on the mantel piece. Amongst other photograph there's one of a son or nephew, in military gear, no doubt serving in Iraq, Afghanistan or maybe even the first Gulf war. And, of course, these people portrayed in Woodrell's book(s) and Granik's film are the very people who fight our wars and die for our country, these people who don't know how to back down, who are so private and clannish, who are forced through circumstances to manufacture and sell drugs culture, and can only get a job or an education by joining the military. They are also the same people who take the blame when anything goes wrong in the military, because they are the ones who are in the foreground, who put themselves in harm's way, who carry the can. Not the Rumsfelds or the Bushes or the Patraeus's But Ree can't even join the military because she has to fight a battle to keep her family together. If you haven't seen this film yet, by all means do. And don't forget Daniel Woodrell's novels, because they are all right up there with Winter's Bone.

The Better Angels by Charles McCarry

2011-02-03T12:01:00.000Z

I've written before, if briefly, about Charles McCarry's Better Angels (Overlook Press), but at the time I didn't give it the attention it deserves. McCarry is one of the best writers of spy fiction around. He's also the king of the backstory. In fact, I'd say 50% of Better Angels is backstory, but he manages it so seamlessly that you barely notice. It's also a novel that when published in 1979 must have been classified at the time as speculative fiction; but reading it thirty-two years later, it's not so far fetched at all, and hardly speculative. A liberal president has been elected, having deposed a incumbent right-wing, charismatic Republican who created a prison-industrial complex and something close to a police state. The latter is trying to get back into the White House. Meanwhile, the Arab world, through its oil, has a stranglehold on the west. The liberal president issues the order to assassinate an Arab leader when he learns that the latter is about to hand over a nuclear weapon to a radical Islamic group. To protest the assassination, suicide bombers become an ever present threat.

So far, so interesting. But McCarry is above all an excellent novelist, with a great eye for detail and character. In fact, his characters never fail to be complex and interesting. This is the third novel I've read by him and, though I've been impressed with the other two, I would say so far this is his best. A former undercover Cold War intelligence officer operating in Europe, Africa and Asia, McCarrry knows what he's talking about. This might account for his early knowledge of computers, environmental politics and urban problems. Plus there's the matter of a rigged election. McCarry even portrays- thankfully, still in the real of speculation- the imprisonment of children whose DNA might indicate future anti-social behavior and prison camps for dissenters in Alaska. On the other hand, he can't be faulted for not foreseeing the collapse of the Soviet Union. McCarry is every bit as good as Le Carre (I think there's an Gaelic-French pun there somewhere). Now I've got to get hold of the McCarry titles I've yet to read.

Some notes on Steve Hamilton's The Lock Artist

2010-11-28T08:36:00.000Z

There are three things about Hamilton's novel- for me, quite likely the year's best crime novel- that are worth mentioning: 1) The subject matter- lock picking. One learns a lot about the skill of picking locks, though I'm not sure I understood it all. Still, it seemed convincing, which is what counts. But then I'm partial to crime novels in which you actually learn something, though here it could be that you learn less about the craft of lock picking than the psyche of a particular person who picks locks. Nevertheless, Hamilton doesn't skimp on details, while making the subject matter every bit as interesting as the protagonist. 2) The protagonist himself. Michael, who, in the novel, goes from child to adolescent to young adult, though not necessarily in that order, has been unable to speak- diagnosed as more psychological than physical- since suffering a violent trauma when he was some eight years old, and this has led to an existential dread that has affected him ever since. In this way The Lock Artist recalls, but is different from, Charles Willeford's Cockfighter. The latter, with its silent protagonist, was more a critique of the culture's obsession with competition, winning at any cost- even if it means a self-imposed silence until one's goal is achieved- as well as the ramifications of dealing with that condition. But Hamilton's protagonist has actually been scarred into silence, and can only communicate on paper, either by writing or by drawing. Just as Michael's art becomes his sole means of communication, his lock picking becomes a means of revenge and holds, if circuitously, the possibility that one day someone will be able to locate the key that will unlock his silence. Though he could have easily done so, Hamilton refuses to sentimentalize his character, even if, at the end, there exists a small ray of light enters his noirish existence. 3) The organization of the novel. Hamilton has taken the narrative and chopped it up into set pieces seemingly without regard to chronology, but with an eye to narrative tension and dramatic effect. I'm probably wrong, but off the top of my head I can't think of many other crime novels organized in this way, or, at any rate, deploys it so effectively. Yet the various narrative strands in Hamilton's make perfect sense, as well as serving to intensify the relationship between organization, protagonist and subject matter. Which makes unlocking Hamilton's novel an interesting procedure.

The Good Son by Michael Gruber

2010-11-14T11:01:00.001Z

I didn't expect to like Gruber's novel as much as I did. It had the appearance of an airport thriller, like something out of the Robert Ludlum school of fiction. Nor was I all that impressed with a pedestrian first chapter mostly comprised of back-story. However, the subject, the politics, and the energy of the novel quickly won me over, as did the various characters. The plot, which takes place in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Langley, Virginia, is prescient enough to read like something that might be taking place at this very moment, and perhaps something like it is. Theo, a Pakistani with a background in jihad and explosives comes to the United States, learns English, studies American customs and becomes a soldier in his adopted country, trained to kill, and pass for a native in tribal regions overseas. Meanwhile, Sonia his mother (traveling in Pakistan despite a fatwa against her) is kidnapped. Theo attempts to get her out. Sonia, a Muslim as well as a Catholic, is an author, psychologist, traveler- and, oh yes, former circus performer. She and her colleagues are about to be executed, but, through Jungian analysis and her knoweldge of the Qur'an, she is able to manipulate her captors, interpreting their dreams, and subverting the system from within. Preposterous? Perhaps, but Gruber makes it work, mainly because of the research he puts into the book, and the way everyone's viewpoint is treated seriously. Moreover, Gruber's depiction of life in Pakistan and Afghanistan feels like it comes from a first-hand knowledge of that region of the world. I found the arguments regarding religion fascinating, though others might find they slow down the pace of the plot. Nevertheless, Sonia's moral ambiguities, combined with Theo's understanding of tribal culture and American greed, make for an unpredictable climax, one in which it's difficult to say who is right and who is wrong. As with the war itself, no one wins, while the only losers are the people themselves.

Slow Horses by Mick Herron

2010-10-24T11:52:00.000+01:00

It's the scope of spy novels that I admire, as well as the political questions they often raise. What's more, these days I seem to read more and more of them: Charles McCarry; Le Carré; though the spy novel I've enjoyed the most over the past few months has been Mick Herron's Slow Horses. Herron doesn't shy away from contemporary politics or the state of the intelligence service. A Brit whose previous work has mostly been more oriented towards detective fiction, Herron's novel is reminiscent of the Brit TV series Spooks. Like the TV series, Slow Horses concerns a factional element within MI5. But, if anything, it's darker, better written, and even more cynical and entertaining than Spooks. The title, Slow Horses, refers to agents exiled through misdeed, error or mishap, destined to spend their time carrying out meaningless tasks in an anonymous building miles away from MI5 headquarters. Here the plot revolves around the kidnapping of a young Muslim and the Slow Horses' gradual involvement and problematical, not to mention competitive, relationship to the more mainstream members of the intelligence service. Tightly written in a stripped down, hardboiled format, Slow Horses portrays contemporary Britain in an unflinching manner. It also has numerous plot twists, even switching protagonists at various points in the narrartive. Though one would be correct in thinking Herron's attitude to the intelligence community is cynical, the novel is the perfect companion to the events surrounding the 2005 shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes at the Stockwell tube station by the Metropolitan police, weeks after the 7/7 bombings. Moreover Slow Horses ends with the suggestion that Herron might have a sequel in mind, and, if he does, I'll definitely be reading it.

The Brave Cowboy by Edward Abbey

2010-10-11T11:03:00.002+01:00

"There is a valley in the west where phantoms come to brood and mourn, pale phantoms dying of nostalgia and bitterness."

Ed Dorn used to say that Abbey's The Brave Cowboy, published in 1956, was the last cowboy novel. It's true. Most subsequent novels seem more like trips down memory lane. Of course, some would counter with Cormac McCarthy. But the latter's Border Trilogy is more nostalgic for a past that no longer exists, while No Country For Old Men, which is similar to Abbey's book, in contrasting the old and new, takes a more conservative view of things. In McCarthy's novel, the hunter represents older, more humane values and the hunted the corruption of the modern world. In Abbey's novel, the cowboy is hunted, and his ethos on the verge of being destroyed, and what hunts him is the law and letter of present day America, with its restrictions, its highways, fast food restaurants, strip malls, free market capitalism, etc.. It's definitely the politics, as much as the prose, of The Brave Cowboy that grabs one's attention. Forget the movie adaptation with Kirk Douglas. Even though the screenplay was written by blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo and features Walter Matthau and a young Gena Rowlands (directed by David Miller, a Hollywood veteran with a limited pedigree, best known for directing Joan Crawford in Sudden Fear and, years later, Executive Action based on the Mark Lane book on JFK's assassination, with another script by Trumbo), the film only hints at the novel's spirit and politics. Perhaps that's understandable given that the film hit the screens in 1962. Put Miller could have done better by Abbey, whose contention was that the cowboy is destined to be destroyed by the culture he helped created, but not before being turned into a mythologized creature of the past. That image- nicely captured in the film- of Jack on his horse trying to cross a modern highway pretty much says it all. Abbey contrasts the theoretical with the real. There's Paul, a bookish anarchist, in jail for refusing to register for the draft (the novel takes place around 1950), his politics making it impossible for him to register as a conscientious objector; after all, he's not objecting to war as such but to slavery, and who believes that nothing- neither law nor country- supersedes friendship. Then there's Jack the cowboy, the authentic anarchist, who comes to town to break Paul out of jail. Jack has no home, can't stand the thought of spending a night in jail, and doesn't understand why everyone else doesn't feel the same. When he finds that Paul cannot ethically justify escaping, Jack breaks out with two Mexican prisoners. Striking out on his own, Jack is chased by a weary sheriff, blatantly uncomfortable in his own skin, and his gung-ho deputies. Abbey may have later developed some idiosyncratic beliefs, some of which (immigration, AIDS) might not have been out of place in the current Arizona political climate, even if some of those Arizonians would have strung him up for his environmental extremism. But Abbey's politics in The Brave Cowboy are never less than perceptive, and his descriptions of the desert and the New Mexico mountains never less than exquisite. Totally unlike The Monkey Wrench, in which he is understandably out to find the lowest common denominator, and more like Desert Solitaire, which remains of the most beautiful deliberations on the American southwest, The Brave Cowboy, which could equally be called "the last cowboy," should be required reading for anyone interested in the west, where we've been and where we're going.

The Killer Inside Me

2010-09-27T11:24:00.000+01:00

I finally got around to seeing Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me (living in the sticks as I do at the moment makes cinema going difficult). For me, it was even more violent and unsettling than I'd expected. At the same time, it is, as far as I'm concerned, the most faithful, adaptation of a Jim Thompson novel yet, coming closer than any other adaptation to replicating the feel and intensity of a Thompson novel. No other adaptation comes close, which isn't to say that the likes of Frears' Grifters or Foley's After Dark, My Sweet are bad films, but they only successfully caught the essence of Thompson in isolated moments. Winterbottom's is obviously not an easy film to watch, nor should it be. Like reading Thompson, watching the movie should be an unsettling experience- not without traces of extremely dark, sometimes surreal, humor. But if one comes away from a Thompson novel not feeling squeamish then you have either not been reading it very closely or you've desensitized yourself to a worrying degree. How dishonest it would be for a director, in adapting Thompson, to sanitise him, to make him more acceptable to a wider audience. Winterbottom's film, beautifully shot by Marcel Zyskind, and excellently-cast, did have occasional lapses if compared to the novel. But that's understandable, given the need to condense the narrative- for example, Lou's talk with Johnny Papas was much longer in the novel, and made the latter's death more understandable. And of course there were moments when the film did take liberties that weren't always necessary. But for the most part the film stayed fairly faithful to Thompson's dialogue and inner hell, while capturing the small-town sleaziness of the novel. Unlike past adaptations which have been a little too glossy for my liking. But I think it's healthy that the film has been attacked for its violence. It should be, because a discussion of violence in movies is necessary, and should be ongoing. Misogynistic violence shouldn't be fun to watch; it should unendurable. And last but not least, Winterbottom's film has a killer soundtrack, reminiscent, like another less violent but equally elegiac portrayal of 1950s Texas, The Last Picture Show, though the two films couldn't be more different.

Greeks, Freaks & Rubes

2010-09-17T11:47:00.000+01:00

It seems that William Lindsay Gresham is finally getting the recognition he deserves. What follows is my essay, Greeks, Freaks & Rubes, which accompanied the British DVD of the film Nightmare Alley adapted from Gresham's novel.

Edmund Goulding’s Nightmare Alley hit U.S. screens on October 9th, 1947, just two months after shooting had finished. Made at Twentieth Century–Fox, the project was spearheaded by the film’s star and national heart-throb, Tyrone Power, who, after returning from the war, purchased the rights to William Lindsay Gresham’s best-selling 1946 dime-store novel for $60,000, a sumptuous sum at the time. Coming from a family of actors, Power hoped the film would alter his image, turning him from the smooth romantic lead of pre-war films like The Mark of Zorro and Marie Antoinette into a post-war actor of substance. This at a time when an array of otherwise wholesome American stars were suddenly intent on exploring the dark side of life. For 1947 also saw Lawrence Tierney, already a Hollywood bad boy, in Born to Kill, Gregory Peck in Duel in the Sun, and Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past.

Despite the expense entailed in Twentieth Century constructing some ninety sets and renting the Patterson-Yankee carnival, reassembling it over ten acres of studio backlot, production chief Darryl Zanuck, whose only previous venture into film noir was Humberstone’s 1942 I Wake Up Screaming, never showed much interest in the project. Likewise, it would be the only film noir made by Nightmare Alley’s producer, Georgie Jessel, better known as a popular comedian-toastmaster. Jessel was interested in adapting Gresham’s novel despite never having read the book. It was on the basis of a newspaper review that Jessel suggested the book to Zanuck. At least Zanuck got through the novel, though when he did, he pronounced it unfilmable, telling Jessel it contained too much censorable material. Jessel said he was less interested in the censorable material than the plot, which he crudely characterised as a story about “a carnival barker who found he could hypnotize a few hicks, decided to become a fake spiritualist, mocked the Deity, and got punished for his impudence.” It was only because Power and Jessel were pushing so hard for the project that Zanuck reluctantly gave it the green light.

With such backing, the movie was able to attract some major Hollywood players. It was Power who urged Zanuck to hire Goulding, with whom Power had worked the previous year on the slushily mystic Razor’s Edge. A Hollywood veteran whose career stretched back to the silent era, Goulding was known for films like Grand Hotel, Dawn Patrol, Dark Victory, Of Human Bondage and a silent version of Anna Karenina starring Greta Garbo, but he’d never directed anything so grim or aesthetically interesting as Nightmare Alley. Also hired were cinematographer Lee Garmes (Shanghai Express, Zoo in Budapest, Duel in the Sun, Morocco, Scarface, Gone With the Wind) and the formidable scriptwriter Jules Furthman (Underworld, Morocco, Shanghai Express, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep). Able to handle complex material, Furthman’s brief was to put together a screenplay that would appease the Production Code office while, at the same time, do justice to the novel, not an easy task when one considers the book’s language, its explicitness and its backstories, including the neglect, if not abuse, suffered by Molly as a child, and the death of Grindle’s young sweetheart after a backstreet abortion.

Other than Power as the ambitious Stanton, and former Ziegfeld girl and studio workhorse Joan Blondell (Cry Havoc) as the maternal Zeena, most of the actors were hardly household names. Yet Coleen Gray (Kiss of Death), Helen Walker (Murder He Says) and old-timers like Julia Dean (Curse of the Cat People), Taylor Holmes (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) and former Shakespearean actor, Ian Keith, are uniformly excellent. While it wasn’t unusual for an A-movie to masquerade as a B-film noir – one could point to The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity or Out of the Past – Goulding’s movie is darker than most such films. Dark not only in its view of the world, but dark, thanks to Garmes’s use of primary source lighting, in appearance, with many shots truncated by shadows and only a handful of scenes taking place in daylight.

Goulding (1891-1959) is not exactly the first director who comes to mind when thinking about film noir. Like Jessel, this would be his only venture into the genre. And like Zanuck, Goulding initially thought the book unfilmable, yet he too was entranced by its subject matter. What’s remarkable is that Goulding, a jack-of-all-trades director, whom the Los Angeles Times described as “a husky, genial extrovert who sports screaming color combinations and cracks wise in stentorian tones touched with British,” could make such a downbeat movie. Few, Power included, expected Goulding to go to such extremes. On the other hand, there was a dark side to Goulding, which included a fondness for drugs, alcohol, bisexual orgies – directed with the same care he gave to his films – voyeurism, casting-couch liaisons and gay one-night stands. Screenwriter Frederica Sagor would even say that, despite being a Christian Scientist and reading his Bible each morning, the director was nothing short of a deviant. Certainly, Nightmare Alley conveys a particular side of the director’s personality, and is doubtlessly the most personal of all his films.

Born in London, Goulding had been known as an actor’s director, having obtained career-establishing performances from Garbo, Joan Crawford, Joan Fontaine, Mary Astor and Bette Davis. It’s difficult to know if the aesthetic success of Nightmare Alley can be attributed to Goulding’s hitherto- unrealised ability to negotiate the tricky waters of film noir, or if the result had more to do with the chemistry resulting from various professionals working together on the project. Whichever, Goulding appears conversant with the genre’s vocabulary, enough to make Nightmare Alley’s apparent quirks seem premeditated or the result of Production Code compromises. Even before its release, letters of protest were arriving at the studio regarding the film’s view of religion. This prompted Code Executive Joseph Breen to dash off a series of memos to Fox, reminding the studio that breasts must be covered at all times; that there must not be any open-mouthed or lustful kissing; and that there shouldn’t be any suggestion that Stan and Molly have premarital sex, “since it would be a story of illicit sex without proper compensating moral values.” This accounts for the film’s out-of-kilter quality and gaps, which, for the most part, have to do with Stanton’s liaisons. However, Stanton’s affairs of the skin cannot account for the second and third act moving at a swifter pace than the film’s leisurely first act. Could this be because Goulding envisioned a longer and more ambitious movie, and had to cut it down to size within a relatively short post-production period? Nevertheless, in a genre in which plot is rarely paramount, such shortcomings only serve to give the film an even more noirish quality.

One wonders if Goulding and Garmes, working in the technological, if not aesthetic, shadow of Citizen Kane, might have been playing with various noir trademarks, not unlike Welles in Lady From Shanghai. Yet, according to the cinematographer, Goulding “had no idea of camera; he concentrated on the actors. He had the camera follow the actors all the time.” Still, Goulding’s staging did lead to the composition of certain shots. As Garmes said, “[Goulding] was the only director I’ve known whose actors never came in and out of a sideline of a frame. They either came in a door or down a flight of stairs or from behind a piece of furniture.” Whatever Goulding’s input, Garmes must be credited for the look of the film, particularly when it comes to his stunning and brilliantly eccentric lighting. Not just his deployment of shadows but the dark delineation of space, cramming carnival life into walkways, tents, platforms and trailers, while characters reveal themselves and their proximity to each other in a series of intimate close-ups.

What makes Nightmare Alley different from other films in the genre is not merely its bleak perspective, but its cinematic and narrative symmetry. But then this is a film adapted from what is probably the only pulp novel to be influenced by T.S. Eliot and the tarot deck. Consequently, shots and lines are repeated throughout the movie. One notes this in scenes in which the camera focuses on the back of Stan’s head, as though to convey his opacity and his vulnerability. Then there’s Pete’s speech, in which his beloved bottle becomes a crystal ball, reiterated by Stan in the film’s finale. Or Stan saying to Zeena, regarding the carnival geek, “I can’t understand how a man can get that low,” not knowing the same will be said of him. This concern with symmetry is also apparent when Zeena reads the cards, the meaning of which the hubristic but good-natured Stan can neither see nor accept. Then, after Stan and Molly’s heart-to-heart about God, which becomes the point on which the plot takes a final turn, leading to Stan’s downfall and redemption, Stan and Molly’s relationship becomes the mirror image of Pete and Zeena’s in the first act.

The ending, insisted upon by Zanuck, might offer a glimmer of hope, but it can’t dampen the sense of despair that permeates the film. Consequently, Stan’s descent into geekdom differs from the novel, in which Molly, the agent of redemption, is absent. The original ending of the film, rejected by Zanuck, was equally dark, and entailed the carnival manager asking Stan if he was up to working as a geek, after which Stan licks his lips and says, “I was born to it.” Yet no 1940s studio would have allowed a box-office star like Power to appear in a film in which there’s no possibility of redemption. Interestingly, Furthman had written an earlier draft in which Molly divorces Stan and marries strongman Bruno, but this version was rejected by the Production Code office. Presumably divorce was another taboo. Also missing is Gresham’s proletariat touch. In the novel Stan, riding the rails, meets an African-American travelling north to do some union organising. Stan gives this son of a preacher his hardboiled view of the world, saying, “What sort of God would put us here … in this stinking slaughterhouse of a world? Some guy who likes to tear the wings off flies? What use is there in living and starving and fighting the next guy for a full belly? It’s a nut house. And the biggest loonies are at the top.” Not lines that would be well-received in post-war Hollywood. Taking a safer route, Goulding simply puts a different spin on the novel’s hobo camp scene. In Gresham’s book, Stan repeats Pete’s spiel, then attacks one of the uncomprehending hoboes for kicking a dog that suddenly appears, but Goulding simplifies matters: the hoboes react to Stan’s speech and cynicism by cruelly finishing the last of his rot-gut whiskey.

Goulding’s ending might differ from the novel, but the relationship between Stan and the femme fatale, Dr Lilith Ritter, a psychologist who caters to Chicago’s troubled wealthy, remains, in spirit, roughly the same. Yet their relationship, given the genre, is somewhat unusual. Normally a film noir protagonist is driven and eventually destroyed by a carnal desire for the femme fatale, but Stan views Lilith more as a partner in crime than sexual conquest, his pursuit based on the belief that her profession is only another scam, and the realisation that she possesses information he can exploit. “Have you ever been psychoanalysed?” Lilith asks when she first meets him. “No,” Stan says, “but I saw it once in a movie mystery. A good mentalist could have straightened it all out in five minutes.” Eventually Stan supposes she might be on the level and allows Lilith to give her assessment: “I think you’re a perfectly normal human being, selfish and ruthless when you want something; generous and kindly when you’ve got it.” It’s what Stan wants to hear, never mind that her words aren’t meant to appraise him but to ensnare him in Lilith’s own well-constructed narrative.

Though they apparently have off-screen sex, Lilith remains aloof with a penchant for appearing in masculine attire, first in her office, where she wears a Sackville-West-type suit, then, later, in a trench coat and fedora, looking like a poor imitation of Alan Ladd. Reflecting her sartorial sense, she assumes the role of sexual aggressor, lighting Stan’s cigarette and inviting him for a midnight tryst. Suggesting bisexuality, and recalling Goulding’s own proclivities, Walker’s icy demeanour is reminiscent of Jean Gilley’s anti-heroine in Bernhardt’s Decoy, made a year earlier, while her clothes revive images of Marlene Dietrich in earlier von Sternberg films, not surprising since a handful of them were written by Furthman and photographed by Garmes.

In terms of perspective, Goulding’s film, though diluting Gresham’s politics, goes further than other movies released in 1947 (some thirty classic examples of film noir, including Dark Passage, The Gangster, Ride a Pink Horse, Crossfire, Lady in the Lake and Body and Soul) not only because Nightmare Alley ridicules authority – law enforcers, psychologists, industrialists – but because it refutes any notion of get-up-and-go capitalism. Consequently, Nightmare Alley can best be compared to Polonsky’s 1948 Force of Evil, for both films depict the predatory forces in the modern success story. While Polonsky uses the number’s racket as his primary metaphor, Nightmare Alley plays upon the idea that the culture is based on scams meant to exploit people’s needs. In Goulding’s film, everyone is cheating someone, whether carnies, mind-readers, psychotherapists, or wealthy businessmen. While in the communal world of the carny there exists a code of ethics largely absent in the outside world. Carnies might regard outsiders with contempt, but their trickery is small-time and for purposes of entertainment. Problems only arise for Stanton when he attempts to use such trickery to move up the economic ladder. But Stan’s take on the world is warped from the beginning. “See those yokels,” he says to Zeena,“it gives you a superior feeling. As if you were on the know, and they’re on the outside looking in.” Yet it’s ambiguous whether Nightmare Alley is saying it’s human nature to con others, or if conning someone is evidence of a corrupt culture in which, to get ahead, one must prey on the weakness of others.

Made after the war, Nightmare Alley, like Nick Ray’s They Live By Night, also released in the following year, refers to the Depression, though not without a sense of nostalgia and lost innocence. For this was an era when carnivals, fairs and proletariat outlaws were at their peak. While Nightmare Alley is harsher and less romantic than Ray’s film, both treat the Depression less as an economic event than a social condition circumscribing those within it. Unlike Ray’s characters, who find little in the way of social mobility, Stan’s rise from carny mind-reader to cult leader, only accentuates his corruptibility and the distance he has to fall.

Added to the mixture of attenuated Marxism and Freudianism is the film’s discussion of spirituality and spiritualism, both of which run counter to the genre’s economic determinism and materialist perspective. Yet Nightmare Alley’s relationship to spiritualism is also ambiguous. Despite moments when Stan and Zeena’s clairvoyance seems authentic, Carlisle insists it’s just a trick, based on a code and an understanding of human nature. If he’s right, the relevant question becomes who is tricking whom. For, in the first nightclub scene, Stan, responding to Lilith’s question, asked in the apparent hope that she will be able to expose him, seems to know the truth about Lilith’s mother. Yet the purpose of her question might not be to expose Stan, but, like her later assessment, a way of enticing him into her world.

Moreover, it’s uncertain if Lilith really pulls the “gypsy switch” on Stan, substituting $150 for $150,000. Perhaps Stan, whose crime, as someone in the final scene says, is to have “reached too high,” only thinks she has done so. Is Stan paranoid, or is Lilith messing with his mind, when she tells him he’s delusional, denies their partnership and urges him to seek hospital attention? And what about the police siren? Lilith insists that she can’t hear it, causing the already agitated Stan to flee her apartment, seek refuge in a run-down hotel, and numb himself with alcohol, his dreams of tabernacles turning into a nightmare that has no end.

Unfortunately, Nightmare Alley, upon release, would receive little in the way of marketing and distribution. The studio wasn’t prepared for such an unrelentingly dark movie. Consequently, Zanuck decided to put Fox’s marketing efforts behind another Power film, the adventure epic, Captain from Castile. Yet reviews of Nightmare Alley were generally favourable. Critic-novelist James Agee said, “Nightmare Alley would be unbearably brutal for general audiences if it were played for all the humor, cynicism and malign social observation that are implicit in it.” The New Yorker considered Goulding’s direction inadequate to the material, but Variety called the film “a harsh, brutal story told with the sharp clarity of an etching. There isn’t a sympathetic or inspiring character in the show, but the acting, direction, and production values lift the piece to the plane of gripping drama. In spots it approaches the dignity of an authentic tragedy.” Time reported that Goulding and Furthman “have seldom forgotten that the original novel they were adapting is essentially intelligent trash and they have never forgotten that on the screen pretty exciting things can be made of trash.” However one looks at it, Nightmare Alley, with its range of characters, intelligent script and unusual visual style, was prepared to be daring, and remains one of the few examples of a classic film noir still capable of shocking viewers. Once seen, Goulding’s film is not easily forgotten.

When it comes to his meteoric rise and fall, Nightmare Alley author William Lindsay Gresham (1909-1962) bears a resemblance to his fictional creation, Stanton Carlisle. Born in Baltimore, Gresham joined the communist party in 1936, travelling to Spain where he fought with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. There he met Doc Faraday, a medic and ex-carny. It was from Faraday that Gresham got his first inkling of carnival geeks. Addled by drink or drugs, a geek, according to Faraday, is the lowest form of carnival life, someone who is placed in a cage, where he bites the heads off chickens and snakes. But, said Faraday, geeks are not found but made, enticed by the promise of a regular supply of drugs or alcohol, and a warm place to sleep. Upon hearing Faraday talk aboutf geeks, Gresham immediately conceived the story that would become Nightmare Alley, even though it would be some five years before he would begin writing it.

Returning to New York, Gresham contracted TB, and spent two years recovering, during which time his marriage collapsed. At a low ebb, he hit the bottle and tried to hang himself, only for the rope to break, which spilled an unconscious Gresham onto the floor. He went into psychoanalysis, took a series of jobs, including magician, copywriter and editor for True Crime magazine, and began contributing stories to pulp magazines. In 1942 he married writer Joy Davidman. Still fascinated by carnivals, he began working on his novel, researching it at the Dixie Hotel near Coney Island where carnies did their drinking.

A best-seller for most of 1946, Nightmare Alley is even more unrelenting than Goulding’s movie. With overtones of Depression writers like Nathaniel West and Horace McCoy, it tapped into America’s fascination with carnivals, which, in their depiction of a strange world outside the confines of ordinary society, has formed the subject matter of novels like Charles Finney’s The Circus of Dr Lao and Robert Alter’s Carny Kill, as well as films like Tod Browning’s Freaks, Lachman’s Dante’s Inferno and, recently, the HBO series Carnivale. Having sold his novel to Hollywood, Gresham purchased a large estate north of New York City where he wrote his second novel, Limbo Tower (1949). Set in a hospital, it focuses on a Marxist, a mystic, an ex-boxer, an ex-con, a judge-industrialist, an evangelist and the nurse and doctor who care for them. Like a post-war pulp version of The Magic Mountain, Limbo Tower was as bleak as Nightmare Alley, but not nearly so successful.

Gresham’s funds began to dry up, putting a strain on his marriage, aggravated by an unshared belief that he should sleep with more than one woman. Gresham was again drinking heavily and flying into rages for little or no reason. He broke a bottle over his wife’s head and regularly smashed chairs against the pillars on the front of his house. He sought refuge in Zen, the tarot, Yoga, I Ching and Dianetics, but to no avail. Influenced by the writings of C.S. Lewis, Gresham and his wife joined the Presbyterian Church, announcing their joint conversion in articles published in a 1951 anthology. The following year, Joy, now ill, was advised to take an extended vacation. She sailed for England, leaving Gresham with her first cousin, Renée. Four months later Gresham wrote saying he and Renée had become lovers. Joy returned, divorced Gresham and returned to England where she lived with, and eventually married, her mentor, C.S. Lewis (this and her death from cancer formed the basis of the 1993 film Shadowlands). In 1953, Gresham’s Midway Monsters, an Uninhibited Look at the Glittering World of the Carny was published, followed, two years later, by Houdini, The Man Who Walked Through Walls. Gresham and Renée were married in 1954, after which he joined Alcoholics Anonymous. There would be a final book, The Book of Strength: Body Building the Safe, Correct Way, published in 1962. It seemed a long way from Nightmare Alley. Discovering he had cancer, Gresham returned to the run-down Dixie Hotel where he had researched and written Nightmare Alley, registered under the name Asa Kimball and, on September 14, 1962, took his own life. The only tribute paid to him in the New York Times came from the bridge columnist.

There were others connected to the film who would be similarly marked. Edmund Goulding never recovered from the financial failure of Nightmare Alley. It was just too dark, too explicit, and too disrespectful of authority, to be a box office success. Meanwhile, the director’s private life would continue to affect him. He even believed his hedonistic pursuits had made him a target for the increasingly powerful McCarthyite witch-hunters. Meanwhile, Zanuck, who’d always disapproved of the director’s life-style, ran Goulding’s career into the ground by offering him a series of demeaning projects. Directing only six more films, none of them better than mediocre, Goulding’s decline would correspond with the rise of McCarthyism, the growing popularity of TV and the break-up of the studio system. Goulding died on Christmas Eve, 1959, while undergoing unsuccessful heart surgery.

While Ian Keith’s fall from Shakespearean actor and romantic lead to Hollywood bit player mirrored his fall in the film from mind reader to carnival drunk, Helen Walker, who plays Lilith, would face many years of misfortune. On New Year’s Eve, 1946, after picking up three hitchhiking soldiers in Palm Springs, her car hit a dividing island and turned over several times. One of the soldiers was killed, while the others were seriously injured. Walker herself suffered a broken pelvis. Though charges, based on claims that she was drunk and driving over ninety miles an hour, were brought against her, the actress was exonerated. Despite her injuries, she managed to make Nightmare Alley, as well as a handful of other noir-inspired films, including Hathaway’s Call Northside 777 and Lewis’s The Big Combo. To compound her misfortune, not long after retiring from the screen in 1955, her house burned to the ground. Diagnosed with cancer, she died in 1968, at the age of 47.

Tyrone Power would also be marked by Goulding’s film. His hope of becoming an actor of substance never materialised, though he did star in The Sun Also Rises and appeared in Witness for the Prosecution. But, for Power, it was mostly a return to film geekdom, ending in 1958 when he died of a heart attack while making Solomon and Sheba. Of all his films, he claimed Nightmare Alley was his favourite. As for the film itself, it too would be fated, becoming for many years one more lost movie, the victim of a dispute between the Gresham estate and the Jessel estate over exhibition rights. Fortunately, with the dispute finally settled, Nightmare Alley is back in circulation, enabling viewers to view and review one of the darkest films of an already dark genre.

Bob Dylan in America by Sean Wilentz

2010-09-08T13:13:00.000+01:00

Bob Dylan in America by Sean Wilentz

I've been listening to Dylan since he first began recording in the early 1960s. So far, not counting Dylan's Chronicles, there have only been two Dylan books that have ever really caught my interest: A Darker Shade of Pale by the renown Cambridge musicologist Wilfred Mellers (1984) and Clinton Heylin's Recording Sessions, 1960-1994 (1995). The former, though little known and seldom cited, was, despite its flaws, the first book to really delve into Dylan's influences on a strictly musicological level, while the latter I appreciated because it was straight-forward information, with a minimum amount of commentary, speculation and criticism. Though I appreciated Mystery Train, I've never been overly fond of Greil Marcus's books on Dylan; they seem overblown, too knowing, and, for me, bordering on the pretentious. And he's probably the best of the lot. Likewise, I have little time for the political browbeating of other books on the subject.

Sean Wilentz is at least a reputable historian (The Age of Reagan, The Rise of American Democracy), and he turns in what is arguably the best book yet on Dylan's music, charting the singer's career and evolution with particular emphasis on his recent work, stretching back to World Gone Wrong, and, before that, the Rolling Thunder Review, the making of Blonde on Blonde, and influence of the Beats, particularly Ginsberg, the aesthetics and politics of the Popular Front embodied for the most part in the music of Aaron Copland. In that chapter on Copland and the Popular Front, he also cites Charles Seeger, father of Pete. It's interesting, but I would have preferred hearing more about the likes of Ruth Crawford Seeger, mother of Mike and Peggy and step-mother to Pete, a far more important composer than her husband (nor does Wilentz mention that Charles' major contribution wasn't his music so much as his machine for notating non-western music). Nevertheless, Wilentz isn't afraid to enter troubled waters, picking over the more contentious parts of Dylan's long career.

Ironically, the parts of the book I found least interesting were the sections that entailed historical research of the kind more usually associated with someone in Wilnentz's profession- the story of Delia. But if I might add a few comments on that particular section: 1) Delia might be roughly the same melody as White House but there are major harmonic differences between the songs; 2) White House Blues, closer to the Carter Family's Cannonball Blues than Delia, was never recorded as far as I know at the same tempo as the latter, though there is no reason why it could not be done that way; 3) though he claims earlier examples, I can't think of any recordings that predate Charlie Poole's in 1927 version, though Ernest Stoneman and Riley Pluckett might have done so. I had the same problem with his sections on Frankie and Albert and Blind Willie McTell. It's not that these sections are poorly done, uninteresting or lack merit; it's just that I'd read much of it before from bona fide blues scholars like Paul Oliver. At least Wilentz avoids doing too much cultural analysis. Though I haven't cared for Dylan books that have emphasised that approach, I actually could have done with more of it from Wilentz, particularly the section on Dylan's conversion to Christianity, and why it became a cultural phenomenon during the period in question and how Dylan fit into that cultural climate.

On the other hand, I enjoyed the section of Love and Theft, and Dylan as a modern day minstrel, picking up on that record's many influences. While some of Wilentz analyses fall short , such as his all too brief section on Masked and Anonymous, a movie which I thoroughly enjoyed, and one of the best soundtracks ever, but at least he went to the trouble of covering Dylan's Theme Time Radio and the much misunderstood Christmas In the Heart recording. Other parts were a bit long-winded, like addressing charges that Dylan has plagiarized some of his work. I mean, does anyone other than a few bloggers really care?

In the end, anyone who is interested in Dylan will doubtlessly want to read this book. And well they should. After Wilentz, I'm not sure what more can be usefully said on the subject. That Dylan is a veritable history of American music, as well as American history, has been known for some time. Though I'm sure historians will comb Dylan's back and future catalogue for new ways to address the subject. I just wish more musicologists would have a shot as well. At least Wilentz recognizes that fact; it's just that on that score he sometimes falls short of the mark.

Tony & Susan by Austin Wright

2010-09-05T11:02:00.004+01:00

Blurbed by writers as diverse as Saul Bellow and Ruth Rendell, Tony and Susan might well be an anomaly in crime fiction. Not only is it an example of literary fiction, containing a novel within a novel, but it is, in itself, a perceptive critique of crime fiction and perhaps even fiction in general, particularly when it comes to the power a writer holds over his or her reader. But this isn't one of those pretentious and often inaccessible exercises in post-modernism. Instead, it's a down to earth book about the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, reverie and thought, fiction and reality. It centers on Susan, who, fifteen years earlier, left her would-be writer husband Edward for the security of a life with Andrew, a surgeon. She and Andrew have two children and a nice, if at times problematical, life. A parcel arrives for Susan containing Edward's novel. In a note he mentions that she was, and remains, his best critic and would she please read the novel and let her know what she thinks. While pondering the real reason Edward might want her to read the book, she turns over the pages of the manuscript and becomes engrossed in it. She discovers the protagonist is someone called Tony, whose quiet life is suddenly and violently turned upside down. Moreover, she can't help but find clues in it to Edward's life and their earlier relationship. As she delves further, she, through Tony, relives her past, including her life with Edward and her marriage to Andrew. It's a dark tale- both the novel within the novel and Susan's account of her life- about fear, regret, revenge, the power of the past to inflict itself on the present and future. For me the novel contains one minor flaw that has to do with the contradiction between Susan's well-defined sexual politics and her real life attitude regarding male sexuality, which probably isn't all that unusual and, for all I know, might have been intentional on the part of the author. In any case, in questioning the nature of writing and the relationship between writer and reader, this remains an exceptional and unusual crime novel, well observed, and, with both narratives moving at a fast pace, well worth reading. Austin Wright died in 2003 at the age of eighty. After reading this, it makes me wonder what his other books might be like.

Film Noir: The Encyclopedia, edited by Silver, Ward, Ursini, Porfirio

2010-08-21T10:13:00.003+01:00

Of course, I have, in the past, ruthlessly exploited earlier editions of this book. Want a plot for a film you’ve never seen or dimly remember? Look it up in Film Noir: The Encyclopedia. Want a critique of a film that you can't quite articulate or recall? To jog your memory and critical faculties just check out what one of the critics in the Encyclopedia has to say on the subject. On the other hand, I have rarely used the Encyclopedia to look up post-1960s films. The reason is simple: I’m one of those purists who think that, other than the rare exception (e.g., Friends of Eddie Coyle, Chinatown) film noir does not really exist after the 1960s other than in a bastardized form, whether as pastiche or nostalgia. Part of the weakness of the present edition recently published by Overlook Press (Duckworth) is its concentration on “neo-noir” films. Though I can see the reasoning for this. After all, it increases the book's appeal, accessibility and saleability. I also have issues with the printing job which, to me, isn't quite up to the standard set by previous editions. On the other hand, there are more visuals here- posters, stills, etc., even if they are not as well presented as before. But what the hell, we’re living through the sequel to the Great Depression, so I guess one shouldn't be too choosy. But on closer examination, where are those great indexes the previous volumes contained, to which I referred to so often. In the present volume, there is just a general index, a chronology and another based on studios. But what about the ones in the previous editions based on writers, directors, producers, actors and cinematographers that proved so useful to a historian-manque like myself? Though there are definitely more films covered. And more contributors. Unfortunately, as good as some of them might be, that tends to make this fifth edition more dispersed, and turns Silver, Ward, Ursini and Porfirio into editors of an anthology than authors of an encyclopedia. Previous volumes also had other writers than the editors, but it also seemed to contain the personal stamp of the editors when it came to the various critiques. And though I can't prove it- my older, tattered copy is presently some five hundred miles away- it seems that some of the films that appeared in previous edition have been re-reviewed by other critics. Though why, it’s impossible to say. Still, these are minor and perhaps subjective gripes. One does get value for money here, and there are also some interesting insertions- though again I’m not sure why- on subjects like the Fatal Man and significant shots in Where Danger Live. Whatever it’s faults, this remains, as one would expect, an extremely useful book, yet to be equalled. And I for one will undoubtedly be dipping into it time and time again.

Pogo on Folk Music

2010-08-09T13:40:00.001+01:00

(click to enlarge)

More From Overlook Press

2010-08-05T10:51:00.008+01:00

Along with Jim Nisbet's two books, Overlook also were kind enough to send, amongst others, the following:

The Better Angels by Charles McCarry
One of the best spy writers around, whose work goes back at least some forty years. This one was first published in 1979 and has turned out to be very prophetic. It prefigures nine-eleven with Islamic terrorists led by an Arab prince made rich through oil, using airplanes and America. The novel takes place in an election year matching a liberal against a hard right businessman with ties to the energy industry. I have never been disappointed by a McCarry novel, and this one is no exception.

Double Negative by David Carkeet
Hadn't read anything by Carkeet before. A pleasant surprise and very funny. Jeremy Cook is a genius who works at a linguistics think tank connected to a daycare center. When someone is found bludgeoned to death, Cook is the prime suspect. Consequently he is forced to investigate the case himself. Perhaps the first crime novel which relies on linguistics to unravel the investigation. I'll be reading more of Carkeet sometime soon.

Noir by Robert Coover
The great Robert Coover turns in another cutting-edge novel. Though this one differs considerably from his past work. Existing somewhere between surrealism and Oulipo fiction, Noir examines the formal limits of the genre. With its genre-bending flashbacks, sleazy bars and jazz clubs, protagonist Philip M. Noir is hired by a woman to find the killer of her husband- though we aren't even sure if he was actually killed. Soon the woman is murdered and her body disappears. Noir is a hall of mirrors in which the reader becomes the investigator gathering the shards of a time-honored genre. Though some noir fans might see this as too much of a pastiche for their tastes, any new Coover novel is an occasion to celebrate.

The Man Who Never Returned by Peter Quinn
A novel about the disappearance of Judge Crater in 1930. That was enough to hook me right there. I had never thought about the politics of Crater's life before.The protagonist Fintan Dunne is called out of retirement to return to New York to solve the crime for a wealthy newspaper magnate. Fascinating stuff.

The Caretaker of Lorne Field by Dave Zeltserman
Part noir and part Stephen Cain, with a dash of James M. Cain thrown in for good measure. Zeltserman is one of the more cogent of the neo-noirists, and this might be his best yet. About Jack Durkin, whose family has been weeding Lorne Field for over 300 years. If the field is left untended, a horrific monster will appear. Book by book, Zeltserman is proving himself to be one of the best around.

2010-08-04T16:09:00.006+01:00

Jim Nisbet, author of The Damned Don't Die, Lethal Injection, Prelude to a Scream, Death Puppet and Price of the Ticket has long been one of my favorite noirists. In Windward Passage, his tenth book, he pulls out all the stops, combining his long-standing noir sensibilities with an off-the-wall post-modern disposition and cultural critique. Pacey, but filled with enough tropes to keep the most hardcore Jim Thompsonite happy- at least those partial to the final section of The Getaway or the surrealism of Savage Night- Windward Passage centers on a ship that sinks in the Caribbean, its captain chained to the mast. A logbook, a partially written novel, a brick of cocaine and the DNA of a President are all that remain. The appropriately named dead sailor's sister, Tipsy lives in San Francisco, where she hangs out at bars with her gay friend Quentin. That is until she runs into Red, Tipsy's brother's old employer.

Scrambling genres and voices, Windward Passage flits around geographically as well as linguistically, high-tailing it from San Francisco to the Caribbean and back again, dove-tailing from fast-talking, never-less-than-witty dialogue to tangential asides, reportage, paradoxical quips and a novel within a novel. With his ear to the ground, Nisbet not only updates the traditional noir narrative, combining it with a sea adventure story, conundrums, a dash of cyberpunk, and a sprinkling of literary concerns (including the likes of Tom Raworth, Paustovsky and Leonard Clark's The Rivers Ran East). From a prologue that will leave you scratching your head for at least a hundred pages, Windward Passage sometimes reads like a hardboiled Saragossa Manuscript, and bound to appeal to anyone looking beyond the confines of the genre. Still, I remember thinking while reading the novel that this is the sort of book we're told doesn't get published these days. So hat's off not only to Nisbet, but to Overlook Press. Because this is Nisbet at his wildest and weirdest. I'm still not sure what it all adds up to, other than an entertaining, insightful and highly recommended adventure.

If you haven't read Nisbet's Lethal Injection, Overlook has just reprinted it, to be followed by The Damned Don't Die in October and apparently the rest of Nisbet's back catalogue. Lethal Injection is arguably the best of Nisbet's early novels about a prison doctor who oversees the execution of a young black inmate indifferent to his fate, and sets out to discover the man's backstory. Not to be missed.

Your Face Tomorrow by Javier Marias

2010-07-05T13:31:00.003+01:00

Though I'm no longer quite sure what the term "literary fiction" actually means- one person's literature is someone else's mass entertainment- Javier Marias's trilogy Your Face Tomorrow would no doubt have to be placed in that category. If for no other reason than it makes allusions to classic texts, is contemplative, has historical depth and includes long, elaborate sentences that sometimes span an entire page. At the same time, the trilogy, unlike much literary fiction, depicts a recognisable world, is gripping, horrifying and even funny. For this is a spy novel in the most complete sense of the term, in that the protagonist, Deza, a Spaniard separated from his wife and living in London, works for the intelligence service, interpreting what he sees and hears. It's also a spy novel in the sense that the narrator spies on the world, which makes the reader realize that he or she is also a spy who must disentangle fact from fiction. Or perhaps this is literary fiction simply because it tackles such themes as memory, time, the manipulation of history, literature, exile, betrayal, terror, the state, man's inhumanity, language and translation (in fact, it's also a remarkable feat of translation that Margaret Jull Costa manages).

Each volume begins with a statement which, as the novel progresses, is expanded upon, scrutinized, tested and even compromised as they move through the currents and undercurrents of history. In Marias's world, time collapses, then expands, while single events can take scores of pages to describe, much less resolve. Events that happen in the early part of a novel might not be spoken about until the final pages, or not spoken about at all; they might only be referred to, implied or, like a musical theme, referred to time and again. Meanwhile, historical events, like the Spanish Civil War or World War Two, are rearticulated from one perspective or another.

Because the narrative moves linearly, it's important to read these novels in the order in which they appeared. The first volume, "Fever and Spear," centers on a party in Oxford, where Deza is told by his old friend, a don at the university, that someone attending the party, because of Deza's skills at language and perceptual abilities, might be interested in employing him. So Deza goes to work in a building without a name for job that has no name as a translator and interpreter ("a translator of people, or an interpreter of lives"). That volume's opening sentence, or part of it, sets the scene and reverberates throughout the book: "One should never tell anyone anything or give information or pass on stories or make people remember beings who have never existed or traversed the world, or who, having done so, are now almost safe in uncertain, one-eyed oblivion."

The second volume, "Dance and Dream," takes place mainly in a disco, where Deza witnesses a terrifying and violent event perpetrated by his boss, but it's an event in which Deza colludes for which he bears some responsibility. This volume's first sentence- "Let us hope that no one ever asks for anything, or even enquires, no advice or favor or loan, not even the loan of our attention, let us hope that others do not ask us to listen to them, to their wretched problems and their painful predicaments, so like our own..."- will soon be tested. The book ends with a request by a woman who works at the building with no name, but what that request is and how it will be acted upon is not revealed until the next volume.

The final volume, "Poison, Shadow and Farewell," begins with "While it isn't ever something we would wish for, we would all nonetheless always prefer it to be the person beside us who dies..." Again, it's a sentence that will reverberate throughout the book, as Deza moves between London to Madrid. In this volume one discovers what that request was. More importantly, Deza finds himself infected by the poison conveyed in images of the despicable things things people can do to one another, which forces him to question the morality of his job, but not before he too must perform a violent act.

Although the three volumes constitute more than 1200 pages, I gobbled them up one after the other. Perhaps I'd been starving for this kind of fiction, the sort that makes you stop and think about things, and, above all, consider the morality of what is taking place on the page or in the world. At the same time, Your Face Tomorrow contains some of the most shocking and horrific writing I've come across. Perhaps that's because Marias slows things down to let the events and thoughts sink in. In an age of minimalism, anything filled with nuance and emotion is going to be, by definition, frightening and moving.

2010-06-15T10:50:00.004+01:00

What I like about the novels of Don Winslow is what learns from them. He never fails to throws in information about various subjects, which, for me, can't fail but to make the novels interesting. Whether the drug trade or the fire insurance business, Winslow's subjects and the information that derives from them invariably supersedes his plots, which usually turn every which way but loose. Then there are his characters, ranging from Lebowski types to hardcore psychos, all fully human, flawed and all too believable. Yet what I remember is the information. For instance, I can only vaguely recall the protagonist and plot in California Fire and Light, but I still retain bits and pieces of the information regarding indications of how fire spreads and the way insurance companies work. In The Gentlemen's Hour one learns, naturally, about surfing, which here is pretty much a metaphor for everything, but also the politics of real estate. I would even go so far as to say that Winslow is one of the most subversive writers around, seducing the reader through character and plot, while sneaking in a killer political punch. Plus his prose sometimes, particularly as a way of kicking-off his novels, can sometimes read like poetry. Though I like him best when he scales down his work rather than embraces larger subjects as in Power of the Dog, I'm looking forward to his next major work, Savages, out in the UK at the end of the summer.

May Day by John Summerfield

2010-06-01T10:42:00.006+01:00

"Men make history, but not as they please."

"Art and literature were a racket without the saving grace of gunmen."

Reading London Books' reprint of John Summerfield's May Day is a welcome antidote to the doldrums of post-election Britain. First published in 1936, Summerfield's novel, his second in a career interrupted by serving in the International Brigade in Spain, portrays a country in which the ruling class is squeezing workers more than ever, making them work more hours for less pay. The novel takes place over a three day period, leading up to the May march in London. Lacking a single protagonist, May Day moves through an assortment of characters and classes affected by the turmoil and the coming march, focusing on, amongst others, a seaman, a carpenter and young female works in the East End and factory owners. Portraying an era when class consciousness was rife and the proletariat was ready to take to the streets, the novel utilizes a montage technique delineated by circumstance, speech, observation, rumination, time and place. Born and raised off the Portebello Road, Summerfield was a member of the Communist Party and wrote for the Daily Worker and Left Review. In his Afterward, written for the 1980s edition of the book, Summerfield says, "When I wrote it I'd have probably said May Day was socialist realism. Now I'd call it early 30s Communist romanticism. I'm not in any way apologizing for the book's enthusiastic, simple-minded political idealism. Because it was a genuine idealism." Perhaps that's selling his book short, because May Day even today is a moving and poetic novel, sometimes satirical, but always lyrical and even pastoral, reminiscent of the film Naked City, John Dos Passos's USA, Wyndham Lewis's Apes of God, and Mass Observation's Humphrey Jennings. Like Simon Blumenfield's Jew Boy, Robert Westerby's Wide Boys Don't Work and Alexander Baron's Low Life, it's part of a genre that's no longer with us- working class London fiction. This at a time when such writing is needed more than ever.

Heaven Before I Die

2010-05-23T14:13:00.010+01:00

I've been reading Michael Oliver-Goodwin off and on since the 1970s. He's written for a variety of periodicals, and has a handful of books to his credit, including a biography of Francis Ford Coppola. His most recent work is an excellent and perceptive book on New Orleans, entitled Heaven Before I Die- A Journey to the Heart of New Orleans. Weighing in at nearly five hundred pages, it's arguably the most evocative book to be written about music in the Crescent City since John Broven's Walkin to New Orleans. In many ways, it's better than Broven's influential and ground-breaking book, because Goodwin here has a much larger remit, which is to explore not only the city's live music scene, but to investigate the roots and branches of the culture itself. In describing what it was like to live in the city from the 1970s to the post-Katrina years, one gets a good idea of Goodwin's relationship to the city and the music, as well as the connection between New Orleans and Trinidad, the intricacies and joys of second line dancing and rhythms, and portraits of local personalities and musicians, many of whom, like Danny Barker, Tuts Washinton, Jon Cleary, Tom McDermott, Willie Tee, Davell Crawford, etc., are often relatively unknown outside the city. Heaven Before I Die is available at Lulu.com and on Amazon (Kindle edition), and essential reading for anyone interested in what has always been the lifeblood of the city. But a word of warning: it'll make you fork out some hard earned cash on cds, not to mention wanting to purchase a ticket on the next plane to the Crescent City.

Dark Matter by Juli Zeh

2010-05-10T09:43:00.007+01:00

When it comes to crime fiction, it's not often that you come across something totally different from anything you've read in the past. Juli Zeh's Dark Matter (US title: In Free Fall) is a philosophical thriller that isn't afraid to be both intelligent, poetic and playful. The novel revolves around the lives of four characters: two physicists and two detectives. The two physicists, Sebastian and Oskar, have been friends since university, where they were considered so brilliant that it would be only a matter of time until they both would win the Nobel Prize. Still deeply attached to one another, they have gone, regarding their work and their private lives, their separate ways. Nevertheless, they see each other on a regular basis. After a heated TV discussion featuring the two of them, Sebastian, who lives in the Black Forest, takes his son to a Scouts camp. On his way he stops at a service station, leaving his sleeping son in the car. When he returns he discovers someone has taken his son and the car. While searching the rest area, he gets a phone call telling him, if he wants his son back, he must kill a man. Sebastian has no choice but to ask for Oskar's assistance. Two detectives eventually become involved. The physically and intellectually impressive Rita, whose entire life revolves around police work, and her over-sensitive and empathetic mentor, Schilf. Now dying from a brain tumour, Schilf had been Rita's teacher, and, considering her naive view of the world, had advised her to always go against her instincts and judgement. Having heeded this advice- not quite the usual mode of operation for fictional cops- Rita is now the most successful detective on the force.

Here, as one can surmise, the focus is not so much on the crime as on character. I suppose this is a particularly European type of thriller, unafraid to tackle large issues and clashing views of the world, such as the ideal versus the materialistic, debates about multiple worlds as opposed to a unifying theory, the bending of reality, the nature of time, and the difference between detection and investigation. At the same time, Zeh's approach is such that the novel, though intellectual, never becomes too weighty or obscure. In the end it reminded me of cross between Jerome Charyn and Philp K. Dick, maybe with a bit of Jack O'Connell thrown in for good measure, but, on the other hand, unlike any of them. One thing for sure, you won't have ever come across anything quite like it before.

Election Fever

2010-04-30T19:34:00.004+01:00

Was Gordon Brown, in the final debate, acknowledging Cameron's victory or Con-Lib-Dem coalition, or was he simply trying to frighten and, therefore, energize his base? Probably the former, but really this is getting ridiculous. After all, the election has looked more like a reality TV show or a poor facsimile of an American style campaign. Still, for better or worse, Britain remains a parliamentary democracy. If Brown wins more seats and finishes third in the popular vote, he deserves, however unfairly it might seem, to be given the opportunity to form a government, and would be PM until another government is formed. Whether that's a minority government or a coalition with the Lib-Dems is another matter. If not, we might as well switch to the French system where there's a PM and a President, or, for that matter, the America system and do away with parliamentary democracy altogether. Though that's a decision to be made further down the line. I'm no great fan of Gordon Brown, but when you think about, he is, ironically and, of course, arguably, the best PM Britain has had for the last thirty years! Think about it, who would you prefer: warmonger Blair? clueless Major? tyrant Thatcher? proto monetarist Callahan? Well, in retrospect maybe Callahan, but then again maybe not. But we're already talking about thirty years ago. It's says something about the sad state of the UK political system. No, Labour doesn't deserve another term in office, but nor does Britain deserve to have a Cameron-led Tory government, whether on its own or in a coalition with right wing Lib-Dems privatisers like Clegg and Cable.

Then there's the media's role in bringing Brown down, which has been an on-going process ever since Brown refused to call an election (thus costing the media, who had put their people and machinery in place, millions). And what about the the role of pollster and political consultant to the Tories and Republicans, Frank Luntz in all this. As well as appearing frequently on Newsnight with his focus group, bringing forth critiques of Brown and, before that, Blair, he also advised the Consevatives to react to anything Brown said or did, just he advised US Republicans to attack the Democrats regarding financial reform (see Sam Stein, Huffingfton Post, Feb 1st, 2010) and, before that, health care reform, by simply being against whatever was proposed, turning US GOPers into NOPers.

Considering all this, unless Labour gets a last minute surge in support, my bet is on a Cameron minority government or a Lib-Con coalition, as they have in various councils. Sure, Lib-Dem rank and file would be against it, but, hey, this is a new era and just as Blair ignored party members when it came to such matters as the war in Iraq, so Clegg and Cable will ignore their members when it comes jumping in bed with the Tories. After all, what the Tories and the Lib Dems want, more than anything, is a taste of power, just as Labour did in the run up to Blair becoming PM. Of course, I might have more time for the Lib-Dems if they took a left of center position and came out against the war in Afghanistan and promised to soak the rich. But that doesn't seem to be on the agenda.

Pete Dexter's Spooner

2010-04-27T15:13:00.004+01:00

You can always count on Pete Dexter, but, though this one is about another outsider-oddball, Spooner is unlike any previous Dexter novel. For one thing it is very funny, but, as it moves from slapstick to tragedy, it is also going to break your heart. Read it, and anything else by Dexter,including his journalism.

Tom Piazza's Blues and Trouble

2010-04-22T07:48:00.008+01:00

I've long been an admirer of Tom Piazza's music writing. After seeing him on the trailer for Treme, I thought his fiction might also be interesting. So far he's published three works of fiction: a collection of short stories entitled Blues and Trouble, and two novels, My Cold War and the New Orleans-set, City of Refuge. I just finished Blues and Trouble and it doesn't disappoint. In fact, it's one of the best books of short stories I've read for some time. But, then, I guess it was pretty much written for the likes of myself- someone who's into such things as blues, jazz, rock and roll, and the effects of geographical displacement.

A quote at random: "I picture Brownsville as a place under a merciless sun, where one-eyed dogs stand in the middle of dusty, empty streets staring at you and hot breeze blows inside your shirt and there's nowhere to go. It's always noon, and there are no explanations required. I'm going to Brownsville exactly because I've got no reason to go there. Anybody asks me why Brownsville- there's no fucking answer. That's why I'm going there."

It puts me in mind of that great mid-Dylan song Brownsville Girl, but more in your face. Blues and Trouble is also about race and class, and not onlycontains that sense of estrangement present in the best blues music, but its written with a perceptive eye and an ability to turn a phrase with the best of them. The collection ends with a evocation of the music and recordings of Charlie Patton, which is as evocative as it is poetic and odd, like a series of Walker Evans photographs: "The unseen wraps itself in the visible facts, the curbs that crumble in the midday sun, the street you follow out of town, the dirt road, the tin awning, the fireplace empty in the empty house, the fields almost brown in the haze, the scraps of old wallpaper, brown with the years, the woodsmoke in the tree branches, and your grandfather invisible in the darkening blue evening, searching for fireflies..." I'm looking forward to the two novels, and will report on them at a later date.

Millard Kaufman's Misadventure

2010-04-06T09:32:00.006+01:00

Millard Kaufman is best known for writing screenplays for Bad Day at Black Rock and Take the High Ground, as well as co-creating Mr Magoo. Disliking the political climate of red-baiters during the era of the blacklist, Kaufman also fronted for Dalton Trumbo on the 1950 film Gun Crazy. In his sixties and fed up with Hollywood, he turned to writing novels, but didn't publish his first novel, Bowl of Cherries, until he was past 90 years of age. Now, a little more than a year after his death, comes his second offering, Misadventure. It's a novel that Kaufman began almost three decades ago, and revised at the end of Kaufman's life, then, after his death, by his son.

Misadventure is fast paced, with as many twists and turns as the Southern California roads on which Gulf War vet turned real estate agent Jack Hopkins so often himself driving. It's also very funny. The novel's protagonist Jack Hopkins is a literate, working class Gulf war vet, now a Los Angeles real estate agent. He lives with his plaster-eating, slightly ditzy, girlfriend and hates the world in which he works, but doesn't know the depths of its corruption until a wealthy, charismatic client asks Jack to kill his wife, followed by the wife asking Jack to kill her husband. And that's only the beginning of the novel.

Written with the linguistic exuberance of a much younger man, Misadventure is a slice of literate noir tempered by maturity and, thanks to Hollywood, the ability to construct a good story. Here Kaufman successfully combines Cain's grand gesture, Fante's soulfulness and Condon's humor and political acumen. What's more, his portrayal of the real estate business as just about the sleaziest game in town makes Misadventure a timely reminder of what the world has so recently become. Interestingly, before he died Kaufman had written a script for The Big Blow, based on Joe Lansdale's novel. I wonder what happened to that one?

2010-04-04T17:23:00.005+01:00

Two of my current favorites:

Jerron "Blind Boy" Paxton.

And his pal and playing partner Frank Fairfield:

And the two of them together, along with Dom Flemons from the Carolina Chocolate Drops:

2010-03-29T07:59:00.011+01:00

Godard's tribute to Eric Rohmer

Eric Rohmer (Maurice Scherer) was never my favorite film-maker, but I found this tribute to him by Jean-Luc Godard (brought to my attention via Ron Silliman's blog) rather touching.It's Godard's usual mixture, used to such great effect, of word, text, music and voice. And it's good know that even here, Godard is pretty much as incomprehensible as ever. Maybe that's one reason I like even his later work. Also, I only just realized- I don't know why it never to me before- that his first film, Breathless, is most clearly based on Joseph Lewis's Gun Crazy.

2010-03-27T08:18:00.005Z

Jess Walter's The Financial Lives of the Poets

The publicist I spoke to was adamant, Walter's latest was not a crime novel. I had to say that I thought, in a round about way, it might be, this even though I had yet to read the novel, and knew little about it other than the title, which attracted me in the first place. After all Citizen Vince from a few years back was a classic. And I was right. After reading The Financial Lives of the Poets, I can say if this isn't a crime novel, I don't know what is. Okay, it's not hardboiled and there are no corpses lying around, but it is a book, pretty noir at that, about the financial and economic crimes committed in our name which force people to commit minor crimes to survive. Family guy Matt Prior, an ex-journalist and writer of financial poetry, is about to lose everything- his wife, his house, his livelihood- thanks to the credit crunch. Going out for milk at the local 7/11, he meets two young drug dealers who change his life and things go from bad to worse. It's a tale that runs from the suites to the streets- the true trickle down economy. Like Citizen Vince, it's also very funny, and reminiscent of Donald Westlake's social satire/crime novels such as The Ax and The Hook.

2010-03-22T13:19:00.004Z

Ace Atkins

What is it with me when it comes to reading Ace Atkins novels? One moment I think his books are some of the best around, and the next I find them difficult to plough through? Obviously this says more about me than about Atkins as a writer. Though maybe not. But it does bring up the question of how one's state of mind affects the reading of particular books- one day you love 'em, the next day you're indifferent towards them. Literature is not value-free, either in a political or psychological sense. Robert Duncan used to talk about being in a state of readiness in order to write, or, for him, receive a poem, and the same goes for reading. In fact, has anyone ever written about the psychology of reading, just how one gets transported through a text to the place where the writing is taking place, and the mechanics which asks the reader to suspend disbelief? If so, I've yet to come across it. But back to Atkins. While I'm still of the opinion that White Shadow was one of the best crime novels of recent years, Devil's Garden left me cold. Moreover, a few years back I thought I'd have a look at Atkins's early work, after all he writes about blues and soul music, subjects that are right up my alley. But I was ambivalent about those novels, believing them to be derivative and shallow. Then other day I finished re-reading his 1997 Crossroad Blues, recently republished by Busted Flush and loved it. What does that say about me? Who knows? Maybe I just wasn't in a suitable state of readiness. Or maybe it has something to do with Atkins's work which treads a thin line between pulp fiction and a more engaged type of investigative, if not literary, writing. In fact, what's interesting I think about Atkins is that he exploits the tension between pulp fiction and investigative fiction, which demands more of the reader. Though sometimes one simply wants to be entertained, and at other times one wants something more, both of which Atkins can hint at even in a novel like Crossroad Blues, and certainly in a book like White Shadow and, apparently, though I missed it, in Devil's Garden.

Along with David Fulmer and, of course, James Sallis, Atkins is amongst the best when it comes to writing crime fiction with a music theme. Personally, I found Crossroad more satisfying than Walter Mosley's RL's Dream, which also centers on Robert Johnson, if only because it had taken its research seriously, and because the push of the narrative, incfluenced as it is by John D. MacDonald. On the other hand, I tend to agree with Elijah Wald when it comes to over-romanticizing Robert Johnson and his music at the expense of other equally good, if not better, blues musicians, i.e., Patton, Lonnie Johnson, Son House, etc.. That romanticization does a dis-service to the music. And Atkins's book does play on that romanticization. Well, it makes a good story. Plus the novel paints a vivid picture of the Delta region. Though, back in New Orleans, I think associating Professor Longhair with the disneyfication of blues is not only dubious but unfair. Granted, Longhair, at the end of his career, was over-exposed, as are many great musicians, from Monk to BB King, but Longhair was also one of the greatest of the New Orleans piano players. Small points, perhaps. All the same, I would highly recommended Crossroad Blues to anyone interested in crime fiction and the blues, and the relationship between the two. Unissued Johnson recordings. A cop called Willie Brown. A punk kid obsessed with Elvis. A devilish white blues promoter. And Nick Travers, a harmonica playing protagonist writing a thesis Guitar Slim. As well as the ambiance of the Delta and pre-Katrina New Orleans. Plus an Atkins short-story thrown in for good measure. Apparently, Busted Flush will be reprinting the three remaining Nick Travers novels, and I'm looking forward to re-reading all of them. Because, like Robert Johnson's song and his music in general, those book exist at the crossroads, between pulp and investigative fiction and, no matter how subjective the reading experience, can't help but be fascinating.

But let's give Ace the final word:

"For me making the connection between classic blues and hardboiled detective fiction wasn't hard. As a young writer, I found inspiration equally in Son House and Dashiell Hammett, and later in Chandler and Muddy Waters. The writing styles, the mood and tone, the subject matter and the atmosphere were very much the same. Those artists wrote about hard-luck bars and jilted lovers, betrayal and revenge. People had real problems, their worlds held real dangers, and they wrote about those problems and dangers in a spare, refined poetry that knocked you right in the gut. I think Nick Travers was born when I read John D. MacDonald while listening to some old Chess records. Somewhere along the line, Travis McGee and Muddy and Chicago and New Orleans became fused into one."

2010-03-19T13:05:00.004Z

Charlie Gillett
1942-2010

Without him so much have gone unheard.

2010-03-09T14:27:00.001Z

It's Ornette Coleman's 80th birthday.

Here he is playing with Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins, recording in Barcelona in 1987:

2010-02-25T16:45:00.003Z

From Victor Serge's Unforgiving Years:

"A curious document, this journal, whose carefully chosen words sketched out only the outer shape of people, events, and ideas: a poem constructed of gaps cut from the lived material, because- since it could be seized- it could not contain a single name, a single recognizable face, a single unmistakable strand of the past, a single allusion to assignments accomplished (about which it is forbidden to write without prior permission). No expression of torment or sorrow (this for the sake of pride), no expression of doubt or calculation (for the sake of prudence), and nothing ideological, naturally, for ideology is the sludge at the bottom of the pitfall... [The] construction of this featureless record, similar to a thought puzzle in three dimensions turned entirely toward some undefinable and secret fourth dimension, had furnished her with an exhilarating occupation..."

2010-02-23T09:41:00.018Z

"San Francisco seems to have always had a peculiarly salubrious climate for personal journalism, the occasional essay, the intimate column, from Bret Harte and Ambrose Bierce to Fremont Older and John D. Barry, it’s a great tradition. Today the papers are full of them, excellent, good, bad and indifferent. They are not now and never have been, these columnists, all of them sensationalists. Even the gossipiest ones have never been as invidiously gossipy as some elsewhere in the country. A lot of them have purveyed, between the lines, a lot of wisdom and light."

So wrote Kenneth Rexroth in his very first column for the San Francisco Examiner. The excellent Bureau of Public Secrets website, to celebrate fifty years since their original appearance, is running every column written by Kenneth Rexroth for the San Francisco Examiner from 1960-67. As one would expect from Rexroth, they cover a range of topics. Though at the time I remember wondering why Rexroth, given his politics, would write for a Hearst publication. But then there have been stranger journalistic marriages, such as Beaverbrook and Michael Foot here in the UK. I'm looking forward to going back over Rexroth's columns, some of which I read when they were published, even though I steadfastly refused to ever once buying a copy of the paper. Maybe one day we can look forward to someone reprinting the columns of Ralph J. Gleason from the San Francisco Chronicle. Less literary and with no reputation other than in the jazz and Rolling Stone world, Gleason's columns would be a more accurate picture of the era. I remember someone asking at a Left Coast Crime conference in Monterrey, which San Francisco journalist best typified the hardboiled tradition. The panel agreed that it had to be Herb Caen, who also wrote for the Chronicle. I thought, Herb Caen? You've got to be joking. What about Gleason? He shared a column with the renown jazz historian Phil Elwood, not only modelled himself on Hammett, but was the consummate outsider, on the periphery of any number of San Francisco concerts, literary events, film showings, etc., during the era.

I remember nearly running Ralph down in my Yellow Cab just outside Winterland on my very first night on the job. Herb Caen? Until I looked him up just a few minutes ago, I never even knew what the guy looked like.

Though I suppose that's pretty hardboiled in itself. On the other hand, I crossed paths with Rexroth on numerous times, whether on one of my various trips to Jack's Record Store on Scott Street, just below Rexroth's apartment, or the class he taught at SF State. My father had known Rexroth back in Chicago and would listen to him read from his autobiography on Pacifica Radio, and for the rest of the day would talk about the friends they had in common.

2010-02-23T09:02:00.003Z

Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge (NYRB) must be the most profound and modernist spy novel of the 20th century. Serge was born in poverty in Brussels in 1899 to émigré Russians after fleeing the Czar. He became a political activist, was jailed and arrived in Russia in 1919 to support the Bolshevik Revolution. Climbing the hierarchy of the Comintern, he fell foul of Stalin, went to prison, followed by his exile from the Soviet Union. Unforgiving Years would be Serge's final novel, destined, as far as he was concerned, for the bottom drawer. And you can see why. It's his darkest and most extreme book. Paranoid, unrelenting, brutal, poetic, surreal, hallucinatory, the book moves from pre-war Paris to Leningrad under siege to Berlin during the last days of the war to Mexico (this last part reads like a B. Traven story). Serge's translator, Richard Greeman, in his informative introduction, suggests that D, the main character, is based not only on Serge himself, but a defector, actually the head of Stalin’s apparatus who met with Serge in Paris, Walter Krivitsky, died in a hotel room in Washington under mysterious circumstance, as well as another Soviet agent, Ignace Reiss, who, in the process of defecting to Trotskyism, was murdered by Stalinist agents on his way to meeting Serge in Switzerland. In a sense, one might say that Serge's novel is antidote to Celine, at least so far as the depiction of the horrors of war is concerned. Translated into English for the first time, Unforgiving Years tells the story of two revolutionaries, D and his friend Daria, as they approach, endure and survive World War II. Earlier Serge writing is quite different in style and content, and definitely less modernist in orientation. I would also recommend The Case of Comrade Tulayev (reprinted by NYRB as well), about the reign of terror in the Soviet Union. Like Unforgiving Years, it was one of his last books, and one that Serge did not seek to publish during the latter years of his life. Unforgiving Years is the real thing, the sort that the likes of Alan Furst would die for. If anyone thinks latest batch of post-apocalyptic novels, like The Road, are bleak, they should try this one.

2010-02-12T11:28:00.011Z

Sam Fuller

Is there a more amazing opening sequence than that in Sam Fuller's Naked Kiss (Thanks to Howard Rodman for reminding me of this):

Then there's Park Row, with that great opening shot and filled with some terrific tracking shots and long takes. A tribute to the early days of journalism made with Sam's own money. But Fuller would turn in his grave if he knew the state of newspapers today. Unfortunately this is the only extract of the film I could find:

2010-02-10T13:24:00.007Z

Fielding Dawson

Newly available from Rvive Books.

Read it!

At his best, he was one of the truly great American writers.

And don't forget Krazy Kat and the Unveiling, Black Mountain, An Emotional Memoir of Franz Kline, The Mandalay Dream, The Open Road, The Dream/Thunder Road, Penny Lane, etc..

2010-02-08T11:03:00.020Z

Buster Keaton

Prompted by Charles Simic's blog for the New York Review of Books, let me say that I'm all for a Buster Keaton revival.

Somebody once called Buster the Charlie Poole of silent films. Or maybe it was the other way around, and someone once called Charlie Poole the Buster Keaton of string-band music. Some of my favorite Buster moments are those where he's riffing like a jazz musician with Fatty Arbuckle. But I like everything, at least until Buster began to talk.

For all Busterites, as well as anyone interested in L.A. history, go out an buy a copy of John Bengston's Silent Echoes: Discovering Early Hollywood Through the Films of Buster Keaton. A work of true urban archeology, perhaps the sort of thing that Mike Davis should have perused before writing City of Quartz.

2010-02-08T11:00:00.002Z

Seventeen Reasons Why This Guy Loves San Francisco poet Michael McClure.

2010-02-06T11:00:00.004Z

Gil Scott-Heron

Nice to have him back, with a great version of Robert Johnson's Me and the Devil. Not to mention the visually stunning video. Watch it in tandem with the previously posted version by Rainer Ptacek posted on January 9th. Then go back to the original version by Robert Johnson:

2010-02-05T15:21:00.003Z

Craig McDonald's Print the Legend

Once again, Craig McDonald covers some tricky territory, though this time it's more circumscribed than in his previous outing, which crossed a number of continents as well as decades. Though Print the Legend moves about a bit, it is, for the most part, set in Hemingway's hometown where a literary conference celebrating the great man is taking place. Okay, so there are few subjects potentially more tedious than a narrative about a bunch of critics gathered together at a literary conference. But, hey, why not; after all, we know that critics can be a cut-throat bunch, and here they are that with a vengeance.

But point is, McDonald once again pulls it off. Because Legend is much more than mere David Lodge-noir. Here we're on the cusp between modernism and post-modernism, between Hemingway or the pulp-literary fiction of McDonald's protagonist, Hector Lassiter, and something about to appear on the horizon, whether in the guise of feminism or metafiction. While deconstructionism was not, as portrayed in Legend, in vogue amongst critics in the mid-1960s, it still packs a punch and puts one in mind of the Gramsci quote, something along the lines of "the old world is dead and the new world has yet to be born."

The plot of Print the Legend (the title of course comes from Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance- "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.") revolves around stolen and fake Hemingway manuscripts, and the possibility that Mary might have murdered Hem. Trailing Hemingway, as well as Lassiter is a renegade FBI agent-novelist based on spook-writer E. Howard Hunt (Hunt wrote several novels and even received a Guggenheim in 1946 for his pulp spy and crime fiction). While I found the link between Hemingway and J. Edgar somewhat tenuous, we do know that Hoover did have a file on Hemingway that went back to the Spanish Civil War, as well as on the likes of Hammett, Dorothy Parker, Tennessee Williams, EB White, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Dreiser, Mailer, etc., etc..

I have to admit that Print the Legend didn't grab me straight off. It took about a hundred pages before I was really into it, at which point I was hooked and found myself looking forward to reading about the weird but ultimately tragic, Mary Hemingway, Hector and the various spooks and critics, both synophantic and competitive, who would as soon bury Hemingway as explicate him. Though there are some uneven spots early on, and it's neither as complex or labyrinthine as Toros and Torsos (which Hector is apparently writing in the latter stages of Legend). Likewise, it lacks the latter's scope and scale. Nevertheless, the last section of Legend is every bit as intense as anything in Toros. I like McDonald's ambivalent approach to Hemingway, and it's impressive that he can get so much mileage out of the great man, using him as a launch pad to examine the culture and particular epochs. And, as I've mentioned before, McDonald is one of the few writers who can move comfortably within a post-Ellroy framework of historical crime fiction, prompting at least this reader to go back to some of his sources. Always interesting and, in the end, engaging, I'll be interested in where he goes once his Hemingway period has been exhausted.

2010-01-31T17:36:00.007Z

Farber On Film

Anyone who loves the film criticism and art of Manny Farber should watch this recent San Diego celebration of Farber On Film, edited by Robert Polito, with, amongst others, Polito and Farber's long-time partner, Patricia Patterson:

2010-01-24T13:06:00.006Z

Bobby Charles
RIP

I've always admired Bobby's singing and song-writing. But could this really be the only video footage we have of him- an out-take from the Band's Last Waltz:

2010-01-22T18:14:00.004Z

Django will be 100 years old tomorrow, Saturday, January 23rd. And he sounds as good as ever.

2010-01-09T20:44:00.007Z

Three of my current favorites

Craig Ventresco- One of the best ragtime players around. Catch him in San Francisco. Here he is playing Summertime Rag:

The Sweet Hollywaiians- From Japan. These are some of the best practioners of old time Hawaiian swing that you're going to find anywhere. Watch out because they're coming to Europe:

Rainer Ptacek- from back in the 1980s, with a nice version of Robert Johnson's Me and the Devil:

2009-12-25T14:25:00.005Z

One more to be added to my favorites for 2009: Josh Bazell's Beat the Reaper. Hilarious, weirdly informative, deliciously perverse, but not for the squeamish.

2009-12-10T09:06:00.010Z

Favorite Novels of 2009 (in no particular order)

Dennis Lehane's The Given Day

Craig McDonald's Toros & Torsos (actually autumn 2008, but only got around to it a couple months ago)

James Sallis's Salt River (UK paperback edition)

Dennis Johnson's Nobody Move

George Pelecanos' The Way Home

Megan Abbott's Bury Me Deep

Wu Ming's Manituana

Attica Locke's Black Water Rising

Massimo Carlotto and Marco Videtta's Poisonville

Darmenico Starnone's First Execution

Book of the year

Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City- part Philip K. Dick, part early Pynchon and part Wyndham Lewis's Apes of God, but mostly just Lethem at his very best.

Away in London until the new year, so blogging will be very sporadic, if at all.

2009-12-06T11:35:00.004Z

Craig McDonald's Toros & Torsos

I don't know how I missed this one when it came out a while back. But I finally got around to reading it a couple months ago, and intended to write about it along with McDonald's forthcoming Print the Legend. But since it doesn't look like I'm going to get to the latter until after the new year, I thought I'd address this, McDonald's second novel, sooner rather than later. Toros & Torsos, published by Bleak House in 2008, is a book that, in its scope and politics, I've come to greatly admire. At a time when, aside from the likes of Ellroy, most crime fiction has become increasingly localized, Toros & Torsos moves from Florida to Cuba to Spain to the US, and, spanning three decades, from the 1930s to the 1950s, depicts such personages as Hemingway, Dos Passos, John Huston, Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, etc.. In doing this, Toros & Torsos is able to take into account many of the social forces that inform mid century America, from modernism to surrealism, anti-fascism to anti-communism. I had my doubts about McDonald being able to carry this off, but he does and it was only a matter of a few pages before I had fallen under the novel's spell.

McDonald has definitely done his research when it comes to surrealism, the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway and his circle, as well as the group surrounding Man Ray and John Huston that Steven Hodel writes about in Black Dahlia Avenger. I've always been dubious about Hodel's book, though enough of it is probably true for it to be disturbing and effective fodder for a novel. Likewise, McDonald's account of rumors about surrealist torture chambers during the Spanish Civil War, were based on reports- the one I read appeared in the Guardian- whose source has since turned out to be somewhat dubious. Nevertheless, it makes for interesting speculation and fits nicely into the confines of McDonald's novel. It also helps of course that McDonald's protagonist, Hector Lassiter, a pulp crime novelist "who writes what he lives and lives what he lives," is a fairly complex person, whose outlook, partly noble and partly distorted, fit nicely into the eras described. Meanwhile, McDonald's depiction of Hemingway- here suitably egocentric, overblown, brilliant, childish, obsessive, irrepressible- is sufficiently ambivalent and complex to be interesting, the implication being that in some way he personifies America during that period and beyond. By portraying Hemingway and Hector Lassiter, warts and all, Toros & Torsos, from the novel's opening scene to its denouement, critiques the effect of masculine values on the culture, and examines the relationship between reality and ficiton. And by looking at the sexual politics of surrealism, McDonald addresses the nature of metaphor. And don't think surrealist murders are simply the stuff of urban legend. In the part of the world where I'm currently living, near Perpignan, there were a handful of such murders a few years back, the corpses of which supposedly replicated paintings by Dali. Toros & Torsos illustrates that McDonald can handle complex material and on the basis of this one book, has become, along with Megan Abbott, one of the more interesting crime writers to have emerged over the past couple years.

More about McDonald's Print the Legend in the new year.

2009-12-02T07:45:00.024Z

I'm currently engrossed in Jonathan Lethem's hilarious, perceptive and beautifully written paean to contemporary New York culture, Chronic City. I've long been an avid reader of Lethem's work and always look forward to his next book. For me, Chronic City is a return to form after the somewhat disappointing You Don't Love Me. But I was interested in hearing on WNYC's Soundcheck with Lethem and Kevin Avery that the protagonist of Chronic City was loosely based on the late, but sorely missed critic Paul Nelson. Not physically, but intellectually. That is, as someone that is, above all else, engaged with the culture. As I've written before, my interest in Nelson goes back to the Little Sandy Review in the early 1960s, when he, along with fellow editor, Jon Pancake, became one of my favorite music writers. Once Nelson moved to New York, I more or less lost contact with many of his activities, while I was more into the likes of Grover Lewis. Still, whenever I came across liner notes or articles by Nelson, I read them with interest. Nevertheless, I could easily identify with Nelson's obsession with film noir, Orson Welles, Philip K. Dick and Ross Macdonald. So I'm looking forward to Avery's forthcoming biography of Nelson, Everything is an Afterthought. For anyone interested in Nelson, and the world around him, and you read French, you could do worse than have a look at Philippe Garnier's Freelance: Grover Lewis a Rolling Stone. If you don't read French, try the University of Texas's Splendor in the Short Grass. Lewis was every bit Nelson's equal, with some of the same interests, and, of course, like Nelson, and a major influence on any number of subsequent rock and film critics.

2009-12-01T20:37:00.002Z

Check out this excellent and comprehensive interview with the indefatigable Wu Ming in Social Text.

2009-11-22T11:06:00.005Z

Heartbreak & Vine Film Festival

Femmes Fatales

Googie Withers

The great Googie Withers in Night and the City, directed by Jules Dassin in 1950. With Richard Widmark, Herbert Lom, Gene Tierney, etc.. An underrated film, but which still does not do justice to Gerald Kersh's great novel. Now if only someone would adapt Fowler's End or Prelude to an Uncertain Midnight.

2009-11-18T19:07:00.004Z

Happy birthday Don Cherry, November 18, 1936 – October 19, 1995,
Wherever you are.

Here he is with Sonny Rollins

Then, with James Blood Ulmer and Rashied Ali

2009-11-16T15:11:00.007Z

Heartbreak & Vine Film Festival

Jane Green in Out of the Past, directed by Jacques Tourneur in 1947

That entrance

The exit

2009-11-12T08:09:00.007Z

December 22nd, 1935 to November 7th, 2009

Donald Harrington has returned to Stay More

But there is still time to read this extraordinary writer:

Enduring (2009)
Farther Along (2008)
The Pitcher Shower (2005)
With (2003)
Thirteen Albatrosses (or, Falling off the Mountain) (2002)
When Angels Rest (1998)
Butterfly Weed (1996)
Ekaterina (1993)
The Choiring of the Trees (1991)
The Cockroaches of Stay More (1989)
The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks (1975)
Some other Place. The Right Place. (1972)
Lightning Bug (1970)
The Cherry Pit (1965)

Let Us Build Us a City: Eleven Lost Towns (1986)

For an excellent overview of Harrington's work, have a look at this Boston Globe article by James Sallis published a few years ago.

2009-11-11T13:45:00.005Z

Black Water Rising by Attica Locke

Black Water Rising sounds like it could be the name of a blues number sung by Bessie Smith or Memphis Minnie. And, in its own way, Locke's book is a kind of blues for the generation that came of age, as Locke's parents did, during the days of the civil rights and black power movements, and had to contend with its aftermath. Set in Houston during the Reagan era, it's about the onset of free market economics, the fracturing of unions through divide and rule resulting in their loss of power, the rise of oil as a dominating force, and the creation of a new, more mature politics. Locke's protagonist is Jay, a disillusioned, former activist, now a two-bit lawyer with a wife, a minister's daughter, about to have a baby. Consequently, the demands of family life and the church mitigate Jay's attempts to go his own way, which he does until he can no longer stay on the outside and must join the fight which means coming to terms with his past. These might be old tropes, but they work well here, as former friends from the movement and the community, including his former girlfriend who is now mayor, want him to intercede on their behalf. Just one small point of contention in what is one of the best crime novels of the year: the plot point on which the novel turns is a scene in which the college chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society, led by his former girlfriend, hijacks a rally held by black activists, led by Jay. Now maybe things like that happened in Houston, but at San Francisco State and Berkeley where I happened to be during that time, it would have been unimaginable for SDS or any other predominantly white political organization to hijack a rally held by the Panthers, the Black Students Union, or the Black Power movement. Groups like SDS were too much in awe of black groups, and even intimidated by African-American groups to pull a stunt like that. But, okay, after a brief spell saying "this just wouldn't have happened," I suspended any disbelief and allowed the narrative to take me where it was going. Needless to say, I enjoyed the ride. This is an interesting and important novel, and I'm already looking forward to Locke's next book.

2009-11-08T08:22:00.008Z

Heartbreak & Vine Film Festival

Day 15

Arlene Dahl

And to think she appeared regularly as a panelist on What's My Line?

Wicked as They Come (trailer), directed by Ken Hughes in 1956

Then in Slightly Scarlet, directed by Allan Dwan in 1956

2009-11-06T09:22:00.001Z

Heartbreak & Vine Film Festival

Day 14

The great Ida Lupino

Road House, directed in 1948 by Jean Negulesco

Private Hell 36, directed in 1954 by Don Siegel

They Drive By Night, directed in 1940 by Raoul Walsh

2009-11-04T09:24:00.002Z

Heartbreak & Vine Film Festival

Day 13

Still with the Femmes Fatales

Linda Darnell in Otto Preminger's 1945 Angel Face, with Dana Andrews

2009-11-02T08:41:00.003Z

Heartbreak & Vine Film Festival

Day 12

Femmes Fatales

Helen Walker and Coleen Gray in Edmound Goulding's 1947 classic Nightmare Alley

2009-10-31T14:16:00.014Z

Heartbreak & Vine Film Festival

Day 11

Femmes Fatales

Peggy Cummins in Gun Crazy, 1950, directed by Joseph H. Lewis

Still my favorite scene in the film.

Too bad no one other than Lewis appreciated Peggy's talents enough to cast in a decent role.

2009-10-31T13:54:00.007Z

Heartbreak & Vine Film Festival

Day 10

Femmes Fatales

Who is the more demented in Nick Ray's Johnny Guitar: Joan Crawford or Mercedes McCambridge?

2009-10-30T09:54:00.006Z

Manituana by Wu Ming (Verso)

History is made by the vanquishers, while the vanquished are left to struggle for their stories to be told. Manituana by the Wu Ming collective concerns Native Americans, specifically the Six Nations of the Iroquois before and during the American war of independence. Celebrating their tragic role during that period, Manituana depicts a people thrown into a cauldron of violence of a kind that might make Cormac McCarthy gasp. Concerning real personages, their story and struggle, it also says a lot about the roots of American colonialism. Wu Ming relates the Iroqois' belief that they were better off serving the King than the colonists- better one King two thousand miles away than 2000 kings a mile away- so certain were they that the latter would steal their land. But this is no heroic tale in reverse. Manituana contains no real heroes, but a situation in which everyone is compromised, and ultimately broken. This is an extraordinary novel, well-researched and heartbreaking, that has clear parallels with the war in Iraq, and the pitting of "good" Muslims against "bad" Muslims, just as Native Americans were used during the revolutionary period, only for the colonists to exploit and devastate both groups. Told in short chapters, it covers a lot of ground, but spans a mere ten years. As the hardest working collective in literature, Wu Ming, have produced a book that, for me, is better, if not more interesting, than Q, and, though not humorous, every bit, if not more, important than their lasting outing, 54. Though Manituana reads seamlessly, it does suffer somewhat from it being written collectively. Despite its intensity, good intentions and historical accuracy, its Brechtian picaresquesness means that it is difficult for the reader to identify with particular characters. But that's a minor criticism, because this book that isn't be missed.

2009-10-28T14:07:00.002Z

Heartbreak & Vine Film Festival

Day 9

Femmes Fatales

The toughest of them all:

Ann Savage in Detour, directed by Edgar Ulmer in 1945
Jean Gillie in Decoy, directed by Jack Bernhard in 1946

With a short documentary on Decoy

2009-10-26T08:52:00.002Z

Heartbreak & Vine Film Festival

Day 8

Femmes Fatales

Barbara Stanwyck was more versatile than she is often given credit for. Of course, there's Double Indemnity, and an assortment of noir outings, but I also like her pre-production code work. Not as vulnerable a presence as Gloria Grahame, but there is always the impression that below her tough exterior lurks someone more fragile, whose circumstances have coerced her to adopt one of her many masks.

Night Nurse, directed by William Wellman in 1931
Forbidden, directed by Frank Capra in 1932
Ladies of Leisure, directed by Frank Capra in 1930
Baby Face (trailer), directed by Alfred E. Green in 1933
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (with Liz Scott), directed by Lewis Milestone in 1946
Double Indemnity, directed by Billy Wilder in 1944

2009-10-24T09:15:00.001+01:00

Heartbreak & Vine Film Festival

Day 7

Femmes Fatales

There's no better place to start than with Gloria Grahame. It's hard to pick examples of her best work, so I've stuck with the obvious.

Odds Against Tomorrow, directed by Robert Wise in 1959
In a Lonley Place, directed by Nick Ray in 1950
The Big Heat, directed by Fritz Lang in 1953

2009-10-22T13:40:00.001+01:00

Heartbreak & Vine Film Festival

Day 6

For those, like me, who missed last week's film festival in Lyon, here are clips from some of the rarely seen films that Eddie Muller and Philippe Garnier presented there. As often the case with clips like these, the picture quality is often less than desired.

The Prowler, directed by Joseph Losey, 1951

Woman on the Run, direcgted by Norman Foster, 1950

711 Ocean Drive, directed by Joe M. Newman, 1950

The Sniper, directed by Edward Dmytryk, 1952

2009-10-21T10:17:00.003+01:00

Heartbreak & Vine Film Festival

Day 5

If you haven't seen Thom Andersen's superb LA Plays Itself, you should make an effort to do so. At times it comes close to being the cinematic equivalent of Mike Davis's City of Quartz. Here are a couple of interesting scenes from the film that center on LA architecture in Hollywood movies.

2009-10-20T20:18:00.005+01:00

Today, October 20th, might be Jelly Roll Morton's 120th birthday.

2009-10-20T08:07:00.003+01:00

Heartbreak & Vine Film Festival

Day 4

Elisha Cook, Sterling Hayden, Marie Windsor, etc. in Kubrick's 1956 The Killing, with a script by Jim Thompson.

Another great character actor:

Timothy Carey, who also appeared in The Killing, from his 1962 World's Greatest Sinner (music by Frank Zappa):

Coming next: Femmes Fatales

2009-10-18T07:50:00.006+01:00

Heartbreak & Vine Film Festival

Day 3

Thieves Highway, or Thieves Market, is one of Bezzerides' finest novels. Here is the trailer for the film, directed by Dassin in 1949 with a script by Bezzerides.

Next: Elisha Cook Jr., the greatest and most recognizable of all film noir character actors. This is the weird and famous jazz band scene from Siodmak's 1944 Phantom Lady, adapted from Cornell Woolrich's novel.

2009-10-16T08:07:00.004+01:00

Heartbreak & Vine Film Festival

Day 2

More Bezzerides

On Dangerous Ground, directed by Nick Ray, starring Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino.

Today's short: Harry Smith's Early Abstrations (11), with a soundtrack by Thelonious Monk

2009-10-14T17:53:00.007+01:00

Lee Horsley's The Noir Thriller (Palgrave, Macmillan) should be perused by all readers of noir fiction. It starts at the very beginning of the genre and manages to bring it all up to date with discussion of the likes of Megan Abbott, Sara Gran, Jason Starr, Charlie Stella, Jess Walters, etc.. Moreover, it does so in a stylish fashion. Particularly impressive are his delineations and ability to historicise into large but comprehensible categories. His chapter headings alone are indicative of this: Fatal Men; Fatal Women; Strangers and Outcasts; Players, Voyeurs and Consumers; Pasts and Futures, etc. Concentrating on the poetics and politics of noir fiction, The Noir Thriller might be a bit academic for some, but no one is going to go away from this book empty handed. There are very few omissions that I could find, as well as a handful of writers I've yet to read. So far one of the best books on the subject. Highly recommended.

2009-10-14T16:22:00.006+01:00

Heartbreak & Vine Film Festival

Day 1

The first in a series of films written by AI "Buzz" Bezzerides

Kiss Me Deadly

Plus a short feature
Stan Brakhage's The Dead

2009-10-12T09:51:00.008+01:00

Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter is about to be published with an introduction by George Pelecanos. See my September 8th, 2008 comments regarding this American classic.

2009-10-09T11:18:00.017+01:00

I-Pod Shuffle

The last ten tracks of the day:

1 Dock Boggs, Danville Girl

2 Moon Mulligan, Give Me My Dime Back

3 Billie Holliday and Lester Young, The Man I Love

4 Lightnin' Hopkins, Don't Think Because You're Pretty

5 Lennie Tristano, Line Up

6 Little Walter, Mercy Baby

7 Bob Dylan, Cry a While

8 Rainer Ptacek, Time Slips Away

9 Mose Allison, That's All Right

10 Serge Chaloff, I've Got the World On a String

Also, anyone care to offer their opinion on a piece of music that best personifies noir. My vote goes to Frank Honeyboy Patt's Bloodstains on the Wall: "Sheets and pillows torn to pieces, bloodstains all over the wall/I know when I went out this morning, I didn't leave the phone out in the hall." Then, "Better come clean baby, I soon will find out/the detectives will be hanging around my door, they want to know what it's all about/Tell me baby what's those bloodstains on the wall/I know there weren't any there this morning/Didn't leave the phone out in the hall..." Though those latter lyrics come from Lazy Lester's version, slightly more comprehensible than Honeyboy's (who, I think, sings "I wasn't injured this morning" rather than "when I went out this morning"), though not nearly so intense.

2009-10-07T14:44:00.007+01:00

Heartbreak & Vine Music Festival

Day 17

The final day.

Lap guitarists

Jerry Douglas
Harry Manx and Greg Leisz
David Lindley
Kelly Joe Phelps

COMING NEXT: THE HEARTBREAK & VINE FILM FESTIVAL

2009-10-07T08:38:00.003+01:00

Heartbreak & Vine Music Festival

Day 16

My favorite contemporary Manouche guitarists

2009-10-06T08:52:00.008+01:00

Heartbreak & Vine Music Festival

Day 15

More piano players, but from out a slightly different genre(s).

Hoagy Carmichael, Gene Austin, Moon Mulligan, Ivory Joe Hunter

2009-10-05T08:39:00.001+01:00

Heartbreak & Vine Music Festival

Day 14

New Orleans Piano Players

Nobody plays piano like these guys do.

Eddie Bo
Tuts Washington
James Booker
Professor Longhair
Allen Toussaint

2009-10-04T08:06:00.005+01:00

Heartbreak & Vine Music Festival

Day 13

Songsters

Lonnie Johnson
Mance Lipsomb
Skip James
Mississippi John Hurt

2009-10-03T09:01:00.007+01:00

Heartbreak & Vine Music Festival

Day 12

Little Walter, with Hound Dog Taylor, then with Koko Taylor

Coming soon: The Heartbreak & Vine Film Festival.

2009-10-02T08:39:00.005+01:00

Heartbreak & Vine Music Festival

Day 11

Time to bring things up to date.

Two contemporary guys. Or close to it.

Guy Clark with a gothic tale and the late Rainer Ptacek putting a little reality on the box.

2009-10-01T08:17:00.004+01:00

Heartbreak & Vine Music Festival

Day 10

Blues from the Delta: Fred McDowell and Bukka White.

I was privileged enough to know both of these great newsmen.

2009-09-29T12:08:00.008+01:00

Heartbreak & Vine Music Festival

Day 9

Cool

Bill Evans playing Waltz For Debbie, accompanied by Scott LeFaro
Count Basie, with Wardell Gray looking pretty nifty and playing beautifully. Along with Clark Terry and Buddy DeFranco.

2009-09-29T09:55:00.002+01:00

Heartbreak & Vine Music Festival

Day 8

Tennessee Ernie Ford with Speedy West and Jimmy Bryant.

My dad had a radio program every Sunday on KXLA in Pasadena, just after Tennesse Ernie's program. I used to go to the station with him and Tennessee Ernie would spend a minute or two joking with me. I couldn't have been more than four or five at the time. We always got there to catch the last couple numbers by the band which I guess must have included Speedy West and Jimmy Bryant. What I would to give to go back to that time. I know Buddy Charlton and Leon Rhodes were great, as were Leon McAuliffe and Eldon Shamblin/Junior Barnard for Bob Wills, or Vance Terry and Jimmy Rivers, but I've always had a soft spot for the frenetic playing of Speedy and Jimmy.

Okay, here's another great duo- Buddy Emmons and Danny Gratton- though clearly they never officially played together in a group.

2009-09-29T09:53:00.002+01:00

Poisonville by Massimo Carlotto and Marco Videtta

I've been an avid reader of Massimo Carlotto ever since The Columbian Mule, followed by The Master of Knots and The Goodbye Kiss. His work epitomises noir fiction and gives an interesting and accurate picture of the dark side of contemporary Italian culture. In Poisonville he has teamed up with script writer Marco Videta (Il secreto del successo, Sotto il sole nero). This is a more expansive and political novel from Carlotta's previous outings. Of course title derives from Hammett's Red Harvest. And like the latter novel, Poisonville is a book about how endemic corruption has become, and not just in northeast Italy where the book is set. In the new world order, everyone must share the guilt. And though localised, the crimes spread far and wide (timely considering that, as I read the novel, the Guardian reported the dumping of waste in the Ivory Coast by British oil trader Trafigura). Given Carlotta sparse style, it's difficult to tell which sections he wrote and which sections are Videtta's. I would suspect that the more discursive, political sections are Videtta's, but that is only a guess. Perhaps it was a genuine collaboration. Though it hardly matters, given the fina result. Nor does it matter that it was easy to figure out who the culprit was before I was halfway through the book, causing me to practically scream at the characters to realize what was going on. But family ties can hide the obvious. But then Poisonville isn't really a whodunnit as such, but something much more interesting. Moreover, it's a good thing the city in which Poisonville takes place is never named, otherwise Carlotta and Videtta would not be all that welcome there. Once again, Europa has proved itself to be in the front line of European crime fiction.