Energy vampires

There's a Philip K Dick story in which science fiction has become so ubiquitous the characters ask each other if they've seen the latest Captainkirk. Funny, but we joke about seeing a Star War now. That extended universe and Marvel are all that exists, and it is shaping criticism. Writing about the Sony film Morbius for The Hollywood Reporter critic Richard Newby says "there's a Super Bowl mentality to these projects where everything has to be a major event, the experience of the year, and rarely does the idea that something can just be good or fine hold sway".

It's no skin off my nose if Twitter beats up on a mid-range $75 million movie. But that critical attitude of "it's brilliant or it's shit" seeps into everything. Music and now films have hit stadium-rock bottom. I don't want books to be next.

Consumer report

I have been painting my study, proofing and re-editing the manuscript of my latest novel pre-production, and reading. The new Keigo Higashino Silent Parade is another locked room mystery. I'm taking it one chapter at a time, spinning it out. I admire his narrative discipline. Translation by Giles Murray. I'm also reading Robert Hughes' Rome, which feels like preparing for an exam – I keep stopping to make notes. 

Other novels that passed through the bedside stack over the last six months are In The Miso Soup by Ryo Murakami, The Hotel of the Three Roses by Augusto De Angelis, Blue Murder by Brett Halliday and No Room at the Morgue by Jean-Patrick Manchette. Non-fiction includes Flash Crash by Liam Vaughan, Lou Reed: A Life by Anthony DeCurtis, Breaking News by Paul Barry, Being Nixon by Evan Thomas. I have on order Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany by Uwe Schütte.

I don't know when I will go back to a movie theatre. Black Bear is the best new thing on Netflix. I went into it knowing nothing and enjoyed every second. It presents as surrealism but is actually a portmanteau, and Aubrey Plaza is terrific. Second-best Netflix is the original Cowboy Bebop. I often pause it to admire the frame. Good anime really is art.

On Apple+ (primarily propaganda for using iPhones without a cover) I'm enjoying Severance and WeCrashed. Severance is something I've seen before but the script and cast are so good. WeCrashed is likewise very well put together. What didn't people like about it? Wouldn't want to meet Leto and Hathaway in real life but on screen they're incredible.

I'm listening to Magdalena Bay, Blawan, Shinichi Atobe, Destroyer and M83.

Pandemic and finishing my book has left me more tired than I've ever been. I'm working on the second Ray Moody novel now. It's on second draft, about 55,000 words. When it hits seventy, I'll stop.

Blue Hotel

So it looks like my seventh novel, Blue Hotel will be published in New Zealand and Australia in 2022. More details to follow ...

Now playing: Drop

1. 'Submission' – Marcus Miller & Miles Davis
2. 'The Shade' – Eno / Moebius / Roedelius
3. 'Light Years' – The National
4. 'Self-Control' (Fenech-Soler Remix) – Sunday Girl
5. 'Window' – Fiona Apple
6. 'After All' – Ryuichi Sakamoto

Bedside reading 2021

A Quiet Place – Seicho Matsumoto. Translation by Louise Heal Kawai (Bitter Lemon Press)

In The Miso Soup – Ryu Murakami. Translation by Ralph McCarthy (Bloomsbury)

Death Going Down – Maria Angelica Bosco. Translation by Lucy Greaves (Pushkin Vertigo)

No Room at the Morgue – Jean-Patrick Manchette. Translation by Alyson Waters (New York Review Books)

The Wretches – Frederic Dard (Pushkin Vertigo)

The Uncomplaining Corpses – Brett Halliday (The Mysterious Press)

The Private Practice of Michael Shayne – Brett Halliday (The Mysterious Press)

The Hotel of the Three Roses – Augusto De Angelis. Translation by Jill Foulston (Pushkin Vertigo)

Ride the Pink Horse – Dorothy B. Hughes (American Mystery Classics)

The Informer – Akimitsu Takagi. Translation by Sadako Mizuguchi (Soho Press)

Ellery Queen's Japanese Mystery Stories – Ellery Queen (ed.) (Tuttle)

Three Days and a Life – Pierre Lemaitre. Translation by Frank Wynne (Maclehose Press)

Newcomer – Keigo Higashino. Translation by Giles Murray (Abacus)

Spaghetti Western showdown

The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (1966); Succession (2021).

Pay your toll, sell your soul

For all its violence and murder Narcos: Mexico is comfort viewing. The third season on Netflix is a prequel but that almost doesn’t matter because the stories are so cyclical they're practically a wheel. We know what's coming, the same morality tale over and over. Like a great pop song, you want to hear it again and again.

A lot of the fun in s03 is watching Scoot McNairy do his thing. He's like a two-door Gene Hackman, ever hovering between protagonist and victim. The most effective stars are the new faces. Luis Gerardo Mendez as Juarez city police officer Victor Tapia is unknowable. Mayra Hermosillo as the Tijuana Cartel boss Enedina Arellano Félix is potency off the charts.

Never complain, never explain

Netflix's Icelandic crime thriller Trapped (S01) is powerful because it's cold and low-key. In modern visual storytelling the location can be as unthinking as switching on a green-screen backdrop but the terrain in Trapped is intrinsic to the plot. The snowstorm that locks in the small town forces its protagonists together. Police searching for a parked car have to literally dig it out from under the snow. The actors are lit brightly in the glare yet hidden beneath layers of clothing, their faces numb. The characters move with direction but keep their energy in reserve. There is real joy in storytelling that holds something back. You don't need to say everything. You can just sketch it in.

Now playing: Know your worth

1. Destroyer – 'Kinda Dark'
2. Magdalena Bay – 'Chaeri'
3. Porches – 'Okay'
4. Soccer96 feat. Salami Rose Joe Louis – 'Sitting On A Satellite'
5. Stinky Jim – 'It's Not What It Sounds Like'

Another green world

I was trying to think what I enjoy so much about Keigo Higashino. Lately I've been reading a lot of Japanese crime fiction. Whether the authors are writing in the 1950s or through to the 1980s, several elements recur. Small business, debt sharks and hostessing are often integral to the plot. I do not know if the fact of the works being translated into English benefits them by clarifying the prose but there is a cool distance to the writing which is reassuringly mid-century. I like this way of writing which is out of fashion in the West. And the plots bang, because they break the rules.

Higashino is a very productive author, which is to say he is very published. Writers write and the finished works pile up: few are lucky enough to get them all out there. His novels are not all perfect in every way. No artist is. I am reminded of an ex-colleague's comment on Elvis Presley movies: they're all good, but some are better than others. The two Higashino novels I find dazzling are Journey Under the Midnight Sun and Newcomer. Both mysteries comprise some of the parts mentioned above but each is structured in a different way. Sun sets up the puzzle before taking a long loop away from it and back. Newcomer turns the process of discovery inside-out, bringing us into the story from bystanders' point of view. Higashino's construction of the narrative demands faith from the reader and also patience. In other markets the gatekeepers worry 'you're not allowed to do that' and 'we need to see more' and 'the reader needs to know'. These works prove you can and we don't and the reader will be just fine.

Misappropriation

Money Heist reminds me how much I like Money Heist. Charming cast, vigorous retconning, a snatch-and-grab of influences and ideas, and a nasty realist political element that balances the escapism. I have a stack of books to read for plot and how they tidy it up but the Netflix show is an inspiring tangle. 

Death takes a holiday

Nine Perfect Strangers is arguably better TV than The White Lotus. The set-up is clearer and the direction is more dynamic – the slo-mo blender shot is a witty metaphor. But Strangers feels more thrown together. Three episodes in and it's already wobbling at the point where Lotus was starting to build.

Both resort dramas are whodunnits framed with menace which brings them in line with other bad trips in crime. A group of holidaying strangers with murder in their midst is a staple of drawing room detective stories like Death On The Nile. But evil at the spa is almost a sub-genre in itself. James Bond was dispatched to a health farm in Thunderball and nothing good came of it. Number Six in The Prisoner was sent on permanent holiday to a resort that was a brainwashing panopticon. The Stepford Wives (1975) peddled an easeful suburban existence; Seconds (1966) promised better life through surgery. In Nine Perfect Strangers and The White Lotus 21st century privilege adds an even darker twist: access to wellness health care comes at the cost of money and little else.

Now playing: Time to move

1. Prince – 'Play That Funky Music' (live 2011)
2. Angel Olsen – 'Safety Dance'
3. Dazz Band – 'Let It Whip'
4. Zapp – 'I Can Make You Dance'
5. Roger Troutman – '(Everybody) Get Up'

Now playing: Your page title here

1. Ariana Grande ft. The Weeknd – 'Off the Table'
2. Earth, Wind & Fire – 'Serpentine Fire'
3. Ramsey Lewis – 'Jade East'
4. The Flying Lizards – 'Money'
5. B.T. Express – 'Do It ('Til You're Satisfied)'

Long distance information

Unsolved crimes attract amateur sleuths because there is little evidence to sift through, which is also why the crimes are unsolved. While the known facts that directly relate to the so-called Zodiac killer fill a page, the information that may or may not be germane fills many books. Mark Hewitt has written three. Hunted: The Zodiac Murders (The Zodiac Serial Killer Book 1) is an impressively painstaking tally of eyewitness reports and investigator accounts spritzed with emotional insight and personal projection. In the third volume of his series Hewitt proposes the theory that the Zodiac could be Theodore Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber. And why not? The Zodiac could be Jack the Ripper if humans lived that long. A compelling conspiracy requires many possible angles, like the Kennedy assassination. Cognitive bias pop quiz: which operator do you believe is more likely to have acted alone – Lee Harvey Oswald or Edward Snowden?

See into the trees

I could watch a hundred European detective shows like Capitani which is good because Netflix has that many. Their titles are forgettable and many of their principal elements are generic but good stuff comes from low expectations and plain delivery. Business requirements have caused other genres in movies and TV to bloat. Like stadium rock, the spectacle is part of the package. But something about crime stories keeps things small. Capitani is set in Luxembourg in summer. The characters are sunburned and petty. A girl has been killed and her twin sister survives and an out-of-town cop is assigned to the case for no particular reason. The story ambles for quite a bit until something else hits from the side and gives everything in it new shape. Best of all is that it's not in English. Good crime is local.

Absolute ego dance

About two-thirds of the way through Ryu Murakami's In The Miso Soup things turn nasty but not in a way that should surprise the reader. The energetically paced short novel was always leading up to this. The shock is how long the violence is sustained. Although the scene runs for several pages it is not as gripping as the build-up to it. The tension of nightclub guide Kenji wondering if his client is a killer plays like a very crowded version of Dorothy B Hughes' In a Lonely Place. (Is Frank a murderer? Is he? Is he? Is he? He is!) Reviews call Miso Soup a philosophical novel. It's a sort of philosophy: James M Cain and Jim Thompson also followed it. Murakami's novel was published in 1997: the author was born in 1952. That surprised me. He writes younger. Perhaps it requires age to be so reckless.

Above all, no psychology!

Luis Bunuel was 67 when he made Belle de Jour; 72 when he made Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie; 74 for The Phantom of Liberty. Jeanne Moreau called him 'the only director I know who never threw away a shot. He had the film in his mind. When he said "action" and "cut," you knew that what was in between the two would be printed.'

Catherine Deneuve: 'He had a wonderful sense of humor. One thing he stressed was, "Above all, no psychology!" I accepted it wholeheartedly, especially because it came from him.'

Michel Piccoli: "He was severe in life and very hard to please. He was a great Spanish bourgeois by birth, and very well organised. He was very good about working within the budget, because when he was young, he had experienced economic hardship, especially in the U.S. He lived very modestly... He was once interviewed in Spain by French TV, which sent a crew with two trucks. He told them, "I could make a film with what it cost you to bring all this here." 

Dan Yakir's 1983 collection of interviews with actors who worked with the director is here.

True romance

Louis Leterrier’s The Incredible Hulk is the last Marvel movie to exist alongside other movies. Jon Favreau’s Iron Man was Dr No: after that, every Marvel movie / TV series / live-action animation set out to bottle that lightning. But even with its tacked-on post-credits scene you can watch The Incredible Hulk without the burden of legacy. The film taps into the unseen horrors of Cat People (1942) and Hammer horrors and their literary antecedents. Hulk is Frankenstein's monster, Banner is Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Liv Tyler is the only female character in the MCU films who exists on her own non-superpower terms. Blonsky is the only villain who really poses a threat. Consider the indestructible god Hulk – so boring in Ang Lee’s take; the ultimate weapon in Whedon’s (“We have a Hulk. Do you have a Hulk?”) – and then consider how perky chancer Tim Roth backs him down with a pop gun. Edward Norton on the run in Rio de Janeiro is the fugitive fuse for a cascade of bad decisions. Betty and Bruce’s doomed romance has real weight. It shows you how little Marvel risked with Tony and Pepper.

Of thought