MARK MILLS' WHALEBOAT HOUSE: A Forgotten Friday Entry

I'm not sure if, strictly speaking, The Whaleboat House qualifies as a forgotten book--after all it won the CWA Silver Dagger for best debut, and his second novel, The Savage Garden, was a Richard & Judy finalist, but as he had managed to slip under my crime-reviewing radar, I thought I'd revisit it, to see if it deserved its award. And I'm pleased I to say, it probably did, though it's also fair to ask how many award winning books have since been retitled by their publishers? Maybe they assumed a British audience wouldn't figure out it was a place name, and certainly wouldn't know how to pronounce Amagansett (it would come out Uh-MAG-an-set). But the original title was Amagansett (see below left) when it was published in 2004 (and it's a place name, pronounced AM-a-gan-set, just like it looks) but perhaps that name looked too serious for a Dagger winner. Even under its new title (which I confess actually works better) it's had two different paperback editions, the first pitching it more as a crime story, as befits a Dagger winner, the second positing it as a sort of historical piece of serious fiction, dirty realism set in the immediate post war, with a romantic twinge, as befits a Richard & Judy nominee (see below right). The problem with the latter approach is that although Mills writes well, and his period setting is drawn well and intriguingly, the story is, at heart, a mystery, and a tale of revenge.

It's notable too for its setting, the immediate postwar fishing community of Amagansett, before the huge boom in the Hamptons, when fishermen still plied their trade in New York's waters (see Joseph Mitchell's exquisite collection, The Bottom Of The Harbor, for a brilliantly realised picture of that industry from the same era). Conrad Labarde is the descendant of Basque fishermen, and works the waters from his shack on the ocean side of Long Island, along with his friend Rollo, the somewhat dimwitted scion of the area's oldest fishing family. It's Rollo who's brought the whalehouse to Conrad's property: and the second title is a far better one for this book; along Amagansett is the setting, it is the whalehouse that sees the story.

Conrad and Rollo bring up the body of Lillian Wallace, one of the wealthy population who visit the area on summer weekends. But Conrad has his own history with Lillian, and knowing the presumed suicide is a murder, he investigates alongside Tom Hollis, a disgraced former New York cop now deputy chief in the small town. The investigation, of course, visits the areas where cultures clash, while Hollis, whose own investigation is directed, as it were, by a few dropped words from Conrad, also discovers ways around his own problems. As well as Lillian's death, Conrad is also haunted by his experiences in the war, where he was an assassin, and somehow blessed with luck while those around him died.

This is a lot to pack into a relatively small package, but Mills does it well. You might say it's too much, that the Hollis and Labrade backstories are slightly too melodramatic, but I think that what is also going on here is a bit of homage from a British novelist to the great novels of the early twentieth century: not just Joseph Conrad, which is signaled pretty obviously, or Fitzgerald's Gatsby, which of course is the classic novel of a Hamptons hit and run leading to more serious crimes. There are echoes of Hemingway, and Steinbeck too, and maybe even a little John O'Hara. It's as if Mills is simply touching those familiar soft spots, and it wouldn't work if he hadn't made his own characters so real, real enough to carry the story through. Its denouement is, like the backstories, somewhat melodramatic, and certainly we see it coming because we've seen it before, but it is handled well, and resolved honestly. As I said, Mills writes very well, and writes his American scenes and characters as well as any Anglo-Irish writer since John Connolly. The fact that he can make his period story resonate with echoes of great novels while still keeping the suspense compelling suggests the Daggers, and maybe even Richard & Judy, were right.

The Whaleboat House by Mark Mills
Harper Perennial 2005 £6.99 ISBN 0007161921

PYNCHON'S INHERENT VICE: THE SPECTATOR REVIEW

My review of Thomas Pynchon's latest novel, Inherent Vice, appears in today's Spectator, you can link to it here. It is a very funny book, and one that I think looks back on how 'we', who grew up in the post-war baby-boom era, got to where we are. Pynchon's style is less popular now that it was in those heady days, when I would have easily dumped V or Gravity's Rainbow into my list of the best American novels. There has been a backlash against the pursuit of the great American novel and against 'metafictions'--and yes, the former can be overblown and the latter disappear up their own asses, but when it works it works, and there's something conservatively British about the preference for minute examination of polite society. You never have to worry about that with Pynchon, but underneath the invention and the authorial playfulness, the examination, if not minute, is far more telling than, say, all of 'dirty realism' wrapped up in one.

HENNING MANKELL'S PYRAMID

Reading Henning Mankell's Wallander in shorter stories provides an interesting perspective into what makes the detective work—and more importantly into how Manning himself approaches writing about him. Two of the stories in this collection are long: the opener, here titled 'Wallander's First Case', is a good-sized novella, and the title story, 'The Pyramid', which ends the book, could have easily been published alone as a short novel. Mankell wrote all these stories to answer questions about what happened to Wallander before he debuted in 1990's Faceless Killers, and they were originally collected in Swedish in 1998. He explains in an introduction that is typically precise but somewhat less reticent than his interviews, that it wasn't until after those eight years had passed that he came up with the phrase which he would have used retrospectively to subtitle the Wallander series: 'Novels About The Swedish Anxiety'.

Without using the A word, this confirms what many of us have thought, and the link which Mankell has also explained between his books and the Sjowall/Wahloo Martin Beck series.
At times in these stories he tries to make the sense of collective angst rather too clear: at one point commenting on the fractured walls of society, and in another at the way, a generation before, Ystad would have been free of the effects of crime from the cities. There's a reflection of the novels too, since Mankell has always had fun with the sense of Ystad as a crime capital: remember the cash machine in the town square that was about to cue world wide armageddon? 'The Pyramid' is a classic case in point: an international drug cartel run by two spinster sisters who otherwise sell buttons and thread? But Mankell balances the unreal nature of that situation with the tale of Wallander having to rush to Egypt to get his father out of jail: the cantankerous old Swede has tried to fulfill his dream of climbing a pyramid, and been arrested. It's as surreal a scene as I can recall in any crime novel, and it helps put this Christmas tale into perspective.

'Wallander's First Case' is the best of the lot, in part because knowing much of the story to follow, one can see the seeds planted carefully. His new romance with Mona is already suffering from his devotion to his job, a devotion which will pay off in his promotion to detective. And it will also stoke her fears; because he is seriously wounded—the original title of the story was 'The Stab'-- and that personal anxiety will later be magnified as their relationship flounders on its lack of communication.

In his shorter stories, Mankell is often making a character point. This is signalled particularly strongly by the original title of 'The Man With The Mask', which was called 'The Divide' and emphases not only the relationship between Wallander and the man who holds him hostage in a convenience store robbery, but also between Mona and him, she being the outsider who can never understand what he has gone through. A couple of stories end in suicides, which is a particularly Swedish way of dealing with things (Americans tend to prefer taking people with them) and a couple require epilogues to explain the complications of plots that are creaky, but which Mankell is not taking too seriously; less police procedural than Swedish psychological. It's a riveting book, that to anyone familiar with Wallander hangs together like an episodic novel, doing exactly what Mankell planned.

The Pyramid by Henning Mankell
Vintage 2009 £7.99 ISBN 978009951297
This review also appears at www.crimetime.co.uk

ARNALDUR INDRIDASON'S DRAINING LAKE

In many ways, The Draining Lake is my favorite of Arnaldur Indridason's Erlendur novels, and the most ambitious. The discovery of a corpse found buried in the eponymous lake, with an outdated Soviet radio transmitter weighing it down, starts an investigation whose roots go back to the heyday of the cold war, when Iceland was (before the Fischer-Spassky chess match put it firmly on the map) a backward island important to both sides only because of the American airbase at Keflavik.

There are distinct echoes in this novel of Halldor Laxness' The Atom Station, with the echoes of geopolitics rebounding on the narrow world-view of Icelanders, and Indridason, while not revealing who the corpse is, tells its back story convincingly, the tale of committed Icelandic communists studying in East Germany in the mid-fifties, of naiveté in both politics and love, and ultimate disillusionment. That story is portrayed convincingly, with young Tomas' idealism tinting the narrative, and we, the audience, knowing better.

Meanwhile, the investigation of the corpse shows Erlendur and his team at their most persistent, especially as they deal with the diplomats from the US and the 'new' Germany. There is a wonderful scene where the German ambassador explains that Iceland is seen as 'the back end of the world' in terms of diplomatic service, and when he proves less than forthcoming, an irritated Erlendur finally asks her 'what did you do wrong?' and when she doesn't understand, asks 'why were you sent to the arsehole of the world'. When his colleagues later chastise him, Erlendur lights up a smoke as says 'this arsehole-of-the-world stuff gets on my nerves'.

Of course that isn't all that gets on his nerves. The troubles with his drug-addicted daughter, and the distance of his relationship with his son, provide a counterpoint to the story told in flashback; meanwhile his platonic relationship with Valdegur, which began in Voices, is causing her husband to telephone him with threats. Erlendur is haunted by his lost brother, and there is in this novel a palpable sense of the isolation of Icelanders in the almost hermetically closed society of the small, cold island. This was part of the theme of Jar City, but here it is developed with the contrast of the enforced repression of the GDR, not that they are parallels, but each comments on the other: particularly when Oli, the young cop, reveals a strong conservative bent. If Hanning Mankell thought of Wallander as being about the anxiety of modern Swedish society, you could very much make the case that Indriason is following in his footsteps. But the wallander novels set outside Sweden are, to my mind, Mankell's least successful; Indridason's venture to East Germany works better, and makes Erlendur more compelling as a result.

The Draining Lake
Arnaldur Indridason, translated by Bernard Scudder
Vintage, 2008, £6.99 ISBN 9780099494140

IN THE SPIRIT OF THE SPIRIT

Will Eisner's Spirit remains the standard by which all comics should be judged, story-telling that defined the form for generations of writers and artists to come. Eisner's stories were humorous little moral tales, a cross between O. Henry and Issac Bashevis Singer, told in a cinematic style that emphasized the tongue in cheek nature of the masked detective while treating the story-telling very seriously indeed. It remains a difficult combination to imitate.

What is best about these of stories from DC Comics' revival of the Spirit is the playful tone, and the way they've updated him. Most telling is the way he's present in all circumstances, in his mask and costume, and no one seems to find it unusual, which is one of the character's best conceits. Interestingly, in the Frank Miller film, which I haven't seen, the trademark blue suit and mask are replaced by a literally darker black, signifying Miller's own vision of the character. The comics have updated the taxi-driving Ebony, now more Wire than minstrel show, naturally, but Ellen Dolan, always a bit of a feminist in her day, seems somehow more strident now, or maybe it's just that the Spirit is a little more beleaguered.

Originally, DC had Jeph Loeb writing, but this third collection of stories comes later in the series, written by the team of Sergio Aragones (creator of Spy v Spy in Mad, whose playfulness is very similiar to the Spirit) and Mark Evanier. Their first story, 'The Medical Murders' is probably the best. It's drawn by Mike Ploog, who comes closer in feel to the original Spirit, with darker backgrounds and more adventure in the layouts than the rest of the book. Of course, the tradmark of Eisner's design was the splash page, in which the tone of the story would be set, the credits given, and the Spirit title incorporated into the design; Eisner was years ahead of movie title sequences, as you can see in the example on the left. The plot is serious, and remarkably similar to Hakan Nesser's Woman With Birthmark (which I reviewed for Crime Time and which you can link to here).

Paul Smith is the artist on most of the tales, and 'Stand In For Murder' is probably the best of those. He's generally aiming at a more humorous presentation, subsituting dynamic movement for active layout design. This brings out the comedy element, but in 'Fish Tale', for example, there's almost a flatness to it that doesn't quite fit.

Aluir Amancio works in a similar style on his two stories, but also plays a bit more with the Spirit and women; in what is probably the best and most Eisner like of the splash pages, he's like a flirty private eye with the secretary of the insurance boss who hires him (see right) but back to his stunned haplessness when Ellen shows up, in bikini stretched across three panels, on the cruise ship where he is sent on assignment.

Paul Rivoche is the artist and colorist for 'The Comic Book Killer', where his heavy inking suggests EC Comics and which challenges 'The Medical Murders' as the best of the bunch. That tone is perfectly suited for an EC-type tale in which a comics writer is murdered, and which uses the old saw of all his collaborators wanting to take credit--particularly the artist, who goes insane ranting about how the writer's words filled the panels and made it impossible to draw the story. There's a lovely panel, almost entirely a dialogue balloon, in which the Spirit explains why he thinks a comic book can't have too many words! There's also one story drawn in a more modern cartoony style by Jason Armstrong, which somehow doesn't seem to fit. You can see what he's trying to do, but wonder if there's a reason for trying.

The collection may be uneven, and maybe not as compelling visually as the originals, but it's always entertaining, and it's probably the best tribute to Eisner's genius that one can still see the character's possibilities almost 70 years after it was created.

The Spirit Volume 3, Titan Books 2009, £12.99, ISBN 9781848561458
this review also appears at crimetime.co.uk

OF A MOMENT ON THE MOON, AND ANOTHER ON TV

Black boy in Chicago
Playing in the street
Not near enough to wear
Not near enough to eat
But don't you know he saw it
On that July afternoon
He saw a man named Armstrong
Walk upon the moon
 -'Armstrong' by John Stewart

The fortieth anniversary of Apollo 11 is bittersweet. On one hand, we celebrate the amazing feat America accomplished by making John Kennedy's promise that we would have a man on the moon by the end of the decade come true. As my friend Michael Goldfarb suggested in a BBC essay recently, how many other politicians' promises, of a positive nature, can you remember being fulfilled in such spectacular fashion? When we look back at those astronauts, at those crew-cut guys in mission control with their slide-rulers and punch cards, and realise what they actually accomplished, it makes you wonder why the billions we pour into technology today seems to be directed at smaller and smaller ways of keeping people watching screens instead of doing anything.

Of course, most of that technological cash was diverted to the space programme for military reasons, as well as the effort to regain US prestige. It strikes me as deeply ironic that the whole 'Star Wars' programme so beloved of the Reaganauts and neo-cons devoted to military pork, is exactly the stuff we feared the Russians were going to do to us with their Sputniks back in the 1950s. It's not so much we become what we fear, as that we have consistently, throughout the Post-War era, attributed to our 'enemies' all the qualities and aims, methods and motivations that were driving our own dark sides; this is the Jungian theory of the shadow, and it definitely knows what evil lurks.

It's also amazing to recall just how positively news of the moon landing was received all around the world, at the same time the US was deeply unpopular in much of that world for the way it was waging the Vietnam war. In that sense, the successes of the space programme in the immediate aftermath of Apollo might be seen as a very expensive circus, distracting the public from the even more expensive slaughter that was going on in Southeast Asia.

That's the sort of context that, in retrospect, I never felt at the time, not even when people (not least Tom Lehrer, see here) pointed out the space programme was the Dr Strangelovian step-child of a Nazi scientist whose previous rockets had made it only across the North Sea, from Germany to England. That July evening, I was able to put aside those thoughts to simply celebrate a unique small step. That America was self-evidently the greatest country on earth, that our 'can-do' spirit had made the impossible possible, struck me as further evidence that we were caught helplessly in the schizophrenic madness of our leadership. But it did, and does, make me proud of what my country could achieve, not so much if we put our minds to it, but if we put our hearts in the right places.

It was ironic that Walter Cronkite, struck speechless by the sight of a man on the moon, should have died during this anniversary, since it was his voice that Americans would associate with the landing almost as much as Armstrong's (and remember Col. John 'Shorty' Powers—the last military spokesman we liked or trusted?--that's him between John Glenn and Alan Shepard). Cronkite anchored most of the 30 hours of CBS's coverage, with Wally Schirra beside him for the landing. As Spiro Agnew said, famously, when asked for a comment, 'if Cronkite was speechless, what can I say?'

I was struck by the ill-feeling toward Cronkite in a couple of the obituaries I read—one blamed him for Rupert Murdoch's Fox News in some bizarre twist of retribution towards those about whom we aren't supposed to be speaking ill. It somehow sought to attack Cronkite for not being more than what he was--a skilled reporter who approached the CBS Evening News the same way he had approached working for United Press: as a way of bringing important news concisely and accurately to people who depended on it as their main news source--and refused to credit that work with being useful. The battle between the news agencies meant local papers in America were supplied with lots of foreign news in those days, a far cry from the present. And Cronkite, as an overseas reporter turned news reader, used his position as 'managing editor' of the Evening News to make sure the world got covered. That this appealed to audiences in ways the modern focus-group selected Kens and Barbies don't should be obvious from the way the mantle was passed, eventually, from Cronkite to ABC's Peter Jennings, the last of the anchors to have been a working overseas reporter.

But Cronkite was also the voice and face of reassurance; he did inspire trust. I was disappointed by the BBC, who in their notice ran the opening of the Evening News followed by Cronkite's announcement of JFK's death, as if that announcement had been the lead item on a newscast, rather than a 'flash' stuck into the afternoon programming, where the emotion that Cronkite fights hard to repress ultimately becomes evident on his face. In that instant, all reassurance was gone.

None of the obits I read made much of the programmes Cronkite hosted before taking over CBS Evening News--'You Are There', which 'sent' reporters to historical events, and more importantly, The Twentieth Century, whose documentaries covered the world, and the world of ideas (and, with one episode, 'The Violent World Of Sam Huff', did almost as much to boost the NFL into popularity as the 1958 title game had). The Twentieth Century had a relatively liberal outlook, though it was tempered considerably by its sponsor, Prudential, and by the network, and it was heavily influenced by the US military, who were portrayed in all their Cold War glory. But those were the times, and America's leadership wasn't being called into question they way it would be after Vietnam.

And yes, Cronkite's conversion marked the turning point of America's perceptions of the Vietnam War. LBJ didn't run for re-election because he knew if he'd lost Cronkite, he would lose America. But Cronkite hadn't turned against the war because he was a liberal, but because he was a reporter, and had gone to Vietnam to see for himself. Todd Gitlin, in a New Republic story about Cronkite, quoted my friend and ex-ABC colleague Jack Laurence, as follows:

I asked John Laurence, formerly one of the stars of CBS's Vietnam reporting, what he remembered of Cronkite's special report. "The reason his Vietnam War broadcast in 1968 had such a big impact," he wrote back in an e-mail, "was that it was so unlike him to take a position on anything. It just wasn't done in those days." Laurence recalled dinner the night before Cronkite left Saigon: "Walter said he wanted to know what was really going on. The senior US military officers he had spoken with had told him the Tet Offensive was turning out to be a huge success for the allies because they were killing so many VC and NVA. They were predicting victory. I acknowledged the huge numbers of deaths, but pointed out that the Northerners would replace their losses and come at us again. And again, and again. And that the sooner we realized the fact that we were not going to win this fucking war, the better for everyone, especially the Vietnamese and Americans who were being butchered by the thousands. For no good purpose. I got a bit emotional and [chief CBS Vietnam correspondent Robert] Schackne gave me a polite but stiff kick in the shins under the table at one point, to suggest that I cool it".'

Gitlin continues: The CBS special aired on February 27, 1968, with this peroration: "To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy's intentions, in case this is indeed his big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could."

Hardly the words of a radical. But more honest than the words of, say, Robert McNamara, who died just a week before Cronkite, and whom we now know was aware even then that the war was unwinnable, but just neglected to tell us, and didn't dare stand up to LBJ and tell him. McNamara was one of the 'best and the brightest', exactly the sort of guys who built NASA and put a man on the moon. They were the opposite side of America's Vietnam coin.

But do we need to look all the way back to Vietnam to note instances of the facts arguing for themselves against the pre-conceptions and subtrefuges of the war mongers, and to note the way an increasingly subservient media rush to condemn as leftists, subversives, traitors and/or terrorists those who simply, like Cronkite, present the facts?

What I like to think Cronkite stood for in the end was the decency of the common American, the nobility of journalistic curiosity, and the possibility that you could pursue news honestly on television, that you could respect and perhaps even give the benefit of the doubt to your audience, respect authority without bending over to it. Most of all, in a world of news, both local and national, that stokes the fires of fear and hatred, in the interests of power and profit, it was reassuring to be told that 'that's the way it is', and actually believe that it might not be all that bad, and that it might get better. That we might, someday, do something like put a man on the moon.

MOON: MIDNIGHT COWBOY TAKES A MOON WALK

I will confess to being a little apprehensive when I showed up to see Moon; a film directed by David Bowie's son, scripted by Alan Parker's son, produced by Sting's missus and released, as if by coincidence, on the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing--Apollo 11 meets Ziggy Stardust Jr? Yowza!...but no role for Moon Unit Zappa?-- suggested all the hallmarks of a vanity project, the better-connected equivalent of Judy Gardland and Mickey Rooney going 'why don't we put on a show!' in the Andy Hardy movies. But I was won over completely by a film that, despite being very knowing about its roots, and somewhat playful with them, treats itself and its audience seriously, tells a simple tale well, and uses that simple tale to suggest, rather than gnaw over, stronger and deeper concepts. It's helped by the fact that it is nearly a one-actor, if not one person, show, and Sam Rockwell does such a good job in carrying it off.

Rockwell plays Sam, who's coming to the end of a three-year stint mining Helium-3 on behalf of Lunar Industries for clean consumption back on energy-hungry earth. It opens with a Lunar Industries corporate promo, always a red flag in sf films, especially those based on Philip K Dick, or his spirit. Since Blade Runner, there have been many Dick adapations (Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report among the big ones) and probably twice as many films that are Dickian in all but credits, playing with his concepts and worries, everything from The Truman Show to excellent smaller films like Cypher or Gattaca, or almost all of Charlie Kaufman's work.

Dick's central concern is whether the world we live in is 'real' or a construct, how to tell the difference, and more importantly, whether we ourselves are real, or constructs, and if the latter, what difference it makes. For three years Sam has had no direct communication with earth; the satellite link has suffered endemic problems the whole time he's been on the dark side of the moon, and he sends and gets only taped messages with his family. The tapes themselves will remind you of Total Recall, and as Sam's date of departure looms closer, they become more and more distant, and omnious, in tone.

His only companion in space is the robot, Gerty, an obvious reference to Hal 3000 from Kubrick's 2001. Gerty is perfectly realised, voiced by Kevin Spacey (yes, Spacey's his real name) and given his humanity not by Spacey's monotone, but by cleverly changing emoticons. The knowing quality of the film is evident in the way they tease a revisiting of Hal's breakdown, there's a wonderful tease where Gerty appears to be about to strangle Sam, onl to pat him on the shoulder, because, as he reminds us, hes programmed to protect him. It's also cute that, in a film produced by Trudie Styler, this robot should be called by another dimunitive of Gertrude (when I made this point on Saturday Review it was, oddly, edited out of the broadcast).

Sam and Gerty's relationship follows in the traditions of smaller-budget sf films like Silent Running (to which there are obvious references in Sam's garden, and whose situation, of Bruce Dern with robots Huey, Dewey and Louie, is very similar), or Aaron Lipstadt's Android : and any number of other films that use their limited budgets in creative ways, working out straightforward approaches to serious sf concepts . In the same way Dick hit on some instinctive truths, and certainly a clearer vision of our present world than virtually any other writer in or out of sf, while churning out his pot-boilers for chump change, and got the future much more accurately and entertainingly in the big sense and the 'serious' hard sf writers, so too have these 'smaller' films often contained much more humanity than bigger films whose budgets seemingly demand to be spent on effects, not ideas.

Without giving away too much of the plot, Sam is seriously injured in a crash, then wakes, apparently having been rescued and treated at his station. But how? He realises that the Sam from the crash is still out there, goes to rescue him (for he is still alive) and finds himself. Which means Sam II is a clone.

The beauty of the film from this point, as Rockwell plays two roles (it's like Silent Running's Dern face to face with 2001's Keir Dullea) is that rather than get all philosophical over identity, the two clones behave like two people forced to realise they are both the same person as well as two different people. Working together, they uncover the secret of the moon operation, of Sam and his family, and of the way Lunar Industries has devised to cope with the problems of leaving a man isolated on the moon for three years--a method devised, we realise, at least 15 years before.

The film makes only one visual reference to the moon landing: one shot of Sam bouncing along the surface, which makes him look almost gleeful in a situation where he should not be. Likewise, it only cheats once with the concept, when Sam sees a vision which foreshadows the situation, like a mirage, but for which there should be no memory on which to draw.

The story's heart now becomes the two Sams working for a solution, an escape; basically a reworking of another event which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year: John Schlesinger's film Midnight Cowboy. As the injured Sam deteriorates, Rockwell launches into a knowing but respectful, if playful, impersonation of Dustin Hoffman playing Ratso Rizzo--and in the end it's hard not to see the other Sam as Joe Buck heading off to Miami on his space bus. The two, and Gerty, work against the clock, making it a suspense film, and by now the audience has been won over to the two Sams, and the struggle is the classic one of individuals, clones or real, against the system.

Early press documents and reviews compared Rockwell's performance to Nicholas Cage's in Adaptation, and to Jeremy Irons' in Dead Ringers (Irons' is the most subtle of the three, Rockwell's the most flamboyant). But there is another comparison, which I mentioned on Saturday Review. Moon's director Duncan Jones (ne Zowie Bowie) reminds me of another director with a famous name who changed it to Jones, Spike Jones. Like Jones' first feature, Being John Malkovich, Adaptation was written by Charlie Kaufman, and very much in the Philip K Dick mode; in Adaptation, of course, Cage played two brothers, with the question of the second brother's reality always in the forefront. Spike Jones' directing career stalled, but there is a difference. Duncan Jones came up with the story for this film, and he's apparently already working on another sf film; he has great visual flair, and it will be interesting to see if the ideas, and the playfulness continue in that film. Nathan Parker has apparently done a screenplay for Thomas H Cook's subtle and very moving thriller, Red Leaves.

In the meantime, however, Moon is a small, intelligent movie, entertaining enough for a non-sf audience, and knowing enough for (older?) sf fans who will get its references. Can it appeal to the CGI Friday crowd? It deserves to.

MOON directed by Duncan Jones, screenplay by Nathan Parker, story by Duncan Jones, with Sam Rockwell, Dominique McElligot, (voice of) Kevin Spacey, photography: Gary Shaw

SATURDAY REVIEW ON BBC RADIO 4

I appeared on Saturday Review tonight, discussing the film Moon, the BBC TV series Desperate Romantics, Jez Butterworth's play Jerusalem, which stars Mark Rylance, Ewan Morrison's novel , Menage, and Charles LeDray's first British exhibition, Mens Suits, which is at the wonderful Old Fire Station on Chiltern Street. My fellow guests are the historian Tristram Hunt and the playwright Julia Pascal; the host is Tom Sutcliffe. If you missed it, it's available for one week on the BBC I player, to which you can link here, or go to bbc.co.uk and search it out. It may sound a bit like the Tom and Tris love-in; I was definitely there only to sing backup. So I may also write about one or two of these items, either here or on Untitled: Perspectives, but don't hold your breath, or close your ears.

ALEXIS ARGUELLO: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obituary of Alexis Arguello, the boxer and mayor of Managua, is in today's Independent, you can find it here. The list of his survivors was left vague; I believe he was survived by his third wife Carla, but another paper identified a different wife as his widow; the local papers in Spanish referred to Carla, and the other woman was definitely his wife at the time of an excellent 1985 Sports Illustrated article by Gary Smith, profiling Arguello at a low point (link to it here).

The question of murder vs suicide is an interesting one; most of the speculation was circumstantial, in that there were people who probably didn't want him investigated for corruption, and the shot to the chest is not necessarily the best way to shoot yourself. The death marked a strange triumverate with those of Steve McNair (shot by a girlfriend who then killed herself) and Arturo Gatti (apparently strangled and stabbed by his wife, who then spent the next ten hours alone in the hotel room with the corpse and their one year old son).

WALTER SCHNEIR: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of Walter Schneir, who along with his wife Miriam wrote the first important book about the Rosenberg trial, is in the Guardian today, you can link to it here. The Town Hall debate, to which I refer, was a major landmark in what has become a continuing Reaganization of America, a retroactive process by which the McCarthy era could be justified, celebrated, and, as we have seen through the Bush regime,fianlly reborn and institutionalised, to the point where the Obama administration seems keen not to dismantle it.

The Verona decrypts and various other revelations from the Soviet archives require very careful handling, and Schneir was very good about pointing out their limitations, and the abuses to which they were put, while at the same time being honest about the fact that Julius Rosenberg was, indeed, a spy. Whether he deserved the death penalty is another debate.

I also wanted to make a bigger point about the Stronium 90 case, which was absolutely huge in the 1950s: nuclear poisoning of the baby boom children. It was one of the first of the big 'green' stories.

PHILIP REED'S LOW RIDER: A Forgotten Friday Entry

Harold Dodge was the eponymous 'Bird Dog' of Reed's first novel, published in 1997, a spotter of suckers for used car dealers who reformed for a honest life in the aerospace industry. At the end of Bird Dog, Dodge fled to Chile with his girlfriend Marianna, who'd killed Joe Covo, a crooked car dealer who'd fleeced her. In Low Rider, he's back in LA, because Marianna needs an operation, and Harold can help Vikki Covo, Joe's grieving widow, find the body, prove he was murdered, and collect on the insurance, of which Harold's cut will pay for Marianna's op. Sound easy? Amazingly enough, problems develop, not least that, once the body's found, harold becomes the prime suspect in the eyes of detectives Torres and Gammon.

Reed assembles a great cast of characters, all of whom are conning each other, or thinking about swo doing. Even when they don’t intend to lie, circumstances force them to, so what the hell. It leads to car chases, gunplay, and even a little guilty sex for Harold, which in noir terms, is the classic formula for disaster, but who can resist?

While all this goes on at a frantic pace, the cops, perhaps because they're focused on Dodge, seem strangely inert. You could blow up the Santa Monica Freeway and kidnap Monica Lewinsky’s mother and they probably wouldn’t notice. What’s a few corpses here and there, between friends? This California laissez-faire allows things to move to a double slam-bang finish. And speaking of double slam-bang, Harold has to choose between women, wondering if he’s being conned by one or the other or maybe both. It’s somewhere between the dilemma of classic film noir and being the hero of a country song.

And as in country music, Harold also wants revenge, on whoever stripped his father's cherry '64 Chevy Impala SS, the kind of muscle machine even someone named Dodge can appreciate. After all, you can take the bird dog out of cars, but you can't take the cars out of the bird dog. As Harold’s father says, “there’s no replacement for displacement”.

POSTSCRIPT: I reviewed Low Rider for Petrolhead back in 1998, and wondered where Reed might take the character. That he would continue seemed a given, in that he was being routinely compared to Carl Hiassen, and a breakthough seemed just around the corner. Another novel, Marquis De Fraud, came out in 2001, similar in that it apparently is a fast-paced novel of sleazy people conning each other, but set in the world of horse racing. Reed's other books have been non-fiction, but Harold Dodge would seem primed for a revival, especially since the money-grubbing days of the 1990s have given way to the new austerity, and gas-guzzling muscle cars have a whole new status, or lack thereof.
Low Rider by Philip Reed Hodder & Stoughton 1998, New English Library (paper) 1999

HOLLYWOOD'S CENSOR: Joseph Breen and the Production Code

Thomas Doherty's study of Hollywood's production code, originally published in 2007, is an important book about movie history, not just the history of censorship, because it does such a good job of setting its story into context. It is so good on the background in which the censors worked that we come to understand not only the way Hollywood functioned in its golden age, but the way America saw itself and its morals reflected in the pictures it produced. Using the story of Joseph Breen, who headed the Production Code Administration, or 'Hays Office' for twenty years, from 1934 to 1954, as its 'spine', as Thomas Doherty calls it, Hollywood Censor provides a revealing look at what the movies meant to America and how 'the system' worked in Hollywood, through the era when the talking picture was the nation's, and the world's, entertainment king.

Doherty begins with Breen receiving an honorary Oscar in 1954, presented by Joe E Brown, to the ironic strains of 'Don't Fence Me In'. Tellingly, Breen had nothing to say to the Hollywood crowd gathered that night, nor to the audience watching for the first time on TV. The book describes Breen, and the pictures bear him out, as a ward-heeler, the kind of guy standing behind the shadows in The Last Hurrah perhaps, and he makes much, fittingly of Breen's Irish Catholic upbringing and Jesuitical education. After all, the irony of the Hollywood system was that an industry run largely by Jews was making movies for a nation still overwhelmingly Protestant, and the boundaries of taste were being defined largely by Catholics.

That was how Breen, a journalist and PR man by trade, got the job; he had done the PR for the 1926 Chicago 'Eucharistic Congress', a sort of Catholic World's Fair that combined the pomp of Rome with the American religious selling power of Aimee Semple McPherson. It's the Jesuitical (you might have called it rabbinical had the studio chiefs themselves been doing it) parsing of morality that stands above everything else. The code itself was written by, literally, Catholic priests, but it's not just the specifics of sin, and the way those were shaped to reflect Catholic doctrine on any number of points; but the literal way in which those rules were interpreted. Contrary to the way people think of censors working, and indeed how the British Board of Film Censors (now called, for appearance sake, Film Classification) appears to work still,Breen's people were concerned mostly with checking the scripts before films went into production. This meant they were often applying a strictly literary sensibility to the films they were censoring, it also meant that once the script had been approved, it fell to the film-makers to find ways of saying things, on screen, between the lines. In that sense, it was actually an encouragement to finding a language of film, though I'm not suggesting this was a positive way of working toward that end.

Breen worked like that because he was inside the system, and perhaps the most interesting thing about Doherty's portrayal is the way he shows Breen's own belief that he was part of the film-making process. He makes suggestions which have no more or less validity than any modern producer might, he often feels like he is taking the film-makers side against the studio, trying to find a way to get what they want said into the finished film. Because, in the end, he also realised that his ultimate responsibility was to the studios' profitability; they had set up the Hays Office to try to ameliorate the effects of local censorship of what was called in Boston the 'ten-cent plague', by police departments, city morality boards, and the like, and especially by the Catholic Legion of Decency, whose bans on films carried the authority of moral sin behind them.
When the book came out, much was made of Breen's alleged anti-semitism and, to a lesser degree, racism, and Doherty was accused to giving Breen a skate on those issues. Again, you have to put things into context; at the time, Catholic doctrine still insisted Jews were 'Christ-killers', that would not be overturned until Pope John XXIII came along.

Ethnic stereotypes were also still acceptable for use in public discourse; the Jews who made Hollywood run were just as likely to crack wise about their 'nature' as anyone else—what we now call slurs could still be used as terms of affection (does anything date the Clint Eastwood of Gran Torino more—but his point was a valid one; while we've taken the PC cleaner to public discourse, we've done far less with the real effects of society's racial inequalities). Breen would have used the 'some of my best employers, if not friends, are Jewish' line and he would have meant it. The racism charge is a bit more nuanced, and a lot of it, like not producing pictures that would offend Hitler's Germany or which, by featuring miscegenation for example (and interestingly, the priests who wrote the original Code had not included anything about miscegenation, that was an addition made by the studios themselves), wouldn't play in the American South, had economic as well as cultural roots. Yes, we portrayed the Japs as less human than the Nazis, and that was racist, but this was a country that put its citizens of Japanese descent into concentration camps (taking the word back to its origins, with the British in the Boer War). The point being that rather than give Breen a pass on personal morality, Doherty simply refuses to take him out of the context of the prevailing ethos in America of the time. In fact, you might argue that my looking at Breen as a typical Irish ward-heeler is exactly the same sort of thing, but I'd be unlikely to be excoriated as a racist for that.

Oddly enough, censorship, a keystone of war time, began to fall apart with the war. During the war, the idea that you couldn't show a soldier battling for his life saying 'hell' or 'damn' or 'bastard' was preposterous. Even more, when soldiers came back from the war, they wanted more realistic entertainment; the same impulse that made Mickey Spillane a best-seller would eventually drive a stake through the heart of the film censors. Censorship became as tired as Breen himself; sadly, although he will be remembered in a negative fashion, he saw himself as having given his life to the movies, Doherty's recognition of this, and his sympathetic, yet realistic telling of Breen's own story, makes this book work, and remembers Breen in the most appropriate way.

Hollywood's Censor: Joseph I Breen & The Production Code Administration by Thomas Doherty
Columbia University Press, £13.00, ISBN978-0231143592