BILL BUCKNER AND ME: A PLAY, A CLINIC -- LIFE AND BASEBALL

All the obituaries led with the error. Bill Buckner, whose fielding mistake in Game Six of the 1986 World Series cost the Boston Red Sox their first championship since 1918, since the Curse Of The Bambino was laid on the team after the 1919 season, when their owner sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees. It is not the way any of us would care to be remembered, and it is unfair, and I had a chance to see up close the effect it has on a life.

In 1993, I was Vice President for European Operations for Major League Baseball International, and I had Buck in Britain for some coaching clinics and a little baseball publicity. He was an affable guy, there to do a job, and did everything he was asked to do. He turned out to be a natural instructor, which is not always true of very talented athletes, and smooth with the media. To a point. We staged a PR event at Lillywhites in Piccadilly Circus, and a number of reporters from national papers turned out. Before we started, I took them aside and asked if they would refrain from concentrating on, or hounding Bill about, the '86 Series. The wound was too fresh, the story too familiar.

So of course a guy from the biggest Sunday paper, as things are going fine, asks a convoluted question about watching a movie where a baseball player drops an easy fly ball and loses the most important game for his team. Such a movie did not, to my rather extensive knowledge, exist. But this guy wanted Buck's opinion. I don't think the question bothered Bill as much as its transparent dishonesty did, and he gave a perfunctory answer and visibly lost his enthusiasm for the rest of the event.

I walked away with him afterwards, apologized in an ineffective way, and went off with him and the other coaches for a beer and lunch. I knew Buckner had received death threats immediately after the World Series. I knew he'd been abused by fans in New York. I knew the media would never let that be forgotten (and imagine how much worse it would have been in today's world of half-baked mockery on the internet). But this is the story I should have told him right then and there. Because I am a Red Sox fan, and in 1986 I was probably twice as fervent as I am today. Which is still pretty fervent. I followed them religiously, though from afar. But I was working for ABC Sports in 1986, and ABC had a WATS line with New York, which meant my counterpart and friend in New York, David Downs and I could throw in extensive Sox chat as we discussed business daily.

On the evening of Saturday October 25, 1986 I was in Monaco. I had spent the previous three days with David and two of our colleagues from New York doing business at the annual congress of AGFIS, the association of international sports federations. The others had left for the airport Saturday morning, leaving me to finish business with the head of the World Weightlifting Federation over breakfast. In the afternoon, my then-girlfriend arrived by train from Milan. We had dinner, and were asleep in my room in the Hotel de Paris when the phone rang, sometime after five in the morning. It was David calling from New York. “Two outs, two strikes, bottom of the tenth: I wanted you to hear this!” He held the phone to his TV speaker. I heard “Stanley's pitch...” followed by a scream and a curse. And he hung up.

I grabbed the Sony short-wave I'd always carried since my days as a journalist for UPITN, and tried desperately to tune in Armed Forces Network, from Germany or Italy. Cornelia was half awake in the bed, asking in Italian what was going on. But the sun had risen in France, and I couldn't find a signal. I waited a while and then took the immense step of calling New York from an expensive hotel phone. The Sox had lost, the New York Mets had tied the series at 3-3 and the deciding game would be played Sunday night.

Let me explain something now. The moment I heard (or didn't hear) over the phone was a wild pitch by Bob Stanley (or passed ball by catcher Rich Gedman, the point is still being argued) with the Sox still leading 5-4 in the bottom of the tenth inning. It allowed the tying run to score. Mookie Wilson, the batter, then hit the ground ball down the first base line that skipped between Buckner's legs and allowed the winning run to score. The Mets won the game 6-5 and tied the series 3 games each.

Buckner had the misfortune of making the highly visible error, the perfect photo, the metaphor for the loss: but the win implied by Boston's scoring two runs in the top of the tenth had already been erased before Mookie's ground ball.

It wasn't Buckner's fault manager John McNamara pinch hit for his starting pitcher, Roger Clemens, in the eighth inning up 3-2 (the hitter, Mike Greenwell, struck out). Nor that Calvin Schiraldi, the closer acquired late in the season from the Mets, immediately allowed the tying run. It wasn't Buck's fault that after going up 4-3 in the top of the tenth, McNamara called allowed Schiraldi to hit for himself, nor with the lead now 5-3 he called on Schiraldi to pitch a third inning of relief. It's not Buck's fault that after getting two outs, Schiraldi allowed three straight hits before McNamara pulled him. Nor that the new pitcher, Bob Stanley, didn't see Marty Barrett calling desperately for a throw that would pick Ray Knight off second base for the third out. Most of all, it isn't Bill Buckner's fault that McNamara, for the first time in the playoffs, neglected to send Dave Stapleton, a slick fielding infielder, in as a defensive replacement for Buckner. Johnny Mac, old school all the way, wanted Buck to be on the field for the moment of the triumph.

I knew all the back-stories: how Schiraldi's ex Met teammates knew how he was likely to pitch to him. How McNamara claimed Clemens had 'begged' to be taken out, which the pitcher vehemently denied. How Stanley, lumbering over to cover first, might not have beaten Mookie to the bad even had Buckner made the play. The basic point was: you lose as a team, and there was more than enough blame to go around.

And of course, the Series was still there to be won; Game Seven was supposed to be played the next night. I was still in Monaco, but it rained Sunday in New York, so the game was played Monday Night (opposite it, the lowest-rated Monday Night Football game in history) and, back in London, I listened on AFN from Wiesbaden.

The delay allowed McNamara to give the start to lefty Bruce Hurst, albeit on three days rest rather than four. Hurst had two wins already and had been the Sox best player in the series so far. But here Johnny Mac made his biggest mistake. The pitcher on Sunday would have been Dennis 'Oil Can' Boyd. Boyd was told he wasn't starting Monday. But instead of the manager saying something like “look, Can, Bruce has been our best. But he'll get tired, and when he does, I want you ready to go. Not pacing yourself, just giving us your best innings. It's not who starts the game, it's who finishes it, and we need you to finish it. OK?” Mac just told him and walked away. He was the skipper and his word was law. As it was, Can went to the clubhouse and started drinking beer (that's where his 'Oil Can' nickname came from) and by the time pitching coach Bill Fischer found him he was angry and drunk. Or drunk and angry. He supposedly spent the whole game in the manager's office.

The Sox led 3-0 going into the bottom of the sixth, when Hurst tired and allowed three runs, which would have been more had not Dewey Evans thrown out Keith Hernandez on the bases. Now tied 3-3, the seventh would have been the moment for Boyd. Instead, McNamara had to call on Schiraldi who gave up a home run to the first batter and allowed two more runs before giving way to two walks from Joe Sambito and finally the third out from Stanley.

The Sox got two back in the top of the eighth, a rally started by Buckner's single. But Jesse Orosco came in and shut the rally down. It was now 6-5 Mets, and McNamara replaced Stanley, who'd faced only one batter, with Al Nipper, in order to make a 'double switch' to get Ed Romero into the lineup where his bat could be a factor. Like Schiraldi, Nipper gave up a leadoff home run (to Darryl Strawberry), then another run. Orosco closed down the Sox in the top of the ninth and the Mets won the game 8-5 and the Series 4 games to 3: since selling Babe Ruth the Sox had lost three World Series, in 1975, 1967, and 1946—all by 4-3 in seven games, all to arguably the decade's best National League team.

I would have told Buck that I blamed David, who had tickets to Game Seven but didn't go. All kidding and superstition aside, I blamed McNamara more than anyone. But I didn't mention that. I could have said the 'Curse Of The Bambino' thing was a modern construct, born of the nostalgia boom of the 80s and the Sox resurgence post 1975. But I was also stymied by my own evaluation of Buck's overall disappointment in the Series: only six hits, and no production with runners on base. Which was something I pondered as I watched him teach.

Buckner had 22 years in the majors. He was an amazing contact hitter: he didn't walk much, but he didn't strike out very often either. He wasn't a power hitter, but in his best home-run year, in Boston, he hit 18 and struck out only 25 times. For his career, his 162 games average season showed 29 walks, 29 strike outs. His career batting average was .289, lowered by a severe decline in his last three years. But he was also helped by playing much of his career in great hitting parks, Wrigley Field and Fenway. He came up with the Dodgers along with Bobby Valentine and Steve Garvey (see photo of them with Tommy Lasorda at rookie-league Ogden in 1968). Valentine was a similar kind of player whose career also wound up being limited by injury. Valentine was already a legendary high-school athlete when I was a kid in Connecticut, and they were both players with intense natural talent that matured early. Buck was a quick outfielder, contact hitter, without a great arm (career-wise, he's a pretty good match for Al Oliver). He was playing left field for the Dodgers when Hank Aaron hit a home run over his head to break Babe Ruth's career record, which makes another odd link between Buckner and the Babe. But the Dodgers produced a lot of talent in those days—they were constantly moving players out of the outfield, Bill Russell to short, Pedro Guerrero to third. With the ankle injury and infection limiting his mobility, they tried moving Buck to first but of course Garvey was there at the same time. Interestingly, Garvey is the third-closest comparison to Buckner's career, after Oliver and Mickey Vernon, though Vernon's a different type of player with an odd career pattern. Eventually they traded Buckner to the Cubs for Rick Monday, who proved integral to post-season success.

The Cubs were the only team in baseball with a longer history of futility than the Red Sox. In fact, there was an equation known as the Cub Factor which could be used to determine the outcome of nay post-season series: the team with fewer ex-Cubs would win. With the Cubs Buckner would win a batting title in 1980, the first of three straight years hitting over .300, including 105 RBIs in 1982. But in '82, a young outfielder named Leon Durham would make the All-Star team, and by '84 he'd been moved to first base, and Buckner was sidelined. He demanded a trade and was shipped to the Sox for pitchers Dennis Eckerlsey and Mike Gorman.

Here's where it gets weird. In the 1984 National League playoffs, the Cubs were on the verge of eliminating the San Diego Padres, a game where Durham's homer had staked them to a 3-0 lead. But with the margin cut to 3-2, and two runners on base, Durham allowed an easy ground ball by Tim Flannery through his legs, and the tying run scored. Another error by Ryne Sandberg would seal the Cubs' fate; it turned out Durham's glove was soaking wet because Sandberg had accidentally overturned a Gatorade barrell onto it. The play was an eerie foreshadowing of what would happen to Buckner two years later.

As a footnote, Eckersley, whose career as a starter was fading, would be reborn in Oakland as a closer, but he is perhaps best remembered now for the backdoor slider he threw with two strikes to a hobbled Kirk Gibson, which Gibson blasted for a home run on the way to a Dodgers' win and championship in 1988. Eck, of course, represented the Cub Factor in that game.

In '85, Buck had his best year with the Sox: .299 16 HR 110 RBI and even 18 stolen bases with only 4 caught stealings. He'd slipped a bit in '86, but still was over 100 rbis in a lineup loaded with players who got on base (Wade Boggs, Evans, Don Baylor) batting ahead of him. He was much less effective in '87, and the Sox traded him to the Angels, where he had a decent half-season, but after that his career was effectively over, though he hung on for three more years, retiring at age 40. He lived in Boise, made good real estate investments, and later returned to baseball as a coach of an independent minor league team outside Boston.

But in 1993 Buckner responded to being admired by young baseball players and respected by British coaches as only someone with major league credentials can be. There was no false modesty just as there was little defensiveness about '86, he knew what he had and hadn't accomplished in his career. As I said, I wished I'd expressed a little bit more of this at the time, but I too was more concerned with showing him the respect he was due, and helping him do his best for the clinics at which his talent was visible and his effort in teaching admirable.

The Red Sox finally broke the Curse of the Bambino, if such a thing existed in 2004, rallying back from three games down to the Yankees in the American League Championship, and sweeping the Cardinals, their nemesis in both 1946 and 1967.

In 2008, after a second World Series win in 2007, Buckner returned back to Fenway to throw out the first ball on opening day. The Fenway Park crowd rose to their feet and gave him a standing ovation that lasted minutes. Buckner visibly wiped away tears a couple of times, but otherwise stood awkwardly, one hand in his pockets, without a hat to tip to acknowledge the fans. When the applause died down he threw a perfect 12 to 6 curve ball to Dewey Evans at the plate, and the two embraced as the crowd applauded again. Afterwards, Buckner said he had never carried animosity toward the fans when he was criticised, but he did have some for the media. Imagine again what that would have been like today. But the moment was a ceremonial and symbolic burying of that moment of surrender to a curse, and a reclamation of Bill Buckner as a player.

He died at the end of May in Boise, of Lewy Body Dementia. He was only 69. Had he lived another six years, he and Mookie Wilson would probably have gone on tour, like Gibson and Eckersley did, putting that moment of the past into historical, legendary, perspective. I could not help but wonder how his memory was affected by the dementia, and whether he would blessed to recall the cheers of 2008, the high points of his career, and of course the blessings of his life. There is one photo of him, with the Red Sox, that I think captures the joy we all get to feel with life, when it seems it will go one forever, that we will enjoy being part of it, that all our problems will be insignificant, or if not, will be overcome. Ironically, I'm writing about that one moment which will always be attached to his name, but I am grateful that I had the chance to put a real person ahead of that moment in my own memory. RIP Buck.

NIC PIZZOLATTO'S GALVESTON

I don't know what it is about the Gulf Of Mexico, but if there is a better, steamier, darker backdrop for noirish fiction, I can't think of one. Maybe foggy San Francisco. Roy Cady is a strong-arm man working for Stan Ptitko, a big shot gangster in New Orleans. He's not totally in with Stan's crew, partly because he's from Texas, partly because he was inherited from the old crew when Stan took control, and in large part because Roy's old girlfriend Carmen is now Stan's. So one day when Roy is sent to deliver a message to recalcitrant local labor leader, and told not to bring a gun, he brings one anyway. That he's been diagnosed with cancer earlier in the day might have something to do with it too. That's the kind of world Roy lives in.

When Roy and fellow hooligan Angelo break into the house, they're ambushed and when he wakes up, the union guy (called Sienkiewicz, in evident homage to Bill, the amazing graphic artist?) is dead, Angelo's beat up, and a badly-abused woman is wimpering, while another lies dead in the bedroom. Next thing you know, Angelo's dead, three thugs are dead, and Roy and Rocky, no longer wimpering, are on the run, headed for East Texas and winding up in Galveston.

On the way, there's some of Rocky's back-story they need to deal with, which includes a child and more, and once they are in place nothing is going to be easy. But Roy tries. He tries to help Rocky, and her child, and to make himself and them safe. But she's a young woman no one has ever really helped, not without an ulterior motive, and of course she isn't a tough as she thinks she is. It's as close to a straight life as he is ever going to get, and it isn't very straight, and there's nothing that says it's going to last very long.

Galveston is bleakly, darkly noir: the atmosphere is very heavy, the sense of impending tragedy never far away. Nic Pizzolatto was the creator of True Detective, but this book has a lot in common with some graphic novels; I'm thinking in terms of Frank Miller or Ed Brubaker, where the colours are all stark black and white and the situations are bleak. But I was comparing it most to Lou Berney's November Road, both novels where hard men wind up in family situations. There is a difference: although Roy on the surface is a much harder guy, he's less cynical and self-concerned than Frank Guidry. Pizzolatto uses Roy to narrate the story himself, and we know from the first he's a wounded character, even before the cancer is diagnosed, and what transformation we see in him does not come as a huge surprise. In a sense we see it all along, more aware of what kind of man he is than he is himself. Guidry's story is the opposite; it was told in third person, making the growth of his character more distinct, and it's eventual path more more unsure.

Which makes Galveston a violent noir with a heart of gold, and makes Roy Cady a memorable character. It's not hard to see how this 2010 novel served as a springboard for Pizzolatto, who's also written for the US version of The Killing, and wrote the screenplay (eventually under a pseudonym following creative differences) for the film adaptation of this book.

Galveston by Nic Pizzolatto
Sphere £7.99 ISBN 9780751557053

THE PEARLY GATES a poem

This poem is one I've always liked. I wrote it in March and April of 1976, in Montreal, and remember well the Metro ride that inspired it. It really is typical of the kind of style I was working on, in tandem with something similar but more expansive, which would turn into my master's thesis at McGill. I also like the way it seems faith-based, even more so now than it did when I wrote it. It bounced around a bit. At one point I thought it might be paired with 'Basic Training' (which you can find here at IT) in New Poetry 4, the Arts Council of GB's anthology, but it wasn't. It wound up, confusingly enough, being published in issue 47 of New Poetry, a London-based magazine. Ten years later, slightly changed, it appeared in the US, in issue 5 of Brief, from Canyon, California. In 1991 I included it in my chapbook Chump Change, published by Northern Lights. I reckon none of you have it seen in any of those three incarnations.  The line breaks have their purpose: which might be clearer were I to read it out loud....

 THE PEARLY GATES

If there is a man

    there to judge

he will be ugly.

Wars will have been fought

on his face

                    he will be

the man you could never resist

      sneaking quick looks

at

         in the underground

& you will

shudder

                or be polite

& look

               the other way

before you shudder

& already you

      will be in

          trouble.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DISNEY & THE GEORGIA ABORTION BOYCOTT: MY FRONT ROW INTERVIEW

Yesterday I appeared on BBC Radio 4's Front Row programme, talking with John Wilson about the Disney announcement they would not engage in production in Georgia if their newly-passed abortion ban came into effect. You can link to it here. Front Row booked me to speak without knowing my personal connection with Bob Iger, the Disney CEO, but that was both a good hook and something we did not linger on. You may recall last year there was some talk of Bob's running for president.

John and I had to cut the talk short because the previous interview had gone long, so I was rushing, and made a couple of verbal slips (New Jersey, not New York, was the second state pitching for business) and I didn't get to mention that Black Panther and the new Avengers movie were both filmed in Georgia. Judges in two states (Iowa, a state judge and Utah a federal judge) have struck down the bills passed by legislatures, while it has not passed in either Florida or Texas, the state where the original Roe v Wade case was brought.

But one important point we didn't get to was the possible knock -on effect in the Uniter Kingdom, specifically in Northern Ireland. Game Of Thrones was filmed there, as is Line Of Duty among others, but if the petitions against working in US states trying to limit abortion in the face of the national law, someone will eventually notice that Northern Ireland already does the same thing in this country, and their abortion ban is in some ways even stricter than Georgia's.

JAMES MC CORD: THE LAST WORD INTERVIEW

My discussion with Matthew Bannister about Watergate burglar James McCord is online at BBC Sounds,
you can link to it here. It starts about 13:30 in, if you want to go straight there. I originally recorded it about a month ago, but given the two years it took for McCord's death to become public knowledge, that's not really a pressing problem. We go through the basics of the Watergate burglary and trial, the Bay of Pigs, and McCord's other CIA work (including covering up the death of Frank Olson, which I mentioned in my post about my Guardian obituary, here) but not included in the broadcast edit is the link with JFK's assassination, or as Richard Nixon put it, 'the whole Bay of Pigs thing'.

STEFAN AHNHEM'S MOTIVE X

Do you remember when Wallander discovered an ATM in the centre square of Ystad, Sweden was about to crash the world economy? Well, Helsingborg is a bigger city than Ystad (just over 100,000) people but in the limited time frame of Stefan Ahnhem's Motive X it suffers enough big-time crime to make it Europe's murder capital. For example:

1. a young immigrant boy killed in a laundry room washing machine which might be related to

2. an active child molester or

3. neo-Nazis, whose Sweden Democrat party office is firebombed and who fire-bomb a refugee centre

4. a stabbing at the scene of a hit and run

5. a series of killings by a killer instructed by charts he has created and follows using probablity dice

6. a child kidnapping

7. a sex killer who stalks his victim while she sleeps, who turns out to be character legendary in a local sex club (Remember I Am Curious, Yellow?)

which seems a lot of business for one small crime squad, especially since detective Fabian Risk has decided one of the detectives, Ingvar Molander, is a serial killer himself, and has murdered another detective who had also figured th1s secret out. Molander, a know-it-all who considers himself far to smart for his colleagues, is the most interesting character in the series, and his name carries what seem to me playful reminders of both Wallander and Martin Beck's collegaue Melander, who knows everything but spends all his time in the police toilet.

That Ahnhem can keep all those balls juggling without dropping them is no mean feat, even though at times you find some of the villains, particularly the neo-Nazis, waste a lot of time rather than taking care of business, and he does rely on one pretty blatant bit of deus ex machina coincidence, but what makes it work is something that is the essence of Scandinavian crime fiction: the personalities of the police, and how they are affected by the pressures of their society.

This goes right back to Sjowall and Wahloo's Martin Beck, and in Risk we have a cop whose home life makes Beck's look like Ozzie and Harriet's. In the previous novel, the family has nearly been killed by another serial killer, though some of this is understandable, but one of the key elements of this novel involves Risk trying to reason with his son while he's thinking through a crime problem, a very good piece of writing.

Ahnhem was a screenwriter on the Swedish Wallander series (with Krister Henriksson), and he's obviously learned from Mankell, as well as Sjovall & Wahloo and very much from Steig Larsson. But he's somewhat less concerned with Swedish society (although the Sweden Democrats are a right-wing nationalist party, and probably don't enjoy his neo-Nazi portrayal of them) than with the nature of control in individual relationships. This is the point where the crimes and the personalities intersect: questions of who controls whom.

He tells the story with almost teasing changes of scene and multiple points of view, and very matter of fact gory violence. Meanwhile his cops are falling apart, even beyond of them being a killer. It sometimes creaks, and sometimes the responses don't quite seem right, but as with Larsson, the impetus of the plot carries the reader on. And of course, two of the main storylines are left unresolved for the next high-Risk installment.

Motive X by Stefan Ahnhem

Head Of Zeus £18.99 ISBN 9781786694607

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

JOHN HAVLICEK: A MOMENT NOT LOST IN TIME

John Havlicek, Boston Celtics' star from 1962 through 1978, died last month. I couldn't get any papers in Britain interested in his obituary, but he has remained in my thoughts since then, running around my brain the same way Hondo ran around a basketball court, and it spurred a lot of recollections, which made this reminiscence sneak itself down a lot of tangential alley ways. I suppose it has something to do with his career coinciding with my prime years of sporting attention, and something with to do with the kind of athletic ideal he personified: a rare sort of physical ability combined with the vision only the greats possess, linked to an ability to play at full speed for more time than anyone else without tiring, and a drive to do just that in pursuit of the team goal of winning. Whatever it was the Celtics needed Havlicek to do: score, defend, pass, rebound, run, run, run, he would do it.

I was watching the 1974 Finals, against the Bucks, the double-overtime loss in game 6. Just as the announcer mentions how tired everybody looks, Havlicek, the game's high scorer, who played all 58 minutes, comes running off a great circle route to take a backdoor pass and hit a baseline turnaround. That sort of thing. Without any flashiness, without any attention-seeking. It was part of that Celtic mystique that the team was bigger than any player: I saw the same thing with the Montreal Canadiens of that era, which is why they were my favourite hockey team, and they played the same way as the Celtics: 'head-manning' the puck the same way the Celtics found the lead man upcourt to run and beat the other team back. No player was better suited to that game than Hondo. He got the nickname because someone thought he looked like John Wayne; I never saw that, but I could see the resemblance in the ambling walks. It beat being called by some rhyming sportswriter thing, like Chet the Jet Walker.

And of course Havlicek Stole The Ball. From Chet.

That was the seventh and final game of the 1965 NBA Eastern final, in the Boston Garden, the Celtics led their fierce rivals, the Philadelphia 76ers, by three when Bill Russell allowed Wilt Chamberlain to dunk the ball uncontested. Now with five seconds to play, the Celtics led by one and Russell would inbound the ball. But his inbounds pass hit a wire supporting the backboard, and possession went over to the Sixers. Russell was the heart of the Celtics' supremacy, and for him to suddenly make a crucial error was frightening. Now Hal Greer of the Sixers looked to pass the ball in, with Wilt lurking under the basket, and Russ, four inches shorter and 40 pounds lighter, fronting him desperately to prevent the pass for an easy shot. So Greer looked upcourt, and launched a pass to Chet Walker, and, in Johnny Most's call on the radio: 'Havlicek stole the ball!” Havlicek, playing off Walker to the inside, had started counting in his head, knowing Greer had only five seconds to inbound the ball, and on four he looked back, tracked the ball, and knocked it away. Sam Jones picked it up, and dribbled the five seconds off the clock. The Celtics advanced to the NBA finals against the Lakers and beat them, as they always did.

I still have, somewhere in my brother's attic, a record album with that 1965 call on it. The funny thing is that Most, and the rest of us, mispronounce Havlicek's name. We say Have-li-check'. But Hondo himself said 'Havel-check', like Brett Favre being 'farve'. I realised this as I watched him speaking on a nice video made on the steal's 50^th anniversary. Looking at the grainy black and white footage, I saw something for the first time I've never seen referenced before: when Russell inbounds the ball, he's a full four feet behind the end line, and Chet Walker, with arms up in Russ's face, is over the line, then leaps forward until he's just about touching Russell. Even the official is in front of the two of them. No wonder the ball hit the wire.

What's also touching is to watch the fans mobbing Havlicek, carrying him off the court while ripping the jersey off his back. Meanwhile, Russell pushes through the crowd to hug Hondo as he's being carried off. In a sense, Russell's amazing streak of winning: 11 titles in 13 years, had its most dangerous self-inflicted challenge right there, and Havlicek saved the team from his mistake.

I also wonder now what would have happened had Havlicek not stolen the ball. Walker would have had it 20 feet away from the hoop, with his back to it, and Hondo all over him. In today's game he could have, like Kawahi Leonard did recently, tuck the ball, take three steps, bounce the ball once and take another two steps before throwing up a shot. Or maybe he gets a twisting alley-oop pass off to Wilt that Russell can't get to. Or bounces it back to Greer. I don't know, but it might have been a tough thing for the Sixers to actually get that basketball. Hondo's D on that play was team man-to-man the way I was taught both in basketball and lacrosse, but the deflection of the ball was more like an NFL receiver, which, funnily enough, Havlicek nearly was.

As was the ideal in those days, Havlicek was a three-sport star in Springfield, Ohio; all-state in football, basketball and baseball. He grew up with the Niekro brothers, Phil and Joe, who thought the kid who hit .440 in high school could have played pro. Woody Hayes wanted him to play football; the story goes that he used to tell people that the best quarterback in the Big 10 was at Ohio State, but he was playing basketball (shades of Otto Graham at Northwestern). But Paul Brown, who had coached high school football in Ohio and was still well-connected, knew all about Havlicek. He drafted him in round 7, the 95^th pick overall, in the 1962 NFL draft. Hondo lasted until the final cuts, which wasn't that much of a surprise, since the Browns' first pick in that draft was Gary Collins, who won't mean much to folks today, but was your prototype 'flanker', he and Bowd Dowler, both of whom are on the NFL's all-decade team for the Sixties. Big, long-striding receivers who could run deep or catch slants; Havlicek would have fit the role perfectly. The Browns offered him a taxi squad role, and supposedly chased after him again, but Havlicek went to Boston to play for the Celtics, who had taken him with the seventh pick of the first round (ninth overall) NBA draft. I'll explain soon why the seventh pick was the ninth.

At Ohio State, Havlicek was not the big star in basketball; that was Jerry Lucas, an even bigger Ohio high school legend. The team also included Larry Siegfried, a scrappy guard who would wind up on the Celtics, and Mel Nowell, almost as big an Ohio high school legend as Lucas, a sharp-shooting point guard. On the bench was Bobby Knight, who would go on to coach at Army and Indiana and elsewhere, and be the guy who cut Charles Barkley and John Stockton from the 1984 USA Oympic team. Not that they needed them to win the Olympic gold in LA with Jeff Turner and Bobby Alford.

Ohio State beat St Louis for the 1960 NCAA title, Havlicek's sophomore year (and first year on the non-freshman varsity). It was Lucas who played on the 1960 Olympic team, along with Terry Dischinger (whose NBA career was lessened by a severe knee injury) Oscar Robertson and Jerry West; Havlicek might have made the cut had the team not had five spots reserved for players from the AAU leagues and the military. The other college guys included Walt Bellamy and Bob Boozer, along with Oscar the only other blacks, and Darrell Imhoff, coach Pete Newell's star center from Cal. Of course they didn't need Hondo to win that title easily.

Ohio State went to the NCAA finals each of the next two years, losing to the post-Oscar Cincinnati team both times, a team built around its defense and star center Paul Hogue. Lucas was the star; Havlicek was the captain. It's easy to speculate why the Celtics drafted Hondo; it's highly likely GM Red Auerbach was going on a word-of-mouth recommendation...teams often didn't see players who didn't play locally. In fact, Lucas was the first pick of the draft, with a special 'territorial' pick, to the Cincinnati Royals, who already had Oscar after a similar draft. But Lucas had signed a deal, which included a share of the team, with George Steinbrenner of the ABL's champion Cleveland Pipers. The NBA then tried to merge them into their league and kill off the competition, but the Royals complained about their territory, demanding compensation which Steinbrenner eventually defaulted on. Lucas then signed another deal with other Cleveland businessmen. But a team never materialised, and after missing the 62-63 season, Lucas began playing with the Royals, who had retained his rights. and the second pick was Dave DeBuschere, to Detroit; he would wind up both pitching baseball and playing basketball before becoming a 23 year old player-coach of the Pistons.

So Hondo went after Billy 'The Hill' McGill, Hogue, Zelmo Beatty, Len Chappell, Wayne Hightower and Leroy Ellis, all of whom were big men. Big Z had the best NBA career of the bunch. Terry Dischinger went with the pick immediately after Havlicek, at the top of the second round, which also included Chet Walker and Kevin Loughery.

Local 'scouting' might explain why the Celts, with the last pick of round 2, 16^th overall, took Jack 'The Shot' Foley from Holy Cross. Maybe they thought he'd attract fans, maybe because they'd had great success with Bob Cousy and Tommy Heinsohn from the Cross. Foley was a 6-4 forward, a white guy with a deadly outside shot. There were a lot of guys like that at the time, the next few years would see Donnie May of Dayton, Larry Miller from UNC, Pat Riley at Kentucky, Pat Burke of Fairfield, Larry Cannon from LaSalle. Soon it became apparent if you couldn't be big enough to play over the rim inside, or make your own shot (ie: beat a man to the hoop) outside, you couldn't play: the type evolved into Billy Cunningham, Doug Moe, Jack Marin types. The Shot lasted only one season.

The pick after Foley was the first of round three: Don Nelson from Iowa, who would wind up coming to the Celtics from the Lakers and being a key part of the 1969 win over LA: the most seemingly un-athletic 6-6 forward imaginable, but a crucial championship part. The Celts' pick at the end of the round was Jim Hadnot of Providence, who had been the center when PC won the NIT (still a big thing in those days) in 1961, beating the same St Louis team Ohio State beat the year before in the NCAA final. That was the team of Connecticut hero Johnny Egan, who led Hartford Weaver High to the New England championship in Boston Garden, and 5-8 Vinny Ernst at the guards (along with future Boston mayor Ray Flynn). Hadnot for to PC from Oakland, because Bill Russell had taken him on as a mentor after Hadnot's father died. He didn't make the Celtics, and played only one year of pro ball, five years later, for the Oakland Oaks of the ABA. Jobs were a lot tougher to get in those days: the NBA had 9 teams, rosters were 10 men, and the money was such that players fought to keep their jobs. Mel Nowell, as it turns out, was drafted in round 12, with the 92^nd pick, but still played one season in Chicago, and also later in the ABA.

You see what I meant about diversions? I was a die-hard Celtics fan. So much so that in the spring of 1969, in what was player-coach Bill Russell's final go-round, I skipped hearing Joni Mitchell in the beautiful circular dining hall on my college campus (since torn down in the name of austerity) in order to watch the Celtics and Lakers on TV, and watch my roommate throw something through the ceiling as the Lakers managed to wind up on the wrong end.

When he joined the Celtics, Havlicek fit right into their style of play, and Bob Cousy, in his final season, had someone whom he could find almost at will for open layups. “I made a living off Bob Cousy,” he later explained. At that point Hondo was not a shooter, so he went home after the season and worked at it: the results were evident, and it's noteworthy he was lifetime 81.5% free-throw shooter, up from 72.8% his rookie year.

What else stands out about Havlicek's career? Playing left-handed and scoring 18 against the New York media-proclaimed Greatest Dynasty Ever Knicks on their way to yet another championship, their second!, in 1973. Just imagine, if the Celtics had played in New York, Steve Kuberski would have had his autobiography published. Forget about the Sixties, the Celtics matched that Knick dynasty by winning titles in 1974 and 1976.

I watched some of that 74 final against the Bucks, with Oscar, Kareem, and Bobby Dandridge: the game 6 double-overtime loss is amazing. The defense is tough: Havlicek, Duck Chaney, JoJo White, Paul Silas and Dave Cowens for the Celts; Dandridge's quickness, Oscar's strength, and Kareem's hustle getting back, like a young Russell, to contain the Celtics break. I also marveled at how the officials actually called things like traveling, three-seconds and carrying the ball. In today's game, some of these guys would have gone to town (and they would have had the three-point shot to open things up). Hondo was blessed with having another player who matched his effort, and had even more intensity: Cowens. The undersized center whose physical battle with Kareem was astounding. Cowens fouled out with a bump as Kareem backed in on him; I am still arguing that one now...his replacement was High Hank Finkel.

In 1976, the Celtics took Phoenix in six, including the triple-overtime game that had more controversy than a Farage campaign stop, including a Boston fan attacking Richie Powers. Toward the end of regulation, with the Suns trailing by one, Paul Westphal, who had been traded from Boston to Phoenix, did a Havlicek stole the ball, to Havlicek, and Havlicek missed a rebound, tapping the ball back to Curtis Perry who hit on his second try to put Phoenix up one with six seconds left. But Havlicek hit a soft running bank shot to put the Celts ahead by one as the buzzer sounded. But the shot had gone through the hoop before the clock expired, so after arresting the guy who attacked Powers and sorting everything out, the Suns got the ball back under the basket with a second left. At which point Westphal, knowing the Suns had no timeouts remaining, called time. JoJo White hit the technical foul for Boston, now leading by two, but Phoenix got the ball back at midcourt, and Garfield Heard hit a turnaround buzz-beater to tie the game once again.

Havlicek would always say he thought he should have had two more titles: one in 73 had he not hurt his shoulder, and one more later, in 77, had the Celts not traded Westphal (for Charlie Scott) and later Paul Silas (for Curtis Rowe). They got Scott ostensibly to replace Chaney's D (for some reason they never seemed to trust Westphal) while Curtis Rowe, we'll never know. He was supposed to be a better offensive player than Silas, but he wasn't a Celtics' type, and had they kept Westphal and let him play, they probably wouldn't have needed the extra firepower. The Celts, with Glenn MacDonald coming off the bench in his moment of glory, built a six point lead in the third OT, but Westphal hit two baskets, and nearly stole another inbounds pass, as the Suns finally lost by two. It was Havlicek's eighth NBA title.

Things would go downhill for the Celtics. Red Auerbach traded for Rowe and signed Sidney Wicks, reuniting the UCLA teammates, but they were never the same in the NBA. Wicks' former team, Portland, went to the NBA title without him (and with another UCLA guy, Bill Walton). Havlicek announced the 1977-78 season would be his last. The ill-fitted Celts started out 11-23 and Heinsohn was fired, replaced by his assistant Satch Sanders, who had left the Harvard job just that year. Havlicek scored 29 points in his final game.

After the season, Celtics' owner Irv Levin traded the franchise to John Y Brown for the Buffalo Braves, whom Levin then moved to San Diego to become the Clippers, because he wanted to live in California. Brown was a millionaire from Kentucky Fried Chicken, had owned the Kentucky Colonels of the ABA before the Braves, and was a notorious meddler with his teams. As part of the deal, the owners engineered a trade that sent Billy Knight, Bob McAdoo and Tiny Archibald (all of whom he had acquired in Buffalo) to Boston for Wicks, Kermit Washington, Kevin Kunnert, and Freeman Williams, who had been a number one pick of Boston's but never played for them. On paper it looked good, but in Red's office the ceiling was nearly destroyed by his head exploding. He had a plan, as usual, and he and Brown never could agree on who ran the club. Sanders was fired soon into the season, and Cowens took over as player-coach: he was simply too intense for that job on top of playing. Luckily, the Celts got to keep the extra draft pick they had, which became the rights to Larry Bird, drafted a year before he finished college. It's fascinating to consider what might have happened had Hondo been able to wait out and play one more season, then a final one with the rookie Bird. It would have been a handover of sorts, but the two of them would have clicked immediately.

In retirement, Havlicek moved into a country club resort where Bob Cousy had been comped, and he would get comped as well; he, Cousy, and former Knick Hall Of Famer Richie Guerin would golf. Havlicek carried a fishing rod, and, in some kind of breaking of golf protocol, often stop to cast into the water hazards if he saw signs of fish. Cousy also hosted a regular dinner; one week when Havlicek and his wife Beth didn't show up, he knew something was wrong. He died after suffering from Parkinsons, and catching pneumonia. It was hard to think of Hondo actually running down.

“The good players see the game in slow motion,” Havlicek once said, explaining the play when he stole the ball. “Actually, they see what’s going to happen before it actually happens.” For someone who moved at the pace he moved, it was easy to think of his seeing normal motion as being slow, and it may have explained in part why he was so calm, so pleasant, so friendly off the court. I've spent a month going through the various permutations of Havlicek's career in Boston, and I'm afraid my mind is still running. The long-time Globe sportswriter and basketball savant Bob Ryan called Havlicek Stole The Ball “a moment that is not lost in time”. Neither was John Havlicek.

THE FAT MAN: SOLVING MURDERS IN A THIN MAN'S WORLD

The other night I watched The Fat Man, a 1951 mystery film that's sometimes billed as film noir, which is what got me interested. It's not a noir at all, not that I'm one of those authoritarian purists who insists on a strict definition of classic noir; it's more like a series B movie of the 30s or 40s, a Falcon or Boston Blackie kind of thing, a frantic mystery with a bit of comedy and a bit of action. The gimmick is that the detective is indeed a fat man. He's a gourmand, makes no bones about it, but as played by J. Scott Smart, he's comfortable in his role—at least until, as he squeezes out of a drugstore phone booth (no one under what, 50?, will understand what that is!) a mother warns her young son about growing up to look like him! Think William Conrad as Cannon, without the fat everyman action hero car chase bits. He's not as pretentious as Nero Wolfe, and unlike Wolfe, he does move.

The Fat Man was a popular radio show which ran for ten years from 1946, sponsored by Pepto-Bismol, an antacid. The opening has him stepping on a drugstore scale: “weight, 237 pounds; fortune: danger”. The show was ostensibly created by Dashiell Hammett, as a counter-point to the Thin Man, but it's most likely Hammett merely licensed his name. Originally billed without a character name, but then called Brad Runyan, he was given life by Smart's deep tones (Smart was also appearing on the immensely popular Fred Allen show).

Smart carries the character into cinema well. There's some foolery with his size, and his appetite, though his first scene is doing the gourmet thing with some French chefs who are very much impressed. There's also a scene where he dances with Julie London—who needs persuasion, in the sense that it never occurred to her that the Fat Man might actually be able to dance—and he struts his stuff as the whole dance floor stops, Hollywood style, to watch and applaud. If the fat-shaming might seem pretty offensive in today's PC world, don't worry, because Runyon calls all the frails 'sweetheart' too. And there's a scene that takes place with a blackface comic performing in the background; it is a 1951 B movie.

I said Julie London, and the singer has a straight dramatic part here. One of the two reasons people might think there is something 'noirish' about the film is that much of it is told in flashback—and part of that is London telling of her romance with Rock Hudson, who's just got out of prison and has come to collect his cut of the money from a race-track robbery for which he took the fall. London is very good; you have to think this was the kind of part for which she was better-suited than most, playing some scenes herself rather than as the love object. Watching the retelling of the robbery itself later, I couldn't help but think Stanley Kubrick must have kept it in mind when he wrote The Killing.

London and Hudson's scenes together work; the weakness underneath Rock's star appeal works. In general, the cast is actually better than the material. You'll see a number of familiar faces in small parts: Jerome Cowan (Miles Archer in The Maltese Falcon) as a police lieutenant; Parley Baer as a New York detective; Peter Brocco as the racetrack bookkeper; Tristam Coffin (TV's 26 Men), among others. And one not so familiar face, Teddy Hart, playing a thief called Shifty as if he were Joe Pesci's father. Hart had a small part in Mickey One, and also seems to have played a character called Crowbar in three Ma and Pa Kettle movies.

Jayne Meadows is the dentist's secretary who comes to Runyon when her boss falls (is pushed) out the window of a New York hotel where he's attending a dental convention. The story takes the Fat Man, and his thin assistant Bill (Clinton Sundberg) to California, where two of the other robbers (one is John Russell, later TV's Lawman) have made it big. Russell's wife, played by Lucille Barkley, is also having an affair with the chaffeur, a sub-plot which, like Barkley's career, undeservedly never goes anywhere. But the other real star is Emmett Kelly, the famous clown, in his first dramatic role. He plays a clown who did time in prison, and if anything the film doesn't do enough with the contrast between his own face and the clown's face, not that it hasn't been done before. But Kelly carries a great deal of straight, not clownly, pathos, and the scenes shot in the circus wagons and under the tent are the most atmospheric of the film, and at times use shadow and darkness well enough to invoke noir.

The plot creaks—there is a moment when Meadows announces she can name the killer, while the killer is conveniently in position to overhear the call—but try as I might, I cannot figure out how she possibly could have encountered, much less recognised, him. And crimes themselves are probably a form of overkill (sorry) that keeps the plot moving before you have a chance to think about where it's going or where it's been.

The Fat Man was directed by William Castle, best known for theatrical gimmicks when his B horror or sf movies were shown (he's the character John Goodman plays in Matinee, and was supposedly the inspiration for Hitchcock to make Psycho, in that he'd shown Hitch these things made money. It was written by Leonard Lee and Harry Essex. The first time I heard of Essex was when I got Mickey Spillane's opinion of the film version of I, The Jury which Essex wrote and directed (“he rooned it,” said the Mick). It's not noir, it's not classic, but it is fun. And kudos to J.Scott Smart, who, like William Conrad, keeps his dignity while being laughed at for his size.

LISA HALLIDAY'S ASYMMETRY

Although Asymmetry might be considered to be about its eponymous subject, in reality it's primarily about something else. Toward the end of 'Madness', the second of the book's two stories (there is also a coda to the first story at the end) Amar Jafaari, an Iraqi-American economics graduate with a recent PhD, a Kurdish Iraqi born in the air over Cape Cod, is being detained at Heathrow after trying to enter the country while on his way back to Iraq to visit his brother. Amar, who once interned at a bio-ethics council in London, has a surprisingly vast recall of literature and is remembering having discovered a copy of The Portable Stephen Crane in the music seat of a piano his brother bought in New York. He recalls how he felt at that point in his life, eleven years old, with a sense of “the metaphysical claustrophobia and bleak fate of always being one person”. It is, he thinks, a problem “entirely up to our imaginations to solve.” And then he recalls lines from Crane, “it might perhaps be said—if anyone dared—that the most worthless literature in the world is that which has been written by the men of one nation concerning the men of another”.

This exquisite, if seemingly unlikely, bit of literary recall by an economics student is at the core of what Lisa Halliday is up to. Her two stories are actually moving, almost inevitably, toward a symmetry determined by each story's asymmetry. Amar's is multi-faceted, including the asymmetries of his life in the US and his family's life in Syria, but it is anchored by his interminable and frightening encounter with the officious staff of British customs, convinced his stop-over in London is something they should not allow. It is a frame around his wider tale, a constricting frame that seems to be tightening like a medieval torture device around him. It is also, we might later conclude, an attempt at a story of one nation written by a woman of another.

The book's first story, titled 'Folly', details one asymmetrical relationship, between Alice, an assistant editor at a literary publishing house, and Ezra Blazer, a major novelist, who seemed a cross between Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, if a bit less healthy than either. He approaches her in the park where she is half-reading, and recognises, looking at the book, that she 'likes old stuff'. Alice is 25, Ezra 66 (though in fact he seems somewhat older—which may only be the perception of youth) and their affair is of course one of assymetry, based mostly on his fame but also on his experience and his will (though interestingly Alice is more the aggressor sexually). The writing is young and dreamy; Alice doesn't know who she is, almost literally: her given name is Mary-Alice and Ezra soon gives her an alias to use when they are at public affairs. She also doesn't quite know Ezra: when he calls her, her phone always reads CALLER ID BLOCKED, which is a perfect millennial way to describe that part of relationships. She is also a Boston Red Sox fan; he, being a New Yorker, roots for the Yankees. Talk about asymmetry.

Because Lisa Halliday's Alice is so convincing in her ambivalence, 'Folly' as a whole works better than 'Madness', whose intensity in the immigration interrogation far outweighs the details of Amar's own life, or indeed the real story of what is going on with his family in Iraq. You realise there is another asymmetry on offer there, but you sense there is no real parallel to be made between Alice or Amar's love lives and the taking of hostages in a war zone. And you do marvel at the way the narration of 'Folly', while from Lisa's point of view, manages to build, subtly, a convincing portrait of Blazer. Men of another nation and all that.

The coda is an attempt to resolve some of the asymmetry, as Ezra is interviewed on Desert Island discs by a thinly-disguised Kirsty Young, providing a battle of more-or-less equals, with her situation, like that of the interrogator at British immigration, providing her with power, and Ezra using his tricks to re-establish footing. This seemed a little forced to me, and tonally not of a piece, but it does make her point, if narrowing it somewhat to a battle of the sexes.

I read Asymmetry on recommendation from my friend Alexis, whose praise for the writing was justified. So when I finished, I looked to see why I had missed the book, and discovered two things. Less importantly, in Britain, it was the coda that seemed to receive the most attention, a certain amount of critical cheerleading at the way Kirsty Young deals with the old man, mixed with a definite ignoring of the parallel situation at Heathrow Airport rather than Broadcasting House.

But more significantly, the real attention-grabber was that Lisa Halliday had actually had an affair with Philip Roth, when their ages were roughly what Alice and Ezra's are, and thus this fiction was, as the movies (or Granta books' PR probably) say, 'based on a true story'. This is not essential to enjoying the book, indeed, I think it probably reinforces the fiction's own asymmetry between Alice's and Amars stories. But this is not Joyce Maynard dishing the dirt and getting revenge on JD Salinger. In fact, in retrospect it reminded me more of Joanna Rakoff's My Salinger Year, detailing the time she spent as an assistant to Salinger's agent.

I would have preferred not to have learned the 'true story', especially since much of it occurs as Ezra is 68, when their ages total 95, and it all seems rather hopeless. Or pathetic. Or asymmetrical. Which seems reinforced as 'Folly' ends, with a Red Sox player striking out against a Yankee, and Alice holding Ezra's hand in hospital. It's a fine piece of writing, true story or no.

Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday

Granta £8.99 ISBN 9781783783625

MARK MEDOFF: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of the writer and teacher Mark Medoff is online at the Guardian now; you can link to it here. It should appear in the paper paper soon. It was a fascinating piece to write, not least because my friend John Basinger was in the cast of Children Of A Lesser God, because of his long association with the National Theatre For the Deaf, and as I wrote, he met Medoff during the filming, but more importantly knew Phyllis Frelich (pictured with Medoff right) and Robert Steinberg (her husband, whose primary trade was as a lighting designer, not an actor) very well indeed. Much of John's role, as William Hurt's friend and confidant on the school's staff, was lost in the editing, as the film made the love story between Hurt and Marlee Matlin, and their direct contact in scenes together, the focus of the film. And with apologies to John, Marlee certainly made that worthwhile.

Medoff's career is interesting particularly for his 50 years at New Mexico State, during which time he put the university and the regional theatre company he founded on the national map. His plays tended to be workshopped and performed at festivals and in college programmes, and the more I looked at his work the more convinced I became that Children was almost a one-off, a real perfect storm of a time when issues like deafness or mercy-killing were in the forefront of theatre, and the presence of Frelich's immense skill as an actress, and Marlee Matlin's striking cinematic presence. Frelich worked with Medoff many times, but it was hard to convey just how badly their last collaboration, Prymate, was received.

The Wager seemed to me like a younger, less intense version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. I've always thought Red Ryder was kind of a cross between Sam Shepherd and Bus Stop--the more bizarrely it is played the better it works. I also noticed how certain themes, beyond deafness, repeated in his work: oddly enough his later film Walking With Herb, in which an aging widower is given a golfing talent, reflected his earlier play Crunch Time (written with Phil Treon) in which a similar Mephistopholean deal is offered a girl playing high-school basketball. This is an old trope in sports, going back at least to Damn Yankees (and of course in a non-sporting sense Faust) but Walking With Herb also recalled the syrupy Mitch Albom bestseller Tuesdays With Morrie.

Perhaps it was the freedom acadame gave him to explore riffs on themes, to encourage younger talent, to do the kinds of things he wanted to do. But if I am right, and Children was indeed a sort of one-off, it was a major one. And after writing his obituary, I really do want to see Refuge.

WARREN ADLER: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obit of Warren Adler, whose 50 novels included The War Of The Roses, from which was made a hit film, is online at the Guardian; you can link to it here. It should be in the paper paper soon. Of course the movie is what the hook for the obit was -- it's odd that such a successful and prolific writer should have such a low-profile output.

It is pretty much as I wrote it--but one thing was edited out. I have to confess I had never come across, in my time as a crime fiction reviewer, any of his Fiona Fitzgerald novels. They sound intriguing, and almost a natural for development on TV. I mentioned that, but what was cut out was the fact that the adapter is currently Eric Overmyer--who was the showrunner and adapter of Bosch (and was working on Man In The High Castle as well.) That would bode well.

In Adler's own biography, he mentioned that his classmates at the New School for Social Research included Marion Puzo and William Styron; when I wrote Thomas Berger's obit I recall writing the same thing. So I wonder if they ever overlapped, or if they somehow moved in different circles. I also wondered if Berger's The Neighbors (1980) might have been an influence on War Of The Roses?

Adler is good with set-ups, and it was impressive to me just how prevalent the theme of broken, dangerous or twisted relationships was at the heart of his books, whatever their genre. That he was such a devoted family man shouldn't surprise anyone, but making fiction out of the opposite, repeatedly, is something remarkable. I read a piece he wrote for the magazine of the American Association of Retired People, from which I drew that final quote, and it was very moving: told from a point of view of his own loss, you might say victimhood, and it seemed to me a cruel way of his having to go through what he put so many characters through.

It was also fascinating that, in his first career as a DC PR, he should have advised Nixon (on how he could win the Jewish vote) and been the man who gave the Watergate complex its name. Because of course the Guardian obit I had written just two days before Adler's was that of James McCord, leader of the Watergate burglar's, whose confession was the key to Nixon's being brought down. A strange bit of
synchronicity.