CLARENCE CLEMONS, IN MEMORIAM

People forget how frenetic Bruce Springsteen was in the early days of the E Street Band, which is why the Big Man, Clarence Clemons was so essential; on stage he provided an anchor for Springsteen's antics as he dashed and jumped across the stage, only to make it back (most of the time) just in time to hit the mike, and Clemons, at just the right time. He provided another sort of anchor, too, because Bruce wrote serious songs and often it was Clarence who reminded him, the songs themselves, and us that this was rock and roll.

Musically, Clemons did for Springsteen what King Curtis did in Memphis, or Junior Walker in Motown, providing that anchor, but also the raw squawking reminder that there is more to life than teenager-satisfying guitar solos and hip-hop bottom.

But possibly the most important thing was Clemons looked just right to unify a ragtag bunch of white kids from the Jersey shore. Although people forget that the E Street Band originally included another black musician, the talented pianist David Sancious. Sancious was in some ways even more of a professor than The Professor, Roy Bittan. They both provided elegance, trills weaving in and out underneath the big sax (and sometimes organ) that shared the lead with guitar. Think of the Band's Garth Hudson and Richard Manuel doing the same, and think too of how Springsteen used Danny Federici playing glockenspiel, even in 'Born To Run'. Sancious moved on to more serious (and less star-making) musical pursuits, while Clemons, who never seemed to move on to bigger things (unless you count Lady Gaga, which I can't) always seemed to fit best as Springsteen's sideman, Bill Cosby to his Robert Culp. It's an American stereotype that goes back to Chingnachook and Deerslayer. The relationship is made iconic on the cover of Born To Run (recently voted one of the top 10 ever by Rolling Stone readers) with Springsteen seeming taking a break and resting as he leans on the Big Man, who's playing up a storm, apparently giving him the crucial something he needs.

I first saw the E Streeters in the summer of 1975 at Tanglewood, before Born To Run broke. I'd been directed there way by my friend Berms, who came from Toms River and insisted Greetings From Asbury Park was the greatest record he'd ever heard. It wasn't, but The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle soon jumped into my consideration, and while I lived with Berms in Washington he scared away a woman named Adriana I was dating by calling her Rosalita. Many years later I picked up a bootleg of Springsteen's 'farewell' concert, broadcast on WMMR in Philly from the Main Point, and it is one of my all-time favourite bootlegs. It's from just before that Tanglewood concert, and it's full of energy and promise and never sounds stale. Oddly, it's just become available legitimately, which may be the fate of all my favourite bootlegs—Neil Young's International Harvesters was another of my treasures and that one's just come out too.

The best of Clemons' E Street solos may be the one on Jungleland, but the one on Rosalita may be the one that expresses best his role in the E Street Band: it kicks, it drives, and it restates the theme, which is the theme of so much of Springsteen's music, of salvation through music. He's the second E Streeter to die, after Federici, and he was 69, a bit older than the rest of the band, but it still makes me feel old to think he's gone. I'm not sure how they could tour now without him, but I sure as shit would like to hear a tribute album, with other sax players taking his parts. RIP Big Man.

13 ASSASSINS: A SAMURAI EPIC WITH WESTERN APPEAL

In one sense, Takashi Miike's 13 Assassins is familiar; following in the footsteps of films you've seen (The Seven Samurai and its American remake The Magnificient Seven being the best-known) and films you haven't (Kudo Eiichi's Jusanin No Shikaku—a 1963 film on whose screenplay Miike's film is based, and serves as the Japanese title) and I haven't either. Miike certainly lives up to the spectacle of Seven Samurai; this is a big action movie staged with great flair, an big-screen epic immensely satisfying on that level.

But Miike rises above that in a number of impressive ways. The first third of the film needs to set the stage, and he begins brilliantly with a samurai committing seppuku. It is 1844, and Japan is living in the last days of Edo and the rule of the shoguns. The suicide, is shot with an almost abstract simplicity that recalled, for me, the extreme stylisation of Paul Schrader's Mishima, but more importantly focuses the audience on the ritual, the obligations, on the strict lines of demarcation of Japanese society, and on its concepts of honour. The death is a protest against the abuses of the Shogun's son, Lord Naritsugu, a psychopath and a sadist almost in the sense of DeSade's cod philosophy, but also a spoiled child who abuses the absolute power he has. Naritsugu is played brilliantly by Inagaki Goro, once a boy-band pop star, with a cruel insouciance and a sometimes child-like wonder; he carries almost every scene he's in.

There is nothing that can be done within the system to stop Naritsugu, so officials look beyond, to a seemingly retired samurai, Shinzaemon (Yakisho Koji), who, after being shown Naritsugu's worst atrocities, and understanding the dangers to the current age of peace his being placed on the ruling council would bring, undertakes his assassination, and assembles a team of 12,basically untraceable, samurai to accomplish that. The gathering of the team is familiar stuff, but the 13th assassin is not a samurai, but a hunter they meet as the travel to their objective—Koyata, half hunter, half forest spirit, who provides comic relief but turns out to be quite a fighter himself. Leading Naritsugu's guard is Hanbei, an old rival and colleague of Shinza's going back to their days in the samurai dojo.

The final third of the film is the battle—with an entire village turned into an exploding trap, the finale of a sort of game of go for Shinza and Hanbei, which Hanbei appears to have won when he shows up with some 200 samurai, not the 70 Shinza was expecting. It's a spectacularly well-staged battle, and the amazing thing is that we follow each of the 13 characters to their individual fates, understanding who they are—if you think back to The Magnificent Seven, that is exactly what gave the film its power.

If you also think back to The Magnificent Seven, and how Eli Wallach's bandit becomes such an entertaining foil, you will get an idea of Miike's subtlety, because although Naritsugu is a monster, he is not the battle-foil, that is Hanbei, who is remaining true to the code of the samurai, and loyalty to his master. And this is what gives the film its true power.

Miike wrings every ounce of drama from the ambiguity of the samurai code, and the epic, in another sense, breakdown of society's order that the assassination itself signifies. At one point, as Naritsugu's pleasure in seeing the slaughter around him leads him to yearn for a return to the age of war, you almost think Hanbei will turn against this maniac, a Hitler-cum Genghis Kahn-cum Donald Rumsfeld. But his sense of samurai duty is too strong. And when Hanbei and Shinza stage their ultimate duel, Shinza reminds him they were always equals in the dojo, before 'cheating' his way to victory. What is the virtue in loyalty to the wrong cause? Of blind obedience? At one point Shinza points out that rulers have some responsibility to servants and Naritsugu, who has addressed almost everyone as 'servant', finds this notion somewhat strange and amusing.

In that sense, and in another way, Miike seems drawn to another western model, The Wild Bunch. There is much looking back to the age of war, which some fondness, and there is a lot of living up to the true code of the samurai which reflects the debates about what a man has to live up to in Peckinpah's movie. In one sense you can see that film as Pike Bishop atoning for first abandoning Deke Thornton, who goes to prison as a result, and then abandoning Angel in a similar fashion. They are happy to engage in a massacre, knowing they are likely to die, for the simple pleasure of knowing they will be going out doing what they perceive of as the right thing. That it turns out to be futile for them is not the case in 13 Assassins, but the impulse is the same, and Miike also undercuts that western ethos by having the 13th assassin, the forest-imp Koyata declares, in the end, samurai bore him when they aren't fighting one-on-one.

It's a wonderful combination of traditional samurai epic with modern ambiguity. You might expect the latter from Miike, but there is little in his previous work to suggest either the scale or the control of this film. If the ball has been bouncing back and forth between samurai epics and epic westerns (with the odd spaghetti western thrown in), Miike has put the ball firmly back in the western court.

OUTSIDE THE LAW: REVOLUTIONARY GANGSTERS

With the 50th anniversary of the Paris Massacre almost upon us, Rachid Bouchareb's Outside The Law (Hors la loi) takes on added significance. Inevitably, it will be compared with Pontecorvo's classic Battle of Algiers, but equally inevitably we need to realise that 45 years after that film there is little point in trying to repeat its brilliance, that in putting together a big-budget (for a French film, reputedly $25 million) film, Bouchareb is going to approach the issues within the context of a more mainstream entertainment. But having done just that, Bouchareb does not dodge issues.

He tells the story of three Algerian brothers, who have their home stolen from them by French colonists because they have no deeds--a story familiar today from Israel's appropriation of Palestinian farms. Their father is killed while police massacre demonstrators on VE day in 1945 in the town of Setif, to which the family has moved, in what is probably the film's most visceral and powerful sequence. The brothers take their separate paths: the eldest, Messaoud (Roschdy Zem) to the French army, and capture at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, the studious Abelkadir (Sami Bouajila) to the revolution, and a French prison, and the youngest, Said (Jamel Debbouze) to a life of petty crime as a pimp in Paris, eventually graduating to owning a nightclub and managing a talented fighter, dubbed Kid Algiers.

In fact, Outside The Law comes closer to Jean-Pierre Melville's Army In The Shadows than to Pontecorvo, and in using many tropes from gangster movies resembles a politicised Warner Bros movie like The Roaring Twenties, or Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In America. That much of the film is familiar, if not predictable, from our gangster memory, slows it down somewhat. But it still caused a political outcry in France, in part because the French authorities are seen to be such villains, and in part because of it connotations to the current 'war' on terror and the situation of Moslems with France itself. Because we identify with the brothers, and thus their cause, and because we agree with the idea, if not always the realities, of liberation, it is inevitable that the French become the film's villains, and that in each situation they are portrayed in the worst light (think of British reaction to the Croke Park massacre as presented in Michael Collins for a parallel). But compare the English poster above with the French version, left, to get an idea of how much more seriously the characters appear, and thus the issues become.

What is most interesting in this portrayal, however, is where it seems to veer slightly from historical reality. The officer in charge of anti-terrorist activity, Colonel Faivre (Bernard Blancan) is presented as being immensely self-aware, not racist in the way the police are, and as a veteran of the Resistance. Historically, the police in charge of the repression of the FLN in France as the police turned out to be uniformly those who had collaborated energetically with the Nazis, and in effect were happy to substitute Algerians for Jews (see my previous post on this blog, on the novel Murder in Memoriam). Faivre, however, while fighting for the French empire, has, like Messaoud, been a prisoner of the Vietnamese, and has come to believe Ho Chi Minh's axiom, which is presented as revolutionary theory to Abelkadir in prison: repression works in favour of the revolution, and the more vicious the repression, the more self-defeating it becomes. Faivre understands this, and to him is given the film's final, prophetic line, which is shown to come true in a silent coda celebrating Algerian independence.

Bouchareb transcends his gangster-film set pieces in a number of other ways—by having police break up the wedding (with echoes of The Godfather), by having the dilemma of whether Kid Algiers should fight for the French title become a political issue (which needs to be resolved through violence), by having Said—the criminal—being the brother who wants to preserve his French life. And he benefits immensely from the talents of his three leads, whose interactions helped make his previous film, Days Of Glory, so successful. Debbouze, in a Cagneyesque role, steals the show—he's so imbued in the look of Thirties Hollywood, so almost cuddly, as to throw the film into another dimension. Bouajila's task is somewhat harder—he starts out almost as a Jeff Goldblum before morphing into Giancarlo Esposito, though I kept thinking of Jerzy Kosinski in Reds as the role model for the increasingly cold doctrinaire leader he becomes. Zem, whose solidity provides the anchor, has the biggest moment, the break-down scene with his mother. Without such strong leads, the film would dissolve into an action thriller, as it is always threatening to do, but because they play against each other so well, it assures that the personal and political stories stay connected and neither overpowers the other.

Given the recent 'Arab Spring' the anniversary of the Paris Massacre ought to be an opportunity to revisit what importance we give to independence, and what responsibilities remain for the colonial powers, not least in their own countries. There is an interesting sequence, in which DeGaulle goes to Algeria, to encourage a 'moderate' government, which celebrates Algerian oil coming to France. The parallels with our own world aren't hard to miss. And Ho's lessons on the futility of repression ring true more than half a century later. This is a film which gives new meaning to familiar materials, and transcends them powerfully.

DIDIER DAENINCKX'S MURDER IN MEMORIAM: A Forgotten Friday Entry

NOTE: While starting to write about Rachid Bouchareb's film Outside The Law, which deals with the Algerian struggle in France for independence, I went back to Didier Daeninckx's novel to see how his approach compared. A slightly shorter version of this review originally appeared in Crime Time 47, in February 2006--I'm assuming I hadn't seen the film Hidden, which approaches the issue in much the same way, at the time, although it came out right around the time the CT review was published.

The best thing about this translation of Murder In Memoriam which, as Meurtes pour memoire, won the French Prix du Roman Policier in 1984, is how fresh it seems. The French conflicts over Algeria in the early 1960s, against which it is set, have a distinct echo in today's so-called Global War on Terror, and the response of the French authorities for abuses committed under the guise of fighting terror have a distinctly sharp reflection in Washington and London today.It created a stir at the time, and is sometimes credited with forcing the French to examine the fact that many of the police responsible for the massacre had been active collaborators with the Nazi occupation twenty years before that.

When Bernard Thiraud, a student, is murdered in Toulouse, Inspector Cadin soon discovers that his father was also killed during the massive pro-Algerian demonstration in October 1961, during which the police murdered scores of marchers, and which has become known as the Paris Massacre. Is there a connection?

Although in mystery terms the availability of news film of the event seems somewhat contrived, a deus ex machina link, and Cadin's relationship with the murdered student's girlfriend doesn't quite ring true, it is all presented with an understated verisimilitude that somehow seems very French; its atmosphere a cross between Chabrol and Costa Gavras or Pontecorvo. The political history is actually far more interesting that the crime itself, which is obviously because it's more interesting to the author as well. But Daeninckx carries off the task of making the political thriller work with success. The translation by Liz Heron also strikes me as being first-rate, with colloquial French being rendered in appropriate English. Kudos to Serpent's Tail for bringing this back into print.

Murder In Memoriam Serpent's Tail £7.99 ISBN 9781852427955

JAMES ARNESS: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obit of James Arness, Marshal Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke, is in today's Indy; you can link to it here. It's pretty much as I wrote it, except the bit about the show being retitled 'Gun Law' when it ran in the UK. I had written 'imaginatively retitled', but maybe we're not as self-deprecating as we like to think here in Britain!

Arness was very much like the character he played, low key and modest, and the fact he was content to stay in the same role for 20 years was one of the keys to the show's success and its long run (Law & Order tied it with 20 seasons, but far fewer episodes, and of course a changing cast). I was never a fan, but I'd be curious to go back and see some of the shows now; perhaps the early black and white half-hours, often based on the radio scripts, were harder-hitting. Oddly enough, I am old enough to remember hearing, if not listening, to Gunsmoke on the radio--I'd have to guess I was 3 and my mother was listening.

The Wayne friendship was real, and it must have been a treat for Arness to play Tom Dunson in the TV remake of Red River; though I doubt Bruce Boxleitner carried the impact of Montgomery Clift as Matt.

WILLIAM BURROUGHS' NAKED LUNCH: THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY APPRECIATION

NOTE: I originally wrote a piece on Naked Lunch for Headpress, then revisited the idea for London Magazine to celebrate the book's 50th anniversary, and the anniversary edition that was published then. It appeared in the October/November 2009 issue of that estimable magazine, as noted on this blog at the time, but it has not been available online, in either version, until now. What follows is the London Magazine essay, slightly revised. I find it easy to choose the four greatest American novels (The Confidence Man, Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby) but numbers five through ten seem to change and re-order constantly. But Naked Lunch is always one of those next six....

When I was 17, in the summer of 1968, I brought a copy of Naked Lunch home from the library. Mrs. Doyle, the librarian, who had been watching over my reading ever since she snuck me my first library card when I was only four, had no negative reaction; after all, she'd put the book on the shelves. But my father, perhaps remembering the book's obscenity trial only a few years before, or more likely reading the Grove Press cover blurbs (ignoring Norman Mailer’s praising Williams Burroughs as “perhaps the only American writer possessed of genius”) and worried perhaps about my motivations, took it back the very next morning.

Imagine my surprise when I arrived at university just a couple of months later and Naked Lunch was the first book I was assigned to study in John Hackett's freshman English class. That assignment put an end, once and for all, to any idea I had of studying religion, or even worse, political science. I was hooked.

Hooked being the operative word for the kaleidoscopic parade of addictions on display in Naked Lunch. Burroughs was writing about the way human need creates the conditions for humans to be controlled, and I, along with my generation, was starting to feel the cultural imperative to rebel against control. Read the essay “Testimony Concerning a Sickness” which introduces the novel. Addictions, to Burroughs, were like viruses; they took over your body's metabolism and changed it, so it couldn't function normally without them. 'Language is a virus,' he said, and language was just another thing he refused to allow to control him. Thus Naked Lunch proceeds almost at random, its cut-ups disdaining elements of control like plot, or logic, but it drives its points home directly, with image and with language that reflects both pulp fiction and pornography, language that works to get a reaction from the reader.

Reading Naked Lunch was like studying a combat map of the Sixties' culture war battle zones. Although it was almost a decade old, the writing was fresh, hallucinatory. I’d already read the Beat heroes, starting, oddly enough, with Gregory Corso, whose appeal was more to romantic adolescents than to revolutionaries. But Corso, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac symbolised rebellion to a younger generation looking for freedom but also dependent on their new parental figures to show them the way. It was part of being a baby-boomer, this expectation of having things done for you while you changed the world. But where most of the Beats were wild and loud, the bad neighbours who needed to turn down their be-bop music at four in the morning, Burroughs was more the quiet guy walking down the street staring at his feet, maybe mumbling to himself. But, and this was an important lesson to learn, despite not being wild, not being loud, Burroughs was farther out than anyone. Ginsburg’s hero, Walt Whitman, said “I contain multitudes.” Hidden inside the grey suit uniform of middle America, Burroughs’ said 'of course you do, you have to'.

I sought out his first novel Junkie, published under the pseudonym William Lee. It's a pure pulp first person tale of addiction written in tight prose, Naked Lunch before it flipped out. My friend Michael Goldfarb told me when he was young he fantasized about Bill scoring scag at the same Automat he used to visit with his parents. I envisioned Bill waiting for his man, eying Joseph Cornell in a corner table surreptitiously checking out the counter girl. Michael and I were both middle class college boys and could identify with Burroughs’ life story. It enhanced his mystique. Born in St. Louis, attended Harvard: he could have been TS Eliot. But after Harvard he wandered to New York and hooked up with the Beats, discovering crime, drugs, and the sleaziest side of the gay underworld. Even better, family money supported him. It came from his grandfather’s cut of the Burroughs' adding machine fortune—some tales had his granddad actually inventing the thing—and he even called his last collection of essays The Adding Machine, along the lines of 'when the legend becomes fact, print the legend'. Now the Burroughs Co. is gone, merged into the giant Unisys, a monolith corporation straight out of one of Burroughs’ Nova Express novels.

Well ahead of the hippies, in the Fifties, Burroughs left the cities and went back to the land, growing dope in Texas with Joan Vollmer. He married her as if to defy the controlling conventions of his own sexuality. They lit out for Mexico one step ahead of the police. The story of his failed attempt to play William Tell with her is well known, but her death was the pivotal event of his life. In the introduction to his novel Queer (written just after Junkie but not published until 1985) he said 'I live with the constant threat of possession and a constant need to escape from control. The death of Joan brought me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice but to write my way out.'

Control again. He jumped Mexican bail and wound up in Tangiers. He wrote notes and stories, and in Paris, with Ginsburg, Brion Gysin, and Harold Norse cutting and pasting and editing, produced Naked Lunch. Norse, whose died only recently (I wrote his obituary for The Independent, you can link to that here), produced his own cut-up novel, Beat Hotel, but it wasn't published until 1973, and then only in German. There's nothing addictive about it; Norse, a poet, lacked the pulp edges of the writer of Junkie, lacked the tormented vision of control.

The ripple effect was immediate. Mailer’s Why Are We In Vietnam?, one of his two or three best novels, drew heavily on Naked Lunch, blending it with Faulkner's The Bear into a searing take on the addictions of pre-Sixties America. Meanwhile Burroughs was extending his cut-up techniques, going farther into the realm of Philip K Dick paranoia in his Nova Express trilogy. Rock bands named themselves after props in his novels, Steely Dan, Soft Machine. David Cronenburg understood what Burroughs was about when he tried valiantly to film Naked Lunch, trying with limited success to find an objective correlative for what Burroughs saw, to translate his hallucinations into celluloid reality. Less successfully, what was Trainspotting if not the outer trappings of Burroughs moved to Edinburgh and reduced to mundane Scots dialect? Forty years later, writers could still be copying his prose and calling it avant garde.

Eliot fled Missouri because it wasn’t respectable enough, became a bank clerk in England. Burroughs left Missouri to abandon respectability, then, having discarded it, trampled it, inverted it, perverted it, gave up the bohemian haunts of Tangiers, Paris, London, and New York to return to Lawrence, Kansas, a town whose claim to fame is its pillaging by Quantrill’s guerillas during the Civil War. Did Thomas Wolfe say you can't go home again? Lawrence was the hated mirror image of Missouri, a final finger flung in the face of his respectable tradition. Shooting Joan didn’t lessen his fascination with guns. In the 1980s Burroughs began painting, exhibiting works of “shotgun” art, created by blasting buckets of paint onto the canvas with buckshot, Jackson Pollack meets Travis Bickle. Interviewers would show up expecting mystic rap and be driven to distraction by his laconic drawling reticence. With-it celebrities, millionaire actors and rock stars, Sean Penn and Dennis Hopper and Kurt Cobain, came to pay tribute to his far-out genius. Bill put on his suit and showed them his guns. (Hopper, at least, got it: that's his portrait of Burroughs on the right). Burroughs had returned to his roots physically. Emotionally, he had never left them. He always was Bill Lee, his alter-ego narrator of Junkie, clinically aware of the effects of the many abuses to which he subjected his system. Like Hopper, he could stand back and observe his addictions even while serving them. Unlike Hopper, he could write them into his books. He never gave up drink or drugs, though he did clean up his heroin addiction. He outlived Cobain, with whom he cut an album in 1992, and outlived almost all the major, younger figures of the Beat Generation.

The enduring image of the Beat movement will be Kerouac and Cassady in their T shirts and Levis. The advertisers won’t let that die. Burroughs never fit that image, even though his sober, business-suited figure itself should be as iconic, in its ironic way. Burroughs' writing was the most dangerous of all the Beats, and the most original. We can all sit at home now and use computers to rearrange paragraphs the way Burroughs did with scissors and glue. Interzone has its own web space on the internet. Heroin hasn’t gone away, though it had to move over for crack. I still prize my Sixties Grove Press edition of Naked Lunch, the most subversive of all the Beat works, the feel of it, that sense of being rebellious by being a consumer of the right stuff. Ironic isn't it? I haven't actually held that book in years. Fifty years since it was published? Forty since I read it? In the age of Google and Wikipedia, I wrote this essay from memory, nothing more.

DEON MEYER'S THIRTEEN HOURS

Deon Meyer's Thirteen Hours has been nominated for the Johannesburg Sunday Times Fiction Prize, which is fascinating, because it's so rare to see the crime genre elevated into these general awards, and guessing the reasons why Meyer's book is on the shortlist provide a good entry into why Thirteen Hours is such a compelling book.

First off, it's a totally involving thriller, but that in itself would never be reason for the mainstream reviewers to take notice. A young American tourist is found murdered in Cape Town, and her friend is missing, and, it turns out, being pursued by the killers. Benny Griessel, the recovering alcoholic detective who first appeared in Devil's Peak is put in charge of the investigation, and he basically has 13 hours in which to find the girl and bring her to safety. The story proceeds as if in real time (I say as if because, unlike a TV show like 24 Hours, a writer cannot control real time—the book won't take 13 hours to read, obviously, though some reviews write as if it would!). Meyer has shown himself adept at thrillers before, and his touch is sure, his pacing relentless, and he never plays tricks with the reader.

But what makes the book so good is that Meyer's true forte is the police procedural. The format actually lends itself to thrillers better than mysteries—it deals with the process of policing, and in a thriller where all that is hidden is the result, the procedure itself becomes part of the tension. What the procedural offers is the chance to glimpse into both the personalities of a police team, the ensemble casts that make everything from Ed McBain's 87th Precinct to Harry Bosch's LAPD or Wallander's Ystad police so interesting, and the politics of policing itself.

Griessel gets the assignment partly because he is expendable; he is a loose cannon who can be sacrificed. His superiors see the task as hopeless, and it's better that Griessel take the hit if it fails. He is an older white officer in a force which is increasingly conscious of achieving some sort of racial balance. Which leads to the other factor in Meyer's mainstream appeal, his frank and revealing approach to race as revealed in the interactions of the various police, Afrikaaners, Zulus, Xhosa, and Colored. I've mentioned James McClure before when I've written about Meyer; his novels set in apartheid South Africa featured an Afrikaaner police lieutenant and his Zulu sergeant, and to many readers provided a telling look at the realities of South African life that they couldn't find in mainstream fiction.

Meyer's world is more complex than that, and he does an excellent job of playing with the rivalries, jealousies, and internal politicking of the new South Africa, while keeping the context personal. In that sense, Griessel is somewhere between Bosch and Wallander, maybe closer to Martin Beck, in providing an abrasive but somewhat neutral sounding board for the other characters. He also has to navigate through the monied politics of the South African music business, solving a second, seemingly locked-room murder, at the same time. Of course the two cases turn out to be connected, but it's in such an inventive way (and a way that reflects the reality of dangers in South Africa—whether people choose to get involved with violence or not) that it really works.

There also turns out to be a bigger story behind the two American girls, and although it's not contrived, it's so big that the revelation seems something of an anti-climax, as if there could have been a whole separate story built from that. Still, it is a bigger theme, and those are the kinds of elements that also impress the mainstream critics. And what most impresses me is the smaller themes which Griessel himself personifies—like so many of our favourite detectives, a flawed but well-intentioned man, with the cynicism of the idealist who's seen his ideals shattered. He's more interesting than Mat Joubert, who also appears in this book, and although Meyer has studiously avoided writing either into an actual series, more Griessel, and continued involvement of Joubert, who's bound for the private sector, would be welcomed.

Meyer's mainstream attention in South Africa is deserved, and more attention in this country is definitely overdue. Thirteen Hours is a compelling thriller, a multi-layered police procedural, and a book whose good writing survives into English translation. Meyer's surely one of the very best in the game.

Thirteen Hours by Deon Meyer
Hodder& Stoughton £6.99
ISBN 9780340953617

'DR. DEATH': JACK KEVORKIAN'S GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obit of Dr Jack Kevorkian is up on the Guardian's website, you can link to it here. It's hard to know exactly what to make of Dr Death, and perhaps one can make too much of his defense of Nazi doctors in concentration camps, but it is hard to escape the feeling that he was, at heart, a badly-adjusted obsessive, and it is easy to see that like many obsessives, he was capable to great compassion to individuals but had great trouble extending it in theory. I called him the 'Ralph Nader of Death' in my copy, but that was cut from the piece as used.

I also wanted to try to compare him to William Burroughs, not just for their asceticism but for their attitude to death--but that was the stuff of a literary essay, not an obituary. It was telling that Kevorkian became a popular talk-show guest even as he was disavowed by most of the assisted-suicide community.

The Barry Levinson HBO film with Al Pacino sounds interesting, but on the face of it I get the feeling that Pacino's hot emotionalism might not be right. If he did 'crack' Dr Death, it would indeed deserve an Emmy.

And it was also fun to revisit Ron Rosenbaum's essay, Travels With Dr Death, which became the title-piece of his first, and probably best, collection of journalism. It was when he was really at his peak as an essayist, and Kevorkian provided him with the perfect fodder for one of his exegeses, almost a religious interpretation while being both perceptove and entertaining.

I also found myself wondering if a wrestling match between Kevorkian and Dr Sam Sheppard might have had any legs?

WALLY YONAMINE: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obit of Wally Yonamine, who died three months ago, is in today's Indy, you can link to it here. It's a great story: a Japanese-American football star who suffered racial abuse in the AAFC, then switched to baseball in Japan and suffered even more from prejudice there. He is a legend in Japan, and in Hawaii, and the whole story of foreigners playing baseball in Japan is a fascinating one that probably deserves its own study.

So does the history of pro football on the Pacific Coast before the Rams (transplanted from Cleveland) and the 49ers (from the All American Football Conference) established themselves in the NFL. The PCFL featured a lot of stars who went on to bigger things, including Jackie Robinson and Woody Strode, as well as integrating the NFL, and the tale of barnstorming outfits like the Hawaiian Warriors is another with no equivalent nowadays.

BILL HUNTER AND NEWSFRONT: IN MEMORIAM

Whenever film critics seemed to 'discover' Australian cinema, Bill Hunter always seemed to be right there in the middle of the films they were discovering. He was, in some ways, the Australian everyman; the guy who could play the everyday Aussie and bring out all his virtues and some of his weaknesses too, and do it convincingly. He's also, to me, the kind of guy who, were he not on the wrong side of the world, would have made a great Scandinavian detective. The Aussie cinema boom that received the most attention was the early and mid 1990s, with the success of films like Strictly Ballroom, Muriel's Wedding, and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, in all of which Hunter played a major part. In fact, his performance in Priscilla, as Bob, does to Guy Pearce, Terrence Stamp, and Hugo Weaving exactly what Jack Nicholson did to Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in Easy Rider.

But an earlier explosion in Aussie cinema began in the mid-70s, and although Hunter's success in Peter Weir's Gallipoli was widely noted, his best work, to me, was two movies he made with Philip Noyce: Heatwave (1982) with Judy Davis and Chris Haywood, which to me is a seriously underrated thriller, and one of my favourite 'small' movies of all-time, Newsfront (1978).

Hunter gives a standout performance as a newsreel cameraman who refuses to bend with the times and sell out to television. Noyce does a brilliant job of mixing in years of post-war Aussie history and the conflict between Hunter (as Len Maguire) and Gerard Kennedy as his more adaptable brother. Haywood is there too, as his assistant. It's about changing times in Australia, and in the news industry, and it ends with Hunter and his newsfilm camera being the only person covering the infamous USSR vs Hungary water-polo match at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, a match which took place after the Russians had put down the Hungarian uprising. But what it's really about is staying true to old-fashioned ideals, to a sense of Australian mateyness which seemed to be fast disappearing, if it had really existed when it mattered, which may have been the point of Gallipoli too.

Part of the reason I was drawn to the film was that I was working at the time for UPITN, a television newsfilm agency, which had evolved from Fox Movietone news (in fact, just two weeks ago, Reece Schoenfeld, who had started with Movietone, headed UPITN, and left to found CNN for Ted Turner, died, and I couldn't get British papers interested--but he personified the same news ethos that Hunter does in Newsfront) and we covered the world on 16mm film, which was shipped to London, edited, scripted, and then shipped (and later satellited) around the world. I was doing the scripting and the sending, and I could empathise with Hunter's predicament, trying to hang onto news values in a faster-moving world that wants more entertainment. Sound familiar today? It's a fine film, and I recommend it without reservations.

Looking through his credits I see a couple of television mini-series that interest me, a 2000 remake of On The Beach, in which Hunter plays the PM, and 1995's Blue Murder, an Aussie police thriller. I'll look forward to catching up with Bill Hunter.

AGE OF HEROES: Assault On Familiar Territory

Is Sean Bean our era's Jack Hawkins? If that thought has ever occurred to you, then he is a perfect fit for Age Of Heroes, a well-crafted little war film which manages to lifts parts of virtually every familiar bank-holiday boys-own war movie of the past three generations, including but not limited to The Guns Of Navarone, The Eagle Has Landed, and The Dirty Dozen. Of course, because this is austerity Britain, we are limited to only eight heroes, but that's the price you don't pay. Sadly, there is very little that's new included in the mix, and what little there is doesn't really improve the movie, but if you can suspend your need for originality, Age Of Heroes is well-made and reasonably entertaining. But really, even the fil's poster is a compendium of throwback!

Supposedly this is the true-life story of 30 Commando during WWII, as created by Ian Fleming in his pre-James Bond days. As played by James D'Arcy, Fleming's role appears less to create the unit than to emphasise the class distinctions between the men in it (and indeed, within it) and the war's plotters. Nothing wrong with that, especially when Fleming comes out on the wrong side. There's a little bit of romance hinted at, and I'm not sure why unless it's to persuade us that Fleming isn't all Bullingdon Club, but otherwise he does serve another purpose, which is to explain everything to death, in case the 'intricacy' of the story is too much for you. Fleming demands an eight-man team, which is interesting because the eighth man, as played by Danny Dyer, is someone who's not supposed to be there, but persuades Bean, as Captain Jones, to let him in the unit.

The mission is to capture German radar technology in Norway, thus the cast is enhanced by both a 'Norwegian Yank' and a beautiful Norwegian Norwegian underground fighter. The film follows the usual format: put the unit together, bond (or James Bond) during training, take on the mission, and get away, and it has all the usual twists and turns, none of which would be hard for Ray Charles to see coming. Bean, for example, has been talked into the 'one last mission' which virtually assures he will not return; his wife is having a baby in the meantime, as if the odds weren't already stacked against him in movie terms. Why they all carry American Thompsons is another query I'd like answered; Fleming wants them to fight like 'red indians' not Chicago mobsters.

The oddest thing about the film is the enemy. The Germans seem oddly unaware of what the potential target might be; they are too busy committing atrocities in the Norwegian mountains, and filming them for the WWII equivalent of You Tube. This film-within-a-film technique might be an attempt to position Age Of Heroes for Sundance, particularly as the Germans are equating the Norwegians with terrorists. The German commander for some reason doesn't dress in mountain gear, and Askel Hennie tries to look like William Forsythe at his most demented, both violations of movie military procedure. And what's weirdest is that when he holds a gun to one of the Brits, Sean Bean doesn't shoot him, but shoots his comrade.

No, that isn't weirdest. Bean and his sarge make a stand to allow Dyer, the woman, and the radar to make a getaway, but we never see the result. Dyer's escape seems predordained; if Fleming is the perennial upper class, Bean the doomed officer class, Dyer is the modern football hooligan turned respectable hero, the Daniel Craig as James Bond 21st century Brit. In dramatic terms I suppose we can live with that ambiguity, but for film sticking so close to conventions, we expect to at least see his fight, if not his heroic death (or potential escape for Age Of More Heroes). As I said, it's frustrating that a film made so well, its action handled so deftly by director Adrian Vitoria, has so little new to say. Jack Hawkins might have something to say about that.

JOHN SHANNON'S POISON SKY: A Forgotten Friday Entry

It was a couple of years ago I wrote about John Shannon's Palos Verde Blue for my American Eye column in Shots (you can link to it via this post), so when this earlier (2000) Jack Liffey novel crossed my path, I read it with great interest, to see where Liffey was then, and how Shannon wrote about him.

In some ways, The Poison Sky is a better novel, particularly for the way it backgrounds Liffey's own life and character somewhat, and brings to the foreground his observations. In this he reminded me of Lew Archer, and the careful way in which Ross MacDonald kept Archer's perceptions relatively neutral; he served as an unusually accurate and detailed observer, but he kept the reader on an even footing. Rarely do you have to filter what you are seeing through your own apprehension of Archer's prejudices or blind spots. And when Liffey is hired to find a runaway boy who's hooked up with an extremely defensive and secretive religious cult we are in prime Archer territory, and Shannon handles it brilliantly. Liffey's empathy brings out people's true feelings, and his cracking wise doesn't hurt either, but the story is never about him. The big question, however, is why the cult seems to be coming down on him so hard.

The other plot concerns the boy's father, who has been the victim of an industrial accident at work, and has been researching Bophal online. Of course the stories overlap, and that is where Palos Verdes Blue displays a surer hand; the entry of hardened criminals into the story and the action climax in The Poison Sky are a hard trick to pull off, and Shannon can't do it without changing the tone somewhat, to the point where Liffey himself seems almost a different character. That may be what you have to lose when you're that close to Lew Archer, but if Liffey is more his own man in later novels, it means the story proceeds more seamlessly. Where the comparison with MacDonald holds up further, and what is the same in both the Liffey novels I've read, is the way social concerns are central to the story, and the crime. There isn't the buried past which always seems to resurface in MacDonald (James Lee Burke has now cornered the market in that) but Liffey's cases always seem to confront society's ills head on, and we need more of that.

So in the end I discovered what I'd set to, how Shannon was writing and what Liffey was like then. If it's impressive to create a character like Lew Archer, it's even more impressive when he becomes a character like himself.