IRRESISTIBLE TARGETS

THEODORE ENSLIN: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

2012-01-30T15:26:00.005Z

My obituary of the poet Ted Enslin is up today at the Guardian's website; you can link to it here. Because his passing on 21 November last year went mostly unreported, this appears to be the first large-scale obit anywhere--oddly enough I had written it a number of years ago for the Guardian's files (and went back for some small re-writes and to add the verses today). They also found a wonderful photo which shows him framed by the Maine coastline, which is so important in his work.

I made contact with Enslin through Cid Corman (who died on my birthday in 2004 and which also went relatively unreported at the time) and felt his poems would be a natural for the folded-over six pages of text format I used for the Northern Lights chapbooks. And so it was. We corresponded on the ordering of the Pavanes, and for a while it was a rich back and forth, even after the poems were printed.

Going back through some of the Enslin books that fill my favourite poets shelf, I was amazed at how quickly his voice came back to me, and how much of his work I actually have yet to really discover. He does fit, perhaps too neatly, into my perception as something between Olson and Creeley, though his voice is often more musical but less formal--more like a cross between Robert Duncan and Ed Dorn, if that makes sense. I used to think of him, up in Maine, listening to Mahler while smoking the pipe in front of the wood stove, and somehow transferring the immediacy of his thought into flowing lines on the page. I'm glad the Guardian has given him some of the space he deserves, and glad I was able to write it.

THOMAS FRANK PITIES THE BILLIONAIRE

2012-01-30T13:19:00.002Z

Thomas Frank is best-known for What's The Matter With Kansas? (retitled in the UK to replace Kansas with 'America') in which he examined the propensity of middle-America to vote against its own best economic interests while supporting politicians firmly committed against those interests. The same thing is writ large in Pity The Billionaire, in which Frank details the way, facing a financial system blow to bit by free market greed and deregulation, the very policies which American voters deluded themselves to believe would help them, America's right has embraced a self-contradictory double-think that blames the collapse on the government and regulation, on social programmes and a few bad apples, and turns the problem on its head.

In case you think this argument far-fetched, go to you-tube and watch the 30 minute attack documentary about Mitt Romney produced by a PAC completely uncoordinated with the Newt Gingrich campaign. Romney ran a company devoted to asset-stripping businesses, putting thousands out of work and reaping huge profits along the way. But although the doc itself plays like something made by the Socialist Workers Party, its conclusions are that, somehow, government regulators and a few greedy men (like Romney) were to blame, and that, left to their own devices, the banks and corporations would have avoided crisis, kept everyone in work, and made America great again. Or something like that.

It's enough to drive me back to my college reading of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. As Frank points out, a weird sort of 'reverse Marxism' prevails in America, where the wealthy have become that way because the public is behind their entrepreneurial zeal—wealth is less a sign of God's blessing than that of your fellow God-fearing Republicans. He also notes the increasingly apocalyptic strain of the right wing's politics; that America, as we know it, will simply cease to exist. As Newt as said, the threat of Obama is as great as ever posed by Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia.'

I read a snide review of this book in the New York Times, criticising it mainly for being out of date, in that examples of, say, Glenn Beck, are just sooooo last year. It never addressed the points the book makes, which become more and more relevant as the Republican presidential primaries reveal the pandering to a Tea Party platform which, as discussed above, makes about as much logical sense as arguing the world is only 6,000 years old.

In sad fact, most of the book will not come as news to those who come to read it. Which makes the most interesting parts the analysis Frank gives of Franklin Roosevelt's battle against the Great Depression, and his detailing of where the Obama administration has Hoovered the crisis, rather than moved to escape it. In that sense, the absurdity of America's far-right has been doubly-counterproductive. Not only to those who embrace it, but as a way of deflecting the centrist liberals from actually dealing with economic realities and economic problems. Why take on an obdurate, more aggressive, and more efficient Congress; a rightist mainstream media whose agenda is set by an Australian billionaire's whims, and that large chunk of disillusioned America, when you can sit back on laugh at Newt, Mitt, Santorum, Cain, Palin et al? Why worry when Jon Stewart's on once a day?

Frank never adopts that position, those he's sorely tempted. Which is why it's important to consider the ways in which we are being let down, the ways in which we've handed over governance completely banks and corporations, even handing them the right to free speech as if they were individuals. That the victims of all this are being turned into its cheerleaders is a deep irony which Americans don't seem willing to see. I might argue it's the inevitable consequence of choosing the fantasy world of Reagan for the reality of the world offered by Jimmy Carter and his successors, and that American discourse simply moved to the right in the same way Mrs. Thatcher did in this country. In that sense, Obama, and Clinton before him, are far closer to free-market Reaganauts than to the socialist terrorists the Right would have them be. But then, if you believe in fantasy, you need a bogey man when reality hits you in the face. Brits like to think Americans possess no sense of irony, though they themselves seem to lack it when considering Messrs Cameron and Clegg, but believe me, Thomas Frank posseses it in spades. It doesn't short-change his book, and it's a shame the book can't be air-dropped across the midwest.

PITY THE BILLIONAIRE by Thomas Frank
Harvill Secker £14.99 ISBN 9781846556029

STEVE HAMILTON VISITS MISERY BAY

2012-01-29T10:05:00.005Z

After his Edgar-winning standalone novel, The Lock Artist, (see my review here) Steve Hamilton returns to the familiar ground of Michigan's Upper Peninsula and Alex McKnight, his reluctant detective. For Hamilton it's not quite the retreat it is for McKnight; most of the series has involved Alex escaping, healing or both in the loneliness of the winter landscape, and Misery Bay is no exception. Still unable to re-enter his own cabin where he's lost his last girlfriend, he's wintering in a ramshackle guest cabin, rebuilding it around him (Hamilton's ability to extend and refresh the metaphor has been remarkable over the eight McKnight books). Then his old adversary, Sault Ste. Marie police chief Maven, comes to him asking for help. Maven's former state police partner has lost his son, a suicide who hanged himself at Misery Bay, and Maven wants Alex to at least answer the father's questions about why he did it, and who he was.

Of course, this turns out to be the first in a series of suicides and murders of former state policemen and their children, which throws Alex into the middle of an unofficial investigation, caught between the FBI on one side, and the notoriously bull-headed Maven on the other.

As serial killer books go, this one is somewhat slim; Hamilton frames the methodology, but the motive is slow to unravel. The killer himself is revealed in a nice twist which seems to justify all those long hours of introspection Alex spend driving his plow-equipped truck along the deserted and ruler-straight roads of Michigan. But interestingly, the victims are the real focus here, and while McKnight and the FBI search frantically for the link that might lead them to the killer, we see any number of lives with little hope or promise—a bleakness that reflects not just the landscape but the dead or abandoned character of the towns themselves. in that sense, and with so many cop characters, it reminded me a bit of Hamilton's first stand-alone, Night Work (link to that review here)

There's some good writing here, and Hamilton is at his best when the personal emptiness and the darkness of the setting coincide. And it seems that northern Michigan is overflowing with ominous place names, so there will never be a shortage of titles! There are moments of hope, however, as if the story itself were an Objibwa sweat tent. If character is indeed action, Hamilton's McKnight is one of the best.

Misery Bay by Steve Hamilton
Orion £12.99 ISBN 9780752897103

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

LES DANIELS: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

2012-01-24T14:57:00.008Z

NOTE: I wrote this obituary of Les Daniels back in November, but it got shunted aside during the holiday season, and two months later has passed its sell-by date for the paper, so it appears here for the first time.

Les Daniels, who has died aged 68, will be remembered best as an historian of comic books, author of official histories of both Marvel and DC Comics, and some of their most famous superheroes. His most important work in the field was Comix: A History of Comic Books in America (1971). Jules Feiffer's The Great Comic Book Heroes (1965) is generally considered the first mainstream comics' history, and Daniels' book came after 1970's fan-based All In Color For A Dime. But Comix was the first to trace comics from their roots in pulp magazines, through the Forties' so-called Golden Age of superheroes, and their doldrums during the 1950s' censorship brought on by psychologist Frederic Wertham's attacks on the industry in his book Seduction of the Innocent (1954). Daniels was particularly telling on this, since his own favourite comics, the EC horror line, were Wertham's prime target. Daniels detailed the Sixties renaissance sparked by Marvel and stoked by the rise of underground comics, or comix. He was the first to eschew gosh-wow nostalgia in favour of a serious, but never academic, appreciation of the medium as art., and showcased artists, among them Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman, who would not achieve mainstream acclaim until years later.

Appropriately, given his love of EC comics, Daniels had an equally important, if less noted, career in the horror field. Following the success of films like The Exorcist and The Omen, his 1975 book 'Living In Fear: A History of Horror In Mass Media', approached horror with the same artistic seriousness had comics. He edited a companion anthology, Dying Of Fright, and, with his sister Diane, another anthology, 13 Tales of Terror, designed for teachers.

Soon after, he became a key part of the first boom in vampire fiction, led by Fred Saberhagen's novels about an heroic Dracula, starting with The Dracula Tapes (1975) and Anne Rice's best-selling Lestat series launched in 1976. Beginning with The Black Castle (1978), set during the Spanish Inquistion, Daniels published five novels featuring the vampire Don Sebastian De Villanueva. Mixing horror and apocalyptic history, he placed Don Sebastian in situations, such as the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, the French Revolution's Reign of Terror, or Britain's Imperial Raj in India, where humans wielded greater destructive evil than vampires.

The arc of this peripatetic career might best be ascribed to Daniels' following his own enthusiasms, an urge he traced back to his mother's throwing out his comic book collection when was he was only nine years old. He was born 27 October 1943 in Danbury, Connecticut, and grew up in nearby, rural, Redding. His father, who wrote radio adventures like Jack Armstrong All-American Boy, primed his interest in horror by giving him a collection of Ambrose Bierce's stories. He was so taken with H.P. Lovecraft's tales that he moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where he earned BA and MA dregres from Brown University, writing his master's thesis on Frankenstein. He would stay in Providence the rest of his life, and in 1970, with artist John 'Mad' Peck, create a four-panel poster of life in that city, playing ironically on streets with names like Friendship and Hope, which is still a local best-seller.

He was also a talented bluegrass banjo player, and hooked up with a Rhode Island School of Design student named Martin Mull to write and perform songs described by Bob Booth as 'a cross between the Foggy Mountain Boys and Monty Python'. They formed The Double-Standard String Band with Sam Tidwell and his bass-playing brother Marc—Tidwell went on to a career as a bluegrass virtuoso, while Mull became a successful comedian and actor in Hollywood. Mull and Daniels reunited on a 1974 album of comic folk songs called In The Soop. In 1998 Daniels and Rick Lee recorded an album called Dr Daniels and Mr Lee, new versions of his Mull collaborations , and followed it with a release of 1966 tapes of a live performance by the Double Standard band. In the Seventies he was hired by Dino DeLaurentis to write an unproduced disco-horror screenplay, and then teamed with comic Rudy Cheeks to write Comediac, about a serial killer obsessed with the Three Stooges. Sadly, it was never made. Daniels also performed in Providence clubs giving comic commentary while horror movies were played on the screen, long before such formats were used on TV.

But primarily he was devoted to his writing, whether introductions for independently-produced adaptations of Lovecraft, or producing authorised histories for the big comics companies. That the same man would be trusted to chronicle two arch-rivals like Marvel and DC speaks to his objectivity, as well as his talent for researching and ordering the chaotic back-story of an industry which never assumed itself to have any value for posterity. He did histories of Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman, winning an Eisner award for the last, and was nominated for the World Fantasy Award four times. Daniels died in Providence on 5 November, of a heart attack. He is survived by his sister.

DON WINSLOW REACHES SATORI

2012-01-21T14:22:00.009Z

Extending the careers of other novelists' memorable characters is a task which has defeated many big-name writers, some (like Sebastian Faulks with James Bond) almost before they've even started. On the other hand, there have been many characters written by ghost writers where no one has, at the time, noticed the difference (Ellery Queen springs to mind).

In the detective field, such franchises tend to be offered to likely suspects; Robert B Parker with Chandler, Joe Gores with Hammett, Max Allan Collins with Mickey Spillane; often writing sequels or finishing material left behind (see my take on Max's Mickey here). Recently Parker's work has been passed on, with Michael Brandman, who produced the Jesse Stone TV movies, writing new Stone novels (see my review here), and Ace Atkins a surprising choice to continue Spenser.

The difficulty is deciding how far to go on the road to pastiche. Can you remain true to the spirit of the writer while taking his character in new directions? Can you write in his style, or is it useless to avoid your own? The more distinctive the writer, and the character, the more difficult the task becomes.

On the surface, Don Winslow may have seemed an unusual choice to produce this prequel to Trevanian's Shibumi. Winslow is an immensely talented writer who has produced some fine, neo-noirish, California stories, a recent series of laid-back surfer detective novels, and two remarkable books centered on the drug wars, the majestic epic Power Of The Dog and the brilliantly bleak Savages. He may have been chosen because Hollywood has caught on; The Death and Life of Bobby Z has been, so to speak, filmed (see my take here); Robert De Niro and Michael Mann were at times attached to a film of The Winter Of Frankie Machine, Oliver Stone is adapting Savages. And you might argue his bittersweet novel Isle Of Joy (see my review here) showed a facility with spy tales that might have appealled to the Travanian estate.

What must be remembered is Shibumi, although Trevanian's most successful book by far, was an outgrowth of his earlier work, straight-forward Bondish stuff like The Eiger Sanction. He moved from them to The Main, a dark police procedural set in Montreal, which may be his best, but wasn't a best-seller, before simplifying his formula and hitting on a character, Nicholas Hel, who is, in effect a Super Hero, pitched beyond Bond and nothing like a Marlowe, Spade or Hammer. Hel beat Jason Bourne into print by a year, but whether there's any influence would be for the reader to decide.

The background was intricate, but the problem was that, as a super hero, Hel would always triumph in the ultimate shoot-out, and this is a dilemma that might constrain your story telling. As this is a prequel, Winslow has to conform to the Hel Trevanian created, but he is afforded some freedom in showing how he got to be who he is, and he uses this freedom well. After all, as the blurbs suggest, Hel is not only the 'world's most dangerous assassin', but a 'mystic, master of language and culture, and the world's most artful lover'--so Winslow gets to provide him with a French courtesan to instruct him in whatever he doesn't know, courtesy of the CIA. The multiple conflicts and contradictions implied are something Winslow has fun with, but his assignment, to kill a Soviet commissioner in China, becomes something more complicated.

This is where he is at his best, outlining multiple betrayals, warring loyalties, and as you might expect from the author of Power Of The Dog, following the drug trade through Asia alongside the budding conflicts in South East Asia. He is constrained, to an extent, by Hel's talents, the fact that he is a Superman, and at times the trying to draw all the strands together can have twists colliding with each other. But he manages to draw it all together in a climax that not only resolves his story but does leave Hel set up properly for Trevanian's own book from three decades earlier.

I think if you're a Winslow fan already you'll be impressed rather than enthralled. If you're a Hel fan you shouldn't be disappointed; the world may have caught up and passed Trevanian's super-assassin in 30 years, but Winslow, while taking him back in time, also brings him forward. The news that Leonardo di Caprio wants to play Hel in a movie makes a lot more sense than his playing J Edgar Hoover, and should help cement Winslow's name. Next he brings back Hel to the Manhattan setting of Isle Of Joy, say in the early 1960s, all hel breaks loose, and the adapters of Mad Men option the film rights.

SATORI by Don Winslow
Headline, £14.99 ISBN 9780755370207 (paperback published at £6.99)

A SPIELBERG FOOTNOTE TO DICKENS

2012-01-11T15:46:00.004Z

In light of what I posted yesterday about Dickens on Film, it was synchronistic that today's Independent would feature an interview with Steven Spielberg (conducted in Paris, where Warhorse was opening) which made much of his child-like perspective, and noted the influence of his father's war stories on his film-making. James Mottram also noted how many Spielberg films, (like fairy tales and indeed, like Dickens) have absent fathers (and, in Dickens, substitute father figures). You can find the interview here.

I can attest to the truth of one part of the interview; the delight Spielberg showed in his newly-born Max (his son by Amy Irving) when I met him in Belsize Park many years ago. He politely asked what I did, and I politely asked what he did.

I did mention a friend of mine who had worked for him, but didn't mention the story she told of quitting rather than go on location for Raiders of the Lost Ark (in Tunisia, if I remember correctly). Her line was, 'how would YOU like to spend six months in the desert with an army of 200 drug addicts commanded by a 12 year old kid?' It was the 70s, after all.

GREAT ADAPTATIONS: DICKENS ON FILM

2012-01-10T17:58:00.012Z

The bicentenary of the year of Charles Dickens' birth has proven a springboard to a multitude of events, and, appropriately enough for the man whose novels have been the most translated onto screen of any author, an inevitable surge of costume dramas for a market that seemingly can never get enough of it. Tonight, following up on yet another version of Great Expectations, arguably Dickens' best book, the BBC begins an adaptation of the Mystery of Edwin Drood, which he left unfinished at his death. It's appropriate that the television Dickens should be celebrated, considering how important the 1950s series of adaptation were to establishing families staying indoors and around the telly when they aired.

Cynicism and easy profits aside, there are reasons why Dickens is such a fruitful source of adaptation. Running the risk of being cruelly overlooked amidst the onslaught of high-scale productions on the terrestrial channels, BBC4 tonight offers a remarkable Arena programme, Dickens On Film, directed by Anthony Wall and written and narrated by Adrian Wooten and Michael Eaton. Launched to coincide with a three-month retrospect of film and TV adaptations at the BFI Southbank, the film makes the case for Dickens as a pioneer of film, even though he died in 1870, before the medium was even born.

It's not a difficult case to make, because it has been made before, most notably by two of the giants of the silent screen. DW Griffith attributed his pioneering cross-cutting to Dickens' technique of moving between storylines to build suspense and increase narrative drive and tension. Sergei Eisenstein, in his 1944 essay 'Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today', retells the story of Griffith's persuading his backers such techniques could work in film, and goes a step farther, quoting a 1922 article by AB Walkely, the drama critic of the Times, in which he specifically claims Dickens as Griffith's inspiration, noting he might have seen the same thing in Dumas, or Tolstoy, or any other Victorian novelist—the point being that it was the way Dickens' used it, the power of his imagery and its motion, that was cinematic. Eisenstein also recognised Dickens' appeal to 'sentimental elements', an appeal made all the more moving by the juxtaposition of the sentimental and cruel. It's not just that Dickens uses such techniques, but the way he uses them virtually compels adaptors to follow. That Dickens was often writing serial literature, and thus faced the same need to keep the audience coming back that the makes of cliffhanging serial movies or modern soap operas would, merely emphasises the point.

In the same sense that modern filmmakers learned their sense of narrative and story-telling from watching movies, on DVD or movie channels, and the previous generation might be said to have learned theirs from TV (and film schools), early-filmmakers learned their dramatic techniques from Victorian literature and the stage. As seemingly apart from Eisenstein as John Ford may appear, and as obviously Shakespearian in his approach to dramatic structure; Ford's sense of his cutting, his use of secondary villains to contrast his often more noble antagonists, has been obviously absorbed Dickens, if perhaps in part via Griffith.

Yet beyond cinematic technique, it's worth considering Dickens' ability to project his audience into what is often a child's sensibility. He is certainly ruthless about sacrificing children and child-like characters to wring the emotion from his audience, but much of what makes his descriptions of the dark side of Victorian England so memorable is the way he frames them around the experiences of those who we consider innocents. If you're looking for a modern equivalent in cinema, one who makes no bones about tackling 'big' issues but who always does so by exploiting their 'sentimental elements' you could look at Stephen Spielberg, whose camera often adopts the perspective of a child, looking up at adults, sneaking peeks into their world. If you're seeking a bridge between the early days of cinema and Spielberg's films, you might consider the work of Robert Stevenson, now much overlooked, but whose early films, like King Solomon's Mines, Tom Brown's School Days, and the Orson Welles Jane Eyre, are particularly Dickensian, and whose work for Disney in the 1950s, films like Johnny Tremain, Old Yeller, Zorro, or Kidnapped (though the last is not a patch on Byron Haskins' 1950 Treasure Island), are small masterpieces of the child's-eye point of view, and full of the picaresque supporting casts of which Dickens was the master.

The Arena programme shows clips from nearly two dozen Dickens adaptations, yet barely scratched the surface. Eaton pointed out that there are around 100 silent movie versions of Dickens that we know about, of which only about a third are known to exist. The earliest on offer is a 1901 Scrooge, called Marley's Ghost, six minutes long with special effects that have been echoed through the decades, even by The Muppet Christmas Carol. One of the silent gems is a version of Oliver Twist starring Jackie Coogan. The production was put together by Coogan's father, eager to capitalise on the talents of his seven-year old son, and features Lon Chaney as a memorable Fagan. Thought to have been lost forever when the original negative was melted down for its silver, a print was discovered in Yugoslavia in the 1970s, and certainly deserves wider exposure.

At the launch of the film, David Nichols, who has adapted the latest Great Expectations, with Helena Bonham Carter as Miss Havisham, and Rafe Fiennes as Magwitch, spoke of seeing the novel as something akin to Chinatown, as a film noirish crime story, complete with the 'visit to Hannibal Lecter' scene. It reminds us that crime is at the heart of Dickens, and his catalogue of crime included abuses allowed by society. It's no coincidence that the trailer for the 2002 version of Nicholas Nickelby protrayed Christopher Plummer, as Ralph, as an embodiment of Oliver Stone's Gordon Gekko, 'greed is good'. Victorian values, as Mrs Thatcher might say, are good for us all today.

Yet it's also fascinating how Dickens, despite the wide spectrum of characters and settings, remains firmly nailed into his period, the early Victorian. Even that most (late) Victorian figure, Sherlock Holmes, has been transplanted, without too much shock, into the 1940s on film, and with some cleverness into the modern era, yet Dickens' stories resist it (as evidenced, for example, by Alfonso Cuaron's soapy 1998 Great Expectations, with Gwyneth Paltrow and Ethan Hawke, or by Joao Bothelo's enigmatic 1988 Portugese version of Hard Times). Yes, Dickens' settings are alive, and yes much of his social drama derives from them. But even the Muppets need that Victorian setting (and A Christmas Carol is one of the most, and consistently best, adapted of all his novels, as if proving Eisenstein's point about sentimentality).

Otherwise the catalogue of films and television (including the Channel 4 broadcast of David Edgar's memorable 1982 eight-hour stage version of Nicholas Nickleby directed by Trevor Nunn and John Caird) is spectacular, and the myriad adaptations remind us of the way even small characters provide opportunities for defining performances. In January I'd rush to see Claude Rains in the 1935 Mystery Of Edwin Drood, or, in a more familiar vein, Ronald Colman in A Tale Of Two Cities, directed by Jack Conway in the same year.

But don't miss the Arena programme, which above all else provides a counter-point to the somewhat self-congratulatory tone of the early entries into the Dickensian tribute sweepstakes. It is hard to avoid a certain chauvinistic self-congratulation, a tendency to over-priase well-made costume epics which adapt but don't add to our understanding of Dickens' brilliance. But of course, every time gets the Dickens it deserves, and if David Nichols' Great Expectations is somewhat more prurient and less picaresque, less outre, than previous versions, it may be because we shock less easily, and we are more easily offended.

Then again, if Dickens were alive today, he might take a similar attitude. He probably wouldn't be writing novels, but it is one thing to say his writing of novels as serials translates to the idea that he'd be doing East Enders now. We'd like to think he'd be working in the more creative reaches of the medium, though it's probably not out of line to suggest he might find producing more creative and much more profitable than merely writing. On the other hand, producers nowadays often seem get themselves tangled in the slippery net of being ironic and superior to their material—which is dangerous when it's material as superior as Dickens.

This is material like the BBC's Christmas offering, Mrs Dickens Family Christmas, which seemed aimed at cutting Dickens down to size, since he hadn't gone from Cambridge Footlights to standup comedy to the BBC, which in our Victorian world appears to convey instant expertise in virtually any field. It's one thing to complain of a lack of 'real women' in Dickens (!) while presenting Christmas recipes, and another to try to bring him down to the level of East Enders, or the Radio 4 News Quiz.

Luckily, Arena serves as an antidote to that, and even the smallest taster of the richness of serious adaptation serves as a reminder of his genius, and more importantly his inspiration. From WC Fields as Micawber to Diana Rigg as Honoria Dedlock, from Valerie Hobson in Great Expectations to Bill Murray in Scrooged, it's a catalogue of genius. All that remains, in this anniversary year, is for the inevitable bio-pic, based perhaps on Claire Tomalin's biography, to cast someone as the writer himself.

Arena: Dickens On Film is broadcast 10 Jan on BBC4
Dickens On Screen is on through March at BFI Southbank

BORGEN: BBC4'S SARAH LUND REDUX

2012-01-07T18:49:00.009Z

The BBC have announced they bought the rights to another Danish TV series, Borgen: you can link to the announcement here. The series will air tonight, as The Killing did on Saturday nights, on BBC4. I'll try to catch it on Iplayer, that wonderful tool which for some reason the BBC cant make compatible with the latest version of Firefox (you can watch, but you can't store, suggest, or favourite).

Without pre-judging Borgen, the premise is interesting in a number of ways--the most obvious being that the most compelling part of the second series of The Killing, and almost the most compelling part of the first, was the political drama. In fact, in series two, it was as if the battle within the cabinet were part of a separate show, and though Nicholas Bro may have occasionally over-egged the pudding, his befuddled battle with the 'establishment' and the fights within the ruling coalition, were both extremely well done.

The Danes may be producing the best cinema in Europe right now, and their television seems equally strong. Not that it matters, because Borgen will be something the BBC can market to Sarah Lund fans because it's about a female political leader whose party takes power in a coalition which she heads as Prime Minister. When you consider, despite the strength of Sofie Grabol's performance, how the British response inevitably concentrated on her sweater, you can almost predict that whatever Sidse Babette Knudsen (another fine actress, as anyone who saw the Oscar-nominated After The Wedding can attest) wears is likely to do the same.

But there is far more to Danish film than sweaters and actresses--the country has such talent that even the Swedish Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was directed and written by Danes (and if you're looking for a fine political thriller to prepare for Borgen try The King's Game, written by the same pair of writers, Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg, and directed by Arcel). So check it out tonight, or on IPlayer, or, if you don't have either, you can buy the Danish DVD with English subtitles on Amazon.

D.D. GUTTENPLAN'S I.F. STONE: AMERICAN RADICAL

2012-01-05T09:56:00.010Z

In 1958 IF Stone wrote 'For almost two decades we have lived in a stale atmosphere of Fifth Amendment radicalism; no one is a Communist, few admit themselves Socialists, nobody owns up to reading Marx, and practically everybody on the Left claims only to be a Liberal, nothing more; the word 'radical' is avoided as a bad word.' Reading that passage, it struck me as some measure of how far backwards we have gone in the past fifty years, that today virtually no one claims even to be just a Liberal, devalued as that word has become. The real beauty of DD Guttenplan's monumental biography of the man best-remembered for IF Stone's Weekly is the way it tells a story whose themes seem to reverberate constantly with echoes of today.

American Radical is really the tale of two rises to journalistic success, accomplished in two very different atmospheres. Thus it is almost two different books. As someone who grew up during the era of (if not 'with') IF Stone's weekly (my parents being mainstream Democrats who got their news from Time, Life, and the right-wing New Haven papers, 'balanced' by the Sunday New York Times), to me the tale of Stone's early rise was the more surprising. I had never realised just how successful Stone had been in the mainstream—to the point of wielding (or thinking he wielded) a little bit of influence in FDR's Washington. It was still possible to do that from the Left in those days, and Stone's rise is the more remarkable because he managed to do it while avoiding the in-fighting and back-stabbing which seem to always categorise left-wing politics, and which seems to grow more vicious the more politically irrelevant the groups or issues involved. Stone somehow managed to avoid being caught up between factions, while writing for both mainstream papers and leftish magazines. In the case of the latter, almost as interesting as Stone's story might be that of J. David Stern, the crusading Philadelphia newspaper owner, who wound up buying the New York Post, and turning it into a left-wing daily of some courage. Of course the peak of mainstream leftwing news in America might well be PM, and as it died so too died the progressive dream. It's chilling to read that in August 1943 PM was already charting the murder of 1.7 million Jews in Europe, while officially Allied governments were refusing to take steps to try to save those who remained.

In the case of the factionalism of the left, it might be easy for Guttenplan's detailing of the many-faceted progress of progressives through the Thirties to lose readers along the way, but I found it fascinating, if in a sometimes anoraky way. The minutiae of esoteric debate and distinction may itself be part of the reason the left found, and still finds itself, so vulnerable to the right in the bigger picture. The right has always been quicker to understand that it's about power, not principle. But it's fascinating to learn that a group of Republican backers offered Earl Browder, head of the US Communist party, $250,000, to either nominate or endorse FDR in 1936. That gives somewhat more credence to General Smedley Butler's 1934 testimony that he'd been offered, by a similar group of shadowy financiers, command of a fascist army to overthrow FDR. Often Guttenplan throws off fascinating stories in footnotes, as when he details Philip Johnson's career as a 'fascist intellectual'. The Johnson & Johnson heir was a huge supporter of Father Coughlin's hate-mongering, and started his own band of 'grey shirts' – yet rose to architectural prominence in post-war New York with no one commenting on the wistful totalitarian nature of his design. I was intrigued to discover Corliss Lamont, the Marxist scion of an investment banking family, whose great-nephew Ned tried to rid the world of Joe Lieberman a few years back.

The better-known story of Stone's blacklisting stands in sharp and touching contrast to this early story of success, and the fact that he built his second career on a self-published weekly newsletter has huge relevance in today's world of internet 'journalism'. It's facile to say that Stone would be blogging today—his work was better suited to the weekly, which allowed him to collate research—but he was in a sense a small-scale aggregator, like a number of present-day sites at the sub-Huff level, which mix good journalism with aggregation (eg: Truthdig. Tom Paine). Perhaps the heirs to IF Stone's Weekly are Tom Englehardt's Tom Dispatch or Robert Parry's Consortium News. But it reminds us of exactly what a journalist is. Stone was so successful as a newsletter maverick precisely because he had been successful in the mainstream (and, to a lesser extent, on the left-wing). He had contacts, and more important he both knew how power worked, in Washington and in city halls, and how to find information in the public domain. He had built his sources through hard work, through go-getting of the sort that used to be a journalist's stock in trade. This is the most interesting part of his progression from Isidor Feinstein to IF Stone. He wasn't a Studs Terkel or Jimmy Breslin, haunting the working-class bars, but he knew how to work rooms in high places, how to argue policies and principles, and he kept it in service of his ideals—he wasn't likely to be Judith Millered, even in the service of policies or ideologies he agreed with.

Guttenplan is very good on such dilemmas—in the protean world of the Depression Thirties, no less than the McCarthyite Fifties, people often tailored their opinions to suit their ideologies. They always have and still do, of course. But more than most, Stone needed to see for himself, and it shows. He was an early and unofficial visitor to Israel, as detailed in his classic book Underground To Palestine, and an equally early proponent of treating the Arab population fairly. He warned of the 'moral imbecility that marks all ethnocentric movements'. When he added a new introduction to the book in the Seventies, the early neo-Con Martin Peretz denounced him as a PLO stooge. Even in his years of success, nothing had changed.

What's sometimes missing is a sense of the contradictions inside Stone. Devoted husband, he seems to have been both a devoted and difficult father. He had some talented people as assistants on the Weekly, but tended to drive them hard and treat them harshly. There's little information and less speculation about his relationships, except when they turn into politicised feuds. The radical lawyer Leonard Boudin was his in-law and friend, his daughter Kathy was a key figure in the Weather Underground—I wonder what Izzy's reaction was to having an outlaw of the left in the family. I've always wondered why Stone was so adamant about supporting the Warren Commission's whitewash of the JFK assassination: he was perfectly willing to believe in a conspiracy (even involving J.Edgar Hoover and his FBI) in the killing of Martin Luther King. But these are my curiosities.

If the book seems to pick up pace and slide through the years of Stone's return to the mainstream (although interestingly, the world of his sort of political reporting was already being marginalised by television) it may be because we know those political debates too well: Vietnam, the Middle East, the late Cold War, the civil rights movement. It may also be that Stone as a success, as an icon, is less interesting to a biographer than Stone as a fallen angel, or a maverick outsider. If anything, however, his decision to study Greek and write The Trial Of Socrates deserves even more attention; a remarkable late change of pace. Years ago I went back and read up on Stone, often missing much because the context wasn't fully there. But the over-arching theme was: that governments could not be trusted to act in the best interests of the majority of their citizens; that official versions were suspect for that reason, and for other, more practical versions, and that the pursuit of profit and power was no respecter of human life or morality. In that sort of context, an analysis of Socrates seems perfectly fitting.

In our own trying times, this book stands as both a blessing and a warning. Guttenplan (whose own claim to fame is now may be as the father of a remarkably Brainiac University Challenge champion) is aware of this, and makes such connections subtly, but unmissably. The greatest danger to the left in the United States has always been the fear that FDR warned us about, the fear that it is somehow 'un-American'. One warning stood out to me. 'Never turn your back on a liberal in a tight corner'. In this tale of one man's stand against the right-wing's force-marching Americans into tight corners, it seems salutary to remember now.

American Radical: The Life And Times of IF Stone
by DD Guttenplan
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2009, ISBN 9780374183936
also published in the UK by Quartet/Charles Glass Books, £25

PER WAHLOO'S STEEL SPRING

2011-12-31T11:29:00.007Z

After discovering Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo's Martin Beck in the early Seventies in Sweden, I remember searching around for Per Wahloo's early novels, and finding all of them except The Steel Spring (1968). In fact, I had forgotten about the book, until Vintage's reissue of it along with the other Chief Inspector Jensen novel, Murder On The 31st Floor, in new translations by Sarah Death, whose work here seems to catch the bleakness perfectly.

It's fascinating to read Wahloo in retrospect. The Steel Spring is a dystopian sf novel, in which Jensen, having gone abroad for a liver transplant, receives a message from his government telling him to return home. He soon discovers that his country is closed off to the outside world, but his doggedness gets him back home, where he finds an epidemic has struck, and his familiar surroundings are almost deserted.

Wahloo's concerns are the failure of social democracy, with a specific eye toward the way social improvement leads to social control, and democracy edges into totalitarianism. The urge to control is what has led to the epidemic, a case of society destroying itself from within. That the government under which this tragedy has happened is a nominal coalition makes the story shiveringly relevant to today's Britain, if not as much Sweden. The nameless country in which Jensen works seems to be a mix of Sweden with some proto-Iron Curtain eastern European state, sort of Albania or Romania thrown in.

Jensen is the perfect protagonist for such a setting, and in him it's easy to discern the prototype Beck. He has no personal life, appears to have no opinions or preferences, very little individual feeling, apart from doing his job to the best of his ability, which implies a sort of blind faith in the laws, the social contract, he enforces.

That was always the main conflict in the Beck books: the contrast between the world the policeman is protecting, and the laws he is enforcing—the way they are applied selectively, or not at all, depending on circumstances beyond his control. If The Steel Spring has a flaw, it's that most of the realisations seem to come from Wahloo, because although they are presented via Jensen, Jensen doesn't seem to share the criticisms which are obviously implied. Or maybe it's because he can't see them as criticisms, whereas we can. Which is the mark of good dystopian fiction. Wahloo's solo work deserves to be considered in the same context as Zamyatin, Capek, Orwell, or Durrenmatt...high praise indeed. I will probably revisit Murder On The 31st Floor soon, and if you haven't got to the Martin Beck books, please start now—and be aware I wrote the introduction to the sixth volume in the Harper Perennial reissues, Murder At The Savoy.

The Steel Spring by Per Wahloo
Vintage £7.99 ISBN 9780099554752

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

JERRY ROBINSON: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

2011-12-28T16:48:00.008Z

My obit of the comic-book artist Jerry Robinson, who created The Joker, Robin, Two-Face, and Alfred the Butler for Bob Kane's Batman, is in today's Independent; you can link to it here. The paper has a wonderful layout of Robinson and his Batman art. And I ought to point out my own mistake, as the first Superman movie appeared in 1978, not 1975.

I was fascinated to learn that Robinson had taught Steve Ditko, because you really can see the link between their thick, expressionistic inking, and the way they exaggerate to create realistic characters out of somewhat unrealistic drawings. And also because their political world-views couldn't be more diametrically opposed!

It's also rare to write an obit of someone so universally admired. He helped artists in myriad ways, guys like Siegel and Shuster in particular, in the fight for the rights to Superman, but many others in general, by helping them win the fight to retain copyright to their work (and here Neal Adams stands as the other beacon), syndicate their material, and fight for the human rights of political cartoonists. He also deserves for credit for his early history of comic art, one of the first books to take it seriously and do it well.

I wanted to include this quote from Stan Lee, for whom he worked at Atlas in the 1950s, but cut it for space. In retrospect, I wish I had. 'Jerry Robinson was not only one of the finest artists ever to illustrate comic books, but he was also the head of an editorial syndicate which made cartoons available worldwide, as well as being an inspiration to young artists whom he always found time to help and advise. A genuine talent and a genuine gentleman, he was truly a credit to the arts.'

JOHN HARVEY'S GOOD BAIT

2011-12-27T09:36:00.006Z

John Harvey's police novels have always been built on the characters of his cops, and there is no one better at revealing those characters through the day-to-day concerns that real people have. In that sense, you might place Harvey firmly in the path forged by, say, Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels, and Sjowall & Wahloo's Martin Beck books. Harvey is a master at very subtly using the cases his detectives pursue to reflect the conflicts they face in their 'real' live, and this is what is most impressive about Good Bait, which follows two separate investigations.

In London, DCI Karen Shields is lumbered with the corpse of a teenaged Moldovan boy found on Hampstead Heath, and despite a number of leads, finds herself running into walls. Not only from potential witnesses who won't talk, but from higher-ups in the department who want certain aspects of the case left alone. Meanwhile, in Cornwall, DI Trevor Cordon, playing out his string in the sticks, is asked by Maxine Carlin, a long-time problem for social services and the police, to find her daughter Rose, who never showed up for a planned visit with her father. Years before, Cordon had tried to help Rose, now calling herself Letitia, and found himself getting more involved emotionally than was safe for a cop. But when Maxine herself is killed just a few days later, underneath a train in London, Cordon decides he will get involved.

Involvement is the real danger in Harvey's work: his characters find it dangerous, and often withdraw rather than take the risk. Although the two cases will be brought very close together, the real parallel between them is the sense of danger emotional attachment can bring, how committing yourself to a person, for whatever reason, always brings risk. The dead boy was involved with a girl whose parents disapproved; Letitia/Rose has a child, by very dangerous man who believes the boy belongs to him. At the heart of each subplot is also a father's desire to protect or possess his child, and a mother's to protect it. The personal is never far from the criminal in Harvey's writing.

Meanwhile, Shields winds up facing an unexpected relationship on the job, and Cordon (a name full of resonance in this context) finds those old feelings for Rose are indeed real, though just as dangerous and unlikely to be fulfilled as ever, and his efforts on behalf of her and her son show him just what his own withdrawal from life has meant. This is where he is vulnerable, and he has to face and shrug off that vulnerability if he is going to get a 'result'. Meanwhile, since in Harvey's books the bureaucracy of the police is often more threatening (and sometimes more criminal) than the villains, Shields finds herself having to walk a fine line, which her new relationship may make more dangerous. It seems likely this is a potential conflict to which Harvey may turn in the future.

Drawing all these stories together, in a way, is 'Good Bait' the Tadd Dameron tune which has become a jazz standard. Harvey name-checks quite a few versions throughout the book (as well as the Swedish Wallander TV series, Eric Dolphy, and his own early western novels!) to the point it becomes a motif, and we remember that we are the bait for each other, and the hooks we take are often barbed. My favourite version might be John Coltrane's on Blue Train, where it's a tune that tries to escape itself, be free and happy, but can't quite shake its way out of the blues. That's what this quiet and affecting novel, whose layers draw out feelings in a masterful way, is all about. It's a very early entry for the best crime novel of 2012.

Good Bait by John Harvey
William Heineman £12.99 ISBN9780434021628

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

KILLING THE BLUES: MICHAEL BRANDMAN DOES ROBERT B PARKER

2011-12-24T09:41:00.005Z

Michael Brandman's Killing The Blues is the first of the posthumous continuations of Robert B Parker's characters, being the tenth Jesse Stone novel (Ace Atkins will pick up the Spenser franchise) and it's interesting in the way in strives to match Parker's concerns, and tone. It's more successful in the former, especially once it gets going, because action is character and once Jesse begins trying to help out kids with problems we enter familiar Parker territory.

Brandman produced, and co-scripted with Parker a couple of Spenser TV movies starring Joe Mantegna, which attracted little attention around the turn of the century. He and Parker then did a remake of Monte Walsh, which starred Tom Selleck, which led to a quite good series of Jesse Stone TV movies, starring Selleck as Stone (I reviewed Stone Cold favourably years ago for Crime Time, and might revisit the series later here). In that sense, for Brandman it's a continuation, but when it comes to tone, there is a bit more of the Selleck Stone, and a lot more of the TV movie. Brandman's Stone is somewhat darker, a bit more confrontational, and much more aggressive, than Parker's. He's made his task a little easier by writing out Sunny Randall, and bringing a new girlfriend on the scene. She seems more like Jesse's long-lost Jen than a perfect mate for him, but as always in these series, one assumes things will evolve.

The biggest change is in Spenser's supporting case: Molly, who's a mothering sort of figure with Parker, becomes an even sassier version of the TV movie character, and Suitcase Simpson's role seems diminished. It's as if this Stone is more of a TV series police chief, and needs an action sequence every now and again; the kidnapping and holding of a small-time gangster seems quite out of character for the old Jesse, but the new one is a man of action. Which also changes the nature of his sessions with Dix, the shrink (played wonderfully by William Devane in the TV movies) because Jesse seems far more in control and far less revealing.

The story itself is very much in the Parker vein, it moves well, and the scenes are delineated clearly. But what it most lacks is Parker's ability to draw a character quickly and concisely, to establish with just a small description and a couple of lines of dialogue, a person you could see and understand. It was his greatest talent as a writer, and it would be asking a lot of Brandman to match it. But while the story is constructed cleverly and delivers at the end, its most powerful scenes are not, as they would be with Parker, the one-on-one confrontations with mobster Gino Fish, because Fish's character just doesn't explode. But the single best scene may be when Fish sends his hitman, Vinnie Morris, off on a job, and when's he's done it he delivers Fish's message: 'always look on the bright side of life'. It isn't really Fish, or Morris, but it many ways it's pure Parker.

Killing The Blues by Michael Brandman
Quercus £18.99 ISBN 9781780872896

3D SEX AND YEN: YOUR CHRISTMAS MOVIE?

2011-12-20T09:56:00.010Z

The new 3D version of Sex & Zen quickly became Hong Kong's all-time biggest grossing (and I choose the word carefully) film, but I wonder if its makers ever happened to watch either of the Paul Morrisey 3D sex 'n horror films. If they had, they might have realised that 3D merely accentuates the unreal nature of soft-core porn, while adding nothing at all, and the western market has moved beyond Category III in Hong Kong. I wonder also if there is a real cultural divide in terms of sex and comedy, and I don't necessarily mean between China and Britain, but within Britain itself, because releasing this film on DVD just in time for Christmas week seems a very strange idea indeed. It is being billed as the first 3D erotic film, which ignores the 3D Stewardesses, a big hit when I was a boy, and the Warhol/Morrisey films, but had they watched any of those films they might have realised the extra dimension, so to speak, isn't necessary or sufficient. But as a stocking stuffer (and again, I choose the word carefully) I'm not so sure!

It was only 20 years ago that Sex and Zen (both films are adapted, extremely loosely, from the 17th century story The Carnal Prayer Mat) was made in 2D, starring Lawrence Ng and more famously Amy Yip (see poster below), but again, western viewers drawn by the allure of 'Category III', the Hong Kong version of 'adult' discovered a very soft core at the heart of a very strange sort of eroticism, one that didn't translate easily into our mores. The new 3D version is also billed as the biggest-grossing Hong Kong movie ever, and I choose the word for box office success carefully. Be warned as well, if you're a seeker of prurient interest: the version I saw in preview a few months ago suffered three minutes of cuts, which may improve it, or not, depending on your point of view.

There are a few funny moments in Sex and Zen, mostly revolving around the sexual naivete of our 'hero' Wei Yangshang, but otherwise the film is all too often nasty and violent, its sex primitive male fantasy, its attitude curiously prissy about what it shows and doesn't show, and, its mood, in the end, boring. In fact, the single most interesting thing about it is the way the sub-titles, in 3D, appear to be running in another dimension from the film itself, as if they were being projected onto a clear screen in front of each scene, an effect I began to find fascinating, like watching a child's toy theatre.

Wei is a conceited, not to say boring, scholar, who reacts to a recent outrage by the Prince of Ning by telling his master, the Monk Budai, that Ning will not be happy in the long run. Then Wei discovers love. But after marrying his true love, Tie Yuxiang, he fails to excite her. Given his boring lovelife when he goes to Ning's Pavilion of Ultimate Bliss, intending to make Ning pay for his blasphemy, he soon finds himself lost to carnal delights. The sexual-expert Ruizhu entices him but seems oddly unfulfilling, while the sadistic Dongmei frightens him, but seems to symbolise the dangers of the basic insecurity Wei is trying to assuage. But he still has problems, and eventually realises his tool is inordinately tiny. Since he has abandoned Tie, his true love eventually bows to family pressure and divorces him. Meanwhile, however, the Elder of Ultimate Bliss, a transsexual who has attained a sort of immortality by sucking the Zen ying yang out of his/her victims, has a solution for Wei, but the price will be high. He can get a new, larger penis, but in return he has to perform a service for the Prince...

Hiro Hayami is a suitably dazed bozo of a hero, while Tony Ho sometimes seems like a Hong Kong version of Brian Blessed as the villain. The female roles are basically a dead-end street, but Leni Lan is appealling as the true love, and Saori Hara and Suou Yukiko compelling as Ruizhu and Dongmei, as far as the moaning allows. What might work for Suou, and for Vonnie Lui, is the contrast between their relatively innocent appearance, and their 'true' characters, but they don't get a huge chance to display it. Lui, from a girl band, is apparently known as 'Hong Kong's Sex Bomb' in Taiwan, which must be worth something at the Golden Globes (the very idea of a general release in the US is hilarious to entertain, whereas it has attracted virtually no attention in the UK).

The slapstick comedy is crude but effective, especially when Wei gets a donkey dick attached, and a couple of times the intrigue around the Prince threatens to make the story compelling. There is even some well-done action (of the non-sexual variety) which is really the only time the 3D effects seem to add anything at all.

But those moments are all too few-- there are even a couple when the characters' pursuit of pleasure reveals the extreme cost, a sort of Sadian insight which seems strangely out of place. In the end, however, true happiness is revealed with an O. Henry twist, marital bliss is achieved only after the husband has been castrated and wife placed in an impregnable chastity belt. Oh the irony. Of course the young won't believe it, so you probably should not bother taking the kids to this one for Christmas. But it does make a certain amount of sense, especially seeing as the 3D Sex and Zen is liekly to put them off Sex and leave them praying for Zen.

3D SEX AND ZEN: EXTREME ECSTASY is on DVD (cinema release was in September)
directed by Christopher Sun screenplay by Mark Wu, Stephen Shiu, Stephen Shiu, Jr. photography: Jimmy Wong Hiro Hayama (Wei), Leni Lan (Tie), Tony Ho (Prince of Ning), Vonnie Lui (Elder of Ultimate Bliss), Saori Hara (Reizhu), Suou Yukiko (Dongmei)

MONEYBALL: THE MOVIE

2011-12-12T13:45:00.011Z

Moneyball the film is just as interesting for what it isn't as for what it is. It isn't a traditional misfits get together and start to win baseball movie, like Bad News Bears or Major League, though it threatens to become one at a number of times. And it isn't a particularly good explanation of what it is that Billy Beane bought into, and why it was so different to the rest of baseball. What it is, however, is a very good attempt at getting to the core of what Michael Lewis was writing about, which is Billy Beane and his character.

You probably thought it was about the economics, which is the point that people – especially baseball people-- always missed. Lewis was not saying that Billy Beane was the smartest guy in baseball, or that he'd found the best way to build a baseball team. Lewis was saying that Beane had realised something about the economics of baseball, and that if he were going to survive in Oakland, and produce a winning team, he would have to invest in those commodities that other teams undervalued. The film does a pretty good job of explaining that, though they basically boil it down to on base percentage and don't really show what that means.

But that's not the core of what Lewis wrote about. Lewis' theme, his persistent theme, is the maverick, the man who goes against the book, bucks the trends, follows his own drummer. He especially enjoys it when his maverick is obsessive, as Billy Beane is, and eccentric, which he also is, and the film is literally at its most successful when Brad Pitt's Beane gets to play off the stolidity of Philip Seymour Hoffman's Art Howe. That is the core of Moneyball, Pitt burning off energy on the stationary cycle in the bowels of the stadium while Howe sits impassively with his arms folded watching the season first collapse and then explode in front of him.

Moneyball might have been a more interesting film had Steven Soderbergh hung around to direct. The original adaptation was by Stan Chervin, the first screenplay by Steve Zaillian, and Soderberg's concept apparently would have included interviews, like Reds, and probably explained the baseball concepts behind Moneyball better. You can see the urge to make the film more accessible to folks who aren't baseball geeks, more like what everyone expects a sports movie to be, which is why the film as directed by Bennett Miller keeps edging toward those traditional tropes (and it's not just baseball, think of Hoosiers, or Miracle on Ice, or Bang The Drum Slowly, or The Longest Yard—all films about disparate characters learning there's no I in team--and that's why North Dallas 40 is such a good sports movie, because it subverts that entire message, and why it was so important in the original Rocky that Rocky NOT win) of the team that learns to play together turning into winners. But you can also see why Aaron Sorkin, who seems to specialise in making drama out of mundane non-fiction, would be find this story interesting, because his films are full of obsessives, misfits, and geeks, and also because Billy Beane is literally a Sorkin character come to life, full of fast-talking repartee, and every bit as driven, if not by the same drivers, as Sorkin is reputed to be.

Where the film lets down is in failing to make some of the obvious parallels stronger. Scott Hatteberg is a Billy Beane character: Beane's own career as a player stands as a monument to the ability of scouts to misjudge talent, or predict a player's ability to harness his own talent—Hatteberg's own doubts reflect Beane's and more might be made of that. Similarly, the film gets mawkish with Beane's daughter, but skips the potential for real conflict and literally ends with her offstage, speaking through a cheesy song she's recorded for him. They really need to explain Bill James more clearly, explain the Red Sox' John Henry and his attempted hiring of Beane better (Henry is given the film's 'hammer' (a phrase I coined in my book about Oliver Stone) speech, which hits you over the head with the movie's theme, in case you've been asleep for the past 80 minutes and missed it) and it would have been good to have answered the question of how, if Bill James was actually working for the Red Sox, Billy Beane was responsible for everything. It also would have useful to have credited Joe Morgan's gloating explanation of why Moneyball couldn't work, just so we could blame him for fatuousness.

It's also interesting that Jonah Hill is so obviously unathletic (until you see the film of A's extreme Moneyball propsect Jeremy Brown, a pudgy catcher who never really made it in the bigs, and he looks just like Hill) because Paul DePodesta, the executive on whom he's based, was actually a college baseball player at Harvard, so yes he was somewhat socially inept, quiet and self-effacing (which is why he didn't want his name used in the film, which otherwise uses real names throughout).

In fact, if Aaron Sorkin had got involved earlier, we might have been able to combine The Social Network and Moneyball into one movie, with DePodesta and Mark Zuckerberg duelling with their computers trying to impress Radcliffe girls. It's like Beane's the Rob Lowe character from West Wing, or maybe Josh, and Brandt is Toby. In Beane Sorkin gets to combine the handsome jock with the smart geek, and create an unclubbable god! In that sense Moneyball and TSN are the same movie, and end on the same note, with Zuckerberg and Beane both viewing or hearing the voice of their love, ex-girlfriend or daughter, who can't be with them. Sob.

CRIME TIME'S BEST NOVEL OF 2011

2011-12-07T18:07:00.004Z

I wrote the following for Crime Time (crimetime.co.uk) who are doing a survey via tweet, and then posting the full text on their website.

I agreed with the Dagger judges for once: Crooked Letter Crooked Letter is beautifully written & says much about America, not just the South. I thought Robert Crais' The Sentry defined Joe Pike & Elvis Cole. I admire Michael Connelly's 2011 two-fer: The Drop, a fine Harry Bosch, and The Fifth Witness, the best Mickey Haller yet.

I should also mention that I was going to put Graham Hurley's Borrowed Light on my list, but went back and discovered it was published last year. But it deserved the mention.

MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS: GODFREY HODGSON

2011-12-07T14:52:00.008Z

NOTE: Speaking this morning about my obit of Tom Wicker, which appeared in today's Guardian and which is discussed in my preceding post, my friend Michael Goldfarb and I talked briefly about Godfrey Hodgson, the Guardian's man in Washington during much of the time Wicker was the Times' bureau chief. It reminded me of this review I wrote for the Spectator seven years ago, and it seems appropriate to post it now, because Hodgson's analysis seems so precient given our precipitous decline in the years since then, years during which most of the inequalities Hodgson warned about were increased, with little thought to the effects that might have on society. I've reprinted it as it appeared, with just a few cosmetic changes...

A SECOND, DARKER, ANALYSIS (Spectator, 15 May 2004)

In 1976 Godfrey Hodgson published In Our Time, a portrait of America in the years from ‘World War II to Watergate’. To this American, reading it newly arrived in Britain in 1977, it seemed remarkable that the best social history of my country during my then-brief lifetime should have been written by an Englishman. Hodgson's sharp eye captured both a society in turmoil and one imbued with immense postwar promise. He combined critical distance with an innate, almost American optimism.

Nearly three decades later this sequel, as its title implies, is far less optimistic. Hodgson would certainly agree with Richard Nixon’s campaign manager and Attorney-General, John Mitchell, who said, on his way to jail, ‘This country is going so far to the right you won’t recognise it.’ Certainly there’s little of In Our Time recognisable in Hodgson’s analysis of the nation today.

He now sees a country in which the postwar liberal consensus has indeed moved right, turning free-market capitalism from an economic theory into a cultural template. The result is an America in which financial segregation increasingly preserves opportunity for a wealthy elite. Quoting Mark Twain’s aphorism, ‘We Americans worship the almighty dollar! Well, it is a worthier god than hereditary privilege’, Hodgson argues convincingly that American society has come to resemble old-fashioned Europe, and its strictly class-structured elites.

Hodgson’s analyses in cross-section, topic by topic, dividing the country into its constituent interests and ultimately bringing those sectors together. By digging beneath the surface of cause and effect, he shows clearly where political policy and social change intertwine. Nowhere is this more evident than in the central issue of race.

The Right’s current hegemony is not due to policy, but in fact a by-product of racial politics. On signing 1965’s Voting Rights Act, Lyndon Johnson said, ‘There goes the South!’ The Democratic party’s control of Congress came from its uneasy alliance of northern liberals and southern conservatives. The combination of legalised equality for blacks and the left's protest against the President’s conduct of the Vietnam war drove southern whites first to George Wallace and then to the Republicans, changing the political balance for the rest of the century.

Once in power, the overriding aim of this Republican ascendancy has been to undo Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Buttressed by the postwar economic boom, the New Deal created a burgeoning middle class, expanded its educational system, provided a state-guaranteed safety net, and gave the baby-boom generation the most privileged upbringing the world had ever seen. Those baby-boomers have piece by piece dismantled the hand that fed them, until only Social Security remains from the New Deal, and it too is now under fire.

The moneyed elite in northern cities have abandoned state education, while the growth of ‘Christian Academies’ in the south has, in effect, resegregated education there. University costs have escalated while financial aid shrinks, reinforcing an eduational upper-class. Is it any coincidence that both candidates for president in this year’s election were members of the same secret society at Yale?

This paradigm repeats in Hodgson’s examination of American life. One major change from 1976, as befits a scholar rather than a journalist, is that he now draws on mounds of statistical analysis. This is not always an advantage; sometimes the numbers threaten to overpower the reportorial instincts which make his work so telling. Strangely, the most obvious factual error he makes is British, saying that the 1970s saw Arthur Ashe become Wimbledon’s first black champion. In fact, Althea Gibson had won the woman’s title two decades earlier, but her death in relative obscurity last year showed, without needing Ron Atkinson to drive the point home, that we sometimes overrate the impact of sport on the advancement of minorities.

Yet sport helps demonstrate Hodgson’s acuity. He rightly draws on Robert Putnam’s excellent study, Bowling Alone. Putnam extrapolated from the decline of recreational bowling leagues that television had destroyed the sense of community activity in America. Hodgson takes his analysis further, tracing the massive changes in the telecommunications industry, arguing convincingly that the free market has created a less responsive and less responsible media just when Americans are most crucially dependent on it.

Hodgson concludes, with typical understatement, that his book paints ‘not an altogether happy picture’. He asks if America will ‘turn back’ to ‘older and wiser’ instincts. Rarely has a call for liberalism been made in such a convincingly conservative fashion.

More Equal Than Others by Godfrey Hodgson, Princeton Univ. Press, £29.95

TOM WICKER: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

2011-12-07T09:38:00.007Z

My obituary of the New York Times columnist Tom Wicker is in today's Guardian, though online it's dated last Friday (2 December); you can link to it here. Wicker was a fine writer; I've enjoyed a number of his novels very much, and my praise of A Time To Die is honest and if anything understated; I've never understood why it didn't win a Pulitzer that year. But the point I was trying to make was that he was by no means the outsider some of his writing (and his presence on Nixon's enemies list) would make him out to be. But unlike many columnists, he was in most cases a writer who refused to bend reality to fit preconcieved ideology--he was hugely critical of Jimmy Carter, and was one of the few important opinion writers who refused to let Ronald Reagan skate on Iran Contra. If his fiction had a flaw, it was a tendency toward worthiness, an echo perhaps of the strong morality in his columns. Thus it was a surprise to discover his three Gold Medal paperbacks written as Paul Connelly--pulpy fiction was a good way of working out some of the kinks in those moral positions.

Although his career might be said to have been made by the JFK assassination, his position on the killing was one instance where he avoided his own dictum (in On Press) against over-reliance and trust in official sources. Wicker supported the Warren Report without equivocation immediately upon publication; and when the Times published its version of the House Assassination Committee's report, Wicker's introduction contradicted the report's own findings, that JFK's assassination was likely a conspiracy. I had written about a confrontation at a 1980 New York literary cocktail party at Jean Stein's apartment, where Anthony Summers and Norman Mailer took pot shots at Wicker, with Robert Blakely, chief counsel to the Committe in the crowd (Blakely would write a book concluding the Mafia, and no one else, killed JFK). Summers accused Wicker of having written his critical introduction before studying fully the evidence; Wicker, by then having read Summer's own excellent book, acknowledged that there were questions but opined a conspiracy had not yet been fully proven. It was an odd position for a journalist as critical and probing as Wicker to take, but I suspect it had more to do with the leaning against the Manichean world-view the establishment ascribes to conspiracy theories of any sort, than the actual evidenciary trail.

Finally, in my obit I did mention his step-children as survivers; I worked with one of his step-daughters at ABC in London for a number of years, and I'm sorry Kayce didn't get mentioned in the piece as published.

GEORGE PELECANOS' CUT

2011-12-06T17:17:00.005Z

When I reviewed The Way Home in 2009 (you can link to it here), I suggested that, since so much of his work falls into the series framework, it might be grouped with George Pelecanos' previous two novels, The Night Gardener and The Turnaround, into a trilogy I dubbed 'Fathers and Sons'. His new novel, The Cut, in one sense might be considered the fourth book in what would then become a quartet, but it also marks a departure in style from the trilogy which precedes it, and also introduces a character who seems poised to begin a series of novels all his own. Spero Lucas does the investigating that gets a major drug dealer's nephew off a stolen car/traffic accident beef, and winds up working for the dealer to trace a leak in his marijuana supply chain. Things get complicated from there, and there's an interesting twist in the end, which helps confirm Spero's lone-wolf status.

In one sense, Spero's story continues the concerns of the 'Fathers and Sons' trilogy, with family values, in the old-fashioned, core sense of that phrase, being at their centre. Lucas is one of four children, two natural, two adopted, raised by hard-working Greek parents. He and his brother Leo are the adopted ones, and Leo is black. Of the two older children, one is a successful lawyer and the other is a ne'er do well; neither has much to do with their widowed mother. Leo is a teacher, Spero a war-hero home from Iraq, working as a casual investigator for a criminal defense attorney. The Cut features sub-plots; one of Leo's students is a witness to one of the central crimes, and is a bright boy in need of a father figure; a crooked cop turns out to have a criminal father of the worst sort—the contrasts between nature and nurture are never sharper than when Pelecanos approaches them through the prism of crime.

But looked at from another angle, The Cut does a couple of things differently from most of his previous fiction. There is a feeling in the way the book is structured around Spero that reminded me of Robert B Parker's fiction, how quickly he constructs a scene and the characters within it, and then moves on. Like so many of Parker's novels, this one also moves very quickly toward one big action scene, a structure not unlike the westerns which Pelecanos admires and which have been reflected before in his work.

The other new thing is Spero himself, who, unlikely as it seems, reminds me of John D MacDonald's Travis McGee, the 'salvage consultant'. That's the nature of Spero's work for the defense attorney. Like McGee, he possesses superior and well-honed skills that make him more formidable than he might seem (and like McGee's, those skills were acquired in the military). But most striking is Spero's attitude toward the opposite sex: though firmly on the side of families and raising children properly, he is, like McGee, a confirmed bachelor and unwilling (or unable) to commit to a relationship—though he is a lot of fun even without that. Being the 21st century, this attitude runs afoul of one of the women in the story, but being McGee-like that is, in effect, her problem. Admittedly, it has been a long time since I read a Travis McGee, but I was hearing definite echoes of his pop psychology in the narrative.

This is not meant to deflate the impact of this book. There is no one writing crime fiction who deals more realistically or more tellingly with the situation of working class people in American cities, and the degradation of life within those cities caused by the disappearance of jobs and the downscaling of education as a government priority for those people. He makes the problem personal, and that works. In The Cut, he has adapted those concerns to a faster-paced, more hero-centered story. If it's Parker and MacDonald with a conscience and a soul, that is not a bad thing to be.

The Cut by George Pelecanos
Orion Books, £12.99 ISBN 9781409114567

THE THREE TINKER TAILORS

2011-11-19T13:53:00.018Z

In 1938, E.M. Forster wrote that, if asked to choose between 'betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country'. You might look at John LeCarre's work, particularly the books now known as the 'Smiley novels' as a profound examination of that point of view, and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy as its apotheosis. The novel was published in 1975, and the justifiably renowned television adaptation was shown in 1979. It may strike some as foolhardy to make a film of Tinker Tailor now, but in three decades our world has changed. The wars fought by our spies are no longer symmetrical and our perception of the home team in that battle, that nebulous entity called Britain/England, depending on who's speaking and in what context, has taken a battering from years of Thatcher/Blairism. Most importantly, our feelings about the nature of loyalty and betrayal have altered, and that change of our perspective may be the most notable thing in the new version.

The film is a fine adaptation, too, so good it drove me to re-read the book, and then to watch the TV series, which, oddly enough, I had never seen (in my early years in London I eschewed television, in part because I was working at ITN and got enough of it there). The screenplay (by Bridget O'Connor and Peter Staughan) sacrifices, as it must, character for plot, but the way it re-structures that plot, leading with the shooting of Jim Prideaux, not only makes the story flow more like a thriller, and less like a parlour mystery, but also foregrounds the novel's central concern with betrayal. It jettisons some of the supporting cast to simplify things. Where it differs most frothe previous versions is in its attitude toward what drives that betrayal, and in its nostalgia for something very different than the things LeCarre wrote about.

It's too facile to say that being directed by a Swede (Tomas Alfredson) means the film falls onto the side of neutrality, but when Bill Haydon justifies his treason on the grounds of aesthetics, the film seems to accept the statement as being a critique of design, and wonder if Haydon had ever been to the USSR. But in the book and on TV it is clearer that Haydon's aesthetic is his self-view; after all he is an artist, even if not a very original one, and rather than submit to the failed aesthetics of the world in which he grew up, he found it more aesthetically pleasing to create his own world which in secret mocked that one. I've always found it odd that Ian Eichardson played Bill; he's hardly a charmer, especially to the opposite sex; in my mind he was playing Anthony Blunt (whose own treason was revealed just before the TV series came out). But Blunt's own betrayal was indeed for aesthetic reasons, like those I've just described, and LeCarre was either prescient or imbued with deeper knowledge when he wrote his book.

The other big difference is that the film seems nostalgic for the era in which the book was set, but only to a point. But the book itself was nostalgic for an earlier time—either the pre-war innocence of England or the years of the war itself, when these men were heroes and not so much bureaucrats. Haydon's art speaks to the thirties, and the suits worn by the Circus' leaders speak of that era: chunky tweeds and garish pinstripes, whereas the film's version of the 70s boast thinner materials, thinner ties, thinner lapels. Everything is more sleek, including the Circus itself. Critics praised its grainy reconstruction of its era, but a few moments with the TV series renders that praise hollow. It is far more shoddy world, one that still speaks of rationing and second-class status. But in the film gone is the ramshackle HQ of a small British overseas business, stuck into tiny rooms in old buildings—its Circus is a cross between the many warehouse sets of Spooks and the control room of Get Smart.

There are other odd changes too: Smiley is moved from Pimlico to Hampstead (though the address on his letters, strangely, is a building in Kings Cross used for Spooks); he even swims in the pond on the Heath every morning. Gary Oldman's Smiley is a stronger and silenter character than Alec Guiness'; his is more of a bureaucrat, in fact the performance reminded me most of Toni Servillo as Andreotti in Il Divo; Smiley as determined bureaucrat. The bureaucratic fighting in the Circus is presented along those more European, less English lines as well. This is highlighted by some of the mis-casting, which you see around the Circus 'board room': Toby Jones is too young to be Alleline, and though he catches the ambition he doesn't get the clubbable fatuousness, nor the hint of incipient fascism, both of which were captured perfectly in Michael Alridge's TV perfromance. David Dencik's Toby is too weak; Bernard Hepton's was a more mysterious character. And although Terrence Rigby's Bland looks the part more than Cieran Hands, both are wasted; Hands' role reduced to a few sinister closeups and threats to maintain your suspicions. Which is the real problem: in the novel and the TV series, the identity of the mole is still a mystery—even though, like Smiley and Prideaux, we intuit it must be Haydon. But in the film, Colin Firth is really the only possibility; none of the others, bar Dencik, are given a chance to establish themselves, but he plays the character too weak to be the traitor. That the film manages to be far more a thriller than the TV series is a tribute to the structure of its script and the pacing of the direction.

The novel is clear about the nature of betrayal, as an outgrowth of secrecy, and sexuality is part of that secrecy; its clarity recalls the Forster quote. Its deeply understated sense of friendship grows from the world of schoolboys from which LeCarre traces the English proclivity for both loyalty and betrayal. For LeCarre, sex is a side issue, a motivator, not a determining factor, and the TV series reflected that. For example, in the novel the relationship between Bill Haydon and Prideaux is explained, if you can call it that, by innuendo—small comments about being close, reports from their university days, all which require you to read between the lines, and much of which might have been missed by, say, a young American like myself with no grounding in British society. In the TV series, you are almost shocked to see the slight reaction from Ian Richardson when Ian Bannen (an excellent Prideaux) shows up. It should be noted that in LeCarre the only sexual relationship that is actually out in the open, discussed and mentioned freely, is Smiley's, or more specifically, Anne's serial adultery. In other words, betrayal makes sex an open subject. In that context, Smiley's loyalty to Anne becomes a mirror, if not an explanation, of his loyalty to Britain, and the Circus.

And of course Smiley's own deepest relationship (apart perhaps from Control—and consider the meaning of his service being run by 'control', English self-control, self-restraint, stiff upper lip and all that) is with Karla, whose woman's name is no coincidence. Smiley 'gives' Karla the lighter Anne has given him, inscribed with the ironic-in-context 'all my love', and that becomes a key to identifying Karla's machinations behind the Circus' problems.

All this is grounded in hidden sexuality, but our world requires that we give sex a more straightforward approach. In the film, Colin Firth and Mark Strong exchange smouldering glances that leave little in doubt. This is the reason they are there, although strictly speaking it would be a stretch, in the time of the story's setting, to see them as veterans of World War II. In this light, it is odd that they chose to give Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumerbatch) a gay back-story; there is no hint of that in the earlier versions, and there seems no point to it, unless they were worried they needed to balance off the image of gays as traitors. It does work much better on one level, however, and that is in the relationship between Ricki Tarr and Irina, who is far more beautiful in the film, and whose fate is shown in a moment that helps condense the plot. Moving Prideaux's betrayal from rural Czechoslovakia to a Budapest cafe is fine for its time-saving, but moving the Tarr scenes to Istanbul is a fine change that allows less religious overtones to Irina's conversion, and more standard spy intrigue. Interesting, Tom Hardy's Tarr is probably the single role in the film that comes closest to the interpretation in the TV series (by Hwyel Bennett) while Svetlana Khodchenkova's Irina is very much a figure of sexy glamour, where Susan Kodicek's had been partly religious and partly non-glamorous in exactly the same way the service is presented throughout.

This ties in with the decision not to show Mrs. Smiley, which is pretty much true to the book, although it ends with Smiley anticipating her return to gather him up. The TV film adds a postscript of sorts—with Sian Phillips perfect as Anne—which uses her to sum things up: Bill 'loved being a traitor', and she misses one opportunity when Smiley asks if she loved Bill, she could echo Smiley's earlier answer 'not really', but she also sums him up. 'Poor George,' she says, after telling him she didn't love Haydon. 'Life's such a puzzle to you isn't it?' Meanwhile Smiley fiddles with his glasses, and resets them over his eyes, perhaps seeing straight again. Anne is very much a presence in the film, but in a very clever way, seen only from behind, and with a flower in her hair to symbolise some sort of exotic and old-fashioned glamour, perhaps someone trying to retain their youth.

The film adds a few other inventions which are improvements, not all simply because they're needed in the restructuring which turns it into a literal thriller. John Hurt is particularly over the top as Control, and that works. The Christmas party scene is the one contrivance which actually harkens back to the LeCarre point of view, the one time you get that sense of the Circus as a second-rate British overseas corporation. And the moment Santa enters as Lenin and everyone sings the Soviet anthem in full voice is brilliant.The Christmas party scene is brilliant, the one time when you get the film's sense of the Circus as a second-rate British overseas corporation, and the moment when Santa enters as Lenin and everyone sings the Soviet anthem in full voice is brilliant. The modern ethos seems reflected too in Connie's new status: from a dump of a flat she has moved up the property ladder to a lovely detached house in Oxford, and though Kathy Bates needs to be more crucial to the condensed plot, it is hard to top Beryl Reid's Connie for pathos.

And although Haydon's artistic career doesn't play the part in the film it did before—hence the problem with the 'aesthetic' argument; Haydon is not, after all, a very good artist—it is a signal that he is off-kilter. Colin Firth's performance is exceptional, particularly in catching what LeCarre described as the 'pewter' tone of Haydon's eyes after his interrogations. His louche pose, slipping on his chukka boots, would be something Richardson would not do. But of course much of the rest, including the looks exchanged with Mark Strong's Prideaux, is stuff we've seen before from both actors; that Firth could have wandered in from the set of A Single Man.

But the most telling re-doing is Prideaux's relationship with the schoolboys. Prideaux, after all, is the key character, the one who is personally betrayed by the man he idolises and loves, the man with whom he has the exact sort of schoolboy relationship envisaged by EM Forster. In the novel and TV series his car is something old fashioned, 'best of British,' an icon which represents the illusions of a lost past which he is conveying to the boys he teaches. LeCarre is pretty clear about this: in the novel we again intuit that Jim has killed Bill because the manner of death has been foreshadowed a couple of times, most notably when he kills a bird in front of the schoolboys. On TV we see it, but it's a face to face killing, a small discussion of betrayal followed by anger. And although there is no discussion between Jim and Bill in the film, the face to face is reduced to Jim's seeing him through a sniper scope, the look on Colin Firth's face is one of what, resignation? Perhaps invitation? And we sense Jim may even be doing him a favour.

We know the myopic Jumbo could well be the schoolboy Smiley—the kind of boy who could grow into a Alec Guiness' huge spectacles. But he can't really become Gary Oldman's Smiley, and that is probably why there is such a significant change in Strong's Prideaux, whose car is a junker and who, after killing Bill reacts to Jumbo with fury. In LeCarre, the traditions carry on, and will continue to produce men increasingly unsuited for the non-imperial world—Camerons and Osbornes and even non-men like Stella Rimington. For Alfredson, it's different. You might read Strong's rejection of Jumbo as a rejection of the weak or you might read it as a rejection of the system. In the latter reading, Prideaux becomes a sort of disillusioned hero, the only one in the game willing to give it up because it's at heart corrupt, or at least disfunctional. But I prefer to see it as Alfredsson's way of suggesting the circle has been broken here, and Prideaux will no long participate in grooming boys for the system that feeds the Circus. I love the ambiguity here, but it bothers me because of what follows.

Which is why the triumphalist ending, undercut by the ironic use of 60s pop song 'La Mer' as Oldman's Smiley sits in the control seat in the Get Smart set. It doesn't really work. Smiley is in charge, but as we know from LeCarre, this is not really a triumph: it is only the first step in his becoming what he is closest to. For me, coming back to the 1970s versions, artefacts of the time I arrived in this country, but with the knowledge I have learned over all this time, the depths of its predecessors seem something the film cannot match. But I am also acutely aware that there is a generation of film-goers now as ignorant of that Britain as I was when I arrived here, and this is a film for them, and, as I have said, an excellent one, for me too. I am not criticising the film for not recognising what is after all outside its purview; but I wonder if, even within its own terms, that was way it ought to end.

THE NIGHT THEY DROVE THE CANDIDATES DOWN

2011-11-15T14:05:00.008Z

Sometimes it really does seem like you couldn't invent this stuff...but while reading about Herman Cain's defenses of both his past as an employer of women and his present as a tabula resa in terms of Libya and other parts of the rest of the world, and the opening line of The Band's 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down' ('Virgil Cain is my name/and I served on the Danville train') and the resentment which provides the emotional core of that song seemed to fit our current Tea Party world, that the rest of this just happened, as they say...so peace out

THE NIGHT THEY DROVE THE CANDIDATES DOWN

Herman Cain is my name

and I worked on the pizza chain

til Bachmann's insanity came

and tore up the prim'ry campaign

in the winter of 2011

I was trailin, barely made news at seven

Then came the babes with the stories to tell

It's a time I remember oh so well

The night I drove her forehead down

Liberal media grinnin

The night she claimed I felt around

Fox News pundits were spinnin

They went, gag gaga gag gaga

Gaga gag gag gaga gag gaga....

Back on the stump in Tennessee

Politico says to me

Herman quick come see

We've got the testimony

And one week later when it all came out

Said I don't know what you're talkin about

Don't remember that woman, not at all

And the settlement's somethin' else I don't recall

The night they drove the candidates down,

And it's just beginnin

The night they drove the candidates down

Why can't we do our own spinnin

Goin gag, gaga gaga gag

Gaga gag gag Gaga gaga gag

Out on the stump in Richmond town

Said 9-9-9'll bring your taxes down

Tea party they gave a frown

said it's just 666 upside down

Now it may be the devil who made me grope

But for tax policy there still must be hope

If I'm President, I'll make the country fine

And if I dont, at least I got mine

The night they drove them candidates down

The tea party was grinnin

The night they drove them candidates down

Cause Mitt Romney weren't winnin

They go, gag gaga gag gag

Gaga gaga gag gag gaga gag

Met with the papers in Milwaukee

And what did they say to me

Herman, do you agree

With Obama's take on Gaddafi?

Well, OK, so I answered slow

And I had to admit that I didn't know

WTF, it's only President,

Bush knew shit from Saddam and look where that all went...

The night they drove them candidates down

What was it they expected?

They night they drove them candidates down

Jes tryin to get elected

They went gag gaga gaga gag

Gaga gaga gag gag gaga gag

Like Rick Parry before me

I forget and smile

Unlike Mitt Romney longside of me

I'll hold a view for a while

Now I don't mind choppin Michelle

Santorum? Already gone to hell.

But if the voters notice what I lack

I'll say it could be worse, cause I could be Barack!

The night they drove them candidates down

Liberal pundits all grinnin

The night they drove us candidates down

Fox News says I'm winnin

they're all gag, gaga gag gaga

gaga gag gag gaga gag gag gagaga...

SMOKIN' JOE FRAZIER: IN MEMORIAM

2011-11-08T10:55:00.011Z

It was Joe Frazier's blessing and curse that he shared center stage in the squared circle with Muhammad Ali, and their rivalry may be the greatest of the sporting 20th century, better than Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain, Palmer and Nicklaus, Borg and McEnroe, because it took place in the one setting most revealing of a man's character, courage, and self-awareness.

It helps that Frazier and Ali were perfect complements to each other. Out of the ring Ali was pretty, loud, egotistical—a presentation he'd learned studying pro wrestlers. He often had another agenda, and he played it out perfectly. Joe was rugged but not beautiful, softly spoken, and straight forward in what he said and what he did.

The same applied inside the ring. It's not enough, nor is it true, to say they epitomised the 'boxer versus the puncher' matchup—you want a classic for that watch Kenny Buchanan against Roberto Duran. Rather, it was that their behaviour in the ring echoed perfectly their characters outside it.

Ali's boxing style kept his face from being hurt. He was the quickest heavyweight any of us had ever seen, both with his dancing feet and his ability to pull his head back out of range in a flash. His punches, with their twist on the end, weren't knockout blows, but damaging in their own way.

Smokin' Joe, by contrast, was willing to sacrifice himself to get into punching range, taking a beating in order to give one, and once he got close enough he inflicted hammering drill-press pain, with a left-hook that destroyed right-handed punchers. He was Rocky Marciano, in a lot of ways, and once Eddie Futch taught him to bob and weave coming forward, he was as close as boxing gets to an irresistible force.

The shame of their three meetings is that Ali, having been stripped of the title, didn't get to work his way through the other contenders, and face Frazier with his hand and foot quickness intact. When they met at the Garden for the first time, a few days before my 20th birthday, I listened to the fight on the radio. I was a war-protesting pseudo hippie jock trapped into a love of competitive sports, and Ali of course symbolised the meeting of those two worlds so I was cheering for him. But even in the radio commentary I could tell that Joe was dominating, coming forward, taking the fight to Ali. The beauty of their fights is that Ali proved he had the courage to match Frazier at his own game, enduring inhuman punishment, until in the monumental rubber match, it was Futch who threw in the towel after the fourteenth round.

People remember that Ali won the gold medal at the Rome Olympics in 1960 (but often forget it was at light-heavy) but not that Joe won the heavyweight gold in Tokyo four years later. His path to the medal wasn't easy, because he lost at the Olympic trials to Buster Mathis, who drove Joe crazy in the amateur ranks. When Joe lost to Mathis at the Olympic trials he complained that the Baby Huey-shaped Mathis pulled his trunks so high ('up to his titties') that he was penalised two points for a low blow that went right into Buster's ample midsection. But Mathis pulled out of the '64 Olympics, and Joe, despite breaking his left thumb in the semifinal, won the heavyweight gold. He would later destroy Mathis when they met as pros.

Frazier's pro career is odd, in that, having come up later than Ali, he never fought Liston or Patterson, he missed Ernie Terrell and Cleveland Williams, and after Ali he somehow never got in the ring with Ken Norton. His best fights, apart from Ali, were probably his first against Oscar Bonavena, who knocked him down twice, the stoppage of George Chuvalo (both those guys made Joe look like Ali), the first win over Jerry Quarry, which was probably Quarry's best fight, and the first over Jimmy Ellis, the Ali sparring partner who won the 'tournament' to replace him as champ, a tournament Joe refused to fight in. Joe Bugner gave him a tough fight losing a 12 round decision, and the one I remember well is Frazier's quick win over Bob Foster, the exceptional light-heavyweight, who was tall and skinny and nearly knocked horizontal in mid-air by a Frazier punch. But here's the rub: Ali had half a dozen fights besides the ones with Frazier that were legendary, or close to it. Frazier really had only the ones with Ali.

He lost twice to Ali, and twice to George Foreman, who was an immovable object if ever boxing produced one. Ali watched Frazier's irresistible force rendered useless and figured out what he'd have to do to beat Foreman, and he knew, having survived three fights with Joe, he could take the punishment. He paid the price down the line, as we all know. He saw Ali extending his career for big paydays, but his comeback lasted only one fight, an awkward draw with Jumbo Cummings, and he retired for good.

Joe's legacy will always be entwined with Ali's, and it's important to remember how badly Ali treated him. Joe refused to participate in the WBA's tournament when Ali was stripped, and he wrote to President Nixon asking that he reinstate Ali. He actually loaned Ali money to keep him going when he wasn't boxing, and making a living speaking on college campuses. He thought they were friends, and he'd stood by his friend.

Then, when the time came for them to be matched, Ali launched into his full pre-fight hype mode, calling Joe an Uncle Tom, a gorilla, dumb, and all the rest, which not only infuriated Frazier, but hurt him. You could see his anger in the first fight, which otherwise he might have approached with some reluctance, in a business-like way. But Ali had made it personal, and both guys took a lot of punishment as a result.

Smokin' Joe was pretty fine as a singer too, with that Philadelphia sound—something that is often overlooked. He wasn't dumb by any means; but there was still a lot of rural Beaufort, South Carolina rather than urban Philly (or Louisville, for that matter) in him. He was funny and quick-witted in interviews, but that side of his personality would always be overshadowed by Ali. As would Joe's entire legacy. There is no shame in that—Ali is undoubtedly the biggest worldwide sports personality ever-- but there is shame if we don't remember just how good, how straight-forward, and how important Joe Frazier was. He was everything heavyweight boxing was supposed to be, and, since the days of Ali and Frazier, has not really been for a long time.

LONDON FILM FESTIVAL: IDES OF MARCH

2011-11-07T14:15:00.008Z

Sometimes it seems as if George Clooney wants to single-handedly re-interpret America's last great Golden Age in terms of the paranoid politics of today, as if to make the world safe for an heroic sort of Kennedy liberalism. Although he reached back to the Fifties to recast TV newsman Edward R Murrow as the forefront of the campaign against McCarthy-ism in Good Night And Good Luck, it's more instructive to see the CIA reduced to a Chuck Barris gong show, or Fail Safe's Col. Jack Grady given a conscience but still carrying a full payload of paranoia strong enough to conclude both the President and his own son are Soviet dupes.

His latest film, Ides of March, which received its world premiere at the London Film Festival is really a reimagining of The Candidate, which highlight the differences between Clooney the director/star and the approaches of both Michael Ritchie, a sharp social critic, as the Candidate's director and Robert Redford as its star. Ides transfers the focus from the candidate, Governor Mike Morris, played by Clooney, to his number two campaign chief, played by Ryan Gosling. In a neat transfer from The Candidate, here it is the political pro who is the idealist, who believes in the candidate, and the candidate himself is, at best, already a seasoned pol. But just as crucially, we can imagine Ides Of March's storyline beginning exactly at the point The Candidate ends, with Redford as Bill McKay, exchanging glances with the young campaign worker slipping into a hotel room. That moment symbolised McKay's corruption in the way American political films—and I extend this to documentary as well as fiction-- see their politics: in personal terms.

The difference between the two films is primarily that Clooney starts from an assumption that we all know our institutions are corrupt; he is building on the revelations which spawned films like The Candidate. That the professionals are running the show, that ideals are sacrificed on the altar of vote-getting expediency, a revelation in The Candidate, here is taken for granted. The play on which the film is based was called Farragut North, after a Washington DC street off K Street where lobbyists and consultants make their lairs. Therefore the crucial change of focus is from the candidate himself as idealist to the campaign manager as idealist—the somewhat contradictory idea that Ryan Gosling's Stephen Meyers is a ruthless professional who could be in this sleazy business for idealistic reasons. That he is out-smarted by Morris' opponent's campaign chief, Tom Duffy, played by Paul Giamatti reprising Allen Garfield/Goorwitz's brilliant performance from The Candidate, is not a surprise; that the weakness on which Giamatti preys is Meyers' boss Paul Zara's (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) sense of loyalty—Hoffman in a sense is playing the Peter Boyle character from The Candidate, but he is playing it as PSH in standard mode. Although the term 'anorak' doesn't really exist in America, he wears one, and plays it as one; the most predictable scene in the film is the one where he gets the push from Morris. It's a shot of the car in which the dagger is being used, and when Hoffman gets out, and the car drives away, you can predict the slump of the body within the anorak.

Because this is America, the crucial betrayals are not political but personal—and it's hard to figure out whether Meyers is more incensed because Morris is shown to have sexual feet of clay, or because Molly, the campaign intern he's sleeping with (Evan Rachel Hunter) has 'cheated' on him. Intern sex reflects the post-Clintonian reality of political morality, which is specifically referenced twice: first when we learn the Republicans are more ruthless, better organised than the democrats-better at the process of politics, the perennial lament of the headed-for-extinction liberal. And second when we learn that the one unforgivable political mistake is 'fucking an intern'--all else, including starting wars, pales into insignificance.

That Meyers first lets Molly down and then appears to threaten her with exposure causes her suicide, and puts him in the position to be able to blackmail Morris indicates the key thrust of the film. Although Clooney the actor handles Morris' 'reveal' brilliantly. It's always fascinating to me how powerful Clooney can be playing against type. He's our Clark Gable, but he has darker depths. And like Gable, he's not very good at comedy, though unlike Gable he keeps trying. Clooney the director isn't so subtle about the reveal: both Morris and Gosling's Steven are cast in half-shadow, to emphasize the duality of their positions, the choices they make. It's shot wonderfully by Phedon Papamichael, who alternates the styles of campaign documentary and neo-noir with aplomb. The film reveals its origins as a play – it is opened up but everything of importance takes place in small encounters, and the mobile phone plays an important role in delivering outside news. But the real point of the film is never politics, but love.

This is born out by Marisa Tomei's turn as Ida Horowitz, the obnoxious (and Jewish—pointedly so) reporter for the New York Times, who keeps telling people she loves them and reminding them that love means nothing. In that sense, we see Giamatti's seduction of Gosling as more telling than Molly's seduction of him, and we realise that Molly's weakness may well be believing in love more than politics. It is interesting that the scene in which Gosling rings least true in his role comes in the bedroom, where he's revealed to be far more buff male beefcake than you'd expect from a campaign manager—more American Psycho than American Politico. But again, that may be the point. And the reversion of Molly to helpless girl, female victim of morality (her family is Catholic) may well be more a comment on the false morality of American politics than an attempt to send the women's movement back to the Sixties.

There are a few practical problems. That Molly is the daughter of the Democratic Party's chairman means that Mike Morris would know her as well as Paul Zara says he does, and Stephen would likely be at least aware of who she was. Would Morris thus choose her to sleep with? After her death would no one do an autopsy that would reveal her recent abortion, and then check local clinics? Did no one ask Stephen why he happened to go to her room where she was found dead? Did no one try to trace her phone? But those are the kinds of question you'd ask in a crime film, not a political drama.

The revelation that politics are corrupt, or hypocritical, is hardly earth-shaking. It's easy to see Ides Of March as longing for some more innocent reality, but such innocence may never have really existed, we George Clooneys just believed it did because the media (and movies like The Candidate) hadn't revealed all to us. This film is earnest in its liberal way, well-played and well-made, but it really reveals very little.

Ides Of March directed by George Clooney
screenplay by Clooney & Grant Heslov and Beau Willimon,
based on Willimon's play, is on general release

JOKERS ARE WILD

2011-11-04T15:15:00.008Z

When Bob Kane and Bill Finger were producing the Batman, the villains were influenced heavily by Chester Gould's Dick Tracy. They were often bizarre, barely human creatures which reflected a perception that criminality was an aberration, out of pace with normal human behaviour. In one sense, they were ogres from children's bedtime stories; think of the Riddler, the Penguin, or Catwoman, yet not really threatening in a real-world sense. Yet even in those days of more straightforward comic books, and even through the Sixties rebirth of the Batman as an icon of ironic camp culture, there were a few villains who hinted at darker depths, and touched more sensitive areas. Two Face is a brilliant creation, a basic psychological trauma personified, but the key adversary for every version of the Batman has always been the Joker, and no matter how camply the caped crusaderwas portrayed, no matter how comic the Joker became, he was the one villain who can never quite hide the basic frightening instability that serves as the perfect foil to the Batman's obsessive quest for revenge against crime itself. He was and is the one villain who personifies the chaos which is what we all ultimately fear.

This is the spirit which is captured brilliantly in Batman: Going Sane, written by JM DeMatteis and drawn by Joe Staton and Steve Mitchell, in which the Joker, having 'killed' the Batman, discovers both 'normal' life and love. DeMatteis' story pulls no punches, but is based on the perilous ying and yang between hero and villain; without the Batman, the Joker remains haunted by an emptiness even love cannot fill, while the 'reborn' Batman cannot conceive of a world in which a Joker reborn as an ordinary man can exist. The artwork plays this dichotomy well: often harkening back to the simplicity of 'comic' books, but always bordered with darkness that occasionally is allowed to take centre stage, as in the dramatic moment when the Batman announced to Jim Gordon 'I'm back'. But the studied plainness of the Joker's life as a citizen makes a strong contrast, and the way he edges back to his Joker-madness is an intercut sequence of rough brilliance.

The real key to the modern Joker is the embrace of his madness; some of the artists who've approached him recently assume there is no top over which they cannot go. But he's such a brilliant creation, such a representation of the appeal of the madness, that they may be right. But notice the story's title: this is not really the story of the Joker's 'going sane', it is the struggle of the vengeance-stoked Batman to regain his sanity, and not surrender to the Joker's world. Mitchell's heavily-inked lines remind me of Frank Robbins, and serve here to remind us of the harsh borders of the world these two antagonists inhabit, and the equally wide lines that delineate order from chaos. It's that response to chaos that makes this such a touching, and indeed powerful, story.

Appended to it is a story called 'Gotham Emergency', written by From Hell artist Eddie Campbell and Darren Sears, and drawn by Bart Sears in a style nearly as dramatic but somewhat slicker as Going Sane, which draws on the thing that has lain at the centre of all Joker stories—the Batman's need to inhabit the Joker's mind in order to defeat him—this is Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter stuff, and like Lecter the Joker is the more flamboyant character. The other connection with Going Sane is the presence of an attractive woman doctor who is drawn to the Batman, and who can be used, if only for an instant, to establish his own somewhat tenuous humanity.

With the Joker stowed away safely at Arkham Asylum, it was another stroke of brilliance to make him the narrator of short stories. These stories work best when we remember, or indeed forget but are reminded, that they are told from the Joker's own unstable and untrustworthy perceptions. In Volume Two of Joker's Asylum the most impressive tale features the Mad Hatter, and is drawn by Keith Giffen and Bill Sienkiewicz in a wonderfully tormented style that only dimly recalls Tenniel. Like Going Sane, it revolves around the Hatter's efforts to make himself 'normal' through love, and of course it fails for the same crazy reasons the Hatter is what he is. What brings it to a bravura conclusion, however, is the Joker's own presence as narrator, as writer Landry Quinn Walker catches his function perfectly. In other stories the Joker presents you with a riddle in a story about the Riddler and leaves you to figure it out...or not. Penciller Andres Guinaldo reminds me a lot of Gil Kane. There's also a little comic relief from James Patrick and Joe Quinones, when Harley Quinn breaks out of her asylum to spend Valentine's Day with the Joker, and a rather familiar film noir version of Beauty and the Beast with Killer Croc playing, of course, the Beast. I was also taken with Kelly Jones' art in Kevin Shinnick's tale of Clayface, 'Midnight Madness'. But it's the Joker who unifies all these stories, and makes them work.

Batman: Going Sane DC/Titan Books 2008 £9.99 ISBN 9781845768638
Joker's Asylum, Volume 2, DC/Titan 2011 $10.99 ISBN 9780857681676

LONDON FILM FESTIVAL: LATIN LOVES

2011-10-31T22:32:00.009Z

LATIN LOVE AT THE LONDON FILM FESTIVAL
Las Acacias (Argentina)
Karen Cries On The Bus (Columbia)

An Argentinian truck driver picks up a load of lumber in Paraguay. On his way back to the border, he stops and waits for a woman whom his boss has paid him to take with him to Buenos Aires. When the woman arrives, she is carrying an infant daughter, which was not part of the deal. But it was his boss' request. They drive on, he nearly leaves her behind, but finally he gets her across the border, takes her all the way to the capital, and slowly warms to her and her daughter. They get to Buenos Aires, where she's greeted warmly by her relatives, and goes inside. He waits. Eventually she comes back out. They agree they might meet. He drives away.

That's all that happens in Las Acacias, at least on the surface of things. But as a study in the hesitant return of a shut-down man to humanity, in the power of optimism, and as a slow-building maybe love story, it is as touching and convincing a film as I have seen in some time. Yes, it is a two-hander, and yes, it is a road movie, and we know how these elements constitute almost a special genre in independent film. But a number of things make Las Acacias stand out from such works—and justified fully its winning the Sutherland Award, for 'most original and imaginative first feature' at the London Film Festival.

The most important is the way director Pablo Giorgelli uses the road not as a device, but as a metaphor, for the narrow confines of truck driver Ruben's life. He is more than a loner, or a creature of the road; he exists within the boundaries of the highway, within the claustrophobic spaces of his truck's cab. His links are to his sister, to whom he delivers a birthday present many months late, and to his son, who exists in a picture, taken the first time he ever met him, when the boy was eight. He is living in an existential wilderness, his rituals of gear shifting and drinking mate, guarani, or fizzy water are the sort of rituals of theatre of the absurd.

Into this existence comes Jacinta and her daughter, added to his truckload of acacias. There are parallels: he has a son he doesn't see and a mother who's never mentioned; she has a daughter she carries with her and her bags, and says the baby has no father. But she has hope; for her the road is simply a way of getting from one place to a more promising alternative, one where she and her daughter will have a better future.

Eventually, Ruben's gruff, hardened exterior begins to bend, and it is here that German DeSilva's performance is extraordinary. He shows the way Ruben has internalised the strict boundaries of his world, he implies the self-protection that forms the foundation of that attitude. And he shows the hesitation, the almost self-bewilderment, with which Ruben begins to emerge, dares to take the chance. Hebe Duarte, as Jacinta, has to play straight-man at times, to this impassivity, which she does with great sensitivity—and the beauty of the film is we watch waiting for the worst to happen, for the fragility under Ruben's hard exterior to crack, and for Jacinta to pay the price. But it doesn't happen, and the film ends on a small note of hope, even as Ruben drives his truck away, still shifting gears. It was probably my favourite of all the films I saw in the Festival, and it's rare I find myself in such whole-hearted agreement with the LFF awards.

Karen Cries On The Bus exchanges types of vehicles, opening with Karen, indeed, sitting on a bus in tears. It is the story of a woman who leaves her husband in search of herself. Karen finds herself with few skills and little money, with a room in a shabby boarding house, and quickly reduced from optimistic job-seeking to begging at the bus station and stealing food and basics. It's also a familiar tale, and this Columbian film stays truer to the tropes than Las Acacias; the husband is a charming boor, Karen finds a somewhat iffy friend with a heart of gold, and she meets a man who is much closer to her ideal—all of it very predictable, and not really going anywhere new. But Angela Carrizosa Aparicio is absolutely brilliant as Karen, flashing intelligence beneath her seeming helplessness in the face of life on her own in the big city. The way she adjusts, or doesn't, to the filthy and barely working communal shower in her boarding house acts as a metaphor for that adjustment, but even better is the way she appears to first shrivel and then blossom, and sometimes both, almost a more demonstrative version of Ruben. In fact, her performance is yang to da Silva's yin; were the Festival presenting best actor and actress awards, those two would likely have been my picks.

Writer/director Gabriel Rojas Vera handles the men in the story brilliantly too: her husband Mario makes the right gestures, but we soon she exactly why she lost in marriage to him, and when she meets a more sensitive and encouraging man, he reveals, to her and to us, the almost ingrained macho attitude which is at the core of what she must overcome to find herself. If it's a little black and white in its juxtapositions, and if her new-found friend is even more a caricature than the men, and her 'conversion' a bit forced, Maria Angelica Sanchez's performance plays off Carrizosa's restraint very well. What's even more impressive is the way scenes are staged, the use of locations, and the way they are shot, with the photography reflecting and amplifying Karen's emotions, draw the audience into her dilemma, and though it is very much a womens' film, none but the Marios in the crowd would fail to be drawn is as well. The film ends as it began, but now Karen is watching another woman on the bus in tears...there are eigh million stories in the naked Bogota, and hers will be another of them.

Las Acacias (Argentina-Spain 2011) directed by Pablo Giorgelli, written by Girogelli and Salvador Roselli
Karen Cries On The Bus (Columbia 2011) written and directed by Gabriel Rojas Vera
both premiered at BFI London Film Festival

FRANK KAMENY: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

2011-10-31T21:46:00.002Z

My obituary of Frank Kameny, the gay rights activist, is on-line at Guardian.co.uk now, and ought to be in the paper tomorrow (Tuesday 1 November). You can link to it here. There was much to admire about the way Kameny went about his fight for equal rights; and I thought the analogy with the civil rights movement was a good one. But he was also confrontational when he felt he needed to be, and with his bellowing, unmodulated public voice, sometimes seen as overbearing or impolitic. But he deserves to be placed at the forefront of those 'average' people who turned themselves into activists, or were turned into activists rather than submit to prejudice and fear from society. There is a lesson there that still needs to be learned. And just to be clear: the Supreme Court didn't rule on his equal rights case; they heard his arguments, but refused to review the lower court decisions...Kameny had a day in court, but not the day he needed. It didn't stop him.

MC SQUARED: MICHAEL CONNELLY INTERVIEWED LIVE ON STAGE BY MICHAEL CARLSON

2011-10-22T19:14:00.003+01:00

I will have the distinct pleasure and privilege of interviewing Michael Connelly at a public event at the Prince Charles Cinema, just off Leicester Square, Tuesday 25 October, at 7pm. Tickets are available at Waterstones as well as via the Prince Charles, and I hope to be able to post a report of the event here at IT soon afterwards. I first met Michael long ago, at a reading he gave in Melbourne, Florida, soon after I'd reviewed Trunk Music for the Spectator, and I was lucky enough to write an afterword to Crime Beat, a collection of his reporting published a few years ago. He's a great interview, a superb crime writer, and well worth listening to.

MICHAEL CONNELLY'S DROP

2011-10-22T19:07:00.002+01:00

The Drop pits Harry Bosch against an acronym; the drop in this case referring to Deferred Retirement Option Plan. When Bosch was brought back onto LAPD and assigned to the Open-Unsolved Unit, he knew it would be for a limited time, but now he's hoping to get the maximum extra time allowed before being forced to retire. But as usual with Michael Connelly and with Bosch, there are ambiguities: The Drop might also refer to the drops of blood from a long-unsolved rape-murder which provide a link with a convicted rapist—only he was only eight years old at the time. If someone messed up with the DNA, any number of convictions could be overturned as a result.

Or The Drop might the dive taken by LA political fixer George Irving, found dead beneath the balcony of the room he'd just taken at the Chateau Marmont. Did he fall? Did he jump? Was he pushed? Irving's father is Irvin Irving, a city councilman whose enmity Harry earned when they were both on the force. Irving's now a thorn in the LAPD's side, but he wants Harry as the investigator, and so does the Chief: putting Harry in his usual position between a rock and hard drop.

If that sounds relatively complicated, rest assured it is. George Irving made his living peddling his father's influence, and he was involved in fixing a city licence for taxi services, and might have bent a cop or two to do it. Harry's former partner Kiz now works in the chief's office, and the politics of the department's battle with Irvin Irving lurk over every move Harry makes. The two cases are not connected, but as Harry investigates the rapist whose DNA was identified, now living in a halfway house, he becomes involved with one of the workers there, someone who believes people can be helped to change, that evil is not a permanent state of being. Someone who brings a palette of grays to Harry's more black and white, or shall we say noirish, world.

That has always been the strong point of the Bosch novels, the way that Connelly can meld the format of the police procedural with the noirish, if not hard-boiled, detective. Because Bosch works outside the subtleties and compromises of politics, he fights against his own demons, which tend to make those on his side, but without his morals, almost as guilty as the criminals he chases.

The Drop is Bosch at his complex best, and if anything Connelly weaves a web so tight that the series of revelations at novels end function like a stone skipping across water—and leave enough uncertainty about Harry's future to make his own drop, or Drop, ambiguous. It's Connelly at his best, and there aren't many better.

The Drop by Michael Connelly
Orion, £18.99 ISBN 9781409134282

ASA LARSSON'S UNTIL THY WRATH BE PAST

2011-10-15T11:32:00.004+01:00

The thaw is a crucial part of life above the Arctic Circle, and it is a dangerous life, so when the body of a young woman surfaces in a river, it is going to be written off as an accident or suicide until prosecutor Rebecka Martinsson has a vision in a dream, and realises she is dealing with a case of murder.

Asa Larsson's first two novels both won awards in Sweden, so it is interesting to see the chances she takes and different directions she pursues in her third. Martinsson is a compelling lead character, drawn to life in Kiruna (full disclosure here: my grandfather came from a nearby town, and I have never really felt the urge to settle there) despite the prospect of success in Stockholm, That Wilma Persson (a nice choice of name), the dead girl, participates in the story as a ghost, isn't new; it's a device that's won awards for mainstream writers in the English-speaking world, and ghosts have factored in Johan Theorin's work (set in Oland, oddly enough, because it's the other end of Sweden and it's where my grandmother was born). As a devide it frees Larsson from having to worry about making her book into a 'whodunit', but what makes it really effecticve here is the idea that a character as rational and driven as Martinsson, trying to come to grips with the irrational love she has for the area where she was born, it becomes particularly effective as part of the draw of the north.

Martinsson's romantic relationship with her former boss forms one of the one of the sub-plots here, and Larsson contrasts his handsome charm and city slickness with the more homey virtues of one of the male characters. The other big contrast is between Martinsson and Anna-Maria Mella, the police inspector, who has her own problems with men, including her police partner, which were detailed in the previous novel. It's no coincidence that Scandinavian work examines the pressure of work on the domestic lives of women (think about the Danish TV drama The Killing as a recent example, though it factored in the Martin Beck series 50 years ago) because they have long been established as equal in the workplace, yet the inbuilt prejudices are brought out most strongly in this extreme rural setting. Which leads to Until Thy Wrath Be Past's other real strength: its setting.

By setting I don't mean, in this case, the landscape or weather of the north, although Larsson's descriptions are often telling. Rather, it is the rural background; this novel could be transposed into the American south say, fitting somewhere into the territory of Erskine Caldwell or James Dickey's Deliverance, or perhaps more closely into the Maine of Stephen King, John Connolly or Michael Kimball. It is the people, and in the Krekula brothers Larsson creates two frighteningly vivid villains who are recognisable to anyone who has spent time in those rural areas with their undercurrent of repressed violence. Although Hjalmar, the oversized adolescent, a violent savant, seems familiar from other stories, but he is drawn with depth and sympathy, while the viciousness of Tore, the brother in control, is palpable, and made more so when it is unleashed in a very modest way, on Anna-Maria.

It's also fascinating, because the brothers are trying to protect a secret which has remained hidden for many decades, and which relates back to a time of what in Sweden was divisive (I'm thinking of how America's Southern gothics refer back to the Civil War). In the far north of Sweden, during World War II, the plight of the 'plucky Finns' was very close at hand, as were the Nazi trains moving men and materiel between Finland and Norway. The changing allies in the years between 1939 and 41 made choosing sides difficult all over the world, but the quiet role many Swedes (and indeed some Norwegians)and their businesses enjoyed while supporting the Germans has been a feature of many books, not least Asa Larsson's namesake Steig. That it should remain a somewhat contentious issue seven decades later speaks to its power.

Until Thy Wrath is a many-layered novel, deftly written and as best I can tell, well-translated by Laurie Thompson. And if the ghost story is indeed resolved, and the past revealed, it leaves enough of Martinsson's life unsettled to make readers look forward to the next one.

Until Thy Wrath Be Past by Asa Larsson
Maclehose Press, £12.99, ISBN 9780857050724
NOTE: This review will also appear at Crime Time
www.crimetime.co.uk

PETE GENT: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

2011-10-15T07:50:00.008+01:00

My obit of Pete Gent, Dallas Cowboy receiver and author of North Dallas 40, is in today's Independent, you can link to it here. It was, of necessity, short, but there was a lot more I would have liked to say about both the man, and his book and film. It is probably the best novel about football, but there are other contenders. What it did was to come along, as I said in the obit, after Jim Bouton's Ball Four; a time when writer George Plimpton's Paper Lion and Green Bay Packer star Jerry Kramer's Instant Replay had offered insider looks at the NFL, while Dave Meggesey's Out Of Their League was critical of it from much the same perspective as Gent. But Gent's fiction carried with it an aura of reality, as well as a situation where the intrinsic hypocricsy of those who ran it could be highlighted.

Phil Elliott is forced out of the game he loved because he won't conform, and, unlike Seth Maxwell, the team's good ol' boy star quarterback, he flaunts his non-conformity. He delivers on the field, but that isn't enough, because in the computerised Dallas system, there is always going to be someone bigger and/or faster. In Gent's case it was Lance Rentzel, whom Dallas had identified as a potential flanker to replace Gent, and who available from Minnesota because he'd been caught exposing himself (he was married to the TV starlet Joey Hetherton, which made the story even more bizarre). It had been covered up in Minnesota, but when he was caught again in Dallas it became a cause celebe, and again, as Gent's book makes clear, there is a double standard implicit in the morality of America's Team.

I made quite a bit of the Cowboys' scouting: Bob Hayes, of course, considered himself a football player who happened to run, but most NFL teams didn't take that seriously. Cornell Green, who was a very good corner for a long time, was, like Gent, a college basketball player, and the Cowboys specialised in finding guys at small black colleges or the by-then passe Ivy League. The NBA wasn't as rich an option in those days; John Havlicek was the last player cut by the Cleveland Browns before become a star for the Boston Celtics, but as a 6-4 shooting forward Gent was a long-shot, so to speak, for an NBA career.

Dallas' computerised judgement of talent was a metaphor for our dehumanising era, and in the film--which I said unequivocally is the best ever made about American football--Steve Forrest, as the team's owner, and Dabney Coleman as his brother, who has personal issues with Elliott and who has his job because of nepotism, are the real enemy. They are eerily accurate, except perhaps for the extent of their control (though look at Dallas now) and the way Phil perceives that the coach is merely a tool of the ownership is both perceptive and prophetic, if you think what happened after Jerry Jones bought the Cowboys.

There are many other twists to admire in the film: Charles Durning's smarmy assisstant coach, and the born-again quarterback who is the coaches' favourite, and wears number 9, and who drops the extra-point snap that would have tied their cruicial game, sent it into overtime, which Phil and Seth would surely win. Eerie foreshadowing of Tony Romo in Seattle! The film deals with the medical issues every bit as strongly as Any Given Sunday would many years later (you have read my Pocket Essential Oliver Stone, haven't you?). If it ends with less blackness than the novel, well, the metaphoric ending still works.

Gent wasn't a great writer--his other novels are sometimes heartfelt, sometimes revealing, but never as compelling as his first. But his first novel was a great book, coming at just the right time, making just the right message, in just the right way. He then became part of a group of Texas cynics, many of them transplanted, like Gent, from other areas, that included singer Jerry Jeff Walker and writers Dan Jenkins and Bud Shrake, who also wrote good books about football. But his heart probably lay in small town Michigan, to which he returned in the 1990s. The Bangor High School state championship in basketball was a Hoosiers-type story--exactly the sort of sporting triumph which no amount of profit or corporate pressure can take away from an athlete.

LONDON FILM FESTIVAL: LET THE BULLETS FLY

2011-10-13T09:22:00.009+01:00

It might be hard to imagine Sergio Leone with a Chinese sense of humour, but if you can, you will probably enjoy Let The Bullets Fly, which plays in this year's London Film Festival and is one of the most entertaining movies on offer. With its knowing combination of plot twists, characters unwilling to take themselves too seriously, and homage, it turns 1920s China into a half-gangster, half-western romp.

Although it's based on a story by a Sihuanese writer, the screenplay's immediate model would appear to be Fistful of Dollars. In this case a bandit, 'Pocky' Zhiang, having blown up a luxury train carrying a con-man named Ma who had been appointed the new governor of Goose Town, takes over Ma's role. But Goose Town is controlled totally by a warlord, Huang. Zhiang, in effect, plays Ma off against Huang, in the tradition of Red Harvest and Yojimbo, but and former governors have found both little profit and short life-expectancy. In this case, the plot's twisting is, if anything, more intricate than its models, especially because Ma's wife continues to play governor's wife, with Zhiang. The Leone-ine roots are made apparent in the scene set of Goose Town, especially its clock tower, but also in the script itself, where the characters have to explain the English word 'dollars'--a knowing wink too at Chow Yun-Fat, who plays Huang, and of course is well known in the west, where he has made a lot of dollars.

What makes it work is the interplay between the three leads: Jiang Wen, who directed and co-wrote the screenplay, plays Zhiang as half thug half philosopher—not that there isn't a casual sort of violence and indifference, which is part of both the Leone and Chinese traditions. As Huang, Chow gets to indulge his great talent for comedy, playing against the expectations he brings to characters. He also plays Huang's double, recruited for his safety, and not the firmest noodle in the bowl—it reminded me of Chow in God of Gamblers, where he played his character regressed to childhood after being wounded in the head: a performance that conceded nothing to, say, Tom Hanks in Big. The beauty of the film is that Zhiang isn't really the man in the middle, it's the conman Ma, played by You Ge with a brilliant combination of cunning and weakness. He's played off brilliantly against his wife, played by Carina Lau (right), who turns out to be the real brains behind the operation, and even more adept than he is at changing sides, at least on the surface. Yun Zhou tries as Flora, who drums the ceremonial drums and is a prostitute charged with spying for Huang, but the role doesn't really allow her much room except as a putative love interest. Added to the mix of ambiguity is a fake Pocky, complete with pockmarks (which the real Zhiang of course doesn't have), with the result that all the action is played out as part of a battle of wits, exactly the dynamic that drove Fistful and its sources.

Is Zhiang really in it for the money? Is he after revenge, once his number one 'son' is killed? Will he be betrayed by Ma? Loaded with slapstick humour to playoff against its action, with martial arts and gun battles, and with the sort of twists that culminate in two groups of fake bandits wearing identical masks facing off against each other in a shadowy street, Let The Bullets Fly is immense fun, and remarkably satisfying. It is, apparently, China's biggest-grossing film ever, not least because Jiang needed a hit after his first film as director didn't do well, and it's easy to see why it was a hit. It played well at the Tribeca Film Festival (where Yun Zhou stole the show), and it should do the same here as well.

Let The Bullets Fly (China/Hong Kong 2010)
directed by Jiang Wen, screenplay by Jiang, Zhu Sujin, Shu Ping based on a story by Ma Shitu, plays the London Film Festival 19/20 October

THOSE HILARIOUS GUYS ON THE SUPREME COURT

2011-10-08T12:15:00.004+01:00

There was a fatuous piece on Slate (you can find it here) which I just happened to spot while reading Ron Rosenbaum on Long Island serial killers (don't ask) by one Dahlia Lithwick, which said that Supreme Court justices Stephen Breyer and Antonin Scalia ought to take their double-act on 'Living Constitutionalism' (something of an oxymoron itself) on the road, and put TV cameras into the Court, after their boffo show before the US Congress. According to our solons, and Lithwick, the guys are funny! Here's how she explained it:

The bear joke is a Scalia classic. (Patrick Leahy, chairman of the committee, confirms that he’s been telling it for years.) “The story is about the two hunters who are out in the woods in their tent and there's growling in the brush near them,” Scalia told the committee. “And they open the tent flap and there is a huge grizzly bear and they start running. … And—and the guy who's a little heavier and he's running behind, he says, ‘It's no use. We're never going to outrun that bear.’ And the guy who's running in front says, ‘I don't have to outrun the bear. I just have to outrun you!’ ”

As the Senate chamber dissolved in laughter, Scalia sharpened his point, just in case no one got it. “It’s the same with originalism,” he said, referring to his preferred theory of constitutional interpretation. He doesn’t have to prove that it’s the best theory. Gesturing toward Breyer, Scalia said, “I just have to show it’s better than his.”

Nobody expected any less. But the two justices killed before the Judiciary Committee, raising the question anew: Why don’t they do this every week? Why are they hiding this great light under a marble bushel?

Great light? Lithwick wrote Scalia 'sharpened his point in case no one got it', but never realised he'd ALREADY done just that. The punchline of the joke is 'I don't have to outrun the bear!'. Period, full stop, end of joke. 'I just to have to outrun you' is EXPLAINING the joke, and this also explains in a nutshell what is wrong with Washington--that someone who twists the consitution into tantric pretzels for his own ideological gain can tell an old joke, so old it's been used in television commercials, and tell it badly, and thus can be presented by the chatterati within the Beltway as the 'great light' who will get people to 'believe' in the Supreme Court again! Like cameras would reveal some hidden sympathy in the judges, or indeed, reveal Clarence Thomas actually saying anything during the Mudville Nine's deliberations.

Maybe if the Roberts/Scalia Supreme Court occasionally ruled in favour of 'the people' then those people might start to believe in it? And they could leave the jokes to Henny Youngman.

BERT JANSCH: AN APPRECIATION

2011-10-07T18:51:00.004+01:00

Bert Jansch's death touches me in two ways: first because I've loved his music for such a long time, and second because he's one of those people whose music you realise, in those sleepless brandy moments somewhere before dawn, would be suited perfectly for your own funeral.

If my memory serves me well, I discovered Jansch through one of those Warner-Reprise sampler albums they used to give away for postage, full of very clever, modest marketing, and loads of great music (Van Dyke Parks, the Kinks, Randy Newman, the Beau Brummels, the folk-rock Everleys) that seemed sort of sophisticated, which wasn't a word I applied to rock n roll at the time. The album was Birthday Blues, so it must've been 1969, and I was at university, and it blew me away. I wasn't averse to folk music, but that's not what Jansch was doing; he appealed to me at the time the same way Keith Jarrett did climbing inside the piano with the Charles Lloyd Quartet, or Ken McIntyre did playing jazz contrabass clarinet: his acoustic guitar was harsh, jangling, full of notes played just off the rhythm, or struck forcefully, as if to emphasise what was happening. And it was complemented by his voice, which did the same things— full of emotion that could draw dark or sad shadows behind each song. It might not sound it, but it was romantic too: and 30 years later I would give that very record to my not-yet-wife as a gift of love.

A lot is made of his jazz influences, and I was impressed with Ray Warleigh playing alto and flute, and of course Jansch led me to Pentangle at their peak, where the jazz influence was more obvious. He did any number of fine versions of Mingus' 'Good Bye Pork Pie Hat'. But to me Jansch himself was playing a sort of folk-blues. Bill Frisell has made some records that sound like what jazz would be if it developed out of country music; Jansch often sounded like what folk would be if it had grown out of the blues, and picked up a bit of jazz along the way. He was often compared to some of the great singer-guitar players like Leo Kottke, Ry Cooder or Bruce Cockburn, but he was darker than them, and if Big Bill Broonzy was an early influence, it was one I don't believe he ever left behind.

I saw Jansch a couple of times, once at a pub on Great Portland Street, where I showed up after work at ABC, and marvelled at the way such a huge talent was so at home playing before 30 or 40 people in a smoky room upstairs over an anonymous pub. In my jacket and tie I felt like I was distinctly out of place—but a few notes of his music made that feeling disappear.

His obituaries have made clear just how powerful an influence he was across a huge spectrum of musicians all over the world. Last year he opened on tour for Neil Young, playing huge concert halls, and apparently winning crowds over easily, if not with ease. You can see the affinity with Young, the same voice preferring to get the emotion rather than hit the notes perfectly, the same jangle in the guitar, the same willingness to revisit the same material and do it differently just for the sake of making it new. Always making it new. Bert Jansch was a rare musician of unique talent. He won't be replaced.

JOSEPH GARLAND: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

2011-10-07T18:26:00.002+01:00

My obit of Joe Garland was in the Guardian on 5 September, you can link to it here. It ran pretty much as I wrote it, unfortunately with a short word count, but that was to be expected as the story of Howard Blackburn isn't well known here in Britain, and as far as I know, Unknown Soldiers received no attention here, though in fairness a quick look at its US reviews helped persuade the Guardian that Joe's was a story that their readers would enjoy having told.

What was lost from the piece I wrote was some detail about Joe's wartime experiences in an 'Ironhead' platoon, as 'intelligence and recon' was known, and a little about my own interest in the Gloucester poet Charles Olson, which prompted my friendship with Joe, who had known him well.Olson mythologised the town in his poetry, creating a universe out of it, with himself at the centre, and it was amusing to see the way it looked to someone else in the middle of that world. In that sense, Olson's poem 'The Librarian' ('when does 128 get me home/who is Frank Moore) was our common ground. And I had written about the tour of Eastern Point Joe gave the guests at my friend Alison's wedding; an experience in itself. He loved to talk, and he loved to ask questions.

One of the things I didn't write about was the fact that Joe's first wife, Rebecca Choate, worked in medicine, which given his background I found a curious paradox, and I would have loved to include the story of Helen, his second wife, diagnosing Joe's writer's block with Unknown Soldiers as being a case of long-lingering post-traumatic stress syndrome. She got him to seek help for it, the block disappeared, and a wonderful book was the result. I would have loved to write more about Joe's politics, his contempt for the war-mongerers and profiteers, for the government regulators driving fishermen out of work and off the sea, and many other issues we discussed. I would have loved to have more time to learn about Gloucester's fishermen, their boats, and their seas. And I would have loved to talk Charles Olson the way Joe had with him: through the night, well lubricated. May Joe rest in peace, and may you all read his books...

CARL OGLESBY: THE INDPENDENT OBITUARY

2011-09-30T21:33:00.008+01:00

My obit of Carl Oglesby, SDS leader and author of one of the most interesting of assassination studies, was in yesterday's Indy (29 September); you can link to the online version here. By the time I came to consider SDS, Oglesby was already on his way out, but his earlier writings and speeches were impressive, and The New Left Reader, which he edited, was a handbook of sorts as I wandered my way through protest. Oglesby's version of left-wing politics reflected his working-class upbringing, and a certain idealism which originally led him to found useful alliances with the wider anti-war and civil rights movements, with whom he organised the first great March on Washington. But his faith in the ultimate rationality of America's political leaders proved misplaced, at best. When the Weathermen came along, Oglesby was condemned as being hopelessly bourgeois, when really what he might have been was hopelessly American.

From that perspective, it's easy to understand the importance the assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK had for him; he helped found the Assassination Information Bureau, and he wrote a number of books which reflected the wealth of information he gathered. The most interesting is The Yankee and Cowboy War, which tries to create a sort of unified field theory of the assassinations, and connect the dots between Dallas in 1963 and Watergate in 1972. It was a foreunner of what came to be known as 'Deep Politics', considering the forces that really power our country (and indeed, today, the world) regardless of who holds nominal power, and he tried to identify a power-struggle within that American elite between the old money of the east and the newer money in the west. If you don't see the relevance today, consider the Bush family, Skull and Boners all, who begin as Yankees, merchant bankers in New York with Prescott becoming a senator from Connecticut--but transform into Cowboys--George W goes into the oil bidnez, heads the CIA, and eventually becomes president, and Shrub, full scale born-again Texan, doesn't do much of anything but serves the needs of Cowboys as he becomes governor of Texas and then president, where he gets to recapitulate the Reagan malaise on a far grander scale.

I hadn't seen much by Oglesby on that malaise; he did two books on the JFK assassination in the 90s, but the more interesting of them draws heavily on Yankee/Cowboy, and I've yet to read Ravens In the Storm, his memoir of radical politics in the Sixties, but I surely will. I never even knew he'd made two folk-rock records, and it's interesting because one of the covers makes him look just like the great keyboardist Barry Goldberg. But in many ways he symbolises the better impulses of the Sixties generation--even though, like most of that generation's leaders, he came from the pre-baby boom. Perhaps someone ought to consider why my generation has proven so incapable of leading itself, at least in a progressive direction.

CLAIR GEORGE: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

2011-09-28T19:32:00.002+01:00

My obituary of Clair George, the highest-ranking CIA official convicted of perjury during the Iran-Contra affair, was in the Indy on 31 August, while I was in the USA, and if you missed it you can link to it here. That's George with CIA chief William Webster and the head of Pakistan's ISI, General Hamid Gul visiting our then-buddies in the Mujahadeen at a training camp. Of course terrorism didn't exist in the world at that point....

Although Lawrence Walsh's independent counsel investigation of Iran-Contra was full and extremely convincing, very few people paid the price for illegally promoting murder in Nicaragua, violating the law to provide arms to our so-called enemies in Iran, and engineering the wholescale export of drugs to the USA. Far from paying the price, the US names airports and anything else that isn't tied down after Reagan, elected Bush and his son president, allowed them to bring back the same bozos into the Bush II regime and quickly make the world safer for terrorism. That these ops were run out of the White House didn't proclude deniability--and although the CIA were merely facilitators in the business, they, and especially George, paid a higher price for their lies.

Iran Contra was an outgrowth of the second October Surprise, where the Reagan people persuaded the Iranians to keep the American hostages in Tehran hostage until after Jimmy Carter was beaten in the election--in return we armed them, via Israel, and made the world safer for democracy. I say second October Surprise because in 1968 Nixon had made a similar deal with th Vietnamese, convincing them they'd get a better deal from him than from the Hump. Sad thing was, they believed him. Robert Parry continues to produce material on the Reagan October at his excellent consortiumnews.com site, to which you can link here.

I described Clair George as a kind of American Smiley, but the reality is that Smiley came from the British equivalent of the CIA's 'old boys' whereas George was of the next generation, and perhaps deemed more expendable as a result. His life after the CIA is incredible: Jeff Klein's stories on it can be followed here. There should be an investigative sub-genre dedicated solely to the antics of ex-CIA people.

STATE OF IRRESISTIBLE NATION: AND A LINK TO AMERICARNAGE

2011-09-28T17:11:00.004+01:00

As you may have noticed, IT has gone oddly silent lately. Part of that was due to circumstances beyond our control: I took my son on holiday to New England and stayed part of the time in a place with no communications, and part of the time during a hurricane which meant ditto. And we were busy! Then when I came back the start of the American football season has been busier than usual, as I am doing college on Eurosport (Big 10 and Notre Dame) as well as Channel Four's Sunday Night Football, and I was drafted in to do some basketball on the BBC as well.

There's one new thing that might interest the less-sporty among you: in addition to broadcasting and writing for nfluk.com I am part of Americarnage, a weekly podcast aimed at American sport and pop culture, which you ought to link to here and take a listen. It is rather laddish, so I get to play the wise tribal elder, or something like that. As you might glean from the photo above.

I am intending to get back on track now, with reviews of the new Pelecanos and Connelly novels, a piece on the Three Tinker Tailors, London Film Festival and other movies, Asa Larsson, Tom Franklin and more. I hope most will be shared by outlets in the more, shall we say, commercial sphere, but we shall see. In the meantime, I was so busy I missed one of my own pieces when it appeared in the Independent; filed just before the hurricane struck...

LAWRENCE BLOCK'S DROP OF THE HARD STUFF

2011-09-12T12:54:00.004+01:00

It's odd that Lawrence Block, by going back to the early days of Matt Scudder's career as an unlicensed private eye, has created a book so valedictory. It also says a lot about the quality of Block's writing that he can sublimate the mystery element to what amounts to a minute examination of Scudder and his fight against alcoholism and make it so engrossing.

The story is told in flashback, by Scudder, reflecting the novel itself. It's a way for two friends to see the night through, and reminds us of Scudder's essential uncertainty in the face of the vast darkness he confronts. In this sense, the character he has always resembled most is Donald Westlake's Mitch Tobin (in the novels written by Tucker Coe), and AA has been his version of Tobin's brick wall.

Scudder's tale concerns the killing of a boyhood acquaintance of his, whom he first re-encounters when he was still a cop, as a suspect in a lineup, and then meets again through AA. Jack Ellery was deeply involved in the ninth step of AA's 12-step programme, offering amends to those he had wrong over his years of drinking. One of those people has shot him dead, and Ellery's sponsor wants Scudder to investigate, as some of the people on 'High-Low' Jack's list might not appreciate their own stories being passed on to the police, even if they weren't the one who killed him.

At heart, the story is a classic mystery, complete with clues which the reader can follow and, as more bodies begin to accumulate, guess the identity of the killer. But that serves merely as the framework for Scudder's story, as he reaches the end of his first year without a drink, finds relationships coming and going, and eventually solves the mystery, although without achieving any sort of justice for Jack. And that fits with what Block is saying about Scudder and about life, that sometimes the result is simply getting through unscathed, and the knowledge that you have done what you could to prevent further harm in the future is more important than the sense of justice, or revenge, or indeed moral vindication you might have sought. Alcoholism may be the affliction, but the real disease is life, and how we cope with it. Life is the real hard stuff.

A Drop Of The Hard Stuff by Lawrence Block
Orion, £12.99, ISBN 9781409124825

THE OPEN BOOK ON IRA LEVIN

2011-08-17T19:04:00.008+01:00

Last Sunday (14 August) I appeared on Radio 4's Open Book (you can link to that here, for at least a few more days, it's the last segment of a very good show) discussing Ira Levin's career with presenter Dreda Say Mitchell. This tied in with the re-issue of Levin's four best-known novels, A Kiss Before Dying, Rosemary's Baby, The Stepford Wives, and The Boys From Brazil; they were all made into successful films, with the last three all remembered well today. Although we delved into many of the things that made Levin successful, I found over the course of re-reading (and, in the cases of A Kiss Before Dying and Boys From Brazil, reading for the first time) and researching Levin that his career raised a multitude of issues.

As a crime writer herself, Dreda was particularly interested in Levin as a 'genre' writer, and I called him a 'genre dilettante', not in a pejorative sense but in the sense of someone whose most successful books address mainstream issues in a mainstream way, with genre elements giving the story its punch. This was only partly true, because it applies to Rosemary's Baby, Stepford, and the much overlooked Sliver, but for example A Kiss Before Dying is a straight-forward suspense novel which draws its most compelling thrills from the difficulty of a fortune-hunting boy resolving his rich girlfriend's pregnancy. This is Dreiser's American Tragedy done as a thriller, and I am convinced that Levin was influenced heavily by the 1951 film adaptation, A Place In The Sun, with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift. It is as if he mixed that classic plot with elements of Old Woman, a script of his which had placed second in a CBS competition, and been produced on the US Steel Hour. In that teleplay a young man plots to kill his rich 103 year old aunt, enlisting the help of her nurse. And it would not surprise me if Levin conceived the story as a play or screenplay.

That's because Kiss, the novel, is structured as a three-act play—and it points to one of the keys to Levin's success; he might well be seen as a playwright who, with one notable exception, did his best work on the page. It's one of the reasons his books translate well into film—though the films, even the good ones like Polanski's Rosemary's Baby, usually lack some of the ambiguity of the novels, often as a result of mis-casting or playing roles too broadly.

In Kiss, published in 1953, the first act details Dottie's fate: we know what is going to happen but Levin drags it out beautifully, telling the story from Burt Corliss' point of view. In the second act, Dottie's sister Ellen plays Nancy Drew to solve the mystery from the first act, but it ends in a fiendish twist that would play perfectly onstage. The third act, which starts to strain credibility, as Burt pursues the third sister, Marion, the bland Gordon Gant takes centre stage. It climaxes, inevitably, in melodrama which would be difficult to stage, but ends with the kind of curtain-down brilliance that characterises Levin's best novels. I'm sure Kiss would have been Levin's first successful play, had he been able to work out the climax for the stage. As it was it won him a best first-novel Edgar, but I don't think that was the way he wanted to go – he would not publish another novel for 14 years. He wrote one crime story, 'Sylvia' for Manhunt in 1954, and it was adapted for Alfred Hitchcock's television show four years later, but he would not revisit the crime genre for another quarter century.

The film version of Kiss simply loses the third act, hoping to keep the punch of the second but giving it a 'happy' ending. The film might be better if Jeffrey Hunter, as Gordon 'Grant'--a less geeky name than Gant—played the Robert Wagner role, but as Burton Corliss Wagner is good. Yet his character is overplayed as a mama's boy—in the film Mary Astor looks desperate as his mother, with whom he lives on campus, unlike in the book where he's on his own, a war veteran, and seemingly more mature. Kiss would be remade in 1991, again keeping the two-act, two sister structure, with Matt Dillon very effective in the Burt role, and Sean Young playing both sisters (now twins). Her performance reflects the difficulty of adapting to a new era, because Levin's novel is so rooted in the 50s ethos of paying a guilty price for illicit sex. Still any sex with Sean Young is probably by definition illicit.

Levin spent the 14 years between Kiss and Rosemary writing plays. He was lucky, or unlucky enough to have a huge hit with his first, No Time For Sergeants, which he adapted from a novel by Mac Hyman, and which made a star of Andy Griffith. He also adapted it for the US Steel Hour, and a film, and it became an unsuccessful TV series. But in the decade following that hit, Levin wrote five more plays, four of which ran for a week or less, and the fifth, Critic's Choice, with Henry Fonda, ran a moderately successful three months.

So the success of Rosemary's Baby (1967) came as something of a surprise, but Levin appeared to draw on the theatre again, where a single issue can become the hook on which to hang a play. Again, Levinm also drew on his own previous work, a short story, 'Underground Gourmet', published in Ladies Home Journal in 1954. It tells of a woman renowned for her devil's food cake, who gets a visit from the Devil, who wants to check it out. Of course there's nothing new, per se, about the devil as a character, as Dr Faustus might remind us, and 'The Devil And Daniel Webster' is a classic American tale. The dramatic structure is not as pronounced as it was in Kiss, but it's still there: set-up, mystery, reveal—and the horror of the situation comes from the way it builds out of its perverting of the basic family unit. As with Kiss, Levin is up to date with the social mores, and the issue of marriage and childbirth is again the hook—the 'choice' of having a child being crucial, as opposed to the accidental pregnancy which drives Kiss. But you can also see the devil worshippers, despite their age, as a metaphor for the sexual licentiouness opened up by the Swinging Sixties and the birth control pill. In many ways, Guy Woodhouse is simply an extension of Burt Corliss, again using his wife for success; what's shocking when you watch the original film of Kiss is how much the young Joanne Woodward, playing Dottie, looks like Mia Farrow as Rosemary. Probably the biggest problem with the film of Rosemary's Baby is John Cassavetes' performance as Guy, which is overladen with menace from the start. Of course, in Levin's world, marriage is an institution laden with menace.

Which becomes clear in The Stepford Wives (1972). Having written a thriller and a horror novel, Levin published his most straightforward genre book, This Perfect Day, in 1970. It was a outright sf dystopian novel, very much in the Brave New World mode, and it made none of the impact of Rosemary. It's not a patch on some of the masters of pulpy sf and their own dystopian worlds—Tom Disch's 334, for example, makes better parallels with widersociety, as did Orwell's 1984, and Levin doesn't have the issue hooks of his previous (or indeed his next) book.

Stepford Wives was a return to form. It has a social mores hook, to the extent its title has become a sort of all-purpose shorthand for suburban housewivery, robotic Barbie Doll wives, and the male desire for pneumatic playthings rather than women. It's an examination of what exactly is meant by the women's liberation slogan 'our bodies, ourselves'. Because the point is that the Stepford husbands' club has a charity which supposedly provides 'toys for needy children', and that's pretty much what they consider their wives bodies should be for, and it's as good a definition of the Playboy philosophy as any. It's no coincidence that Joanna's friend Ruthann does children's books. Levin's hook once more is the family, and specifically the relationship of the sexes within it: 1950s mores gave way to the sexual licence of the pill, which in itself is an sf idea. What often goes unnoticed, and is one of the best features of Bryan Forbes' film version, is the unearthly science-fictional quality of the supermarket--the human reduced to robotic action. Again the novel is more subtle than the film: you can read its ending without considering the idea of killing wives and replacing them with robots: you can take Joanna's pleas to be allowed to go to psychiatry and change her ways as literal, as well as metaphoric. The film version never gets the horror elements of the story down. Casting is a problem: Katharine Ross looks like an almost a perfect Stepford Wife before she arrives in town, while Paula Prentiss is so engaging that she makes a perfect argument for having one. On the other hand, I'm not sure Forbes was making a statement by casting his wife, Nanette Newman, alongside the likes of Prentiss and Tina Louise. Even so, the less said about the 2004 remake, which starred Nicole Kidman, and apparently is intended as a comedy, the better.

The Boys From Brazil was published in 1976, and its influences seem even more apparent than those of Kiss. I don't mean this in a negative way, either: Rosemary's Baby spawned works like The Omen and The Exorcist, and we think no less of them for that. The 1970s was the time when the world started to realise those Nazis not brought to justice would soon be dying off, and this realisation was intensified by the growth of what has been called the 'Holocaust Industry', when the events of the Hitler era began to dominate discussion instead of being left out of the discussion. In any case, the most obvious influences would be the best-selling Odessa File or Marathon Man, which were both turned into successful films. The connection is emphasized by casting: Laurence Olivier, so memorable as the Mengele figure in Marathon Man, plays the Simon Wisenthal character in the film of Boys, with Gregory Peck in one of his best roles as Mengele. But this is Rosemary's Baby meets The Odessa File; instead of Satan, we are seeing the spawn of the next best thing. I missed making that point more clearly when discussing the absence of father-figures with Dreda on Open Book; there is the strict father of the murdered sisters in Kiss, but otherwise your father figures are Satan and Hitler—the Stepford guys are husbands, but not obviously fathers.

I will confess I never read Boys first time around; coming to it now, with my awareness of Levin's theatrical talent, I was impressed by some of the subtle foreshadowing, even to the uise of visual images—as when one of the young sons stands in a hallway with multiple mirrors reflecting duplicate images of himself, a nice metaphor for the cloning which has not yet been revealed. The structure is not quite theatrical—at least not unless you used a revolving stage—but each scene seems structured that way; the climax with 'Wisenthal' and Mengele is set up and plays like theatre, and as with Rosemary's Baby, whose climax with the Japanese satanist photographer I discussed on Open Book, Boys offers an equally chilling coda, which makes the argument between the Wisenthal figure and the Meyer Kahane figure take on added significance. As happens in theatre, Levin manages to anchor his play in the current debate (I once raised the point that perhaps 'serious' theatre's role had been prempted by issue-oriented made-for-TV movies).

After Boys, Levin would take another 15 year hiatus before publishing his next novel. But in 1978 Deathtrap opened on Broadway, where it was an immediate success and one of the longest-running plays in history. Again, I see a major influence, Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth, which dates to 1972, and again the connection was made by movie casting: Michael Caine plays the hairdresser in Sleuth, and the old writer in Deathtrap.

Deathtrap is also, in one sense, another re-writing of Old Woman, but from a wider perspective once again examines the American marriage and its reaction to new mores, in this case gay liberation. The 1982 movie, directed by Sidney Lumet, is a good piece of filmed theatre, and certainly the most true to Levin of any of his filmed works.

Two more plays followed, and then another decade's break before Levin published Sliver, which is sort of Rosemary's Baby (in the sense of the hunt for New York housing setting off the plot) meets A Kiss Before Dying. You might also take it as Levin's metaphoric commentary on the taking of sexual mores that one step further, to observation (via video and TV), which is after all a sort of commercialised electronic peeping tomism. The film of Sliver is entertaining, if unconvincing—ironic that Tom Berenger would go on to play in Someone To Watch Over Me, and I wonder where the producers of that one got that idea.

I haven't read Son Of Rosemary (1997), Levin's last novel, and I don't intend to now; I suspect it has not been reissued for a reason.

What's unusual about Levin is not so much his relatively small output, especially from such a successful writer, but the way that output is divided. One novel in 1953, a 14 year gap, then four in nine years, then a 15 year gap, then two in six years. Seven novels in 45 years. In between, he wrote six plays in 12 years; only one of which, an adaptation, was a hit. Then came back with his most successful play after another decade, and followed quickly with two more that came and went. It is as if Levin could put on his commercial hat for books, become a genre dilettante, use the techniques of theatre to great effect, but when he was actually writing for the theatre his focus became less precise, unless the material was structured for him at source (Sergeants) or by genre (Deathtrap). This in no way diminshes his genius, it simply makes one wonder why it only seemed to come out when it was channelled into work unfairly labelled 'genre'.

MATTHEW DUNN'S SPARTAN

2011-08-17T17:43:00.007+01:00

It has always been possible to divide espionage novels between what might be called the covert and overt. The first group deals with individuals caught in the webs of bureaucracy and betrayal, and often features little action; when they do it is often anti-climactic, small actions with larger impact, which require great sacrifice on the part of otherwise ordinary people. It has its antecedents in detective fiction—but its heroes tend to be along the lines of the anonymous Continental Op, or the lonely private dick, rather than the Poirots or Wimseys of classic who-dun-its.

The second group deals in action, in the efforts of people who are increasingly above the ordinary, who often hold the fate of the world in their firm grip. This group has its antecedents in the adventure novels of empire, and in American terms in westerns, and would of course include James Bond. Since the fall of the iron curtain, and the removal of a stable (and relatively equal) enemy from the spy genre, this second style of novel has predominated—this has coincided happily with the swing in movie-making toward ever-increasing reliance on special effects. There's another essay to be written on the ripple effects of asymmetrical conflict.

Matthew Dunn's first novel, Spartan, comes down very much in the second camp, and comes down with a bang. He has delivered a thriller with fast action, a great villain, several twists and turns, and enough ambiguity to escape the many of the obvious pitfalls of genre cliché. But to my mind he is trying to do something different, which is to force his hero, Will Cochrane, the eponymous agent code-named Spartan by MI6, into a world of conscience, where moral dilemmas inform his action hero. That Dunn is a former MI6 operative, who ran agents himself, is significant, because the most interesting part of the novel is its set-up, and Will's relationships with the people he runs. Normally, these are the kind of pawns set up for betrayal in either sort of spy thriller, but Will, for reasons that go deep into his family past (his father was a CIA agent) attempts what might be seen as a kinder, gentler approach to the business.

This is fascinating stuff because he is pitted against an Iranian mastermind, Meggido, who always seems one step ahead. In fact, Meggido turns out to be the most interesting character in the book, and it is a shame he is forced to remain off-stage for so long. But if the duel between these two is the root of the book's strength it is also its weakness, because it is a battle of super-hero against super-villain, which for all its twists and turns is apparently resolved by a simple quick-draw showdown. I say apparently, because Dunn adds a last twist, which forces Will to finally abandon his effort a being a kinder, gentler spy. Not that he actually was: for the all the talk of saving innocent life, Will calmly butchers four allied agents guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the same time as his crew. It is a very English sort of morality.

As the book pushes forward relentlessly, Spartan begins to push Will out of the picture. Still, I wonder what's really going on in MI6. Picture this: Will wanders into Albany, New York, fresh from shootouts, capture, chases through the snow, killings, and narrowly missing Meggido, and although he judges the airport too dangerous, hops the Amtrack to New York City. Why wouldn't the FBI think of that? In the meantime, however, he has gone shopping in Albany's finest stores, and what essentials has he found? Some 'men's Chanel Platinum Egoiste eau de toilette' (no agent leaves home without it--otherwise the bad guys wouldn't be able to smell you coming!), a Hugo Boss suit, and 'matching brogues'. I don't know about you, but I've never met a man who matched his shoes and suits, much less a secret agent! On the other hand, Hugo Boss designed some swell matching outfits for the SS, and Coco Chanel was a Nazi fan, so maybe there's just a natural affinity! Will then 'secretes' a silenced H&K MK23, three clips, a cell phone, and two thousand bucks into his new suit. Either Hugo Boss is tailoring for the loose fit these days or Spartan bought a few sizes too big. We're used to the catalogues of equipment in this kind of thriller, and indeed Dunn gives us a few (as an aside: the nadir of this style might be the Chris Ryan-style BONA, or Boys-Own Novel with Acronyms, you can find my essay on Ryan and Allan Hollinghurst here).

I make this criticism somewhat tongue-in-unscented-cheek, but there are other problems with having your super-villain such a remarkable character. In order to get some understanding, you have to inevitably bring him together with Will, which means he has to leave Will alive for his own egotistical reasons, which means you get a very long 'Blofield' scene, in which Meggido keeps Will alive just a little longer in order to reveal the details of his plot to take over the world. Again, Dunn provides us with another well-placed twist that explains, but does not really manage to subvert, the convention within which he's operating.

There is one further problem with the spy thriller conventions, and that is dialogue. Far too often, characters need to explain things to the audience, so they wind up telling each other what they obviously already know. Spartan gets a lot of this, particularly because Will's peculiar morality means he's beset with doubts, never a good thing in this business, and he's acting in ways people in the demimonde don't really expect. So we are often getting people explaining Will to himself, mainly telling him how super, or how sensitive, or how super-sensitive he is. And finally, there is the arch-villain kind of line: 'you are lying to me in a futile attempt to justify your father's actions.'

In the end, the super hero triumphs, but pays a price. But because he is a super hero, he moves on. Dunn has produced a compelling, if uneven, first thriller, and given Britain the new James Bond, eau de toilette and all, that Daniel Craig could not.

Spartan by Matthew Dunn Swordfish, £12.99, ISBN 9780857820198

THE LONELY DEATH OF JOHN MACKEY

2011-08-13T07:55:00.007+01:00

NOTE: this essay appeared first at Football Diner, to which you can link here...

The sad passing of John Mackey at age 69 attracted a lot of attention, but not nearly as much as it deserved. Just as he had done while he was alive, breaking barriers and extending boundaries, Mackey's death came just at the moment when it seemed the NFL's owners might begin to move to end their lockout of the players, who had decertified the union Mackey was instrumental in building. Make no mistake, the dropping of the anti-trust suit filed by individual players against the league was a major factor in getting the deal done; that the Players' Association will be re-certified has never really been in doubt.

Mackey was the first president of the NLPA, and his commitment to its cause could be traced back to his having a contract thrust in front of him and being told to sign. Mackey, a minister's son from Long Island, who'd followed another Long Islander, Jim Brown, to Syracuse University, where he was a student as well as a football player, didn't sign that contract, and never forgot the insult to both his dignity and his intelligence. His great legacy with the NFLPA was to overturn the Rozelle Rule, helping to create a more viable form of free agency, and winning compensation for those players whose movement had been restrained by the rule.

But more attention should have been paid to the way Mackey died, suffering from the dementia which had become noticeable in his public appearances years earlier, and which had led his wife Sylvia to petition Paul Tagliabue on his behalf, which led to the creation of the 88 plan, named after Mackey's number, which was the first step toward starting to take care of those whose lives have been harmed indelibly by playing pro football. That these moves will be expanded and intensified as part of the current settlement is a credit to both sides in the negotiation, but also a tribute to the Mackeys.

Mackey's legacy on the field is an odd one, because he was universally recognised for a breakthrough that wasn't exclusively his, yet at the same time one very strange devaluing of his legacy went unnoticed. Let me explain.

Don Shula's quote to the Baltimore Sun was used to define Mackey's greatness as the prototype tight end. 'Previous to John, tight ends were big strong guys like (Mike) Ditka and (Jerry) Kramer who could block and catch short passes over the middle. Mackey gave us a tight end who weighed 230, ran a 4.6 40 and could catch the bomb. It was a weapon other teams didn't have.'

Well, yes and no. You could argue Ditka and Kramer in 1961 (and Fred Arbanas in 1962 in the AFL) were the first wave of tight ends—previously you had two ends, who might play in line or split, and now you had a designated 'tight' end and a designated 'split' end, as well as a 'flanker' who was evolving from a running back like Lenny Moore or Bobby Mitchell into an end like Gary Collins or Boyd Dowler.

But neither Ditka nor Kramer were really that much bigger than Mackey, and though neither was as fast, it wasn't like they were catching quickies over the middle. In Ditka's 1961 rookie season with the Bears he caught 56 passes for 1,076 yards (19.2 yards per catch) and 12 touchdowns. That's a lot of YAC if he was running short patterns. You could argue he broke tackles or outran slower linebackers, but remember too, these were George Halas' Bears, and Billy Wade was the QB. He never matched those numbers again, and the grind of blocking slowed him down as a receiver. Kramer was no burner either, but between 1961-64 he averaged between 15 and 16.8 yards per catch. Arbanas, over the entire course of his career (1962-70) averaged 15.7.

You can argue Mackey added a deep dimension to the passing game, and may have forced the designated strong safety to cover tight ends. His rookie season he caught 35 passes for 726 yards (20.7 ypc) and seven scores. In the next three seasons he would average 18.5, 20.4, and 16.6 yards per catch, but after 1967 injuries slowed him down too; he had only one more eason with an average higher than 14.3.

But there was another contemporary of Mackey's, making his debut in the same season, 1963, who also provided his team with a downfield passing threat. Although he's remembered primarily for one pass he didn't catch, over the course of his career Jackie Smith averaged 16.5 yards per catch, and his 1967 season was spectacular: 56 catches 1,205 yards, 21.5 yards per catch, 9 touchdowns. Even though Smith's in the Hall of Fame, he's not looked at as a mould-breaker the way Mackey is, though I think he ought to be.

Which is not to imply he was Mackey's equal as a tight end. Smith wasn't quite the devastating blocker Mackey, Ditka or Kramer were. It's reflected in their legacies: Mackey, Ditka, and Smith all played in five Pro Bowls, but Mackey was first-team All-Pro three times, Ditka twice, Kramer once, and Smith not once at all (although I'd argue he should have been in 1967). If you were picking the best tight end in football, it probably would be Ditka in 61, Kramer in 62, Mackey in 63, Ditka in 64, Mackey in 65-66, Smith in 67, Mackey again in 68 and in 69 either Jerry Smith or Bob Trumpy.

The NFL recognised this. Mackey was named the tight end on the all-decade team for the Sixties, and when the 50^th Anniversary All-Star team was chosen, he was the tight end on that squad too.

But then something strange happened. 25 years later, when the Pro Football Hall of Fame chose the 75^th anniversary team, Mackey had disappeared. And not because Kellen Winslow was chosen at tight end, which was understandable: Winslow was a bigger, faster version of Mackey, though probably not the blocker Mackey was. But they chose two tight ends, and the other was Mike Ditka.

I'm not putting Ditka down, but I wonder just how someone could dominate their decade at their position the way Mackey did and then not just fall off the map, but be replaced by one of the men he clearly outplayed over the course of their careers? Perhaps it's because Ditka can retained a high profile as a coach and TV personality, helping his legend grow, or more likely it's because Mackey's work with the union had soured some of the voters on him. We will never know the answer to that one. But Mackey's legacy on the field is as a pioneer of the tight end position, and probably one of the two best of the twentieth century. His legacy off the field is just as impressive, and it remains to be completed.

NEWTON THORNBURG: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

2011-08-10T13:19:00.011+01:00

My obituary of Newton Thornburg is in today's Independent, you can link to it here. He's a strange contradiction in terms: he went off in totally different directions after his biggest successes, yet in the end went back to the same basic elements for all his best works. Sometimes those two strands conflate: Beautiful Kate (a lousy title, by the way) was both another riff on his theme of disfunctional families and romantic triangles, while at the same time approaching it in ways that made it hard to push either as crime or mainstream.

Thornburg wasn't high profile; in fact despite the delay I believe this was the first obituary to make it into national press in this country or the USA. In researching it, I was helped immensely by Bob Cornwell's excellent interview with Thornburg in Tangled Web, to which you can link here; Bob was also helpful with other details and his own take on Thornburg. I also got to quote my friends Michael Goldfarb and George Pelecanos in the piece, which may be their first joint appearance.

I'm not kidding when I mention the similarities in his best work: he returned to themes over and over. Spurred on by the assignment to write his obit, I decided to catch up, and starting reading Eve's Men (another less-than-perfect title), and even though it's been some years since my last Thornburg, it seemed very familiar indeed.

This is not to demean him. Cutter And Bone remains a pantheon work, like the film Cutter's Way it is one of those rare works that seems both just as good AND just as important as it did when it came out. I remember being bowled over by Beautiful Kate when I read it; as I recall on a visit back to my parents in the late Seventies, the kind of setting made for appreciating Thornburg's concerns. To Die In California is the other key book to check out, but start with Cutter And Bone and see if you aren't totally taken by it.

BUBBA SMITH: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

2011-08-09T07:17:00.008+01:00

My obit of Bubba Smith, football player, pitchman, and actor, is in today's Guardian, you can link to it here. As usual with obits of American sportsmen, some things get lost in the translation (for example, Bubba was only once All-Pro, and played only twice in the Pro Bowl, signs he was nowhere near as dominant in the NFL as he'd been in college). But others, like Police Academy, appear to be universal. Where ripping a beer can in half to demonstrate it's 'easy-opening' falls, albeit somewhere in between, is beyond me.

If you're thinking of a more recent equivalent as a pro football player, it would probably be Too Tall Jones, but the guy he most reminded me of was his predecessor on the Colts, Big Daddy Lipscomb. Like Daddy, Bubba was both strong and fast, but he often played 'high', standing up, and as Jerry Kramer once pointed out, didn't use his hands all that effectively, the way guys like Deacon Jones did. His NFL career was cut short by injury, and in his case the injury was particularly freakish: chasing a runner to the sidelines, Bubba got tangled in the first down chains and sticks--the doctors described the knee injury as the worst they'd ever seen, but Bubba returned the next season. The Colts promptly traded him to Oakland for Raymond Chester, which was a hard deal to turn down; Al Davis got two seasons out of him before he ended his career with nearly-hometown Houston.

In Kill Bubba Kill, Smith claimed Super Bowl III was a 'fix', but offered no evidence for his theory and no on took him seriously. He did claim he went to Don Shula and offered to play over the center and disrupt the Jets' blocking schemes, but Shula turned him down. Maybe he thought he could do what he'd done in the 'Game of the Century', where he injured Notre Dame center George Goedekke early in the game, then sacked Terry Hanratty and put him out too. One of the things people forget about that game is that the Irish, trailing 10-0 on the road, already without their best runner, lost their quarterback, and still held State scoreless the rest of the way and rallied to tie the game.

I suppose Army-Notre Dame inn 1946, another meeting of unbeatens that ended in a tie, might have a stronger case to be the game of the century; played at Yankee Stadium in New York it must be the only college game which featured four Heisman Trophy winners. There have been lots of matchups of the top two teams, but when ND is in the mix it added a national dimension that was important in the days before TV destroyed regional conferences, rivalries, and made them less important.

Allan Barra has a fine essay on the game in his book Big Play, and reprised it in a post about Bubba, and I used it to refresh my memory. I was trying to think of another team that boasted as many black stars but generally I came up with teams in the early 60s with two or three--like Minnesota with QB Sandy Stephens and T Bobby Bell, or Ernie Davis-John Mackey-John Brown Syracuse. I seem to recall that Bubba didn't follow his brother to USC because he would have put the Trojans over their black quota. But State had Jimmy Raye (the current NFL coach) at QB, Gene Washington at end, Clint Jones at halfback, and, on D, Bubba, Jess Phillips, Mad Dog Thornton, and, at rover, George Webster (number 90 left), who went on to make the all-time AFL team, and died a few years ago after losing an appeal to get his disability from the NFL increased even as his limbs were being amputated. Webster may have been the most ferocious hitter in a game full of them.

Notre Dame had their first-ever black player, Alan Page, who went on to the best pro career. The second best probably belonged to linebacker Jim Lynch, whose days with the Chiefs were played in the shadow of Bell and Willie Lanier; they are arguably the best trio of linebackers ever fielded. The third-best pro career was probablyRocky Blier's improbable success with the Steelers after returning from the Vietnam War. Oddly, neither Hanratty nor his star receiver, Jim Seymour, ever did much in the pros. The team also boasted defensive linemen Kevin Hardy and Pete Duranko, backs Larry Conjar and Nick Eddy (injured the week before the big game), and a number of other players who played in the pros.

Ara Parseghian has been accused to 'settling' for a tie, but as Barra shows, he made an effort to move the ball in the final minute and a half, after Duffy Daugherty had punted it away (and nearly recovered the fumbled punt). With the wind at his back and with a killer D, Duffy did what any coach would do, playing to stop ND and maybe get the ball back for a field goal with the wind. Ara had Coley O'Brien, a second-string QB without Hanratty's big arm, throwing into the wind; a Hail Mary was probably out of the question, but there is no question the Irish did try to move the ball.

Where Paraseghian's bad rap comes from, I believe, is first of all Bear Bryant's disgust at not leap-frogging the two teams in the polls with his undefeated Alabama, and second, Parseghian's running-up scores (especially against USC) in order to cement Notre Dame's number one. There's no doubt in my mind that tying State in Lansing without Eddy (and after losing Hanratty) was enough for Notre Dame to edge State in the polls. Barra thinks voters were punishing Alabama for being segregated, but the point runs deeper than that: they played in a segregated conference, and when they met northern teams in bowl games they were, in effect, home games in warm conditions that favoured them. Bryant was not a segregationist--he wanted the best football players--and the story is he tanked a meeting with USC and Sam the Bam Cunningham in order to persuade the SEC to integrate. And Daughtery famously said 'I got out of coaching when Bear started recruiting black kids' (a line cut from my piece).

I can't actually claim to have watched much of the Police Academy movies, but Bubba's 'easy-opening can' commercial was always one of my favourites. I do have a memory of another Miller Lite commerical in which Bubba and Dick Butkus are camping, and one of them starts stretching before retiring to their tent. When the other asks what he's doing, he says, there's bears in these woods and I want to be ready to run. The other laughs and says you can't outrun a bear! Comes the reply: I don't have to ourun the BEAR. I may be conflating a story and/or old joke with the commercial, but there's no sign of it on You Tube. If you remember it, let me know. It is odd how most of the football players turned successful actors: Bubba, Butkus, Merlin Olson, Jack Youngblood, Fred Dryer, Woody Strode--were linemen--and think of Alex Karras, Howie Long, John Matusak, and others who had shorter careers. Jim Brown, Bernie Casey, OJ Simpson, Ed Marinaro, even Mark Harmon might be considered the exceptions.

ALEX STEINWEISS: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

2011-08-06T08:40:00.003+01:00

My obit of Alex Steinweiss, who was not only the father of record album cover design, but actually invented the cardboard record sleeve, is in today's Guardian. Coincidentally, I had done the obit of Neil Fujita, who was the heir to Steinweiss' pioneering at Columbia, for the same paper back in November; you can link to that here. You can really see the progression from one man to the other; Steinweiss' influence on Fujita is huge, but Fujita moves far more into both fine art and into use of the performers' images. It's also interesting to me that both men basically retired early to pursue painting, which I think was the way working on the canvas of the record cover made irresistible.

THE ART OF PULP FICTION

2011-08-01T12:00:00.020+01:00

A fantastic exhibition has just closed at New York's Society of Illustrators. I mean fantastic in both senses of the word, for its subject matter and its quality, in the latter case even though I didn't get to see Pulp Art: The Robert Lesser Collection. But as I did, you can view part of it at the Society of Illustrators website here, and because some of Lesser's collection has been donated to the wonderful New Britain Museum of American Art, you can find out more at their website here. Best of all, a link from the NBMAA's site linked to this Robert Lesser collection gallery, often showing the original art and the magazine covers side by side, which shows the full range of pulp art—everything from Argosy to Zeppelin Stories, with bug-eyed monsters, costumed heroes, and flying aces in between. In that slide show I found the painting by Richard Lillis pictured to the right; years ago I bought a poster of it at the now-defunct Gallery Pierre Boogaerts on the Rue Vieille du Temple in Paris, and it has hung in my offices ever since. has adorned my offices for years. For which magazine it was painted, or if it was ever used, is something no one knows; perhaps it languished unused and then was disposed of with other original art which the pulp publishers tended not to value.

But they should have. Even with my limited viewing, a couple of paintings stood out. One was a cover by J Allen St John for a 1933 issue of Weird Tales featuring Jack Williamson's Golden Blood, which looked so good I went and ordered a copy of the 1964 Lancer paperback edition, whose cover is a homage by Ed Emshwiller, who's a very different kind of artist. I'm pretty sure I've never read it, either! Back in 1999, when I reviewed Lesser's seminal book Pulp Art for Headpress, along with Frank Frazetta's Icon; I pointed out that St John was a major influence on Frazetta, who took some of the impressionist quality out and put more dynamism in, but St John influenced almost everyone working in the fantasy/adventure field.

So I was familiar with St. John, but the painting that really floored me was a cover by someone I didn't know, Hubert Roberts. It's from the April 29, 1939 issue of Wild West Weekly and shows ominously dark birds perched in the bare branches of a tree. But as you follow the line of the lowest branch, you're led to the head of a man hanging from a rope wrapped around the limb. It's both dramatic and chilling, remarkably subtle for the pulps, one of the best pulp covers I've ever seen.

When I discovered the show I also I stumbled upon a lovely blog entry by the artist AE Kieren, about hanging the work, and was floored to see his photo of 'The Pirate Of Wall Street' being hung. It's a remarkable painting done for a cover of Argosy in 1931 by Paul Stahr. I remembered writing a piece for the Financial Times some time ago which sold off the back of this picture (what secret master of the universe could resist it?) about an exhibition at Illustration House in Spring Street.

So I dug up the FT article, and remembered I'd got Roger Reed's name wrong; in those days I was still phoning in my copy and the copy taker got his name as Robert. It's taken me 15 years to correct that error—though as I pointed out to him in my apology to him then, I did get it right in Headpress 20, when I mentioned his excellent essay which appeared in Lesser's Pulp Art.

THE ART OF PULP FICTION (Financial Times, 15 March 1996)

The body of a woman is being hoisted out of the water. Her red dress clings to her voluptuous figure. In the foreground, a swarthy man watches, submerged except for his head and one arm clinging to an anchor cable. His point of view becomes yours. Painted by Robert Stanley in 1951 for the cover of a paperback reissue of Dashiell Hammett's Blood Money (a combining of 'The Big Knockover' and '$106,000 Blood Money' into a novel), this is only one of many striking images on view in "Pulps and Paperbacks: Sensational Art from the 20s to the 50s", an exhibition at Illustration House in New York through March.

'"Go for the jugular" was their motto' explains Roger Reed, the organiser. 'You had to grab the attention of the browser at the newsstand.' If a curvy dame was good, a diagonal damsel in distress was better. 'Diagonals get your attention more than straight lines,' says Reed. 'A whole generation of B actresses developed their sultry poses based on that lean.' Sure enough, in Rudy Nappi's cover for Unfaithful, a Diana Dors-lookalike gives her come-on to a slick hepcat smiling through his cigarette.

'A gun was good, but a gun going off was better,' smiles Reed. The hard-boiled look was everything. Hardboiled meant being able to resist the allure of those diagonal sirens. George Gross was a master of the cheap femme fatale. His cover for A Girl Called Joy shows a woman on a doctor's examination table, diagonally, of course. Her blouse is open nearly to the waist, her skirt rides up to show her slip. Poor doctor. In contrast, Gross' cover for Harry Whittingham's Violent Night shows a woman in a similar pose, but without the threat. She is on a slab in the morgue. A hard-boiled cop in a raincoat is talking with the coroner. He's seen it all before. The scene is lit to make the corpse seem alluring, even in death. Needless to say, these magazines were aimed at men.

Part of their lesson was dames are dangerous. It's hard to miss the point in Gross' outre cover for Love Me And Die by Day Keene. A couple embrace passionately as a huge blue hand descends as if to crush them; love me and die, it's saying. The artwork reflected both the marketplace and the changing style of American detective stories. The covers remind you of Raymond Chandler saying Hammett had taken murder out of the parlour and put it back in the hands of people who really committed murders. Examples from Black Mask in 1932 and Scotland Yard Magazine in 1931 reflect the cool design of smart drawing rooms. Black Mask, originally edited by H.L. Mencken, may have thought of itself as upmarket, but soon magazines like Dime Detective boasted darker, more threatening scenes. Crime had been glamorous in the Roaring Twenties, but in the chaotic world of the Depression it became more threatening, and headed downmarket. This evolved into the noir style in the 40s, but by the late 1950s, the shadows were disappearing: lines are cleaner again, colours cooler. Once again crime is discreet, outside the mainstream of a seemingly peaceful society.

The artists churned this stuff out. There is a chilling echo of this in Rafael deSoto's cover of an artist frantically painting the portrait of a dead matron. The magazine cover itself shows him dipping his brush in her blood; the original oil has been painted over to lose that image. Amazingly, most of these paintings are large-scale oils, pained on canvas. This size was not demanded for reproduction. 'It was more a convention,' says Reed. 'But the attitude of the publishers and most of the artists was that this stuff was junk. Magazines sold original art for a dollar. The artists looked at it as a stepping stone to slick magazines, but they didn't think of it as art. It wasn't until later they started working on board, and in smaller scale.'

One man who did reach the slicks, and book illustration, was J. Allen St. John, who is featured with a cover for an Edgar Rice Burroughs-type adventure (man battles giant scorpion while armored woman is trapped in giant spider web, all rendered in delicate pastel tones). St. John's is the costliest work on display,but pride of place is given to an amazing cover by Paul Stahr. "The Pirate of Wall Street" cackles over his stock ticker, flintlock pistol in his red sash. With brush strokes bold as a pirate's slashing sword, this is Reed's particular favourite. 'We're only a few blocks north of Wall Street,' laughs Reed. 'I'm amazed this hasn't found a wall in some arbitrager's office yet.'

Illustration House 96 Spring Street New York 10012 (212) 966-9444

Pulp Art: The Robert Lesser Collection
Society Of Illustrators, 28 East 63rd Street
New York, NY 10065-7392, (212) 838-2560
2 June- 30 July 2011

GEORGE KIMBALL: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

2011-07-29T18:15:00.012+01:00

My obituary of Boston sportswriter George Kimball will appear in Monday's Guardian, but it's online now and you can link to it here. I have to confess that I over-wrote the piece; it was very hard to both tell the facts of George's life and convey the brilliant quality of performance art about it within the confines of my original word count, so I called and asked if I could have another 200 words for some stories. Sadly, what was lost in transition to the page was the additional material; since George was one of the most colourful scribes I've ever met, I still wanted to share them. Rather than just adding the anecdotes here, some of which are pretty amazing, the easiest thing to do is simply provide my original take alongside the link to the one published. So here's the original copy (as you notice, I spell hippie the way that doesn't mean someone broad-beamed, although in his later days George was a bit hippy as well as hippie--and I will confess also that I spelled Abbie Hoffman's name 'Abby' in my copy and the Guardian luckily for me corrected it!). I didn't have space to talk about the way George's column at the Phoenix helped make the tribalistic, if not primitive, world of Boston sports accessible for lots of people more concerned with counter-culture than the Red Sox, Celtics, Bruins, or Patriots. Nor did I mention the awards he won later in life--though frankly, I don't need to, because his writing speaks for itself.

GEORGE KIMBALL, SPORTSWRITER

Ernest Hemingway was reputed to have said 'my writing is nothing, my boxing is everything'. George Kimball, who has died aged 67, wasn't a boxer, but if writing about boxing is the ultimate test of a sportswriter's skill, Kimball deserves a place with the greats.

As a columnist for the Boston Phoenix and Boston Herald, Kimball covered all sports, displaying an uncanny ability to cut through the persiflage and get to the core of a story or a personality. He was that rare bigger-than-life raconteur who could write with the same fluency he spun stories, conveying through the grace of his prose the intimacy of an audience gathered in a smoky bar. A robust figure, with ginger beard and pot belly, chain-smoking Lucky Strikes, indulging his Irish ancestry as if he were a native Bostonian, Kimball was as legendary for his disdain of authority as he was for his ability to meet deadlines no matter how hard the previous night's session had been.

When he was diagnosed inoperable cancer of the oesophagus in 2005, he was given six months to live. He ignored the doctors, continued smoking, and began working to leave behind something less ephemeral than his thousands of columns. One result was Four Kings (2008), the tale of the great middleweights, Marvin Hagler, Thomas Hearns, Ray Leonard, and Roberto Duran, who dominated boxing in the 1980s, its last era of greatness.

That was when I met George, while working for ABC television on its European bouts. Any fight that drew George to Britain, or even better Ireland, became a holiday in itself. The British boxing press recognised one of their own, and to be caught at a bar between George and Hugh McIlvaney, Colin Hart, or Ian Woolridge was, to me, infinitely preferable to further negotiations with promoters or indeed my bosses in New York.

Although George fits in seamlessly with the Runyonesque traditions of great boxing scribes, his route to the daily papers was unique. He came to this hard-boiled field as a literary hippie, typical of his contrarian nature. Born George Edward Kimball III in Grass Valley, California 20 December 1943, his father was an army colonel. George grew up on bases around the world, and entered the University of Kansas on a Navy officer training scholarship. He was soon drawn to campus protest against the Vietnam war. In 1965 he was expelled for picketing the local draft board carrying a sign saying 'fuck the draft'; he'd been arrested for lewd conduct. It was the first of half a dozen arrests. According to Kimball, his father claimed he would have retired a general had his son's anti-war profile not been so high.

Having worked on a poetry magazine, Grist, he headed for New York's East Village poetry scene, and got a job at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, critiquing the work of would-be writers and ghost-writing for Meredith's innumerable books packaged for paperback publishers. His poetry was published in the Paris Review, and in 1967 the famed Olympia Press brought out his only novel, Only Skin Deep, a tongue-in-cheek adult book. He sold pieces to the Village Voice, Rolling Stone and Playboy, but in 1970 returned to Kansas to run for sheriff against the Republican incumbent who'd arrested him in 1965. He ran unopposed in the Democratic primary, as the self-proclaimed leader of the 'Lawrence Liberation Front', used the unwinnable election to indulge in political theatre which included an appearance by Abbie Hoffman.

After the election he moved to Boston and its excellent weekly 'alternative' paper, the Phoenix, part of whose story was told in the movie Between The Lines. His column, 'The Sporting Eye', was an immediate hit, drawing the counter-culture community into Boston's passionate world of sports. Its title referred to his own glass eye, which he claimed to have lost in a youthful bar-room brawl, and which was the punchline to the possibly apocryphal tale of the female reporter who asked George to 'keep an eye on my chair' while she went to the loo. Kimball was renowned for eschewing the Phoenix newsroom in favour of the Eliot Lounge. Famously, he once appeared to drop off copy which was unintelligible, until one editor realised it had to be retyped with every letter moved once space to the left on the keyboard.

Kimball finally quit the Phoenix in 1979 after the millionth confrontation with his editors, bribing a cleaner to open the bar of the Park Plaza hotel at 9am, leaving a colleague at the bar when he disappeared and caught a flight to Florida. He moved to the Boston Herald in 1980, where his columns ran until his retirement in 2005. In 1997 he began a column, 'America At Large', for the Irish Times; they were collected in a 2008 book published in Ireland alongside his biography of the runner Eamonn Coghlan. After Four Kings, Kimball edited two collections of boxing writing with John Schulin, and published a collection of his own boxing writing, The Manly Art, earlier this year.

Kimball died 6 July 2011 at home in New York. He was married four times, and is survived by a son and daughter by his third wife, Sarah, and by his wife Dr. Marge Marash, whom he married in 2004 in a ceremony conducted by George Foreman. He joked that after sixty years he was finally marrying someone who could write prescriptions for him, and it was too late. It would be wrong to say they don't make them like George Kimball any more, but if they do, they certainly don't let them into newsrooms.

JOANNA RUSS: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

2011-07-27T13:25:00.004+01:00

My obit of Joanna Russ is in today's Independent; you can link to it here. In the flower of my sf reading, late teens and early twenties, I was more impressed by Russ' work than fond of it, though I remember loving Picnic On Paradise, in its Ace Special edition with a beautiful cover by Leo and Diane Dillon, the illustrators of choice for 'New Wave' sf. I made the comparison with Ursula LeGuin deliberately, because they seem to me to be two sides of the feminist coin, in a time and a genre when 'liberation' was still primarily a male game. But they approached it in different ways, and Russ' work always seemed more didatic, more rooted in theory and argument. I could be wrong, but my suspicion is LeGuin's work, more accessible and making its points more metpahorically, will hold up better and survive longer--though as I said in the obit, I think Russ' criticism will continue to be important.

In the piece I used the term 'sci-fi' when I was making a deliberate contrast between the work of Leigh Brackett or CL Moore with the 'speculative fiction' or 'sf' Russ wrote. Call me unreconstructed, but I still love Brackett and Moore and their space opera. But I did use sf in all my other references, which the Indy rendered as sci-fi. If any of you hardcore new wave sf fans were offended, I apologise.

THE DEATH AND LIFE OF BOBBY Z: Straight to death by video

2011-07-26T12:20:00.007+01:00

It's not surprising I never came across the movie adaptation of Don Winslow's The Death And Life Of Bobby Z, as it went straight to video almost everywhere in the world (Japan, Egypt and Israel being a few of the exceptions) after Warner Bros. passed on the finished product. It isn't hard to see why—there were a lot of possibilities in Winslow's breakthrough 1997 novel, which was already somewhat tongue-in-cheek . Tim Kearney has had problems in the Marines and problems in prison, including a fatwa put on him by Hells Angels, so when the DEA offers him an out by impersonating the legendary drug dealer Bobby Z, he takes it. But when his handover to Bobby Z's Mexican connection goes wrong, it begins a story of pursuit that sees just about everyone chasing either Tim or Bobby...including the son Bobby never knew he had.

What's most interesting about the film, in retrospect, is how clear it seems that the characters of Bobby Z and his erstwhile partner Monk appear to be dry-runs or models for Ben and Chon in
Winslow's recent masterpiece, Savages (you can link to my review here), which Oliver Stone is making into a movie which ought to eclipse this one as Winslow's finest cinematic adaptation.

The problem with the film is it can't decide on how straight they want to play it, and frankly Paul Walker isn't a strong enough actor to be able to straddle approaches. This becomes painfully evident whenever he shares a scene with Laurence Fishburne, even though Larry seems to be sleepwalking through much of his menace. Walker's somewhere between Jason Statham and Chuck Norris, not as pretty as the former, not as tough-seeming as the latter (although, as an aside, it's it odd to see the curiously vertically-challenged Norris appearing smaller-than-life alongside various Tea Party bozos?). Oddly, the business with Walker reacting to Bobby's son is probably his strongest emoting, so perhaps there is hope. He isn't helped by his love interest, Olivia Wilde, who's painted-on face has a range of emotions that makes Walker look like Charles Laughton, if she were any more wooden she'd be outside cigar stores.

Walker's at his best when, in effect, playing straight man for his more talented adversaries: Fishburne of course, but also Joaquim de Almeda as the Mexican drug lord Don Huertero, Michael Bowen as the biker Duke, and most interestingly Keith Carradine as Huertero's foreman, Johnson, who is really the only one who gets the idea of balancing comedy and thriller absolutely right. It's a shame that two of the excellent stars of Justified, Margo Martindale and Raymond J Barry, don't get bigger parts, because they could put the whole thing on the right keel, as they've done in that great TV show (Timothy Olyphant is much more talented, but suffers from some of the same problems as Walker; his is a small screen talent).

The balance, however, is never right. The biker Boom Boom, a explosives 'expert' is played by MC Gainey with some seriousness, quickly seems to have drifted into the gang that chased Clint Eastwood in his orangutan flicks. Josh Stewart doesn't really have the menace to play Monk, Bobby's erstwhile partner. Jason Flemyng, as Huertero's right hand man, Brian, seems to have wandered in from one of those Brit gangster flicks. And it reaches an absurd conclusion when we see the real Bobby Z, and he looks about as much like Walker/Kearney as I do. Which helps deflate a really funny and clever ending, in which his presumptive fatherhood becomes his literal salvation. It's a sign that the screenplay adaptation was, at heart, a solid one, but either director Herzfeld couldn't take in the right way or, more likely, his actors couldn't cope. Having said that, the bookending sequences with Bruce Dern doing his best Dennis Hopper imitation as a crazy man on the beach, telling the legend of Bobby Z, make me wonder whose idea all this ill-judged zaniness might have been.

In the end, there enough action to cover most of the cracks, if little originality to reward you, though Carradine's expression just before his death is priceless. It's also interesting to see MMA star Chuck Liddel look less threatening than you might think in his role as a Hell's Angel heavy; look quick and you'll also spot Oleg Tartarov, Robbie Lawler, and Pat Miletich. When you're more curious about UFC fighters than the love interest, it may be the ultimate definition of straight to video.

The Death And Life Of Bobby Z (2007) directed by John Herzfeld
screenplay by Bob Krakower and Allen Lawrence, based on the novel by Don Winslow

KLINE AND DEKOONING: A 1995 RE-EVALUATION

2011-07-26T10:21:00.005+01:00

I've just posted an unpublished essay I wrote in 1995 about the Abstract Expressionist painters Franz Kline and Willem DeKooning over at Untitled: Perspectives; you can link to it here. Kline, of course, has been one of my favourites ever since I discovered art--the poster for that 1994 Whitechapel show is sitting over my shoulder as I write this. Part of that was the Black Mountain connection: I read Fielding Dawson's Emotional Memoir of Franz Kline, and it was easy to see the way Kline's work reflected or was reflected in, the poetry of Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, just as those influences were reflected in the work of Cy Twombly. So pop over to the other blog and see what I was talking about then...

EDWARD WRIGHT'S FROM BLOOD

2011-07-25T13:55:00.004+01:00

Ed Wright's period detective novels have been a critic's delight; each of the four has garnered at least one award, including two from the CWA. They're written with an ease that belies the conflicts between characters, and between them and the setting and times, in immediate post-war Los Angeles. Yet they've thus far failed to attract a wider audience--and it would be nice to think that From Blood, released last November, would be the standalone to attract a new audience. It would be nice because it's always good to see writers rewarded for taking risks.

And they are risks Wright, for the most part, handles with aplomb. The setting is modern, with its roots in the protest movements of the Sixties. His protagonist is a woman, one who often behaves more like a young girl, which is understandable as she first loses her family and begins a process of discovering the truth behind that family and her upbringing.

In a sense, it's a road novel, as Shannon Fairchild meets new people, friends, relatives, enemies, and those in between, and moves from place to place both pursuing and being pursued. Wright handles her character nicely; in fact the book is at its most convincing at the beginning, when she is most troubled, and doesn't have the lure of a quest to drive her on.

He's particularly good on the background of the Sixties: was it really so long ago that young people literally have no idea about things which obsessed the book's characters then? Those characters are draw convincingly, both the ones who stayed in the movement, underground, and those who didn't. You can sense the seriousess of the debate, and Wright makes sure you understand the sea-change in our society's attitudes and expectations.

And he's also good at the thriller aspects of the story. Shannon knows who she can trust; her instincts are called into question. And as she gets deeper and deeper into the protest underground she finds her own basic loyalties being twisted. It's a wonderful set-up, that Wright carries off perfectly almost to the end. So you have a story that's as fresh as the continuing headlines about radicals coming up from underground, with deep personal conflicts expressed with believability, and a solid chase thriller. The elements are all there.

It's in the resolution that the story becomes somewhat mechanical, with characters literally coming on-stage one after another as if they're being cued. There are two major turnarounds, which an astute reader will have guessed long before they're revealed to Shannon, and in the end the question is really one of extremism, and whether it's a vice--in the defense of liberty or of anything else. It's a enjoyable debate, and a thrilling ride Wright takes you on--and if the impact of the finish doesn't quite match the build-up, it's understandable. But it makes me doubt whether this is the book that boosts Wright into much-deserved wider success.

DICK WILLIAMS: IN MEMORIAM

2011-07-24T10:30:00.008+01:00

I had meant to write something earlier about the death of baseball manager Dick Williams; sadly his career didn't really have much of a hook for a British paper's readership. Most of his obits in the States seemed to concentrate on his time with the Oakland As, which was to be expected, as he won two World Series with them ('72-73) and they were a collection of larger-than-life characters--Reggie, Catfish, Vida Blue, Joe Rudi, Blue Moon, Rollie, Sal Bando, Gino Tenace, Campy and so on, all orchestrated by owner Charles O Finley, who made an interesting fit with the irascible Williams', who, like his team, appeared to simply ignore Finley as much as possible and get on with the business of winning baseball games (in fairness, it should be noted that it was Finley who put those teams together, as well as tried to keep them poor and hungry). He called that Oakland team '25 versions of me...we looked like damn hippies...but didn't care about anything but winning.'

I remember Williams most fondly as the manager of what remains my favourite baseball team and season: the Impossible Dream Red Sox of 1967, who won the American League pennant at the longest odds of any team in history. I was 16, starting as a junior on a prep school football team loaded with high-school graduates, and we played at Thompson Academy in Boston Harbor the same weekend the AL season was ended. I got dispensation to stay over at my uncle's in Chelmsford, and watched the season's final game, which the Sox won, and later won the pennant when the Angels beat the Twins that night. It cemented my lifelong obsession with the Red Sox (which has not even been dampened by their recent transformation into the Yankees-lite).

That '67 team was the perfect one to adore, and Williams was a rookie manager who made the perfect fit for that club for a number of reasons. Owner Tom Yawkey was the antithesis of Finley: he didn't need to make his living from the team and he adored his star players. Williams came in and used his 'my way or the highway' approach to shake some players of their comfort zone. He stripped Carl Yastrzemski of the team captaincy, sending a message that was taken on by the team's core of young stars: Yaz, Rico Petrocelli, Tony Conigliaro, George 'Boomer' Scott, pitcher Jim Lonborg. Yaz would turn in one of the all-time great seasons, winning the Triple Crown, Lonborg would dominate as a pitcher, and all the others would raise their performance levels.

Williams' approach worked because the Sox were a young team; Yaz being the oldest regular at 27, and many of them had played for Williams in the minors. He also inserted Reggie Smith (cf) and Mike Andrews (2b) into the starting lineup, making it older and better. General manager Dick O'Connell got him some pitching pieces, and when Conigliaro was lost for the season when he eye was shattered by a pitch, he got Hawk Harrelson to play right field.

The Sox lost a great seven game World Series to the Cardinals, the strongest National League winners of that decade, when Bob Gibson out-duelled Lonborg in the seventh game. Lonborg was pitching on two days rest and didn't have it; as they did in game seven in 86 against the Mets, the Sox didn't show enough faith in the rest of their staff.

The team didn't repeat in 1968, though Williams managed well. Lonborg broke his leg skiing, which is another of the dozens of Red Sox 'what if' scenarios, because O'Connell went out and picked up Ray Culp and Dick Ellsworth in the off-season' they won 16 games each and with a healthy Lonborg the Sox would have had the league's best rotation. Williams, meanwhile, fired pitching coach Sal Maglie, wanting his own guy: Maglie had made a winner of Lonborg, and other Sox pitchers like Dick Radatz, Earl Wilson, and Bill Monboquette, by insisting they pitch inside.

Yawkey fired Williams late in the 1969 season. He quit the As, mostly because Finley had tried to force him to place Andrews, now playing in Oakland, on the disabled list as punishment for making two errors in a World Series game. He early moved to the Evil Empire to manage the Yanquis, but Finley insisted on compensation, so he managed the Angels and Expos and then took the expansion Padres to a pennant in 1984, making him one of only seven guys to manage champions in both leagues. he was fired the next year, managed in Seattle, and then scouted for the Yanqui. As a manager he was great at changing the attiutude in a clubhouse, and getting the best out of players who wanted to do things his way. Eventually, of course, that approach wears itself out. As he said in a recent interview, about the current millionaire players, 'today I wouldn't last a week...(but) I don't know anybody who refused the World Series checks I helped them get.'

When I did the World Series for Sky with Rico Petrocelli we talked at great length about Williams, and how his drill sergeant approach worked in those heady days of the Sixties in Boston. The players were somewhat apart from the counter-cultural capital the Hub was (and if you doubt me listen to Earth Opera's song 'Red Sox Are Winning') but they were a team convinced of their own destiny; and if destiny worked they always had Yaz. Williams was the perfect face for that team, and we were always convinced that beneath his gruff exterior was a guy who'd fight for his players. He proved that in Oakland. RIP.

ARNALDUR INDRIDASON'S OUTRAGE

2011-07-23T10:58:00.003+01:00

With this novel, Arnaldur Idrisason sends his detective Erlender on leave to pursue his own obsessions in remote eastern Iceland, and leaves to Detective Elinborg the investigation of a young man stabbed to death in his own apartment in Reykjavik. The man, Runolfur, is wearing a woman's T-shirt, a woman's shawl lies under the bed, and a large dose of rohypnol, the date-rape drug, is in his system. As Elinborg investigates, with the sometimes tendentious help of Sigurdur Oli, she's led to a woman who appears to have herself been drugged by Runolfur, and brought back to the apartment. She has no memory of the night, but she called her father for help. Is it a case of modern date-rape leading to murder?

Or is there something else going on? The theme running through Indridason's books is usually about the old Iceland versus the new. Erlender is very much the old, symbolised by his traditional horse-head eating habits. His daughter, with her drug problems, is one representation of the new, and in this novel Elinborg seems to encapsulate the dilemma. She is very much of the new Iceland, a working mother who prefers the life of the 'big' city to the traditional monotony of village life. And as she investigates this case, she gets caught up in the barrier between the mores and values of the village, and those of the big city. Clues deal with foreign cooking, and much is made of the differences between the recipes Elinborg writes about (in her sideline creating cookbooks) and the lackluster diet in the sticks. Food makes for a wonderful contrast, and so does family.

In the investigation, we find family ties playing crucial roles, and the same is true for Elinborg at home. Her adopted son has left the family, and her own son seems set to follow. He's active on social networking sites, where the traditional reticence and privacy of Icelanders seems to have disappeared. Yet her younger daughter, Theodora, takes it all in stride. This precocious child is, in many ways, the most interesting character in the book—full of both modern wisdom and a seemingly ageless attitude toward change.

In effect, Idirason is building Elinborg's character by reflection of those around her; it is not easy, and in fact works best when she clashes with the clumsier police methods of Oli. She works, like Erlender, on instinct, and her instincts are good, and she also seems to be able to use a female empathy in balance with authority to reach some people. Indriason has given her what amounts to a very traditional kind of murder mystery to solve, and, in the end, the solution is something tangential to the main investigation, something that only someone with a sensitivity to Icelandic mores would be able to solve.

But the book's most interesting character remains Erlender, even though he appears only in one or two moments when Elinborg considers him—she reminds me of Wallander or Martin Beck with their mentors at those times. So when it is revealed that Erlender appears to have disappeared: his rented car found abandoned in a church yard, there is, typically for Iceland and for anyone who knows Erlender, little worry. But we know that some sort of investigation is going to follow, and in that sense it's good we've grown a little closer to Elinborg, and enjoyed this novel, because we're already looking forward to the one that will follow.

Outrage by Arnaldur Indridason
Harvill Secker £12.99 ISBN 9781846555503

STEPHEN HUNTER'S 47TH SAMURAI: A Forgotten Friday Entry

2011-07-22T13:29:00.006+01:00

The 47th Samurai is not the first time Stephen Hunter has paid homage to movies; the Earl Swagger novel Pale Horse Coming referred explicitly to The Magnificent Seven (and to Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes). This should not be surprising, since Hunter is also a film critic who has championed the action/adventure movie, but unfortunately this tale of a sixty-year old Bob Lee Swagger embarking on a quest for revenge in Japan has to be taken with a huge amount of tongue in cheek. Hunter signals this when he's listing samurai movies – it's as if he's giving you Quentin Tarantino's young adulthood to follow, and though he isn't into the wholesale exaggeration that QT built his Kill Bill films on, Hunter still has a few problems to overcome.

The main ones concern Bob Lee, first because part of the story requires him to remain relatively anonymous in Tokyo, which is not an easy thing for any gaijin, and the other because Bob Lee's samurai training is of necessity too short, a fact about which everyone in the story reminds us, but being aware is not the same as being convinced.

The real problem is that Hunter attempts to encourage the suspension of disbelief by using facts—constantly giving the Japanese terms for weapons, fighting moves, techniques and parts. I noted in my review of I Sniper (2009--you can link to that here) that Hunter's writing was becoming more 'device-centric', and that as a result Swagger himself was turning into a plot device, rather than a character. This book was published the year before that one, but you can see it moving in that direction. In truth, however, when you look at Hunter's pre-Swagger work, you can see that it is the action thriller that interests him, and perhaps the historical emphasis was a detour.

That's dangerous because the strong points of the Swagger series (both father and son) have been personal as well as historical. Point Of Impact, which introduced Bob the Nailer, was conspiracy-based and began filling in Bob's personality; Black Light, the second novel, in which Bob investigates his father's death and White Springs, the first Earl novel, are perhaps his best books, and their core is character crossing corruption. There's some of that here; the sequences on Iwo Jima are particularly strong, if a bit reminiscent of Clint Eastwood's films, and of course the parallels of the Swagger men as American samurai is not subtle, but it is effective. So too is the relationship between Earl and his Japanese adversary during the war, and between Bob Lee and that man's son afterwards.

So, in the end, the question is whether you smile when Bob Lee assembles his own 47 samurai (the tale of the 47 ronin being the classic Japanese samurai story) or whether you feel it's all too contrived. As usual, Hunter's combat scenes always convince, and when he brings a twist or two into the plot it's never telegraphed, even if Bob Lee always saw it coming. It's got more meat than, say, I Sniper, and it flows along—the only question is how much you want to surrender to the ride.

The 47th Samurai by Stephen Hunter
Arrow Books 2008, £6.99 ISBN 9780099519232

MICHAEL CONNELLY'S FIFTH WITNESS

2011-07-22T11:12:00.003+01:00

Times have been tough for crack criminal attorney Mickey Haller, and lately he's been mostly defending people against foreclosures, advertising (in Spanish and English) on every page of the phone book and taking every case that comes along. Then one of his clients, a woman who's led a high-profile protest against the bank trying to take her home, is charged with murdering the CEO of the bank. He's been found in the bank's parking garage with his head hammered in, and Lisa was spotted in the vicinity.

The case is almost too open and shut, the perfect platform for Mickey's criminal practice to get back into gear. Throw in a DA friendly with his ex-wife, a missing husband, and a growing link to mob activities, and it's just the sort of theatre where he loves to star. Except that nothing, of course, is quite what it seems.

It's almost criminal that Michael Connelly, undoubtedly our best writer of what you might call police procedurals, is also establishing himself as a master of courtroom drama too. It's not just the twists and turns of the evidence, where he stands out is in delineating the personal battles between attorneys, and between each of them and the judge. He uses that dynamic as a main part of the suspense, which makes the story personal. That has always been the strong point of the Harry Bosch series, the way the personal drives and reflects the story, and it's no different with Haller. Throw in the fact that his client is increasingly unreliable, and the story continues spinning with the twists never seeming artifically inserted, and that is a necessity in good story-telling. Without giving away what 'fifth witness' actually means, the parallel between what Haller does to the eponymous wit and what he does in other facets of his life is clear.

Haller is not as interesting a character as Bosch, perhaps less likeable and certainly less easy to pin down. His morality is flexible, as befits a lawyer, and he himself is actually most interesting when interacting with his ex, ADA Maggie 'McFierce', because both are driven by their profession, each with a holier-than-thou attitude to a business where holy doesn't often enter into it. The big challenge for Connelly is probably to get that next step deeper into Haller's character, which, if the forgrounding in this book is any indication, he is going to try to do.

But in the end, this is, after all, a mystery, Connelly resolves it with a twist, one which, in the old-fashioned sense, plays absolutely true with the reader: it's been out there to see, but there's no reason you (or Haller) would have, because you're just as caught up in the case as he is. It's a bravura piece of courtroom writing, one of those keep-reading-all-night until you finish it books.

The Fifth Witness by Michael Connelly
Orion £18.99 ISBN 9781409114420

SHERWOOD SCHWARTZ: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

2011-07-15T08:29:00.008+01:00

My obituary of Sherwood Schwartz, who created both Gilligan's Island and The Brady Bunch, is in today's Guardian, and you can link to it here. I have to admit I was something of a Gilligan fan, though I had and still have, no time for the Bradys, and when I sat down to think about the reasons it led to my over-writing the piece somewhat. What was cut to shorten it were my reflections on Bob Denver--who also starred in Schwartz's neo-Gilligan Dusty's Trail, and in two other pilots that never got bought as series, though the pilot episode of Scamps is available on DVD and The Invisible Woman appeared as a one-off TV movie.

Some of the obits quoted media studies professors on the significance of Gilligan, and Schwartz himself in later years would attribute simple but universal themes to it. But the key, in my mind is Denver. First off, he offered Schwartz the abilities to do much of the goofy slapstick and idicoy that were the attributes of Red Skelton's comedy, but with none of the star's ego, so in that sense he made the perfect focus for the series, which in that sense can often be seen as an extended series of sketches for Denver.

But when I suggest Gilligan as a proto-hippie, I also mentioned his previous TV incarnation as the work-shy beatnik Maynard G Krebs, on The Adventures of Dobie Gillis. And when you consider that Backus brought persona of the hapless father from Rebel Without A Cause (as well as the voice of the nearsighted eccetric millionaire Mr Magoo) to the role of Thurston Howell, you can an intersection of characters that might have appealled to the emerging 'rebellious' generation.

Or it may just have been because there was Tina Louise to gawk at in every episode.

It's also important to remember that the perception of the Sixties as a decade of turmoil is true, it is even truer that the vast 'silent majority' did exist, and the real cultural change wasn't marked until the Seventies, when the Sixties counter-culture became the accepted over-the-counter culture --at which point The Brady Bunch was definitely being presented as an antidote.

It's also informative to look at what other shows were popular during the era, to realise Schwartz's comedies were not all that different from, say, The Beverly Hillbillies or even Hogan's Heroes, and one might look at Norman Lear's redoing of Til Death Do Us Part as All In The Family as the sort of anti-Brady.

The one antidote I left out, sadly, was the constant friction between Robert Reed and Schwartz. Reed's previous best role had been as EG Marshall's younger partner in the issue-oriented drama The Defenders, and Schwartz had apparently promised him the Bradys would address the cutting edge issues of the time, and for some reason Reed had chosen to believe him.

Schwartz frequently worked with his children, and in many shows there are credits for an Elroy Schwartz--in fact it is Elroy who co-wrote the original, long-lost pilot show for Gilligan--and he is described in some references as Sherwood's son. Yet his none of his three sons were named Elroy, and two are credited under their own names, so either this was the third son, Donald, using a pseudonym, or Schwartz (or someone else) using one for their own reasons. A curious little mystery.

DEREK JETER: MY 1999 ESSAY ON WHO'S THE BEST SHORTSTOP

2011-07-10T14:14:00.010+01:00

Derek Jeter's 3,000 hit yesterday reminded me of an essay I'd written twelve years ago, and I thought I'd go back and look at it to see how accurate I'd been about his position vis a vis the other two great young shortstops of 1999. A little background: after I stopped working for Major League Baseball, and was doing baseball comentary on Sky and other satellite channels (as well as the Olympic finals, twice, for RTE Ireland!) I used to self-publish a baseball preview annual. The following essay appeared in the 1999 edition, along with previews and predictions of each team, and essays on Cuba (the Orioles went to Havana to play and I wrote a piece for the FT), the first-to-worst phenomenon (selling off great players wasn't a new thing in baseball), and an early look at 'weight training' and power hitting titled 'Popeye Arms And The Man'.

The way Jeter reached his 3,000, with a homer at the end of a 5 for 5 day, reminded me that, although the stats have often ranked him below the top, especially in the field, he has had the knack, especially useful playing in New York for the highest-payroll, highest-profile team in baseball, of rising to big occasions where his current teammate ARod has been his virtual opposite. Hence the Yankees leaving Jeter at short, when the younger ARod has more range. But ARod has less of what a NYTimes writer might call 'the right stuff'. Consider the difference in ARod's trying to slap the ball away from Bronson Arroyo, or 'Jeter the Cheater' doing a soccer-style fake of an injury to draw a HBP against Tampa. Jeter (who scored on ARod's slap) isn't tarnished, even after admitting his gamesmanship.

What I couldn't predict, of course, was that Jeter and ARod would become teammates, and ARod would move to third base, thus taking himself out of that 'greatest shortstop' equation. One thing I should point out too, as you watch various stats about Jeter's place in the 3,000 hit club, is that for various reasons there are lots of great hitters who never reached 3,000 hits (especially all those Yankees, plus Ted Williams and Jimmie Foxx) while Craig Biggio, Al Kaline, and Yaz did (Yaz being the first American Leaguer with 400 homers among the 3,000 hits). Longevity is, in itself, a sign of quality, particularly at shortstop (second only to catcher in the way it takes a early toll on bodies). Nomar, whose overly developed frame soon broke down as I speculated it might, is a good example. The length and relative consistency of Jeter's career will argue covincingly for his spot in the Hall of Fame; ARod, with all the side issues, will certainly justify my rating of him, but make the vote a harder call.

I should also point out that I wrote some snide things about Mariah Carey, and eerily anticipated ARod's dating Madonna. All three sportsters have moved on, in a sense, Jeter to Minka Kelly (via Jessica Biel) ARod to Cameron Diaz (via Madonna and whatever), and Nomar to the soccer star Mia Hamm. Why should multi-millionaire star shortstops be attractive to celebrity actresses?

While you ponder that one, here's what I wrote in March 1999:

WHO’S THE BEST OF THE SHORTSTOPS?

There may not have been a time in baseball history when three young shortstops of the quality of Alex Rodriquez, Derek Jeter, and Nomar Garciaparra have emerged together in one league. In fact, based on the past two seasons, you’d be hard-pressed to find three veteran shortstops putting up similar numbers. Most of the great hitting shortstops have stood out by a long margin from their colleagues: Honus Wagner, Ernie Banks, Cal Ripken, Robin Yount, maybe Arky Vaughn. Most shortstops, even the good hitting ones, weren’t there for their sticks anyway. In the American League just after the war you had Lou Boudreau, Junior Stephens, and Eddie Joost (who generally outhit Phil Rizzuto by good margins), but Joost never put two big years in a row together (his 1949 was a dinger, though: .263 23-81, 149bb, 128r). Stephens in 1949 hit .290 39-159 but Boudreau had an off year after his 1948 line of .355 18-106, 98bb and 9k. That’s right, nine.

But right now you’ve got three guys putting up numbers that are close to MVP quality, and they’re doing it every year. Two of them are already their club leaders, and all three are among the wave of new young players who bring back that everyday hard work and respect for the game which many of us believed the NBA/MTV generation had lost forever.

The highest profile, because he plays in New York, belongs to Derek Jeter. The other guys don’t get to date Mariah Carey. To me, she looks about as attractive as Governor Carey, but I’m old and jaded (2011 update: Minka, right, looks much better). Jeter is the middle of the our three guys in terms of age (turns 25 in June) and is already in his fourth year in the bigs. He shows the least power of the three (19-84 last year) but in the offseason this year he has worked on his hands to add more power to his swing, and I’d look for his power numbers to jump. Not that they need to, if Knoblauch becomes a great leadoff hitter again. He’s an excellent base runner (30/36 in sbs, 83%), and he managed a .384 oba despite walking only 57 times (119 Ks). Listed at 6-3 185, Jeter is big for shortstop, but doesn’t look it on the field.

Defensively, Jeter had his best season last year, cutting his errors to an amazing nine, and fielding .986. He’s got the least range of these three, and there are questions about him going to his left, but they aren’t serious ones. Given the pop in his bat, I wouldn’t be surprised if he eventually moves from the shortstop position, to second or third, but that would depend a lot on who the Yankees come up with in the future. Bernie Williams was quoted this season as saying that Jeter was the leader of the Yankees and their MVP. Given the talent on that team, and the quality competitors, that is an amazing compliment.

The oldest of the three is Nomar, who turns 26 in July, and he’s only in his third season. He too is his team’s leader, if somewhat by default since Mo Vaughn lumbered out of town. But from the first day he hit the Red Sox lineup, Garciaparra has breathed a fresh attitude into the team, and moving from leadoff to cleanup hitter he proved he would do what it takes to help the team win.
Unlike Jeter and Rodriquez, Garciaparra is a contact hitter: he walked only 33 times and struck out only 62 last season. He’s the smallest of the three at 6-0 175, but looks bigger because he’s so skinny. His power (35-122) is generated by the whip he gets in his bat, and the more I look at him the more he reminds me of hitters like Henry Aaron. He’s a good baserunner, but batting in the middle of the Sox lineup he’s not going to rack up steals.

Last season Garciaparra made 25 errors, fielding .962, but part of that was because the Sox tried to get him to set before he threw, rather than complete the throw on the run as he likes to do, and once he went back to his own style, his errors slowed down. When you watch him closely, you’ll see his whole approach to picking the ball up is consistent, and lets him get the throw away so quickly he saves at least a step on the baserunner. He’s got more range than Jeter, but like Jeter he uses his arm to make up for the ground he can’t cover. Like Jeter, I see him moving off shortstop eventually (particularly if he’s injured, which he seems likely given his body type). Whether it will be an Ernie Banks type move to 1b or a Rico Petrocelli-type move to 3rd I don’t know: but I’d guess it could be tied into the development of SS Adam Everett in the minors.

Rodriquez is the youngest of the three, turning 24 in July, and has already hit 106 home runs in the majors. He may have quicker hands than Gary Sheffield, which gives him phenomenal ability to punish good pitches by waiting on them. His season, .310 42-124 123r 43sb was an MVP calibre performance, especially from a shortstop, and you could argue that could’ve been his second MVP. And don’t think that ARod is feasting in the Kingdome: last season he hit .286 18-54 at home but .335 24-70 on the road. Defensively, I’m not convinced he’s second to Omar Vizquel in range, but I won’t argue with the strength of his arm, which will keep him at shortstop even if he starts to slow down. He’s 6-3 195, which again is big for a shortstop, and you’ve got to worry when he gets hurt on the step exercises, but basically, he’s done nothing wrong thus far in his career. You’d like to see him stop chasing bad pitches (121Ks, only 43bb) but that will come.

I think we owe a lot to Cal Ripken here. When Earl Weaver was the only person in baseball who thought Cal could play shortstop, everyone laughed. Maybe Earl was remembering Ron Hansen, a big shortstop who’d played well defensively for the Orioles in the early 60s, or Junior Stephens on the Red Sox, or even Ernie Banks. For whatever reason, Ripken proved that positioning, athletic ability, and a strong arm could overcome whatever balletic quickness he gave away to the Ozzie Smiths and Luis Aparicios of the world. Traditionally, the best young baseball players all start off (if they don’t pitch exclusively) as shortstops or, in the old days, as center fielders if they were big. Nowadays, they look at shortstop as a place they want to stay, and the additional offense they provide really can change the game of baseball.

So who’s the best? In the field I’d rate them 1. ARod 2. Nomar 3. Mariah’s boyfriend. At the plate, the rating stays the same. In intangibles, it goes 1. Jeter 2 Nomar 3. ARod, but of course he plays second fiddle to the Paganini of the bat in Ken Griffey Jr. It's so close, I find it hard to drive a wedge between Jeter and Nomar, and I suspect we may have a Ted Williams/Joe DiMaggio type argument going on here for years to come. I’d give the edge to Nomar right now, but I suspect that Jeter’s bat will continue to improve, and he is a year younger with an extra year’s experience as well.

But neither guy is ARod. If this guy played in New York he’d be pushing Madonna out of the way to get to the ballpark (2011 note: or not, we can say now. Boy was that a prophetic line!). I think he’s more valuable this season than either of the other two, and remember, he’s both the youngest of the bunch AND has the most big league experience. He’s probably the guy I’d want to start with if I were building a team from stratch, and that means I consider him the most valuable property in baseball.