Chad Taylor

Tell me your troubles and doubts


Elliott Chaze's stomping 1953 noir classic Black Wings Has My Angel is available in a new edition from New York Review Books. If you dream of becoming a writer the introduction by Barry Gifford will set you straight.
Chaze was a fairly large man, seventy-two years old when I met him. He was cranky, bitter about having been mostly ignored as a serious writer but making attempts throughout our visit to pretend he didn't really care.
That's one of the brighter bits. But the novel sings. Go buy it. Chaze is very dead so he'll never know it's being rediscovered but that shouldn't deny you the pleasure.

So I've got that on him

Bruce DeSilva: Why do you write crime novels?

Robert B Parker: I write them because I know how, and because it never occurred to me not to write them. The process I go through is the same process Faulkner went through. The difference is that Faulkner writes better than I do, not because he is not writing crime novels but simply because he is a greater talent. He's dead, of course, so I've got that on him.

BD: Some people don't take crime fiction seriously. They see even your best books as mere entertainments.

RBP: Writing is either good or it isn't. It's not good because it's about 20th century angst. It's not bad because it's about a private detective. If it's good, it should be taken seriously. There is a misapprehension that it's easier to write a bad novel than a good one. It isn't. You write what you can, and if it comes out good you are lucky.

BD: Why is this such a hard lesson for some people to learn?

RBP: Literature is perceived as what you were taught in college. Professors can't teach books that are not difficult. If students read a book and they all understand it, there's nothing left to talk about in class. The second thing I would say is that most reviewing in this country is not very good. Its main function is not to do something useful but to enhance the reviewer's career. It's easier to review a difficult book because you get to explain it.

BD: Tell me how you work.

RBP: I think up a story and then I outline. The outline isn't terribly long – four or five pages handwritten. Catskill Eagle took me three months to think up. It's the hardest thing to do. I may go two, three weeks with nothing on the notepad, but I am not nervous about it because I know it will come. It always has. When the outline is completed, I write five pages a day.

BD: No matter how long it takes?

RBP: Yeah. Sometimes it takes eight or ten hours, but usually it takes no more than two. But I deliberately don't press on because if you do, then you start thinking you should write seven pages a day. It's better just to stop. I type it up in a draft, make a few pencil changes, and someone retypes it for me and sends it in.

-- Robert B Parker talks to Bruce DeSilva in 2011

All things bad


The True Detective finale got it right. The series was about the relationship between Cohle and Hart (coal and heart!) and the last episode resolved it. The extent of the serial killer's murders was too expansive to depict literally so the writer and director employed metaphor -- an image Lovecraft and Philip K Dick readers would catch immediately -- and in that moment the crime story transcended its genre. Which, in my humble opinion, makes great crime/noir stories great. Think Kiss Me Deadly when the suitcase exploded.

The ritual of the Yellow King was a portal to another universe of parallel evils courted by all the characters. Rust carved the figures of victim and spectators out of beer cans. Even Marty's daughter when she played dolls arranged them in the same voodoo circle: she was toying with an opening to all things bad. It was no accident that fornication led to both Marty and Rust's downfall: Rust took Maggie from behind and the final straw for Marty's marriage was fucking a prostitute up the ass. Everyone fell into an opening, and the opening changed their lives.

Sexuality is not gender, and some critics have commented that there should have been "more" female characters in True Detective. Which is true. Instead of a triangle between a female and two male leads it could have been between three women, or a group of four female friends. Perhaps there could have been some light comedy to it, too, and better product placement. But that would have made it a different show.

Clothes of authenticity


I'm in two minds about Henning Mankell. He doesn't do plot -- surprisingly, for such a mainstream writer -- but, like some other Swedish authors, he really does coffee and sandwiches. Such details bring the Wallander novels alive. Here is the reluctant crime writer on crime and location:
Q: Your 'Wallander' novels too seem to chronicle important changes in society.

HENNING MANKELL: It is twenty years since I wrote the first book, and in that time some interesting things have happened. When I started I realized that crime itself was going through changes, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening up of Eastern Europe. Earlier you'd only see criminality in a big city like Stockholm but now you can buy drugs even in small towns. Look at where Ystad is situated, down south in Sweden in a border area close to the European continent – you could say that the Baltic Sea is our Rio Grande.

Q: Your choice of setting the books in Ystad appears to have created a trend.

HM: Yes, but today, I'm sorry to say, there's a lot of very bad crime fiction being written in Sweden where writers use small town settings without any real point. If you set a crime novel in Gotland just because you spend your holidays in a cottage there, I'd call it ridiculous. With a few exceptions, much of the crime fiction published in Swedish is trash.
Martin Cruz Smith is a journalist who wrote pulps before sweating 11 years on Gorky Park, the novel that would become the first of several starring Arkady Renko. The subsequent Renko novels have tapered off in length -- Smith returning to his pulp habits, maybe -- but maintain the tone, and are thick with detail. Smith spoke to Anna Mundow about researching place and time:
Q. "Stalin's Ghost" revisits the Chechen war. Are historical events starting points for you?

A. Well, I had to begin somewhere, and the Chechen war is practically a coloring book of disasters. I was interested to read about Chechens in Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago." Then I read a little Lermontov, a little Tolstoy where there is a theme of this wild, hono r-bound, somewhat privileged society. That's one of the great things about what I do; I'm allowed to follow any trail.

Q. Is Arkady's environment increasingly bleak?

A. With "Gorky Park" I thought I had done my Russian book. Then Russia changed. I couldn't get back in, so I got on the factory ship, the Polar Star. I could sense that things were changing. Then at the end of "Red Square" there was great hope that things were coming together, a triumphant feeling. That has disappeared. Arkady is more and more thrown back on his own resources, which makes what he does all the more singular and dangerous.

Q. You literally couldn't get back into the Soviet Union?

A. Literally. I was barred from the country.
My friend Paul Reynolds loved John Le Carré. One birthday when I made the error of gifting him yet another copy of Single And Single he accepted it with enthusiasm -- 'One can never have too many,' he said. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is built almost entirely on details of time and place: the narrative plays out in the characters' memories. (The action centerpiece is Peter Guillam stealing a folder from a library.) Here is Le Carré on location in an interview by George Plimpton in 1996:
There's some kind of constant interaction between the fantasy that I brought with me to the location — the place as character — and what happens to me after that, the way the fantasy takes on some semblance of truth. What we want is not authenticity; it is credibility. In order to be credible, you have to dress the thing in clothes of authenticity.

St Valentine's Day massacres


The victim who has been hacked to death and left in the Bayou is an analogue for the movie itself of In the Electric Mist, based on the James Lee Burke novel. Directed by Betrand Tavernier, Tommy Lee Jones's Dave Robicheaux remains too faithful to the character, which has panicked the studio to cut the narrative in an effort to get things moving -- a mistake, because detective novels are all about sitting around. But the movie still works. It has Burke's voice, and his atmosphere and his landscape, with its sudden, emotional bursts of colour. In The Electric Mist could have been Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans or No Country For Old Men but in its bones it's Chinatown, i.e. a movie that wants to be a crime novel: complicated and puzzling for most of its length until the resolution appears right where it started. Also: Kelly Macdonald. All movies with Kelly Macdonald in them are good movies.

It's taken me this long to see Before The Devil Knows You're Dead and if I had to draw up a list of the ten best noir movies I've seen it would come in at around number four. Sidney Lumet directed it and it's a fucking gem: modern, shabby, direct and as black as night. Shot in digital, interestingly, a long time before people were talking about that. If you like Black Widow, Against All Odds (one of the best remakes of Out Of The Past) or The Morning After you should really tuck into this. Lumet calls it a melodrama but it's realistic and dirty and moving. The DVD includes a good making of documentary featuring interviews with the cast, producers and director, but not author Kelly Masterson.

The end of our elaborate plans, the end


Forbrydelsen (The Killing) III starts off as a mood piece with Sarah Lund too far in the background, crowded out by her male colleagues. Lund has become the formalist instead of the maverick, the passive spectator rather than the active investigator, the weakling. Once she was driven: now she's just upset. The red herrings and interruptions are dispensed professionally to the point of routine. (Does anyone in Lundland ever finish a phone call?) Creator Søren Sveistrup shares the scripting duties this time around, presumably for scheduling reasons. The series feels like he hammered out a synopsis and the other writers fluffed it up. But things get going in the last four episodes, when Forbrydelsen suddenly becomes very good again. Stick it out for Sofie Gråbøl's performance and a tidy wrap up. Spoiler alert: everyone's fucked. Not a happy ending, but a good one.

Sveistrup talked to Holy Moly about creating the series:
When we started there were a lot of episodic crime shows. You know, these 45-minute shows with a heroine who solved the case and caught the killer and started dating the forensic guy, wearing heels. And I thought ‘well we won’t do that and we’ll try to do it more like a novel.’ Television is a great window to the world but it’s often used to do nothing. So I thought if somebody offers me this window, at least I can do my best. I can try not to be a recipe, I can try not to imitate the Americans or the English and try to do something original. Try, try, try.
He wanted Lund to be the strong, silent type:
She doesn't really talk much. She has to have these characters around her to push her into saying anything. The partner role is very important as it generates some pressure on Lund and pushes her in other directions. If she was just alone she would be speechless. And it's to show her annoyance with other people. She is always annoyed when the phone rings and that's part of the game: to annoy Lund.
Sveistrup has compared Lund to Clint Eastwood's Harry Callaghan:
I've always been fond of Clint Eastwood. The parts he plays are so silent, sometimes a bit biblical. If you watch Dirty Harry he's not especially likeable and I like that paradox about a character.
Director Birger Larsen said he modelled Lund on Clint Eastwood's The Man With No Name:
"I wanted her to be wearing a poncho like Clint Eastwood and I worked with that for many weeks. But Sofie said that she couldn't draw her gun. I said, 'if Clint Eastwood can do it, then you can do it as well'. But she said, 'no, it's not right'. And she looked so wonderful, so sexy, so good in the poncho. Exactly the Clint Eastwood one. She came along one day and said, 'I've got this sweater, perhaps we should use that'."
There are nods in the final episode to a certain Swedish trilogy. Sveistrup told Holy Moly that his influences also include the Mark Frost / David Lynch series Twin Peaks:
"The first episode of Twin Peaks begins with the discovery of the body of Laura Palmer and the first episode of The Killing ends with the discovery of the body of Nanna Birk Larsen. But I saw a lot of shows before we started writing and shooting. I was a big Twin Peaks fan when it was first shown and week after week I couldn't wait for the episodes, but then I guess I was a bit disappointed when the resolution happened. But today I can see that David Lynch was deconstructing the whole genre, and he was actually making a comedy. And in that sense it's perfect.

"I wanted to see if I could do it with no humour. And especially taking the parents into it, and their grief, I wanted to see if I could portray it in a more realistic way instead. So I think I owe a lot to Twin Peaks but it's an entirely different genre. We couldn't invent things like throwing a stone to decide where the investigation went – which must've been fun to come up with in the writing room – we couldn't do that. We had to stay loyal to the grief and the importance of the investigation."

Safe





Well, it finally comes out that the idea of Harry the Horse and Little Isadore and Spanish John is to get Big Butch to open the coal company's safe and take the pay-roll money out, and they are willing to give him fifty per cent of the money for his bother, taking fifty per cent for themselves for finding the plant, and paying all the overhead, such as the paymaster, out of their bit, which strikes me as a pretty fair sort of deal for Big Butch. But Butch only shakes his head.

'It is old-fashioned stuff,' Butch says. 'Nobody opens pete boxes for a living any more. They make the boxes too good, and they are all wired up with alarms and are a lot of trouble generally. I am in a legitimate business now and going along.'
-- 'Butch Minds the Baby' by Damon Runyon, Furthermore (1938)
Victorian crime literature, official and popular, often seems obsessed with keys, as if nothing else mattered. But in those days, as the master safe-cracker Neddy Sykes said in his trial in 1848, "The key is everything in the lay, the problem and the solution."

We forget how extraordinarily cluttered Victorian rooms were. Innumerable hiding places were provided by the prevailing decor of the period. Furthermore, the Victorians themselves adored secret compartments and concealed spaces; a mid-century writing desk was advertised as "containing 110 compartments, including many most artfully concealed from detection." Even the ornate hearths, found in every room of a house, offered dozens of places to hide an object as small as a key.

Thus, in the mid-Victorian period, information about the location of a key was almost as useful as an actual copy of the key itself.
-- Michael Crichton, The Great Train Robbery (1975)

Rififi (1954), Thief (1981), Die Hard (1988), The Score (2001)

I got into a self-destructive pattern





I rewrote the character for McQueen. All the sentences had to be short, a character of internal integrity who's not afraid of a fight. -- Alan Trustman
To Catch A Thief (1955), Mélodie en sous-sol (1963), The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), Ocean's Eleven (2001).

'Cause I got some weird ideas in my head


Pictured: coming onstage for Sunday's crime panel at the Frankfurt Book Fair with Paul Cleave, Alix Bosco (AKA Greg McGee) and Paddy Richardson, hosted by Wolf Dorn. Paul talked about his Christchurch serial killer novels and writing unsuitable stories at school. Greg talked about how writing a female protagonist gave him the idea of creating a female pseudonym to go with it, as a way of protecting his creation. He thought the critics went much easier on unknown Alix than they would ever would have done on the author of Foreskin's Lament. Paddy talked about writing non-gory crime, and the importance of narrative. She hadn't considered herself a crime writer initially, but came to it later -- something I had a chance to talk to her about when we caught up the next day. Wolf asked me about the influence of film and music on Shirker, which was published in Germany by DTV. All of us (novelist Dorn included) write differently from one another. I said I thought crime-writing was to literature what the blues were to music: a form that has spawned countless variations.

The pavilion was packed, as you can kind of see. That big light in the corner was a lot brighter on stage, but the audience certainly sounded as if they enjoyed what we had to say. Big ups to Wolf for hosting the event.

Directions


In preparation for the Frankfurt Book Fair I downloaded the German + Travel app, which supplies and speaks useful phrases. The sound files are preloaded so there is no wait to play them, and no network traffic charge. And you can play phrases at random to make up robo-conversations: it's the app Kurt Schwitters would have liked.

Since upgrading to iOS6 I've been using the Apple maps app too -- I thought it was fine. Consumer Report rates the app as not that bad. 'Apple’s problem is that is replaced best-in-class with pretty-good.'

There is a new and best Amazon Kindle out. Gizmodo says the Paperwhite is for 'anyone who wants an ereader with a great screen. Which is basically anyone who wants an ereader.'

You may have Sherlock Holmes' on your e-reader, but you will not find his address on any map. The suspiciously well-named Jimmy Stamp deconstructs and reconstructs the mystery of 221B Baker Street:
As a real manifestation of a fiction, the many 221Bs attest to the power of Arthur Conan Doyle's writing. So strongly do the Holmes stories resonate with our culture that we have manifested his home in our own reality, creating shrines and sites of pilgrimage across the world. But these "replicas" also attest to the power of architecture and interior design, which by their very nature make things real.
Gavin Polone at New York Magazine talks about why TV is better than movies. If you're interested in popular culture you should print out this article and nail it to the wall. Almost a coda to Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, it does well to explain the most significant shift in mainstream entertainment since the rise of the movie blockbuster in the 1970s.
I would bet that you have noticed that your friends are more excited for new episodes of a favorite show than they are for the release of a super-hyped studio tentpole movie...  [A] malaise has taken hold of the movie audience, which is illustrated by the oft-heard phrase, "There is nothing out worth seeing.".
But why? Polone:
There are too many networks now competing for attention and they don't have the luxury of spending the huge sums movie studios can to cut through the marketing clutter and get the consideration of the potential viewer. So, they have no choice but to make shows that stand out from everything else based on their quality and distinctiveness. That is why, in recent years, you've gotten to watch not only Breaking Bad, but also The Walking Dead, Sons of Anarchy, and Homeland. None had pricey CGI, huge stars, or a flashy, unavoidable ad campaign; all they had was terrific writing, acting, and originality that made people want to recommend these shows to their friends.
On the 25th anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Graeme McMillan at Time discusses how the series changed pop culture forever:
These days, of course, we're used to the idea of rebooting series and franchises and getting new takes on what had come before, keeping the best bits and discarding what doesn't fit for something that everyone hopes is better. That wasn't the case back in 1987. Back then, translations between media tried their best to faithfully replicate previous iterations, and even oddities like the Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks Dragnet movie that predated The Next Generation by a matter of months tried their hardest to offer affectionate homage to their predecessors, even as they pretended to parody them. Star Trek: The Next Generation may not be a reboot in the common usage of the term today: It takes place in the same continuity as the earlier series, and doesn't seek to replace it or undo anything that came before, but for all intents and purposes it was a reboot for the concept and a chance for Roddenberry and staff to correct whatever mistakes or bad decisions had been forced on the original.
In Hollywood, pitching is everything. TV writer Bill Barol remembers being with Al Franken for the worst meeting in the history of show business:
After a few moments the telephone rang at the host's station, Franken picked up the phone. Here's what I heard him say:

"Hi, honey... No, still having meetings. What? CNN? No, why?" He listened for a long moment, and then I saw all the color drain from his face. And I heard him say: "He's DEAD?"
However a study published in the Journal of Aging and Health has found that creativity predicts a longer life:
A large body of research links neuroticism with poorer health and conscientiousness with superior health. Now openness, which measures cognitive flexibility and the willingness to entertain novel ideas, has emerged as a lifelong protective factor. The linchpin seems to be the creativity associated with the personality trait—creative thinking reduces stress and keeps the brain healthy.

The beautiful victim


Watching A Perfect Murder (1998) again reminded me how much I like it. Written by Patrick Smith Kelly for director Andrew Davis (The Fugitive), the story is based on Frederick Knott's play Dial M For Murder, which Knott adapted for Alfred Hitchcock's film version in 1954. There are a few nods to its heritage, such as the camera in the opening credits spiralling upwards to a loft window with a touch of Vertigo, but the story is its own movie.

A Perfect Murder works because it focusses almost entirely on the triangle of Steven, Emily and David: there's no relief from the mental lock they have on each other, and no rationalisation offered by other characters. The casting is perfect. Michael Douglas and Gwyneth Paltrow are believable as wealthy, successful people (because they are) and Viggo Mortensen is just on the right side of smart. He lives in what is now an unbelievable loft, but his boho life is as intrinsic to the plot as the Taylors' wealth: if they didn't live like that, there wouldn't be a story. New York is presented as a village in three parts: the two apartments and Emily's home -- again, mirroring the characters -- and there is no escape either by car, boat or train. No friends, no-one you can trust. Most of all what I like about it is its economy. No set ups, no back story, information rolled out when it serves the story and not before. The technology has dated -- landline telephones, slow trading screens -- but it's credible. This is one of the last pre-smartphone thrillers: once everyone had a handset, killing would change.

The Big Snatch


On Sunday I caught a screening of Mélodie en sous-sol (1963) released in English as Any Number Can Win and also, wonderfully, The Big Snatch. The print was widescreen (2.35:1) and black & white. YouTube hosts colour snippets that look like a digital treatment but these may have been contemporary. The film is clearly trying to match itself with Hollywood and dipping Alain Delon in what looks like pancake batter might have been part of the effort. Forget them: the monochrome version is better -- gorgeous, in fact, in the way that old & white films are: a holiday for the eye.

Mélodie is a casino heist and much of the action unfolds in sunlight, from the opening shot on a bright morning in Paris Gare du Nord to the poolside dénouement in Cannes, and the intermediate tones are appropriate to the story. It doesn't paint its exotic locales in the sinister velvet-black of, say, Notorious (1946). It's a noir-lite: a large grey. When Francis (Delon) gives up the wheel of his Alfa to his Swedish girlfriend, she drives at a sensible speed.

Critics have noted the similarity between Mélodie en sous-sol and Rififi (1955) -- as if any heist movie could escape the comparison -- but its true antecedent is The Killing (1956), right down to the (spoiler alert) ending. In the final scene of The Killing Kubrick's thieves are undone when the money is blown away on the airport tarmac: in Mélodie the bills float gracefully to the surface. Francis's mentor Charles (Jean Gabin), surrounded by police, can only watch for fear of giving himself away; Francis, shamed, simply turns his back, and the cops rush past, unaware of the thieves right under their noses. The construction of these final moments is stark and modern and genuinely tense-making: as good as anything De Palma or David Fincher has served up.

In between lie the delights of any film older than you are: the glimpses of street scenes, the chugging cigarettes (Francis's mother scolds him for smoking), the measures of drink (for a sunbathing tipple, fill half a tumbler with scotch, add two small ice cubes and serve. Ye gods), the casino dancing girls with real bodies and action sequences without stunt doubles. In one lengthy unbroken shot Delon climbs out of a hatch, runs up a thirty-degree tiled roof and monkey-bars along a crenellated cement facade twenty feet off the ground wearing a tuxedo and leather dress shoes; later he drops ten feet, forgets the bag he is carrying and hops back up to retrieve it, like a gymnast.

Because this is a noir, it's all for naught. The point is not that the heist goes wrong but how, and why, and director Henri Verneuil renders the fatal misstep with the same balletic ease. You truly won't see it coming. Mélodie en sous-sol is far from the greatest noir you could see but then again, noir is not about individual achievement. It's about being part... of... a... team.

Mélodie en sous-sol was based on the novel Once a Thief by John Trinian, who died in 1974. By day Trinian was Zekial Marko, a successful Hollywood screenwriter who worked for shows such as The Rockford Files and Kolchak: The Night Stalker. By night, in the 1960s as Trinian, he published a small, eclectic set of mystery and crime paperbacks including North Beach Girl and Scandal On The Sand. Could one have a cooler obituary?

I've paid my dues to make it


Walter Mosley on writing, interviewed by Charles L.P. Silet:
MysteryNet: Obviously you don't see much distinction between what we would describe as genre or crime fiction and straight fiction or literature.

Mosley: No, I don't see any difference in it. Of course, in the genre there are certain kinds of things that you have to do, but it's the same in a coming-of-age novel, somebody has to come of age. So you have to follow the conventions. Good fiction is in the sentence and in the character and in the heart of the writer. If the writer is committed to and in love with what he or she is doing, then that's good fiction.

MysteryNet: Who have you read both in crime fiction and in regular fiction that's had an influence on you?

Mosley: In crime fiction, I've read lots and lots of people. Charles Willeford, I just adore. Every one of his books is so deeply flawed plot-wise, but it matters nothing to me because he's such a wonderful writer. I was reading one of his books the other day about some old guy and his wife; he was seventy-two but looked older and she was sixty-three and looked older than him. It was so funny; just the way he wrote it. My God, this guy is fantastic! Hoke Mosley is a real guy. It's so right. I've read everybody -- Gregory MacDonald -- I've read all the Fletch books. I thought they were wonderful. Parker, of course. Vachss, who I adore, because I think that he is so deeply committed to what he believes in. I feel the heart coming through it, and I compare him to Dickens. Rex Stout. I've read almost everything Simenon ever wrote. The people I love for writing are the French: Malraux, Camus, Gide, for just the style of writing. It is almost the heart of fiction for me. Then the older guys like Proust, and tons of black poets: Gwendolyn Brooks, Derek Walcott, Amiri Baraka. It doesn't matter who writes it, no matter their sex or their race or what period of time they lived in.
Raymond Chandler, from Frank MacShane's The Life of Raymond Chandler (1986):
My theory was that readers just thought that they cared about nothing but the action; that really although they didn't know it, they cared very little about the action. The thing they really cared about, and that I care about, was the creation of emotion through dialogue and description.

What you like is in the limo


The Megaupload arrests are doing more to contemporise New Zealand's image than sport ever could. Reports the New York Times:
The Auckland police arrived at Dotcom Mansion on Friday morning... Kim Dotcom... ran inside and activated several electronic locks. When the police "neutralised" those, he barricaded himself in a safe room. Officers cut their way through to nab him.
Repeat: Cut their way through to nab him.

Also in the NYT, Ms Melanie Lynskey:
Melanie Lynskey has playing wacky down cold. She's done it for years on "Two and a Half Men" as Rose, the off-kilter neighbor. And she shines in dramatic parts, as when she played Matt Damon's wife in "The Informant!" Yet job offers are almost always the same: a fifth lead here, the best friend there. She's 34 and was recently cast as Aunt Helen in "The Perks of Being a Wallflower." Can't she — just once — land the big, meaty, carry-the-movie role?
Does she need it? Since starring with Kate Winslet in Heavenly Creatures in 1994 Lynskey has gone on to make fewer movies about the Titanic and not married as many directors but her career is arguably the more interesting. (Also: sexier.)

(Pic: Ann SummaNYTimes)

Pattern recognition





Writers may not be more self-aware than anyone else but they keep better records. A body of work is the snail's trail of sensibility. But artists are as limited in their capacity for change as anyone else: no matter what they observe they will continue to make the same mistakes. This is one reason why writers tend towards melancholy: they have the data but can do nothing with it.

All by way of saying I've been reading the pulps again and trying not to drive a mental red-pen through words and sections. I finally -- finally -- made it through Dragon Tattoo. I love the images from the book and the film and I'm looking forward to Fincher remake and yes, it's sold a billion copies but boy does it creak. Pointless to rail against it, not least of all because the author is dead, but stroke of luck that the killer mastermind forgot to shut the door... The oversight would not embarrass Henning Mankell, who writes very well about Wallander drinking coffee and eating a sandwich; fairly well about the everyday nature of police investigations and terribly about crimes themselves. But Raymond Chandler's Playback is one of my favourite crime novels and that made no sense at all, so I have to give Mankell a pass... Now I'm back to Richard Price and Lush Life. Clockers was an OCD Adam 12. Maybe Lush Life will be the same. But I'm into it because of its dialogue and detailing.

In between I've been re-watching The Killing. The series has such a great setup that it can only be let down by the resolution. Not unlike the unravelling of a cheery Danish sweater... And dipping back into Twin Peaks, Hitchcock... And Californication. Nothing will be as good as Hank's first season so that's the one I return to. Again. The same decisions, the same mistakes over and over, the accrual of which becomes the author's style.

I took a wrong turn on the astral plane


People are raving about the posthumous Amy Winehouse album but I find it difficult to listen to, and not just because she isn't here any more. The production is too up front for her intimate, sharply sensitive vocalisations. Even if the young singer's performances were physically frail – and lord knows they probably were – it's wrong for the band and producers to take center stage, let alone put a beat box there. Winehouse is played over on 'Girl from Ipanema' and trapped by a snare drum on 'A Song For You.' It's as if everyone's pushing past her for the last piece of the limelight. Bad production, bad karma. Above: Amy in her happier unhappy days. (Update: And here, accompanied in Ireland. Recommended.)

In 2006 Bookslut – my favourite slut – interviewed Lawrence Block about his Hit Man series. The first book in the series is a crime novel I really admire.
Let's start with the new book, Hit Parade. What's next for John Keller?

Morrow will publish Hit Parade on July 4. Like Hit Man and Hit List, the book's an episodic novel, and I don't know to what extent it differs from the earlier books. It seems to me we get a little more background information about Keller, and that he's going through changes and emotional stresses. But he's still Keller.

Does Keller's distant nature lend itself to the episodic format you've employed in the Hitman trilogy?

It seems to. Most of the episodes seem to work as short stories. Playboy will be publishing one sometime this spring.

Does Keller have a conscience?

It seems to me he has both roots and a conscience. They're just a little different from most people, and he's learned to cope with them differently.

Peter Straub said that Keller reminded him of you more than your other characters. Is it hard to keep yourself out of your books?

No, what's hard is keeping myself out of jail.
Full interview is here.

When we were very Jung

Drive feels like the movie I have been happily watching my whole life: Le Samourai by way of The Driver, Vanishing Point, Medium Cool, 8 Million Ways to Die, 52 Pick-Up, Thief, Heat. The references are indirect: Drive is in the spirit of those films, and the tone. There is not that much driving in it and the violence is overdone and it's a little under budget but these limitations feel right, too, if not appropriate to the genre. That's just Drive's thing: cars, LA and robberies cast in the blue key of existential. For all the darkness, it's a bright, upbeat tale of brooding.

Drive is presented as "A Nicolas Refn Film" but is based on a screenplay which is in turn based on a novel so the director is a realisateur rather than an auteur. The blissfully spare screenplay is by Hossein Amini, who also recently adapted Elmore Leonard's Killshot, and is based on the novel by James Sallis.

Sallis was born in Arkansas 1944 and has written 15 novels - seven in the Lew Griffin detective series. He has written SF and worked as an editor and essayist as well as a translator, translating works by Pablo Neruda, Mikhail Lermontov, Pasternak and Pushkin, among others. He's also a musician. Sallis published Drive in 2005, when he was 61.

In an interview with Paul Kane Sallis talked about his Lew Griffin character, and crime as a genre:
Kane: Do you see yourself as primarily a crime writer or simply a writer, period?

Sallis: A quick look at my list of publications should answer that: collections of poetry, books of musicology, a biography, translation, a lot of science fiction, wide literary-magazine publication, a large body of criticism. I'm a writer who writes, among much else, crime fiction.

Did you choose crime fiction or did it choose you?

I came to crime fiction rather late, actually – after many years of involvement with science fiction, then, when that market changed, with "literary" fiction. I was introduced to Chandler and Hammett by Mike Moorcock when I was in London editing New Worlds; this would have been 1968 or so. I read constantly in the field: Ross Macdonald, Rex Stout, Chester Himes, Ed McBain, Larry Block, Donald Westlake. I didn't turn to writing crime fiction for some years after. The Long-Legged Fly was the beginning.

What can you do in crime fiction that you can't do in a straight literary novel, or in say science-fiction? What possibilities does the genre offer you?

Crime fiction shares with arealist fiction (fantasy and science fiction) a built-in edginess: an alienation, an apartness. It gives access to a straightforward skeleton of plot that's able to hold as little or as much weight as you wish to pack on; and it's connected more directly to the archetypes within us, which can be a source of tremendous power. I should probably add here that one of my agendas as critic has been to tear down as many of these artificial distinctions as possible – crime novel, "literary" novel, commercial novel....
In 1997 Gerald Houghton interviewed Sallis about the Griffin novel Eye of the Cricket:
Q: In Cricket we are told that New Orleans is a city that 'could still be 1940.' The Griffin novels take place over many years and yet seem to exist within the same time - almost out of time. References to beepers and e-mail in the novel leap out.

Sallis: The modern touches are to some extent meant to be jarring. In Cricket for the first time Lew begins to feel that the world has passed him by, that he's on his way to becoming an anachronism. New Orleans, as Lew says again and again, is a kind of island, cut off from mainland American society, timeless in its own peculiar way, filled with people (as well as buildings and social structures) who are anachronisms. Remember, too, that in these novels Lew is looking back on his life, relating it; memory, as it always does, runs things together, blurs them (more poet than reporter). That's pretty much the reason for using the title for The Long-Legged Fly from Yeats. Lew, like the fly in the poem, is sitting up above the stream of time, watching it flow beneath him.
The full interview is here.

Two dollar pistol but the gun won't shoot

I pushed my way through two of Henning Mankell's Wallander novels, Faceless Killers and Firewall and was not so impressed. They were commendably bleak but surprisingly loose with the plot. Here for instance, Hastings, is Firewall not summing things up:
They never did manage to find a satisfying answer to why Sonja Hökberg was thrown against the high voltage wires at the power station, nor why Falk had been in possession of the blueprint.
Which was only central to the entire plot. To quote
Raymond Chandler, Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel (1949):
The mystery novel must punish the criminal in one way or another, not necessarily by operation of the law courts. Contrary to popular belief, this has nothing to do with morality. It is part of the logic of the form. Without this the story is like an unresolved chord in music. It leaves a sense of irritation.
Still, Mankell sells mega, so it's a reminder maybe that mysteries are not all about answers. (I've pleaded as much myself.)

I am however a hard and fast fan of the Swedish TV production starring Krister Henriksson. A few of the handsomely produced movie-length episodes were based on Mankell's novels while the remainder were storylined by the author and scripted / worked up by television screenwriters. The encroaching professionalism means that over the course of the two seasons the series evolves into something not unlike others we have seen but at its core Wallander is grim, locally authentic and refreshingly awkward. One aspect of this is the locale – as with Stieg Larsson, the extremes of winter are both an elemental symbol and threatening plot device. Another is the mood of the players: the Scandanavian cast are naturalistic and react in ways that are unexpected. Kurt Wallander really is curt; Prosecutor Katarina is brittle; Martinsson is blinking and uncomprehending – a by-product of the writers not giving him many lines, or the camera needing something/one to cut away to. Sometimes the stories are just damn clunky, but there's really something there, and so the dramatisation has sent me back to the novels to puzzle them out. I love a good mystery, especially the conundrum of how the writer did it.