Performance Anxiety

Talking to a guy I know – we’ll call him Mike – who was once upon a time in the same trade I was, and who still has skin in the game, I wondered what he thought about how badly the Russians have stepped on their dicks in Ukraine.  There were in fact two parts to the question: why Russia has underperformed so fatally, and why Western intelligence so overestimated their war-fighting capacity beforehand.

Mike happened to be on his way to Ft. Huachuca for a workshop, or a briefing, or a roundtable, at the least a guarded conversation with some other stakeholders on this very subject, so he already had his ducks lined up, and was ready to share them. 

The chief impediment is that Russian command authority is rigidly hierarchal.  The culture and doctrine are top down.  Initiative is career suicide.  And the weakest link is simply that there’s no professional NCO class, not in the sense that an American combat soldier would understand.  Russian junior enlisted are cannon fodder; their sergeants are brutal, indifferent, and corrupt.  Morale is clearly in the toilet, unit cohesion near collapse. 

Where, then, did the intelligence consensus come from, that the Russians were going to kick ass in Ukraine?  Mike had an answer for that one, too.  We put a lot of faith in the hardware.  That’s because intelligence analysis mirrors our own presumptions.  In other words, NSA looks at the performance specs for, say, the MiG-31, and the obvious question is how it stacks up against the F-16.  Same thing with tanks, or infantry weapons: the AK-47 is one of the most copied guns in the world.  Our attention is fixed on the platform.  Mike’s point being that less weight was given to the personnel, the existing skillset of the pilots or the tank crews or the ground-pounders, or in support.

Like a lot of things, once you hear the explanation, you slap your forehead and tell yourself it makes perfect sense.  Nor do I think it’s Monday-morning quarterbacking.  For me, it actually conforms to what I learned back in Berlin, in the 1960’s, during the Cold War, when our target was the Soviet occupying forces in Eastern Europe, and the Warsaw Pact.  Poland and East Germany and Hungary and the other satellites were being trained by Russians, on Russian equipment, so there was a lot of overlap. 

The reason we were there, if I haven’t made it clear before, or if you’re new to this space, was to provide a basic profile of what the Russians could throw at us.  In military vocabulary, it’s called an Order of Battle.  A specific example might be: How many aircraft are at Zossen Wunsdorf? - Are they fighters or ground attack? – And how many pilots? - What’s their readiness posture?  This is all numbing detail, but it kept the Cold War from going hot.

Here’s why I don’t think the Russians have learned anything in fifty years.  Back in the day, they had sophisticated systems and platforms, but they didn’t trust them, or they didn’t trust their people, which adds up to the same.  They scrambled fighters, for drills, using Ground-Controlled Intercept, or GCI.  MiG-21’s and Yak-28’s were fitted with on-board pursuit radars, and a ground station tracking their targets could transmit encrypted signals directly from the ground radar to the pursuit radar on the aircraft, and the radar would vector the plane to target, all done electronically.  Hands off.  Fire and forget.  We, meaning your humble servant and his crowd, were listening to the pilot chatter, we could image the Russian ground radar, we could follow the encrypted signals, we intercepted the frequency shifts from the aircraft’s radar and knew when it went from Lock to Launch.  In effect, we were in the cockpit, too.  And not a single one of those pilots, or their command structure on the ground, believed the system would work on its own.  Every instruction the pilots got, every course correction that was transmitted, over a secure network, the pilot would repeat, in the clear, on Voice.  “Roger that, turning to heading 270.”  At which point you watched him on radar, changing course to 270.  I kid you not.  And you wonder why Russian generals are getting blown out of their shoes in Ukraine?  They’re using open comms.

I think there are other reasons for what’s going on.  I think the Ukrainian defense is heroic.  Volodymyr Zelensky has bigger balls than Vladimir Putin.  And the resolve from NATO has been unexpectedly solid.  But at its most basic level, the Russian disaster is a character flaw.  Arrogance defeats empires.

 

The Irish & Their Discontents

There’s a lovely line in Thomas Perry’s new book, Eddie’s Boy – and I’m unreasonably envious – “The sky was the color of disappointment.”

Here’s one from Ed Dee, not so recent.  I think it’s in Bronx Angel. An old New York harness bull is retiring after thirty years, and the boys are sending him off.  Two cops are leaving the party.  One cop asks the other one what he thinks of the guy, and the second cop says, “He’s got Irish Alzheimer’s, he’s forgotten everything but his grievances.” Dennis Lehane wouldn’t kill for that? Or me, or George Higgins?

And then, of course, the inimitable John Gregory Dunne, in True Confessions. The set-up is two brothers, one a cop and the other a priest: Tom, the homicide dick, is on the pad; Des, rising fast in the church, is consigliere to the cardinal. Tom and his partner catch a murder, a dead woman dismembered in a vacant lot, and the victim has a votive candle in her vagina.  Tom’s partner remarks, “Looks like a job for your brother the monsignor.”

These would be, of course, Irish-American tropes, going back to Finley Peter Dunne and his Mr. Dooley sketches, and up to Edwin O’Connor and The Last Hurrah, with a little Studs Lonigan thrown in along the way.  It’s a rich vein, if it sometimes veers into caricature.  You could make the case that John Ford did as much to compromise the immigrant experience as he did to celebrate it.  All that blarney, along with an unhappy nostalgia for the Ould Sod that wraps violence in sentiment.  Then again, Jimmy Breslin’s World Without End, Amen turns that delusion inside out, and makes the politics of denial an engine of despair.

Which is by way of saying that we look at the Irish of the Troubles through an American lens, one sort of tribalism translated by another, provincials both.  It’s altogether bracing to discover that contemporary Irish thriller writers aren’t wearing those leaden shoes.  Irish noir may not be getting quite the rouse of the Tartan variety, but it’s coming up strong on the turn.  Stuart Neville, for one, who I first encountered with Ratlines, and Ken Bruen – his first Jack Taylor novel, The Guards, won the Shamus, and was nominated for both the Edgar and the Macavity.  Not by coincidence, Jack Taylor got his own TV series.

This all to introduce a more recent Irish cop show.  My pal Carolyn, who’s a fan of Jack Taylor, turned me on to the series Single-Handed, which ran for four seasons – the Brits call them series, meaning not the full run of the show, but a single year – and is now gone.  The first three are ninety-minute features, made-for-TV movies.  The last season is three two-hour episodes.  It has something of the flavor of Shetland, in that it’s a dour, damp landscape, but with sudden, striking shafts of light breaking through, that show off its extraordinary beauty.

The Quiet Man it ain’t, though.  This isn’t the Ireland of Sodom and Begorrah, it feels very genuine.  The thing Carolyn liked about it, and why she recommended it to me, and why I’m recommending it to you, is that it has a depth.  You sense a life, and a community, off-camera.

It’s not ground-breaking.  The guy leaves Dublin, under a cloud, and comes back to the west of Ireland, the town where he grew up, where his own Da is the Garda constable, a sitch-ee-ay-shun, as Victor McLaglen might say, rife with conflict. Not as light as The Coroner, not quite as dark as Justified. But close. The kid takes over from his dad, and the storm clouds gather.

I’m sorry, but you gotta watch it.  I can’t describe why I find it so compelling.  The cast and the characters are engaging (some you know to trust, some you know are suspect); the landscape is there, but not a character in itself, as with Shetland; the plots are involving, but not contrived, they seem organic, they rise up out of the yeast and ferment of the place.  Wow, some metaphor.

One other thing.  Thinking about it, it might be the most Irish quality of the show.  The rhythm.  The way the beats are placed.  It really isn’t Law & Order, and I mean no disrespect, but you have to get used to a different ebb and flow. You’re listening to some other instrument. 

Grace Notes

Previously in this space, I spoke about beginnings, the hook or hinge of a story, how it presented itself in the mind’s eye.  What, in other words, made it seem like a story at all, why did it catch our attention?  Which got me thinking about endings, and wrapping things up.

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”  That’s a last line that sticks to your ribs.

Bill Goldman once remarked that the first five pages of a script sell the picture.  Paul Newman said, OK, but it’s the last five minutes of the movie people walk out talking about.  There’s that first rush of adrenaline, when you recognize you’ve opened the door, and you’re about to step through into a place of wonder or certainly surprise, and then there’s the enormous satisfaction of closing it behind you.

Another example: Stephen Crane’s The Open Boat.  It begins with the line, “None of them knew the colour of the sky.”  (John Berryman argues that, no, in fact it begins with the title, and I have to agree.)  And there’s the ending, like a long, indrawn breath, “When it came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the moonlight, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea’s voice to the men on shore, and they felt that they could then be interpreters.”  Extraordinary.

In between, of course, there’s incident, and dialogue, fated meetings, and sudden partings, missed opportunities, and the like, but I wasn’t considering process, as such.  It’s that when we first look through the keyhole, which is I think Virginia Woolf’s metaphor, possibility clamors.  Then, necessity steps in.  Each narrative choice we make closes off other variables.  At the end, though, when we’re putting the tale to rest, we can tuck in the covers.

Now, in my case, I have a hard time starting a story if I don’t have a title, because the title captures, or projects, a sense of the story as a whole.  By the same token, I want the ending to reflect back – not necessarily a twist, but a comment or a glancing blow.  For instance, with Aesop, each story points a moral, the Tortoise and the Hare, the Fox and the Grapes.  I don’t mean that I want to be cautionary, or prescriptive, or teach a lesson, but I want to draw a line under the story.  Think of it as a sort of curtain call.

There’s a Benny Salvador story called “Old Man Gloom,” which takes place not long after the war (WWII, for you young’uns) and goes back to the Japanese internment camps.  At the end, Benny takes his daughters upriver to Embudo, to gather fruit.

     As he expected, it was hard work, but satisfying.  The girls, of course, complained to him about it.

     Benny had little sympathy.

     Peaches, he explained patiently, are easily bruised.

This is very much on the oblique, but as a last line, I thought it was terrifically effective, the story turning on honor, and obligation, and bitterly damaged feelings.

Here’s another.  At the wind-up of Black Traffic, a spy story, there were half a dozen closing scenes, each of the major players getting a last bow, and the final scene was somebody I figured the reader might have left off their mental list.  Oh, yeah, that guy, the Serbian gangster with the blood feud.  And the box of chocolates.

To the fallen, in forgotten wars.

The last line of the book, and it said it all, so far I was concerned.  It was about grievance. 

I’m using examples from my own stuff, but obviously the Fitzgerald or the Crane are more widely known.  I know why I used what I did, and how.  I don’t have any particular insight into the other guys.  It’s said that Fitzgerald put this passage into the book earlier, in a first draft.  I also heard Franklin Schaffner told George C. Scott he wouldn’t lead Patton off with the “No dumb bastard ever won a war by dying for his country” address.  Which happens to be a good example of how to round out your picture, without easy irony.  “All glory is fleeting.”

The first five pages; the last five minutes.

The Chicken or The Egg

I just finished a novella, set during the Battle of the Bulge.  I’ve been working on it for a while.  I realized that I can’t pin down my original impulse, that glimpse of something, the orphan intuition that tugs at your sleeve or plays hide and seek in your peripheral vision.  

Sometimes you know right away when you’ve got a workable idea, and once in a while not just workable, but inspired, and the fuse is lit.  We’re all familiar with getting in the zone, and the feverish clamor of momentum, but genuine inspiration comes from applying your ass to the chair.  You have to be there for lightning to strike.

Now, in the case of “The Lion of the Chama,” another long and time-shifting story, I can tell you exactly where it sprang from.  I read an article in the Santa Fe New Mexican about a local criminal lawyer who was retiring after forty years, and the interviewer asked him which was his most memorable case.  The guy said, I defended Reies Lopez Tijerina after the siege of the Tierra Amarilla courthouse. My mental ears pricked right up.  What siege was that?

Which is actually pretty widely-known history hereabouts, but I was only a wash-ashore in those days - as former Santa Fe mayor Debbie Jaramillo used to say, “You just got off the bus.”  I began to dig into it, and as research made the narrative more concrete, it also began to veer off in unexpected directions.  This itself is not unexpected.  But the more I learned, the less wiggle room I had.  In a way, it mirrors the writing process.  You begin with an empty canvas, but as you fill it in, your avenues of choice close off.  The narrative funnels down.

The expression is: Don’t spoil a good story for lack of the facts.  I stopped researching the facts of the courthouse siege, because they got in the way of the story I wanted to tell.

Now, coming back to my WWII novella, The Kingdom of Wolves, we have almost the opposite dynamic.  I knew I wanted the wider backdrop to be authentic, so I tried to stick to the chronology and movements of the fight, and who was actually where on the big map.  Patton and Bradley, for example, have cameos.  So does my Uncle Charlie, breaking down the ENIGMA traffic, back at Bletchley Park.  (My primary source was Antony Beevor’s terrific book, Ardennes 1944.)  On the other hand, I wanted my own story to slip between the cracks.  I had to make room for it, without playing the historical record false.  What happened in this case, is that I didn’t have a story of my own until I’d straightened out the facts.  That background determined the story.

So, here’s the question.  Or, at least, a framework for discussion.  Sometimes you have a situation, and you work from that; sometimes you start with a character.  But almost always, you have a difficulty to surmount.  The ring goes back to the fires of Mount Doom, where it was forged.  Not every story is a hero’s quest, of course, but is the narrative engine the hero or the journey?  Clearly the two influence each other.  I guess what’s interesting, and probably unanswerable, in this context, is whether we start with Frodo, or the Ring? 

It also probably doesn’t matter.  What counts is that we got to the finish line.  Still and all, I often wonder why and how.  The sudden and exact detail that shows up in high relief, and we say to ourselves, Now there’s a story!

A Thousand Steps

  

T. Jefferson Parker’s Laguna Heat came out in 1985, and I gobbled it up.  Two years later, he released Little Saigon, which I thought was even better.  I skipped the next six books, for a reason so trivial as to invite scorn, and with apologies, here it is.

Laguna Heat was adapted into a made-for-TV movie.  It’s got a good script, it’s well-directed, it has two-thirds of a solid lead cast.  Unhappily, the other third is Harry Hamlin, who conveys the hero’s moral conflict with furrowed brow and a general air of unplumbed gastric distress.

Now, of course, we both know that the last person to be held responsible for this is the writer.  I don’t have to quote Bill Goldman.  Jeff Parker is innocent of the wrongs done his novel, but he was somehow guilty by association.  I think this was partly unconscious – if I’d thought about it at all, I would have seen how ridiculous it was, but the effect lingered. 

So, cut to Silent Joe.  Fifteen years later, if you can believe it.  I pick it up in a bookstore and flip it open, thinking, I remember reading this guy.  The book sucks me in, no hesitation, and I’m like, where have I been?  And then, to my chagrin, I remember the back story.  This leads me to catch up with many of the books I’ve missed.

Then, in 2009, the Edgar nominations for best short story include me, Jeff Parker, Laura Lippman, Sean Chercover, and Dominique Mainard - and Linda Landrigan, my editor at Hitchcock, invites me to their table at the awards dinner.  Had a great time.  Didn’t win the Edgar.  Parker did.  “The fix was in,” Laura Lippman mutters to me.  But here’s the thing, which she and I would both readily admit.  It’s disappointing not to win, for sure, but it’s better to lose to somebody you like and admire, not just some chump.

Kept right on reading the guy.  All six Charlie Hood novels, which stack up with Don Winslow’s border trilogy. 

I have to say I’ve written about this neck of the woods as well, and about what Parker has called the Iron River, money and guns going south, drugs and human traffic coming north.  We three would probably agree that the War on Drugs is a failure, but nothing we’ve written is prescriptive.

Which brings us to A Thousand Steps. 

Jeff Parker is a California boy, and his books have a local specificity, particular to a place and time.  A Thousand Steps takes us back to Laguna, but the Laguna of 1968, the summer of a thousand Zig-Zags.  The book is, yes, a mystery thriller, but I’m inclined to think of it as a quest story first and foremost.  The departure here is that the hero is sixteen, and Parker inhabits the kid’s voice with absolute authority.  It doesn’t feel made-up or inauthentic in any way.  Parker was that age, in Laguna at the time, and he’s said in interviews that he didn’t have to conjure up much – that it was a matter of reimagination.  I believe it.

The thousand steps of the title are metaphorical, but they refer to a beach just off the Pacific Coast Highway, on the south end of Laguna.  I have another tangential connection here, which is that my pal David Price, himself a native Southern California boy, is the architect who designed the public restrooms for Laguna’s beaches.  (Both the restrooms and the flights of steps are being rehabilitated.)

A Thousand Steps, the book, is immersive.  It’s both a journey inward, and an embrace of the larger world, at high velocity.  I didn’t hesitate.  Neither should you.

Rogue Male

My sister sent me a book she picked up at the Blue Hill Library book sale, remarking that A) it had my name on it, and B) a woman she knew had written the introduction.  It’s a recent paperback edition of Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, a much celebrated and compelling yarn: think The Most Dangerous Game with Nazis thrown in. 

The first and best movie version is Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt, released in 1941 - Household’s novel came out in 1939 - once you get past Walter Pidgeon in the lead.  (I’ve never bought him in anything, which includes How Green Was My Valley.)  This stumbling block aside, Man Hunt has the hugely endearing Joan Bennett – considerably less sympathetically cast in Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street, two later pictures with Lang – and the impeccable George Sanders at very possibly his slimiest, outdoing even the blackmailing bottom-feeder Favell in Rebecca. 

Here’s the hook.  Pidgeon, a renowned big-game hunter, stalks Hitler in Berchtesgaden, and has him in his sights, but he’s caught before he pulls the trigger.  He’s tortured by the Gestapo to get the truth out of him.  Sanders, the most sophisticated and sadistic of the secret police detail, is convinced Pidgeon could only have been acting on instructions from British intelligence.  Pidgeon escapes, through dramatic contrivance, and gets back to England, but Sanders and his goons follow him home.  Enough spoilers.

The most significant difference between the book and the movie is that Household drops you in media res.  There’s no preamble, and no back story.  In fact, the hero, the country, and the target go unnamed – you can certainly infer that it’s Hitler, but he’s never specified.  The book opens with the guy already on the run, and the details get filled in as you go along.  All you know is that he’s being pursued by malevolent adversaries.

This is very much John Buchan territory, The Thirty-Nine Steps.  The paranoia, the noose tightening.  Which is also familiar to Fritz Lang.  Household uses a journey narrative on both the surface level and belowdecks, though.  There’s an atavistic bass note.  In the wild, paranoia is your ally, a sense of the immediate, fight or flight, whether the environment presents as hostile or tame.  Landscape can be psychic, or magicked, just as well as physical. 

This isn’t a new storyline, by any means.  Household is reinventing, or reimagining, a descent.  Beowulf goes into the cave, to face Grendel’s mom.  Orpheus challenges the god of the underworld.  When the guy in Rogue Male goes to earth, literally, like a badger or a bear, hiding in a hole in the ground, he becomes earthen, old, primal. 

Nor is this simply habit, or trope.  This is a theme, for Household.  Victoria Nelson, a Goddard scholar and the author of Gothicka and The Secret Life of Puppets, says in her introduction to this newer edition of the novel, that he’s walking back the clock.  That in order to survive against the primitive, primitive instinct has to resurface.  Old wine in new bottles, we might say.

For all that, it’s one hell of a good story. 

The Iron Lung

Elvis got his polio shot on a Sunday night in October, 1956, backstage at CBS Studio 50, right before he went on the Ed Sullivan show.  On the right is NYC Public Health Commissioner Leona Baumgartner, and the guy with the needle is Assistant Commissioner Harold Fuerst.  The enormously influential Daily Mirror columnist Walter Winchell had suggested the Salk vaccine might be as deadly as the disease itself, but in the six months after Elvis was seen getting the shot, U.S. vaccination levels shot up to 80 per cent.

In the early 1950’s, there was a spike in U.S. polio cases, and a surge of quiet hysteria.  It was a little like the fear of nuclear war, and as a kid, I remember confusing the two in my mind.  My mom warned me not to grab the brass door handles at the Woolworth’s in Harvard Square, and we didn’t get to go to Brigham’s afterwards for ice cream.  Polio was an invisible adversary, cold to the touch, and it was everywhere. 

The approval of the vaccine in ‘55 put Jonas Salk on the cover of TIME.  He was a national hero.  The oral vaccine developed by Albert Sabin came along a couple of years later, and the Americas have been polio-free for almost thirty years.  There have been outbreaks in Southwest Asia, but nowhere is it epidemic anymore. 

There was, mind, a dedicated growth industry in anxiety back when.  The aforementioned atomic holocaust, along with fringe nuttiness - fluoridation of the public water supply being a Commie plot, for example – but polio inspired an actual sub-genre.  Stories featuring the iron lung became a staple, all with roughly similar conventions.

An explanation.  One in five paralytic polio cases develop respiratory symptoms.  The virus affects the upper cervical vertebrae, and paralyzes the diaphragm.  You can’t breathe on your own; you’re kept alive on a ventilator.  In the 1950’s, they used a negative-pressure ventilator called an iron lung.  It was a coffin-sized metal tube, and your entire body went into it.  Only your head stuck out.  The vacuum created by negative pressure inside sucks your chest up, and your lungs draw in air. 

On an episode of Alfred Hitchcock, Brian Keith is in an iron lung, and his wife plans to pull the plug.  The question is how he can possibly outwit her when he’s flat on his back and immobilized, and there’s no way he can call for help.  There’s a delicious twist I didn’t see coming.

The iron lung is an obvious metaphor, but it’s also physical, the helplessness cruelly literal.  It’s interesting to me that certain tropes are so much a product of their particular time.  In this instance, representing the Cold War: we’re in the grip of overwhelming, mechanical forces, and struggle like ants.

There are clear echoes, or reflections, in the present day.

  One difference, however, is that we don’t have individual influencers as unifying as Elvis.  We’ve lost consensus.  We apparently can’t agree on a shared reality.  One thing you can say for polio.  It scared the shit out of enough of us to tip the scales.

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.

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.

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. 

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.