LINCOLN, THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS, & PICKETT'S CHARGE

One of the Carlson family's favourite stock stories involved our first-ever 'vacation', in 1962, when we went on a trek through Washington DC; Williamsburg, Virginia; Bristol, Tennessee and up the Shenandoah Valley to Amish country and Gettysburg. We learned a lot on that trip; at the Washington Monument my brother got sick, and when we went to the facilities, at a national monument in the nation's capital, they were segregated. We were in the 'whites only' restroom and I asked my father if that was right, that we should use separate facilities, and he said 'no, that's wrong, but that's what people here do'. A man at another sink turned and shot him the glare, which bounced off my dad as if the guy didn't exist.

What happened at Gettysburg my mother never forgot and always told me and anyone else who would listen. This was during the Civil War centennial, of course, but Gettysburg was nowhere near as developed as it today—development that has taken place in the context of great resistance from both locals and historians. I was, at age 11, already keen on the Civil War, and as we stood on Cemetery Ridge I started to explain what we would have been seeing on the day, and how the troops moved, and by the time I finished we had attracted a small crowd of people, who then proceeded to follow us to the next few points of interest, which I happily explained as if I were a guide.

I mention this because it is the sesquicentennial anniversary today of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, originally delivered at the dedication of the cemetery at the battlefield. In honour of the event, I stopped to read Pickett's Charge, George R. Stewart's 'microhistory of the final attack at Gettysburg', originally published in 1959, on the cusp of the centennial. Stewart is a fine writer much overlooked today, best-remembered for Names On The Land, his study of American place names, but also the author of Ordeal By Hunger, about the Donner Party.

Pickett's Charge, a misnomer because General George Pickett did not actually charge with his command, signifies what is recalled as the 'high-water mark' of the Confederacy. Faulkner wrote famously in Intruder In The Dust of the way that 'For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out.' By the end of the afternoon, Robert E Lee's Army of Northern Virginia will have, for the first time, been defeated; the next day, Vicksburg would fall to Ulysses Grant. Apart from a few hundred thousand more bodies, the Civil War was over.

It is the ultimate myth of failed glory—especially because Pickett's charge, as with each of the Confederate set-backs during the Gettysburg battle, came very close to triumph. They were not defeated, this once, by superior numbers, nor was the Union position on a big hill or entrenched, but it was nonetheless a suicide mission across bad ground which James Longstreet, Lee's second-in-command, did not want to undertake, and did his best to avoid. For that, he would eventually become one of the scapegoats in Southern history. It might also be seen as the beginning of the end for Napoleonic warfare, except European generals would not get the message until well after millions had died in the Great War.

Stewart, by assiduously reporting facts as best they can be ascertained, without any obvious agenda, recreates the battle in detail both comprehensive and comprehensible. The true heroes arise naturally from the narrative: those forgotten, like Capt. Frank Haskell, who single-handedly rallied the 71^st and 72^nd Pennsylvania to counterattack at 'The Angle', the center of the Union Line; he deserves a film like Josiah Chamberlain of Maine, who saved the Union lines the previous day at Little Round Top. But the stories that resonate are those of the leaders. Notably Winfield Scott Hancock, arguably the best field commander the Union had, who had taken over from John Reynolds, killed on the first day of the battle. Hancock remained mounted throughout the massive artillery bombardment preceding the charge; when wounded during the fighting he refused to quit the field until the battle was won. Hancock was a leader; he would run for president, as a Democrat, in 1880, but lost to James Garfield by only 10,000 votes.

The Confederate general who got the farthest was Lewis Armistead, Hancock's close friend (he's played brilliantly by Richard Jordan in his final role, in the film Gettysburg). Armistead, commanding one of Pickett's divisions on foot, stuck his sword through his hat and led his men waving it for all to see; he was killed crossing The Angle, and his dying words, as reported by the Union surgeon who answered his call as a fellow Mason, and treated him on the battlefield, became, as Stewart says, 'a storm-centre of controversy': 'Say to General Hancock for me, that I have done him, and you all, a grievous injury, which I shall always regret'. Was he apologising for breaking his oath to serve the United States, or was it a more personal apology for perhaps under-estimating Hancock's troops?

Pickett's Charge is particularly subtle on Pickett's own behaviour. Col. Eppa Hunton, of the 8^th Virginia, repudiated his commander; he would never even call the event 'Pickett's charge'. Lee, blaming himself, was less harsh, though Pickett was never again promoted. And at the battle of Five Forks, just before the end of the war in April 1865, Pickett's division was again slaughtered; this time he was enjoying a 'shad-bake' with some fellow generals away from the battlefield; his disgrace was not made public, but he was removed from command, and from Lee's sight. Pickett, with his long ringlets and sharp angled face, reminds us of two other American heroes, Poe (like the author, Pickett courted, and married, a teenaged girl) and Custer, as flamboyant and also foolhardy.

Stewart's account is engrossing; he has adopted the mindset of the time, which is something I find particularly fascinating. Had I read this book in 1962, I would have automatically understood the points of honour and duty which the battle brings to the foreground. Following the flag, not surrendering the colours, giving your word of honour, all had a meaning, even to me as a boy then. Stewart does not romanticise these, but he clearly understands them in the context of their times. I suspect now that those meanings may have faded, that a modern audience will find much of this behaviour as incomprehensible, in the personal sense, as they do in the political—that is, fighting a war to keep men enslaved. Although there can be no doubt that slavery was the reason for the war, Lincoln was, at least until the Emancipation Proclamation, and always for public consumption, fighting primarily to keep the Union together. And though it was slavery that caused the South to secede, many Confederates were indeed fighting for concepts of states' rights, more abstract than slavery, or for the honour of the places where they were born, out of loyalty, not racial conviction.

Thus Pickett, no hero on the battlefield, becomes a hero in Southern myth, and if we know anything a century and a half on, it is that those myths die hard. Many thought the Civil War finally ended in that centennial period; in 1964 Lyndon Johnson, a Texan, signed into law the Civil Rights act, and said prophetically 'there goes the South'. For a century, the South had refused to vote Republican; a hundred years of GOP payback for freeing the slaves. We know now that what really happened starting in 1964 was an electoral realignment of forces already arrayed against each other, which the odd give and take between northern and southern Democrats had held together.

Fifty years later, we find an America whose progress is brought to a standstill by representation as disproportionate as when non-voting slaves counted as 3/5 of a person for allocating the size of Congressional delegations. We have a newly segregated South, full of 'Christian' academies outside the de-facto segregated public schools; gated communities outside the provenance of municipalities, where 'stand your ground' rules. We have elected a black man President, yet his reception from a part of the country ideologically, if not always geographically, descended from the Confederacy, has been relentlessly and uniformly hostile. We have a well-funded opposition, proportionately over-represented in the modern legislature of media, that has spent the past five years refusing to accept the legitimacy of an Obama administration. It is a veritable deconstruction of reconstruction.

And a far cry from Abraham Lincoln, who was one of Obama's conscious role models on his path to the Presidency, and whose ideal of conciliation and reconciliation seems to be Obama's determined policy, long after everyone else in America has realised his enemies are no more likely to be placated than South Carolina was in 1861. It is perhaps most significant for us today to realise that just as Pickett's Charge is the high-water mark of the Confederacy, the Gettysburg Address, not the battle itself, nor the surrender at Appomattox, remains the high-water mark of the Civil War for the rest of America.

The Gettysburg Address remains the single most powerful speech in American history, and a model of concision for the world. The people who came to Gettysburg for the dedication ceremony might well have come to hear Edward Everett, a renowned orator, and he gave them their money's worth, speaking for two hours. Everett later wrote to Lincoln, requesting a copy of his speech, saying Lincoln had said better in two minutes what he had tried to say in his far longer time.The Everett copy is one of the five known to exist. Garry Wills' Lincoln At Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (1992) is a fine exegesis of the speech itself, and its effect: it is a commonplace now to note that before the Civil War, United States was not a collective noun in the American sense; it still took a plural verb. After the Civil War, it became a collective, requiring the single verb a united group deserves. That was down to Lincoln, but at Gettysburg he made a simple declaration—we, the people, could not consecrate the battle ground; the dead and living who fought there had already done that. We who did not fight there could only apply 'increased devotion' and 'highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom'. In many ways today, his words, stirring as they are, ring hollow even as they are recalled and intoned, because we are still awaiting that new birth, or perhaps chasing its post-World War II wisps. Both sides of America must endure their own legacies of failure.

BINARY: TWO BOOKS BY MICHAEL CRICHTON AS JOHN LANGE

Michael Crichton put himself through medical school writing paperback thrillers, under the pen name John Lange (a German pun on his 6-9 height). He wrote seven of them between 1966-70, but in 1969, the same year he received his MD, he published, under his own name, The Andromeda Strain, which was a best-seller and doomed his medical career. In that same year he published A Case Of Need, under another pen name, Jeffrey Hudson (a famous 17^th century dwarf) which won an Edgar award.

Before he died in 2008, Crichton had arranged for Hard Case Crime to bring the Lange books back into print, and had even done some revisions. It should be noted that there have been previous reissues of Lange books, from a number of publishers, but they are now out of print. Hard Case issued four of them in October, and another four this month. And that makes eight, because Crichton wrote one last Lange book, Binary, which was published in 1972 (along with The Terminal Man, under his own name), and which was crucial in providing him the opportunity to direct the film version—a surprisingly good made for TV movie called Pursuit, with Ben Gazzard, EG Marshall, and William Windom)

Perhaps because it was the last of the Lange books, Binary may be the best place to start, because it is a taut thriller that moves straightforwardly, and contains a confrontational puzzle at its center. It's anchored firmly in its time, as a right-wing millionaire plots to explode a canister of nerve gas over San Diego as the Republican party holds its convention there, and President Nixon arrives from the Western White House in nearby San Clemente. Interestingly, the convention in reality was moved to Miami Beach (not for reasons of terrorism) but in a brief note Lange explains he preferred to leave his book as it was).

The millionaire is John Wright, and John Graves is an agent for the State Department's Intelligence Division who has been tracking Wright and his extremist views, and is on alert because of the convention. Meanwhile, a shipment of nerve gas has been stolen from a train—the gas is transported in two canisters, each inert until they are mixed, hence the title of the book. What ensues is a cat and mouse battle between Wright and Graves, which Wright relishes, and in which Graves is always playing catch-up; it is a binary situation just as much as the deadly chemicals.

Crichton moves the pace along quickly, and handles the chess game between the two fairly, with Graves' more interesting battles coming with other government agencies. It's interesting, in light of the influences which are obvious in the earlier books, such as those detailed in Grave Descend, which is reviewed below, that Graves should be working for a man named Phelps—of course on Mission Impossible Peter Graves played Jim Phelps. Call it a hommage. It's also worth noting that Glen Orbik's cover is one of the best Hard Case covers, in the style of pulpy paperbacks, but the alluring femme fatale doesn't really appear in the story at all!

What makes Binary the most interesting of these releases is not so much Crichton's usual technical aplomb, but the way the story resonates with the present day. The use of nerve gas obviously prefigures modern WMD and terrorist worries, but in Wright Crichton creates a character right out of today's Ayn Rand reading Tea Partiers, the kinds of people who felt frustrated in the post-Goldwater Republican party, but who, in the years since Ronald Reagan have taken it over. The idea that they are the true terrorists wasn't completely ahead of its time, but it was in the James Bond category in those days, and here, in contrast to Grave Descend, Crichton saw through it to what it was.

Grave Descend was published in 1970, and nominated for an Edgar, which reflects the sure hand Crichton had developed writing the first six Lange thrillers. It;s very entertaining, but seems slight, and I wasn't quite sure why until I went back and looked at the other nominations and winners in the best paperback original category—Dan J Marlowe's Flashpoint, not one of his great ones, won the award that year (1971) but most books were still being reprinted from hardcover in those days; the pb original market was nowhere near as deep as it is today. I retrospect, it's far less slight than it seems by today's standards. Similarly, A Case Of Need won the Edgar for best novel, and it's odd looking back just how traditional in orientation that award was at the time.

James McGregor is a diver based in Jamaica who is hired to investigate the wreck of a luxury yacht, called Grave Descend, only he watches the ship blown up and sunk after he's hired to retrieve its cargo. Crichton's influences come through very clearly here: there's more than a little John D MacDonald here. I wrote on this blog when I linked to the obituary of Crichton that I wrote for the Guardian (follow the link here), that Crichton had obviously learned from MacDonald's bigger, mainstream novels, more than the Travis McGee ones. But here McGregor, like McGee, specialises in salvage,and also has McGee's attitudes toward women—a combination of 50s old fashioned morality and 60s sexual freedom, as well as the classic hard-boiled suspicion of affection offered. This is a major part of most of MacDonald's non-McGee hard-boiled thrillers. MacDonald was expert on getting just enough technology and detail into his books to make them seem realistic, and more importantly to make the plot grow from that reality; this was the way he constructed those later, major novels, which often seem very close to what Crichton was doing.

There's also a lot of Ian Fleming here—the island setting, and its enigmatic cop, and the master-villain sort of set-up in the isolated mansion and classy yacht. McGregor's local helper, Chingnachook to McGregor's Hawkeye, is there to provide the necessary deus ex machina, and it all comes to a rousing climax, with a surprisingly downbeat and nicely written anti-climax. It is a fine example of Crichton's innate story-telling ability—how he was able to distill the familiar tropes of the time, and give them freshness. He would find his own niche in medical and scientific thrillers, but never settle for just that, and these books are a good indication of why.

Grave Descend (ISBN 9781783291243) and Binary (ISBN 9781783291250)

are published at £7.99 by Titan/Hard Case Crime

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

PARKLAND: FROM LONDON FILM FESTIVAL TO FIFIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE JFK ASSASSINATION

After opening in the London Film Festival, Parkland's release was delayed to coincide with the 50^thanniversary of the Kennedy Assassination, and presumably thus cash in on the notoriety and nostalgia.Though of course nostalgia is the wrong word, because we are talking about an audience that doesn't remember the event, doesn't remember the time, and thinks that Kennedy was a boring version of Don Draper. Parkland plays with this fondness for an idea of early 60s glamour, all Rat Pack skinny ties and Jackie pill-box hats and Chanel. But in its rather limited definition of who the real Mad Men are, it lets its audience down.In fact, if you kept a scorecard of Parkland you'd quickly realise the guys in the Mad Men threads are the good guys.

The good news is that although the credits say it is based on Vincent Bugliosi's Reclaiming History, his massively prolix redoing of Gerald Posner's Case Closed, the film doesn't subject us to a massive prosecutorial brief for the Warren Report. It does, however, retreat to the Warren conclusions, that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone crazed assassin, and that assumption permeates everything that follows. Apparently, this was originally intended as a Band Of Brothers style mini-series, but it must have been evident that examining the assassination itself would quickly become far too tendentious, and that a Band of Conspirators scenario has already been done by Oliver Stone.

Produced by Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman's Playtone, what Parkland tries to be is a story about the personal lives are the crucible of the assassination and how the event focused its stresses on them, like a more serious version of Bobby. Hanks is, in some sense, Hollywood's American Everyman, heir to Jimmy Stewart perhaps, although there has always been an element of Forrest Gump's idiot savant or not so savant in that image. Parkland's cross-section of American everymen hold up well under fire, as it were, but where I find the film most pernicious is in its Gumpish assertion of not only respect for, but faith in, authority. The Secret Service, the FBI, everybody except perhaps the Dallas Police who threaten Oswald's brother Robert, are figures of huge competence. And I even got the feeling we were supposed to admire the red-blooded thirst for revenge by these square-jawed Ray Ban-wearing Texans. Billy Bob Thornton even gets a speech about the SS never having lost a president, as if oblivious to the one just lost on his watch. Instead, we see the SS jumping out of their motorcade cars at the hospital setting up a cordon armed with their Armalite rifles (one of which, according to one popular, though easily refutable, assassination theory, actually fired the fatal head shot). I've looked at every photo I can find, news film footage, and read recollections, and I can see no evidence this cordon ever existed. But what the visuals do is important to the film; they create an image of the fighters of terrorists keeping the public safe, drawing a quick line between Oswald as assassin and terrorism, and absolving authority of blame.

And that is the point, making Oswald into a terrorist. He's portrayed as both cocky and kooky, which is not that far off-base, but also dangerous (in fact, Jeremy Strong could just as easily be playing Snowden journalist Glenn Greenwald). That is enough to convince his brother (a tremendous performance by James Badge Dale) of his guilt, and if Oswald's own brother believes him guilty, what's left for the rest of us to decide? Jacki Weaver as their mother, seems to be channelling her inner Joan Allen without huge success; Mrs. Oswald was a strange woman who did warm to the spotlight, but she was also shrewd enough to sense that there was more going on behind the scenes with her son. But her obvious delusion in the film negates her assertion that Lee was some kind of government agent.

Which he more than likely was—either when he 'defected' to Russia and/or came back. It is highly likely that Oswald was acting as an informant for somebody—the rumour at the time, that it was the FBI, has never been refuted convincingly, and which puts Parkland's approach to the whole agent James Hosty (well played in this light by Ron Livingstone, the closest to Don Draper Parkland actually gets) story in a different light. Of course embarrassment was the reason for many of the cover-ups around the assassination investigations, and cover-up can begin to look like conspiracy, but the destruction of Hosty's memo, and other missing files higher up the food chain quite likely represent more than mere embarrassment. But examining the many anomalies in the case, the approach which comes closest to explaining them is the assumption that Oswald was an informant, as shown convincingly in Oswald Talked and that he was exactly what he claimed to be, a patsy.

Where Parkland falls down worst, however, is at the hospital itself. Zac Efron is our Forrest Gump, MD, driven to exhaustion and beyond by the pressure of working on the president, with only nurse Marcia Gay Harden for support. More importantly, we never see doctors describing JFK's throat wound as a wound of entry (the tracheotomy performed immediately destroyed that evidence), we never see them repeatedly identifying the fatal wound's being above and to the front of the right ear, not in the right rear of the head. When the Secret Service steal the body from the Dallas coroner before he can perform an autopsy, we are presented with forthright professionals protecting a corpse from further terrorism. We never learn of the farcical autopsy conducted at a military hospital. Most puzzling of all, we never see Jack Ruby, who will soon be the star of his own murder, this time on live television instead of home movie film, at Parkland, where he most definitely was. Later he would pop up at Police HQ, and even interject a helpful correction about Oswald's background as a commie radical into one of the press conferences.

Instead of Jack Ruby, we get Abraham Zapruder, as played by Paul Giamatti, who understandably starts out fearing for his safety because he has the best record of the killing, but soon gets turned from home-movie maker to a sort of nascent film producer, shrewdly selling the rights to Life Magazine (where stills would be printed in the wrong order to make it look as if the fatal shot drove Kennedy's head backwards). What is amazing is the way the Secret Service and FBI not only defer to Zapruder and his property, but actually do what they promise they will do, and give him back a copy of the film. We've come a long way from that in 50 years.

I suppose that when Parkland ends, in Gump or Private Ryan fashion, with the moral uplift of Walter Cronkite's encomium to tolerance and understanding, it will not ring hollow in the light of the five decades that followed. But Parkland's faith in our institutions, and blind acceptance of the power of the long crazed madman, may suit our post 9/11 America, but it rings hugely false for anyone with a memory. It will probably gain much unwarranted respect from those who don't.

Parkland played at the London Film Festival, and will be released on 22 November

NOTE: this essay will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

CAR CHASE TO THE SEVENTIES: REWATCHING THE SEVEN-UPS

It may be the best car chase of all time. The other night, when I re-watched The Seven-Ups for the first time in at least twenty years, I was struck immediately by how completely it drew me back into its place and time. Roy Scheider, dressed like a businessman, is pacing in front of the Chock Full O'Nuts lunchroom on 42^nd Street. It is New York City circa 1972, gloriously brash, cheap, dirty, dynamic, and exciting all at once. By the time Scheider and his team (called Seven-Ups because the crimes they investigate carry sentences of seven years or more) bust some counterfeiters in a jewellery store, it was like I was 21 again, and I was THERE!

The Seven Ups was produced and directed by Philip D'Antoni, who had produced The French Connection, and it exists basically to reproduce the thrills of that film, namely dirty New York, grimy cops, and a car chase. Scheider plays a character named Buddy, just as he did in The French Connection. He's obsessed, and the car chase, which we'll get to in a moment, reflects his obsession.

The other things I remembered were a brilliant little scene from Joe Spinell, when the Seven Ups are about to pound a confession out of him, and he shows them his mis-shaped fingers and tells them to go ahead an hurt him, he won't talk. Spinell plays a guy helping the movie's pair of villains; I recalled how perfectly matched Bill Hickman and Richard Lynch were, playing Moon and Bo. Lynch is the guy who burned himself while tripping on LSD, turning him from handsome leading man wannabee to bizarre villain. Hickman, who also was the stunt driver for this film, and The French Connection, and Bullit, simply looks more like a hard-boiled thug than anyone I can think of; how he never got cast in a Parker movie, or as Parker, is beyond me.

Hickman not only choreographed the Seven-Ups chase scene, but drove the lead car. It was filmed on the Taconic Parkway, and the ending, with the auto-decapitation, does indeed deliver the payoff D'Antoni wanted. But underneath the action, the movie is really about betrayal. The story comes from Sonny Grosso, who was the real cop Scheider played in The French Connection (and that's Grosso with the beard delivering the funny money in the first scene). Grosso, who went on to become a producer (of Pee Wee's Playhouse, among other things), was himself targeted in police corruption investigations—they were the subject of a book he co-wrote, Point Blank (not the Richard Stark one!) and a film which he co-produced, A Question Of Honor, based on that book, with its screenplay written by Budd Schulberg. Given that subtext, it's no surprise that, along with obsession, loyalty and betrayal should be at its core.

As in The French Connection, Tony LoBianco plays the neighbourhood guy with big ideas, but this time he and Scheider are childhood friends, and he thinks Lo Bianco is his stoolie. Their final scene, when the extent of betrayal is confronted, was one I remembered vividly as soon as I saw it again, and still is powerful. Urs Furrer's photography is the epitome of dirty seventies urban, and the film also boasts an outstanding score by the jazz trumpeter Don Ellis—fast-paced, punchy, discordant, sharp-edged: it helps drive the film with the same manic energy as Scheider and the cars.

His Seven-Ups are well cast too: Jerry Leon as Mingo in particular, whose characterisation seemed to have homage paid to it by Paul Butler in the TV series Crime Story. There's also a pre-Dallas Ken Kercheval as Ansel, one of those characters whose fate you can predict as soon as he walks into a scene. 

I mentioned Crime Story, and it would not surprise me at all to learn Michael Mann admired this film, and that it didn't, in some ways, make its way into a number of his own movies. I was pleased The Seven-Ups held up so well, and amazed at how fully it drew me back into its world.

MY FAVOURITE FOOTBALL BOOKS: THE GRIDIRON LIST

Note: This essay appeared in September, in the first issue of a new British online American football magazine, Gridiron (www.gridiron-magazine.com). It was a sidebar, alongside my column, which has continued through the next two issues, and is worth checking out (issue 2 on concussions, issue 3 on NFL nepotism). I've done listings of baseball books, and an essay on boxing books for Radio 4's Open Book, but this is my first one on football. I've made a few small changes to the published version....

MIKE CARLSON'S FIVE (Or So) FAVOURITE FOOTBALL BOOKS

Essential reading for anyone interested in the overall history of the NFL is Michael MacCambridge's America's Game, a comprehensive survey of the rise of the league to its position of dominance in American sport. It's particularly well-written, and as far as I can tell, accurate on the issues of business that are so important behind the scenes; it is also scrupulously balanced in its portrayals.

In stark contrast, Jeff Miller's Going Long is a very entertaining oral history of the American Football League, patterned after Terry Pluto's classic Loose Balls, which did the same thing for the American Basketball Association. The players aren't quite as wild as the ABA stars were in their day, but the owners probably are, and it's eye-opening to see exactly how disorganised top-flight American sport was in those days, in contrast to today's corporate world. I often make the comparison between the pre-Rozelle NFL and the Rugby League in Britain: this book shows you the truth of that analogy—while the MacCambridge shows you just how far the NFL has gone since then.

Breaker Boys by Dave Fleming comes from the days when you'd be hard-pressed to separate pro football from early rugby league. It's the story of the 1925 Pottsville Maroons, who were the best team in the fledgling NFL, but still are not recognised as the champions, because they played an exhibition game in Philadelphia, territory of the Frankfort Yellow Jackets, and just as it does today, money talked and the Maroons walked. It's somewhat repetitive in its writing, but it's a great story.

My favourite football biography is J. Brent Clark's Third Down And Forever, the story of Joe Don Looney, an immensely talented running back who lived up to his surname. It was perhaps his misfortune to come to the NFL in the Sixties, when his non-conformist nature was both confronted by the military and could be indulged out of it. Dave Meggyesy's 1970 Out Of Their League tells a somewhat similar, but much less moving and tragic story, about the changing times of the Sixties; it was billed as a football version of Jim Bouton's Ball Four but is much more than that. Weeb Ewbank called it 'communist hogwash', which is a good enough endorsement for me.

I'm lucky enough to have a copy of Pro Football Chronicle, which Dan Daly and Bob O'Donnell published in 1990, in the wake of the Bill James Baseball Abstracts. It's less statistical than historical, and loaded with surprising info. The most interesting stats book is probably John Maxymuk's Quarterback Abstract, which was published in 2009 and which I almost wish were updated (see his website for info). He's not always complete about things like players in WLAF/NFLE, but in terms of putting passers into the contemporary context, he's brilliant. Allen Barra's Big Play is worth the price just for its essay on Notre Dame vs Michigan State in 1966, but also has interesting valuations on Bart Starr vs John Unitas, the YA Tittle/Allie Sherman New York Giants, and some very thoughtful essays, including the first one on the story of Marcus Dupree. Barra sometimes lets his own Alabaman roots show, and gets the old 'ruffians and gentlemen' rugby vs soccer quote backwards, but he's a fine journalist, and author of one of the very best books on the Gunfight at the OK Corrall, Inventing Wyatt Earp.

ROBERT RYAN'S DEAD MAN'S LAND

Sherlock Holmes pastiches seem to arrive in bunches every generation—and the recent ones move the original caped crusader in ever-stranger directions. So it comes as a relief to read Rob Ryan's take on the genre, which is at once a throw-back and so perfectly fitting it's a wonder no one considered it before.

It's 1914 and Dr. John Watson has returned to the army, re-commissioned as a major in the medical corps, and sent to the front in Belgium. He has had a falling out with Holmes, and despite his age, the veteran of the Afghan campaign is back in a very different sort of war. As I said, this makes perfect sense; despite his age, Watson's concept of duty, and his need to feel useful on his own, without Holmes, makes it more than believable, and his service to the crown would get him his commission.

Ryan does a nice job of getting Watson's tone right, and even the voice of Holmes he hears when he tries to think a problem through. Watson discovers there is a serial killer operating in the British trenches, and though he isn't believed immediately, and the concept itself is anathema to the officers above him, his investigations are as dogged as you'd expect, and more dangerous given the context of the front. Ryan's descriptions of the trenches are vivid and horrifying—appropriate at this time of year, in the centenary of the Great War and with Armistice Day approaching—as is his straightforward portrayal of the rigid class system in effect not just among the fighting men, but also in the hospital wards. This impedes not only the tactics of modern war, but Watson's ability to treat its victims, as well as track down the killer. There's a neat contrast drawn as well with his portrait of a German sniper, through whom Ryan manages to draw out some of the moral complexities of modern war. With poison gas floating across no-man's land, there is an eerie echo of the present-day's WMDs just as much as Watson's Afghan service echoed in the modern TV update of Holmes.

But what makes Dead Man's Land work as a Holmes pastiche is the way Ryan's mystery turns out to be so true to Doyle's style. Because for all the brilliance of the Holmes-Watson partnership, and the great villainy of Moriarty, Doyle was working very much in the puzzle side of the mystery world. It's interesting that the British Crime Writers Association named Agatha Christie the greatest crime writer, and one of her stories the greatest as well, because she follows so closely in the Holmesian tradition, of characters not being who they are, and of issues of primogeniture, inheritance, and family status being so important.

In Ryan's story, Holmes does respond to his friend's call for help, and the mystery is solved by the two together, but not before a no-man's land finale that puts War Horse to shame. For die-hard Holmes' fans, this will be a satisfying climax, and for other readers, Ryan's mix of the traditional and the new is like the war itself, grim, modern, and endlessly fascinating.

Dead Man's Land by Robert Ryan

Simon & Shuster, £7.99, ISBN 9781849839570

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

MANHUNT: LONDON FILM FESTIVAL'S WAR ON TERROR II

Manhunt might be billed as the counterpoint, or indeed antidote, to Zero Dark Thirty or Homeland, in the scripts and iconography of which a single (in both senses of the word) beautiful American woman, obsessed with her task, either because she's the best or bipolar or both, tries to defeat a 21^st Century Fu Manchu, head of a monstrous third-world army about to swallow up America and its 'freedom they hate'.

Made for HBO by Greg Barker, based on Peter Bergen's book, and featuring Bergen among its interviewees, Manhunt tells the story of the decade-long search for Osama bin Laden in different terms, a manhunt against a small gang of criminals, spearheaded by 'the Sisterhood', a team of women analysts more like soccer moms than secret agents. From that premise, the film examines h the contrast between the reality of that hunt, which culminated in the killing of Bin Laden in his compound in Pakistan, and the perception foisted upon the public. It also addresses cogently the entire structure of the so-called 'war on terror', its uses and abuses of torture, and its relations to what might be seen as that war's ultimate aims.

It's a balanced picture, filled with interviews that lay out the moral dilemmas and the practical problems. The most interesting at first are with the members of 'the sisterhood', whose tracking of Al Queda began in the 1990s, and became obsessive, and whose warnings about his plans were largely ignored. In the wake of 9/11, however, with Bin Laden elevated to the levels of a Hitler as worldwide public enemy number 1, their work became more and more important, though they often found themselves in conflict with the agents on the ground. Nada Bakos and Cynthia Storer, tasked with following and tracking Al Queda from afar, are given more depth when set against the agents on the ground, here represented by Marty Martin, who worked the Middle East, and Jose Rodriquez, who ran counter-terrorism at the CIA.

Storer talks about how the women were called 'obsessive', as if that were a female characteristic, before the whole CIA became obsessive. And Bakos, assigned to find Musab al Kawaki, who was finally killed in an airstrike in 2006, explains in plainest terms 'my job was to hunt a person down, to capture or kill. I had to be okay with that.' It was Bakos who provided the key link to the courier, whose tracking finally located Bin Laden.

The contrasts are worthy of an episode of Homeland, though more chilling for their reality. A smug reference to 'black sites' as 'boutique locations' where suspects can be tortured by American proxies, is a chilling reminder of what the reality of intelligence work is like. But the former deputy director of the CIA, John McLaughlin, introduced performing sleight of hand tricks, is unconvincing when he speaks about the CIA feeling 'alone' with their responsibility to prevent another 9/11. When considered in the wake of what that excuse has been used to justify, from domestic surveillance to political repression, he sounds chilling. One of the Sisterhood, Jennifer Matthews, was actually killed in the suicide bombing at Khost, bringing home the reality, and the frustration.

What becomes most clear is how false the Zero Dark Thirty portrayal, and argument, is, and how much domestic politics impeded an early elimination of Bin Laden, during the Clinton years. Zero Dark Thirty's celebration of torture is scoffed at most effectively by Ali Soufan, an agent and interrogator, who points out the intel that finally got Bin Laden came through research by the Sisterhood and more traditional interrogation techniques. It demonstrates how Barker's documentary not only raises questions, but presents them in depth and context, something sorely lacking in most mainstream media. In this context, the absence of reference to the Bush administration, and the early connections between Bin Laden and the US, seems odd, and when President Obama is portrayed announcing Bin Laden's death, he is almost literally seen as a hologram figure, a PR construct worthy of Orwell. Barker includes an interview with General Stanley McChrystal, whose criticisms of the adminstration when he was in command in Afghanistan, which makes the most crucial point, when he says, 'I'm not sure America has made the effort to understand what it is we just went through...the key is why are the enemy the enemy? If you don't understand why they're doing it, it's very difficult to stop it.'

In the larger sense that question it seems to get lost in the rush to action. Philip Mudd, former deputy chief of counter-terrorism sees things more simply: 'There are philosophical debates you can have, but at the end of the day, the question is: Are you gonna move or not? Yes or no? Go or no go? That's it.' If you've watched Zero Dark Thirty, or network news, you know the answer to that one already.

DRONES: THE WAR ON TERROR COMES TO THE LONDON FILM FESTIVAL

In the language of detached warfare, a wife, parents, and three kids can be called 'several unidentified terror suspects' and this is the fulcrum on which Drones balances. The film is largely a two-hander, in which an experienced drone 'pilot', Jack (Matt O'Leary) who is a mere airman, is breaking in a new pilot, Lieutenant Sue Lawson, who not only has 'washed out' of pilot school at the US Air Force Academy because of a detached retina caused while boxing, but is also the daughter of a general. On their first day together, they spot that a wanted Al Queda terrorist Mahmoud Khalil will soon be showing up at a house their drone has under surveillance. Showing up to see his children and celebrate his birthday. And after one false alarm, which irritates the folks at CentCom (central command), they are given orders to kill him when he does arrive.

But killing him will involve taking out his family, in fact, all the people who show up, with a goat to barbeque, for the party, some dozen civilians, or 'potential terrorists'. And as she thinks about it, Sue decides she will not kill innocents, not even to take out a top terror target.

Drones plays out like a play, at times almost as didactic, though the film opens out in a curious way, through the two screens on which the 'pilots' watch the drone's cameras, and the third screen on which their superiors communicate with them. It's interesting the way director Rick Rosenthal handles those screens, because we never see the people from the drone's-eye view in close up until the film's final moments of denouement (I'm not sure anyone actually hits a zoom button, like those crime films where surveillance camera footage always seems to come with a director), which stands in sharp contrast to the closer shots we get of the commanding office, and then of Sue's father.

The film builds its arguments carefully and subtly; although they're in the middle of the Nevada desert, in a trailer, they wear flight suits, as if they were 'real' pilots; Jack is obviously playing Top Gun in his mind. The point that they are conducting war via video game is obvious; they even send out for pizza, which gets delivered at exactly the moment of most tension. The planes flying overhead, from the nearby airbase, remind Sue of what is now out of reach for her. The film plays carefully with chain of command issues; she outranks Jack, but he is the experienced pilot; she is also better educated and tougher, but he is still a man and she a woman.

But the biggest issue is what is acceptable in the 'war' on terror. Sue soon realises that Khalil might not be an Al Queda terrorist at all, but merely a dissenter our Pakistani allies wish to see eliminated. Her father was a bomber pilot in Vietnam; her issue with killing civilians is really a question of sight; were she an actual pilot dropping bombs or firing rockets, she would create far more 'collateral damage', but she would not have first seen the people she was killing. And the film's reversal hinges on what her father tells Sue about the terrorist, and about his connection with the 911 attacks in which, coincidentally, her mother and brother were killed. It is Jack who believes what the audience may suspect: that Sue's father, at this moment of greatest familial candor, is lying to her. Meanwhile, armed MPs wait outside the trailer to storm it, arrest one or both of them, and carry out their mission should either of them, in the end, refuse.

The film ends abruptly, with the decision, and without chasing down the ramifications of it, but that leaves the debate uppermost in the audience's mind. That it is settled by the personal, emotion argument, rather than the moral, political, or military one, is a bit of a cop-out, but its arguments have been made, and the audience is therefore free to decide for themselves, agree or disagree as they see fit.

Rosenthal builds his tensions nicely, and with the caveat about the turnaround, Matt Witten's script is taut. Director Rick Rosenthal was a cinematographer himself; his son Noah's camera on this film sets the outdoor scene lovingly, but does a nice job within the confines of the cabin, and with the two screens: when they are dealing with Col. Wallace (the excellent Whip Hubley) there is more than a slight reminder of Dr. Strangelove. William Russ, as General Lawson, is also excellent in his small part.

But the film depends on its two leads. Eloise Mumford is excellent, only occasionally less than fully convincing; her moral stance at the start would be something you'd expect she would have confronted at some point earlier, growing up in a military family, attending the Air Force Academy, suffering loss in 911. It's a quick conversion, and when she becomes a daughter again, her vulnerability plays against the character she needed to set up, as if she's almost too good for the part. Matt O'Leary as Jack is even better; he nails his role, the underlying weakness, the macho pretense, and, just like Mumford, he needs to present a conversion, based on his experience with own problematic father, which doesn't quite come off. In both cases, praticality, the reality of the military, gets lost within the deeply personal, rather than the personally ethical. It's what stops the film from being something major, rather than just thought-provoking and suspenseful, which isn't bad.

DRONES plays the London Film Festival today and Sunday 20th

STEVE HAMILTON'S LET IT BURN

It's the end of summer in Paradise. Paradise, Michigan, that is, on the Upper Peninsula, and Alex McKnight is anticipating another long and cold winter when he gets a call from Detroit, telling him a killer he helped catch, just days before the shootout where his partner was killed and he took the bullet that is still lodged inside him, is about to be released from prison.

It was a hot summer in Detroit, and Alex was still adjusting to being a cop, after his baseball career peaked in the high minor leagues. Darryl King confessed to the murder of Elana Paige, a young black man who'd killed a robbed a wealthy white housewife who was doing a photography course at Wayne State. And although he doesn't really intend to, Alex finds himself drawn back to the city, and to that summer, and finds that the case was perhaps not as open and shut as he'd thought it was at the time.

Steve Hamilton weaves the two stories together—the summer Alex lost Franklin his partner was also when he began to lose his wife as well—and does it well, mostly because this is a story about the city of Detroit as well. It is a catalogue of loss, of the way a city can suffer from exhaustion and become a shell of itself, and the people who once coped with it in its decline can become shells of themselves as well. It's never overdone; in fact, if anything the landscapes are sketched in very sparingly, and the intimate details of Alex's own loss are more hinted at than described in their agonies. But that helps it all work, as the basic plot, the resolving of the injustice done Darryl King, becomes a torturous maze which Alex, in that stubborn way he's exhibited previously, plugs away at until the path through finally appears.

Sadly, there appears to be no path for Detroit, nor to undo or redo the past. Perhaps Paradise, is, in the end, simply where we find shelter, where we can insulate ourselves against the cold of loss, and the loss of things we love.

Let It Burn by Steve Hamilton

Orion £18.99 ISBN 9781409140771

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

ENOUGH SAID: JAMES GANDOLFINI AT THE LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2013

Although Enough Said is nominally the story of a single-mom masseuse in LA trying to have a relationship, and it sometimes fails to make the most of the farcical elements it's set up, what makes it work is the exceptional performance of James Gandolfini as the male lead, in his penultimate film role.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays Eva, whose daughter is about to go 'back East' to college, and whose career as a masseuse is an almost endless parade of clients who have bad breath, natter on inanely about their problems, or who seem oblivious to Eva's own problems, like having to lug her massage table up a flight of steep stairs. At a party she meets Albert (Gandolfini—whose character appears to have been given that name solely so Eva can later make a 'Fat Albert' joke) and they get a small sense of attraction when admitting neither finds anyone at the party attractive. Of course, romance blossoms, but Eva is besieged by doubts, mostly because Albert is overweight, messy, and doesn't seem to worry about that. His own daughter, also headed east to college, is obnoxious. But what makes it worse is Eva's newest client, another product of the fateful party, Marianne (Catharine Keener): a poet whose tastes Eva admires and who is constantly disparaging about her overweight ex-husband.

Who of course turns out to be Albert.

Although it is funny, and often written very cleverly, in one sense, Nicole Holofcener's film seems to back away from being the comedy it cries out to be—as if its chops as an 'independent' movie would be at risk were it not to highlight the suburban LA malaise while it sets up a Feydeau farce. In some ways, this is a movie about people who are uncomfortable with themselves, and their roles; people driven by a need to have something else, something better. This is illustrated best by Eva's friend Sarah (Toni Collette), who's dissatisfied with everything from her husband Will (Ben Falcone) with whom she is constantly bickering and comparing to an imaginary new man, to the way the furniture's arranged, to the disorder of their maid Cathy (Anjeleh Johnson-Reyes), whose shortcomings are mostly Sarah's. Her inability to fire Cathy, based on an literal inability to find what she wants because she's so messy also hints at an ominous LA perception: earlier in the film Eva yells at one of her daughter's friends to 'pick up your trash...you're not British!'

This sort of dissection of the mores of LA, the needy daughter whose mother wants to dress like a teen, and whose need pushes Eva's own daughter into the background, to a goodbye dinner for Eva's daughter with her ex and his new wife, and especially in Catharine Keener and her relentless attack on Albert coupled with a sort f lonely name-dropping of her own, is built around self-centeredness, and around perception being mistaken for reality.

The only exception to that, of course, the only character who actually seems comfortable in himself, is Gandolfini, who may have walked into LA from New Jersey just as surely as if this were an episode of the Sopranos. In fact, what made Tony Soprano work was in large part Gandolfini's innate humour and likeability, something hinged to the vulnerability of the less attractive fat man. In that sense, Albert is Tony Soprano without the threat of violence, without the simmering rage underneath. He understands who he is, and if not always happy with his loneliness, can live with that. It has always puzzled me why this wasn't spotted in Gandolfini, after playing Bear in Get Shorty, which was 1995 after all. Instead, when he started getting film roles they were in the George Dzunda class, ignoring his comic potential.

This is important because for most of the film he plays straight man for Louis-Dreyfus, who is far more a television, small-screen, actor than he is. She spends much of the film acting with her teeth, and as if aware of the limitation, Holofcener shoots much of it in extreme close-up, as if we were watching a TV screen. Louis-Dreyfus is good when she has to be controlled, mostly at the moment of breakdown, but it's Gandolfini who reveals big emotions through small gestures, who manages to project the inward, which is the big screen way. His ability helps Louis-Dreyfus find a bit of the screwball touch, and stops her from spinning madly out of control with toothy smiles, which may indicate Eva's uncertainties, and do whenever Gandolfini is on screen with them.

The real moments the film works are not in ensemble moaning, but when it is dealing with the personal, the way love grows, then dissipates, how , which is external, can evaporate if you don't find the kindness which is internal. I so wanted this movie to have an unhappy ending, and there are moments when it could have—and that would have given it independent street cred out the wazoo. But Gandolfini had made us feel Albert deserves better, and Jwe know, in the end, he will be himself. This film is dedicated to him, and well it should be, because it turns a lightweight comedy into something memorable.

Enough Said plays at the London Film Festival 12,13, 14 October, before release from Fox Searchlight.

SCOTT CARPENTER: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of Scott Carpenter went up at the Guardian online today, you can link to it here, and it ought to be in the paper paper soon. I wish I'd had the time to go back and either read through The Right Stuff or watch the excellent movie: although Carpenter's part is small (as evidenced by his being played by Charles Frank), but it's important; the movie makes it clear that Carpenter is the one who's 'stuff' is seen as questionable--I can't remember offhand if he's shown in confrontation with Chris Kraft directly, but my distinct recollection is that he is the pretty boy, all-American face, and it may be that his troubled family life was part of the perceived problem. At any rate, such speculation was probably best left out of his obituary, but I will now go back to the film to see if my memory is correct.

Otherwise, I am always saddened to recall the immense promise of my country in my youth--John Kennedy promised a man on the moon and we did it in less than a decade. Those crew cut guys with horn-rimmed glasses, short-sleeved white shirts, nerd packs and slide rules sent a few equally crew-cut pilots into space and brought them back using computers the size of my house with less power than the one I'm writing this on now. It was an immense achievement.

The nature of Carpenter's shift from space to the bottom of the sea is actually the sort of conversion that would make an epic film itself--and reading between the lines, his personal life would make it even more so. I lean toward the idea he deserved another chance in space, but the film would probably start with his re-entry, and take the conflict, and his response, from there.

THE REAL DEADWOOD: RICHARD MATHESON'S WILD BILL HICKOK

It's always sad when a writer's untimely death motivates you to find that unread book and, a day late as it were, finally read it. Such was the case for me recently with Richard Matheson, who was better known as an sf writer, or indeed a screenwriter, but who produced a number of westerns that share a clean prose, clear storyline, firm narrative drive, and deft characterisation. The Memoirs Of Wild Bill Hickok is no exception, but it's also a revisionist version of gunfighter myth, a sort of Little Big Man focussed in on just one man.

The excellent conceit of the novel is that it is indeed written by James Butler Hickok himself, and he is no gunfighter, much less a hero. In fact, he starts a sensitive soul, and grows into someone who's more coward than anything else; even his name is acquired through accident and misunderstanding. Fate seems to have a different path for Hickok that the one he might imagine, and in this case, fate deals him tough cards—not least his famous, fatal, aces and eights.

What makes the book most effective is that Hickok's own writing begins to follow the rough-edged frontier talk he has borrowed from the dime novels who've created his legend; the sensitive man proud of being well-read, winds up writing as if he really were the hero he's been written to be, and in that chasm, in that conflict between the man and myth, lies the story. It's fiction as life, and the scenes of Hickok on the stage have a true discomfort, even for the reader. And Bill finds his solace, as he did when he was a boy, in women, or failing that, as a man, in the bottle.

It seems a simple tale on the surface, but it's Matheson's version of Hickok's prose that gives this novel its edge, and makes it memorable. It reminds us of just how controlled, how spare, and how good Matheson was.

The Memoirs Of Wild Bill Hickok by Richard Matheson

Forge (Tom Doherty Associates) 1996, $6.99
ISBN 9780765362278