STEPHEN HUNTER'S G-MAN

Unto the generations, the Swagger family continues to deliver for Stephen Hunter, who in G-Man revisits Bob Lee's grandfather Charles, who as the book opens is sheriff of Polk County, Arkansas and there at the mowing down of Bonnie and Clyde in Arcadia, Louisiana.

So when a strongbox is found in a property back home in Arkansas that Bob Lee is selling, and it contains an FBI badge, a .45 coated in Cosmolene, a gun part and a treasure map, Bob Lee is intrigued, and with the help of Nick Memphis, his old buddy at the FBI, he begins to work on the mystery of what these things are, and why they've been buried and preserved.

Charles was a hero in World War I, and like all the Swaggers to come, an expert in weapons. So through a complicated bit of internal politicking within the already-political FBI, Swagger gets assigned to the FBI bureau in Chicago, where the fight against the big-name gangsters of the era: most crucially Baby Face Nelson, who is, in his own way, just as competent a gunman as Charles Swagger.

The period story is Hunter at his best; the Thirties Gangster era is perfect for his skills, highly-armed shootouts and teams working with almost militaristic plans. Hunter's story is one of the best of many that have been part of a recent gangster revival. He's done his research and gives us a new perspective on Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly, John Dillinger and their cohorts, as well as the nascent FBI, already a bureaucratic nightmare ruled by the authoritarian J Edgar Hoover. Charles Swagger is not a fit in there, and his ethos as the lone gunman hero is closer in many ways to his adversaries than to Hoover's G Men, though of course Swagger is on the side of good, though he considers himself flawed in serious ways.

The modern story is less convincing—as Swagger and Memphis piece together the puzzle from small clues, helped by a good bit of coincidence. And they are unaware, at first, that their investigation is being tracked. The resolution in the present is, of course, limited by the resolution of the past, but it is intriguing in another way. There is a secret lurking in Charles Swagger's life, one that informs the flaws in his character, which drives his drinking, his brooding violence. The secret is revealed, but I suspect we have not heard the last of it, because we also learn that when Charles Swagger is killed, years later, the reasons remain unexplained, and Hunter may have laid the foundations for Bob Lee to solve that crime next.

G-Man by Stephen Hunter

GP Putnam's Sons, US $9.99 ISBN 9780399574610

Note: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

RAGNAR JONASSON'S DARKNESS: THE SHOTS INTERVIEW

This is the interview that ran in Shots magazine. I posted a link to that on 29 October, if you'd like to scroll back to IT for that day you can read my introduction to it. I also reviewed the book back in March, and you can link to that review here. Otherwise, here's my first version of the Shots interview (there were a few small changes in the web version....

Ragnar Jonasson's most recent novel, The Darkness, was so impressive that I worked on arranging an interview from the moment I knew I was visiting Iceland. We met at his office, in a handsome but unimposing house just off the centre of Reykjavik. Inside, it's been converted into a slick modern headquarters for an international investment firm, for whom Jonasson is a lawyer in his day job. This was a pleasant Icelandic summer day in August, some sunshine, temperature in the high teens celsius. It had been a bit colder wetter and more rainy that morning, when my son and I went out of Reykjavik harbour on a whale watch, to which the whales themselves were not as accommodating as the crime writer.

Of course in Iceland when you have a day job, the days are very long in summer and very short in winter. Which is why my first question was how he managed to balance his high-powered day job with his steady output of novels. The interview has been edited slightly to avoid spoilers, given that the finish of The Darkness is so powerful.

RJ: I write every night in the winter, which gives me enough time to finish a novel. It's like a hobby, like some people go hiking, or watch TV. I plan one book a year, and in Iceland the big publishing date falls before Christmas, because books are a traditional Christmas present here. Sometimes I'm tempted to do more, but I really like being a lawyer, and if I did have more time free, much of it would likely be spent marketing my books, not necessarily writing more.

MC: You started writing professionally at a very young age, translating Agatha Christie. How did that come about?

RJ: I needed a job for the summer! Christie had been well-translated into Iceland, but I discovered there were quite a few works still out there, and I liked them. I starting translating short stories for magazines, and did it for 10-15 years, again like a hobby. Then the crime-writers who came before me started to make Icelandic crime a lively genre and proved it could be done. So Icelandic readers learned to like crime fiction, but it needed to be a believable story when you're set in a small country where there aren't as many crimes.

MC: Indridason, for example?

RJ: Yes, of course, and it was very interesting how he began by using a situation which depends on Iceland's being an unusual country.

MC: What drew you to Christie specifically? Because your 'Dark Iceland' series is very much in the Christie tradition.

RJ: I love the classic set-up, a limited number of suspects, but you have to do something with it—it would look awkward if you copied the settings and characters.

MC: But there are similarities in the societies, from what I've seen.

RJ: Iceland is a very closed and stratified society, which is more obvious in small communities, which is part of why I set the series in the north. It's about a close community, nature and the landscape, and the weather. I'm blessed with having this strange country to work with.

MC: Having just looked at the old law site at Pingvellur, I wonder if it's a judgemental society too?

RJ: Certainly in the old days. I'm not so sure it's still like that, because people do try to stick together.

MC: You see some tension in your characters, the way Ari Thor is relatively simple and straightforward, somewhat traditional, where his girlfriend Kristin is more modern in many ways.

RJ: Ari is a bit shy, with a sort of closed-off life and personality, like many Icelanders are,

so his personal life can have problems. But the crimes he investigates are the kinds where that personality allows him some leeway in getting to the solutions.

The Darkness features a new detective for Jonasson, Hulda Hermansdottir. She is a dedicated, hard-working, old-fashioned kind of cop, who has been passed over for promotions partly because she is a woman and partly because that doggedness doesn't always fit in, when she won't play the office political game. Now she is being pressed into unwanted early retirement, and to get her out of the way, she's offered one last cold case to choose to investigate. It involves the death of a young Russian woman, found on the coast, and ruled suicide. But that doesn't sound right to Hulda...

MC: I heard you interviewed on BBC Radio 4's Front Row (full disclosure: a programme to which I am an occasional contributor) a few months ago after The Darkness was published in hardback, and although it was an interesting discussion of reading and publishing in Iceland, I was shocked because they never once asked you about your novel!

RJ: Well, I was very happy to talk about my country, and we are a very literate society. But yes, to talk about my book would have been nice.

MC: I thought The Darkness was one of the very best novels crime novels I read this year, and what I particularly liked was the way it ends. I had the same sort of 'you can't do THAT!” reaction I had when I read Joe Gores' Interface: you've played with the genre's conventions brilliantly.

RJ: Thank you! That was both deliberate but also how the story itself grew. I had an idea I could work backwards, because I knew from the start it was the only way I could end the book. I know the ending may come as a surprise, in fact I expected it, but it was really the only logical way it could end. It was so powerful. The reaction in Iceland wasn't so risky, because you can do more because the crime-writing tradition has been going only a short time. But outside Iceland it was more of a challenge to break the rules, so to speak, but it was a challenge I had to take.

MC: Especially because your earlier books are so relatively traditional?

RJ: You really do want to challenge the form. You know the rules, and you want to break them in your own way. That was always my intention.

MC: And it is somewhat judgemental.

RJ: Yes, there is a price to pay in the end. You cannot go back. Back in the early centuries of this state there was no police. Which sometimes means individuals feel they have no choice but to act.

MC: You establish a great deal of sympathy for Hulda.

RJ: Which made many readers almost angry at the way the story progressed. They liked her, and I loved that reaction. But I'm working on two more novels featuring Hulda, which go back into her early career.

MC: How do you work The Darkness into that?

RJ: They won't give away the twists of The Darkness, but I think to those who've read the first book, it will provide added value to understand that. A deeper meaning, if you will. And I've started the next Dark Iceland novel. I already knew the plot for that one.

MC: It will keep you busy.

RJ: I wouldn't feel comfortable any other way!

Ragnar needed to get back to work, as calls were literally lining up while we spoke in the conference room, but before he did I told him I particularly loved the very last scene of The Darkness, a coda of sorts which is seeped in a kind of polite authoritarian hypocrisy, but also reminds us of how, even in a small, closed society, we may know very little about each other. He thanked me, and I thanked him for his time. Two days later, as my plane left Iceland I looked back at the island and thought just how powerfully and subtly Jonasson had interpreted his society. And how unexpectedly.

The Darkness, translated by Victoria Cribb, is out in paperback from Michael Joseph.

AN IRRESISTIBLE TARGETS CHRISTMAS UPDATE

I should have wished you all Merry Christmas a couple of days ago, but I was, as you will see, distracted. So let me hoe you've had a very Merry Christmas, Happy Boxing Day, a fine St Stephen's Day and whatever else the year's final week offers.

It's been almost a month since I last posted here, and what was originally supposed to be a blog but has looked more like a website featuring reviews and essays and interviews. The kind of stuff I am supposed to be writing for a living, which is part of the reason why there hasn't been anything forthcoming. Not that I have increased my output of writing for payment, indeed, that has decreased steadily, in these days of print contraction. So I have concentrated on my work in American football, on TV radio podcast and online writing, and also offered a weekly column on Patreon (patreon.com/mikecarlsonfmte , hoping to attract enough subscribers to at least earn as much as I did from writing the same column (but in far less depth) for the nfluk's website the previous 13 years.

That has been a lot of work, but the requisite subscriber base did not materialise, and worse, did not increase as the season went on, as I had naively assumed it might. So I face two questions in the New Year: first what do I do with this blog site and second what do I do with the patreon column.

I am going to resume writing for IT for the time being: a few things this week and then try to catch up on some of the material I meant to do but didn't in the past few months--"no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money" said Dr Johnson, and I haven't counted but there must be close to a million unpaid words on this site. Then I'll decide where to go with this--maybe to a full-scale website.

The Patreon column I will likely put into abeyance for the offseason, though my plan was to carry on with something every two weeks, just to keep people on board. Again, we shall see, because I am committed to continue through the Super Bowl in February. Decisions, decisions. Your responses and input are valued, but I am thinking the key idea is how to reach more readers directly. And make it a Happy New Year!

OSSIPEE LAKE HAIKU

When I was a boy, from ages 7-10, I spent my summers at my great-uncle Andy's boys camp on Lake Ossipee, in New Hampshire. As an adult, I would visit my uncle Jack and aunt Jane at their cottage on the other part of the lake (it was Jane's family's cottage; they had met when Jack canoed past one day, a counselor with some young campers,
and spotted her on the shore.) For a few years I would always manage to visit in early September, when the lake was quiet, the nights were cool, and the pine needles were thick on the ground.

This is for Jack and Jane...
 
OSSIPEE LAKE HAIKU

Pine needles fallen
Soft scent of past beneath my
Stepping silently home

STAN LEE: MY OFF THE BALL TRIBUTE

Tuesday morning I appeared on Off The Ball radio in Ireland, where I often discuss NFL and other American sports, but this time it was to talk with hosts Ger Gilroy and Eoin Sheahan. You can listen (and watch) that conversation here. A lot of it touched on things I wrote last month in my article about the artist Steve Ditko,  "The Amazing Spider Man and the Incredible Ayn Rand" which appeared in the Autum 2018 issue of Jewish Quarterly (sadly no link to the complete article).

There's not a lot really to add, without tracing Stan's history within the comics industry, but the key point was the change in comics which the Marvel revolution brought about. Almost immediately, in one sense, as DC were fairly quick to update Batman and go 'relevant', famously, with Green Arrow, behind the scripting of Dennis O'Neil and artwork of Neal Adams. Stan started a move to more mature work which would accelerate -- often in graphic novel format -- at the point where the comics industry became more diffuse, and at least part of it began aiming at an adult market. Some of which were the now adult and prosperous kids who had read Marvels in the Sixties.

The feud between Stan and Ditko was in one sense the feud between the Sixties and the Fifties, between the traditional comics market and a new one, between teenagers and adolescents. Stan won, obviously.
And in the long run we now have major motion pictures whose sensibilities are very much still those of Lee in the late Sixties, very much still emotionally the same Spider Man and X Men or whatever.

Stan wasn't necessarily the best writer of comics--he had a tendency to flowery kind of amateur dramatic dialogue--O'Neil and Roy Thomas were the two most notable of the writers who began as understudies to Stan, O'Neil moving to Charlton and then to DC when editor Dick Giordano moved from Charlton.
But the tenor of their work was formed by the enthusiasm for story-telling and faith in the medium Stan Lee had. Lee was also a remarkable self (and Marvel) promoter, and being a devoted reader of Marvel in the Sixties was very much like being part of a club, an Our Gang mentality that was a link to that adolescent enjoyment. Plus his heart really was in the right place: that photo above comes from Stan's Soapbox, which appeared in the comics: that one was the famous screed against bigotry which has received a lot of attention now he's died.

I really was 15 when I bought my first comic, and I was right, it was Avengers 28. I was a scholarship student at the local prep school, I had read Crime & Punishment, Look Homeward Angel, No Exit and the like in my English classes (and more at home: that was probably the summer I read The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings in one week). I was playing football, and soon would be starting at defensive end (at 6-2 175) on a team with 19 and 20 year old post-grads. And I was pretty much addicted to comic books. For better or worse, it formed my next six years, probably depressed my grades, definitely made my coaches distrust my toughness, and certainly helped me resist full maturiosity. Thanks Stan.

MRS MAY, MR BECKETT AND THE BREXIT ENDGAME

"The negotiations for our departure are now in the endgame," said Mrs Theresa May on the evening of 12 November, at the Lord Mayor's Banquet in The Guildhall, a suitable occasion to celebrate the kamikaze-like devotion to a display of the splendor of British (or English) sovereignty. It came a day after the ceremonies marking the 100th anniversary of the end of "the war to end all wars". The BBC Radio 4 Now Show was more perfectly ironic in describing the Remembrance Day ceremony as honoring the lives of hundreds of thousands of Englishmen who gave their lives in defense of Brussels.

But it was odd that May should choose a word recalling Samuel Beckett's play to describe the negotiations which would stretch until three in the morning that very morning, and which appear to offer very little to anyone. May's genius has been to divide her own party into three factions, one more than plagued Offshore Dave Cameron, which means that every aspect of the Brexit debate is now 'covered' by BBC by presenting all three sides of their national debate: that is, the Tory party: 'Irish Jake' Rees-Mogg and the errrggghhhh group of hard-line No Deal Brexiters; the Remoaners led by the latest opportunistic Johnson, JoJo, the one who gave Toby Young a job regulating university students, until someone noticed; and May's backers (the hapless Damien Green in the BBC Radio 4 Today knees-up I heard a few days ago) for whatever piecemeal 'deal' she manages to get in the end, hampered by the fact that Michel Barnier and the EU play chess while she plays Chequers. Put May, Mogg, Green and JoJo together and you could stage a production of Waiting For Go Now.

In Beckett, and much of Theatre of the Absurd, life is meaningless, and we cope with the existential anguish knowledge of that fact produces by engaging in rituals that create a sort of meaningful structure for our existence. As metaphors for May's Brexit Britain, you could much much worse.

Keeping that in mind, the endgame, as it were, of Endgame is instructive. Watch Clov's final speech again; you can find Michael Gambon's version here. "You cried for night - it falls. Now cry in darkness"

RAGNAR JONASSON, THE SHOTS INTERVIEW: I'M BLESSED WITH HAVING THIS STRANGE COUNTRY TO WORK WITH

I interviewed the Icelandic crime writer Ragnar Jonasson in Rekyjavik not so long ago: the interview is up at the online UK crime fiction mag, Shots. The interview coincides with the launch of his novel The Darkness in paperback; I reviewed the original launch of the hardback here, back in March. It is a stunningly original deconstruction of a crime novel, probably the best I've read this year. I was very surprised to learn that it is the first of a three-book series; his rather more old-fashioned 'Dark Iceland' mysteries had not prepared me for The Darkness, and the idea that he could work backwards with the character is an equally original idea. You can link to the interview here.

GIRL: DANCE AND GENDER AT THE LONDON FILM FESTIVAL

Is there any gender role more stylised than a that of ballerina? Lara is 15, and has been accepted into one of Belgium's leading ballet schools. But only provisionally, because Lara is well behind the other girls, most of whom have started their pointe by age 12. Lara didn't start then, because at 12 she was still a boy. And now, trying to make up lost time, she is further hindered by the fact that her body is still a boy's.

Lara has begun hormonal treatments, and will have surgery when she is older, but she still tapes down her penis when she dances. She has the dual pressures of a new school, as her father as moved her for her ballet, and the dance. And of course, she is about to turn 16, and needs to deal with sexual curiosity and urges.

One of the beauties of Girl, which won both the Camera d'or for first film, and the independent Queer Palm at the Cannes Film Festival, is the way Lara's reaction to this overwhelming combination of stresses is presented: she is given her headway, and the audience is drawn along with her. She hears the warnings from all sides. A doctor promises more intense treatment “if you're evolving enough”; a dance teacher tells her “some things can't be changed, right?” She has a wonderfully supportive taxi-driver father (her mother's nowhere in sight) but not surprisingly, he (a good performance by Arieh Worthalter) has to struggle to try to understand the deep pull of feelings that Lara must cope with every day. But he, like us, has to remain distant from what is inside Lara. And no matter how often the doctors and psychologists tell her she is already what she is, she seems not to believe them. And of course dance merely reinforces that disbelief.

Despite there being, in effect, two movies going on here: a dance film and a trans film, director Lukas Dhont handles this with great subtlety, because he realises just how tightly entwined those two roles are. Director of photography Frank van den Eeden does a fine job of shooting in different tones for the different moments, the different stresses. There is extensive use of mirrors: the way dancers scrutinize their own movements, poses and bodies; the way Lara watches expectantly for the changes in her. It's all blended in to the story of her dance: this is a young teen aware of her own gender identity, not yet sexual, but attempting to become what she is by becoming the most idealized perception of what she is, and the most difficult to achieve. 'You make this so hard on yourself,' she is told, but it is as if she is aspiring to some sort of idealised, fairy-tale image of the girl she is and wants to be, and something has got to give.

That is why the dance story sits at the centre. We watch as she undergoes the torture of the toe: as she unwraps her bleeding bandages, and we realise the power of her desire to be what she is, and the metaphor for the difficulty of doing that. It is the very definition of the classic ballerina story, told in terms of everyday existence as well as on the stage.

The fulcrum of the story is a birthday party with the other girls in her class, where she is humilated by being asked to show her penis. Her body, which has never sweatted while dancing, suddenly begins to; the taping of her genitals has also caused an infection which will interfere with her treatment. The effort to dance, to stay thin, to have that girl's body, is exhausting her. And she meets a boy.

The resolution of this dilemma will strike some, as it struck me, as overly melodramatic; though it is predictable from the instant the scene starts, but metaphorically it works, in that there is only one way that Lara will be Lara. The film's final scene also seems a bit too pat, too slick, too upbeat: it is like a shot out of a commercial, but again its metaphoric point has been made. Lara is Lara: what has become of the rest of her dreams can be intuited, but has been left open.

As Lara, Victor Polster is brilliant: there is a scene when her young brother calls her 'Victor' in spite, to hurt her, which is some ironic comment, but he catches both the will and the frustration of Lara: she is never in doubt about what she wants, but she is an innocent, who needs to take steps, not ballet steps, for herself. Polster and Dhont have created a character audiences will cheer for, will suffer with, and in the end may well understand.

GIRL (Belgium, 2018) directed by Lukas Dhont, written by Dhont and Angelo Tijssens

UK distribution: Curzon/Artificial Eye

JIM TAYLOR: FULLBACK, PACKER

When the news came that the Packers' great Jim Taylor had died aged 83, the first message I got was from a Philadelphia friend of mine. 'You can get up now Jim, the game's over,' it read. That was a reference to the 1960 NFL championship game, the only playoff game Vince Lombardi ever lost. The Packers were driving, but with about 20 seconds left Bart Starr couldn't find a receiver in the end zone, and dumped the ball off to Taylor, who broke a couple of tackles but was then wrapped up by Chuck Bednarik and Bobby Jackson. Bednarik sat on him for 12 seconds until the clock ran out, then gave Taylor the famous quote.

Jim Taylor was a winner and Jim Taylor was tough. Those two things defined him and I'd put the second one first. His face looked like it was chiseled out of stone: a crew cut topped rectangle with a flat nose and powerful jaw. He was a huge college star at LSU. I can remember seeing Billy Cannon star for them when I was young, in his Heisman winning season, but in 1957 when Cannon and Taylor shared the running duties, it was Taylor who was the focus of opposing defenses. He was drafted by the Packers, but didn't come into his own until Lombardi took over the team, and paired him and Paul Hornung, another Heisman winner. When you think of the power sweep you think of Hornung (or Donny Anderson or Elijah Pitts) running behind the two guards, Fuzzy Thurston (63) and Jerry Kramer (64) and Taylor, but the Pack also ran it the other way, with Taylor the ball carrier. He was also a receiving threat out of the backfield, a hard guy to tackle one on one in the open field.

His good fortune was to be a part of that Packer dynasty, whose greatest ability was to be able to separate themselves from good teams like the Colts or Giants or later the Cowboys when it mattered most. They had talent, but the talent grew because they fit and played Lombardi's system to perfection. In a sense, the idea that players on great teams tend to get overvalued (see all the Packers from that era in the Hall of Fame) also means they get undervalued as individuals as time moves on, and the numbers of that era get lost in the bigger shinier numbers of the present day.

Jim Taylor was also hampered by being only the second-best Jim to play fullback in his era, behind Jim Brown. But look what happened in 1962, when Hornung was suspended for the season for associating with gamblers. Taylor ran for 1,474 yards and19 touchdowns (in 14 games) and that was Brown's only season not leading the NFL in rushing. The Pack beat the Giants 16-7 in the NFL championship game on a frozen Yankee Stadium surface with the temperature at 17 degrees F (-8 C) and the winds at 40-50 mph. Green Bay's D ( led by game MVP Ray Nitschke) forced five fumbles.Taylor ran 31 times for only 85 yards, scoring the only TD (guard Jerry Kramer, subbing for an injured Hornung, kicked three field goals). Taylor, who it turned out was suffering from hepatitis and had lost 15 pounds in the week before the game, took a beating, mostly from Giants' MLB Sam Huff. He bit through his tongue and required six stiches on his elbow. Steve Sabol, whose father Ed had bought the film rights (a key step to becoming NFL Films) recalled the intense violence and profane trash talk between Taylor and Huff. Watching the game on black and white TV as a kid, I can recall it and a 60 Minutes segment called 'The Violent World Of Sam Huff as if they were one thing.

Fullbacks were not just blockers in those days. I recall, besides Brown and Taylor, John Henry Johnson, Nick Pietrosante (a local guy from my area), Johnny Olszewski, Jim Nance, Cookie Gilchrist and the likes: guys operating from two-back sets who did a bit of everything—think Larry Csonka as maybe the last great example of the genre.

Taylor was known as the kind of runner who would seek out potential tacklers and run through them, rather than try to avoid them. 'Jim Brown will give you a leg and take it away,' Lombardi said. 'Jim Taylor will give you a leg and ram it through your chest.' He was old school all the way, exactly what we thought of football players being when I was a kid. It makes me remember why I hesitated for an instant as a 13 year old high school freshman about which sport I was going to be given the kit for. But only for an instant.

Taylor played one best-forgotten season for the Saints in his adopted home town of New Orleans, then ran a business on the docks there. He didn't place much store in the modern game, which probably won't surprise you. As he said to Bob McCullough in My Greatest Day In Football, “Forget all that talk, I like action. Today’s athletes, they’re just full of so much conversation instead of keep your mouth shut and just do your job. I don’t even watch a game.” I would watch a Jim Taylor game any time.

Note: This feature also appears as a bonus at my football site: patreon.com/mikecarlsonfmte, where I preview all the week's games as well as write the occasional feature.  If you're interested in football, check it out...

MICHAEL CONNELLY'S DARK SACRED NIGHT

Night shift detective Renee Ballard is typing up her report on her investigation of a woman found dead, after days in her bathtub, earlier that night, when she notices a stranger going through the file cabinets on the other side of the detective bureau. He's Harry Bosch, and when Bosch goes off with the shift commander, Ballard isn't convinced by his explanation. A quick examination of her own and she knows Bosch lied about what he was doing, and her curiosity is piqued by what his real motives were.

It's a brilliantly understated introduction of the two detectives Michael Connelly brings together in Dark Sacred Night. When I reviewed Ballard's debut, The Late Show, last year I wrote that “Ballard is too good a character not to reappear soon, and Connelly is too good a series writer not to draw Harry Bosch into her orbit,” and so it happened. I Interviewed Michael at Waterstone's Piccadilly on that book tour, and when I asked about comparisons between the two, he said he thought of each in terms of one key word: for Ballard 'fierce' and for Bosch 'relentless'. He repeats those definitions in a short introduction to this novel, which describes his decision to tell the story primarily separately, letting us see each character through the other's eyes.

Connelly does this so well the introduction is barely required. It's sometimes overlooked, in the depth of the Bosch characterisation, just how strong the police procedural element of his stories is, and with Ballard working her night cases while joining Bosch in his relentless probing into a cold case murder. That is the killing of Daisy Clayton, the runaway daughter of a junkie Bosch met in Two Kinds Of Truth, while working undercover on the prescription opioid trade; and the mother/junkie is now living in Bosch's house. Bosch also has another cold case warming on the burner for his employer, the San Fernando PD, the assassination of a Latino gang leader a decade and a half before. Connelly mixes these stories like a magician, but the aim is not to distract, but to put the reader more fully into the mindset of the characters. The pace is as relentless as Harry, and you are left wondering, above all else, how either her or Ballard ever get any sleep.

This is what keeps, and always has kept, Connelly's work above mere gimmickry, and it comes from his understanding of those personalities he has defined in one word. As doggedly as either of them, he builds their characters through the work they do, indeed the work by which they would probably define themselves. Interviewing Michael, I asked about some of the parallels I found between them: the loss of one parent, the absence of the other; the living in a metaphorically isolated location with a tremendous view: Bosch's of the city, Ballard's of the ocean, a view that is always the same but always changing. It is not surprising that they should be drawn together, that cases should be solved, that one would save the other's life, and that there might be some tragedy and sadness involved. This is what Connelly and Bosch have always been about. If, in the end, their 'formal' agreement to work together again seems a little bit too light or contrived, it is already something to look forward to. And I would not be at all surprised to find Mickey Haller being the agency that brings Bosch and Ballard together again. In the meantime, this is a must-read detective novel, for this or any year.

Dark Sacred Night by Michael Connelly

Orion £20 ISBN 9780857826374

NOTE: This review will also appear at Shots (www.shotsmag.co.uk)

THE GIRL WHO TAKES AN EYE FOR AN EYE: MORE MILLENNIUM

This is David Lagercrantz's second novel continuing Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy, and I like it better than its predecessor The Girl In The Spider's Web. Titling is not always a strong point in the series, however, and title of the present volume is every bit as clunky as The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest.

I thought Spider's Web was interesting primarily in the way it seemed to try to transform Lisbeth Salander's much commented-on status as an anti-heroine into something more like an action hero. In that sense, it was closest in feel to The Girl Who Played With Fire, the second of Larsson's books, which had her as the almost lone protagonist, seeking her revenge on her father. That worked because it made such a change from the almost classical whodunnit structure of Dragon Tattoo, just as the third novel, Hornet's Nest, restored Mikael Blomkvist to the lead, while Salander lay in hospital, until the courtroom drama which is the climax.

Lagercrantz seems to have gone back consciously to the formula of the first volume, in which Blomqvist is an investigative journalist, and the third, because for much of this one Salander is in prison, getting her chance to kick ass in that environment, with both fellow prisoners and with the warden. It's a weakness of male authority figures. It's also an awkward kind of mix, but just like the template of Dragon Tattoo, the story is linked to the past of a very wealthy family and to a disappearing child. These tropes come on top of the continuing ones about siblings—Salander's sister who's now her arch-enemy/rival, and about secret government programmes designed, it would seem, specifically to ensure Salander gets abused in the interests of national security. In this case the programme is one about twins, which means the main story and Salander's again overlap.

We know that Larsson intended the Millennium series to extend to ten volumes, like Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo's Beck, and we can almost see Lagercrantz plotting out the links, overlaps and connections which can see Blomkvist and Salander drawn in. And we know Larsson, like many other Swedish writers, was concerned with government abuse of police powers, and the creation of an over-watching secret state, so we can also see how the sketching out of that template can keep the story moving. The problem is that all of this, to five volumes, occurs predominantly as either backstory or the working out of backstory, and backstory on a grand scale as well as one involving Salander.

Lagercrantz can write better than Larsson, but he sometimes doesn't seem to have the knack for narrative drive—these can be separate things, as anyone who follows along voraciously say, a John Grisham story, even when the writing often jars, can attest. Lagercrantz has the habit of re-introducing characters, even main characters, constantly—explaining who they are and what they do, as if he were influenced by English critics whose main response to Scandinavian crime is to marvel at how difficult the names are to pronounce. It's like getting constant footnotes instead of the usual dramatis personae in the front pages of a Russian novel.

But in the end, he gets the story to pay off, and it has a marvelous coda which is pure Salander, though a side of her we've never seen on the page before; it alone was worth the path through the novel, though that was never a problem in the first place.

The Girl Who Takes An Eye For An Eye

by David Lagercrantz

Maclehose Press, 2017 £20.00 ISBN 9780857056405

HUMAN INTERFERENCE: A POEM

In honour of National Poetry Day, let me offer a poem I wrote thirty years ago, just after my birthday, in Geneva. The event it depicts had just recently happened to me, right down to the pigeons jumping on the carriage at Baker Street and off at Edgware Road, where we were being held. It didn't take much revising, and was published in my 1989 Northern Lights pamphlet Homage To Gibbon and then, after some delay, in Tokyo, in the summer 1990 issue of Edge: International Arts Interface. Both times I misspelled Edgware, adding an e, which was appropriate enough given the magazine's title. It is reprinted here for the first time with the name of the station spelled correctly. I've tried out a few other small changes.  TFL, or whatever they call London Transport these days, no longer uses the phrase 'human interference.' 


HUMAN INTERFERENCE

A few pigeons exit the car at Edgware Road.
The platform seems to soften & melt as
We finally pull away. The walls of the tunnel lose
Their blur, become clear as we come to a stop.
We sit. After a while faces move into focus,
Take on expressions, search the car for room or air
Or pigeons or something to read. Eventually
A disembodied someone talks. A person
Has fallen in front of the train. We will have to wait.
London Transport regret this delay, which they say
Is the result of "human interference".
We get in the way.
Many of us are already late.
We are getting later all the time.

DOTTER OF HER FATHER'S EYES

Mary Talbot's father, James Atherton, was one of the world's leading Joyce scholars, and when she was growing up his work took precedence over most other activity in their home. Alternating charm and anger, he drew out Mary's affection, then rejected it brutally. For the adult Mary, a chance encounter with an old ID card of her father's brings back a line from Finnegan's Wake, 'my cold mad feary father' and from that line comes this book.

Dotter Of Her Father's Eyes, another line from Joyce, has at its centre the tragic life of Joyce's daughter Lucia, and the parallels with their lives. There are the obvious ones: the father first struggling to support his family, both men as teachers, while doing creative work of great importance. The daughters relegated to the background, especially in Lucia's case where her younger brother received most of the encouragement. Both wanting some creative life of their own, and finding huge barriers of missing expectation in their paths.

Lucia Joyce spent years dancing, but at key moments of her possible career she would be held back by both her parent's traditional view of a woman's place—one strictly followed in the Joyce household, and a betrayal by Samuel Beckett, her father's secretary, more in love, in the end, with Joyce's work than his daughter. But the revelation at age 24, at just the time her dance career had finally crashed, that her parents were not married, that she and her brother were bastards, triggered something within Lucia. As if the radical modernist who was an upholder of prim bourgeois Irish Catholic propriety turned out to be a hypocrite all the while, at his daughter's expense. Lucia's behaviour became more erratic, suicidal, addicted to Veronal, and eventually, after the occupation of Paris ended, she was committed to institutions, where she died, on Mary's father's birthday.

It's a very sad and very dramatic story, and the parallels are never that strong or complete—though Mary's first dream was also to be a dancer. The nuns at her school are a close enough substitute for Nora Joyce, their strict disapproval aimed at filling her with low aspirations. The crucial difference is that Mary manages to break away from her father's hold, which Lucia was never able to do. She earns her PhD, still trying at 30 to impress her father, and at least partially succeeds. But she also, almost stumbling into the relationship, finds a husband and family of her own, and her husband is the artist who drew this book. And when her father dies, and she hears from students and Joyce scholars about his brilliant teaching, and sees her brothers carrying the coffin, laughing (which shocks her mother-in-law even as we think of Finnegan one last time) it is as if a circle has been broken. The ID card prompts memory, and the academic teams up with her comic artist husband to produce a work of great honesty, filled with pain and some hope. But at heart it is really, in the dizzying world of Joyce's imagination and language, a memoir grounded in dreams of dance and dancing reality, the legacy of our lives as we all emerge from shadows.

Dotter Of Her Father's Eyes

by Mary M Talbot and Bryan Talbot

Jonathan Cape £14.99 ISBN 9780224096089

BODYGUARD AND ITS TWISTS

I was going to put a spoiler alert at the top of this page, but since according to media I am the only adult in Britain who didn't watch the final episode of Bodyguard last Sunday and then spend all day Monday chatting about it on the metaphoric water-cooler that is social media, I don't feel I have to bother. So let me say that I was both disappointed and relieved that Julia Montague's death didn't turn out to be hoax, which would have been daring but also a twist too far. Of course writer Jed Mercurio, having killed off his lynch-pin character, had to twist like Chubby Checker to try to keep things interesting and watchers' brains spinning.

Keely Hawes' departure left a hole to fill which was not quite filled by the Ipad filled with 'compromat'. As an aside, I think 'Compromat' ought to be the name of the next TMZ-style website that comes along. But an Ipad can't do what Hawes does, like stand in the doorway playing with herself. Theresa May and Amber Rudd, eat your hearts out.

At that point the focus of the story fell directly on conspiracy, and DS Budd's personal life dropped into softer, if still monomaniacal, focus. Which is sort of good, because the need of Richard Madden's performance to extend to a second dimension is thus minimised. Madden has the poker face required of a bodyguard. He has the determined poker face required of a cop/soldier on a mission. He has the puzzled poker face of a victim of a conspiracy. And he has the pained poker face of a suffering war veteran who's seen too much. And the frustrated poker face of the damaged husband trying to deal with wife and kids.

In the final episode we got all those faces at once in the key scene, an extended etude on the theme of defusing a bomb, which includes a bizarre march across the city to his flat, with his estranged wife by his side so no one will shoot him. The problem is bomb diffusing stories, always cliched in suspense terms, have basically two outcomes. You snip the wire and....bam, you're dead. Or you snip the wire and you're not dead, then you can jump over the convenient wall all the cops have conveniently retreated far enough away from to make escape convenient. But without it you would have missed Madden walking through the streets with a bloodied face in a serape, like the Man With No Name, rather than the Man With No Expressions.

OK. So far so good. But from the moment Julia was killed, we, knowing we had a conspiracy, knew it had to involve some combination of political plotters (either to install Julia as PM and/or to oust the PM) MI5 plotters (to install Julia with her surveillance friendly bill) or police plotters (to avoid Julia and MI5 taking away their own repressive powers?). That last one never made much sense, but it could also have been a combo platter of two or even all three, something signalled by the stern expressions on the big time police women (Gina McKee as the Met's counter-terror chief and Pippa Heywood as the head of the protection unit where Budd is placed), and the close and cynical cooperation between Mike Travis, minister for counter-terrorism (played by Vincent Franklin as if he'd wandered in from the Labour cabinet in A Very British Coup) and MI5 director Stephen Hunter-Dunn.

The Bodyguard Award for Over-Acting By A Character With A Hyphenated-Surname went to Stuart Bowman as Hunter-Dunn. His facial contortions started out as mere Dudley Nightshade, but by the final episode they were the most serious distorted human visage seen in this country since Keira Knightly was unhinging her jaw in A Dangerous Method.

But there had to be a BIG TWIST, so instead of political conspiracy we discover that the bombings were the result of actual Islamic terrorists, working hand in hand with gangsters, who kind of entered the scene late in the story, except that the Home Secretary's assistant, who got fired early, was apparently hooked up with them from the start. It sounded like the Kennedy assassination, if you actually want to believe that the killers were either Cuban terrorists or the Mafia. And as with the Warren Report, Mercurio's big problems here are many.

Presumably all the fuss from MI5 (and Michael Schaffer, their teflon hit-man, whose face is almost equally silent-movie snarling as Bowman's) is simply to get their blackmailing material back. So why is Travis on their side here? Does he not suspect they might have eliminated Julia? Would he not worry, unless he were part of their plot?

Nadia Ali (Anjli Mohindra), as the suicide bomber Studd, I mean Budd, talks out of blowing up a Virgin Train loo, makes a nice turn at the end, but I wonder if Mercurio had seen and remembered the similar scene in Patriots Day? Regardless, the flip of Nadia begs the questions of (a) why she didn't detonate her bomb on the train in the first place, but more importantly (b) what kind of terror organisation uses its main builder of insanely complicated explosive devices as a suicide bomber? The answer to that latter is question is, of course, none. The people sent to blow themselves up are disposable. Besides, she was apparently the contact with the gangsters (how, is never explained) and the gangsters were also the Islamic terrorists' main source of income (not, say, the Saudis). So blow up one and cut off the other. Plus she remembered the name of Budd's childrens' school? Just so she could launch a terror attack there, and so Mercurio could misdirect our attention toward the people who in the real world would have been the only ones to know that school. He told her that? Was he trying to bore her into not detonating the bomb?

And why has these brutally efficient gangsters bothered to corrupt the head of the protection unit? They anticipated they might someday want to kill a home secretary? One they already had someone working for? The protection unit is not responsible for anti-crime activity, yet Pippa Heywood was apparently feeding them intel enough to live in a pretty posh house for copper standards in London. What about her intel was so valuable?

The cops themselves are interesting, Ash Tandon as Deepak Sharma and Nina Toussaint-White as Lousie Rayburn do their own sort of twisting duet, switching places in the do we believe Judd or don't we believe Judd sweepstakes, even, at the end, when it should be obvious. What is also interesting, and I found the most convincing part of the drama, was the sheer Robocop/Starship Trooper mindlessness of the armed police--a military force of occupation so focused on their methodology it seemed unlikely in the extreme not one of them would shoot Budd dead, and even more extreme no one would order the shot, if only to nip their terrorism and treason problems in the Budd, so to speak.

The British audience disliked the happy-ish ending, calling it (of course) Hollywood, ie, we wrote it and produced it this way for our audience, but don't blame us, it's the Americans' fault. I disliked the real flaws in flipping the story right at the end, whether for the need to add those final BIG TWISTS, or whether we didn't want to show MI5 or Met anti-terrorism units as being traitorous. I know which scenario would be more believable to me. It wasn't like Kevin Coster and Whitney Houston, with Keely Hawes singing at Tory Party conference while Madden looks on admiringly. But I do wonder why they did not use the great Dawn Landes song 'Bodyguard' as their theme.

JOHN SANDFORD'S GOLDEN PREY

John Sandford's Lucas Davenport is one of the enduring action heroes of the crime genre, his books coming in somewhere between police procedurals and action thrillers, usually including elements of
both. Davenport himself is on the outside pretty unassuming, but reveals more and more hidden talents in each book. This is demonstrated perfectly in a very entertaining opening sequence that has nothing to do with the rest of the story, but establishes Davenport's skill, his investigative freedom (due to circumstances arising earlier in the series), and the demeanor that allows people to think they might take advantage.

Golden Prey deals with the robbery of a drug cartel counting house, down in Biloxi, Mississippi. Among the bodies left behind is a six-year old girl, whose grandfather was one of the counters. Davenport gets on the case, and is joined by a pair of FBI agents, while the cartel also has its people on the case, and are tracking Davenport's efforts by tapping into the police communications computers. It's not just Mark Zuckerberg who's a threat to world peace and privacy. The cartel's pair includes a woman whose specialty is torture, and as they track the thieves she gets her results from their relatives and friends, using power tools.

What makes the book work is the portrait of the criminals. Garvin Poole is the shooter who committed the robbery, a careful bad man who lives quietly in Dallas constructing custom guitars with his girlfriend Dora Box. Sturgis Darling is the planner, and lives an even more respectable life on a farm. Their organisation is formidable, and their no-nonsense approach to the business reminds one of the crews Parker set up in the Richard Stark novels, less the penchant for killing. Given the three different chases taking place, Sandford keeps it all moving--and ends it with the kind of action a Jack Reacher novel might offer, a full scale shootout around an art museum in a tiny Texas town, in which Darling suddenly turns into an action man.

By this time the cartel has set another pair of tracker/killers on the scent, and they wind up with Box and Kort, the power-tool specialist, in the RV. This is one of the best casts of characters I can remember, three sets of killers and a trio of cops, and their eccentricities keep the story moving as quickly as the action. Oddly enough, there's a sort of happy-ending finale, as Lucas and the FBI miss a few bits of the cash. But no one can be perfect. Although Lucas stretches the case, when he plays one of the FBI agents, a tall woman called Rae, in one on one basketball. She's played at the University of Connecticut, America's top women's basketball programme. Lucas played college hockey at the University of Minnesota. Not many hockey players good enough to play big-time college have a lot of cross-over time for hoops, and women players at the top level are pretty damn good. Lucas is older too, and though he has a strength advantage, I found following the game a bit Bobby Riggs. But that's the name of the game: Lucas may not be all-seeing, but he is almost all-conquering.

Golden Prey by John Sanford
Simon & Schuster, £8.99, ISBN 9781471177057

Note: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

9/11 AND MY TEAMMATE MOLE

I've written an essay, actually re-writtten it from one which appeared 17 years ago, about my friend  and teammate Blake, whose personal tragedy is never far from my thoughts. When I started editing the Northern Lights poetry pamphlets, and wrote the first one, I dedicated it to him, never dreaming this kind of an essay would ever need to be written. It's up at my Friday Morning Tight End column, an extra that you can read without subscribing. But if you like it.... patreon.com/posts/21366316

PUTTING THE RACE INTO SPACE RACE: HIDDEN FIGURES (AND THE 'GO AND NO GO' CONDUNRUM)

I finally saw Hidden Numbers, and liked it a good deal. What is best about it is the way it reinforces the pain of the world of segregation with the same under-stated sense of daily living that those who lived with it experienced. We see clearly not only the ever-present fear, of stepping out of line, the constant de-humanizing by relegating people to second-class status, but also the debilitating effect Jim Crow had on the white people imposing it on their fellow citizens, the way they take their privilege for granted, recoil at the slightest stepping over that (usually) unseen line, and at the same time think of themselves as friendly, decent Christian people.

We saw this first-hand when I was an 11-year old kid and we took our first-ever family vacation to Washington DC and encountered segregated facilities at, of all places, the Washington Monument. Washington himself was a slave-holder, of course, but I didn't make the connection then. I asked my dad to explain 'whites only', and then asked 'but that's wrong, isn't it?' and when he said, 'yes it is but that is how they do things down here' he got cold-eyed by some guy, who I guess backed down from taking his racist grievance any further.

That is the strong point of the film, established from the start by contrasting the easy camaraderie between the three friends and the unspoken fear when a white state police officer stops to investigate their broken-down car. The power relationship is set from the start. This marks the subtly of the approach, culminating in the moment Katharine Johnson's confirmation of the figures John Glenn wants her to confirm before he will head into space are delivered, and then the door closes in her face. Glenn's character is an exemplar here: early on he extends himself to greet the Langley black women;  he is the first to accept Johnson for her talent, but he's also shown as a complete team player all through his launch into space.

All three of the leads are good, if perhaps a little too glamorous in their 60s retro looks, with Taraji P Henson exceptional as Johnson, whose math genius is essential to NASA's success. Kevin Costner's beneficent white man isn't too overdone--I wondered if his one-man integration of the ladies' rest rooms wasn't still unlawful in Virginia, and why it wasn't reported. It seems odd that neither Costner nor his scientists would have any idea of what an IBM computer was; I probably did and I was 10 years old. It was also interesting that the filmmaker's show an engineer who's a Polish-Jewish immigrant survivor of the Holocaust, but never mention Werner Von Braun, head of the space programme, whose V2 rockets were built with Nazi slave labour. But overall, it's a sort of Disneyfied version of the story, but not simplified like some of their sports films, and told, as I suggested, with restraint that parallels the restraint of its principals.

But one non-racial flaw jumped out at me, so important it's not just a quibble. Katharine Johnson's task was to calculate the 'go/no-go' point for Glenn's Friendship 7 capsule to re-enter the earth's atmosphere. The angle of this departure from its elliptical orbit needed to be perfect: a little too much and the capsule is incinerated by the heat of re-entry, too little and it goes off into space, outside earth's gravity forever. This gets hammered into our consciousness repeated. So why then does the movie make the go/nogo moment occur long after Glenn has re-entered earth's atmosphere and survived the intense heat, as if it was an instant before releasing his parachute? This is such a major error, so obvious, and also loses the drama of hitting the go/no go precisely. Do they think we weren't paying attention to the science stuff? Or weren't they? Baffling.

It also appeared to me that Kevin Costner was both in the Langley labs and mission control in Florida at the same time, but movie stars can do anything. Maybe he found his own go/no go point. But what sticks out about this movie is the way it delineates the way people were forced to cope with an unjust system of institutionalized bigotry, and not just cope with it, but triumph within that broken system. That it is telling the story of these three real women makes it all the more successful.

ECHOES OF RIOTS, ECHOES OF AUGUST (1968)

The essay that follows is a sort of companion piece to one I wrote in March, 'Hey, Hey LBJ, What Did You Do 50 Years Ago Today', to which you can link here. There is, I think, much more to be said about those tumultuous years in the late Sixties, not only about how and why they succeeded or failed, or how they have been misinterpreted, but also about what they have to say to us who lived through them, and what they might say to young people today. I'm sure more essays will follow, but for now, here's a memory of that summer...

At no point in my life did it ever occur to me to congratulate myself for living through August 1968, but somehow I have now I managed to 'survive', to use the more self-sensitive 21^st century term, its fiftieth anniversary. Anniversary remembrance is symbolic, triggered by nothing more than mathematical convenience (years ending in zeroes) which appeals to our senses of order. But August 1968 was not about order, but chaos. As Chicago Mayor Richard Daley explained, on 29 August, after his cops had run riot through protestors at the Democratic Party's Presidential Convention, “the policeman isn't there to create disorder, (he) is there to preserve disorder”.

The Chicago convention riots may have been the high-water mark of political counter-culture in an America (the cultural high would come a year later), which was built around by two great political issues: civil rights at home and the war in Vietnam abroad. The latter was driving a new spike through the liberal political establishment which had already begun to re-order itself in the wake of President Lyndon Johnson signing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts in 1964 and '65. Disaffected racist Southern 'Dixiecrats' still rallied to LBJ's waging of the war. But at the start of 1968 the Viet Cong's Tet Offensive suggested to America that LBJ wasn't 'winning' the war, and in February trusted news-anchor Walter Cronkite returned from Vietnam confirming that was the case. “If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost America,” Johnson said. 

In March, on my seventeenth birthday, anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy came close to defeating incumbent President Johnson in the New Hampshire primary. On the last day of the month, Johnson realised his candidacy would divide his party, and announced he would not stand for re-election. My teenaged self, thinking I was now part of a triumphant revolution, celebrated. But the celebrations were premature, and short-lived.

Four days later, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, and riots in cities across the country left 46 people dead. Protest increased. Columbia University students occupied campus buildings; but that paled in the face of French students sparking a general strike joined by some 22 million workers. Meanwhile, Robert F. Kennedy was trying to unify the opposition to LBJ's designated successor, Hubert H. Humphrey, whom many McCarthy supporters treated as an opportunist carpet-bagger. Yet in the same way King had, just before his murder, specifically linked the issue of civil rights to American conduct in Vietnam, so RFK seemed to be rallying King's constituency to anti-war coalition. Then, on 4 June, as he celebrated winning the California primary, he too was assassinated. Riots didn't follow immediately, but it's not unfair to see those in Chicago as a delayed by-product of that assassination, bringing white kids out on the streets the same way Rev. King's killing had brought out the black population in the cities.

August began with Nixon winning the Republican nomination, and new Defense Secretary Clark Clifford raising the number of US soldiers in Vietnam to its peak, 541,000. We watched again as European dissent got more real than ours; Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to put an end to the Prague Spring. Surely there was something more we could do.

Thousands flocked to disrupt the Democratic convention, to stem the Humphrey tide that would ensure Johnson's war continued. But this was America; concrete action and coalition-building was subsumed into political theatre which played better on television news. Inside the convention, the winning of primaries proved to be less important than the wishes of the party bosses who ran the smoky rooms; the big party chief was John Bailey, from Connecticut, who'd given my grandad his marching orders for one term in the state legislature. Frustration overwhelmed those outside the convention hall, and then Daley unleashed the police. The cops, taking out their own frustration against what they saw as spoiled long-hairs untrue to their country, made the fatal mistake of including the reporters covering their attack among its targets.

Inside the hall, Senator Abraham Ribicoff, a Bailey protege from Connecticut, stood up and excoriated a lack of democratic process which led to “Gestapo tactics being used in the streets of Chicago”. Ribicoff was also Jewish, like my mother, so we watched him with a special pride. He had responded with great grace to a letter I'd written him when I was 12, asking about appointments to the Naval Academy. That was a much different me, I remember thinking, just as Mayor Daley was caught on camera cupping his hand round his mouth and shouted at Ribicoff. We lip-read what he screamed, which wasn't difficult. At least the 'you Jew bastard' part.

Protest had failed. August was over. Immediately after the Chicago riots, I was off to university to play football. My music was changing, with LP records and FM radio. I went off to college with the Buffalo Spingfield's final album, with The Band's first, with Al Kooper and Mike Bloomfield's Super Session. Those old compilations of two hits and filler which kept pop music profitable were yesterday's news, though Otis Redding's History, James Brown Live At The Apollo and Aretha Now had made my cut. John Coltrane's Impressions had somehow cracked my consciousness, which was ripe for being expanded. My hair, under the football helmet, grew. Eventually I even managed to jump onto the running board of the sexual revolution. But before that happened, it was now September 1968. Surely whoever won the Presidency would hear the collective cries of so many of us seeking an end to racial discrimination, an end to the folly of the Vietnam war.

History can tell you how that turned out. The trial of the Chicago Eight protest leaders would become America's greatest example of political theatre of the absurd. Nixon narrowly defeated Humphrey, helped by his 'October Surprise' which sabotaged LBJ's peace talks with North Vietnam in Paris. The Democrats would make new rules, increasing the importance of their presidential primaries, which would result in George McGovern, who had led the Kennedy delegates after Bobby's killing, wiinning the nomination in 1972. Nixon would defeat him in a landslide, despite the clues provided by the early Watergate reports. The Vietnam war would continue until it was lost; Nixon would continue until he was lost, and resign. The Dixiecrats would defect full scale to the Republicans, and a few years later Ronald Reagan would begin the shift of America's political paradigm to the right, as prophesied from jail by Nixon's campaign manager and Attorney General, John Mitchell.

It was still a great time to protest, especially within the protective walls of a small liberal arts college. Especially because even there you found chaos, division between black and white, left and right, straight and hip. It was obvious this would not be a French-style movement for change. It was also a safe time to lose oneself to the cultural revolution, but after Woodstock the following August, that too began to crumble into what became known as the 'me' generation. By 1970 even students, at Jackson State and Kent State, were being killed. Lives were there to be got on with. Some of us would be lucky enough to try to continue to protest. Eventually I would even vote for a presidential candidate who won. But that took decades. Back in August 1968 (was it really 50 years ago?) I would have told you change was in the air. Almost everything still seemed possible, especially if you were 17.