Showing posts with label David Edgerley Gates. Show all posts
Showing posts with label David Edgerley Gates. Show all posts

08 December 2021

What Remains


I’m not always a fan of a dead writer’s unfinished work being ghostwritten by somebody else; in fact, very seldom.

Islands in the Stream, maybe.  And that was only lightly edited, not actually reimagined.  (Pastiche is a different animal: Sherlock Holmes, Jane Austen and vampires.)  That being said, I’m going to immediately contradict myself, and declare for The Dark Remains.

Back story.

  William McIlvanney wrote three Laidlaw books, along with a bunch of other stuff, before his death in 2015.  He left behind notes and a rough draft for a fourth Laidlaw, and Ian Rankin was invited to try his hand.  McIlvanney is widely considered the eminence grise behind Tartan noir, Rankin the most visible brand name, and Rankin has cited McIlvanney as a prime influence. 

You could, I suppose, make a case for

Tartan noir going back to Macbeth, but for our purposes, let’s set the benchmark at Robert Louis Stevenson.  One of the Rebus books is titled Resurrection Men, which conjures up Burke and Hare, of course, but also Stevenson’s meditation on the anatomist murders, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Stevenson is as much a model for style as material.

  His tone is always reasonable, never hysterical, and the most hair-raising incidents and adventures are served up with a dash of the convincingly commonplace.  Jim Hawkins in the apple barrel.  You hear the echoes in McIlvanney, the flat affect of tone, the undercurrent of violence.  It might remind you, too, of Ted Lewis, a Manchester boy who wrote Jack’s Return Home, the novel Get Carter was based on.  The harmonic below decks is the periphery of despair.

It’s fair to say that if Stevenson wrote romances, then McIlvanney and Rankin are writing

anti-romances.  Laidlaw and Rebus aren’t romantics, in the sense that Chandler’s Marlowe is, nor are they nihilists, like the gang chieftains they so often rub the wrong way.  Not two sides of the same coin.  And not, in other words, a literary convention.  What they bring to the table is something more specific and grave, less of a fashion or a fancy.

This is grounded, as well, in language.

  They lean away from the lyric, not into it.  I don’t mean that their writing is leaden, or pedestrian, far from it, but that it has an earthbound density.  Words have weight.  They’re not to be squandered, but counted out like coin.

Talking about

Glasgow:

“It’s a small town.”
“You could paint it in a day.”

Or:

“Not so much a city as a hangover.”

Why a woman left her husband:

“He bored me to my back teeth.”

And this:

“Ach, he’s somebody’s rearing.” 

“You’re telling me even arseholes have their good side and deserve some sort of justice?”

“The law’s not about justice.  It’s a system we’ve put in place because we can’t have justice.”

This last is the closest you get to any kind of social commentary.

  Curious, because both McIlvanney and Rankin clearly have opinions, but choose to express them through character and circumstance.  A lot of these people, if not in dead-ends, are headed down one-way streets, or locked into a fated embrace.  There’s something more than a little Manichean about it, with choice playing no part. 

Can you tell where McIlvanney leaves off, and Rankin picks up a dropped stitch?

  Nope.  The voice is consistent.  I think that’s a testament to Rankin.  He doesn’t impose.  It’s still McIlvanney’s story, and feels of a piece, breast to back. 

‘Remains,’ in the title, is used as a verb, not a noun.

  It comes up as a line of dialogue, late in the book: darkness is what we’re left with, when all is said and done.  But you could be forgiven for hearing it differently.  I’m sure McIlvanney and Rankin enjoy having it both ways.

24 November 2021

The Unwashed


 

I got a call from the laundromat where I drop off my stuff for wash, dry, and fold, and they’d been broken into.  Whoever it was had rifled the laundry bags, and mine was light a couple of pounds.  I was a little nonplussed.  Maybe a junkie, or maybe just kids, random mischief.  Maybe they thought they’d get lucky, and find rolls of quarters, who knows?  But suppose somebody so desperate, they were looking through people’s dirty clothes hoping to find a pair of jeans that fit, or a sweatshirt.  It’s like stealing from the Goodwill drop box, or diving the dumpster behind a supermarket for bruised fruit.  There are people in this country who can’t imagine such a thing, just as there are people living hand-to-mouth, who can’t imagine it any other way. 

The next thing that crossed my radar was in The New Yorker archive, a profile of David Simon while he was shooting the last season of The Wire.  He remarks at one point that they’d taken the ideas of Greek tragedy, of fated, doomed people, and used them in the context of a contemporary urban environment.  “Instead of these Olympian gods,” he says, “indifferent, venal, selfish, hurling lightning bolts, … postmodern institutions are the indifferent gods.”  The social contract, in other words, has failed.

What this reminds me of is the postwar world of the 1940’s, noir and its discontents.  The subtext of noir has always been the collapse of moral order, and the foreground has always been a rat in a maze.  The indifferent gods are the forces of brute capital, in one reading, or simply the exercise of power.  The noir hero is reduced to bare essentials, and pitted against Fate.  He maneuvers across a hostile landscape, and internalizes the darkness. 

Another point, here, is that noir is often about people on the margins.  But this goes back to the 20’s and 30’s.  Warners, for example, was more class-conscious – or more socially self-conscious – than, say, Fox.  It’s the difference between Ida Lupino and Greer Garson (and meaning no disrespect to Greer Garson, either), and there’s an enormous contrast in social content between a movie like My Man Godfrey and Wild Boys of the Road.  Jack Warner got wise to Hitler early on, too, and wasn’t shy about speaking his mind, although it cost the studio money: Germany was a big market, and the price of doing business there was to keep your voice down.  Warners had always been big in gangster pictures, too, and there’s a certain subversive glamor there.  I think, though, that it took the war, and the exhaustion that followed, with the Red Scare, to create the necessary conditions.

It isn’t simply cynicism; that’s a misreading.  It’s weariness, and mistrust, and the deeper paranoia that the Cold War brought.  Look, for instance, at Shack Out on 101, or Pickup on South Street, or the almost definitive Kiss Me, Deadly.  At the end, when Gaby Rodgers opens the case, and the white-hot Furies spill out, what is it that’s lured her to this Doom?  The moth to the flame, it would seem.

Are we seeing something similar, in this uncertain and mistrustful present?  Is the Zombie Apocalypse a metaphor for the dispossessed, or should it be taken literally?  We internalize the darkness, and we seem to have fallen into a place that’s dangerously familiar.  The noir world is narrow.  It’s persecuted and conspiratorial.  Nothing is what it seems.  Authority is suspect.  The only constant is treachery, each of us isolated in our fear.

We’re trapped in generic conventions, and we know the story ends badly.  We’ve seen it before.



27 October 2021

Shelf Life


There was a recent piece in the local paper about a homeless guy who was a crime victim, and the New Mexican referred to him as “unhoused,” which I’m assuming is a new locution.  Mind you, this is a guy my dad would have called a bum, plain and simple. We should take a look at some context.  There was a policy adopted a few years back – a few being relative, it might have been during the Reagan administration – to de-institutionalize the homeless.  Whatever guiding principle was involved, the proximate result was to dump a lot of people on the street who didn’t have survival skills.  What they had were serious drug and alcohol addictions, and unresolved mental health issues.  The problem hasn’t been much alleviated by successive social policies, and it doesn’t matter whether you change the descriptives to somehow humanize these people at the bottom of the food chain.  They’re still in bad shape, just the same.

I realize the anti-woke crowd would suggest that we’re getting overly sensitive to hurting people’s feelings, but it’s not about hurt feelings.  That’s to willfully misunderstand the framing of the argument.  Language is as much about the people applying the labels as it is about the people being labeled, if not more.  Spazz and ree-tard were in vogue back when we were in grade school, and they may still have currency, but if kids use them, they’d probably say they mean no insult to anybody who’s actually spastic or developmentally challenged; it’s exaggeration for effect.  The days are hopefully long past when we threw stones at the witless.  As for words (as opposed to sticks and stones), the same goes for Quentin Tarantino’s favorite noun, or any number of common slang epithets for gay guys or Jews, Italians or Irish or Arabs, and calling somebody a towelhead says more about you than it says about them.

Vocabulary goes in and out of fashion.  We use the term dial tone, but it’s untethered to physical reality, because who dials anymore?  Likewise, a word like Okie, which was specific to homegrown refugees from the Dust Bowl, and these days is as dated as The Grapes of Wrath.  (Except for those pesky refugees, the mojados who just keep coming.)

As a writer, and particularly a writer who’s done his share of period pieces, I’d be the first to admit that colorful language reinforces atmosphere, and authenticity.  Leaving aside the unhappy plethora of prithee, sirrahs in Sir Walter Scott’s medieval fables, he uses picturesque and homely lingo to honest effect in his Border stories, which are closer to his own time.  And for my part, I doubt if the Mickey Counihan stories would have the same gamy flavor if I sanitized the way he talks.  On the other hand, we recognize that even if this is “the way they talk,” common vulgarities perpetuate ugly stereotypes.  It’s not a matter of whether we say these things aloud or in secret.

Language is organic, not prescriptive.  It grows on its own.  The French have an Academy, to hand down the rules, but they can’t keep the weeds out.  I’m no big fan of eviscerating language, of diminishing its muscularity.  Why water your whiskey?  A lot of the time, there’s no real substitute for brute Anglo-Saxon invective.  But there’s a difference between talking dirty, and using language that’s offensive because it singles people out for ridicule, and diminishes them.  It cultivates lazy habits of thought: Jews are grasping, black people are shiftless, Mexicans are illiterate beaners.

We can retire usage, just like clothing.  I might still fit into those paisley bell-bottoms, but hopefully friends and family would stage an intervention.  Sentimental attachment only goes so far.  Enough with the hand-me-downs. 

13 October 2021

Endeavour


I was a big fan of John Thaw as Morse, and an even bigger fan of Lewis, when they brought Kevin Whately back for the sequel.  Then there’s cross-casting, Clare Holman in Island at War, for example, which also featured Laurence Fox (who later shows up as Lord Palmerston in Victoria).  She pops in on an episode of Death in Paradise, and she and Kevin have separate guest shots on New Tricks - his the more sinister.  A treat, watching them out of character, playing against their familiar type. 

Why, then, does the prequel Endeavour leave me cold?


Perhaps it’s a resistance to origin stories.
  In both the series Inspector Morse, and in Colin Dexter’s books, Morse is already established, and somewhat opaque.  He has a history, but it doesn’t appear to weigh on him overmuch.  He has associates - you wouldn’t quite call them friends – but doesn’t play favorites.  He has eccentricities, some of them fixed, some fluid, but in fact he seems almost flat, as a character, and not fully in the round.  John Thaw gives him a larger presence than he has on the page.  Colin Dexter himself said, after Thaw’s death, that there could be no more Morse, that he couldn’t imagine another actor in the part. 

The cleverness of Lewis is that they don’t try to revive Morse, but they do give him imaginative echoes.  Lewis, now the senior, has a less procedural junior, instead of the other way around.  Lewis is luckier in love than Morse, or at least not star-crossed.  The puzzles are, if anything, more tangled, and the resolutions sometimes more uncertain.  They have a classic shape, but they’re less than final.




Mysteries have a formality.  We want them to satisfy.  The rules are bent, the public compact is broken, and what’s gone wrong needs to be put right.  You can push and pull at these boundaries, but that essential balance remains a constant.  If a mystery doesn’t do this, then it’s actually something else.  I’m not complaining if it is something else, but the mystery qua mystery is deeply conservative, in a social sense.  It can be a novel of manners, à la Christie, or Sayers, or even Ross Macdonald.  It can be a novel of bad manners, for that matter, like Lehane or Dutch Leonard, but it shares that same unity. 

My apparent issue with Endeavour isn’t that it doesn’t play fair.  Not at all.  The exec producer and writer is a guy named Russell Lewis (coincidentally), who wrote “The Way Through the Woods” for Morse, five episodes of Cadfael, two out of three episodes for Heat of the Sun, a Trevor Eve series, and five for Lewis, among a host of other credits.  Clearly, no slouch.  My crankiness is that I don’t find the impulse to explore Morse’s back story in any way needful.  In other words, the show would work for me as a standalone, but as part of the canon, it gets on my nerves.

OK, so I’m a grump.  I think if you had little or no experience of Morse, or Lewis, you could well enjoy Endeavour as another ingenious and not overly gimmicky Brit police procedural.  For me, too much previous.  But don’t take my word for it.  The show has many strengths, the writing, the cast, the production values.  We’re back in Oxford, for one, with its evocative locations, and back in the 1960’s, with a little of the rough-and-ready, so far as the cops go.  You could do worse. 




All the same, I have to say, I’d rather go back and revisit those nine seasons of Lewis.  It was charmed.  That easy.

22 September 2021

The Siberian Dilemma


I’ve written here before about Martin Cruz Smith and his Arkady Renko stories.  I’ve liked his other novels - Stallion Gate is one of my favorites - but the Renko books are somehow qualitatively different.  They have a flavor of science fiction, almost, or alternative history.  They are a kind of alternative history, when you come down to it, or an alternative reality.



You take your phone off the hook and spin the dial (this is
Moscow, remember) to zero, and put a pencil in the hole to keep it there; there’s enough electrical interference to screw up the transmission from the tap on your line.  You take off your windshield wipers and put them in a paper bag under the front seat; otherwise, somebody will steal them.  Where is Red Square? the fluent but non-native speaker asks, but confuses the public space, ploshchad’, with the geometric shape, kvadrat, and throws everybody else into even greater confusion.  The ice sheet in Polar Star, the white light of the horizon line in The Siberian Dilemma, the dead zone around the containment facility in Wolves Eat Dogs; the physical environment is a hazard.  The psychic environment no less: the ghost of Stalin stalks the Metro, an old KGB enemy is found floating in Havana Bay, the crusading journalist Tatiana Petrovna is thrown out of a sixth-story window, and the verdict is suicide.  Renko is first cousin to Bernie Gunther, another more-or-less honest cop trying to keep his footing on a slippery slope.



Which brings us to “the Siberian dilemma.”  If the ice cracks underneath you, and you plunge into the frigid water of Lake Baikal, you can drown, or you can pull yourself out, and still wet, freeze to death immediately in the cold air.  So, which do you choose?  Fatalistic as Russians can be, the answer is that it’s better to do something, even if that something is equally doomed.



This would seem to define Renko’s character, character in the sense of destiny.  He’s nothing if not a stubborn bastard.  He survives any number of snares laid by the more politically savvy, yet they over-complicate things.  Renko isn’t devious
enough, actually.  He’s easily led, but not so easily led astray.  Somebody more sophisticated would fall victim to a sophisticated device.  Renko staggers across thin ice, but it carries his weight, and a trickster wouldn’t be so lucky.




The interesting thing about Renko is that while he’s by no means innocent in the ways of the world, he has a certain naïve optimism.  He himself would say that if you expect the worst of people, you’ll never be disappointed, but he keeps looking to be surprised by hope.  It’s a terrific internal tension, and it mirrors something in what we imagine to be the Russian national political identity, the reformers vice the careerists and opportunists.  Although the punch line hasn’t been written, we’d all like to imagine ourselves surprised by hope, and it’s not a Russian failing, alone.  Aspiration is a stubborn bastard.

08 September 2021

Battle Fatigue


Still thinking about A Song for the Dark Times, the Ian Rankin book I talked up a couple of weeks ago, I realize that it’s effectively the first COVID story I’ve read, although not self-consciously so.  Rankin tells us in an afterword that he began the novel before the pandemic got legs, but the quarantine caught up with him.  Suffice it to say that while COVID doesn’t make a literal appearance, it makes itself felt.  The characters all seem to be overtaken by tremendous weariness, utterly exhausted, savage and strung out and wired, their default mechanism an unprovoked strike at soft tissue.

I also mentioned PTSD in reference to A Song for the Dark Times.  I can’t be the first person to suggest we’ve had a national psychotic episode over the last four years, and that toxicity hit a boiling point in 2020.  There’s a marked difference, though, between Carl Hiaasen’s Squeeze Me, a venomous (excuse the pun) satire of a public con artist known to the Secret Service as Mastodon, and the Rankin book – not least because Hiaasen is laughing through tears of despair, but because of the timing.  Hiaasen got his book to press before COVID, although it came out in 2020, and Rankin broke the tape just a hair after, when the pandemic had begun to tighten its grip.  The full effects weren’t known, of course, but fatigue was clearly manifest already.  We were so sick and tired of the unending vomit skit, that when we actually realized how unprepared we were for genuine political respiratory failure, it fell on us like the Plagues of Egypt.  It was absolutely biblical, you couldn’t help feeling we didn’t deserve it somehow.

All in all, it meets the clinical hallmarks of escaping an abusive relationship.  (Except the guy is still out there haunting us, absent Van Helsing and the stake.)  Looked at in context, it could just as readily be combat stress, or alcoholic parents, the gaslighting husband, predatory manipulation, emotional or sexual, the entire vocabulary of passive-aggressive, narcissistic grievance.  The betrayal of trust, the loss of faith.  You could perhaps survive the death camps, but then be consumed by survivor’s guilt. 

A lot is going to be written about this shitty, corrupt, and incompetent Administration, and history won’t be kind, but I’m wondering more about how we approach the dry heaves and the hangover.  Reading, for example, Jackie Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs books, which take place between the wars, they lean on the horror of the trenches.  Her grandfather, we learn in her memoir, This Time Next Year We’ll Be Laughing, was a shell-shocked veteran of WWI.  (We don’t often get this kind of objective correlative with a writer; in this instance, we get the smell of the hops, and the scent of class difference, nothing if not quietly poisonous.)  Our own history is instructive, how we’ve dealt with race, for example, in literature, or popular culture.  You could make a good argument that Chester Himes writes with more vigor or honesty than some other literary lights, but he wrote in a genre that was below the salt.  Blind Man with a Pistol isn’t a title that conjures up the Pulitzer.  So how do we engage the age of Coronavirus and the collapse of political conversation? 

We can look at Latin American literature, in the shifting squalls of dictatorship and social reform, or perhaps Spain, after the Civil War, the country constipated by Franco.  Socialist Realism.  I’m not joking.  Some animals are more equal than others, Orwell reminds us, and at the moment the Right is squealing, but the Left has played the victim card to similar effect.  Don’t get me wrong, I think the Right is weeping crocodile tears. 

I’m asking a different question, which isn’t about our political sympathies.  What happens when our sympathies are exhausted? 

I remember the AIDS epidemic.  I happened to be living in Provincetown in the 1980’s, and gay guys were dropping like flies.  Some of them were close friends, like Howard Gruber, who owned Front Street, some of them were simply people I knew or worked with, friends of friends.  It was about the math.  Your odds were bad.  You fucked a guy you met at Tea Dance, and you didn’t use a rubber?  Personal liberty, I guess.  Like not wearing a seat belt.  The crazy thing is that it took so long to penetrate.

Elvis Presley posed for his polio shot before he went on Ed Sullivan, in 1956.

How will we address these plague years?  Not so much the crazy, the QAnon and that crap.  There was a time when the John Birch Society told us that fluoridation in the water supply was a Commie plot, and Stalin was in our toothpaste.  How do we make this not seem completely nuts?

On the other hand, how is it not completely nuts? 

25 August 2021

A Song for the Dark Times


How come Inspector Rebus gets better and better? Lee Child asks on the dust jacket of A Song for the Dark Times, and the plain fact is that the books have only gone from strength to strength.  Rebus doesn’t get stale, because for thirty-odd years Ian Rankin has never phoned it in.

The trick, if we can call it that, is that Rebus isn’t a static character.  He’s thickened, over time, and fleshed out.  He’s also failed, in significant ways.  The chief dynamic in A Song for the Dark Times is his relationship with his daughter, but more to the point, the damage done.  He’s haunted by the very real possibility that he can never make it right.

Then there’s the atmosphere, the environment.  Rebus isn’t a solitary, although he’d give you an argument.  The people around him are no more generic than he is.  The gangster, Big Ger Cafferty, back for another go; Siobahn Clarke, the dogged junior partner, now DI; and Malcolm Fox, first given space in The Complaints.  The departure, literally, in A Song for the Dark Times, has Rebus taken out of Edinburgh and dropped on the windswept coastline of the far North, in sight of the Orkneys.  Not remotely his turf.

There is, yes, a parallel investigation back home, under the watchful eye of Siobhan Clarke, and there are tempting overlaps and odd confluences – how not? – but the engine of the story is Rebus out of his element.  Displaced in the physical world, and on shaky legs, emotionally.  He’s never been demonstrative, our John, but he’s self-aware, and his melancholy here is a sort of bass note, pitched low, not so much heard as felt, as if to name it would give it power.

The story is very much a suitable tangle, the buried past, an uncertain future, a climate of anxiety our only constant in the present.  Rankin remarks in a note at the end that the book was begun before COVID, but the process carried forward into lockdown.  There’s a sense of those dark energies in the novel, a lingering PTSD, something I doubt we’ll shake anytime soon. I don’t think A Song for the Dark Times is meant as a fable, but it can’t help absorbing the oppressive forces of psychic quarantine and illness. 


11 August 2021

Shuffle Off


I was invited to submit a story to an anthology, and there were specific requirements for setting and length.  But writing it, I was reminded yet again that you really can accomplish more with less.  There are economies of scale in every endeavor, modest or grand.

An illustration.

If you’ve seen the Russell Crowe version of 3:10 to Yuma, released in 2007, it’s very much opened up to horizons and vistas.  It’s shot in color and widescreen, with an eye for landscape.  The characters have the context of place.  Oh, and it runs two hours.  In contrast, the 1957 picture, with Glenn Ford as the outlaw, tops out at an hour and a half, in crisp and beautiful black-and-white, and it’s more claustrophobic, pulled in tightly to the people, the arid terrain a hostile backdrop.  But thirdly, going back to the source material, a Dutch Leonard story published in Dime Western in 1953, the outside world doesn’t feature much at all; the “action” of the story, if you can even call it that, takes place mostly in the hotel room.  It’s about the shifting dynamic between the two men, in the dialogue. 


The story I wrote, titled “Shuffle Off to Buffalo,” is in fact about a couple of guys waiting for a train, and I kept circling back to 3:10 to Yuma, not because I wanted to conjure it up, particularly, but because I was after that economy.  You didn’t need an encyclopedic back story, if you have the odd convincing detail.  I wasn’t even sure you needed to know why they were waiting.  Was it enough that you (and they) understood it was necessary?  I decided that was a little too artful, Vladimir and Estragon.  But the essential rule, per Elmore Leonard, remained: don’t explain when you don’t have to, it simply generates clutter. 

I also used another piece of tried-and-true, courtesy of Raymond Chandler.  If in doubt, have a guy come through the door with a gun.  I wasn’t in doubt or at a loss, by any means, but I needed a catalyst, and the shortest distance between two points was a gunfight.  I was spare with detail here, as well.  It took all of five lines. 

Another thing is that many of the Mickey Counihan stories, of which this is one, have a reverse at the end.  Not necessarily a twist, or an O. Henry, but a deadpan finish, a throwaway line by Mickey that turns the story back on itself.  Mark Billingham – who started out doing stand-up – once remarked that writing suspense has a lot in common with a comedy routine.  There’s a set-up and a punchline, and in both cases, the punchline depends on the reversal of expectations.



Lastly, you simply get a lot of satisfaction from stripping out the inessential.  Not that you shouldn’t drift into eddies and pools, or allow for moments of stillness.  It’s often its own reward, for me, the grace note, the dropped stitch, something caught out of the corner of your eye, but in this instance, there were no DVD extras.

28 July 2021

Vikings


One of my embarrassing favorites is The Vikings, a Kirk Douglas picture from 1958, directed by Richard Fleischer. Fleischer had done 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea a couple of years before, with Douglas and James Mason, for Disney. 20,000 Leagues still gives me nightmares, that giant squid. The Vikings sticks to my ribs for different reasons.

Clearly, a lot of it is bogus. The wife accused of adultery, with her pigtails pinned to the wood stocks, and her husband throwing the axe. The guy loses his nerve, and Kirk steps in. (We know, and so does everybody else, that Kirk himself has been schtupping her.) But he saves her bacon. Then there’s the stuff that you figure was probably made up, but rings true. Kirk, again, dancing on the oars as the long boats make their way up the fjord. The story Dick Fleischer tells is that the stunt guys started walking the oars, and Douglas said he could do it, too. Fleischer is, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, if you break your balls, the picture shuts down. Douglas goes ahead, and you can see it’s him, not a stunt double. And then the moment when Tony Curtis throws his hawk at Kirk, and the bird takes his eye out. These are guys who can inhabit a mutual hatred.

So, when The Vikings comes on TV, the TV Guide listing calls it “Incredible, but rousing, Norse mayhem.” I could cotton to that description. Borgnine is worth the price of admission. He’s about to be pushed into a pit of wolves. He turns to Tony Curtis and asks for a sword. Curtis gives him one, and Borgnine jumps into the pit, calling, “ODIN!” Is this remotely genuine? Who cares? The immediate result is that Curtis then gets his hand cut off. Fair is fair.

I thought I’d give Vikings a shot. It’s supposed to be significantly more authentic. The hair is certainly scary. But it’s all mayhem, all the time. I admit, when Ragnar takes Gabe Byrne down (spoiler alert, but you knew it was coming), it was thoroughly satisfying, but these people are portrayed, essentially, as brute psychopaths.

Excuse me. These are the guys who sailed out into the cold, dark Atlantic and discovered Iceland, and Greenland, and then the Canadian Maritimes, for European fisheries. They established Baltic trading posts. They raided England and Ireland, and the coast of France. Over time, they became not Vikings, a word that means pirates, but Normans. And they changed Europe.

Of the half-dozen books on history my grandfather wrote, two are still in print, and still taught in courses on the Middle Ages. The Renaissance of the 12th Century is the better-known, but The Normans in European History runs a close second. His thesis is that the Norsemen, who began as ravaging predators, turned into settlers, and governors. Normandy, the Kingdom of Sicily, the Crusader states.

The longest-lasting and most influential Norman adventure is of course the Conquest, in 1066, the defeat of the Saxon king Harold by the bastard duke William of Normandy.

There’s a straight line, leading to the Bayeux Tapestry and the Domesday Book. A legacy of those sea-raiders in their long boats, with their devotion to the Norse gods of war. Their striving, their fury in battle, their thirst for spoils, their fierce clan loyalties, and at the last, their hunger for Valhalla and an ever-lasting fame.

Incredible, yes, but rousing.


18 July 2021

Spycraft, Old School


Zoo Station

Usually SleuthSayers learn spycraft from the invisible-ink pen of David Edgerley Gates. A month ago, Janice Law slipped past the yet-to-be-built Berlin Wall to recall David Downing. I depend heavily on my SleuthSayers colleagues for reading material, and I ordered up Zoo Station.

The tale has a much older ‘golden age’ feel of the 1960s and I had to double-check the copyright of the first in the series, 2007. The initial half of the book is slow paced but it builds tension out of proportion to pages turned. I wondered how the author accomplished that, and I’m not the only one. One critic’s comment on the back cover says, “Downing has shown that he can produce that creepy sense of paranoia along with the best of them.”

Furthermore, the book contains a feature I’ve rarely encountered outside a school textbook, a ‘Reading Group Guide’. Question 9 reads: “Given the relative lack of overt violence, how does Downing create the novel’s sense of menace?”

Yeah. How did he do that?

I have a few notions, but other readers will surely come up with better insights. Mostly I credit the immersive nature of the story where the author puts us in the scene with the perfect serving of detail.

The story’s set as the 1930s draw to a close. Perceptive people smell war on the horizon, but live in hope it doesn’t come. Kristallnacht has left its mark. Kindertransport is under way. Jews aren’t permitted to work, travel, or dine in restaurants. While the word ‘ghetto’ hasn’t yet arisen, Jewry are evermore isolated in restricted parts of cities.

The author has allowed history to do much of the heavy lifting. Much of life seems normal, ordinary, but it won’t remain so. We know the horrors that are coming; we want to warn the innocent, tell them to flee for their lives.

Whereas trains and train stations appear in backdrops and settings, mentions of government buildings feel eerily ominous. Downing mentions 15-foot high doors, evoking the architecture envisioned by Albert Speer.

No worthy espionage story would be complete without Soviet spies. One Russian spymaster isn’t so bad, but woe be he who crosses the path of Stalinist spymistress Irina Borskaya. She eats her young.

The novel’s protagonist, British journalist John Russell, advances through a character arc from somnambulance to getting his rear into gear, helping to get the word out while saving a life or two. His actress girlfriend suggests a hint of Cabaret, but with far more gravitas than Sally Bowles.

A minor note jarred me. Russell is virtually broke when we first meet him. He lives simply, but he drinks goldwasser. It seems a pretension more in line with 007 than our impecunious reporter. I excused the gold-flecked drink on the grounds it was a product of Gdańsk (Danzig), but the affectation seemed peculiar.

Along the line, our hero obtains a ten-year-old motorcar, a Hanomag. I thought myself reasonably familiar with cars of bygone eras, and those of the late 1920s are the peak of design– the Mercedes SSK, the Cord, the Packard, the Dusenberg, the Bugatti, and the gorgeous Auburn.

1928 Hanomag
1928 Hanomag © Bonhams Auction

I hadn’t heard of Hanomag. I had to stop to look it up. It turned out to be one of the homeliest automobiles ever made. Easiest way to tell the front from the back is to look for the single, motorcycle-style headlight, on the left in this photo. Oh well, our hero’s Hanomag ran most of the time and many folks had no cars at all.

As Janice suggests, Zoo Station reads as old style spycraft with luggage storage and postal drops, suitcases with false bottoms, and shadowy men who make others disappear. Downing’s novels aren’t nearly as gloomy as those of, say, John Le Carré.

When you’re bored with the current digital library on your Kindle or Kobo, stop in a musty used book store and pick up a dog-eared copy of Zoo Station. Go old school.

23 June 2021

Hunter's War


 

Stephen Hunter’s new novel, Basil’s War, dropped in early May, published by Mysterious Press.  Later in the month, Book Passage put together a video interview, with Steve and Doug Preston.  You can check it out here: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmz0D1o8e_E

 

Basil’s War is a lot of fun, kind of a John Buchan send-up, with a lot of derring-do and Brit insouciance.  The net gain for me, though, was to lead me back to some of Hunter’s earlier stuff.  My first experience of Hunter was Hot Springs, which is a doozy, but as often happens when you run into somebody new to you, who’s got back-list, you start at the beginning.  I picked up The Master Sniper, his début thriller, and the spell was cast.

 


Hunter hit his stride in the 1990’s, Point of Impact, Dirty White Boys, Black Light, and Time to Hunt.  Not that he’s fallen off since, but going back and picking these books up again, after an absence, you find your earlier enthusiasm  reinforced, even while you notice different things, and for different reasons. 

 

We know our strengths, as writers, and we naturally play to them.  One of Hunter’s surpassing gifts is a feel for the physical, an ability to read the room, or the landscape, and adjust to threat posture.  John McPhee wrote a terrific book about Bill Bradley, the college ball player, called A Sense of Where You Are, a reference to kinesthetics.  An athlete will know his position on the court, the geometry of the game.  Hunter is fluent in setting up a physical description.  You don’t need a schematic.  You inhabit that space. 

 


The gunfight in the darkened tattoo parlor, in Dirty White Boys.  One of the most astonishing set-pieces in anything I’ve ever read.  It’s told with multiple POV, and the guys in the dark, with the gun flashes blowing up their night vision, can’t triangulate each other’s position.  But the reader is never disoriented.  You can feel the physicality, the geometry, the ground shifting under your feet.

 

OK, the guns.  It’s true that you can’t talk about Hunter without talking about guns.  Black Light is very much about guns; so is Time to Hunt.  Bullet weight, point of aim, subsonics, and the rest.  It’s all pertinent, mind.  The gun that kills Earl, in the cornfield – or the gun they think killed Earl – is a .38 Super.  A real gunfighter’s weapon, Bob Lee points out: Dillinger carried one.  But not that common, not in 1955, not in Arkansas.  You’d likely find a lot of GI guns, surplus .45’s left over from the war, but that hot caliber?  It sticks in Bob Lee’s mind, an anomaly.  And he’s right, of course. 

 


Somebody once asked Hunter, couldn’t you get rid of all that gun crap?  Which reminds me of a story about Tony Hillerman.  He was shopping the first of the Leaphorn books, The Blessing Way, and one agent he sent it to said she thought it was good, but there was an awful lot of that Indian crap. 

 

Hunter says he was reading about The Wild Bunch, and it turned out you couldn’t get blanks to cycle reliably in a .45 auto, but blanks would work in a .38 Super, which were readily available in Mexico.  Armed with this piece of movie lore, the first thing Hunter does is go on GunBroker and see if he can’t find one.  I did the same thing, me.  I have to say, your .38 Super’s a damn good gun.  Anyway, that’s how come it turns up in Black Light, and later on in Havana.  Writers are magpies, stealing bright things. 

 


So.  I took a trip down memory lane.  I also, however, unreservedly recommend Basil’s War.  It’s mischievous, for one, not something I generally associate with Hunter’s books.  And it’s a puzzle.  (Alan Turing, brought in from Bletchley Park, has an extended cameo.)  I’d almost call it a lark.  Hunter clearly had fun with it.  I did, too.

09 June 2021

Ronnie the Rocket


 

The Hustler came out in 1961, with Paul Newman as Fast Eddie Felson and Jackie Gleason, memorably, as Minnesota Fats.  For those of us who’d been denied a misspent youth – “You’ve got trouble, right here in River City, with a capital T, and that rhymes with P, and that stands for pool” – the movie was a crash course.  I didn’t actually start playing pool myself until a couple of years later, in college, but I tried hard to make up for lost time.

One of my closest pals at Columbia, John Davis, was as rabid a movie buff as I was.  We could quote entire chunks of Lawrence of Arabia to each other; we went to revival houses in Alphabet City to see Seven Samurai and Look Back in Anger, or Paths of Glory; and the time when Albert Finney showed up at the Hagen-Berghof studio where John was taking classes was something akin to the Annunciation (Tom Jones had just been released; Finney was doing Luther on Broadway).  But the biggest solid John did me that fall was to take me down to Times Sq. one early evening, and on a short walk up 7th to the corner of 44th, and then, parting the curtain, so to speak, up the narrow flight of stairs to Ames.

 Ames Billiards is where The Hustler was shot.  It was a second-floor loft space, low and smoky, although in fact they dressed the place down for the picture.  Ames had good lighting and clean restrooms, and people were there to shoot pool, that’s what it was about.  You could get hustled there, yes, but if you were smart, you minded your own business.  Ames wasn’t the place to get into a money game, you’d lose your shirt.  I had my hands full trying to take the boys in the frat houses on Riverside Drive. 

I got my comeuppance a year or so later, when I was in the service.  I met guys in the Air Force who could have put themselves through college playing pool.  Andy Gonzales was one of them.  He had enormous concentration and grace.  It was like watching a big cat.  The languor, and then the sudden application of force.  There was a pool table in the Day Room, so we’d play after lunch, before afternoon classes.  There was also a snooker table, the first time I’d tried one.  The difference is, the pockets on a snooker table are a lot tighter than they are on a pool table.  They’re unforgiving.  If you’re used to the sloppiness of eight-ball, and the sized-down pay tables in a bar, snooker ain’t the game for you.  It requires discipline.

There are a couple of places here in Santa Fe where I used to shoot pool occasionally.  One of them was Garrett’s Desert Inn, which was not quite a dive bar, too well-lit, but very local.  The people who worked across the street in the State Land Office came in for Happy Hour.  Garrett’s fell victim to the If-It-Ain’t-Broke-Don’t-Fix-It syndrome.  The owners decided to go upscale, and stepped on their dicks.  They remodeled, and went through half-a-dozen tenant restaurants, and none of them have had legs.  The other place was the Catamount, on Water St.  Dollar wings, wide-screen TV’s, a sports bar.  But upstairs, they had full-size pool tables.  Not the kind you feed quarters into, real tables.  They went out of business, but I see construction permits posted, so maybe there’s hope, and they’ll reopen.  Pool table slates are heavy.  You’d have to close off the street and bring in a rigging crew, with a crane, to lift those suckers out. 

I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve been getting my fix on YouTube.  Snooker is big business in the UK and the former Crown colonies.  Guys like Ronnie O’Sullivan (the Rocket) and Neil Robertson (an Aussie, the Wonder from Down Under), and Ding Junhui (Enter the Dragon), make real money.  Ronnie the Rocket has a net worth of 14 million bucks and counting.  (He’s also lent his name to a couple of ghostwritten thrillers, but I don’t hold that against him.)

You should watch this guy shoot.

 


Snooker turns out to have arcane rules.  You need to see a couple of games before you begin to figure it out.  And like baseball, it takes as long as it takes.  There aren’t predetermined limits, like hockey or football.  Everything is about position.  You don’t just make the impossible shot, you have to leave yourself with a better one.  It’s about building your score, and the perfect score in snooker is 147.  Fifteen reds, at a point apiece, fifteen blacks, at seven points, and then all six colors, for twenty-seven.  Trust me, you just have to watch, and you’ll pick it up. 


The reason they call Ronnie O’Sullivan the Rocket is that his best time for a perfect game is five minutes and eight seconds.  This is jaw-dropping.  It means you’ve sunk thirty-six balls.  (When you sink a color, it’s re-spotted on the table.)  This means Ronnie is pocketing a ball every eight-and-a-half seconds. 


 
As far as I’m concerned, these guys are like gunfighters.  “I’ll count to three, you can draw on two,” Wyatt Earp tells Andy Warshaw, but Andy says he doesn’t want such a chance.  Snooker is much the same.  Once you slip, and leave the table unprotected, O’Sullivan or John Higgins or Ding are going to clean your clock.  Maybe it’s not as exciting as a gunfight, but it sure as hell is final.  When you get beat, you lose to the faster draw.