THE DOWNBEAT BEAUTY OF JOHN HARVEY'S CHARLIE RESNICK

I've written a heartfelt appreciation of John Harvey, and his best-known character, Charlie Resnick on the occasion of the publication of the 12th, and apparently last, Resnick novel, Darkness, Darkness. You can find the piece at the Windmill Books website, here, and I'd suggest reading all the way to the end, and following the link to the wonderful John Coltrane version of Tadd Dameron's 'Good Bait', to which I refer in the text (Resnick prefers Eric Dolphy's version, by the way). Ave et vale, Resnick. 

UPDATE: The link above no long seems to work, so I've decided to post the original piece I wrote for Windmill Books below, along with the choice of the five best Resnick novels which I did at the same time, and whose link (in the post that follows this one) does appear to be working still....

 

THE DOWNBEAT BEAUTY OF JOHN HARVEY'S CHARLIE RESNICK

Darkness, Darkness is the twelfth, and last, of John Harvey's Charlie Resnick novels (though, in fairness, we thought the tenth, Last Rites, brought the series to an end back in 1998!). It is elegaic, but it's also fresh; as the discovery of a corpse takes the aging Resnick back to the miner's strike of 1984, a defining time for a Britain in transition, and especially so for Resnick's Nottingham. It is the genius of John Harvey that he is able to make the reader feel the turmoil of the time by focusing on the people around the crime, making the giant tragedy and the smaller one work hand-in-hand to create a powerful look back.

Harvey broke new, hard-boiled, ground with the first Resnick novel, Lonely Hearts, in 1989. Nine more followed, like clockwork, one each year. Their influence was immense. Resnick was the spark behind Ian Rankin's Rebus, Mark Billingham's Thorne, Graham Hurley's Faraday and Winter, and many more of our now best-loved detectives. He reclaimed Britain's mean streets for the sorts of people who walked them, and the sorts of criminals who preyed there. And it didn't hurt that, in Tom Wilkinson, the BBC found the perfect Resnick for the hugely successful adaptations of Lonely Hearts and Rough Treatment, for which Harvey did the screenplays.

There has never been a detective less superhuman, nor more human, than Charlie Resnick. Wilkinson understood instinctively that Resnick was defined by an essential loneliness. In many ways he was the antidote to Inspector Morse, trading the lofty spires of an idealised Oxford for Nottingham's damp grey streets. Morse had his opera, Resnick played classic jazz. Morse did cryptic crosswords, Resnick constructed monkey-puzzle sandwiches. Morse read poetry, Resnick enjoyed the shaky free verse of Notts County football club. Resnick showed the influence of American hard-boiled classics, of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe or Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op, but more crucially he was a direct descendant of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo's Swedish detective Martin Beck. Like Beck he is a loner forced to work in a team context. Like Sjowall and Wahloo, Harvey uses Resnick's stories to reflect on changes in society, and contradictions between appearance and reality (interestingly the Beck series was consciously planned to run for ten novels, just as Resnick originally seemed to be). Beck is an obsessive who finds his quest for solutions, for truth often at odds with the reality of his job. And with the reality of his life.

And this is where Harvey excels, because I can think of no novelist who's been better at using the story of the crimes being investigated to reflect on the personal situations of the people doing the investigating. The human dimensions of his stories remain unchanged, regardless of the setting, and there's a persistent quality which Michael Connelly once described as 'wistful' about them. They contain a mirroring of the human condition expressed through violence, and more tellingly through emotional pain, inflicted, suffered, repressed, endured. Few writers have used the framework of the crime novel more poetically.

It was through poetry that I first encountered John Harvey, more than 30 years ago when he published some of my poems in his excellent magazine, Slow Dancer. It took me a while to connect him with the author of a couple of fine stand-alone crime novels, Frame (1979) and Blind (1981), but by the time I began reviewing Resnick novels, I'd discovered John had also been one of the last of the great pulp novelists—churning out paperback originals at a peak rate of one per month. It was an apprenticeship that makes Darkness, Darkness his 102nd novel, more or less, counting those written by Thom Ryder, Terry Lennox, Jon Barton, James Mann and a handful of other pseudonyms. He wrote everything from biker adventures to teenaged stories of The Tempest Twins; from the novelisation of Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo to ten westerns inspired by Sergio Leone about a gunfighter called Hart the Regulator. I confess proudly that I assembled a complete set of them. And before writing this, I searched out a copy of Amphetamines And Pearls, the first of four Scott Mitchell detective novels, a pulpy precursor of Resnick, with much of the darkness but less of the jazz.

Reading Darkness, Darkness, I was reminded of a night about eight years ago when I bumped into John at the Borderline, where the American singer-songwriter John Stewart was playing on what obviously would be his last UK tour. Stewart's songs provided titles for a couple of John's pulp novels (and for my own blog), and as an encore he performed 'Mother Country', a song about a horse-breeder who's going blind and wants to ride his favourite horse one more time. Walking out, we shared our immense sadness, and the sense that Stewart himself was singing with the same knowledge we shared. And that is the quality John Harvey brings to this final Resnick novel, a finish not of melodramatic incident, but of honest and poignant reflection on the way life is, and the way we live it.

In 2011 John published Good Bait, a non-Resnick novel whose title comes from a classic Tadd Dameron jazz song. My favourite version is John Coltrane's on Blue Train, where the tune tries to escape itself, be free and happy, but can't quite shake its way out of the blues. That's how I see Charlie Resnick, and how I think he sees his life as he's lived it. As John Harvey has written it so well.

THE FIVE BEST RESNICKS

If you're coming to Darkness, Darkness as your first Resnick, I envy you, because you

have the whole series to work through. I'd go beginning to end, without waiting a year at a time for the first ten, then ten years for the next, but if you insist on the highlights, try these five, listed in order of publication:

1. Lonely Hearts (1989) The first, and still one of the best. Introduces and establishes his unique character in a novel that the Times called one of the 100 best crime novels of the century. It's the book where Harvey finally relaxed from his feverish pace of writing, and gave his characters and setting more depth, and the result was stunning.

2. Wasted Years (1993) In which a series of brutal robberies forces Charlie to face events from ten years before: an incident he'd tried to forget, and a marriage he'd lost.

3. Still Water (1997): Perhaps the best illustration of the way Harvey uses the criminal investigation to mirror the lives of his characters. A woman's body found floating in a Nottingham canal reminds Resnick of a similar killing that dragged him from a Milt Jackson concert many years before. And the nature of the sex crimes reflects the relationship problems of some of the detectives involved.
   
   
4. Last Rites (1998): In its own way more elegiac than Darkness, Darkness, as Resnick deals with two drug gangs involved in a turf war, and pursues an escaped murderer, and tries to protect his sister. It's a novel about the things love forces us to do, and about the loss of such love.
   
   
5. Darkness, Darkness (2014): Alone after the death of his partner Lynn, Resnick is presented with a thirty-year old murder which took place in the midst of the violent chaos of the miner's strike, forcing him to revisit those times while trying to solve the murder today.
   
   
   And if you have already read Darkness, Darkness, then treat yourself to at least one non-Resnick novel: In A True Light (2001), the story of Sloane, an art forger, which encompasses abstract expressionism, jazz, family relations, and a man finding himself all in one perfectly formed novel.

JOHN HARVEY'S GOOD BAIT

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

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

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

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

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

Good Bait by John Harvey
William Heineman £12.99 ISBN9780434021628

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

ARENA'S RE-BIRTH OF THE COOL

By a curious sort of syncopated synchronicity, since I had just read and written about Richard Williams' The Blue Moment, BBC4's Arena broadcast a film by Anthony Wall titled Cool, which attempted to trace the birth and growth of 'cool' jazz, and then trace its influence on everything else termed cool in the late 50s and early 60s.

The programme was lovely to watch, with extended passages of music ranging from Charlie Parker at his best to the Modern Jazz Quartet playing Bach. In the musical sense it was quite straight-forward, moving from be-bop to Antonio Carlos Jobim and Stan Getz. The programme seemed to dance around one obvious idea, which was that from Miles Davis' The Birth Of The Cool onward, the point may have been as much to create a jazz acceptable to a wider (read, white) audience as to explore wider avenues of music. It was almost literally an attempt to take Charlie Parker's music and sell it to the mainstream. I noted while writing about The Blue Moment that it was Bill Evans who was picked to write the liner notes for Kind Of Blue, and in the end it was Dave Brubeck, and Getz, not Davis or Coltrane who became the 'crossover' artists to the mainstream. The doc shows this clearly, as early as 1954 Time Magazine raves about cool jazz in California, appointing it the new capital, later they would back Brubeck in particular. The USIA would send Brubeck abroad, as they promoted the AbEx painters, to demonstrate the strength of American culture; the world loved it, but the government was reluctant, it seemed to send black artists abroad.

But by the time the bossa nova became dominant, you could argue the whole 'hip' era had floundered, and was about to be replaced by the rock counterculture. By the beginning of the JFK years, cool was the Rat Pack, Hugh Hefner's playboy with his jazz tapes, sports cars, and martinis, that sort of thing--very boring, mainstream hipness.

What were mainstream listeners hearing in the 1950s? My mother, for example, listened to the music of her childhood, ballads, and show tunes. My dad had a few records, The Ink Spots, Julie London, Lena Horne, the latter two likely as much for the way the singers looked on the covers as they way they sang. Oh yes, and Richard Rogers theme music from Victory at Sea! The birth of rock n roll in the 50s was a reaction to the blandness of this; the young audience did not turn to be-bop, nor to its cool successors. Be-bop itself was a challenge to the mainstream bands who had picked up and dominated jazz--an attempt to play music so creative it would be too difficult to copy.

And interestingly, that was the way jazz moved after the cool era: Coltrane, Roland Kirk, Ornette Coleman, Pharaoh Sanders et al challenging listeners again, and Miles electrifying his band and moving quickly from the post-Blue In A Silent Way to Bitches Brew, which combined rock sound with funky bottom and free jazz explorations. It wasn't music impossible, and led to jazz rock and eventually modern 'urban' music.

But in the wider sense of what cool jazz's influence on 'cool' society was, the programme was less sharply focused. The conflation of hip and cool, the hedging of the relation of either concept to mainstream society in general, reminded me of Matthew Sweet's programme on noir, which moved between pulp, hard-boiled, and noir as if all three meant the same thing. One problem was timing: the big influence on the abstract impressionist painters, for example, was be-bop; they should have set the shots of Pollock painting to Charlie Parker. It's Parker who's referenced in the Kerouac reading you hear; he made a record reading behind Steve Allen's piano, but his second was with Parker disciples Al Cohn and Zoot Sims. All white guys, note. That's where the hipsters were at the start of the 50s, and by the end of the decade, when Coltrane is playing with Miles, those hipsters are already part of the mainstream; their influence is always being diluted. When you watch the MJQ play Bach, you see how they're trying to get the longhairs in both 1950s senses of the word, it's impressive but it isn't challenging, which is what, by definition, the hipster was supposed to be. We may go back now and impute artistic importance to these musicians which they richly deserve, but it may be a greater leap of retrospective faith to see them as culture changers. In fact, they may have had a greater influence in Europe: though its obvious every time you look at Belmondo that's its the style, not the substance, which the French adore, and the style is far more James Dean than John Coltrane.

RICHARD WILLIAMS' BLUE MOMENT

Richard Williams has written an admirable history of the classic Miles Davis album Kind Of Blue, but what he is trying to do in this book is much more than that, in those efforts he is only partly successful. There is no doubt that the Davis sextet with both John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderly on saxes is one of the high points of 20th century music--and if it isn't the album right at the apex it probably signals the beginning of a period of frenzied change in musical energy, in New York, that may culminate with Coltrane at the Village Vanguard. That's food for another argument.

Williams tells the story of the record with precision and understanding. The use of both Wynton Kelly and Bill Evans on piano, and the racial undercurrents behind that. He may give somewhat short shift to Adderly's album Somethin' Else, with Miles, which is very much a precursor to Kind Of Blue and, as you might expect from Cannon, somewhat more engaging, but overall Williams is a very sympathetic portrayer of the people involved, he has a balanced and empathetic view of Davis, and he is accurate and telling in his analysis of the record itself.

What is harder to is to make the case for it as the most influential, even of Davis' own records. At least three times in his career, Davis changed the course of jazz, with Birth Of The Cool, Kind Of Blue, and Bitches Brew. Since Birth more or less led to Kind Of Blue, and since the revolution Bitches Brew sparked more or less fizzled out, to be replaced by a sort of return of hard-bop, you'd think it makes sense, until you consider In A Silent Way, which even Williams concedes may be Davis' greatest work. But this is head-of-a-pin kind of quibbling.

More important is whether Williams makes the case for the centrality of Kind Of Blue to his 'Blue Moment', whether there is an era which it can be said to encapsulate. He makes the case in one way; certainly the record reflects and sets the mood music for a certain sense of the 'hip' character of the late 50s, the Hugh Hefner ideal which would bleed into the Rat Pack kind of JFK glamour of the early 60s. Whether this fits in with Fellini or Antonioni I'm not so sure. In musical terms, however, Williams makes the case well, especially the influence of what you might call the Impressionist composers, Debussy, Ravel, Faure. You could argue this sort of jazz carried on those experiments, where modern classical music moved in another direction which was then carried on by free jazz. In the jazz world, George Russell and Gil Evans' influence is pervasive, and Williams makes the case so well you wonder whether some of the music he cites is obviously influenced by Russell far more than Miles himself. Trying to distill an era into one record is difficult, but with a few limitations, most notably the narrow range of influence jazz had even then, when it was at its creative peak, Williams does a fine job.

As a sidebar, while I was listening to Kind Of Blue, I re-read the original liner notes, written by Bill Evans. This struck me as a kind of condescension by Columbia; there is a piece to be written about the underlying tone of the (admittedly loving) commentaries written by white jazz writers about black jazz musicians in that era, but the choice of the one white musician (and Davis--and Adderly's--bands were almost always integrated) to actually explain the music seems a device to give it a certain 'respectability'.

Williams' other task it to trace the influence of Kind Of Blue, and here he is less successful. This is partly because it's hard to see it as the, or even a, main factor in the rise of rock bands like The Velvet Underground or King Crimson, and partly because those bands are in a large dead-in you might label 'art-rock', which Davis-influence or no, shows no organic flow from his music. That I'm no fan of the sub-genre may influence me somewhat here. Williams is better on the modern composers, like Terry Riley, but again, modern classical music followed a different path, before maybe ending up in a similar place--Kind Of Blue doesn't constitute a prime, direct source. Even ECM, whose music does bear a lot of direct connection to the record, started with a lot of musicians trying to be Russell, or Coltrane, or Bitches Brew Davis, before settling into that KOB groove (and of course Keith Jarrett, ECM's biggest seller, came through Davis' BB band, after Charles Lloyd's.

It's an engaging read: Williams writes well enough to avoid the Anorak Syndrome which infects so much jazz (and music) writing, and it's refreshing to see him trying to make the links between the various types of music he loves. That he almost manages to do that, convincingly, makes this book a success.

The Blue Moment by Richard Williams Faber £14.99 ISBN 9780571245062

IT'S THE MIND: THELONIOUS MONK AND THE IT JULY PLAYLIST

Back in 2000 I was having lots of those millennial best conversations. I recall moaning about Waterstones failing to find space for William Faulkner among their 100 best novelists of the 20th century, and countering that slip by noting how few British writers my top 100 contained (since Joyce, Yeats, Shaw, Heaney and Beckett are Irish, and Eliot American).

As the millennium began, I felt comfortable with the idea that the artistic artist apex of the twentieth century came either when the Miles Davis quintet included John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderly on saxes, or when the Coltrane quintet recorded with Roland Kirk, live at the Village Vanguard. Although the abstract expressionist artists, and indeed the beat writers, were more heavily influenced by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and the original stars of be-bop, and I was convinced that one night you might have found Kline or Pollock or Rothko or DeKooning tapping toes in the audience, alongside Burroughs, Ginsburg, Mailer, Paul Blackburn, and thus squash any claims Paris had to being the century's hub.

As the first decade of the new millennium reaches its close, it has become apparent to me that I was overlooking someone, Thelonius Monk, a feeling reinforced by listening to my birthday present from last March, the 29 November 1957 Carnegie Hall concert by the Monk Quartet with John Coltrane. The problem with Monk, when you're thinking in terms of lines of influence and development, is that he is so unique, completely idiosyncratic, that you dismiss him from the kind of widescale evaluations, in the same way that Ives, perhaps, might get sidelined in a ranking of 20th century composers. With Miles Davis you can point to three or four totally different types of music that grew out of what he did at different times; with Coltrane you can see a whole line of players following him. But Monk is doing his thing; it was influential, yes, but it was always Monk.

Sometimes I listen to Monk and think that his approach to every note, tangential, off-time, out of its academic place, is the perfect correlative to the atomic world, to non-Euclidian geometry, to particle physics, to quantum mechanics. I know that sounds pretentious, but it's true: it's as if Monk developed his music not out of logical progression from the music that came before, but from interpretation of the way the world was changing around the music. It is precisely the same feeling I see in the best of the abstract expressionist painters. The beauty of his pairing with Coltrane is to hear that most exciting and creative of sax players fitting within the Monk framework, which is never at right angles to anything, Monk as Kline perhaps, and Coltrane as Pollock, I don't know. Bud Powell is quoted in the album's notes as saying 'if I had Tatum's technique and Monk's mind, there would be no other piano players. Wait. Forget Tatum. If I had MY technique and Monk's mind, there would be no other piano players.' It's the mind.

You get a good picture of where Monk was in the years before this concert from the superb value 4-album collection on Avid, particularly on Monk Plays The Music Of Duke Ellington, in a trio with Oscar Pettiford and Kenny Clarke, where you can see his approach breaking down some of Ellington's greatest modern music. Sonny Rollins plays on two of the other three albums, though Max Roach on drums steals Brilliant Corners, and Ernie Henry's alto is fine too. The earliest album was 1952's Thelonious Monk, another trio with Art Blakey on drums (and Roach on a couple of tracks). Monk returned the favour in 1958, joining Blakey's Jazz Messengers on a record which gives you two more versions each of 'Evidence' and 'Blue Monk', both of which he plays at Carnegie Hall. Johnny Griffin on tenor would go on to play with Monk, and the fit is already obvious. I've always figured the Coltrane Village Vanguard disc for my desert island, but now I'm not so sure. At any rate, it's easy to imagine the cream of the New York scene making it to Carnegie Hall, to see that post-Thanksgiving show where the artistic elite could meet to say reet.

Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall (Blue Note 2005)
Thelonious Monk: Four Classic Albums (Avid Jazz 2008)
Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers with Thelonious Monk (Atlantic 2002)


IRRESISTIBLE TURNTABLES: the rest of July's playlist:

Larry Murray, Sweet Country Suite (Fallout Records) a reissue of a 1970s solo album by one of Hearts & Flowers. I saw this album once in a record shop in Glasgow in January 1973, and didn't buy it because I didn't want to lug it around Europe. I had never even seen another copy until I came across this disc in a shop on Berwick St. It's country rock when that still meant something, a little rougher-edged than the great Hearts & Flowers albums (both available on one CD) but without as many memorable songs. It has Buddy Emmons on steel guitar, JD Souther and the guys who were Swampwater (and became the mark-two Burritos) and best of all Clydie King, Sherlie Matthews and Venetta Fields, the Blackberries, singing backup.

Huckleberries, Incahoots (Huck 2005) I came across these guys busking on the High Street in Guildford, and they had Nate dancing in a matter of seconds. They do all sorts of string music, remind me a little of Canada's Stringband, but it's a glorious mix of bluegrass/folk/world that never has a soft centre, like so many celtic bands these days. They're at www.thehuckleberries.com

Tarika, Soul Makassar (Sakay 2004) This band from Madagascar features the exquisite Rasoanaivo Hanitrarivo writing and singing songs of great quality, but the track that really hooked me, in much the same way Third World grabbed me more than other reggae bands years ago, is a sweet version of 'Be My Baby', called here 'Malalako'.

Budapest Quartet, Mozart: Six Hayden Quartets and Six String Quintets (Columbia Legends 2003) This one's another kick in the pants for those who say government is the problem, since they are all recordings made in the 40s and 50s by the Library of Congress, so we owe Unlce Sam a vote of thanks for this and the Monk/Coltrane. It would be easy to link the 'Dissonant' quartet with modern jazz, and I'm sure it's been done before, but when you listen to these players approaching Mozart, you hear all sorts of possibilities. This is the kind of disc you can listen to when you wake up, while you work, while you read, while you think, and when you go to bed. And then start over again. The desert island is going to need more shelves.