PHILLIP KERR'S THE SHOT: A Forgotten Friday Entry

It may be an exaggeration to say that most of Philip Kerr's work, apart from the Bernie Gunther series, has fallen through the critical cracks. But if I, a crime-fiction critic and a Kennedy assassination junkie, could miss The Shot, Kerr's novel about an assassination attempt on JFK, when it was published ten years ago, I think it's fair to characterize it now as overlooked, if not forgotten. Having said that, it's a novel more clever than good; a book of two halves in more than one way.

Structurally, it begins with a bang, as we meet Tom Jefferson carrying out the assassination of an ex-Nazi in Buenos Aires. Perhaps it is Kerr's familiarity with Nazi stories that gives this scene its resonance, but it is carried off with panache, and Jefferson is a protagonist of admirable amorality. Lately, I seem more and more to be referring period pieces set in the early Sixties to Mad Men, but picture Don Draper with a sniper scope, and you've got Jefferson. He returns to America, to entertain a proposal from the Mob and CIA, brokered by Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana, that he assassinate Fidel Castro. So Jefferson heads of to Cuba to reconnoiter, cozying up to made men. In fact, it may be time for a period gangster show, set in this time period. Call it Made Men.

Anyway, the guano gets in the air conditioning when Tom's wife, Mary, who's been working for the Kennedy campaign, is taped having sex with the priapic Presidential candidate, and then turns up dead. And Tom appears to blame the Kennedys. And reneges on his deal with the mob to kill The Beard. From this point, Kerr begins turning the tables. Jefferson is not what he seems to be, and neither are a lot of the other people. But rather than ratchet up the tension, this reversal has the opposite effect. Jefferson moves, for the most part, offstage, and is replaced as protagonist by Jimmy Nimmo, a Miami cop and ex-FBI man, mobbed up, and hired by Giancana to stop Jefferson from killing JFK, who at that point they still believed was their boy. Ironic, isn't it?

Nimmo is almost the kind of amoral manic operator James Ellroy specialized in, but he never really establishes himself as a character, as opposed to a plot device. Where Jefferson's cold came through, Nimmo's heat does not. And the story itself comes to a halt as, Kerr begins to display his para-political research. The problem is, he does it through his characters, delivering deep background about the CIA's relationships with the mob, or the FBI's COINTELPRO operations, or assassinations and regimes changes, by having characters who should know all this stuff explaining it to each other. The idea that Dick Bissell, running plans for the CIA, wouldn't know who'd been deposed and who was in power in Guatemala is a bit hard to take. This middle section drags on, through endless meetings, which exist not so much to drive the plot forward as to demonstrate the depth of Kerr's historical nous. But as I said, it's a book of two halves: neither taut thriller nor expansive alternate-historical epic.

As the moment for Kennedy to die comes closer, Kerr swerves again, and then follow a couple of twists which, again, are clever rather than satisfying. It's a disappointment, because he's done the research, he understands the ethos of all the players involved, and he's very good on their relationships. But there really isn't that much tension; it's plot device not exploding device. Early in the book, as Jefferson staked out Castro, and came up with a fool-proof plot, complete with fall-guy, we recognised with a nod and a wink that Kerr was referencing the JFK killing. And after his twists are finished, we realize that the mob will be referencing it some time in the future; in fact, Kerr goes out of his way to make sure we see how clever he's been.

The Gunther books were far tighter structurally, and what was particularly interesting about them was their insight into the Nazi era from the inside, as it were. The fact that we knew the ultimate outcome had no bearing on Gunther's own investigations. But more important is the question of tone. The Gunther books are written to emphasize the bleak danger of normality. The Shot, on the other hand, while trying too hard to get us into the era, can't get the tone right, as if Kerr is confounded by the normality of the Eisenhower era, whether it too is bleak, dangerous, or something else. Too often its gangsters talk like bureaucrats ('he has some narcotics deals going down in Cuba that have to be out of the way first') and his spooks sound like professors and students.

But they aren't very good bureaucrats or professors. They get Santo Trafficante's name wrong, they think Calvin Coolidge was a Democrat, and someone ought to tell someone that Kennedy was not the 'state Senator for Massachusetts' before becoming president, and the park in Washington near the Key Bridge is not the Francis Scott park, it's Francis Scott Key (so's the bridge) and he wrote the national anthem while the Brits were shelling Baltimore. I make these points lightly, but with a serious intent; the book wears its historical research on its sleeve (there's even a chapter titled 'On The Trail Of The Asasassins', a knowing reference to one of Jim Garrison's book). But when it's that easy to spot howling errors of fact in a subject I know well, if generally, one begins to wonder how much credence one should give to accepting other historical settings.

But as I said, atmosphere is more important that fact when you're trying to convey the reality of an era, and the atmosphere of The Shot, in the end, feels too contrived. Mary Jefferson is killed with a drug overdose administered in the same way as Marilyn Monroe's was, if you accept she was killed rather than suicided. Since I once titled my review of a book on the subject 'The Enema Within' I suppose I shouldn't be critical of Kerr's having one of his characters crack the same joke (although I did get there first). But it's the wrong kind of cleverness from the wrong character, in a book that, in the end, tries to be too clever for itself. It's a pretty good try, but in the end, any number of people have re-created this era with more veracity, and that's not just a question of which president was which, or who actually did shoot JFK.

The Shot by Phillip Kerr, 1999

THE QUICK AND THE DEAD: UPDATE

No sooner did I write, in 'The Quick and the Dead' (here) about the propensity for CCTV evidence to fail to exist when members of the 'justice' system are being investigated, than the claims of Nick Hardwick, head of the 'Independent' Police Complaints Commission was shown to have been lying when he said there 'was no CCTV footage' in the area, around Royal Exchange Passage, where Ian Tomlinson was assaulted by police, leading to his death.

Last Thursday Hardwick told Channel 4 news "there is no CCTV footage – there were no cameras in the locations where he was assaulted." Although it is pretty easy to disprove this claim, since there are cameras in the area and photographs of them have been published, it took the IPCC until after the Easter holiday to begin cleaning up their covering up, with statements implying Hardwick had been referring to 'footage' when he said 'no cameras'.

However they were at a loss to explain how, if, as they had claimed when they issued their immediate clearance of the police in that assault, that they had looked at 'many hours of CCTV footage' how Hardwick could have been so sure there were no cameras. The assumption must be that the relevant footage from the cameras in Royal Exchange Passage will not be looked at until after it has been 'accidentally' wiped in the 'normal course' of business.

Meanwhile, more footage of the police attacking a woman during the vigil being staged to mark Tomlinson's death also shows that, having penned a small group of protestors, a tactic calculated to create, if not preserve, disorder. Someone who appears to be a photographer is shown being stopped from leaving the inside of the cordon, while another man trapped inside is talking to a WPC and then is shoved from behind by another PC.

A woman sees that attack, and begins protesting to a cop, calling the police 'scum'. She has a carton of juice and a camera in her hands, and makes no move to attack anyone, but the PC, wearing heavy gloves, gives her a back-handed slap in the face, then, as she continues to remonstrate with other offices, turning away from him, draws his baton and smashes her in the back of the legs. His identification number is, of course, covered up: but video taken by another participant identifies him clearly enough that the police have had no choice but to suspend him too.

With the police making massive arrests of people allegedly planning a possible protest that might have led to some disorder at a power station...the conditionals being the key point...the ultimate effect of the G20 may be to clarify exactly what the attitude of law enforcement is toward the people who are being increasing disenfranchised by economic collapse, and see the keepers of order acting to protect those who manage to avoid such disenfranchisement.

AMERICAN EYE LOOKS AT LA OUTLAWS and CHINATOWN BEAT

My latest American Eye column has been posted at Shots, you can find it here. It's discussing two novels with no UK publishers: one by an old favourite of mine, T. Jefferson Parker's L.A. Outlaws,and the other, Henry Chang's Chinatown Beat, which was touted in a column by Ron Rosenbaum. It doesn't quite live up to Rosenbaum's hype, but it's not bad, as you'll see.

FLETCHER FLORA'S KILLING COUSINS: A Forgotten Friday Entry

It is rather odd to read Fletcher Flora's Killing Cousins, written in 1961, while almost simultaneously watching Mad Men, a knowing and ironic look back on that era. Because there is a sense of tongue-in-cheek about Flora that seems slightly out of character for the genre we associate with him. His best known book, the lesbian thriller Strange Sisters (one of at least five books to share that lurid title) was published by Lion in 1954. But when Killing Cousins appeared, in 1960, it was a hardback, from Macmillen, which implies that someone in the publishing world could see what Flora was up to. My copy, shown right, is a 1964 British paperback edition, from New English Library's Four Square, but what really fascinated me what that it reprints the original 1961 British hardcover by Jonathan Cape, at a time when Cape was one of the most prestigious of houses. Which means someone in Britain understood what was going on too..

If indeed he was up to anything more than entertaining at a fast pace. The style and tone of Killing Cousins reminded me of something Ed Gorman once said about Day Keene, that he became more flamboyant the more he wrote, and it doesn't get more flamboyant than this. It opens with Flora explaining about Willie Hogan the most famous of all the residents of Ouchita Road, in a town called Quivera (!), more famous than a losing Republican governor or a bit-part actress, because she killed her husband. Having set-it up, he doesn't wait long to deliver: Willie is confronted by her husband Howard, prosperous because his father is the local beer distributor, and cuckolded frequently, which didn't appear to bother him inordinately until Willie took up with his bright but ne'er do well cousin, Quincy. Howard confronts Willie, while she's painting her nails, and dares her to shoot him. So she does. Then she finishes painting her nails and calls Quincy to help her dispose of the body.

It's a pretty classic set-up, femme fatale and hard-boiled hero about to get in over their pretty heads. But while there is much of the classic femme fatale about Willie, there's a seriously flipped element to the story; she's really stupid, with none of the kind of feral intelligence black widows have in classic noir. Flora really seems to have been intent on reversing lots of the stereotypes of the genre. Quincy is far from the usual noirish hero, driven off-track by lust, stolid and being played by a spider-woman more clever than he is. Instead, he's extremely bright, to the point of alcoholic boredom in Quivera (!), and has more than a little feyness about him, far from your average 50s or early 60s noir hero. His dialogue often sounds like a parody of a drawing room mystery, played for laughs, which may be what appealed to Cape in the first place, that tone like Nick Charles talking to Gracie Allen (the George Burns Gracie, not the British one).

Of course getting rid of the body is never as easy as you might think, and something's always bound to go wrong. Especially when Howard's mistress turns up. And then Quincy's smarts are tested, and so are Willie's natural abilities. As Flora writes: 'Willie, advised to do nothing, was surprised to learn that doing nothing was one of the hardest things she had ever done'. I think that the entire novel may be worth it for just that line; but of course Willie can't keep still, and of course she and Howard turn on each other, and Flora gets to work out a few more reversals along the way. It occurred to me that if you set out to rewrite The Postman Always Rings Twice, take the passion out of it, or better, turn passion into boredom as motivation, and see where that took you, you'd get something like Killing Cousins. You get the sense James M Cain was immersed in his characters, repelled and attracted like his heroes, which is why his books are so intense; Flora seems merely amused by his. But if you could that to Cain's best-known book, you'd probably wind up with that same kind of wry, fed-up with the Fifties, quality that Mad Men has, fifty years later.

THE QUICK AND THE DEAD: 'Terrorism' In Britain

It is instructive that British police can assault innocent bystander Ian Tomlinson, a homeless alcoholic working as a paper-seller, leading to his death by heart attack moments later, and immediately begin releasing a series of lies aimed at covering up their culpability, but no one is held to any immediate account. While it is cause for immediate resignation when Bob Quick, the head of the anti-terrorist squad, decides to play Bozo the clown and expose his unit's top-secret plans to public cameras.

The fact that another policeman, John Dougal, was convicted yesterday of causing the death through dangerous driving of a teenager whom he hit in his police car chasing a car moving at 94mph, driving without lights or siren (so not to give away anything to the car he was pursuing) all of this while his night shift after working a full day as an electrician, merely made this a telling trifecta, marking the path of the transformation of Britain into a police state: a state where the citizens exist by the grace and favour of a self-perpetuating bureaucracy, the sort of thing that C Wright Mills said made 'reflective citizenship' impossible.

The Tomlinson assault and its immediate cover-up is reminiscent of the case of Jean-Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician murdered at Stockwell tube while on his way to work, and raises a few similar questions, and some of a different nature. Incompetance, of course, was also a major factor in the Menezes killing: the surveillance officer missed IDing him because he'd left his post to pee, communications between different units didn't function, operational 'go' words were misundertood. There was also the institutional concept, as articulated first by Ben Hecht and Charles McArthur in The Front Page, of 'production for use'. The officers had their guns, and had to use them. The traffic officer had his high speed car and had to use it. The riot police have their batons and dogs and horses and have to use them.

In light of that, we need to ask what is the basis for the police assumption that anyone on the streets is a protestor, and worse, that any protestor is a violent terorrist? Did no one remember the effects of penning the crowd in Oxford Circus in 2001? The workers penned in for six to eight hours while trying to get back to their jobs after lunch? The tourists trapped on their way to the tube, unable to exit despite displaying their air tickets and passports to the police? The effects of dehydration and heat prostration on that summertime crowd? Tomlinson's killing, and the tactics of corralling which caused it, did not exist in a vacuum.

But the more telling effect of 'kettling' may well be on the police themselves. Like a rugby team in the locker room before a match, or football supporters in the pub for four hours before the match, they are psyching themselves up for conflict, and after six hours on containment, there is aggro bursting to get out.

Given that, why are the police allowed to disguise their identities? In man who hit and shoved Tomlinson wore a balaclava, no warrant card or other ID number was visible on his clothing, and that appears to be the case with the other officers present. This goes back at least to the days of the miners' strike, although then the police were also trying to disguise the fact they were using soldiers to beef up their ranks.

The case has now been referred to the 'Independent' Police Clearance, oh sorry, Complaints Commission, which means no officials need speak about it while it is under 'investigation'. But rest assured, had not spectator footage been available, showing Tomlinson (who may have been struck previously, if the time sequence with the eventually-released Channel 4 footage is right) meandering away, trying to get home, leaning on a bollard, with his back to advancing police dog handlers. One cop, to his right, gives him a slight push as a dog runs into his back. At this, another comes up from his left, whacks him with his truncheon, and shoves him face first to the pavement. He lies on the ground, apparently remonstrating, then gets up and groggily continues, trying to get back to his shelter.

When deMenezes was gunned down, the police immediately spun the story for the gullible press: he had jumped the ticket gates, he was wearing a heavy coat which might have concealed a bomb, he had run from police, the police had identified themselves before firing; all of which were quickly shown to be lies.

When the current 'I' PCC investigation comes out, will the media remember to ask where the police's own CCTV footage from Cornhill is, and check to see how it's edited. It is interesting that we now live in a society where our every move is monitored, yet when that surveillance might work against those in the 'justice' system, it miraculously disappears. Remember, in the Menezes case, all the CCTV cameras in and around Stockwell tube just happened to have 'malfunctioned' simultaneously. By strange coincidence, the judge, 'Sir' Stephen Richards, who handled the Menezes family's case against the police, was himself accused of twice exposing himself to a woman on a commuter train. He elected to have his case heard before a judge, not a jury, and where that judge admitted he was taking his colleague's word over the member of the public, in what boiled down to 'she said, he said', he at least had the grace to say it was only because he laacked 'corroborative evidence'. That evidence, of course, might have been found on the CCTV tapes from Waterloo, except when the police finally got around to checking those cameras, delayed because of their 'heavu case load', they 'discovered' the tapes had been erased, as scheduled, the day before.

Finally, why was the BBC 'not interested' in the spectator footage when the Guardian offered it to them? And why is the story now being buried underneath Quick's resignation. One hopes the raid on the 'possibly aligned to Al Queda cell' produces more results than the one on the Plymouth 'bomb factory' where a family was planning to unleash 'terror' during the G20'; all of them have been released, without charge, to a chorus of silence from the media. They were too busy checking the video to see what Bob Quick's papers said.

I'LL BE TALKING SPORT ON THE RADIO TODAY

BBC Radio Five, Simon Mayo show around 3:15 pm. My old NFL partner Colin Murray's sitting in for Simon (hold the Mayo, anyone?) and we'll be talking about the efforts of US sports to establish themselves over here. And likely a few other things too...

It ought to available online for a week afterwards, at bbc.co.uk

ANDREA MEAD LAWRENCE, MILLARD KAUFMAN OBITS

There's a deep synchronicity in the two obituaries I wrote for today's papers. In the Independent, (here), there's the skier and environmental activist Andrea Mead Lawrence, and the photo which the paper uses shows her winning the US national downhill championship, at Cranmore in North Conway, New Hampshire, on my fourth birthday. I'd wind up spending much time in that area, at my great-uncle's boys camp at lake Ossipee, and at the houses of uncles and cousins nearby. Cranmore was where the 'skimobile' ran skiers up the mountain.

Meanwhile, in the Guardian (here), I wrote about Millard Kaufman, the screenwriter (Bad Day At Black Rock, one of my favourite 50s movies) and co-creator of Mr. Magoo, which was a pretty impressive daily double of his own. He also acted as the beard for Dalton Trumbo, when the blacklisted writer did the screenplay for Gun Crazy, one of my all-time favourite films. A writer to the end, Kaufman published his first novel at age 90 (another will be published posthumously). And, to make the synchronistic point, we shared a birthday.

HARLAN COBEN'S LONG LOST

My review of Harlan Coben's new Myron Bolitar novel, Long Lost, is now up at Crime Time, you can find it here. With my own background in the sports biz, I gravitated to Myron when he first appeared, and did one of the first interviews with Harlan when he came to this country, where reviewers largely underappreciated the Bolitar series. He's moved on to bigger and better things, but I still have a soft spot for Myron; keep that in mind as you read the review.

FIFTY DEAD MEN WALKING

My review of FIFTY DEAD MEN WALKING, directed by Kari Skogland, and adapted by her from Martin McGartland's memoir, has just been published at Crime Time (here). Although it's loaded with fine performances, not least Jim Sturgess in the lead, it's less a showcase for acting than a portrayal, brilliantly designed and shot, of the human side of what the British euphemistically call 'the troubles', and less a thriller than a study in betrayal. The analogy to John Ford's The Informer was meant seriously, but unlike Ford, who although American made much of his Irishness, Skogland, a Canadian, never romanticises her violent men. I'll be curious to see what the reviews here think; all the pre-film publicity has been about 'Sir' Ben Kingsley.

One other thing I should have mentioned: the music, which emphasizes traditional Irish music, is by Ben Mink, better known for his work with KD Lang, but previous of the late, lamented Canadian group Stringband, one of whose albums I actually subscribed to, to help it get made (it's called 'With Thanks To' as I remember, and my name is among the hundreds on the cover). This is the other benefit of having a Canadian director.

HORACE MCCOY'S I SHOULD HAVE STAYED HOME: A Forgotten Friday Entry

It's a bit of a stretch to call I SHOULD HAVE STAYED HOME a forgotten book, after all, Serpent's Tail offered a welcome reprint back in 1997, which I reviewed for an early issue of Crime Time, and which seems like only yesterday, not more than decade past. (That's the 1951 Signet reprint, looking very 50s, pictured right).

But it remains one of the most overlooked of the great Hollywood novels. Published in 1938, it has many similarities to McCoy’s better-known THEY SHOOT HORSES DON’T THEY, which appeared three years earlier, but it could just as easily be viewed as the inspiration for Billy Wilder’s screenplay of SUNSET BOULEVARD. I've seen it suggested that the story is merely an inversion of A STAR IS BORN, which had been a hit movie the previous year, but I think that's true only in the most superficially simplistic sense.

McCoy is one of the hardest of the hard-boiled novelists, and this hard-boiled novel has very little to offer in the way of redemption. The protagonist is Ralph Carson, a big, good looking Southern boy whose slow drawl mitigates against a career in talkies. So he's working as an extra, sharing a flat with a hopeful actress, Mona Matthews. They're not on the hustle, but they are looking for the big break. And it comes when their new roommate, Dorothy, already a failed actress, is arrested for theft. Mona curses out the judge during her friend’s trial, and the resulting notoriety gains them entry into Hollywood society. Corruption follows as sure as the sun sets into the Pacific. Carson becomes toy boy to Mrs. Ethel Smithers, a widow who is rich and influential and who has strong appetites. Not only does he despise himself (remember William Holden in SUNSET BOULEVARD), but McCoy uses the situation to show us exactly why Carson, and a million other good looking kids with some talent never will make it in the human jungle of Hollywood.

The setting and tone is eerily familiar from Wilder’s movie, though the ending is bleaker, and less melodramatic. Mona is fired and blacklisted for union activity; she ends up making a dead-end marriage with a guy she meets through the lonely hearts column (an echo of Nathanael West?), while Ralph stays on in Hollywood, a combination of misplaced optimism and resignation to the reality he can never go home. He's a bit like Joe Buck in MIDNIGHT COWBOY, only more hard-boiled, with the noir hero's usual half-track brain, if not quite the one-track mind.

It all gains impact from McCoy’s hardboiled prose; nearly sixty years later it catches the reader and won’t let go. You’re drawn along, much as the characters themselves are, like marathon dancers who can’t keep going but can’t afford to stop. It's incredibly modern in its vices, and would make a fine film, in period or in our present days of depression, if the film could just be kept true to that tone.

I SHOULD HAVE STAYED HOME by Horace McCoy
Serpent’s Tail (Midnight Classics) 1997, £6.99
ISBN 9781852424022

JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN: MY GUARDIAN OBIT

My obituary of John Hope Franklin is in today's Guardian (here). It was one of those that was a privilege to be able to write, to say a little about someone whose own career stood as a monument to what was accomplished by the civil rights movement, even though he accomplished much of it in the face of systemic apartheid.


It was also fascinating to discover some stories I hadn't known before, especially that of his namesake, John Hope, educated at Worcester Academy, which I knew well as a teenager, whose father was white and mother black, but who refused every chance to 'pass' in the white world, and became a founder, with WEB DuBois, of the Niagara Movement. Franklin's biography of George Washington Williams seems equally interesting --almost a prototype of the Hope and Hope Franklin characters, and the story of his father Buck resonated because of the bits of Dennis Lehane's The Given Day set in Tulsa's prosperous black areas, a sort of tribal homeland before its time.

It's not just that Franklin was a great man; it's the idea that the power of learning, of writing, of teaching can have such an impact on the 'real' world. That's what we hope, so to speak, might still apply, especially since the battlelines are so much less well-defined in today's world.

FURTHER SIGNS OF THE IMPENDING APOCALYPSE

THE ONLY RESPONSE TO THE FOLLOWING IS: 'Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk!'

(Although it is also rather mind-boggling to see 'comedy chops' and 'Guy Ritchie' used in the same sentence, unless it's a sentence about his marriage to Madonna.) And lest we forget: the REAL AND ONLY Stooges appear right...

From Daily Variety Wed., Mar. 25, 2009
MGM gets its 'Three Stooges'
Penn, Carrey, Del Toro part of studio's plan
By MICHAEL FLEMING
MGM and the Farrelly brothers are closing in on their cast for "The Three Stooges." Studio has set Sean Penn to play Larry, and negotiations are under way with Jim Carrey to play Curly; the actor is already making plans to gain 40 pounds to approximate the physical dimensions of Jerome "Curly" Howard.The studio is zeroing in on Benicio Del Toro to play Moe.

MGM has delayed release of the film until some time in 2010. Pic was to have opened Nov. 20 in time for the high-profile Thanksgiving frame. The move means that MGM has only one release so far dated for 2009: "Fame," set to open Sept. 25. (Studio has two horror pics and one suspense title waiting for release dates.)

"Three Stooges" is not a biopic but rather a comedy built around the antics of the three characters that Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Curly Howard played in the Columbia Pictures shorts. Peter and Bobby Farrelly's quest to harness the project spans more than a decade and three studios. They first tried at Col, again at Warner Bros. and finally at MGM, where Worldwide Motion Picture Group chair Mary Parent championed the cause, buying the WB-owned scripts and making a deal with "Stooges" rights holders C3.

Production will begin in early fall. The Farrellys, who wrote the script, are producing with their Conundrum partner Bradley Thomas and Charlie Wessler.C3 Entertainment principals Earl and Robert Benjamin will exec produce. Project will get under way after Penn completes the Asger Leth-directed Universal/Imagine Entertainment drama "Cartel." He hasn't done a comedy since the 1989 laffer "We're No Angels." The Farrellys have long had their eyes on Del Toro to play Moe. Thesp, who's coming off "Che," showed comic chops in the Guy Ritchie-directed "Snatch." The surprise is the emergence of Carrey to play Curly.

Oh, THAT'S the surprise? Someone ought to moiderlize these guys.