FOR FJ TITMUS READ TITMUS, FJ

The Middlesex and England spin bowler Fred Titmus has died at 78. He grew up within walking distance of Lords, and after his career retired to run a post office, I think. I first became aware of him in 1982, while I was still keen on cricket, and Mike Brearley pulled him out of the crowd at Lords to bowl for Middlesex against Surrey and he took 3/43. That means he played first-class cricket in five decades, and few top class sportsmen can make that claim.

Although he was a good enough batsman to open for England on six occasions, Titmus' greatest legacy is a remembrance of cricket's caste system. At 16 Fred asked for a tryout at Lords, and was taken on the ground staff. He made his Middlesex debut that year, and at 17 was selected to play for the MCC against the county champions, Surrey. As the match began, the PA at Lords made this announcement: 'there is a change in your scorecards. For FJ Titmus, read Titmus, FJ.' Fred was a professional, and thus called 'Titmus' by the 'amateurs' whose initials preceded their family names.

Fred also played football for Chelsea juniors, and signed as a professional with Watford. He also lost four toes in a boating accident in 1968 but continued to bowl. He apparently is no relation to Abi Titmuss, but the band Half Man Half Biscuit recorded a song called 'Fuckin' 'ell it's Fred Titmus'. His obits all mention that he was Cockney, which technically Somers Town wouldn't qualify you for, but they also say he walked like Charlie Chaplin, so I guess he does qualify after all.

There is no American equivalent to the English expression 'servant of a club' but with all the good and bad that connotes, it certainly applies to FJ Titmus.

BROOKLYN'S FINEST: TRAINING DAY TIMES THREE

Not satisfied with whatever he learned from Training Day, in Brooklyn's Finest Antoine Fuqua takes that movie and multiplies it by three. Training Day had a familiar but testy take on police corruption, and here we get three takes, presented in a framework whose stories both parallel each other and eventually intersect, which is quite a clever bIt of writing. And Fuqua, best-known as an action director, is good at wringing as much action mileage out of it as possible. The problem is that each situation's premises are more than just familiar, they border on cliché, in much the same way Brooklyn borders and melds into Queens.

Take Tango (Don Cheadle) who's the undercover guy from Deep Cover, in so deep he's lost his wife and is desperate to get out, and offered the chance to do so only if he'll betray his friend Casanova (Wesley Snipes, for whom this was a welcome return to the screen). And there's Eddie (Richard Gere) who's channelling his Paul Newman as the old veteran cop from Fort Apache: The Bronx, but that was in another borough and long ago. It's an interesting take, because he's still a beat cop, who gets by not as much by ignoring the job as not taking chances with it. And where Newman had a doomed relationship with a nurse who used heroin as her vacation, Gere wants to retire with the hooker Chantal (Shannon Kane) who shows him some compassion but is, after all, a hooker.

Finally, there's Ethan Hawke as Sal, the corrupt drugs cop in desperate need of cash to buy a new house which isn't infected with wood mold, which is killing his asthmatic wife (Lili Taylor), pregnant with twins they have no space for and can't afford. Hawke's first scene is a powerful one, as he executes Vincent D'Onfrio as they talk in his car; he turns out to be a bad cop who's possibly talked too much; Hawke needed the money. The script, by Michael C Martin, is very good in the way the three stories mirror each other, and indeed in the use of mirrors and reflections, because everyone has two faces, everyone is playing a role, and everyone has a different agenda. But none of them can get what they want.

The movie is best when the characters feel pressure; Gere goes stoic and silent when asked to present an acceptable version of his rookie partner's shooting a kid. When Gere's retirement day arrives, his badge gets dumped into a box in a drawer of a desk in an empty room, meaningless tin. Tango may have to act to prevent a gang member from being thrown off a roof; he's been accused of being the informer Tango actually is. Tango is pressured by his handler (Will Patton) and an ambitious tough fed (Ellen Barkin) both of whom are playing roles we know well, and it's thankless; no matter how touch she is, how slimy he is, they can't bring new depth to the parts.

The stories come together, eventually, as Sal seeks the big score he's missed, and Tango seeks revenge for Cas' execution, in the same place, and Eddie starts to act like a cop only after he's stopped being one—following up a missing person he recognises, and winding up in the same place. Here, although it's somewhat sentimental, the movie avoids the worst cliches, and the ultimate resolution doesn't really cut corners. Everyone's reduced to a single role, and pays the price, or gets the reward, for playing out that role.

It's very well done, and very well acted, and you can see why actors like working with Fuqua. But Brooklyn's Finest lacks that small spark of originality which would set it apart from the usual cop movies. Which is a shame, because there is a lot to like about it.

Brooklyn's Finest (2009) directed by Antoine Fuqua, written by Michael C Martin is out on DVD

OWSLEY STANLEY: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of Owsley Stanley, who provided acid for Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, the Grateful Dead, and a whole generation of Americans, is in today's Guardian, you can link to it here. Sadly, there was far more to write about than space; I particularly liked the idea of long arguments over the band becoming carnivores, and the fact that after he devised the Wall of Sound for the Dead they actually didn't tour for some two years. It was a long strange trip indeed.

It's also interesting to consider how many of the people who actually generated 'the summer of love' and the hippie movement, and were radicals in the 60s, were actually of the pre-baby boomer generation, and to what a huge extent the baby boomers, my generation, simply consumed, felt good, and moved on, to (in many ways) mess up the world they were trying to improve. Someone like Owsley, whose fierce intelligence was truly altered by mind-expanding drugs, provides some sort of moral lesson for us, and I'm not just saying that because I just turned 60. Nor because among Stanley's own sound archives are some wonderful tapes of Jerry Garcia's bluegrass band, Old And In The Way, with Vassar Clements and Peter Rowan.

ROBERT CRAIS' SENTRY: THE SHOTS INTERVIEW

My latest American Eye column, an interview with Bob Crais, to mark the publication of his excellent new novel, The Sentry, is up at Shots; you can link to it here. You can also read my original review of the book, which appeared at Crime Time, elsewhere in Irresistible Targets here.

DUKE SNIDER: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of one of the greatest of the Boys of Summer, Duke Snider, is in today's Guardian, you can link to it here. Because it was a busy couple of pages, it was trimmed in some small but significant ways, so you can read the original text below--although 'Talkin' Baseball' wasn't a hit song in Britain, it does deserve some notice. Next time it will be my lede.

I didn't write in the obit about the famous catch he made climbing the wall in Philadelphia's Shibe Park (that's not it, but something similar from Ebbets Field below left), nor about the way his father made him, a natural right-hander, bat left (I would have had to explain the advantage for a British audience: but Mickey Mantle's father did much the same thing to him and he became a switch-hitter). I was also thinking about some things the Duke and pitcher Don Drysdale had in common, both being from Los Angeles and returning home when the Dodgers left Brooklyn, they had a highly competitive but somehow laid-back, self-aware restraint that went against the grain of Dem Bums. It would also have been nice to mention Dodger owner Walter O'Malley's betrayal of New York (and fleecing of the residents of Chavez Ravine in LA): there are various stories and I've seen them include Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hammil, and/or Jack Newfield, but the gist was they were asked to write down the three most despicable men of the twentieth century and each one listed Hitler, Stalin, and Walter O'Malley. There is something special about that time, especially for someone like me who was a little boy then, and growing up within media distance of New York (though rooting for Boston's Red Sox). Mantle was every kid's dream then, even if you weren't a Yankee fan; Willie Mays was a joy to watch, and the Duke was somehow the quiet anchor who linked the three boroughs together...

DUKE SNIDER
In the Fifties, New York saw itself as the vibrant centre of an American-led world. Baseball was still America's national pastime, and New York's three teams dominated baseball. Their dynamism was symbolised by the teams' center-fielders, each a mix of speed and power, grace and flair. The Yankees had the late Mickey Mantle, the Giants the 'Say-Hey Kid', Willie Mays, while Brooklyn's Dodgers boasted the 'Duke of Flatbush', Duke Snider, who has died aged 84 .

That the Dodgers, perennial losers known even to their fans as 'Dem Bums', were part of this mix was down in good part to Snider, who joined the team in 1947, the same day Jackie Robinson broke baseball's segregationist apartheid. From that point through 1957, after which the Dodgers and Giants abandoned New York for California, Brooklyn won six National League pennants, and, in 1955, their only World Series championship, beating the hated Yankees, champions of the American League. The Duke hit four home runs in that seven-game series; he remains the only player to homer four times in two different World Series.

The Dodgers' move to Los Angeles broke the hearts of Brooklyn's fans, and shifted baseball's balance of power away from New York. Snider hit the team's final home run in Brooklyn, and got their first hit in LA, but the move sorely affected his career. Brooklyn's cozy Ebbets Field had a short right-field perfectly suited to his sort of left-handed 'pull' hitting. Snider actually hit more home runs than either Mays or Mantle in the decade of the Fifties, but in Los Angeles the Dodgers played first in the Coliseum, with a vast, deep right-field, and then in Chavez Ravine, a park which was hard on hitters to all fields. The ballparks held his hitting statistics down, and the vast outfields put more strain on Snider's aging knees. But his most serious injury came popping his elbow while throwing a ball out of Dodger Stadium to win a bet. Although he finished his career with 407 home runs, only 81 of them came after 1959, and his career batting average fell just under the magical .300 mark at .295.

Born in Los Angeles 19 September 1926, Edwin Donald Snider was nicknamed Duke by his father Ward, who brought him up to be a baseball star, forcing a natural right-hander to learn to bat lefthanded. After starring at Compton Junior College, he signed with Brooklyn, but his minor league apprenticeship was interrupted by service in the navy during World War II. After the war he resumed in the minors, then played part-time for two seasons, before emerging in 1949 as the team's full-time center-fielder. With his good looks and talent he was a fan favourite from the first, but he also developed a reputation for moodiness, which sometimes saw him at odds with Brooklyn's notoriously acerbic crowds.

He helped Los Angeles to the 1959 World Series crown, but was already slowing down, and in 1963 the Dodgers sold him to the Mets, New York's new National League team, one of the worst in baseball history, in desperate need of a drawing card. When the Mets gathered his old Dodger teammates on Duke Snider Day at Shea Stadium, he said you couldn't ever take the Dodgers out of Brooklyn. Granting his desire to play for a contending team, the Mets sold him on in 1964 to the Dodgers' arch-rival Giants, now in San Francisco. He retired after that disappointing season. He coached in the minor league systems of the Dodgers and San Diego Padres, and broadcast games for the Padres and the Montreal Expos. Although he was the subject of two biographies, in 1964 and 1988, he was immortalised best in 1971 in Roger Kahn's classic book about the Fifties Dodgers, The Boys Of Summer. In 1980 he was elected to the baseball Hall of Fame, where he called the three-way rivalry with Mays and Mantle 'a great time for baseball'. The following year, singer Terry Cashman had a hit song, 'Talkin Baseball', which is better-known by the words of its refrain: 'Willie, Mickey, and The Duke'.

In 1995, Snider returned to Brooklyn one last time, to appear in federal court charged with failing to report income from autographs and souvenir shows on his taxes. He was fined and given probation. He raised avocados on his California ranch, and died 27 February in Escondido, of what were described as natural causes. He is survived by his wife of 63 years, Bev, two daughters and a son.

PHILIP GOUREVITCH'S COLD CASE: A Forgotten Friday Entry

In February 1970, Frankie Koehler, who'd been in and out of jails since he was 15, got into a fight with Pete McGinn and his friend Richie Glennon at McGinn's bar, Channel Seven, on New York's West Side. McGinn, who'd been on Koehler's case for knocking up the wife of a mutual friend who himself was in prison, beat Koehler badly, then went home. Koehler left, came back to Channel Seven with a gun, and with Glennon went to McGinn's apartment, ostensibly to settle things like gentlemen. There he proceeded to kill both men, wounded McGinn's uncle Charlie, and left McGinn's girlfriend unharmed. Then Frankie Koehler disappeared.

Twenty years later, Andy Rosenzweig, a career cop now chief of investigators for the Manhattan DA, had a flash of memory triggered by his knowing Glennon when he was a boy, and discovered that the murders had been declared cleared because Koehler was presumed dead. But finding no evidence for that presumption, Rosenzweig began looking for Koehler again, re-opening the case on his own time before it became official. Eventually, old fashioned police work paid off, and in a Grand Central Station scene worthy of a 1940s film noir, an armed and dangerous Koehler was arrested without a fight. 'If you've got witnesses, I'm fucked,' he said. They did, and he was.

Philip Gourevitch's true crime book was originally written as an article for the New Yorker, and it reads like it, the understated style unmistakeable in the way it takes the city for granted. This is not necessarily a bad thing; Joseph Mitchell, perhaps its finest exponent, used it to brilliant effect in Joe Gould's Secret, but also in the pieces collected in The Bottom Of The Harbor, to build a metaphor for a city that was disappearing as he watched, but before most observers were aware of its fade. And this in many ways is Gourevitch's theme, because the city was composed of people like Koehler, McGinn, and Glennon, and cops like Rosenzweig, and they are people who maybe don't exist any longer, or who exist with different, less firmly entrenched values.

He also writes well; the book reads at times like a piece of fiction, like a character study in short fiction. But the style I described above as understated could also be classified as detached, and sometimes, just as Koehler or Rosenzweig threaten to leap off the page, they seem to lose a dimension, becoming somewhat ethereal. And I'm half convinced this is deliberate, because what A Cold Case is really about is the shadowy New York that no longer exists, the smoky world of revenge and force that Koehler (seen at the right in 1962, when he was paroled, and eight years before killing two men; the inset photo is Rosenzweig as a beat cop, in the late 1960s) and to a lesser extent Rosenzweig, grew up in. It's about the codes of conduct for the men who populated the novels of David Goodis, or Day Keene, or Harry Whittington, about what happens to them as times change. And its about how just a bit of that morality from the Fifties survived in at least one cop who wouldn't let a case get closed when it wasn't. Murders like the ones Koehler committed seem to be more commonplace these days, they happen for perhaps less reason, and the killers don't, like Koehler, express a sort of sociopathic slight regret, for one of the murders, some three decades later when they are caught.

A Cold Case by Philip Gourevitch
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001, ISBN 0374125139

A VERY DANISH KILLING

BBC4 has now reached the halfway point, ten episodes, of the exceptional Danish crime drama The Killing. It follows in the wake of the Scandinavian crime boom, the Swedish and British Wallander shows, the Millennium films, and the best-sellers by Mankell, Larsson, Jo Nesbo, and others. But in fact, it's already nearly four years old, first shown in Denmark in 2007, and while it shares many of the characteristics of its Nordic peers, The Killing has a lot more in common with a number of Danish films, and some other European series, than with that new wave of Scandicrime.

A high-school girl is found raped, tortured, and murdered, in a car sunk into a lake outside Copenhagen. The car belongs to the city's leading opposition political party, who are beginning a reform campaign in the mayoral elections. The case is picked up by detective Sarah Lund, on her last day on the job before moving with her son to Sweden, to live with her boyfriend and work in the Swedish police. It's a simple story, which begins to take on multiple layers of complexity and emotion.

Of course the first thing that stands out is the format, 20 one-hour episodes, like a Bizzaro version of 24, which allows those layers to develop. What this amount of time provides is the opportunity to approach the one thing which is hardest to do in the television format: inner feelings, and also allows the programme to deal in the 'real-time', or longer term, effects of the crime. Which by the way is what the Danish title, Forbrydelsen, means, not 'the killing'. This allows one of the three main strands of the narrative, the story of the family of the teenaged girl who's been killed, to carry equal weight with the other two: the search for the killer, and the effect of the crime on the politics of Copenhagen, especially as the reform mayoral candidate, Troels Hartmann, becomes a suspect.

The police procedural part conforms best to the nordic crime mould, especially since Lund (Sofie Grabol) is a good cop, both thorough and instinctive. Grabol is able to appear both inspired and overwhelmed at the same time, a rare talent in an actor, and is completely believeable as a cop, even when wlaking around in that Faroese sweater that apparently has become a fashion item in Demark. When the show begins, she is partnered with her successor, Jan Meyer, who appears to be neither of those things. She is also obsessive, to the detriment of her family; she is Martin Beck or Wallander. What is interesting is the way each relationship in each strand in the film is put under pressure: Lund's with her Swedish police psychologist boyfriend (as well as her new work partner); the victim's parents with each other in their grief, and Hartmann's with his girlfriend and campaign manager Rie.

The format makes it an actors' series, and the actors do not disappoint. They have the advantage of looking real, never like actors playing roles, which was the biggest fault with the BBC Wallander. Bjarne Henricksen and Ann Elenora Jorgensen, as the parents of the murdered Anna Birk Larsen, are spectacularly believable, which makes both her grief, and his ill-judged vengeance in the early episodes, powerfully moving. Crime dramas don't often stay focused on the families of the lost, unless revenge is the reason, and in this case the internal family crisis is every bit as much of a thriller as the hunt for the killer. There is also the subtle parallel with the single-mother status of Lund, whose son does not want to move to Sweden, whose ex has just reappeared on the scene, and whose mother appears to consider her a totally unfit parent.

The Swedish boyfriend was a figure of some humour, if I'm picking up on the use of accents—the precise formality of Swedish against the sing-songy, clipped words and slurred contractions of Danish. But his analysis of the killings, that they are the work of someone who has killed before, and who has planned carefully, is what provides the real depth of the second-half of the story, or at least will when Lund finally gets around to acting on the ideas (as of episode 12 she has still ignored what is presuemably evidence of other murders by the same killer).

It is also what makes Lars Mikkelsen's performance as Hartmann so stunning, because he has established himself as a decent man, as a cunning manipulator, as a put-upon victim and as a viable suspect, all in the space of four episodes. Mikkelsen is probably the most, if not only, familiar face to most English viewers, from Flame and Citron, Island of Lost Souls, or The Kings Game (all of which I reviewed, from the London Film Festival, for Crime Time) and in fact it is as if he has stepped out of The King's Game, a seriously over-looked political thriller. Because politics lies at the heart of everything the Hartmann does, and, we suspect, everything that is happening to him. In that, his relationship with Rie (played by Marie Askehave with some glamour, which in the context makes her immediately suspicious) is perfect: she is a political insider, her father is a power-broker, her glamour suggests the lack of ideals which Hartmann professes, but may psychopathically be betraying.

It's a rich mixture, whose intelligence makes it compelling viewing. The Killing appears to be gaining the kind of word of mouth traction that channels like BBC4 are supposed to provide. In much the same way as the Swedish Wallander and the exceptional first series of the French Spiral, it proves that there are all sorts of approaches to the crime genre, and that many of old formulae which have carried British TV for so long are no longer automatically 'the best TV in the world' as I've heard echoed for decades by people who appear ever to have seen a foreign show unless it were American. And of course, speaking of America, there have already been comparisons made to The Wire, but The Killing is a very different thing. Yes, both shows essay a novelistic approach, but the means are different, the formats are different, the societies are different, and the portrayals of corruption are different; it is less endemic in The Killing, as if the society still harbours hope behind its political corruptions. In The Wire, the killings were part of a more total breakdown. In The Killing, it may be only the suggestion of the fissures starting to show.

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

JOANNE SIEGEL: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obit of Joanne Siegel, wife of Superman's co-creator Jerry Siegel and model for Joe Shuster when he drew the original Lois Lane, is in today's Indy, you can link to it here. Joanne really was like Lois Lane, who as a reporter was actually far more Hildy Johnson than Torchy Blane; she had what my mother would have called 'pizzazz' and was at the centre of Siegel and Shuster's copyright battles with DC, Warner Bros, and Time Warner right from the start.

It might have been nice to discuss Lois Lane a little more; for such a sharp woman, she seemed incredibly blind not to see that Clark Kent was Superman in glasses and with the spit-curl combed up. Of course, that was a neat bit of role reversal, the 30s and 40s stereotypes of girls in glasses, think of Dorothy Malone in The Big Sleep, but it was also a reflection of the perennial dream life of adolescent boys: if she only knew that behind this mild-mannered exterior lurks a real super man!

I also mentioned that, if Marlon Brando had indeed judged the costumes at the Cartoonists Ball where Joanne and Jerry re-encountered each other, it was a considerable coincidence that Brando would decades later waddle onto screen as Superman's Kryptonian father. And of course, despite the outwardly sexier versions of Lois that have appeared on screen in the past 30 years, Noel Neill, to me, remains the definitive screen Lois Lane. Though Joanne Siegel would probably give her a run...

MISSING THE MAN WHO CAME BACK

There's one great line - just one, so make it last - in the nasty, cheap low budget western The Man Who Came Back, released in 2008.Reese Paxton, Civil War veteran and gentle family man, has escaped from prison to seek revenge on the men who framed him and sent him there, the same men who later murdered his wife and son. He enters a saloon/brothel late at night and helps himself to some whiskey. The madam discovers him and asks who will pay for the drink. Reese, now cold-blooded and determined, replies, simply, "Everybody pays."

It's a nice moment, setting up the film's second half, in which Reese sets out to take down the whole damn dirty town. But it doesn't work, because it's in the wrong spot; the scene, which exists to set up the impending revenge, comes after Reese has started that revenge, not before. By this point, we've already had a fire and a murder, both Reese's doing. The coming storm has already arrived, and there's no point now of leading up to it. The scene fails.

The Man Who Came Back is riddled with moments like this, some pieces that must've sounded clever on paper, but fall apart in execution. Other parts work on their own but can't connect - or flat-out just don't fit - with the rest of the movie.

Most glaring is the representation of the Thibodeaux Massacre of 1887, a mass slaughter of striking plantation workers; it earns its own title card at the end, asking us to mull over a dark day in history, even though the movie's not about the massacre, barely shows the massacre, and is only tangentially related to the massacre. But writers Glen Pitre (who also directs) and Chuck Walker seem dead set on including a tribute to those who were killed in the incident, never mind dramatic logic. And actually, for all the talk of the massacre and its victims, the movie doesn't have much use for black characters, and rarely knows what to do with them. The former slaves of this film spend too much time either fawning over our hero or being brutalized by the villains. The film shows little interest in their side of the story, but then, it also shows little interest in the actual facts of the massacre, figuring "striking blacks" and "lots of gunfire" equates an accurate portrayal of history. How can a movie spend so much time touting itself as a tribute to history, but get that history so wrong?

On the swampy surface of things, this would have seemed a perfect project for Pitre, a Cajun filmmaker with an edgy filmography, who's worked with Tavernier on Confederate Ghosts, and he would seem the perfect choice to direct it. In movies there is always a lot of change between concept and finished product, and in this case my suspicion is a lot of changes and compromises were made. The result is like a Larry Cohen movie trying to be something 'better' but having no idea how to do that.

At times, it seems as if they just are not bothering. Billy Zane is cast as the meek new sheriff in town. The film is packed with guest stars out of place - George Kennedy, Carol Alt, Sean Young, Armand Assante - but none are more miscast than Zane, who turns his role into comic relief. Fine, except Zane achieves this comic relief not by bringing out the cowardice of his character, but by stubbornly repeating his trademark laid-back, smart-ass style, all blasé mannerisms and bemused asides. He's too casual, too smarmy for this movie, and no one seems to care it's out of touch with the tone of the story.

And on it goes. Convinced that the film deserves a graphic love scene between Reese and the madam, and unhindered by the fact that the two characters do not share a romantic relationship, we are shown a daydream fantasy, like a softcore porno, in which the madam imagines herself writhing atop the hero in sexual bliss. It's such a bizarre cutaway that even those who will rent the film for all its R-rated blood and breasts will roll their eyes.

It's a brutal movie, ugliness abounds here, but the filmmakers never quite know how to translate such bitter energy into engaging storytelling. The movie sits in an uncomfortable neutral zone between wanting to have the feel of a 1970s exploitation film and feeling guilty about it not being more somber, in which cheap violence and sex were less glorified. At times, you can feel the filmmakers pushing for a frank portrayal of what's lost within a man when he is consumed by revenge and a thirst for nasty violence. At other times, you can falmost hear them saying, 'Hey, we can show boobies.' Usually, the boobies win out.

In mid-movie, a villager, regretting his part in wrongfully convicting Reese, is murdered by his co-conspirator, while in the next room, the man's money-grubbing wife (Young, as ever, typecast) prostitutes herself to a hired thug. Here, perhaps more than anywhere else in the film, the pretense of earnest conflict disintegrates into gross exploitation. Is the cross-cutting between the almost sexual murder and the violent intercourse a dark punchline meant to illustrate some clever parallel, or is it just there for tasteless thrills? Does her grubbing for coins in the mud make a further point? I'm not sure the movie even knows.
,
And there's something else off at the very core of the film. Eric Braeden, the twenty year veteran of an American soap opera The Young and the Restless, stars as Reese. On the surface, this is fine casting; Braeden's craggy face suggests a man who's lived through too much, while his soft, restrained voice suggests a hero of few words, boiling with rage on the inside, cool on the surface. But Reese Paxton is a role requiring great physicality, and the sixty-something soap star cannot oblige. Choppy editing is employed to hide Braeden's stiff moves in every fight scene, but we're not fooled. His performance is filled with awkward poses passing as physical struggles. Both Braeden and his production company Gudegast (his original family name) Braeden are credited as executive producers, and perhaps the aim of the project is to simply create the situations for him to be highlighted.

In the end the film seems clumsy, with a bland badly-paced TV movie feel, and a talented cast turned into characters who stumble their way through the plot, turning exploitation into melodrama. The Man Who Came Back is a mess, bloated and brutal in all the wrong places.

TOM FRANKLIN'S CROOKED LETTER CROOKED LETTER

Larry Ott was a loser, an awkward child growing up, a horror-addicted bookworm disappointment to his garage-owning father. Not athletic or handy with tools, certainly inept with girls, he possessed none of the currencies of manhood in rural Mississippi. One night, Larry went out on a date, and the girl disappeared, and was never found. Ostracised, his father's garage lost its business and Larry went away, only to return eventually to Chabot, where he now runs his father's empty garage, drives his father's truck, and lives in his parents' house, alone and reading.

Silas Jones was, at one point, Larry's only friend. But Silas was black, living with his mother in a cabin on the outskirts of the Ott's land. Their friendship foundered after a fight; Silas went on to be a baseball star, and returned to Chabot to be the town's constable. Now, years later, another teenaged girl has gone missing, Silas is investigating, and Larry, inevitably is the number one suspect.

It is a wonderful, if not unusual set up, but what makes Tom Franklin's first crime novel (after the admirable reconstruction-era tale Hell At The Breech) is the quality of the story-telling and characterisation. Franklin actually name-checks Stephen King in here, but this story has much more in common with the Southern traditions of Flannery O'Connor or Carson McCullers, the novels of writers like Pete Dexter or Michael Malone. This is the south of traditional American literature, the Faulknerian south, but told with a modern sensibility that reflects the massive changes since the days of Faulkner or McCullers, but also the unchanging realities beneath those changes. There is a sense that the traditions of Southern gothic were maintained in the style known as 'dirty realism', the writing-workshop stories that make working people the horror-creatures, their brand-named accessories props that signal a sub-human essence. In effect, that style was ironic comment on Stephen King, and what Franklin does without ever striking a wrong note is to reclaim the materials of Southern gothic for real characters, straightforward as King, but in the end much closer to Daniel Woodrell, just a few hundred miles east.

If this all sounds like great praise, that's how it's intended. Larry Ott's character is built with overwhelming compassion, but with just enough distance to allow us to consider the awful possibilities. The weaving of past and present is deft, and of course the secrets that lay hidden, while somewhat obvious to the careful reader, are delivered with a moving sensitivity that gives them the space to work. All the while, the reality of growing up in Mississippi, the 'crooked letter' spelling of which provides the book's title, and the reality of living there now are both sketched out in great and subtle depth. It is one of those stories that wraps you in its setting, ties you to its characters, and imprisons you until its end. One of the best books of the year, whatever else happens in the next 10 months.

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin
Macmillan £11.99 ISBN 9780230753051
This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

JO NESBO'S LEOPARD

The Leopard opens with Harry Hole in Hong Kong, losing himself after having triumphed over the Snowman, but having lost his love, Rakel, and her son Oleg in the process. But there's another serial killer on the prowl in Norway, and they need Harry back. The lure of the chase doesn't get Harry to return, but the impending death of his father does, and he heads back to Oslo to find himself caught in the middle of a battle for control of the investigation, between his boss Hagen, and the Kripos boss, Mikael Bellman. Meanwhile, the bodies keep turning up.

Jo Nesbo has pulled out all the stops for this one, though in some ways more is less. There are three continents, a chilling execution device, and an action-packed finale that almost screams out for film adaptation. If this is an opening, or widening, of Hole's appeal, it's a brave thing to do, because Nesbo is already being compared, inevitably, to Henning Mankell, and by setting parts of the book in Africa, and titling it The Leopard, he invites such comparisons (recall The Eye Of The Leopard). In fact, the Harry Hole who returns from Hong Kong, and must stay sober rather than lose himself completely is much closer to Wallander than the Hole of earlier books; less abrasive, more vulnerable, more sympathetic. There's also an element of homage to Thomas Harris here, not just with the arcane torture devices, but also as Hole goes back to the Snowman, and to Katrine Bratt, the brilliant but twisted cop from that book, to help him find this new killer.

But it's also uniquely Nesbo. The plot involves many aspects of rural Norway, and in effect offers two villains, but the most interesting battle is not between them and Hole but between Hole and Bellman, who is the most chilling of all the villains in the novel, even though (or perhaps because) he is a cop. As the labyrinthine plot moves forward, the chess game between Hole and Bellman proves in some ways more suspenseful and dangerous than the pursuit of the killer—the affinity between Harry and the killers he pursues is far closer than that to cops like Bellman.

This conflict brings out the most abrasive parts of the Hole who won so many followers originally, and they may be disappointed in a kinder, gentler Harry. Though, since Nesbo's now billed on the cover as 'the next Stieg Larsson' perhaps Harry needs to be as irresistible to women as Mikke Blomqvist? His relationship with Kaja Solnes, the cop sent to bring him back to Norway from Hong Kong, isn't totally convincing, but it does offer its own shadowy twists, and their last scene is an absolutely brilliant piece of writing. Which in the end is what it's all about, and though this is a typically long novel, Nesbo has the ability to keep complicated plot lines going, keep characters in conflict, deal with red herrings, and even in translation make it all feel immediate. He's not the next Stieg Larsson, though he deserves to be that successful, but he does have some of the same ability to convey a wider perspective on the Norwegian world. He's more like, as I suggested earlier, a cross between Mankell and Harris, though Hole is a character either would envy. And in the final scenes of The Leopard, I again thought of Thomas Harris, with a strange echo of Hannibal Lecter and new directions for the character. With Nesbo on top form, that's something to look forward to. It something the very seductive cover of the German edition suggests...

The Leopard by Jo Nesbo
Harvill Secker, £12.99, ISBN 978184655401

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

MAJ. DICK WINTERS: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obit of Maj. Dick Winters, the central figure in Band of Brothers, is in today's Indy; you can link to it here. My criticism of the TV mini-series was that it seemed to emphasize the idea that the soldiers were fighting for their buddies, for each other, to the exclusion of any other motivation--the idea I think being that when men are actually at war that's what it boils down to. I'm not sure that was totally fair to that generation and their motivations. But in any case, the film did a wonderful job of showing the basic decency of men like Winters being stretched beyond limits, and in his case in particular, the way he rose to that challenge with simple unassuming dignity. Damian Lewis did a brilliant job of catching just those qualities. The series resonated with me in the special sense of admiration for my father's generation, one against which I in many ways rebelled, but one whose ultimate resilience, dedication, and deceny I still admire.