TSUI HARK'S THE LOVERS: London Film Festival 1995

I was going through my old files to find a piece I'd written for the New York Times (actually, I'd written it for the International Herald Tribune, and the Times had reprinted it) and discovered the manuscript (remember when we actually wrote on paper) for this story, which doesn't appear to have been published. Sadly, I didn't get enough time with Tsui Hark to write more; I literally didn't discover the Sunday morning interview until I arrived at the Friday late night showing of The Lovers; as I recall it was long on clips and short on discussion (Hark's English was surprisingly shaky for someone who'd gone to SMU; well, maybe not so surprisingly), and he was literally on his way out of town. I've been meaning for some time to write about some of Tsui's more recent films, namely Seven Swords (2005) and Detective Dee (2010). Maybe soon....oh, and the cinematographer who went with me to see Once Upon A Time In China was Phil Abraham, who went on to The Sopranos and Mad Men, and is now a director. Having just seen Hou Hsiao-Hsien's The Assassin in this year's London Film Festival, it seemed a good time to get this essay online.

THE MYSTERIOUS APPEARANCE OF TSUI HARK

His Guardian Interview wasn't mentioned in the programme, but if you were lucky enough to discover it was happening, the highlight of the 39th London Film Festival might have been listening to Vietnamese-born, American-trained Hong Kong director Tsui Hark give a Sunday morning lecture at the NFT. Or maybe it was seeing his latest film, The Lovers, in a late-night showing two days earlier.

Why Hark should have come and gone so anonymously is a puzzle. His first film, The Butterfly Murders, has been a cult favourite in Britain ever since it debuted at the LFF in 1979. Shanghai Blues (1984) was a 1930s Chinese screwball comedy set amidst the Japanese invasion, while Peking Opera Blues two years later, which also starred the wonderful Sally Yeh, was an action-packed musical about a woman disguising herself to actually sing in the Peking opera. It was a hit at London's Lesbian and Gay Festival, but to me it ranks as one of the best movies of the Eighties, period. And Once Upon A Time In China (1990) stands as a classic as well; I took an American cinematographer to see it in New York and he was blown away. And if that weren't enough, Hark also produced three excellent John Woo/Chow Yun Fat films, including A Better Tomorrow and the world-wide hit, The Killer.

Hark works like the great directors of Hollywood's Golden Age, telling richly layered stories that often meld and combine genres, constantly looking for new ways to be visually inventive. Though themes of class and imperial politics, gender identity and reality versus fantasy recur, his signature is a breakneck pace of storytelling that always has time for humour.

The Lovers, a romantic melodrama set in 377 AD is atypical in its slower, more contemplative pace. It tells the story of Chuk Ying Toi (Charlie Yeung), the daughter of a high official and his ambitious wife. They disguise her as a boy and send her to college to prepare her for marriage into a better family. At college she meets Leung Shan Pak (Nicky Wu), a peasant boy who is seeking education so he can earn an official's position and make an upwardly mobile marriage.

Shan-Pak finds himself desperately confused by his feelings for his fellow student, until true identities are revealed. But at this point, the story heads for tragedy. Beautifully staged and shot, The Lovers puts our Austen and Dickens adaptations to shame. And the deliberate pacing, such a contrast if you know Hark's work, now squeezes the increasingly inevitable tragedy for all its worth. Hark can thus go somewhat over the top in his tragic ending, yet still reinforce themes and images he's shown you subtly and allowed to linger throughout the film.

Born in Saigon, and having studied film at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Hark brings a cross-cultural sensibility to Hong Kong cinema. 'In Hong Kong, things move so fast,' he says. 'You do something for the first time and six months later everyone's doing it. The audience is visually very literate, and they expect to be entertained on many levels."

And did I mention that in The Lovers, the college's headmistress invents both football and its Subbeto version, just in passing?

MAUREEN O'HARA: A Moment's Memory, RIP

Angharad's look across to Mr. Gruffydd as he stands at the top of the lift shaft, looking at the empty cage....

RIP Maureen O'Hara. Still her finest moment. How Green Was My Valley, still John Ford's most restrained and moving sentimentality. And watch her in The Wings Of Eagles, maybe her best, The Quiet Man or not, with John Wayne.

MICHAEL CONNELLY'S THE CROSSING

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

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

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

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

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

The Crossing by Michael Connelly

Orion, £19.99 ISBN 9781409145523

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

HENNING MANKELL'S AN EVENT IN AUTUMN

My copy of the book was sitting in the pile, waiting to be read, and then Henning Mankell died, and I wrote my piece (you can read that here) and said my bit on The Crime Vault Live (follow the link you'll find here), and the very next day after that I read the story but found I couldn't write about it right away.

Although it's billed as a 'never-before published' novella, An Event In Autumn was not actually Mankell's final Wallander book; it was originally published in 2004 in the Netherlands, as a give away for people who bought books. It was the basis of one of the BBC Wallander TV shows, and finally Mankell took it back and published it in 2013. It is set, as Mankell explains in a brief afterword, just before The Troubled Man, which ended the series (you can read my review here), and it is very much an autumnal book, the metaphor as pure and shining as snow. Not only for the autumn of the character's life, but the autumn of the character in the author's mind, echoing his own autumn (Wallander was 'born' in Mankell's own birth year, 1948).

Wallander is thinking about buying an old house that belongs to his colleague Martinsson's wife's cousin. He's pretty much convinced himself to buy when a nagging thought forces him to look one more time. He returns and finds a skeleton hand poking up from the ground. The skeleton is of a middle-aged woman, and it's been in the ground some 60 years. Wallander no longer wants to buy the house.

The investigation is classic Wallander; slow, somewhat plodding, but complete; always asking the next question and leaving nothing unanswered. The mystery is solved through this plodding work, but the story ends with a somewhat deus ex machina twist. But that isn't really the point.

'It was getting colder' is how one early chapter ends, and like a long poem lines similar to that recur at the end of many other stanzas. At the same time, we are presented with Swedishness, people who only speak when they have something to say, neighbours being neighbours, not friends, and with the prospect of life in old-age homes, where the inner silence and the outer silence merge. It may be what Mankell has called 'the Swedish anxiety'.

In its own quiet way, this is a powerful piece of writing. It's as if its setting the stage for the last Wallander book, and it even recalls 'Wallander's First Case', which appeared in the collection The Pyramid. (You can read my review of that here). It makes an interesting bookend to that fascinating career. Mankell himself writes about Wallander in an essay appended to the story, dated 2013. It's interesting as much for what is left out as for what is included, but it's good for putting the character into the place in which the author would like him to rest. May he rest in that place, and in the ones many of us have made for him in our own imaginations.

An Event In Autumn by Henning Mankell

Vintage, £6.99, ISBN 9781784700843

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

THE CRIME VAULT LIVE! EPISODE 2

The second episode of The Crime Vault Live is online now, and it's a good one (if I do say so myself). Mark Billingham and I interview the erudite and wonderful Val McDermid about Tartan Noir, series detective novels, Jane Austen, Raith Rovers and everything you'd expect; we discuss the passing of Henning Mankell; highlight Michael Connelly's The Crossing, Ruth Rendell's final novel, Kareem-Adbul Jabaar's take on Mycroft Holmes, and Lawrence Block's take on pulpy Gold Medal-style fiction. There's a digression onto the franchising of characters like Sherlock Holmes and James Bond (you ought to hear the rundown of Holmes' pastiches that was left on the cutting room floor!). There's talk about the Beck TV series, The Corpse Of Anna Fritz and Sherlock in the London Film Festival; the audio book versions of Ngaio Marsh, and there is music by Elvis Costello (thank you Mr.Costello sir, for the kind permission). All in a very listenable 50 minutes, believe it or not.

Here's a link via soundcloud but you can also find it on ITunes, at The Crime Vault website, & through many other noise providers on the interweb. Smash that link now!

HENNING MANKELL: IN MEMORIAM

Henning Mankell was important as a crime writer because his Wallander books sparked what had become an explosion of Scandinavian crime fiction which went nuclear after The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and I find it hard to believe that Steig Larsson wasn't inspired in some way by The Fifth Woman one of the best of the Wallander series.

Otherwise, Mankell's influence was more in terms of marketing than style, though you can see a good bit of him in the best of the Nordic writers, Iceland's Arnaldur Indridason. But Mankell himself was influenced by the godfathers of modern Scandinavian crime fiction, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo and their ten Martin Beck books. Like Beck, Wallander is a dour detective with a depressing private life, and functions within an ensemble cast that both complements and contrasts with him. Mankell spends more time on Wallander himself, perhaps, which reflects the changing times to some extent (our literary cult of fictional personality) but also reflects Sjowall and Wahloo's own influences, especially Ed McBain's 87^th Precinct.

Mankell was often dismissive of the label 'crime writer', but he was very generous to Sjowall and Wahloo, and wrote the introduction to the Harper Perennial reissue of the first Beck novel, Roseanna. When I wrote the introduction to Murder At The Savoy in the same series, I noted that its basic premise, the death of an industrial with fingers in many shady multi-national deals, is mirrored in Mankell's The Man Who Smiled (a very Martin Beck sort of title), and noted a few other parallels in the series. I also quoted the description of Beck's colleague Fredrik Melander, logical, calm, dull, with a 'modest' sense of humour, an excellent memory, and a propensity for being in the toiler whenever he was needed. As Sjowall and Wahloo wrote: 'briefly, he was a first-class policeman'. The one time I interviewed Mankell, appropriately enough at the Savoy (but in London, not Malmo) I asked if Wallander were in some ways an hommage to Melander. 'Oh, did they write that?' he replied. He also had little false modesty; I asked him who the man was who had greeted him just before we sat down. 'Oh, he's Sweden's second greatest novelist,' he said.

What also links Mankell to Sjowall and Wahloo was their dissection of the failures of Sweden's experiment in Social Democracy from a perspective often noted to be left-wing, but more accurately described as true to the ideals of that experiment. Mankell's political commitment is strong throughout his work, both in Sweden and Mozambique, and strongly consistent to a sense of rational help for those who need help and justice, and a society based on those principles. It was no surprise he chose to sail on the flotilla of ships trying to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza, it was even less of a surprise that he reported the summary murder of 10 activists by masked Israeli commandos, and refuted very simply and strongly allegations that the killings were self-defense. He had a field day with the fact that he was captured in international waters, brought to Israel, and then charged by the Orwellian government with entering the country illegally.

Wallander was well-served by television. Rolf Lassgard nailed his character, but Krister Henriksson was justifiably more popular, because he brought some humour to Wallender, just through his quick smile and twinkle in his eye; it made his interactions with the rest of the ensemble less confrontational. Kenneth Branagh's Wallander virtually eliminated the ensemble, concentrating on the superficial problems of Wallander's life, most notably drinking and shaving. It's good that the series has not been continued, like the Beck which for all its strengths has little of Sjowall and Wahloo left to recommend it. And it should be noted that Henriksson's performance in the final Wallander story, The Troubled Man, is every bit as touching as Mankell's own conclusion to the series (and it's one of the most overtly political of the series as well).

There isn't much humour in the books; Mankell wrote a comic novel, Tea Bag, about literary types and immigration—the humane portion about the life of immigrants in Sweden works muich better than the literary comedy. But his work for children is surprisingly good, including Chronicler Of The Winds, an adult story based on a play written to be performed in Portugese, in his adopted Maputo.

Faceless Killers, the first Wallander book, is a good place to start. One Step Behind and Fifth Woman are my idea of the series' best. I'd also recommend his 2006 novel Depths, (you can read my review of that book here), set on bleak islands in the archipelago during World War I; it is to my mind the most Bergmanesque bit of Swedish writing I've encountered (reminiscent of Strindberg as well) and deeply moving. Of course Mankell was married to Eva Bergman, Ingmar's daughter, which may or may not mean anything.

We discuss Mankell in the second episode of The Crime Vault Live; I could not do the same on BBC Front Row that night because we were recording CVL at the same time. I might have said that sometime in the future people will look at Mankell as a transitory figure, between the trail-blazing of Sjowall and Wahloo and the worldwide phenomenon of Steig Larsson. But he's more important than that, and the consistency of his vision for both his iconic character, his other work, and beyond fiction to his country and the world; in many ways he represents the moral focus of the Swedish character. This should make him a major figure no matter from what distance literary critics are looking back.

ROBERT B PARKER'S BULL RIVER BY ROBERT KNOTT

When I reviewed Ironhorse, the first of Robert Knott's continuations of Robert B Parker's Cole & Hitch westerns, I said I thought that the book lacked space for the heroes and villains to interact (you can read the whole review here), meaning a promising set-up is allowed to peter out. Bull River suffers from almost exactly the same problem, which is a shame because the set-up is, if anything, even better.

Virgil and Everett have captured a bizarre Mexican bandit known as Capitan Alejandro, and when they deliver him to San Cristobal they discover the local bank has been looted by its own president, who later turns up beaten comatose, with his wife disappeared or kidnapped by the actual robbers, after a Friends Of Eddie Coyle-style robbery. Which puts Cole & Hitch on the hunt, and coincidentally enough, the Capitan knows the robbers and where they might be.

As in the first novel, we then get a lot of traveling, back and forth, and not really enough tension and precious little confrontation. You can see where the former is waiting to build, especially when the boys are on a train with a Mexican officer who's clearly suspicious, but it never really does, and both the major shootouts are relatively perfunctory, because with Parker they were all about personality, and expressed verbally, whereas here they are diagrammed and drawn, in both sense of the latter word.

More important, however, is the interplay of Cole and Hitch. Everett Hitch narrates, telling Cole's story more than his own, but these two are not like Spenser and Hawk as much as they are the two parts of Spenser: the ego (Cole) and super-ego (Hitch) moderating the gunfighter's id. It's important to get that dynamic expressed in their conversations, but Knott's not able to do that, not even in the other situation where the two express different parts of the Spenserian being: relations with women. Even when Hitch relaxes comfortably with another of the 'liberated' women he seems to encounter regularly, we don't get the obvious contrast with Cole's relationship with Allie French. This lack is striking, because the bank president's wife could well be another Allie, and you would expect that possibility to be noted more than in passing.

Cole & Hitch are such a good pair of characters, and so well delineated by Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen, that their personalities, even the shadow of them, can carry a story enough to keep the reader going. But there isn't the frisson of doubt that Parker managed; the nature of Hitch's protective worry, the slight hint of self-doubt that Allie brings about in Virgil. I miss that.

Bull River by Robert Knott
Berkeley Books $9.99 ISBN 9780425272305

LAWRENCE BLOCK'S GIRL WITH THE DEEP BLUE EYES

Doak Miller is a former New York cop who's taken early retirement, moved to Florida and picked up a PI licence. He lives a quiet life in a small town, has occasional sex with the realtor who sold him his house, and does odd jobs for the local sheriff. One of these is to play a hit-man, and wear a wire when he meets a woman who wants her husband killed. But something about Lisa Yarrow Otterbein's eyes gets to Doak.

It's a familiar sort of noirish set-up, right down to the steamy Florida back-drop, the kind of thing that John D MacDonald (echoed by this book's title) or some of the great Gold Medal pulpsters might turn out. This should be no surprise because Lawrence Block may be the last of those writers who came up in the Fifties and early Sixties in New York, often via the Scott Meredith agency, people like Ed McBain and Donald Westlake, and these kind of novels were their stock in trade.

Many of them also churned out porn, as well as soft-core crime fiction, like Block's Chip Harrison books, which is interesting because sex as well as death is the cornerstone of noir. And what Block is doing here is bringing the two together in a matter-of-fact way to suggest that these urges bleed into each other more than writers care to admit, or explain. What's most interesting is seeing the way Doak, rather than being manipulated like a classic noir bozo, is actually drawing himself in consciously, and with control (though of course we're always on the lookout for the usual inevitable betrayal) of the situation, and with a ruthlessness which sexuality has drawn out and intensified.

There's an almost tongue-in-cheek element to the sex here, as if Block were nodding back to those more outwardly innocent days, where the sin was just as heavy but the description was less graphic. If anything, you might see it as an old master doing what he might have wanted to do many years before. The key is Doak's experience with a pregnant woman he interviews as part of an insurance check. She's a reflection of Mildred Diedrichson, role reversed with Doak. And if Doak's inner self turns out to be worthy of Walter Neff (who is referenced specifically by Block, in what may be a slightly too cute playing of his story against some classic film noirs) there is a reason Block has attempted an hommage of Double Indemnity, reclaimed for the male. Block hands the book's killer ending to Lisa. 'That's the movies,' she said. 'This is life.'

The Girl With The Deep Blue Eyes by Lawrence Block

Titan Books/Hard Case Crime £16.99 ISBN 9781783297504

SAVIN ROCK, 1956 (a poem)

Yogi Berra died yesterday, and while I was revising the obituary I'd written a few years ago for the Guardian's stock files, I thought about this poem. I don't remember when exactly I wrote it; it was part of my master's thesis at McGill, so it was probably in 1975 or 76, in Montreal, but it might have been earlier. It was published with a group of my poems in 1984, in Cid Corman's Origin, Fifth Series issue 3, in Kyoto. Cid was a real baseball fan; for years we exchanged post cards and aerogrammes (remember them?) between London and Japan, discussing poetry, baseball, Charles Olson and sumo wrestling. Cid died on my birthday in 2004; I got to write his obituary for the Guardian, you can link to that here.

This poem was also published in a baseball-themed literary magazine, Spitball, in 1987, and in my collection By The Sound (Torque Press, Southampton) the following year.

Savin Rock was an amusement and resort area along the shore in West Haven, Connecticut, where my parents grew up. It had been big at the turn of the century, right through the depression. My great grandfather had a hot dog stand and pizzeria there; my grandfather, his son in law, at one point was partners in an auction house where my father, again, a son in law, worked weekends. I think it's pretty self-explanatory: there were rides, Peter Franke's fun house, penny arcades (in one of which a waxed gypsy lady inside a glass machine issued printed fortunes if you inserted a nickel), a huge wooden roller coaster, bumper cars, the Wild Mouse, and the remnants of Donovan Field, where the West Haven Sailors baseball team played, run by George Weiss who later was the general manager of the Yankees.

Don Larsen's perfect game was pitched in game 5 of the 1956 series; Berra hit a home run in the second game, but two in the deciding game 7, won by the Yankees as Johnny Kucks pitched (and Berra caught) a three-hit shutout. Both those games were at Ebbetts Field but it's probably game seven I am calling up in the poem. In game six Bob Turley pitched 10 innings of four-hit ball and lost 1-0. That's 28 innings in which Yankee pitchers held the Brooklyns to just 7 hits; Berra knew how to pitch to the Dodgers.


SAVIN ROCK, 1956

Don Larsen was tossing the perfect game.
Berra homered onto Bedford Avenue.
The wax lady cackled in the penny arcade
& scared me, her ignorance of the Series.
I didn't want my fortune told,
I wanted to know who had won.

At grandpa's auction prices always went up,
The marks investing junk with sudden value,
Carried away with the power of their words.
After closing we drove past the hot dogs:
Jimmie's, Turk's, Phyllis's, Jake's.
Jake was your great-grandfather, he told me,
As he always did. He ran away when he was 12
& went out west to be a cowboy.
12 seemed very old. A cowboy named
Rosenthal, my father said, & shook his head.

They talked about cars.
My dad had his eyes on a blue '55 Ford.
I wished he played for the Red Sox.
I would run away north and watch him pitch.
I wished they'd someday win the pennant.
I was five years old. I don't remember now
If I knew then who Don Larsen was.

YOGI BERRA: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obit of Yogi Berra is up at the Guardian online now; you can link to it here. It should be in the paper paper soon. It is pretty much as I wrote it, so follow the link to read it, but there are a few things I didn't have space to say, and a few that would not matter to the British audience.

One of them I got off my chest on the BBC World Service's Newshour this afternoon, at 13:55 on the clock, if you go to BBC IPlayer or link to it here. I did a more brief interview with the World Service's Outside Source in the morning: you can listen to that here. It was recorded off my mobile phone as the train pulled into Waterloo Station.

I mentioned in the obit his feud with George Steinbrenner: you can get an idea of what I thought of Steinbrenner if you read my IT intro and link to the Independent obit I wrote here. Berra was treated badly by the Yankees in his first go-round as manager; the team rallied around Yogi to win the pennant, and the Cardinals may have won the '64 World Series, but they were a far better team. But being treated badly by Steinbrenner was something completely different, and Yogi deeply resented the lies and the public humilation which were Steinbrenner's meat and potatoes. There wasn't really that much discussion of Yogi's managerial style today, but he was baseball shrewd, prone to play hunches, and epitomised what Tom Boswell once referred to as the 'glorified cruise director' whose job as manager was to keep everybody happy for 162 games.

It was Suzy Waldman of WFAN who got Yogi and the Yankees back together, but I always thought the 'kindler, gentler' George Steinbrenner of those days was a pretty shallow facade.  Yet David Cone pitched a perfecto on Yogi Berra day in 1999, as if to echo Don Larsen's in the 1956 World Series; has there ever been a better picture of spontaneous sporting joy than Berra's leap into Larsen's arms?

I pointed out that Berra grew up in St Louis' 'Dago Hill', now known, in more politically correct times, as 'The Hill'. That was the neighbourhood which produced the core of the 1950 US soccer team which beat England, guys who played for Simkins Ford in the St. Louis league. I also got the feeling Berra would have liked to have played baseball for his hometown Cards ('hometown' got cut from the piece in the Guardian, go figure) but you have to feel he was born to be a Yankee.

Where Mickey Mantle was incredibly handsome, Whitey Ford slick as a hustler at the Metropole, Yogi was like a collection of spare parts thrown together; R2D2 to Mantle's Luke Skywalker and Ford's Hans Solo. But as Yogi once said, 'you don't hit with your face'.

I wrote in the piece that in 1950, Berra had at 597 at bats and struck out just 12 times. For a guy who swung at almost everything, that boggles credulity. He walked only 55 times, but hit a career best .322 and had an on-base percentage of .383, also a career high. He finished third in the MVP voting that year, behind teammate Phil Rizzuto and Boston's utility player Billy Goodman.

Bill James wrote about Berra's body type, which wasn't that unusual in baseball. He was more or less 5-8 180 in his prime, heavier later; James says Roy Campanella was 5-9 205, Roger Breshnahan and Smoky Burgess roughly the same. Hack Wilson and Kirby Puckett are others James mentions in the outfield. Short and powerful is good for baseball.

I also owe James for the insight into that 1950s Yankee dynasty: Casey Stengel had Mantle in center field, he had Gil McDougald who could handle any infield spot and allowed Casey to stack his lineup toward his hunches, and he had Berra who never had a really bad year and was not necessarily a great catcher, but a great handler of pitchers, hit like an outfielder, and caught both ends of double-headers 117 times. Look at virtually all the great catchers and you'll see a pattern of good and bad years; Campanella seemed to alternate them. This is due largely to the wear and tear, if not injury, at the position, but Berra was remarkably durable and consistent. Cochrane, Bench, Pudges Fisk and Rodriquez, Gary Carter. OK maybe not Mike Piazza, but he wasn't a very good catcher. Casey was once asked what the secret of his success was and he said 'I never play a game without my man', and his man was Yogi.

I never bought into Maypo or YooHoo, but I bought into Yogi. I was never a Yankee fan, but I liked Mantle, enjoyed Stengel, appreciated Ford, admired the way they won, and loved Yogi. Almost everyone did. New York was the center of the world in the 1950s, and Yogi was the guy who brought the glamour of the city down to earth. It wasn't over until it was over. RIP Yogi.

JUDY CARNE: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of Judy Carne, the 'sock it to me' girl on Laugh-In, is online at the Guardian now: you can link to it here, and it should be in the paper paper soon. It was maybe the saddest obit I've had to write; I recall Carne as someone closer to Julie Andrews than, say, Twiggy, which was the kind of thing Laugh-In was looking for from Goldie Hawn, as well as Carne. But it always seemed to me that she was underused and that 'sock it to me', like much of Laugh-In was a lame joke that got lamer as it went along.

I always found the show too much like a studio executive's idea of what young hip people should be, and although the quick-cutting format was chaotic and different, the humour was largely mainstream and safe. Rowan and Martin themselves I described as stand-ins for the TV audience, but they were also playing those executives. And I meant the word 'leering'. The British influence on Laugh-In was strong; in turn it influenced many shows, from Monty Python to Saturday Night Live (Lorne Michaels worked on Laugh-In).

Oddly, their more 'sophisticated' competition, the Smothers Brothers, who courted actual controversy with network censors, were very much like Rowan and Martin in the sense of Tommy playing the Jerry Lewis character, but they were folk singers, not lounge lizards.

You can see the way Judy Carne was displayed on screen going back to her earliest work, and there was always a sense of unsettledness, perhaps desperation, about her. I had originally written that the divorce from Reynolds was a tabloid sensation in 1966; it may have done more for Reynolds' career than Carne's. I probably should have mentioned that she did do a 25th anniversary Laugh-In show in 1993--she wasn't a total recluse or anything like that. And I do wish the Guardian had kept my ending:  'I was a Sixties flower-child who refused to grow up,' was how she characterised herself; sadly her Sixties fame drew less on her talent than on that nature. RIP

WELCOME TO THE CRIME VAULT LIVE

The first edition of The Crime Vault Live is now up on the interweb for your listening pleasure...it's a podcast I'm doing with the novelist Mark Billingham and @americarnage producer Harry Holgate, and it's all about crime fiction, films & television, audio books, and true crime. This debut show features as its special guest @martynwaites, who also writes novels under the nom de guerre Tania Carver...and it is a cracker. We talk about crime festivals, thrillers, review three novels by Gilly Macmillan, Johan Theorin and Simon Toyne, and bring The Maltese Falcon up from the Crime Vault's Vault, discuss the audio book version of the Swedish novel The Father, and compare notes on Hannibal, Bosch, and Mr Holmes. 45 minutes of, dare I say it, killer, and very little filler...here's the link to it at Itunes, but it will be available on a platform near you at any second....listen up, it's worth it.