IN MEMORIAM: BILL MCLAREN

In the thirty-something years I've lived in Britain, no sportscaster has come close to matching Bill McLaren, who has just died aged 86. He was simply the best at what he did in this country for most of the time I've followed British sport. It was one of the rituals of my first winter living with my then in-laws down in Sussex 1977, and it lasted and grew--for many years I'd tromp across London to watch rugby at the Prince George in Hackney, and McLaren's voice made it easy to enjoy any match, just as some of the other commentators made it difficult to enjoy even a good one. He was more accessible than John Arlott, more serious than Henry Blofeld, more expressive than Dan Maskell (not a difficult task, that last). If it weren't for McLaren, I'd probably not know that Hawick is pronounced Hoik.

Like many announcers, good or bad, he became something of a caricature of himself toward the end of his 50 year career, but unlike many, it wasn't that much of a detriment, because he never put himself to the fore, the game always came first, and he never seemed to struggle for descriptions of it. Although they served different roles, I'd compare his later career to John Madden's, who, as he grew older and veered into self-parody, was lucky enough to be re-energiezed, by the move to Fox, by the move to ABC with Al Michaels, and finally by the joint move with Michaels to NBC. It allowed him to re-examine and up his game, but the BBC doesn't work that way. In fact, it's Michaels who may be the closest American equivalent to McLaren's talent, although he is, or was, a generalist, whereas McLaren was a rugby specialist.

McLaren also suffered somewhat as the game changed; he was, and his style remained, the epitome of when the game was still relatively amateur, when the players looked like real people, not action figures, and before our passion for telestrators and computerized statistics took over. It may seem old-fashioned now, his voice and the game of rugby I came to love in the late 70s, but they were part and parcel of a different attitude toward sport. That McLaren continued to teach PE in a Hawick school for years while doing commentary on the weekends impressed me to; those of us who are lucky enough to have to do other things for a living besides talk about sport benefit from it, just as I benefitted from listening to Bill McLaren.

ALONG THE WAY: A Poem

(after a piece by Ralph Towner)

We are dry as travellers in a desert 
Moving from mirage to mirage, and
Pitching our tents where the moonlight 
Stirs the sands & melts the mirages
Into something we still can't drink.

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

ARNOLD STANG: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obituary of the actor Arnold Stang is in today's Independent; you can pound the link here. By some weird fluke of online subbing, the website headline calls him Arnold Strang (the print edition has it correct), which almost describes his voice...add an e to the end and he could have been a more exotic character. I seem to recall that, as Stang exclaimed 'what a chunka chocolate' singers in the background purred 'open wide for Chunky', but I could be conflating two commercials. I was a huge Gildersleeve fan as a kid; I'm going to have to find that movie....

THE GUARDIAN'S TOP 50 TV DRAMAS

The Guardian's great and good critics selected their 'greatest 50 TV dramas of all time' (you can hit the link here); all-time in this case meaning all-time within the UK, which is reasonable enough since you couldn't really expect them to judge shows their audience has never seen. As usual, such lists are very heavily weighted toward the present; since the TV critic slot is one traditionally given to the editor's roommate at Oxford, next-door neighbour in Islington or the Cotswolds or someone who had actually seen a programme on the wireless, that's to be expected. But the list did throw up some surprises. The biggest one was that an American series, The Sopranos, was judged the greatest of all time (when many would argue it isn't even the greatest imported from HBO). The rest of the top ten (apart from number 4, Mad Men, also from HBO, also tremendous, and current) was filled by British shows, which pointed out another difference: they were primarily in the mini-series format: self-contained movies cut into a limited number of episodes, while the Americans tend to work on the continuing series, which changes the dramatic focus, and almost demands ensemble casts and soap-operay story-lines. Indeed, continuing mini-series, like Prime Suspect (somewhat undervalued at 19) have a distinct advantage over a series like, say Hill St Blues (hugely influential, at number 37--NYPD Blue, its direct descendant, didn't make the cut).

Even in British terms: the only crime series included are Cracker (23), Morse (30) and The Sweeney (47). No Between The Lines? Resnick?, Minder? The Vice? Ghost Squad? And choosing four straight-forward soaps like Coronation Street (26) East Enders (28) Brookside (38) and the best of the lot, Grange Hill (50), is a joke, a pandering to an audience the Guardian doesn't have. All four, but no Dallas?

Obviously, I can only comment about British shows of my youth that made it to America, but though The Prisoner, daring even now and off the charts back then, gets in at 34, there is no place for The Avengers which surely is a landmark whichever side of the ocean you were on. I'd like to see The Saint and Danger Man included too. I have no idea about which shows from 1950s or 1960s America made it over here, though the Twilight Zone does sneak into the chart at 40. I'm pretty sure The Untouchables made it over on ITV and I wonder if The Defenders did. I'm a little surprised American mini-series don't get a look, apart from Band Of Brothers (again, HBO, and with a British lead), but Lonesome Dove seems quality in retrospect; Roots does look a bit too worthy now, but no one appreciated Robert Mitchum's spot-on performance in War & Remembrance.

Nice to see St Elsewhere recognised as the best doctor ensemble show, but perplexing to see 24 (although its format was innovative) and The Shield both in, and no place for Crime Story, Michael Mann's exceptional early 60s show or Homicide, the precursor to the Wire, and very good indeed. Odd to see This Life ('it's not a British Friends', writer Amy Perkins protested over and over again, before anyone had said it was, desperately prompting Brit critics to say how much better than Friends it was. They obliged, and no one noticed it was more a kitchen-sink less glossy 30 Something). Odd to see Buffy at 22 and Battleship Galactica at 25 and not a single western. Nor the newspaper show Lou Grant, a spinoff from Mary Tyler Moore intended as a TV version of All The Presidents Men but closer to The Defenders.

That The Wire comes in at 14, behind Twin Peaks even, seems bizarre. That Six Feet Under is right behind it at 15 seems even more so. Six Feet Under but no Law & Order, which has run over here for years and spawned a British remake that simply copies the original scripts and makes them boring? Where was Edge Of Darkness, maybe the best mini-series of them all? I Claudius? John Adams? LA Law? HBO's Oz got in, which was interesting, but how about Wise Guy, which lasted about as long? Even the first couple of series of Spooks were worth more than Coronation Street. And I saw Guardian readers asking about the German Heimat, but what about those two recent imports to BBC Four, Spiral (France) and Wallander (Sweden), the first exceptional in the mini-series format and the second a tremendous series.

The Six Most Egregious Omissions: The Avengers, Law & Order, Homicide, Edge Of Darkness, Crime Story, Between The Lines

IT'S HOLIDAY PLAY LIST

Two jazz discs got me through the busy December and New Year, both new arrivals in the IT vaults, though one is fifty years old come February. The oldie was Hank Mobley's Soul Station, whose CD reissue I'd been meaning to get for years. Soul Station doesn't quite have the reputation of Kind of Blue, much less my favourites like Cannonball's Somethin Else, the Coltrane Quintet Live at the Village Vanguard, but it isn't far behind, with Mobley's tenor and Wynton Kelly's piano both in top form, inventive but subtle. Art Blakey, as is his wont, occasionally gets too flashy, but when he's not doing that he's providing a lot of energy; it reminds you of Miles' quote about strong music getting weaker as it gets played louder (a quote that came before he met Marcus Miller!). Paul Chambers plays bass a lot like Ron Carter would on Miles Davis records later.

This was Mobley's first record after spending a year in prison for heroin possession; he'd returned to join Blakey's Messengers. Previously he'd been prolific for Blue Note, and played with Monk; not long after Soul Station he, Kelly, and Chambers would join Miles for a brief stay (Kelly, of course, had played with Davis before, including one track of Kind Of Blue). Hank Mobley doesn't seem to get the credit he deserves; the original album liner notes talk about his slow steady climb toward recognition, and the modern notes mention his drug problems which cut his career short. But he is, in my mind, to the tenor, what Cannonball is to the alto.

It had been a while since I'd heard a new disc by Ralph Towner, so I snapped up Chiaroscuro, a series of duets with trumpeter Paolo Frescu that in many ways is a 'pure' ECM record. Towner, who came to the label via his band Oregon, and began in a group with Jan Garbarek, is more romantic than many of the ECM players, though the nature of his playing on acoustic guitar lessens somewhat that elegance, almost coldness, of sound. The combination of guitar and trumpet may sound awkward, but they weave in and out in ways that are sometimes ethereal and sometimes nearly swing. I seem to recall Palle Mikkleborg and Terje Rypdal did an electric Norwegian version of this trumpet/guitar thing sometime back, and although it was quite different, there was that sense of the horn being used almost like a sax, and that is what I sense here as well. It's a lovely record, the perfect thing for watching the snow fall late at night, and knowing there's no hope of anyone British doing anything about it for another week.

When I wasn't lost in jazz, I was perking up with the blues. A couple of years ago in Tampa I picked up Willie King & The Liberators' disc Living In A New World, and I return to it often. King passed away this year, so it was lucky, in one sense that his work finally made it onto disc. This was his second record, in 2002, his first, Freedom Creek, came out in 2000 (when he was 57 years old) and I'm still looking for a copy of it (there's another album from 2000, I Am The Blues, on his own, Willie King label). The band plays with the surety of guys who've been together, with no pressure, for ages, and Willie Lee Halbert provides interesting call and response counterpoint vocal to King's. Kevin Hayes' sax is a perfect fit too. The beauty of Living In A New World is the infectious simplicity of the music coupled with the matter-of-fact irony of Willie's songs, something confirmed by the monologue, The Blues Life which ends this record. But songs like America, Terrorized, and the title track say a lot more about life in these here United States than a whole room full of suits on cable TV news. And you can dance your ass off to it.

You can dance even more to Lil' Ed and the Blues Imperials, another band who've been together for a long time before getting much recognition. I picked this disc up on another of my football trips, to New Orleans in 2008, and playing it in my hotel room was one of the highlights, almost as much as the food at Couchon, the oyster po'boys at or starting the day at Cafe du Monde before it gets crawling. They aren't a Nola band, I assume they're from Chicago, but beyond the infectious quality of the music there is also a wry sense of blues humour, especially on songs like 'Check My Baby's Oil', 'Don't Call Me' and an inspired cover of Smokey Robinson's 'First I Look At The Purse'.

Finally, something totally different (which I would feel comfortable writing no matter what discs I'd already discussed) a great disc I rediscovered at the bottom of a pile I hadn't checked in years: Col. Bruce Hampton and The Aquarium Rescue Unit's 1993 release on Capricorn Records, Mirrors of Embarrassment. Col Bruce(ret.) cannot be categorized, this music is somewhere between Capt. Beefheart (whom he outranks, obviously) and maybe a band like Phish; Bela Fleck guests on this one (one of the tunes for his banjo is called 'Too Many Guitars'), but as the liner notes say, 'Hampton has a long history of chain-sawing through every fence anyone's ever tried to put around his music'. He probably used the same chain-saw to create his own instrument, the chazoid, part guitar, part mandolin, part epoxy. The Hampton Grease Band made a record in 1970, which I can't claim to have heard, and he recorded as Mr. Hampton B Coles (Ret.), with bands called the New Ice Age and the Late Bronze Age, and finally the Arkansas Travelers, before settling on this outfit, which includes Apt. Q258 playing 'Harmonorbital Trans-Atmospheric Suspended Circular Vibrational Membrane Systems'.

Songs like 'Shoeless Joe', 'Memory Is A Gimmick', and 'No Ego's Under Water' suggest Frank Zappa in a weird mode, but once you get into it, it swings. It took me back to a couple of Christmases in London, working over the holiday, and playing something outre just to shake out the silence of holiday London. Worked for me then, works for me now. In a harmonorbital kind of way.

OPEN BOOK: GANGSTERS AND OTHERS FROM THE ROARING TWENTIES

I returned to BBC Radio 4's Open Book today, in what amounted to an almost-to-the-day anniversary performance (see last year's appearance here). I was there to answer a listener query about 1920s gangster fiction, and you can link to the programme at IPlayer here; it's the last five minutes or so of the show. The listener said he'd enjoyed Damon Runyon's gangsters and was looking for more. Hard-boiled-egged on by Mariella Frostrup, I apparently broke some sort of record for most titles recommended within the all-too brief time, far too short to read snatches of dialogue like this (from Raoul Whitfield's Green Ice):

'I just didn't want you to think the dame had sucked me in. She's been playing me—and I've been playing her. She doesn't know what it's all about. I gave her my last coin and told her to break for the dirty burg...' Or how about: 'You were wise to the fact that when I got out prison I was going to shove in on some big-time crime breeders. Donner figured you were white—and he made a mistake. I figured the same way—and I made a mistake...but I hadn't gone all the way with you.'

The dilemma in making suggestions was whether the reader was looking for the real stuff, the kind of fiction turned into the classic crime movies of the early thirties, or whether it was Runyon's special mix of fast-talking and off-beat characters which appealed to him. You could go either way with Dashiell Hammett: Red Harvest remains my favorite crime novel, hard-boiled and politically-aware too, and the Continental Op is the hallmark for all detectives who followed. But The Thin Man, if not as crackling as the film versions with William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles, certainly has its own share of Runyonesque charm.

If we walk down the mean streets of hardboiled fiction, Whitfield and Paul Cain are worth the effort. Whitfield wrote only two tough crime novels, and was dead at 47, but Green Ice and Death In The Bowl both get reprinted sporadically when people start revisiting the hard-boiled genre. Fast One is Cain's only novel (he was born George Sims but wrote as Peter Ruric for the movies) and it is exactly what the title implies, a headlong rush toward hard-boiled oblivion.

The producers had suggested W.R. Burnett, who wrote the novel on which Little Caesar is based, and a number of other classics besides, like The Beast Of The City and The Asphalt Jungle. I thought hard about Horace McCoy, who moves from Burnett-style newsman's cynicism (No Pockets For A Shroud) to out and out nihilism in works like They Shoot Horses Don't They or I Should Have Stayed Home, arguably the greatest ignored Hollywood novel.

The stories I thought the questioner might really like are Frederick Nebel's tales of Kennedy and McBride, the former being a cop and the latter a hard-drinking newsman. They've never been collected in their own book, though they always pop up in Black Mask anthologies and other volumes of pulp fiction, but they are really funny, full of staccato cracking wise and entertaining.

Of course, if the reader were more interested in Runyon's style, Ring Lardner would be the obvious place to start, although he's not writing about gangsters per se, but then neither was Runyon most of the time. Lardner's only book-length narrative, You Know Me, Al, is about baseball, and as we said on the programme, baseball is central to America in the Roaring Twenties, presided over by the larger-than-life figure of Babe Ruth. The scandal of the Black Sox throwing the 1919 World Series was made into Eight Men Out, based on Eliot Asinof's non-fiction book, but Harry Stein's Hoopla is a fine novel about the same subject. James Thurber's 'You Could Look It Up' is very much in the Runyon vein. And of course Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's Front Page is a classic of 1930s cynicism, filmed well by Lewis Milestone and then brilliantly by Howard Hawks, with the reporter changed to a woman, by Howard Hawks.

Among contemporary writers, Elmore Leonard's The Hot Kid and In Honey's Room are Twenties gangster stories that sound as if they're authentic period pieces. Stuart Kaminsky's Toby Peters series, is set in 1940s Hollywood, but is also authentic; I had him in mind as I had written his obituary for the Guardian recently (you can link to it here). I had wanted to also mention Max Allan Collins' Nate Heller books, which start off (time wise) in 1920s Chicago with Ness and Nitti as characters, but time didn't allow; my apologies to Max, because the Heller books (which move up through the 60s) have long been favourites of mine.

We talked about E.L. Doctorow whom I praised all over the place, particularly Ragtime, which of course is set before the 1920s, but Billy Bathgate is specifically about gangsters. I thought Glen David Gold's Carter Beats The Devil, which is set in the same time-frame as Ragtime, was a remarkable first novel; I haven't got to Gold's follow-up, Sunnyside, about Charlie Chaplin, yet, but his debut is a hard act to follow.

Obviously, far more than could be squeezed into the time slot. But it was exhilarating just to be able to mention personal favourites like Whitfield and Cain, and to go all hard-boiled on the BBC. Without anyone even mentioning bourbon, or roscoes, or frails...

ANDREW DAVIS: THE FUGITIVE AND THE PACKAGE: 20TH ANNIVERSARY REEVALUTATION

I finally caught up with The Package, Andrew Davis' 1989 conspiracy thriller. I'd like to say it was because it's been re-issued in a 20th anniversary celebration package, but of course it wasn't, and really, there isn't that much reason why it should be. Like most decent conspiracy stories, the build-up is the more successful part, the gradual laying out of the conspiracy, the slow realisation by the main character that he may be in over his head. Also like most conspiracy stories, the resolution is something of a let-down, as implausible plot devices allow the hero his chance to save the day.

But what makes The Package stand out is the way it sets out, as well as any fiction I've seen, the rationale behind the JFK assassination, the political motivation. In this film, the US and Soviets are about to sign an historic agreement to scrap, or drastically cut back, their nuclear arsenals (interestingly, the Soviet premier is a dead ringer for Gorbachev, though the US President is neither Don Ron nor Bush Sr) and military chiefs on both sides are opposed to the deal. Thus the killing becomes an exercise in avoiding political change. You could watch The Package alongside reading JFK And The Unspeakable (you can link to my essay here) and it would make perfect sense.

Gene Hackman is a top sergeant who fails to stop the killing of a general who refuses to go along with the plot, and is then assigned to ferry a soldier, Walter Henke, Stateside for court martial. Henke, played by Tommy Lee Jones, strikes up a bit of a bond with Hackman, but at DC airport Hackman is blackjacked and Jones disappears. Luckily (the first of many disbelief-stretching coincidences) Hackman's ex-wife (the woefully underused Joanna Cassidy) is in Army personnel, and Hackman figures out that Jones is not the real Henke. The real Henke, we have seen, has been saved from arrest in East Germany and assigned by a black-ops type (John Heard, excellent) who's already set Hackman up for a fall, to infiltrate a neo-Nazi group in Chicago. Which of course is where Jones has gone to assassinate the president, and where Henke is being set up to take the fall. After Cassidy's friend, Pam Grier (with us for far too short a time) is killed while investigating Jones' real identity, she and Hackman head for Chicago too (which happens to be director Davis' home town).

The parallel between Henke and Lee Oswald is clear. The best evidence that Oswald was indeed a patsy is probably the book Oswald Talked, where it is shown convincingly that Oswald was most likely infiltrating a Cuban-exile gun-running operation on behalf of some intelligence agency, and that Jack Ruby was part of whatever the operation was. The parallel in the film is made clearer by having Henke distributing leaflets and taking part in a demonstration that breaks into a brawl, just as Oswald did in New Orleans.

Luckily, Hackman has an old Vietnam buddy (Dennis Franz) who is a cop in Chicago. Luckily, the bad guys, who've been willing to litter the streets of DC and Chicago with bodies, take Hackman back to Jones' apartment, rather than killing him, so he gets a chance to escape. There is a car chase scene, hommage to The French Connection, where Hackman gets to 'drive' under the Chicago El, and somehow an army sergeant who was stationed in Germany knows shortcuts through Chicago to get to the downtown Hilton through the freight yards. And of course, in the end, all the conspiracy information will come out in a Congressional investigation, which is probably the least believable thing of all.

As it happens, I had just rewatched The Fugitive on TV a few days before seeing The Package. Davis, as I said, is from Chicago; his father was the actor Nathan Davis, to whom he gave a good role as the Soviet premier's press attache, who's also one of the masterminds of the assassination plot. Davis' career has been built on action movies, starring Chuck Norris (Code Of Silence), Steven Seagal (Under Siege--probably Seagal's best, whatever that means), and even Arnold Schwarzenegger. But it's The Fugitive for which he's best known, and for which Tommy Lee Jones got a supporting-actor Oscar. Davis gives Jones lots of leeway in his roles; one of the great pleasures of Under Siege, probably second only to Elena Elenika bursting topless out of a cake, is watching Jones and Gary Busey trying to upstage each other. It's as if Davis knows that the comic relief provides the equivalent of depth of character, and helps keep the sense of pace always moving. When he can't use pace, he's somewhat lost, as evidenced by his remake of Hitchock's very static Dial M For Murder, A Perfect Murder, in which Gwyneth proved herself no Grace Kelly, and Michael Douglas, an inspired bit of casting, wouldn't surrender himself to the sleaziness of Ray Milland.

But despite his bravura (helped by straightman Joe Pantoliano's straight-man talent) I am always bothered by Jones' character in The Fugitive. Mostly because, as Kimball escapes from the conveniently-located downtown jail where he's checking out one-armed men, Gerrard tries to shoot him dead, an obviously unarmed man whose guilt has to be in question even in the mind of someone who says he doesn't care, and tries repeatedly, and looks extremely chagrined not to have succeeded. Then we (and Kimball) are still supposed to like him. The Fugitive had its own plot flaws too: that the one-armed man could be a Chicago cop who lost his arm in the line of duty means that he could hardly have escaped notice; when the brilliantly obnoxious cops who pursue Kimball fail to recognise him we assume they must be protecting him, but such is not the case. But as is usually the case with Davis, the pace of the story, and the action, keeps you from thinking about little things like that until well after the film is done. Or almost. The Package comes close to being Davis' best; if he'd just been able to get more conspiratorial and less well-packaged in its resolution, it would be.

GRAHAM HURLEY'S BEYOND REACH

There is trouble in Pompey, as usual, and Joe Faraday gets dragged into investigating the hit-and-run death of one of the nastiest of the youths terrorizing the Portsdown estate. Faraday, always a problem for his bosses, will then be tasked with using new DNA techniques to re-open a 25 year old rape case. He's more despondent than usual, since his French lover has departed for Montreal, and, being Faraday, he knows she will never return.

Meanwhile, former cop Paul Winter is now dragged further into the affairs of his boss, Pompey crime lord Bazza McKenzie. McKenzie's daughter Esme is cheating on her husband, and even worse, given the family business and her involvement it in, she's doing it with a cop. And when Esme's son is kidnapped, everything goes pear-shaped.

Graham Hurley does two things exceptionally well, and these plots intertwine because of those two things. One is to detail the urban blight of Portsmouth, the decay, the moral rot of crime within the city. That Bazza should have set up Winter as a faux-community worker, complete with a bizarre green van, gives a touch of the absurd to the equation, but the first half of the book, centered on the reality of life in the estates, is truly upsetting. Hurley's other skill is in understanding the internal dynamics of the police force, the way policing is sacrificed in favour of statistics, in which ambition colours tactical decisions, and most importantly the way justice rides second to law and order. The real tension in this novel comes from the way those concerns play against life in Portsmouth. And although Winter has become the more dominant character in the series lately, the real emotional heart remains Faraday, and his internal battles throughout the novel are its crux.

Beyond Reach refers not only to Bazza, who remains one step ahead of the filth at every step of the game, nor to the youth of the estates, who are beyond the reach of virtually all of society's usual motivations and controls, but also to the whole idea of policing which Faraday, throughout the series has cherished. The intertwining stories have their final confluence in Faraday's solving of the old rape case, and though the solution is apparent fairly early, it is in its resolution that the real power of this story lies, and, as happens so many times in the story, the only way forward with any practical hope of success falls afoul of the rules of the bureaucratic game. Faraday needed Winter, to relieve his internal morose depression, because Hurley is so good at tracing the larger malaise, and it is even more depressing. This is another powerful novel, and the crimes it examines are legion.

Beyond Reach by Graham Hurley
Orion £12.99 ISBN 9781409101215

NOTE: This review will also appear at www.crimetime.co.uk

NEW YEAR'S DAY WITH THE BIG EASY

I don't believe I'd seen The Big Easy since it was released, before I took another look at it on New Year's Day, courtesy of BBC IPlayer. What a shock. My memory was of an atmospheric thriller, thick with the steamy sensuality of New Orleans, driven by Zydeco music, and with a crackling vibe between Dennis Quaid and Ellen Barkin.

I first saw the film not long after my first visit to the city, for Super Bowl XXI. That was a brief, very superficial stay, and I don't remember sensing any artificiality in the film then. Maybe it's the passing of time, or maybe it's because I've actually been to New Orleans again, for a more serious visit, but I am amazed I didn't notice the lighting, which is far more LA studio backlot than Crescent City, or the terrible accents Quaid and Ned Beatty and John Goodman and especially Charles Ludlum as the lawyer Lamar use. Now I watch Ellen Barkin and her little girl flummoxing seems incredibly artificial, almost as much as Quaid's 'singing' with the band. It plays far more like an episode of 80s serial TV, MacGyver set in NO, than say, Sea Of Love, which now I'm going to have to revisit as well.

I had forgotten a couple of small pleasures: Jim Garrison plays himself when Dennis Quaid is brought to trial, Marc Lawrence, looking very frail, plays the Godfather, Vinny The Cannon, and Solomon Burke plays Daddy Mention, the black Godfather of the town. But overall I sensed none of the atmosphere of the city, none of its outre charm, none of its steam, its sweat, or its flowery corruption. New Year's Day is probably a good time to be reminded times, not just les bontemps, change, and change things, especially us.

DAVID LEVINE: THE GUARDIAN OBIT

My obituary of David Levine is online at Guardian.co.uk, you can link to it here. It ought to be in the next print edition, and has a lovely Eisenstadt photo portrait of Levine at work. Sadly, they changed my description of Henry Kissinger 'screwing' the world in one of Levine's most memorable caricatures to 'copulating' with her, thus losing the double entendre, which I heard Levine describe in an interview, in a sort of cackle: 'he was screwing the world and they kept giving him more chances to do it!'. It's also the expression on Kissingers' face, pure childish bliss and greed, which helps make the drawing work so well.

The change suggests a bit of respectability that somehow echoes the New York Times' editorial page killing another of Levine's Kissinger drawings, to which I refer in the obit. On Alter.net there's a fascinating piece about those killed cartoons; they've now been collected by the long-time art editor of the Times, Jerelle Kraus, in a book called All The Art That's Fit To Print, published by Columbia U, and you can link to that here. According to the article, a 1991 Levine cartoon they didn't kill raised a huge negative response; it showed the descent of man, from Clark Gable to Saddam Hussein, via apes and chimps, thus offending any number of people, as well as, the Groucho Marx in me calls out, apes and chimps.

I would have loved to go on about his 'serious' art: his watercolours on the shoreline remind me of Winslow Homer, a little bit of Hopper, and they have a wonderful sense of the open loneliness of the coast. His Brooklyn paintings, of architecture that marks the borough, cross Demuth and Marin, and it's a fascinating combination. They are not hugely original, but they are very satisfying. I would also have loved to detail many more of his non-political subjects, his John Wayne or Ted Williams (he was a huge Dodgers' fan...of course the Brooklyn sports' ground to which the Guardian refers was Ebbetts Field, where Marianne Moore was among the regulars.

It's hard to explain just how important Levine's art was to a certain kind of American--the kind who read what Esquire, I think, once lampooned as the New York Review of Us. If the magazine's articles sometimes meander, Levine's art inevitably got you straight to the point, and his point was inevitably right on. I was impressed to discover that, although he grew up in Flatbush and had worked his way up to the Heights, he remained a real Brooklynite to the end. It makes me want to find a place to start a breakfast club too....which reminds me, last Sunday we saw Alan Greenspan chowing down in Dan Snyder's box at the Redskins' game, and it reminded me of one of my favourite Levine drawings, which you can see to the right. It was a privilege to be able to write an appreciation of Levine's life, especially on the last day of 2009.

TARANTINO'S INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS ON DVD AT CHRISTMAS

British tradition used to reserve Christmas TV for films like The Guns Of Navarone, so it felt somehow appropriate to settle in Christmas night with Nate's two uncles to watch Inglourious Basterds (hence, IB to avoid terminal irritation by spellcheck), which has just be released on DVD (Universal, Dec 2009). The film was hailed as a return to form for Quentin Tarantino (henceforth QT), but it seems to me more of a transitional work, as there are two separate movies pulling at each other here, and when QT finally brings them together, he needs a good twist to make it work. But the set-piece portion of the film works brilliantly, more than enough to carry you through to the end of Christmas evening.

The first and less interesting strand of the film is the story of the IBs themselves, and oddly it is the bit which received the most attention. This is partly because it features the star, Brad Pitt, and partly because of the politics of having Jews massacring Nazis. Those considerations aside, it is also the bit which is very much in the vein of QT's last few films, all of which have been big budget star vehicles which transmute the low-budget shlock he admired in his video-counter days. This one is a hommage to an Italian rip-off of The Dirty Dozen; the IBs are eight Jews and one German led by a red-neck officer from Tennessee played by Pitt as if trying to channel Clark Gable before George Clooney can claim him permanently. Like Clooney, Pitt's approach to comedy is mugging and over-egging, and in this context that almost works. But the whole conceit of this Jewish version of Sgt. Fury going round France scalping Nazis pales after a short while, though one can see why it might appeal to the Weinsteins, who produced it. In the end, the Basterds wind up being primarily a plot device, as their plot to assassinate Hitler is far less interesting than the other one, initiated by cinema-owner Shosanna Dreyfuss, who has escaped massacre herself, at the hands of SS office Hans Landa.

The more interesting story revolves around Landa, played with great relish (and really as a Gestapo officer) by Christophe Waltz. It is, as I said, a series of set-pieces, all of which involve interrogations by Landa in which he twists his interrogees in a kind of verbal torture. These are, at first, the highlights of the film, and by the time they have paled QT realises it and lets the last one dissolve to violence. Interestingly, there is one parallel interrogation by an 'actual' gestapo officer involving the IBs, which recalls the 1940s film OSS, where one character was exposed to the Gestapo when he switched his fork from left to right hand. This scene's shootout foreshadows the massacre in the cinema that is the climax of the film.

As usual, one can see scenes from movie history played with, everything from To Be Or Not To Be to The Eagle Has Landed, and one hears music which is taken from other films, most obviously Ennio Morricone, whose presence also echoes the hommage to Sergio Leone in the title of the film's first 'chapter' 'Once Upon A Time In Nazi-Occupied France'. This is less of a problem than it might seem, because the scenes themselves are brilliantly written and almost as well played.

But it's also because the film is not about war as much as it is about the cinema of war, most specifically the pleasure audiences get from watching large numbers of Nazi bad guys mowed down by their heroes. Its most interesting conceit is a German version of Audie Murphy, a baby-faced sniper whose heroic killing of scores of Americans in Italy is being turned into Goebbels' greatest success as a propaganda film, A Nation's Pride. The soldier, played by Daniel Bruehl, falls in love with the cinema-owner, and gets the Paris debut of the film scheduled for her theatre. And there in a nutshell is the plot. The British (Rod Taylor as Churchill and Mike Myers as the inevitable plan-ridden general) bring British, devise a plan to send a German film scholar, Archie Hicox (Archie Leech, Alfred Hitchcock) to meet up with the German actress who's a British agent, Bridget von Hammersmark, and you can guess where it all goes from there.

The irrelevance of the Basterds themselves to all this is obvious in the way four of them simply disappear from the film, and another pops up again only when Brad Pitt is arrested, with no explanation of where he was or when he was arrested himself. One assumes there was much footage left on the cutting room floor (or intended for a more complex DVD reissue later on—in fact, I saw that Maggie Cheung had a role as the original theatre owner, who leaves the cinema to Dreyfuss, her 'niece'). The only extra in this DVD is a bit from the German propaganda film itself, powerfully effective and every bit as modern as anything in QT's work propre.

In the end, it's only Pitt's Aldo Raine who is willing to settle for less than ultimate revenge, an odd sort of compromise that merely points out the bloodthirsty-ness of all that has gone before. In the Kill Bill films, QT looked at over-the-top violence and cartoonish body counts, and we smiled until we got bored. Here he's looking at the context in which such things are acceptable, and the seriousness of that point is reinforced by the seriousness of the set-pieces, which remind us of the awful reality which underscores all World War II memories.

Tarantino gives Waltz a showcase, though the moment he pulls out the Meerschaum pipe to show he's really not a Jew-Hunter but a 'detective' is more out of Airplane than anything else. Bruehl is excellent also, and Diane Kruger (as Bridget) and Melanie Laurent (as Dreyfuss) are equally good. But the real star is cinematographer Robert Richardson, Oliver Stone's one-time cameraman, who gives the whole production a look which encompasses the history of war movies, as well as casting a lush, dream-like feeling over the whole thing. It gives the film a lustre which helps carry you along, but in the end, like so much else of QT, it's unsatisfying, not stretching you beyond the narrow boundaries of its own exploitation. At least in parts. I await its revival at countless Christmases to come.