CLAUS VON BULOW, THE MALE GAZE, THE LAWYER AND LAW & ORDER

Seeing his obituaries this week reminded me I met Claus Von Bulow once. It was almost exactly 20 years ago, in July 1999, at the annual Spectator garden party, at the offices in Doughty Street, back when Boris Johnson was the editor and I was writing the occasional outre review for the estimable Mark Amory, the books editor. As always, it was crowded and warm and the champagne was flowing. I found myself in a group with someone I knew and two other men, one of whom was Bulow. It was all pleasant enough, in a sort of dismissive English upper-class way. Then a woman walked past, attractive with a rather large chest. "Look at those tits," Bulow said, or words to that effect. And a few minutes later, when the same woman walked past again, he called her over, and pointed to me. "My friend here was very complimentary about your breasts, my dear," he said.

I blushed, and stammered some sort of denial, and while he was being charming to the woman I turned to my friend and said "He did it."I did not hang around him much longer; oddly enough I later spoke with the woman, explained, presented my theory as to Sunny Bulow's murder, and we wound up going out for dinner a few weeks later. Nothing came of it, but I thought of her a few years later when David Cameron came to prominence. She did PR for Carlton, as did Cameron, Cameron and Boris were both Bully Boys from the Bullingdon Club, and it occured to me at that point that might have been why she was at the Spectator party. I haven't written for the Speccie in a while; in fact I believe the last party to which I was invited was the one of 7 July 2005, which was cancelled after the bombings at Kings Cross.

There's no need to rehash the case now; but that night it seemed clear to me that 'von' Bulow was a perfect fit for at least one portion of the crowd at a Spectator party. That kind of exclusive club person who's distinctly aware of his own distance from the rest, somewhat creepy if you weren't impressed by what passed for charm. I could see where he would be entertaining, how he'd be invited to parties even without the notoriety. But the notoriety made him irresistible; hosts using him just as he was using them.

It's interesting that his attorney who won him a second trial was Alan Dershowitz, whose book Reversal Of Fortune formed the basis of the movie. Jeremy Irons won his Oscar for that one in large part for being able to project ambiguity, but there was a more interesting version of the murder made as an episode of Law & Order, series 4 episode 5, called 'Black Tie' (1993). It is basically the same insulin-based murder case, but the sexes of victim and suspected killer have been reversed.

The victim is the husband, the accused is the wife, who despite her protestations of being blase about their separate lives, knew her husband was planning to divorce her for his mistress. It presents the issues clearly, most importantly Dershowitz's main point was that evidence obtained by investigators hired by the children had no right to search, as they were acting as de facto agents of the police. The Law & Order casting was perfect: Caroline Lagerfelt was her icy best as the wife; the amazing Viveca Lindfors was the maid who suspects foul play, and Beverly Johnson was good as the mistress. John McMartin, whose face you would recognise, is the family lawyer, and Jeffrey DeMunn plays the Dershowitz figure: a law professor whose recurring part on L&O was as the 'disinterested' lawyer who is always hired by rich clients and proceeds because he allegedly is pursuing points of law.

DeMunn is an elegant, sharp-edged actor, with an intense gaze that can make him seem haughtily detached; he and Lagerfelt made a good pair. In fact,  Dershowitz has been remarkably well-served on screen, with Ron Silver playing him in Reversal, all noble energy, more private eye than law professor, and Evan Handler in The People vs OJ Simpson perhaps not quite so flattering, but very small-town (Harvard) academic. That's interesting, once you throw DeMunn into the mix, because not by their actors but by their clients you shall know them.

MICHAEL CONNELLY'S TRUNK MUSIC: MY SPECTATOR REVIEW 20 YEARS ON

Tonight I will be interviewing Michael Connelly at Waterstones in Piccadilly, to celebrate publication of his 30th novel, The Late Show, which features a new main character, LAPD night shift detective Renee Ballard. As I prepared for the interview I realised that I wrote my first review of Connelly 20 years ago. The novel was Trunk Music (his fifth Harry Bosch novel, and his sixth overall) and the review was published in the Spectator. It was, I think, his first major review in this country. Not long after that, I met Michael when he was reading in Melbourne, Florida, and I've been lucky enough to stay in touch, and to be asked to write an afterword to his collection of journalism, Crime Beat. So I thought I'd reprint that first review, from the Spectator, 8 March 1997. I also discovered that Connelly was mis-spelled throughout, and I've finally corrected that. One line from the close of the review was used as a blurb on any number of Michael's later books, which more than made up for the typo!

THE BEST FROM AMERICA

TRUNK MUSIC

by Michael Connelly

Orion,£16.99, pp.375

The Los Angeles inhabited by LAPD detective Hieronymous “Harry” Bosch resembles the paintings of his Flemish namesake. Horrors lie underneath the surface of a garden of earthly delights. The classical gives way to the modern; Trunk Music, Michael Connelly’s fifth Bosch novel, is also the first post-OJ police novel; the ghosts of Judge Itoh and Johnnie Cochrane are never far from the thoughts of cops like Bosch, nor from Bosch’s real Nemeses: lawyers, politicians, and police administrators.

When the body of soft-core porn video-maker Tony Aliso is found in the trunk of his car with two .22 shells in his skull, on a hill overlooking a concert in the Hollywood Bowl, it appears to be a classic mob hit (“trunk music”). The trail leads Bosch quickly to Las Vegas, and to an apparent solution. It also leads him back to a woman who betrayed him, in the very first Bosch novel, The Black Echo. The situation may seem old hat but Connelly makes it work by constantly confounding your expectations as he finds new angles to pursue. His stories have more twists and turns than Mullholland Drive, but they never divert you from where they should be going. Because the murder is only part of the story, the rest is Harry Bosch, his character, and his conflicts with authority, the forces of control whose toes he inevitably steps on. “Who polices the police who police the police?” is a favourite Bosch line.

Character is action, said Fitzgerald, and the way Connelly gets to the core of the situation through Bosch suggests the genre’s best writers. If Bosch resembles Hammett’s Continental Op, a lone wolf who’s honest in a corrupt world, the woman who betrayed him is his Brigit O’Shaugnessy. Trunk Music also recalls Chandler’s relishing of the sleazy Hollywood milieu and his use of Las Vegas as a contemporary Bay City, where respectable people go to be bad, and bad people go to help them. The hothouse corruption of Aliso’s wife and the deserted settings in the Hollywood hills smack of Chandler at his best.

There is no new ground broken in Connelly’s prose style, but he writes with sensitivity to nuance, the kind of undercurrent often missed in conversation. He is particularly good in the interplay of verbal and psychological warfare. This was shown best in The Last Coyote (1995) , where Bosch fences with the police psychologist who must decide if he is fit to return to duty after he has assaulted his chief, the wonderfully named Harvey “98” Pounds (as in the American equivalent of 7 stone weakling). 

Bosch uses his suspension to investigate the murder of his mother, a prostitute, who gave him his name because she had no father’s name to use. There is more than a hint of James Ellroy in the pursuit of this case, which leads to revelations of Chinatown-like corruption. Although he lacks the innovative prose fire of Ellroy, Connelly has the skill to create a powerful new story out of familiar materials to create a new story with its own power.

After The Last Coyote, Connelly changed gears with The Poet (1996), a serial killer novel which is interesting, but hampered by the use of a reporter as its protagonist. The journalist, oddly, lacks the psychic empathy to the killer that the cop may have, the kind of feeling for criminals that Bosch has. The Poet, of course, became a best-seller in America. Trunk Music marks Bosch’s return, and lives up to the high standard of The Last Coyote. This is the strongest crime series being written in America right now, and Trunk Music gets an unqualified recommendation.

MICHAEL CONNELLY'S THE CROSSING

Mark Billingham and I discussed The Crossing on the second edition of The Crime Vault Live podcast (you can link to that here); we both loved it. Mark said he thought Connelly was the most consistent crime writer in America. It was funny, because I said pretty much the same thing, that Bosch was the strongest series being written by anyone, but that was when I first reviewed Connelly in the Spectator more than 20 years ago. They used that quote as a blurb on a number of his books. What's amazing is that he's maintained that level of quality for such a long time.

This one is a Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller novel; Bosch has lost his job on the LAPD, as detailed in the previous Bosch novel, and Haller is representing him in his wrongful dismissal suit. But Haller also has a client named Da'Quan Foster, who's accused of a particularly violent home-invasion rape and murder, of an LA sherrif's wife. Although the state has DNA evidence they claim links Foster to the crime, he insists he's innocent. And Haller, who's not always worried about whether his clients are innocent or not, for some reason believes him, and wants Harry to check it out.

Bosch isn't ready to cross to the dark side, as it were, risking the severance of all his ties with his colleagues and friends. But if Haller's aim is to clear his client, Harry's aim is always to get at the truth. And when he finds an expensive watch case with no watch, he starts to wonder where the truth might lay. Relentlessly, painstakingly, Bosch breaks down the case bit by bit, the pieces slowly taking shape into something coherent, and very dangerous.

Nobody writes police procedurals as well as Connelly. You don't have to have followed Bosch for the quarter of a century he's been doing this; you don't need to know his past and have deep background to understand his character. Connelly's skill is that he writes as a reporter, and he gives you the details you need not just to follow the plot, but to understand the characters, and at his best, as he is here, you find that understanding melds with the understanding of the story.

Harry and Haller are half-brothers; their daughters are the same age, and will be going to the same college, another sort of crossing. As is Harry's forced retirement, and perhaps his personal life, though I don't want to risk a spoiler there—long time readers know better than to expect romantic happiness for Bosch. Mark and I discussed the character, with Mark saying he now sees Titus Welliver, who plays Bosch in the excellent Amazon series, when he's reading. But my Bosch is different. I've always seen, right from the start, someone more like Hammett's Continental Op, crossed perhaps with Gene Hackman, the one from Night Moves maybe. He's as good as they get, and that's because Michael Connelly is as good as it gets.

The Crossing by Michael Connelly

Orion, £19.99 ISBN 9781409145523

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

MC SQUARED: MICHAEL CONNELLY & ME, THE WATERSTONE'S INTERVIEW

It's always a pleasure to see Michael Connelly; Friday night I had a privilege to interview him in front of a sell-out crowd at Waterstone's Piccadilly. I had done something similar at the Prince Charles cinema a couple of years ago, but in this somewhat more intimate atmosphere, I felt a more relaxed approach worked even better, and with luck everyone (except those who didn't get to ask their question from the floor) left happy. I know I did.

The construction was simple: I asked questions primarily about two subjects: his latest book, The Gods Of Guilt, and the upcoming Bosch television series, the pilot of which just finished shooting and is being prepared for Amazon's direct broadcast service. I let those two topics take us wherever Michael wanted to go, and then opened the floor to many questions, very interesting and covering a broad range of Michael's career.

Introducing him, I reflected back on nearly twenty years of knowing Michael, since I wrote a review of Trunk Music for the Spectator (calling Bosch the strongest series being written) and then met him a few months later at a reading in Melbourne, Florida. I was lucky enough to write an afterword for Crime Beat, a collection of his journalism, and mentioned my perception of Michael having a journalist's eye for detail, and the meaning beneath, along with the rare ability to detach, and see things clearly, while still maintaining empathy and compassion. To me that's what marks his books, beneath their hard-boiled shell.

I also recounted how, when meeting Michael for lunch in Tampa the day before the Super Bowl I was there to broadcast for the BBC, I discovered he was already credentialed for the press center. When we were sitting there Dick Stockton, a well-known American announcer, yelled 'Hey Mike' and came running over, and just as I was impressed he remembered me so well, ran right past to embrace Connelly, who, I discovered, has a devoted following among NFL players and coaches. I also mentioned that he is the only person I know who has thrown out the first pitch in two different major league parks: the Rays, where he lives in Tampa, and, last summer, at Yankee Stadium. The sight of Michael in Yankee pinstripes was something I admired against my better instincts as a Boston Red Sox fan, but admire it I did nonetheless.

A couple of points stood out for me from the discussion. I started with the difference between Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller, putting it to him that Bosch was driven by justice, and Haller was driven by a chauffeur. This may a quip that gets repeated (not least by me, as I've already done it once!).

I also asked about the way Gods Of Guilt turns Mickey Haller into more of a detective than a lawyer, and Michael explained how he wanted a story driven by Haller's need to find the truth because he feels guilty he may have let a former client down. He also mentioned how Haller's standing with his daughter is at an all-time low when the book begins, and he's driven to get one right, for her sake too. He explained nicely the parallels between Haller and Bosch and their daughters, reflecting back to his own daughter, and his empathy for the feelings being a part-time father might engender.

We then talked about Bosch, the series, and the relative amount of control he's had (working with co-producer and writer Eric Overmeyer, a veteran of Homicide, The Wire, and Treme). This was particularly crucial in the casting of Titus Welliver as Bosch. Welliver has had some excellent supporting roles, in Deadwood and The Good Wife on TV I've seen, as well as in Gone Baby Gone, The Town, and Argo in cinema. Michael talked about the casting process, and how they were lucky to get Welliver at the last minute. He also mentioned Welliver is a Connecticut boy; turns out we were both born in New Haven, exactly ten years apart, to the day. My feeling is that Welliver will be able to convey Bosch's obsessive drive, despite the fact that, as Michael pointed out, the hardest thing to transfer from writing to film is the internal conflict.

The casting also presented another dilemma. Bosch has aged in real time during the series (unlike, say, Spenser, who remained a Korean War veteran well into the new millennium) and with Welliver they would have to play him in his mid-40s. Financial constraints meant they would be setting the show in contemporary LA, which meant Harry needed a new back-story (gone would be the Vietnam war, for example). So choices were made: Jerry Edgar would be his partner, Harvey '98' Pounds would appear, but in a slightly different role, and the family issues, which are so important, would be lost.

Finally, Michael made an important point about his work habits. He defines himself as a writer: he may an element of creative control over the Bosch series, but that doesn't mean he is going to become a producer. Between the filming, and the tour for Gods Of Guilt , he confessed he hadn't written much, and it was making him nervous. Connelly defines himself, in part, by his work ethic. To be a writer, you have to write, he said, and that's what I am. That is what he does as well. And does it as well as anyone in the field. By the time you read this, Michael will likely be back to his trade. Until next spring, if and when the LA Dodgers offer him the chance to throw out the first pitch.

NOTE: Photo of Michael and me at the Waterstone's interview taken by and c. Ayo Onatade for Shotsmag Confidential.

ELLIOTT CARTER: AN APPRECIATION

I remember going to the 80^th birthday concert for Elliott Carter, at the Albert Hall, and thinking how lucky I was because there might not be another chance to see the man who through much of my lifetime I thought of as the greatest living composer. That was in 1988. Carter has died, at 103, and it's immensely sad because I always think of him as embodying the greatest impulses of the modern era—an artist who managed to express the 20th century in its own musical language, but in a way that would be, ultimately, comprehensible in terms of the previous era. That he continued doing this into the 21^st century was almost as remarkable.

Almost twenty years after grabbing that 'last chance', in 2006 I went to one of the Get Carter events at the Barbican, and Carter, now 98, was there again. Some of the music being played was old, but some was new, and just as enthralling, challenging, and satisfying as anything he'd written. I can't think of another artist who continued producing quality work that late into his life; De Kooning's late paintings don't have the same force as the early ones (and there are the inevitable questions about their provenance). Eubie Blake was still playing in his 90s, but not composing. Carter's final composition was finished just two months ago, and now he has died, aged 103, not far shy of another birtnhday.

I'm sure I came to Carter's music through Charles Ives. Just as Carter nearly spanned the Twentieth Century, he was also a living bridge to Ives, whom he discovered as a youngster in New York. Ives wrote a recommendation for Carter's application to Harvard. I once wrote about Ives, in the Spectator, and said he had a 20^th century mind trapped in a 19^th century soul—and what drew me to Carter, I think, was the sense I had, before I had even tried to think these things out, that Carter's mind and soul were deeply in tune with my times.

At college, I had a couple of Carter records, with lovely simple psuedo-surreal jacket designs on Nonesuch. One of them, the 1952 Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello and Harpsichord (you can link to it here) was one of the two I played most nights when I was going to sleep (the other was Miles Davis' Bitches Brew--and it occurs to me as I write this that I felt much of the same awareness in Miles, Monk, or Coltrane that I did with Carter) which did not necessarily endear me to my roommates, even after I closed the door. I'm listening to it now, and I understand better now what it was then that appealed to me, on a deep and instinctive level. In one sense it's post-modern, about the instruments themselves, and their relations. But underneath the conflicts between the sounds, the timings, the essence of each individual, there is also a coming together, a way of knitting the chaos together, that to me brings all of modern life into focus, into perspective, into a sense of being something we can cope with and celebrate.

That sense becomes more and more profound in Carter's later work—especially as he moved to larger ensembles. I sometimes feel his status worldwide was less than it might have been because he was seen as a 'chamber' composer, as if the absence of a series of symphonies somehow lessened the impact of his music. But his major period is generally thought to have begun with the Concert For Orchestra, in 1969, and among my favourites of his work are the awesome A Symphony Of Three Orchestras and the Double Concerto for Harp and Piano, whose scale of ambition ought to be enough for anyone.

Carter is always the composer I suggest when people say they don't 'get' 'modern' music. There was a fantastic South Bank Show back in the 80s, in the days before contrived talent shows, house-selling, and cooking replaced serious work on commercial TV. It was made by Alan Benson, and linked carefully Carter's music to the tradition, provided signposts for hearing it as such. Seeing it performed often might accomplish the same thing: where the instruments might be arranged across the stage, and even regroup to illustrate what they up to. That he was perhaps better appreciated in this country than in America is interesting; Carter had many champions, but none so effective, or with the status in his own country, as Oliver Knussen here, and Knussen's conducting of Carter's work shows the profundity of his understanding of it.

It's funny. I began writing this feeling sad, wanting to mark the passing of not only a great man, but an amazing creative span, a century of artistic progress in an age not always committed to that. But as I listen to those four instruments engaged in their interactions, I find it impossible to be sad. Just as it did when I was young and looking to clear my addled brain, Carter's music seems to be recognising, and then unravelling mysteries. It is truly a thing of wonder, and though he will be missed, this music will live on, and speak to future generations about our times as profoundly as Mozart or Beethoven do about theirs.

MICHAEL CONNELLY'S BLACK BOX

Michael Connelly is one of those few writers whose books I feel compelled to devour as soon as they appear, and it was somewhat chilling to realise that this has been the case almost since his first, The Black Echo, was published some twenty years ago. Since then, Harry Bosch has featured in seventeen novels, not always as the lead character, but he is the lead in the The Black Box, which is the eighteenth, and which is set, not by coincidence, in 1992, to mark the anniversary of the first book.

Its set in the present, but the cold crime Bosch investigates is a case he had drawn twenty years before, the murder of a Danish photo-journalist in the midst of the Rodney King riots. The chaos facing the LAPD at that time meant Bosch couldn't delve fully into the killing at the time, and no one else did either. But the characteristic that most defines Bosch is his desire to bring justice to those who've been denied it, so he begins retracing the steps his two-decades younger self took. He's trying to unravel two mysteries: who killed Anneke Jespersen, and why.

Soon it becomes apparent that Jespersen wasn't collateral damage of the LA riots, and the trail Bosch then follows leads back not only to the LA of that time, but to the first Iraq war. The beauty of what might be considered a story-telling 'gimmick' is that it fits perfectly not only with the situation Connelly has created (Bosch on the Open Unsolved Unit) but also with the character which he has built so carefully and thoroughly over the past two decades. Even when the settings or situations seem unlikely, his Bosch remains a person who has sometimes grown and sometimes not over the years.

This paradox is probably the best part of the novel—as always, Harry cannot resist going off alone, doing what he thinks is right, and overlooking or sometimes not even being aware of the consequences. Of course, this is more perilous when you're a single father with a teenaged daughter, but it also applies when Bosch tries to do something thoughtful for his new girl-friend, psychologist Hannah Stone, and it winds up bouncing back to bite him professionally, and quite possibly on a personal level as well.

Connelly has gone back in time in other ways too. Bosch tends to be most interesting when he has a corporate foil (remember Harvey '98' Pounds?) which was what his new boss, Lt. Cliff 'Tool' O'Toole provides. It puts added tension into virtually all Bosch's decisions—on top of his added vulnerability with retirement staring him in the face. Throw in an inscrutable IAD detective on his case, and Bosch faces problems inside the department which are possibly harder to solve that a twenty year old murder. But of course, once Harry uncovers the 'Black Box' at the heart of the case, he will move forward to discover the truth. The finish is more action thriller than some, but the beauty of it is that again it recalls Bosch's part—the Vietnam experience which was such a shadow over the early Bosch novels.And it ends with perhaps the finest piece of self-examination we've yet received from Harry.

Music has always been a part of Bosch's story too, and in this novel, along with a huge nod to Art Pepper (as you'd expect, since the alto player represents the essence of Harry's dark and solitary LA soul) Connelly gets in plugs for younger jazz artists: Michael Formaek, Danny Grissett, Gary Smulyan, Seamus Blake, and Grace Kelly (not the princess). So now I'll have to check them out.

Speaking of Pounds, it wasn't quite twenty years ago that I reviewed Connelly's Trunk Music, in which he is the victim, for the Spectator, and said this was the finest detective series being written in America. Nothing Michael Connelly has written since then has led me to change my mind, and The Black Box once again confirms it.

The Black Box by Michael Connelly

Orion Books, £18.99, ISBN 9781409134312

Note: this review will also appear in Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

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

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

ELLROY'S CURSE: THE SPECTATOR REVIEW

My review of James Ellroy's autobiographical The Hilliker Curse appears in this week's Spectator; you can link to it here. It was a short-piece shortened even further for the space limitations of the slot (an unexpected change in typeface), so I've included the bits cut from it below. Ellroy's curse apparently also extends to review headlines, as the Spectator turned Hilliker into Hillicker, a typo Ellroy himself might enjoy.

It's not a great book, but it is involving. The basic problem is that Ellroy the Demon Dog and Ellroy the sensitive confessor are often fighting each other for control. He's far too self-aware to not realise this, but he can't help but relish the persona he created and sold to the reading public (which is not to diminish in the slightest the real achievement of his fiction, and his earlier memoir). He's too honest not to see its flaws, but at heart he's still selling the idea of the great romantic (in both the sexual and artistic senses) genius and drive behind the Dog. I've seen it first-hand and I've admired the self-control it must've taken to write his stuff and maintain his public image. I said so in a long essay I wrote some years ago for Headpress, which I will reprint here soon.

The self-control failed him, and he describes his breakdown, but doesn't really detail it enough. It is the one area where the curtain remains somewhat drawn. To me, that was the most interesting part of the book, apart perhaps from the detail about the composition of Brown's Requiem, his outstanding first novel. My comments on that were most of what was lost from the piece as published; they're the italicised bits of what follows:

This Ellroy suffered a huge break-down while promoting his most challenging novel, The Cold Six Thousand, but most resembles Dave Klein, the bad cop whose life is burning down in his most-overlooked novel, White Jazz. 'It felt like film noir', Ellroy says, but his women aren't femme fatales, nor is he the slightly stupid lug such women manipulate. From his early days as a peeping tom through his two marriages, Ellroy obsesses; each woman is the most beautiful he has ever seen, each his true soul mate. Meanwhile he continues to moon over his poster of Annie Sofie von Otter.

It was a kindler, gentler Ellroy who came through Britain this year, with the final volume of the Underworld USA trilogy; and that was a different sort of book, too, with women at its core and a character who was recognisably Ellroy himself. Yet that woman is another of his romanticised figures, and it is that romanticism which stops the women in The Hilliker Curse from stepping out at us as real figures. We get his obsession, we get what he sees in them, but we don't get what they really are. Perhaps because he didn't get it, and perhaps that's the root
of the relationships' failures. They are, in every sense, characters.

That's what we get here: fact blending into fiction blending into fact. One reviewer, a famous novelist himself, somehow came away with the idea the cellist from Brown's Requiem, his extraordinary first novel, was one of the real ones. It says something about Ellroy's talent. And it reminds us just how good his writing was from the start; I treasure my old Avon copy of Brown's Requiem (now signed by the author) and looking at it again helps me appreciate just how far Ellroy has come as an artist. I wrote in my original copy that this book uses a rough mix of familiar tropes and more revelation than those not Ellroy-embedded might require. There are many who are indeed Ellroy-embedded, but as he confesses here, in The Cold Six Thousand he may have, at least half-consciously, been trying to test the level of their committment. That in itself may be just one of the revelations that may try those not needing so much detail. But that's where the devil lies...

The Hilliker Curse by James Ellroy

William Heinemann £16.99 ISBN 9780434020645

ALAN FURST'S SPIES OF THE BALKANS

Reviewing Furst's The Foreign Correspondent for the Spectator (you can find the whole review here) I wrote that in his novels it always seems to be twilight, and by that I meant the sort of twilight that comes when a shadow descends on life, the shadow being the inevitable (especially to us, reading fiction as history) coming of World War II. In this case, the war is about to visit Greece, as Italy launches its ill-fated surprise invasion, but it is the spectre of Germany which winds up changing the life of Costa Zannis, a very special policeman in Salonika, the most cosmopolitan of Greek cities.

Furst's books are always set in such places, way stations for those who come from cultures displaced by wars; Salonika sits close to the Yugoslav and Bulgarian borders, and of course far closer to its old rulers from the Ottoman Empire. Zannis himself, as it happens, has grown up in Paris; his assistant comes from Salonika's large Jewish community. Which makes it interesting as the story starts with the docking of a Turkish tramp freighter which carries a German passenger not mentioned in its manifest. He turns out to have photos of the Rupel Pass, the key to any invasion of Greece from the north. This is a direct reference to Furst's previous book, The Spies Of Warsaw, a signal of what is coming, but though Zannis may suspect the Germans eventually, he cannot realise what is coming for him.

Before long he is drawn into various operations. He begins to help Jews escaping from Germany while they still can, and is drawn into the British intelligence net. He returns to Paris to rescue a valuable British scientist marooned there. He does these things not from coercion, nor from nationalism, but because they are, basically, the right things to do, the human things to do, if one can do them. Although we often compare Furst with Graham Greene, and even better Eric Ambler, and rightly so, it's important to note the basic influence of Hemingway here, the concept of grace under pressure--as the war draws closer, as people's dilemmas become more and more pressing, Zannis acts not because he is forced to, but because he cannot think of a good reason why he should not.

Like most of Furst's protagonists he is a man of the world, not prone to panic, and comfortable surfacing in a strange country and making his way home. Unlike some, in this novel he draws upon deep resources, unlimited budgets of dollars, fortunate family connections in Paris, his network of friendly cops around the Balkans. Thriller fans may wonder where the suspense lies, but Furst isn't into chase scenes, what he does is set up atmosphere and let his characters embrace it. Costas, of course, is short for Constantine, who transformed Byzantium into Constantinople, and who was, in that sense, a prototype man of the world getting business done in dangerous times. There is also a sense of real dichotomy in this this. Furst shows wealthy people in both Germany and Greece; the former are helping friends to escape the Nazis, the latter are plotting their own getaway, should the Germans invade. As ever, money talks...

As does love. After discovering one lover was in fact a British spy (unbeknownst to him, which is his one fallibility) he then falls in love with a woman named Demetria, after the goddess of spring. As with Costa's own name, this one is rife with connotation. Spring of course is a time of rebirth, but in Furst's novels, it is also the time nations launch invasions. The story comes full circle, back to that Turkish tramp steamer, and if the ending seems a bit rushed, and perhaps a bit of what the ending of Casablanca might have been had Ilsa showed up at the railway station in Paris, it also raises the distinct possibility that Zannis could return, in Spies of the Levant perhaps, a novel that could make great things from the character of Smyrna/Izmir, and perhaps pay hommage to Ambler as well.

As I said when reviewing The Foreign Correspondent, Furst provides rather less action in every book. Yet in his moving of Zannis round the chess board of 1941 Europe, what he has done is raise all sorts of questions about the way we react not only to war, but to life. Furst's novels are like small but great films that were never made in the Forties, and like those films, they remind of the different values, the different personal values of the time. And the values that do not change over time. They are compelling, not because of their thriller suspense, but because of their human suspense, and that's why he is one of my absolute favourite writers.

Spies Of The Balkans by Alan Furst
Weidenfeld & Nicholson, £18.99, ISBN 9780297858881

ELLROY'S BLOOD'S A ROVER: THE SPECTATOR REVIEW

November is Ellroy Month at Irresistible Targets! If you follow the link here you can read my review of Blood's A Rover, in today's edition of the Spectator. I'll be writing about the Ellroy tour of the UK soon, and may even resurrect the long-lost Headpress interview essay as well. Meanwhile, it's interesting to compare the covers of the US and UK editions: the US (below left) is far more atmospheric, while the UK (right) seems designed primarily to sell the 'Ellroy' brand. Whatever works....

PYNCHON'S INHERENT VICE: THE SPECTATOR REVIEW

My review of Thomas Pynchon's latest novel, Inherent Vice, appears in today's Spectator, you can link to it here. It is a very funny book, and one that I think looks back on how 'we', who grew up in the post-war baby-boom era, got to where we are. Pynchon's style is less popular now that it was in those heady days, when I would have easily dumped V or Gravity's Rainbow into my list of the best American novels. There has been a backlash against the pursuit of the great American novel and against 'metafictions'--and yes, the former can be overblown and the latter disappear up their own asses, but when it works it works, and there's something conservatively British about the preference for minute examination of polite society. You never have to worry about that with Pynchon, but underneath the invention and the authorial playfulness, the examination, if not minute, is far more telling than, say, all of 'dirty realism' wrapped up in one.

WIRE TO WIRE: DAVID SIMON'S HOMICIDE

My review of David Simon's excellent 1991 book Homicide is in the current issue of the Spectator, you can follow this link to it. They also sent along a curiously old-fashioned novel by Stanley Reynolds, which made for an odd pairing and a difficult segue, but it was great to be able to praise the Simon book, which I'd read sometime in the mid-90s, and it's the real deal: this first-ever British edition, as well as being about twice as large, adds an interesting afterword by Simon himself...

BLUE LONESOME: BILL PRONZINI REVISITED

BLUE LONESOME
by Bill Pronzini
Canongate 2001, £9.99

(note: Bill Pronzini was honoured with the MWA 2008 Grand Master Award, but his publication in Britain remains woefully lacking. I wrote this piece in 2001 for the Spectator, but despite Canongate packaging the book to attract 'serious' attention, the review appears here for the first time, perhaps because one does not like foreigners criticising one's publishing institutions does not one?)

Bill Pronzini has written more than 50 novels, and another dozen or so collections of non-fiction or short stories, but this is his first book published in Britain. Most of his output has been crime fiction or westerns, and he could be considered one of the last of the old-fashioned pulp writers.
Given that, it’s not surprising that in America, Pronzini is best known for his “Nameless Detective” series of novels, whose protagonist, a pulp magazine-collecting private eye, owes much to Dashiell Hammett’s similarly nameless ‘Continental Op’ and like him, is based in San Francisco. The ‘Nameless’ novels deserve reprinting in Britain, but BLUE LONESOME is a far better starting point, a multi-faceted work which highlights Pronzini’s strongest points as a crime writer.

The novel moves through three stages. The first is a hommage to the classic 1950s pulp novel of urban alienation, and is bleak enough to live up to Canongate’s thoughtful use of Edward Hopper’s “Sunlight In A Cafeteria” on the cover. Jim Messenger is a San Francisco accountant stuck in a dead-end job and living a dead-end life, who becomes fascinated with a woman he spies eating at his local cafeteria, a woman who appears to be even lonelier than he is. When the woman is found dead, having slit her wrists in the bathtub, Messenger decides to find out who she was, and what drove her to such a desperate act.

Following a clue to her real identity, he winds up in the Nevada desert, and the second stage of the story begins, as the stranger in town starts turning over rocks the locals would rather leave unturned. Pronzini’s working familiar territory, reminiscent of movies like “Bad Day At Black Rock”, but as Messenger’s own resources are tested, the surface friendliness of the small town reveals its own type of loneliness, more dangerous than the cold city from which Messenger fled. He also realises individuals make their own isolation, and it requires a certain courage to break out from it.

The book’s final stage is classic whodunit. Pronzini may have a hard-boiled facade, but underneath he loves literary puzzles, in which clues are left for the reader, crimes are solved by deduction, and the world is put right. Messenger lives up to his name, as far as Beluah, Nevada is concerned, and the suicide of a lonely woman in the city turns out to be a rebirth for him.
In other hands, this might have been a wild neo-noir cauldron of steamy sex and violence. Or it could have just as easily gone down the kind of pretentious existential road we fear is coming whenever we see Hopper’s paintings on book covers. Pronzini has a more basic agenda. If his prose doesn’t stun, neither does it get in the way of a carefully constructed, satisfying story, as spare and honest as Hopper. Much more than a cosy mystery, and justification for finally ending Pronzini’s British publishing isolation.