NOTE: In November 2002 I wrote these two pieces. The first for the FT, combining two films from the London Film Festival; the second for the Guardian, an obituary of Motown Funk Brother Johnny Griffith, whose death came, sadly, just before the Funk Bros. documentary made its US debut. Neither piece ran, perhaps in the case of the first because there wasn't a year with a zero at the end to tag it to. A few months later I made a pilot for BBC Radio 6; the series was to be called This Is My Country, examining the musical roots of various American cities. I did the pilot about Detroit while all this was fresh in my mind. I'd conceived of it and proposed a half-hour show using song fragments; they insisted on an hour with complete songs, then passed on commissioning the series saying the show was too long. Go figure, BBC. The two articles follow: Happy Anniversary, Motown!
FOCUS ON MOTOWN AT LONDON FILM FESTIVAL
Of all the American cities identified with their music, and there are many, from Nashville to Seattle, Detroit may be the one whose sounds best reflect its character. Although we think automatically of Motown, currently celebrating its 50th anniversary, Detroit’s legacy extends far beyond Berry Gordy’s vision of pop perfection. Its music is tough, gritty, up-front and challenging, as much as product of its factories as automobiles were. It was that way before Motown came along and it still is a heady mix of black and white influences.
Detroit’s music was featured in two very different films which I first wrote about in 2002 at the London Film Festival: Curtis Hanson’s 8 MILE, starring the rapper Eminem and loosely based on his own life story, and STANDING IN THE SHADOWS OF MOTOWN, Paul Justman’s
vibrant documentary about the Funk Brothers, Motown’s too-anonymous studio band, whose diverse talents moulded the music produced by rock’s greatest hit factory.
For Hanson, whose seductive neon Los Angeles dominated LA CONFIDENTIAL, the star of 8 MILE was a seventies-film gritty Detroit itself, its presence hovering over every person and every action in the film. The impact of the city gives 8 MILE undoubted power, even for audiences unconvinced by rap music, or bored with the familiar story framework of show-business success sagas. Eminem’s character, Rabbit,
is an immigrant looking for work; Kim Basinger as his mother plays her southern trailer-park accent for all it’s worth. That’s important, because Detroit is a city of immigrants. They poured in from middle and southern Europe, even before Henry Ford’s production line sprang up on the River Rouge. Even the great depression couldn’t shut them down; poor whites from Appalachia and the south flooded north, seeking work. Years later, their voices would echo in the country-tinged refrain of Bobby Bare’s ‘Detroit City’: “I want to go home…”
The Europeans and the Appalachians were followed by blacks driven from the deep south by mechanical cotton pickers. Even before the Civil War, Detroit had been a haven for runaway slaves; the last stop before Canada on the Underground Railway. After World War II, as the big-band era died, Detroit’s urban sound coalesced around the electric blues of John Lee Hooker, originally from Clarksdale, Mississippi, and the small jazz combos playing in the city’s countless nightclubs. Berry Gordy’s first entrepreneurial effort, a jazz record store, failed, but back working on Ford’s production line, Gordy co-wrote a song for Jackie Wilson, just released from Lansing State Correctional Institute. Backed by local jazz musicians, including pianist Johnny Griffith, ‘Lonely Teardrops’ became a hit, and it gave Gordy ideas. He began producing records like the Contours’ ‘Do You Love Me’, melding sophisticated background music to pop tunes. That became Motown’s formula, and Gordy organised Motown with the precision of Ford’s assembly line. Writers, arrangers, singers, and musicians laboured in departments, fitting together the pieces of hits as accessible as Model Ts to the (white) American public.
Fifty years later, the world still hums the hits of the Supremes, Four Tops, and Temptations, but STANDING IN THE SHADOWS OF MOTOWN
rescues from obscurity the geniuses who made those songs, including Griffith, who sadly passed away the night of the film’s Detroit premiere (see his obituary, which I wrote at the time, below). It explores their roots in jazz and blues, and demonstrates the fertile creative atmosphere of The Snakepit, Motown’s studio built in Berry Gordy’s basement. The film’s defining moment dramatises the Detroit riots, which started in July 1967 after a police raid on an after-hours ‘blind pig’ drinking club. The riots left 43 people dead, and 14 square miles of urban destruction. Soldiers patrolled the streets. The black Funk Brothers shepherded their white colleagues home through the flames, but this staring in the face of repression and chaos meant the carefree music of Motown was changed forever. Soon Marvin Gaye produced Motown’s most political statement, and not coincidentally, “What Going On”was the first record to credit the house musicians individually.
Just as Motown and black American music influenced British rock, the British Invasion helped create a new Detroit rock sound. Post-Motown Detroit was tough rock, with an edge. Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels wore their Motown-influences proudly, but just as typical were the raw sounds of bands like Question Mark & The Mysterians (“96 Tears”), Bob Seger, or the MC5, house band for John Sinclair’s White Panther political movement. Detroit gave the world Alice Cooper, the early heavy metal band Grand Funk Railroad, and the proto-punk rock of Iggy Pop and the Stooges.
And when Motown met LSD, George Clinton’s doo-wop band, The Parliaments, were transformed into P-Funk, the spawn of Parliament and Funkadelic, where veterans of James Brown‘s backup band, most notably bassist Bootsy Collins, drifted into outer space.
One night, Berry Gordy packed up and moved to Los Angeles, taking the ultimate cross-over act, Michael Jackson, with him. The Funk Brothers went back to playing jazz clubs, and as sidemen for blues singers. But Detroit continued to innovate, everything from the disco of the Commodores in the 70s to Detroit Techno, the industry standard of 1980s dance. When I originally wrote this piece, America’s hottest rock band was White Stripes, a husband-wife duo from the Detroit suburbs who played at being urban brother and sister.
They owed a huge debt to Mick Collins, a singer-guitarist (no relation to Bootsy) one of whose bands, the Dirtbombs, fused garage music with Motown in ULTRAGLIDE IN BLACK, an audacious cover of Motown standards, Nirvana fronted by Stevie Wonder. Detroit can no more escape Motown than Motown could Detroit.
Eminem is often accused of garnering his popularity simply because he’s white, but he is far from a modern version of Vanilla Ice. 8 MILE presented a kinder, gentler Eminem, conspicuously friendly to gays, children, and even respectful to his trailer-park mom (Kim Basinger). But it firmly anchored rap in the roots of a community that gave the world its cars, and now gets nothing in return. It’s no coincidence 8 MILE features its own version of urban flames. Workers came to Detroit from all over the world, and their melting pot made and still makes powerful music. Though Motown deserted them, though they’re having trouble selling their cars, as Martha Reeves reminded us in ‘Dancing In The Streets’ you can't forget the Motor City. At least not its music.
JOHNNY GRIFFITH (1936-2002) OBITUARY
Few people will recognise Johnny Griffith’s name,
but his seductive piano opening to Marvin Gaye’s version of “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” is one of rock music’s most recognisable licks. Griffith, who has died aged 66, was a key member of the Funk Brothers, the Motown house band, who not only played but actually created much of the music for the greatest hit-making machine of all time.
Although it was a badge of rock snobbery to be able to drop the names of James Jamerson, generally regarded as rock’s finest bassist, or Benny Benjamin, the great drummer, the Funk Brothers generally laboured in obscurity. Ironically, Griffith, who had recently moved to Las Vegas, died back in his hometown of Detroit, of an apparent heart attack before the local premiere of a new documentary about the Funk Brothers, STANDING IN THE SHADOWS OF MOTOWN. The film, like an American BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB, helps rescue these virtuosi from anonymity, and received its British premiere last month as part of the 2002 London Film Festival.
Growing up in Detroit, Griffith received classical training, but seeing no opportunity for black classical pianists, he turned to jazz and blues. At 16 he was travelling with John Lee Hooker; later, his skill as a tasteful accompanist saw him hired by Sarah Vaughn and Dinah Washington; he also toured with then-gospel singer Aretha Franklin.
He had already played piano on Jackie Wilson’s “Lonely Teardrops”, co-written by Berry Gordy, when, in 1961, Gordy, a jazz aficionado who had gone bust running a jazz record store, lured him to Motown with the promise of a jazz recording contract.
True to his word, Gordy issued on his Workshop Jazz label two Griffith albums which are now collectors items. But Griffith was one of the few Motown studio musicians not contracted exclusively; as a ‘hired gun’ he played on such non-Motown hits as The Capitols’ ‘Cool Jerk’. At one point, Gordy paid him $100 a week to spy on Motown musicians who might be moonlighting; after Griffith continued to pocket the money without ever turning in any of his friends, Gordy tried to fire him, eventually settling for terminating his career as a spy.
It was as one of the Funk Brothers three keyboardists that Griffith’s legacy will endure. His elegant stylings often served as counterpoint to the ‘gorilla piano’ of the late Earl ‘Chunk of Funk’ Van Dyke, the group’s spiritual leader. But Griffith was just as much at home on the organ: that’s him on the Hammond B3 delivering the powerful opening of Junior Walker’s “Shotgun”.
The Funk Brothers included white musicians, and their collective reaction to Detroit’s racial turmoil in the Sixties can be heard best on Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On?”, the first album on which they received individual credits. They remained close even after Berry Gordy packed up one night and without warning moved Motown to Los Angeles, but as a unit the Funk Brothers ceased to exist until they were reformed for the film.
Griffith stayed in Detroit, playing jazz clubs, session dates, and touring
with, among others, guitarist Kenny Burrell, and he took over the keyboards in Muddy Waters’ blues band after Otis Spann’s death. He also served as musical director of a local radio station, and was involved in the founding of Detroit’s first black-run television station.
Only eight of the 13 Funk Brothers remained to participate in the film, and Griffith is the second of those eight, following drummer Richard ‘Pistol’ Allen, to have passed away since its filming was completed. The night Griffith died, the band went ahead with their performance at Detroit’s Uptown Palladium. “We celebrate his living by playing,” said percussionist Jack Ashford. Usually, during performances, Griffith and fellow keyboardist Joe Hunter would place a studio photo of Earl Van Dyke between them; their colleagues did the same with photos of the other deceased Brothers. The loss of Johnny Griffith may finally leave an unfillable seat in this greatest of rock bands.
Johnny Griffith, musician born July 10, 1936 Detroit
died November 10, 2002 Detroit
survived by his wife Delma, one son, two daughters, six Funk Brothers
I'll be guesting on the BBC Radio Five show Up All Night tonight, talking about Clint Eastwood and Gran Torino with host Dotun Adebayo. I assume if you're not an insomniac you can probably grab a listen via bbc.co.uk the next day. Meantime, you can see my review of the film here.
There's a certain resonance to Something In The Shadows now, in the light of first the HBO series Mad Men and then the Hollywood copycat Revolutionary Road, both of which try to address the restrictive boundaries of 1950s American society. The novel is arguably the best of Vin Packer's psychological thrillers, in which a small killing, of a cat, grows into a murder, but the real suspense in the story is the watching of Joseph Meaker's mind crumble. It's reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith, and therein lies part of the tale.
of Philip Jose Farmer appears in today's Guardian (link here). One thing to mention up top: I never used the term 'sci-fi' in my copy: they simply shortened science-fiction most of the times it appeared. The Guardian needed to save space, too, because the piece was longer than they'd asked for, but they ran it at virtually full length, for which I was grateful. As I wrote, I realised that I wanted to say more: partly because Farmer's work covered such a wide spectrum of the field of sf, but at the same time was internally so connected that it almost demanded deeper explanation, and partly because his life was a fascinating struggle to finally get the freedom to write full-time, so he could give free reign to this torrent of ideas. I had written a little about the downside of such financial pressure: that many of Farmer's books feel rushed, and the ideas flow faster than they can be developed fully, but that had to go in the end. I was reminded of Stanislaw Lem's famous essay on Philip K Dick.
But that year also saw Essex publish Farmer's A Feast Unknown, in which Tarzan and Doc Savage (called Doc Caliban, a fine literary conceit) indulge in a sexually-fuelled feud, manipulated by a secret society. Two sequels followed from Ace in 1970, with the sex toned down, because Essex had folded. Since Brandon books tended to be sold only in 'smoke shops' and inner city stores, they were unlikely to reach an sf target audience, and they were always going to be too weird for the strokers. Farmer's last Essex House book Love Song (1970) was published by Brandon.
one of the many Kilgore Trout titles mentioned in Vonnegut's work, but resented the fact that people originally thought he had written it (and it wasn't up to his standards) and also thought Farmer had made a lot of money off the book, which he hadn't. As it happened, Farmer also believed he was short-changed on his royalties by Ballantine Books (and Lester Del Rey, who edited a line for Ballantine, confirmed this belief), and I would have liked to include that in the chronicle of how hard it was for Farmer to make his living as a writer.
It only occurred to me when Law & Order UK hit its first courtroom scenes that the script, far from being extraordinarily close in content to the original US series, was actually an adaptation of an episode from one of the early years. A little research then revealed that producer/scripter Chris Chibnall had actually chosen 13 of the American shows to adapt, after watching some 150. (Wonder if the L&O version of the Sunny von Bulow killing will be one of them?--and if you're wondering what THAT'S all about, see here)
But the punch of L&O comes from the legal dilemmas, not the pacy cop show; and those dilemmas are often related to police procedure: the ultimate question of whether the law can be enforced and whether, if it is, it constitutes justice. The interesting thing is that ITV, in its advertising, has made the usual mistake of equating the two halves of the show with its title, but the title is actually backwards, since it's the police who maintain order, while the lawyers play with the law. Order and Law doesn't really flow, though.
is the toughest act to follow. George Dzundza's Max Greevy was the original older partner, and is probably closer to what Walsh ought to be; Orbach's brand of New York humour has been translated pretty well to Walsh's London, but I wonder if the character's backstory will be as convincing. Jamie Bamber is in the beefcake role as Chris Noth's Mike Logan, and can only hope a part in something like Mistresses (NOT the British Sex And The City, by the way!) lies at the end of this rainbow. He could aspire to Benjamin Bratt, who wound up sharing a motel room with Julia Roberts, but can we conceive of the British equivalent of that? The excellent Harriet Walter underplayed the role S Epatha Mackerson took over from Dann Florek, as if remembering that any woman playing a DI in charge has to channel her inner Helen Mirren.
Jill Hennessy was probably the best, though Carrie Lowell and Elizabeth Rohm both played off Waterston's stentorian character well. No one will ever look less like a DA than Angie Harmon, though, not even Agyeman, who, as Alesha Phillips (no relation to Trevor, probably) functions primarily to rush into the office with information she's gleaned from a file she should have read before the trial started, but decided to wait for better dramatic effect. Given that she made her name playing second-fiddle to Dr Who, this should be easy.
everyone from Philip Bosco to Ron Silver to Elaine Stritch to Tovah Feldshuh to Lorraine Toussaint's Shambala Green (whose hairdo Agyeman is trying to reprise in the photo left) played against Moriarty and Waterston, and were fine doing it. Patrick Malahide (great name--it would do for the character he played better than for him!) was a perfect foil for Steel: they might have even gone to the same school, but Steel has certainly not followed the career path to success. I wonder too if they'll find an equivalent for Carolyn McCormack's Dr Olivet; I'd bring her over to London explaining she'd come to work at the Tavistock Clinic and wound up working with the CPS.
In the wake of Melissa Leo's not unexpected but surely unjustified loss of a best-actress Oscar for her performance in Frozen River, my round-up of crime movies from the 2008 London Film Festival has been posted at Crime Time, here. As well as Frozen River, my favourite of the films I saw, crime or otherwise, last November, I also consider the Danish resistence drama Flame and Citron, 
which was recently on UK release, an Italian adaptation of the crime novel The Past Is A Foreign Country, the surprising Kala (The Secret) from Indonesia's Joko Anwar, Michael Winterbottom's Genova (surely the first film to include product placement for Ryan Air) which should be on release soon, and the Baader-Meinhof Complex, which I discussed in greater detail on Irresistible Targets when it was released last November (you can find that here).
wondered for a long time what Clint Eastwood might do as a valedictory film (in fact, in my 2001 Pocket Essential Clint Eastwood I guessed an adaptation of Fenimore Cooper's Prairie might be appropriate) and while Gran Torino may well not be his final film, it feels in some ways as if it ought to be. Clint has often been compared to John Wayne, and though one can take that comparison only so far, Gran Torino begins as if it intends to be Clint's True Grit, but winds up coming closer to being his version of The Shootist.
It's a world well delineated by the dark camera work of Eastwood regular Tom Stern, and even the sunshine takes on a flatness which suggests time past, or lost, certainly not the glimmering sunshine of, say, LA.
Mark Lawson somehow decided this film was set in Los Angeles, thus missing the titular metaphor: the Gran Torino was one of those big muscle cars which Detroit turned out in the era when Clint was becoming a star: now they are relics, just as Walt Kowalski is, and Clint himself is, big tough products of a world which accepted toughness, appreciated values of loyalty to family,tribe, and products manufactured in the country, and most of all didn't go all politically correct. Neither the Gran Torino nor Walt (and by implication, the image of Clint) have no real place in today's world, just as the city that produced them has lost its place, and the men who worked in that city's factories making things have fled to the suburbs while their jobs have fled to the very parts of the world that spawn the immigrants in this film.
When I went to revisit this review, in 2020, I found the link to Crime Time dead. So I republished it at IT, and you can link to that here .
Long before Tom Cruise mixed his first Cocktail for Elizabeth Shue, there was Stephen Marlowe's Valkyrie Encounter, published in 1978 (shown right is the New English Library 1979 edition). I'll confess I paid it no attention at the time; it wasn't until I wrote Marlowe's obit for the Guardian (you can find it here) that I went back and searched out the novel.
My review of Leslie Klinger's New Annotated Dracula is up at Crime Time (here) and I've also posted it below, followed by a slightly revised version of the review, mentioned in the current piece, of Klinger's New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, also published by Norton, which I wrote for Crime Time 44, way back in 2005.
NOTE: In November 2002 I wrote these two pieces. The first for the FT, combining two films from the London Film Festival; the second for the Guardian, an obituary of Motown Funk Brother Johnny Griffith, whose death came, sadly, just before the Funk Bros. documentary made its US debut. Neither piece ran, perhaps in the case of the first because there wasn't a year with a zero at the end to tag it to. A few months later I made a pilot for BBC Radio 6; the series was to be called This Is My Country, examining the musical roots of various American cities. I did the pilot about Detroit while all this was fresh in my mind. I'd conceived of it and proposed a half-hour show using song fragments; they insisted on an hour with complete songs, then passed on commissioning the series saying the show was too long. Go figure, BBC. The two articles follow: Happy Anniversary, Motown!
vibrant documentary about the Funk Brothers, Motown’s too-anonymous studio band, whose diverse talents moulded the music produced by rock’s greatest hit factory.
is an immigrant looking for work; Kim Basinger as his mother plays her southern trailer-park accent for all it’s worth. That’s important, because Detroit is a city of immigrants. They poured in from middle and southern Europe, even before Henry Ford’s production line sprang up on the River Rouge. Even the great depression couldn’t shut them down; poor whites from Appalachia and the south flooded north, seeking work. Years later, their voices would echo in the country-tinged refrain of Bobby Bare’s ‘Detroit City’: “I want to go home…”
rescues from obscurity the geniuses who made those songs, including Griffith, who sadly passed away the night of the film’s Detroit premiere (see his obituary, which I wrote at the time, below). It explores their roots in jazz and blues, and demonstrates the fertile creative atmosphere of The Snakepit, Motown’s studio built in Berry Gordy’s basement. The film’s defining moment dramatises the Detroit riots, which started in July 1967 after a police raid on an after-hours ‘blind pig’ drinking club. The riots left 43 people dead, and 14 square miles of urban destruction. Soldiers patrolled the streets. The black Funk Brothers shepherded their white colleagues home through the flames, but this staring in the face of repression and chaos meant the carefree music of Motown was changed forever. Soon Marvin Gaye produced Motown’s most political statement, and not coincidentally, “What Going On”was the first record to credit the house musicians individually.
And when Motown met LSD, George Clinton’s doo-wop band, The Parliaments, were transformed into P-Funk, the spawn of Parliament and Funkadelic, where veterans of James Brown‘s backup band, most notably bassist Bootsy Collins, drifted into outer space.
They owed a huge debt to Mick Collins, a singer-guitarist (no relation to Bootsy) one of whose bands, the Dirtbombs, fused garage music with Motown in ULTRAGLIDE IN BLACK, an audacious cover of Motown standards, Nirvana fronted by Stevie Wonder. Detroit can no more escape Motown than Motown could Detroit.
but his seductive piano opening to Marvin Gaye’s version of “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” is one of rock music’s most recognisable licks. Griffith, who has died aged 66, was a key member of the Funk Brothers, the Motown house band, who not only played but actually created much of the music for the greatest hit-making machine of all time.
True to his word, Gordy issued on his Workshop Jazz label two Griffith albums which are now collectors items. But Griffith was one of the few Motown studio musicians not contracted exclusively; as a ‘hired gun’ he played on such non-Motown hits as The Capitols’ ‘Cool Jerk’. At one point, Gordy paid him $100 a week to spy on Motown musicians who might be moonlighting; after Griffith continued to pocket the money without ever turning in any of his friends, Gordy tried to fire him, eventually settling for terminating his career as a spy.
with, among others, guitarist Kenny Burrell, and he took over the keyboards in Muddy Waters’ blues band after Otis Spann’s death. He also served as musical director of a local radio station, and was involved in the founding of Detroit’s first black-run television station.
California Fire & Life, which I reviewed way back in 1999 for Crime Time 2.6 (number 18 if you're counting in decimals). The Power Of The Dog was one of the best books of 2005, a major novel that deserved mainstream attention. Since then he's published two well-crafted suspense novels, The Winter Of Frankie Machine (which Michael Mann is filming, starring Robert De Niro, for release next year) and The Dawn Patrol (which I reviewed last October for Crime Time, you can find that here), strong on characterization and setting, which I've compared elsewhere to T. Jefferson Parker's consistently successful Orange County stand-alones. But if Winslow has been strong on Californian background, it is nothing compared to this brilliant love-note to 1950s Manhattan.
when it was the center of the known universe, and when anything was possible. Winslow does as fine a job as anyone I've read at conveying the real feel of the era: if you've been watching Mad Men on television, you need to go back a few years before the really modern stuff started to take hold, before the fabric of life itself started to change. It's wonderfully evocative, while at the same time hinting that the betrayals and twists of the worlds of politics and spying were somehow part and parcel of the new world which was coming.
when pro football began to slip into the nation's consciousness to replace baseball. Although Winslow makes a couple of sporting errors (Jim Parker, not Joe; and New York wouldn't be talking about Mantle and Maris together in 1958, as Maris was in Kansas City) they're not serious (of course, not everyone is a sports pedant, luckily for them. I'd noticed a couple of baseball anachronisms, and a train-route problem, in the proofs of The Given Day, but according to Dennis Lehane they were caught before the book went to press) I hope they were corrected when Arrow reissued the book last year. The audience that lapped up Mad Men, which was enough for The Mendes Family to hack up Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road on their behalf, ought to lap this up too. 
It's Yates' era, but it's dealing with the Manhattan the characters in RR left behind. In fact, Winslow nails Yates' dilemma when Walter mulls over the impending death of the Manhattan bar.
Another of the lost Crime Time reviews has resurfaced, T. Jefferson Parker's The Fallen. You can find it here. Parker manages to do something different with each book, while continuing to draw a vivid and dark portrait of his Orange County settings, as if this were the modern version of LA in the Forties.
before I got on a plane for Tampa and the Super Bowl, which I was broadcasting for the BBC. What was difficult was carrying it! My main regret was the proof copy was so big I didn't bring it with me; the notes I'd taken had stopped being comprehensive as I got more and more caught up in its many-layered story, eventually I was just jotting down some of the best lines and my admiration of the way he made the structure work. The novel is another quantum leap for a writer who'd already made one such jump, from his Kenzie and Gennaro books to Mystic River; it's an historical novel centered on the Boston police strike of 1919. It's also his first novel in five years, and worth the wait; I'd say it falls somewhere between Mystic River and E.L. Doctorow. It's a risky book too, because Lehane's stock as a 'crime writer' has never been higher, and though the novel is set among the police, and a corrupt police lieutenant is a great villain, worthy of any crime drama, the parameters of the story go far beyond that, to issues of race and class, immigration and melting pots, of unions and management, of government control and government's purpose, and of baseball.
As it turned out Lehane had been at the game too (he actually met his wife at a Super Bowl party!), so we talked football and Bruce Springsteen's halftime show for a while, and noted how this rain seemed to be washing away all trace of the game from the area. He'd just finished with the annual writer's conference he runs at Eckerd College, where he did his own degree in writing; he doesn't spend much of his time in his native Boston anymore, living most of the year in St. Pete with his wife, who's an opthamologist there, and doing his writing in a downtown office. Lehane looks like a character from one of his Boston books, and sounds like it too, so I ask him about his time as a student at Eckerd, which must have been a big change from Boston.
My clock was from the 1918 World Series to Ruth's sale to the Yankees, and the police strike was the story contained within that container. It's the kind of thing you rarely see done on TV, because it's hard to follow one big story, there's too much indulgence, it's what stopped Twin Peaks, say, from being as great as it could've been. But the story has to stay true to its spine. I'd write stuff for The Wire that I'd love and at the story meetings they'd say 'that's great, but how does it pay off to the ending?', and they were right.
For Lehane it's William Holden as Pike Bishop, in The Wild Bunch, saying 'let's go'. I'd always been more partial to Warren Oates' reply: 'why not?', but no, Lehane said, 'Holden's line is action, and Oates' is reaction'. 'Nilhilstic reaction,' I said, 'which is why I liked it'. 'But it's 'let's go' that defines the movie, and them,' he said, and thinking about it, he was right in an American hsitorical sense, even if Oates' line seems more purely Peckinpah, a signal of change, perhaps. 'Did you know,'Lehane asked, 'that Peckinpah wrote a whole scene for that, that they told him to cut, and he shot so little usable that 'let's go' was basically all that was left.' 'So he didn't start out minimalist, like you, he was just edited that way?' I said. There is a sense sometimes that big stories demand their own space, and in The Given Day it seems that Lehane has used no more space than that story demands. It's a major achievement.
Another seeming relic from the Crime Time vault (we could have a show called Crime Time Team, uncovering lost reviews!), but this review of Walter Mosely's Cinnamon Kiss actually appeared first in CT48! Anyway, it has just been posted on the CT site, here. Bill Clinton made Mosely a household name (and pimped Dennis Lehane and Stephen Hunter too), but Bubba Bills' mojo didn't carry over through the eight years of the Bush regime. Maybe Barack can bring him back, though I wonder if a great Chicago writer like Eugene Izzi might be due for an Obama-boost too?
My review of John Grisham's The Appeal, another of those discovered in the vaults of Crime Time when the magazine went to internet only, has been posted on the website, you can link to it here. It's also timely again because the UK paperback was released in November. That's the cover of the original US edition pictured right, which is much better at conveying the nature of the book than either of its British counterparts.
