HALLOWEEN’S POLITICS: Donald Trump’s Three Rs

                                    Donald J Trump at Madison Square Garden

 A few days ago, while intending to write about the link between Donald Trump, reality television and professional wrestling, I happened to read an article by Alan Moore. It was ostensibly about changes in comics’ fandom, since the time his younger self emerged from it to become one of the genre’s greatest creators. He bemoaned the loss of youngsters who read affordable comics as enthusiasts, and the move to older readers who can afford the more expensive modern versions, and “carp and cavil” at a sub-culture they believe they own. A decade earlier, (before, Moore pointed out, Brexit, Trump and “fascist populism”) he had written a piece wondering if the adult popularity of of superhero movies was “potentially an indicator of emotional arrest” with “worrying political and social implications.” Given that Moore’s work includes Watchmen, From Hell, and V for Vendetta, his concern needed to be taken seriously.

A decade later, we find ourselves with “elections that decide the fate of millions…conducted in an atmosphere more suited to evictions on I’m A Celebrity.” And by inference, being decided by those same people queuing to see the latest Spider Man or Superman sequel or spinoff. The people who buy images Donald Trump transformed into muscle-laden superhero on collectors cards or non-fungible crypto. “I alone can fix it,” exclaims our electoral superman, and as election day looms and the twin spectres of conflict over an unrecognised decision, or a Trump win foretelling a fascist future, raise their monstrous heads, the clarity with which we can see the fruits of this emotional arrest are clear.

They are amplified in every moment of a political campaign stoked by Trump’s three Rs: Reality TV, political Rallies and professional Rasslin’. All three are entertainments which require the audience to surrender emotional belief in what they’re seeing, even when logic or experience argue against it. In one sense, this is the essence of art; reality television is a drama presented without the need for actors or elevated scripts: a debased version of soap opera, which itself is opera without the music and with the conflicts reduced to game boards of conflict. Much like pro wrestling, itself a bowling alley version of sporting opera; the joy of victory, the agony of defeat, as Wide World of Sports used to tell us. The emotions are big, the challenges seem massive, the victory over them cathartic, the defeat, usually at the hands of villainous perfidy, tragic. It’s a Trump election.

                         Hulk Hogan With Pink Feathered Boa & Indestructible Tank Top

Donald Trump was our first professional wrestling president. The link reached apotheosis when Hulk Hogan appeared on stage last weekend at Trump’s Madison Square Garden MAGA version of the 1939 German Bund Rally. The 71 year old Hulkster struggled with his own signature move, failing to rip apart his tank top, struggling like Frankenstein’s monster’s grandad with battery running low. Hogan had been slightly more effective invoking the past last summer at the Republican convention. It was an appeal begging us to recall Wrestlemania 23, when, in the “Battle of the Billionaires,” Trump decked WWF (now called WWE after losing a lawsuit by the World Wildlife Fund) owner Vince McMahon and pounded him with his tiny hands, while each “billionaire’s” champion battled in the ring. After a cheating intervention by Trump’s own “referee”, Stone Cold Steve Austin, his champion, Bobby Lashley, pinned McMahon’s Umaga, and the Hair vs Hair match ended with Trump, Austin and Lashley shaving bald the shrieking McMahon. All it needed was a final aria from the hairless WWF boss.

That match appeared in a Netflix series, Mr. McMahon, which debuted in September, as the election season picked up pace. Although Trump’s role is minor, the comparison it suggests between the two “billionaires” is fascinating, not least because, when McMahon’s WWF was briefly losing the Monday Night War to his main television competition WCW, McMahon actually used a character called “Billionaire Ted”, whose Turner Broadcasting included WCW. This portrayed WWF as a small, family business trying to fight the big corporate bully.

Which was both technically true and ironically false. False, because McMahon had driven out of business most of the family-run regional promotions which had once made up the wrestling world, and had a hugely profitable near-monoply on the business. True, because McMahon’s WWF was originally his father’s World Wide Wrestling Federation, whose territory ran up the east coast from Washington to Boston. Vince had been raised by his mother and a step-father who abused him; the show portrays the young Vince as a bad boy bully and rebel. But eventually his real father took him in, and into the business. He worked his way up, but eventually Vince saw the opportunity to take down most of the regional promoters by stealing their stars and out-promoting them in their own areas, and on TV. McMahon Sr ostensibly disliked betraying what were, in effect, his business partners, and eventually sold the company to his son. The rest was history.

The parallels with Trump are superficially attractive — going into the father’s business, and although he claims his father gave him very little of it, the truth was young Donald received a fortune from his dad, as well as many contacts within the politics of New York, contacts Trump was quick to betray. An interesting sidelight into McMahon’s career is that every one of his ventures outside wrestling ultimately failed: a professional body-building federation; a film company; WWF hotels and restaurants, and even a pro football league, the XFL.

This is a mirror of Trump’s career outside real estate: he dreamed of having an American football franchise in the NFL: he joined the upstart spring-league, the USFL with a team in New York, then persuaded his fellow owners to move to the fall, hoping to force a merger. The USFL sued the NFL and won one dollar in damages; NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle swore Trump would never be allowed to own an NFL team. Sadly, he didn’t make that announcement on tape. The litany of Trump’s other failures is well known: steaks, water, a college, the Eastern Airlines shuttle, even casinos (one of which was hit with the largest money-laundering fine in FINCEN history). Trump’s major business was really talking bankers into loans, using the businesses he bought as collateral, and selling them back to his investors in repayment of his loans. As the adage goes, when you owe the banks billions, you’ve got them by the balls.

Part of the secret of McMahon’s ultimate win over WCW in the Monday Night wars was his re-creation of himself as a heel (ie, villain in wrestling parlance) character, Mr McMahon. With his steroid-inflated muscle-bound body, which made his head look tiny, McMahon borrowed a wrestling strut and brought his own self into the character. As he is interviewed for the documentary, and especially after he grows a pencil moustache in his final days as chairman of the company after scandal had forced him to sell to a bigger entertainment conglomerate, McMahon resembles a Twilight Zone evil ventriloquist’s dummy who comes to control the ventriloquist.

                         Mr McMahon

Wrestling is full of performers who come to believe they are the character they are playing, and the same was true of Vince: “I was a character, but the character is me,” he says. “It’s what I do best; I lie and I cheat and I win,” he tells his son Shane, whose efforts to please his father and win his approval are the most touching part of the documentary.

“Nothing that anyone involved in wrestling says should be regarded as fact,” explains wrestling journalist Dave Shoemaker. Does that sound familiar? Think of Trump in his uniform blue suit and red tie, with the heavy makeup and the George George style-hairpiece blown in the wind. Read the books on business Trump’s ghostwriters produced, “creative exaggeration” became his keyword for lying, and the stuff of his campaign speeches seemed borrowed from the ringside interviews of wrestling heels like Jerry Graham, “Classy” Freddie Blassie, or Dick the Bruiser. If Trump’s businesses did not make him an actyal billionaire, as journalists critics like Wayne Barrett, Tim O’Brien or David Cay Johnston kept saying, though no one in the political media paid any attention, he played a billionaire on TV, in The Apprentice, which turned the world of business into a WWE-style rumble, with Trump as Mr. Mahon.

He is, as many have noted, the poor man’s idea of what a rich man is, and the combination of the supposed dog-eat-dog competition and his faux cruelty to the contestants desperate to succeed gave him lots of opportunity to promote his own acumen while cutting them down to size, in a voice that increasingly would adopt the harsh growl of a wrestling heel. Of course the lines were written for him, the challenges choreographed in the same way wrestling matches are, and the aim was to make Trump the kind of figure who could, love him or hate him, “draw heat” as they say in wrestling: bringing followers in to see what happened next.

By the time Trump announced a presidential run in 2015, a large portion of the nation watching reality TV believed him to be a millionaire who could master any would-be business star and make tough decisions, such as, in Barack Obama’s famous White House Correspondents’ Club put down, “whether or not to fire Gary Busey”. Many in Trump’s circle have claimed that was the moment Trump decided to run for president.

As if the promise of more Hulk Hogan fuelling Trump’s third try at the White House were not enough, a few days before the MSG rally, he went on the Six Feet Deep podcast hosted by Mark Callaway, better known as The Undertaker in his own days in WWE. During the interview, Trump diverted from election talk by playing the quintessential wrestling “mark”, in effect asking the Undertaker whether or not pro wrestling was real. “That ring takes great absorption,” he marvelled. When Trump asked “what stops somebody from going nuts & starting a real fight,” Callaway desperately tried to steer the conversation back to the election, explaining, “It’s like the way I wish politics would get back to,” the Undertaker said, “I may not agree with you…but we can share a dressing room, we can shake hands.” I met Callaway once, in a Sky television make-up room, where I was broadcasting an NFL match and he was being interviewed to promote a WWF event in London. He’s an intelligent guy, very well spoken, but as most wrestlers are, wary of giving too much away. He came off the same way in Mr McMahon; protecting the business and the man who created the character that made him a true superstar. It was as if Trump were expecting the same treatment.

Which he received just a few days later with the rally at Madison Square Garden. It began with a comedian trashing Puerto Rico and characterising sex-crazed Latinos along Trumpian lines. It didn’t get much better, even though Trump’s son Eric, the Fredo of the Trump crime family, described the event as “a movement of total love.” The love extended to Kamala Harris, described variously as the “anti-Christ,” a “Samoan-Malayasian low-IQ” candidate, or a “fake” with “pimp handlers”. Hilary Clinton was described as a “sick son of a bitch” and the Democratic party as a “bunch of degenerates, low lifes, Jew haters and low lifes”. Trump’s two legal eagles appeared: Alina Habba, who started representing Trump’s Bedminster New Jersey golf club, seemed rehearsing her next music videos while Rudy Giuliani, once “America’s Mayor” and now chasing Trump for the $2 million he’s owed in legal fees, warned the crowd about “Palestinian two-year olds” who were waiting to kill Americans.

Then Elon Musk, dressed as “dark Gothic MAGA” as if he were Trump’s wrestling manager, introduced Melania, playing Trump’s wrestling valet, to present the main eventer himself. She asking the crowd to “size (sic) the moment and create a country for tomorrow, a future we deserve.” Imagine if Jill Biden had done that.

                                         1939: The Original Is Still The Greatest

The staging wasn’t as impressive as the 1939 pro-Nazi rally at MSG, but that one wasn’t televised. Not that many of the speakers weren’t trying: Trump’s ambassador to the undead, Stephen Miller, chanelling his inner Fritz Kuhn to declare “America is for Americans and Americans only”. The levels of vitriol were higher, the crowd more raucous, and the coverage far more normalising, as you would expect for Trump. CNN commentator Van Jones nailed the difference in coverage of Trump and Harris in one line: “He gets to be lawless; she has to be flawless.” For months and months, campaign coverage centered on the question of whether 80 year old Joe Biden was physically and mentally fit to be President. He had a disastrous showing at his debate with Trump, and soon withdrew from the race. Did the coverage then shift to ask questions about the 78 year old Trump’s fitness, even as the summer wore on and more and more evidence of cognitive decline appeared? Of course not.

In the past few weeks, the Harris campaign has instead tried to highlight Trump’s fascist tendencies. After all, he had claimed on day one of his second presidency he would “be a dictator”. Nothing in his first term would contradict that, not even his failed coup of January 6 2021. Nothing in statements from generals who served under him, most notably his former White House chief of staff John Kelly, who read the dictionary definition of a fascist and pointed out how Trump checked all the boxes. Nothing from his former VP, 44 members of his cabinets, and Republicans across the country who’ve announced they would not support him (if not, in many cases, vote for Harris). Nothing that Trump has done has shaken his core supporters, not sexual assault, not criminal conviction, not support for dictators world wide.

The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times took their both-siding to the extreme, refusing to endorse either candidate — in both cases at the behest of their billionaire owners over-ruling the plans of both papers’ editorial boards to endorse Harris. Whether this was an owner’s fears of alienating part of his audience or, more likely, especially for the Post’s Jeff Bezos, out of a deeper fear that angering a Trump who won would cost him hundreds of millions of profit via government regulation of Amazon or loss of government contracts. Journalists at both paper resigned, even as the Post in particular published coverage that made it seem a Harris endorsement was the only legitimate course it could take.

Nothing Trump said during the New York rally contradicted his critics’ claims. Nothing would indicate any intention of relaxing the insults, dialling down the false claims, tamping the fires of resentment aimed at the faceless “they” against whom Trump rails. In the Mr. McMahon doc, another wrestling journalist, Dave Meltzer, explained “people will support an entertainment product and not care about the moral character of the guy running the product”. The same is true when the guy running the product is the product. The product is created to draw the audience. Wrestler Tony Atlas said “we cater to what’s in front of us”. Look round Madison Square Garden, America, because what you see in Donald Trump on the dictator’s pulpit is a reflection of the angry faces whooping with entertained joy. As a much quoted, though probably not ancient, Circassian proverb says, “When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.” In just a few days, will American send in the clowns?

JOE GALLOWAY: MY GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of Joe Galloway, one of America's foremost reporters of the Vietnam War, is in today's Guardian, for those of us who prefer a paper paper. It has been online for a few days; you can link to it here. It's pretty much as I wrote it, as I was given a hard word count, and there is not much lost, though there is a difference between the Marine Corps and the Marine I Corps. I was also slightly surprised that they added a qualifier to Clausewitz (the military theorist) but not to LBJ (Lyndon Baines Johnson, the US President).

I found the link to his father, gone during the war, and his war journalism telling, as was the link to Ernie Pyle, whose work in World War II I described in a little more detail.

With more space, I might have talked about the traditionalism of his reporting, as opposed to the more impressionistic work by the likes of Michael Herr, who caught tragedy on a grand scale rather than the individual, but that I think was a difference of style. Galloway was already legendary when I worked for UPITN, the news agency's TV agency, and when I was in Moscow in 1980 a number of people told me Galloway stories. I would have liked to talk a little more about the Reiner movie Shock and Awe, which is held back by its smug sense of self-righteousness: Tommy Lee Jones' version of Galloway seems aimed specifically at buffering the film from criticism for being anti-military--when in reality it is the questioning of illegal or unwinnable wars before the politicians commit to them that is the foundation of what journalists ought to, and usually aren't, doing. Knight Ridder and McClatchey were the noble exceptions.

They also left out a few details from his survivors: his second wife was actually the daughter of an officer killed at Ia Drang, whom he had known since she was young. His third wife was a woman with whom he had been friends for some 40 years before they married. I found that somehow hopeful.

HELENE FLOOD'S THERAPIST

I've published my review of Norwegian novelist Helene Flood's engrossing first crime novel, The Therapist, you can link to that at my Medium page here...

No need to register, but it's nice if you do...

MIKE GRAVEL: MY GUARDIAN OBITUARY

 My obit of Mike Gravel, the Alaska senator who read the Pentagon Papers on the Senate floor, is online at the Guardian now; it should be in the paper paper soon. You can link to the online version here.

The piece has a few small, but I think significant cuts...and I was interested as I knew Assumption Prep well, and AIC somewhat, having grown up in that sports area (I played at AP in both football and basketball in high school.) I mentioned Gravel's enlistment in the Army specifically to note that by enlisting he was allowed to choose his area of service, and he chose intelligence. The point is made by his activities in France and Germany, which were, in effect, spying on allies, but the real significance is that he was able to read the Pentagon Papers with the necessary insider grain of salt.

There is also the argument over where exactly he got his copy of the Pentagon Papers. Daniel Ellsberg denied giving anything to Gravel; it seems likely it was Washington Post Ben Bagdikian, who like Ellsberg had worked at Rand and with whom he was friendly. 

I did try to describe Alaskan politics, which is sui generis. Gravel fell afoul of the major Democrat fund-raisers, by being too much of a loose cannon, and perhaps because of rumours about his personal life. Alaska could, in those days, live with some individuality in attitudes toward government, but not to development within the state. That's where the money comes from. His voting record shows his votes against expanding National Parks in Alaska (protecting them against development) and his voting with the racist Southern Dixiecrats to preserve the filibuster.  I also mentioned his first wife, Rita Martin, who worked in the office of the city manager of Anchorage, and had once been named Miss Fur Rendezvous. For some reason that seemed important.

Alaska politics is also hereditary. I mentioned he lost the Democratic Senate primary to Ernest Gruening's grandson, but what was cut was that this divisiveness meant the Senate seat was actually run by the Republican Frank Murkowski, whose daughter Lisa is currently a Senator for Alaska having won her father's seat after he faced corruption charges.

Gravel's later career is problematic. His stand against the US government's military policy put him in another awkward place when the Afghan and Iraq invasions became this generation's Vietnam. But his other positions landed him firmly in the Libertarian camp. I ignored the similarities with John McAfee, whose obit I had written previously for the Guardian, which were only superficial in the sense that the Libertarians were wide open as a springboard to some national publicity, but I wonder if I should have mentioned my own thought that, as with recurring Libertarian candidate Pat Buchanan, the left fork of Nixon's tongue in the Vietnam era, Gravel might have been happy to get Federal matching funds for his campaign. And of course, his "gadfly" image was not exclusively a product of his own positions, but also, as is the case with those on the fringes, the positions of people associated with parties or publishers or positions that can be used as evidence by association. Criticising the basic tenets of US foreign policy can often bring such attacks down on you. And for someone like Gravel, whose politics, going back to his Alaska days, could be all flaws to all people, that was a dangerous row to hoe.

A BIG BOOK WITH A STRONG FEELING: JOEL DICKER'S DISAPPEARANCE OF STEPHANIE MAILER

 

In 1994, a brutal quadruple-murder shook the seaside resort town of Orphea, in the tony Hamptons on Long Island. The body of a jogger was found in the road outside a house; inside the house the mayor, his wife and young son all lay dead. Two young state troopers cracked the case, and in a car chase drove the killer off a bridge into a river, where he died, a presumed suicide.

Twenty-five years later, one of the those troopers, Jesse Rosenberg, is about to retire. He's now a captain, known as Captain 100%, for his perfect record in solving cases. But his retirement reception gets crashed by journalist Stephanie Mailer, who tells Jesse that he is, in fact, Captain 99%. He did not solve the biggest case, the one that made his career, and enigmatically, she says he failed to see what was right in front of his eyes. She leaves and tells him she will see him later. But she doesn't. That night, she disappears.

The Swiss writer Joel Dicker's follow-up to The Truth About The Harry Quebert Affair is, at first glance, a complex locked-room (or locked village) mystery, in which the stories of twenty years past are revisited and opened up to new examination. But in reality, it is a digging into character: a series of character sketches whose interaction centers on the crime, and whose changes come about as information is discovered and revealed. In a sense, this creates a story-telling dilemma, in terms of what information to release to the reader, and when to it. From the point of view of the classic locked-village mystery, this can be a fault, as sometimes that which is withheld would seem normal to have appeared much earlier by the process of natural selection.

But Dicker has avoided that trampling over the basic whodunit puzzle, with the aim of revealing more about the characters, through the nifty way the novel is structured, with multiple flashbacks and multiple points of view. These intertwine: Jesse's own very unusual upbringing, and his first love Natasha, for whom he pines, have their own impact on the tale, while the former police chief, Kirk Hayward who has moved out to Hollywood and written a play which supposedly will reveal the name of the true killer—a situation which does create more mystery but also makes one wonder about the sense of realistic policing (and indeed realistic murdering!) once the play becomes the focus of the town's theatre festival, the high point of its tourist season.

“I wanted to try something different,” Dicker said during his virtual UK book launch. “I wanted a challenge, to write a choral book with lots of characters and sub-plots. But this is Orphea—and Orpheus was, of course, all about not looking back, which is a great irony. Before Chief Hayward's play, the festival's production was going to be Uncle Vanya; despite Jesse and Natasha's backgrounds in Russian it's hard to see parallels between Vanya and the situation in Orphea except for one, perhaps: in Vanya happiness seems to be something that eludes us in this life. It's interesting that Dicker's characters all seem to be chasing some kinds of unachievable happiness, but in his ending Dicker plays further with that. His approach to the book echoes some of this: “it can work like a crime novel,” he said, “investigation becomes like a guide, a path you follow to the characters.”

Dicker said he chose the name Stephanie Mailer partly out of connection with Norman Mailer. “I create a character before I give the name,” he explained, and when I thinking of the town I wanted to have a lake called Deer Lake, which reminded me of Mailer's novel, The Deer Park. It was that simple. Or not quite, because in the translation, from the French, Deer Lake becomes Stag Lake, so the Mailer connection disappears!

The Disappearance of Stephanie Mailer is a big book, with a deep cast of characters and a plot woven through two decades. There are multiple twists before the end, but the real pleasure may come from the construction itself, like a play (perhaps Chekhov's The Wood Demon?) with a big cast, an expansive set, and a sea of revelations. Talking with Dicker, I mentioned my favourite Swiss writers, Jacques Chessex and Friedrich Durrenmatt, both of whom used the framework of the crime novel to investigate issues of both character and society. Both, however, worked primarily in shorter books. “Yes,” he said, “a book is what we see before we read; a big book may scare the reader but give a very good feeling to have finished. A short book is a strong feeling.” What Dicker has produced is a big book, but with a strong feeling.

The Disappearance of Stephanie Mailer by Joel Dicker

translated by Howard Curtis; MacLehose Press £20.00 ISBN9780857059208

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

T.J. NEWMAN'S FALLING

 My review of TJ Newman's highest of high concept thrillers, Falling, has just been published at Medium. You can link to it avoiding the paywall with this friends link here. It's a great read: make the click to find out why....

F LEE BAILEY: MY GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obit of F Lee Bailey is in today's Guardian; it went online yesterday and you can link to that here.

The paper had hoped for a somewhat shorter piece, of course highlighting the OJ trial, but as it was I tried to hold myself down to just his more famous/important trials, and each time felt it was necessary to explain them at least briefly for an audience who probably don't even recognise the name Patty Hearst, much less Sam Sheppard or Albert DeSalvo.

I mentioned that, in light of the Medina court martial, William Calley was the only officer convicted in the My Lai massacre. I didn't mention that the major who didn't find anything unusual in the action that day, nor when questioned by someone from the Inspector General's office the following year, was Colin Powell, whose recollection of that questioning in his own memoirs doesn't jibe with the IG's tape of it.

It would have been nice to delve further into a couple of the stories: Sam Sheppard became a professional wrestler after finally winning his release from prison, and died young not long after. Efforts to win him compensation for false imprisonment have failed. Hearst (and William and Emily Harris) were not with the rest of the SLA when six died as the LAPD trapped them in a house, but Patty had shot during an earlier robbery to protect them. Bill, aka General Teko, Emily and two other SLA members lived second lives until arrested in 2002. There's a Robert Redford movie, The Company You Keep, which, while based on the life underground of ex-Weathermen members, covers similar ground.   

There was one interesting thread that did get lost; his marriages. Because Bailey and his first wife, Florence Gott, married in 1960 and divorced in 1961, but had two sons. I could not find anywhere a date for his second marriage, to his secretary, Froma Portney, with whom he had a third son. I was constructing a scenario to explain these circumstances, but there was no way of my proving any of it true. However the idea he divorced Froma in 1972 and immediately married his third wife, Lynda Hart (who didn't make the paper, sadly) would be what lawyers might call evidence of a pattern of behaviour. He divorced Hart in 1980 but didn't marry Patricia Shires until 1985, and they stayed married until her death in 1999. I probably should have mentioned, as well as his failure to win admission to the Maine bar, and before his later bankruptcy and finally move into a hospice near one of his sons in Atlanta, he ran a consulting business from an office above his girlfriend, Debbie Elliott's hair salon in Portland.

 

BEHIND THE LABEL OF "NORDIC NOIR": ARNE DAHL'S EUROPA BLUES

I've written a review at Medium, nominally about an Arne Dahl Intercrime novel, but more about the place of Scandinavian crime fiction and the label of "Nordic Noir". You can link to it here, without having to sign up to Medium, though that would not be a bad thing.

THRESHOLD: A POEM

I am in the process of assembling a collection of poems, and going through some which I hadn't really looked at in some time. In some cases they were in files with other poems for other possible groupings, or were simply in a file with other previous published poems. In any case, Threshold is a qualifier on both counts, and it may well make the cut for the new collection. I wrote it originally in February 1983, inspired by a photograph, the cover of Mary Kinzie's book The Threshold Of The Year, which brought back some memories. It was published in 1990 in the Azya Free Collection, from Tokyo, and as it is a work in progress, I have reworked it somewhat this year. 

THRESHOLD

In a cloak of new snow the trees look

Darker, more imposing. It's getting colder.

I take comfort seeing a new sawn stump,

Coming upon it by surprise, as if someone

Else, not me, had chopped it down, as if

Each snowflake were indeed unique, and in

The shadow of these woods I were not alone.

JO SPAIN'S PERFECT LIE

No, it's not a book about golf. Instead, it's early on a sunny Tuesday morning when Erin Kennedy wakes up next to her husband Danny. She's Irish, and a book editor, who moved to New York after a family tragedy; he's a former NYPD cop now working homicide in a sleepy shore town in Suffolk County, Long Island. Then, at 7:15, there's an insistent knock at the door: Danny's partner Ben, and two uniforms, are there to arrest Danny. He walks to the balcony, and with a look back at Erin, jumps to his death.

Eighteen months later, Erin is in court, charged with murder.

Jo Spain's thriller is a finely designed construction, jumping about in time between the period of the trial, the time of Danny's death, and the sexual assault of a Harvard co-ed, told from the point of view of her house proctor, four years earlier. This is not an easy trick to manage, but movement between stories is deft and what helps is the setting, especially as the story moves between Harvard of the past and Suffolk County in the present. They are backgrounded sharply: the insular, almost claustrophobic world of Harvard increase a sense of danger about the campus; the Suffolk community is put into stark contrast by one of Erin's allies, Cal, who comes from the Gatsbyish side of Long Island, an uneasy fit into her world.

Of course the need to find the resolution of each bit of story creates a web of interwoven cliff-hangers which make The Perfect Lie compulsive reading. But there is a problem, in order to maintain the recurring doses of suspense, you have to withhold a lot of information from the reader: from the Harvard backstory and its other protagonists, or the location of its assault, right up to details Erin's trial taking place in the present. This is an easily disturbed structure, and it also requires a certain amount of expository prose once the revelations begin, in order to answer some of the questions readers are going to need resolved. The artificiality of withholding can be irritating at times, but the positive side is that it keeps the reader guessing, and the resolutions are, in the main, satisfying. Spain builds Erin's character well, and Dave's by reflection, but to some extent the other characters are limited by their function to the plot: learning too much might uncover too much revelation. And the moment of that revelation was, if anything, underplayed—perhaps the need to explain how we got there overpowered the actual menace of the situation itself. Cold blood needs to be presented as a dish served quickly.

There is also the danger of bending modern reality: given the amount of investigation Erin and her friends undertake, it seems improbable that aspects of one person's identity could be kept secret by their missing it. The pedant in me also wishes that the American characters didn't occasionally use Anglicisms, which Erin in narration can say to her heart's content. But an American lawyer would never say “inland revenue” meaning the IRS (Internal Revenue Service). Freshmen in America are never called “freshers”, things like that. Small irritations for a natural born Yank, but like the larger question mark, not enough to slow down the suspense train which barrels ahead on its Long Island Railroad (or railway?) tracks.

The Perfect Lie by Jo Spain Quercus £14.99 ISBN 9781529407242

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

GORDON LIDDY: MY GUARDIAN OBIT

My obituary of G Gordon Liddy, the Nixon plumber of Watergate renown, who after getting out of prison turned into a right-wing showman with considerable success, appeared in the Guardian on April 8th; it had already gone up online, and you can link to that here.

For once, this appeared almost exactly as I wrote it: I had not been given a word count, but after over-writing Larry McMurtry I set one for myself and tried to stick to the facts, ma'am, and hope the readers were adept at reading between the lines. I hit my own word count almost precisely, and everything went smoothly.

Looking at other obits, I was amazed at how often he was billed as the "Watergate mastermind". Let's face it, Watergate was not exactly a brains operation, and when I looked at much of Liddy's career, I saw a similar pattern, by which a certain amount of macho bluster and spotlight chasing overpowered his responsibility for a series of, shall we say, mess-ups. In a way, E. Howard Hunt (that first initial thing has been a right-wing pseudo-upper class trope for a long time) was similar: remember Hunt was a long-time spy novelist, and many of his CIA operations seemed planned as if they were fictions. The two of them paired was trouble in a clandestine specimen jar. 

Watergate was one thing I would have liked to go into in more detail, but that would be opening a pandora's box. You could look at my obit of James McCord, of the CIA's Special Research Staff (at the Guardian here --also my Last Words interview about him here) for a sense of some of  my feeling about the nature of the burglary itself...and also the idea that both Hunt and McCord were accused of being in Dallas the day of JFK's assassination. Jim Hougan, who at the time was the DC editor of Harpers, wrote a seminal book on Watergate, Secret Agenda, part of which surmised that the bungled burglary was a deliberate act by the CIA to weaken Nixon (there was virtually no chance he would lose the '72 election to McGovern), perhaps because of "the Bay of Pigs thing" as Nixon referred to it in the infamous White House tapes. It wasn't until after Liddy's obit had been published that I discovered he had been one of the people associated with Norman Mailer, Edward Jay Epstein and other "deep politics" researchers who called themselves "The Dynamite Club". The easiest way to discredit those who believe in conspiracies is to send them down rabbit holes which distract them from the real prize and also eventually may discredit them: I can just see Liddy doing that to the guys in this club.

I didn't see the need to expound further on Liddy as right-wing shock-jock, pitch man, and huckster: who knows? he may have believed his own shtick, at least superficially. He certainly believed his uber-mensch persona, which was probably as close to the real GLL as we will get. I take his autobiography Will with a grain of salt, but it still might have been interesting to go deeper into those "bund" roots in Hoboken, and the way he celebrated this in his later years. However, the idea of Nixon as the leader whose own will could power America "back" to greatness (in the face of hippies, anti-war and civil rights protesters and the like) was so demonstrably false that when it was resurrected in Reagan's kinder gentler return to the Disneyland 1950s or Donald Trump's much more visibly Teutonic MAGA mode, it was no surprise many Americans bought it both times, and Liddy was there to cheerlead every authoritarian moment,and like a vulture profit from it. 

LARRY MCMURTRY: MY GUARDIAN OBIT

My obituary of Larry McMurtry is online now at the Guardian, you can link to it here. It should be in the paper paper soon. It has been cut considerably, because I over-wrote it, and it was a good edit: keeping the most relevant information and the spirit of what I wrote. So this is not a complaint, but an addition.

Because I knew McMurtry's work well, especially his early novels, which I believe are his best and I think, for example, the praise (with some caveats) Jim Harrison gave them was justified; this was in his review of All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers, which is my other favourite of his books (I'd like to re-read it and see if my older sentimental self still enjoys what my younger romantic self did). It seemed to me that the caveats Harrison mentioned were what drove much of his later work, which I found less interesting: his proclivity for writing too much, for extending ideas into series, came from his ability to create characters, and I would use the word picaresque to describe it. In many ways he was like an 18th century novelist; he would take characters he liked, and introduce them to other unusual characters he created (and understood) and let that all fly. But this is not part of what was trimmed from the piece; it is the spirit underlying what I wrote.

There remain a couple of small points that needed explaining, but because of 'reorganisation' weren't. Thalia, the Texas town that is the setting of his first three novels, is a fictionalised version of Archer City; I thought that really needed to be clear right from the start, because, like the Houston-set books which followed, it showed how he transformed his own experience (for example: his father's running his grandfather's ranch echoes the set-up of Horseman Pass-By (Hud). 

And when he held his Last Booksale, it was from his four remaining Booked Up stores in Archer City. For some reason the Guardian said only one was in his hometown: but I'd actually clarified the point to them. This was important because, in another line excised from the copy, I explained his purpose in putting his stores, which grew into six at their peak, in his hometown was his effort to turn Archer City into a Texas version of Hay-on-Wye. I thought the English reference would have kept it in the piece, but what do I know?

One small loss, which I also couldn't understand, was the name Peter S Beagle from the short list of his Stegner colleagues and friends. Beagle, who is still alive, was a major success at a young age, already a success while he was at Stanford with the would-be novelists. He's published the fantasy novels A Fine And Private Place and The Last Unicorn (which is always in best-of lists still) and I See By My Outfit, his tale of a cross-country journey on a motor scooter, well ahead of Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintence. Maybe I should have dropped his middle initial to save space.

The biggest excision was one I expected, because I included a lot of material about Ken Kesey; on the surface very different from McMurtry, but a close friend whose career had some strong parallels with his until Kesey diverged. If this weren't enough reason, however, the idea that McMurtry then married Kesey's widow, on whom he appears to have maintained a crush for 50 years (he said that at the time Kesey would never let the two of them even talk together!) made it important. Anyway, here is what I wrote: 

... Stanford University’s Creative Writing programme, where his classmates included Peter S Beagle, Wendell Berry and Ken Kesey. Kesey attended the Stegner seminars taught by Frank O’Connor (The Last Hurrah) and Malcolm Cowley (Exile’s Return) only because Stegner, who disliked him intensely, was abroad.

...It may not be a coincidence that in Kesey’s first novel, the best-selling One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), the main character, played by Jack Nicholson in the Oscar-winning film, is named Randall McMurphy, or that Kesey’s second novel, Sometimes I Get A Great Notion (1964) revolved around a father/son feud within a family logging firm in Oregon; when it was filmed in 1970, Newman again played the rebellious son.

Let me repeat: I was not surprised these bits got cut: it's an obituary, not a literary analysis. But the idea Kesey simply snuck into the Stegner Fellowship seminars is intriguing, if not crucial to understanding McMurtry. But to me the teaching by O'Connor, whose novels tend toward the sentimental family saga format McMurtry used, and Cowley, chronicler of the Lost Generation, seemed a fascinating influence.And the parallels I mentioned are delineated here, and I found them convincing. And then there was the Merry Pranksters.

After Stanford, McMurtry taught creative writing for a year at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, then back at Rice. In 1964 Kesey and his Merry Pranksters got in their San Francisco school bus driven by Beat icon Neal Cassady, with the Grateful Dead on board for music, and began a cross-country journey to New York. Tom Wolfe’s chronicle of the trip, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, became a best-seller, including the Pranksters’ arrival to visit McMurtry in Houston. As the bus pulled into his driveway, a tripping Cathy Casamo, also known as “Stark Naked”, spotted McMurtry’s son playing on the lawn. Unclothed, she jumped off the bus to hold him. McMurtry recalled "James, in diapers, had no objection to naked people, and the neighbours, most of them staid Republicans, took this event in stride; it was the Pranksters who were shocked". Far from being harmed, James McMurtry grew up to become a country music star.

McMurtry stayed off the bus. He won a Guggenheim fellowship and produced a seminal book of essays about Texas, In A Narrow Grave (1968), whose themes included some of those reflected in his fiction: cowboys “finding it bitter to leave the land...to the strange and godless heirs they had bred.” 

Again, you can understand, as I did, why that basically had to go, but I did suggest re-inserting one sentence about Kesey's visit, if only because Wolfe made such a thing of it. But I loved McMurtry's own later response to it: it clarified difference between him and Kesey, and I thought the early mention of his son's later career fit well right there. I also love the quote about the bitter leaving of the land, because that theme starts in Horseman Pass By and continues through Lonesome Dove.

But the quote from Leaving Cheyenne stayed in.“Nobody gets enough chances at the wild and sweet”, Johnny McCloud says. They aren't quite the story's last words, though. He then wishes he'd had a Kodak, so he could've captured Molly sitting on the steps in her blue and white dress. So memory stays with us all. 

NOTE: I wrote an essay on Leaving Cheyenne/Lovin Molly a couple of years ago. You can link to that here on this blog