FROZEN SILENCE: THE SILENCE OF THE SPANIARDS AND RUSSIAN ROULETTE

During World War II the Spanish dictator Franco, wishing to repay the kindness shown by Nazi Germany during the Spanish Civil War, organised a full division of volunteers (Division Azul, or the Blue Division) who served in the Wehrmacht, with the proviso they would only fight on the eastern front against the godless Bolsheviks, and not again Spain's western European neighbours. Although their name came from the distinctive blue uniform blouses, a hold-over from the Falangists, in the field they fought in German uniforms.

This little-known bit of history forms the background to the 2011 Spanish film Frozen Silence (in Spanish, Silencio en la Nieve, Silence in the Winter, not as good a title), set in 1943, as the Blue Division takes part in the siege of Leningrad. In the midst of the terrible Russian winter, a body turns up with its throat slashed and an inscription carved into its chest. As it happens, one of the privates on hand, Arturo Andrade (Juan Diego Botto) was a police detective, and he is soon given the assignment to find the killer. Who soon, as it happens, turns into a serial killer. Is he a hidden 'red'? A mason conducting some weird ritual? Or is something else, perhaps more sinister, going on?

The strongest part of the film is the setting, particularly the opening, when the body is discovered in the midst of group of horses frozen in a lake. Occasionally in the film there are shots of stark contrast, of cold power, but sadly, not often enough. That mirrors the basic problem of the movie: it's a who-dun-it whose plot is very much mechanical—hence, the action often bogs down into Andrade, and his sympathetic sergeant Espinoza (Carmelo Gomez), travelling back and forth along the front, asking questions, and travelling back.

A serial killer on the loose might have been pushed over the edge by the horrors of war, or by the grinding assault of winter itself; for Andrade, trying to manoeuvre through the military bureaucracy while dealing with the brutal murders, might be enough to push himself over the edge as well. But we never get that far, and, oddly enough, combat is kept in the distance. The winter itself comes and goes: conditions seem arctic at times, at other times it's a very mild sunny time, which might herald the return of spring and fighting, but I'm not sure any such symbolism was intended.

So director Gerardo Herrero and screenwriter Nicholas Saad give us scenes intended to flesh the story out. The film was adapted from a novel by Ignacio del Valle (El Tiempo de los Emperadores Extranos, or The Time Of The Foreign Emperors, which implies a different sort of story altogether) and I don't know how much was adapted and how much was invented. But there is one sub-plot involving a Russian roulette tournament—when in Russia, do as Deer Hunters do—which doesn't seem particularly original or authentic: the soldiers' situation hasn't reached that hopelessness as dar as we can see. There is another sub-plot involving a nascent love affair between Andrade and a local woman (played mostly in silence, because neither knows the other's language) by the lovely Lithuanian actress Gabriele Malinauskaite. It then turns out she is the mother of the boy, Sasha, whom Andrade has already befriended. And in a third subplot, the Germans come along and start killing the locals, including threatening Sasha, and putting those nice Spanish falangists into conflict with the nasty Nazis. Their niceness is indicated by the hats they wear instead of their Nazi helmets most of the time: a fashionable furry flap number for Espinoza, a wool toque for Andrade.

Andrade manages to solve the crimes before the Soviet air force intervenes, with a little bit of help from a friendly mailbag being driven by a friendly truck driver who seems to exist as a plot device—I kept waiting for him to turn evil. A number of plot elements are left hanging, particularly the most gruesome part of the Masonic red herring.The killing turns out to have had a more personal motive, something that goes back to the days of the Civil War, but the real villain of the piece walks away unscathed. At least until the Red Army attacks, and the film's ending is left appropriately dark, if open-ended.

The leads are very good, and the supporting cast is for the most part excellent; there are little bits of Paths Of Glory in the attitudes of the officers, Adolfo Fernandez as the commandant and Victor Clavijo as the clerk-sergeant are particularly good. But as a war movie, it's always going to be held back by the Columbo-like structure of the who-dun-it, and I'm not quite sure how that problem might be solved. It also tends to make the Russian front look too beautiful; as it happens I recently watched The World At War episode 'Barbarossa', and the 'reality' in grainy black and white footage, is shocking. In the end, Winter Silence is eminently watchable, but in the end, like light snow that doesn't stick.

THE NFL DRAFT REDUX: DOING THE RIGHT THING

If you're one of the readers of this blog interested in American football, and you haven't seen this already at nfluk.com, my off-season Friday Monthly Tight End column has been posted there. In it I look back at the draft, with special attention to the fate of the big-name quarterbacks, and the changing nature of the wide receiver and running back positions. You can link to it here...

MALCOLM GLAZER: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obit of Malcolm Glazer, owner of both the Tampa Bay Buccaneers of the NFL and Manchester United of the EPL, is in today's Guardian. It's a joint effort with Gavin McOwan, with his handling the relationship with United and my approaching it from the US and business side. You can link to it here.

What's interesting, in the use of leveraged buyout in English football, is the fact that the NFL, even 20 years ago when Glazer bought the Bucs, would not allow such tactics to be used. The price was 'only' $192 million (a record, as I said, at the time) and the Glazers tried to raise just under a third of it with the sale of Houlihans from one company they owned to another. But Houlihans stock holders would not stand for that.

United's stockholders had no such ability, or indeed desire, to halt Glazer. His purchases of shares were driving the price up, which of course provided him with his safety net should he not wind up buying the team: his profits would pay off his lenders.

One thing cut from the piece was my original lede, which referred to 'knee-jerk' anti-Americanism in the response of United fans. Like London itself, English football has been purchased, bit by bit, by foreigners, starting with Fayed, moving through debt-ridden Icelanders and Norwegians, and including all sorts of other super-rich entrepreneurs. But like complaints about Americans calling football by the English term, 'soccer', the Glazers, and to be fair their methods, hit a nerve.

But in reality the fans basked in success, and went along at MUFC with the same kind of rip-offs that exist across football: the rising prices of tickets, the team shirt scams, whatever, because that's what fans do, and the Glazers were smart renough to keep Alec Ferguson, the greatest manager of his generation, in place and get another five titles. As Gavin notes, with lack of such success last year, the axe fell on David Moyes immediately, and if there is no return to Ferguson-like prowress, the Glazers will start to feel the heat.

But that, of course, is nothing to do really with debt service. In fact, English clubs have always been owned by men who made profit off the backs of the fans, and pace Gary Imlach, in the old days off the backs of the players as well, and kept it for themselves. There are now those who will spend without thought for profit, turning the EPL into their own fantasy league, but the fans don't mind that. There are those who do things like try to change a team's name or colours, and with justification the fans hate that.

I do not admire the leveraged buyout, nor its use in football. But the Glazers simply used a more advanced version of what football's owners have done since clubs turned into businesses with owners. Fans like to pretend they are not, but that's what they are. They are often just owned badly, which is why English clubs go bankrupt, and why EPL teams were such an undervalued asset in the first place.  It has always been a different game for those in the boxes and those in the terraces, and all-seater stadia haven't changed that.

As I said on the World Service last night, Malcolm Glazer's legacy here will be that leveraged buyout. I should have added it ought to be the lifting of the curtain covering the distance between the business of football and its fans.

JOHN HARVEY: THE FIVE BEST RESNICKS

At the same time I wrote the appreciation of John and his detective Charlie Resnick, I also chose the five best of the 12 Resnick novels (and a bonus non-Resnick selection) which has been published at the Dead Good Reads website. You can link to that here. I'd like to say there's something surprising, or controversial, in my choices, but there's not. It does reflect the fact that, as far as I can see from my reading, John's writing continued to grow and deepen as the series went along. For a guy with over 100 novels under his belt, that is a remarkable achievement. Enjoy--a review of Darkness, Darkness will be posted here soon...

THE DOWNBEAT BEAUTY OF JOHN HARVEY'S CHARLIE RESNICK

I've written a heartfelt appreciation of John Harvey, and his best-known character, Charlie Resnick on the occasion of the publication of the 12th, and apparently last, Resnick novel, Darkness, Darkness. You can find the piece at the Windmill Books website, here, and I'd suggest reading all the way to the end, and following the link to the wonderful John Coltrane version of Tadd Dameron's 'Good Bait', to which I refer in the text (Resnick prefers Eric Dolphy's version, by the way). Ave et vale, Resnick. 

UPDATE: The link above no long seems to work, so I've decided to post the original piece I wrote for Windmill Books below, along with the choice of the five best Resnick novels which I did at the same time, and whose link (in the post that follows this one) does appear to be working still....

 

THE DOWNBEAT BEAUTY OF JOHN HARVEY'S CHARLIE RESNICK

Darkness, Darkness is the twelfth, and last, of John Harvey's Charlie Resnick novels (though, in fairness, we thought the tenth, Last Rites, brought the series to an end back in 1998!). It is elegaic, but it's also fresh; as the discovery of a corpse takes the aging Resnick back to the miner's strike of 1984, a defining time for a Britain in transition, and especially so for Resnick's Nottingham. It is the genius of John Harvey that he is able to make the reader feel the turmoil of the time by focusing on the people around the crime, making the giant tragedy and the smaller one work hand-in-hand to create a powerful look back.

Harvey broke new, hard-boiled, ground with the first Resnick novel, Lonely Hearts, in 1989. Nine more followed, like clockwork, one each year. Their influence was immense. Resnick was the spark behind Ian Rankin's Rebus, Mark Billingham's Thorne, Graham Hurley's Faraday and Winter, and many more of our now best-loved detectives. He reclaimed Britain's mean streets for the sorts of people who walked them, and the sorts of criminals who preyed there. And it didn't hurt that, in Tom Wilkinson, the BBC found the perfect Resnick for the hugely successful adaptations of Lonely Hearts and Rough Treatment, for which Harvey did the screenplays.

There has never been a detective less superhuman, nor more human, than Charlie Resnick. Wilkinson understood instinctively that Resnick was defined by an essential loneliness. In many ways he was the antidote to Inspector Morse, trading the lofty spires of an idealised Oxford for Nottingham's damp grey streets. Morse had his opera, Resnick played classic jazz. Morse did cryptic crosswords, Resnick constructed monkey-puzzle sandwiches. Morse read poetry, Resnick enjoyed the shaky free verse of Notts County football club. Resnick showed the influence of American hard-boiled classics, of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe or Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op, but more crucially he was a direct descendant of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo's Swedish detective Martin Beck. Like Beck he is a loner forced to work in a team context. Like Sjowall and Wahloo, Harvey uses Resnick's stories to reflect on changes in society, and contradictions between appearance and reality (interestingly the Beck series was consciously planned to run for ten novels, just as Resnick originally seemed to be). Beck is an obsessive who finds his quest for solutions, for truth often at odds with the reality of his job. And with the reality of his life.

And this is where Harvey excels, because I can think of no novelist who's been better at using the story of the crimes being investigated to reflect on the personal situations of the people doing the investigating. The human dimensions of his stories remain unchanged, regardless of the setting, and there's a persistent quality which Michael Connelly once described as 'wistful' about them. They contain a mirroring of the human condition expressed through violence, and more tellingly through emotional pain, inflicted, suffered, repressed, endured. Few writers have used the framework of the crime novel more poetically.

It was through poetry that I first encountered John Harvey, more than 30 years ago when he published some of my poems in his excellent magazine, Slow Dancer. It took me a while to connect him with the author of a couple of fine stand-alone crime novels, Frame (1979) and Blind (1981), but by the time I began reviewing Resnick novels, I'd discovered John had also been one of the last of the great pulp novelists—churning out paperback originals at a peak rate of one per month. It was an apprenticeship that makes Darkness, Darkness his 102nd novel, more or less, counting those written by Thom Ryder, Terry Lennox, Jon Barton, James Mann and a handful of other pseudonyms. He wrote everything from biker adventures to teenaged stories of The Tempest Twins; from the novelisation of Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo to ten westerns inspired by Sergio Leone about a gunfighter called Hart the Regulator. I confess proudly that I assembled a complete set of them. And before writing this, I searched out a copy of Amphetamines And Pearls, the first of four Scott Mitchell detective novels, a pulpy precursor of Resnick, with much of the darkness but less of the jazz.

Reading Darkness, Darkness, I was reminded of a night about eight years ago when I bumped into John at the Borderline, where the American singer-songwriter John Stewart was playing on what obviously would be his last UK tour. Stewart's songs provided titles for a couple of John's pulp novels (and for my own blog), and as an encore he performed 'Mother Country', a song about a horse-breeder who's going blind and wants to ride his favourite horse one more time. Walking out, we shared our immense sadness, and the sense that Stewart himself was singing with the same knowledge we shared. And that is the quality John Harvey brings to this final Resnick novel, a finish not of melodramatic incident, but of honest and poignant reflection on the way life is, and the way we live it.

In 2011 John published Good Bait, a non-Resnick novel whose title comes from a classic Tadd Dameron jazz song. My favourite version is John Coltrane's on Blue Train, where the tune tries to escape itself, be free and happy, but can't quite shake its way out of the blues. That's how I see Charlie Resnick, and how I think he sees his life as he's lived it. As John Harvey has written it so well.

THE FIVE BEST RESNICKS

If you're coming to Darkness, Darkness as your first Resnick, I envy you, because you

have the whole series to work through. I'd go beginning to end, without waiting a year at a time for the first ten, then ten years for the next, but if you insist on the highlights, try these five, listed in order of publication:

1. Lonely Hearts (1989) The first, and still one of the best. Introduces and establishes his unique character in a novel that the Times called one of the 100 best crime novels of the century. It's the book where Harvey finally relaxed from his feverish pace of writing, and gave his characters and setting more depth, and the result was stunning.

2. Wasted Years (1993) In which a series of brutal robberies forces Charlie to face events from ten years before: an incident he'd tried to forget, and a marriage he'd lost.

3. Still Water (1997): Perhaps the best illustration of the way Harvey uses the criminal investigation to mirror the lives of his characters. A woman's body found floating in a Nottingham canal reminds Resnick of a similar killing that dragged him from a Milt Jackson concert many years before. And the nature of the sex crimes reflects the relationship problems of some of the detectives involved.
   
   
4. Last Rites (1998): In its own way more elegiac than Darkness, Darkness, as Resnick deals with two drug gangs involved in a turf war, and pursues an escaped murderer, and tries to protect his sister. It's a novel about the things love forces us to do, and about the loss of such love.
   
   
5. Darkness, Darkness (2014): Alone after the death of his partner Lynn, Resnick is presented with a thirty-year old murder which took place in the midst of the violent chaos of the miner's strike, forcing him to revisit those times while trying to solve the murder today.
   
   
   And if you have already read Darkness, Darkness, then treat yourself to at least one non-Resnick novel: In A True Light (2001), the story of Sloane, an art forger, which encompasses abstract expressionism, jazz, family relations, and a man finding himself all in one perfectly formed novel.

AL FELDSTEIN, EC, AND MAD: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of Al Feldstein, the editor/writer at EC Comics, and for three decades, at Mad Magazine, is up at the Guardian web site (link here), and should be in the paper paper soon. I wrote it ten days ago while I was in the States, and it appears now pretty much as written.

I concentrated on Mad because that's his wider significance, and what readers would recognise, but I would have loved more space for his work with EC, which in its own way was just as significant, and crucial in comics history.

Feldstein caught Bill Gaines' attention because of his 'headlights', which was 50s slang for the pin-up style embonpoint he drew on his women. It was designed to attract boys to the high school and romance comics which were considered the girls domain (and then, as now, it was adolescent boys who drove the comics market). The Guardian cut the headlights reference out. His talent remained crucial, especially for the covers of the science-fiction comics, as his well-endowed space maidens faced off against Cthulu-influenced bug-eyed monsters with lots of tentacles.

Gaines, who'd inherited the business from his father, was overweight, and took diet pills, which were speed, so he was insomniac as well. He'd stay up nights pouring through science fiction, horror, and pulp novels, and then borrow plot ideas liberally from them. Ray Bradbury famously recognised two of his stories cannibalised into one by EC; he called for payment and wound up recommending other stories they could adapt, and wound up often being flagged on the covers for those adaptations. Gaines and Feldstein would brainstorm stories which Feldstein then wrote; virtually all the stories in 5 or 6 comics a month. I was fascinated to discover that they had attended together a writing course taught by Theodore Sturgeon, arguably the best sf writer of the Fifties. I couldn't say that I'd sensed a Sturgeon influence in Feldstein's EC work, though Bradbury's is indeed often apparent.

What was important was first the way Gaines stood up to the censors, until it almost broke him, and second, especially in the context of Mad, the social consciousness those EC comics, grisly and violent as they could be, often exhibited. This came from Gaines and from Feldstein, and if anything intensified as the persecution of comics grew.

I mentioned Bernie Krigstein's story 'Master Race', whichappeared in Impact, and is considered a classic not just for its subject matter but also for the cinematic way Krigstein told the story, especially the scenes in the New York subway. It was supposed to be a six-page story, but Krigstein came back with eight pages, something artists never did. Feldstein was so taken with them he adjusted the rest of the book to fit the story.

I could just as easily have mentioned 'Judgment Day', another classic EC story, a parable of racism drawn by Joe Orlando. In the story an astronaut from earth arrives on a planet which has been seeded with robots, to check if they've evolved enough to be admitted to the 'Galatic Republic'. He discovers the blue and orange robots are segregated, with the orange robots living privileged lives while the blues exist on separate but equal facilities. The astronaut explains to the robots why they haven't yet qualified for human society, and, in the final panel, the twist is revealed: the astronaut himself is black. This was 1953, remember, and the magazine was titled Weird Fantasy. Gaines had to go head to head with the nascent Comics Code Authority, who wanted the astronaut made white, and then, when they gave in to Gaines' threats to go public, tried to insist EC remove the beads of sweat sparkling on his face in that final panel. The seeds for Mad Magazine were planted firmly in EC comics.

As an artist turned writer/editor Feldstein got the best out of the remarkable stable of EC and Mad artists, and the work is a pleasure to revisit today. And as anyone who grew up in the brave new world of post-war America soon realised, Mad's poking gleefully at the edges and under the surfaces, was givinmg you an indoctrination in what your world was really like. Not just parodies of insipid entertainment, or sleazy politics, or fear-mongering, but things as crucial as the way advertising bent minds to its own reality. Mad was at the forefront of the assault on smoking--and had the tobacco industry nailed from the start (see left).

You might say that Mad laid the groundwork, among kids in the 50s and early 60s, for what is now remembered as a decade of conflict. But what we really experienced in those times was a sort of transition, from protest to changing life style, and today it really seems to have been a transition from one kind of conformity to a new kind. I knew there was a good reason why my parents didn't want me to read Mad. But I don't think it's anywhere near as subversive now, and it probably wasn't anywhere near as subversive then as we like to think it, and we, were. But when you look at most of the comic entertainment you might well find subversive today, you won't have to dig far to find Mad somewhere at its roots.

MEMORIES...IN THE CORNERS OF MASS. AVE.

I was reading the New York Review of Books, and was struck by the opening of an article by Jerome Groopman on memory. Describing his waking before dawn on a Sunday to start work on the piece, he makes his way to the kitchen.

"The dark-roast coffee was retrieved from its place in the pantry, four scoops then placed in a filter. While the coffee was brewing, I picked up the New York Times at the door...I prepared an egg-white omelettte and toasted two slices of multigrain bread. After a few sips of coffee, fragments of the night's dream came to mind..."

It's not how I would write it. Note the adjectival specificity. Not 'coffee', but dark-roast coffee. Not 'the paper' or indeed 'the Globe' since Prof. Groopman teaches at Harvard, but The New York Times (it is Sunday, in mitigation). Not 'eggs' but an 'egg-white omelette' and finally not 'toast' but toasted two slices of multigrain bread. It's not brand-name specific, like a Stephen King story, but it has the feel of one of the personal ads in the back of the NYRB, all professorial good taste and healthy options.

The article itself is an interesting review of a number of books about how memory works, and stops working. But Prof. Groopman's dietary preferences come back into focus near the end, as he discusses Alzheimer's disease.

"To be sure, there is merit in seeking environmental factors that affect risk for a disorder like Alzheimer's disease...But in this search we need to be alert to wishful thinking. Identifying something simple in the environment, like junk food, as having a major impact on developing dementia is wonderful to imagine. If true, we could markedly reduce our risk by committing to a lifestyle free of soda, pizza, and French fries."

Wishful thinking indeed! Soda, pizza and French fries sounds like the sort of stuff the creative writing professor discovers in the ice-box of the trailer-park waitress with whom he's having an affair in one of those 'dirty realism' novels from the Reaganite Eighties. But would losing them really be 'wonderful to imagine'? I now feel guilty in admitting that I followed my trip to the Yale Art Gallery last week by sharing a white clam pizza and a pitcher of birch beer with a professor friend at the Modern Apizza. Obviously we undid whatever positive effect walking through Yale had on my brain cells.

It occurs to me it might be even more wonderful were we to discover that Cambridge's dark-roast coffee, egg-white omelettes, and multigrain bread turned out to increase the risk-factor of Alzheimers. And isn't it even more likely that we someday discover the brains of readers of the New York Times have chosen to shut themselves down rather than remember being subjected to the likes of Tom Friedman or David Brooks?

ESCAPE FROM IN-FLIGHT ENTERTAINMENT: ESCAPE PLAN

So you missed some of last month's Oscar winners? You probably also missed last year's blockbuster action smash. And that is what airplane travel is designed to remedy. There are times while flying when it becomes prudent to find a movie whose plot will keep your attention without working with the low oxygen in the cabin air to further twist your brain. Recognisable stars, whose inability to play very far from their established personae, are a must, because you have to be able to flow with the character development despite missing crucial bits of dialogue because only one ear functions on your headset, or the first officer and head stewardess are hogging the microphone like neophytes doing their first stand up, or at least one person in front, behind, or beside you has their own attention span problem and moves you, bangs you, excuses himself past you, talks through you, at every possible moment. You'd like a villain who will ham it up and die with a wry ironic smile of self-deprecation. Maybe a comely woman or two, one of whom should be eye candy and another who should be one of a couple of cast members who really can act and be wasted in supporting roles which seem to have been written by a scripter on loan from Minecraft.

You are looking for something like Escape Plan.

It's a buddy picture, of course, and it seems written as a vehicle for Sylvester Stallone, as he gets all the good scenes that require minimal dialogue, although many with eloquent grunts. He plays a prison security expert who gets himself thrown into stir so he can figure out ways of breaking out. On behalf of the CIA, represented by comely Catriona Balfe, he gets himself rendered to a secret prison where he hooks up with Rottmeyer, supposedly an employee who holds the key to reaching a criminal mastermind. Rottmeyer is played by Arnold Schwartenegger who, with Stallone playing straight man, turns into a acting genius; Tom Hanks overdosed on Human Growth Hormone.

The new-found buddies team up to thwart evil prison warder Jim Caviezel, who somehow resists the urge to go full Alan Rickman on his role, and thus imbues it with an awkward gravitas which never gets resolved fully, because there is only one way anything ever gets resolved here. Caviezel's evil henchman is played by Vinnie Jones, the ex-soccer player best-known for squeezing Paul Gasgoigne's balls, whose presence in virtually any action movie is a more reliable signifier of schlock than Chuck Norris could ever dream of being. He's like what Jason Statham would be if Jason Statham couldn't act as brilliantly as he does.

The story moves smoothly enough, there's a small twist midway through and what must have seemed like a very clever twist closer to the end. But if the premise is Stallone's ability to plan and execute, he relies to an extraordinary degree on things he discovers by pure chance after his plan has broken down. And he is helped immensely by the deus-ex-machina Sam Neill, a doctor named Kyrie, which may or may not be metaphoric, disillusioned by his service to Cavaziel, who simply needs a few stiff drinks and a reminder of his Hippocratic oath to crucially help Stallone. And the best twist of all is that the Balfe babe turns out to be Arnold's daughter, not his girlfriend, a rare piece of generational Hollywood honesty.

It all erupts into automatic weapons, helicopter gunships, hordes of uniformed minions mowed down like extras in a Bond movie, flames, tidal waves...you know, the usual. And a final twist when Stallone's boss, Vincent D'Onofrio, turns out predictably to be not what he appears to be—he's too good an actor not to be a plot twist. The other wasted talent is Amy Ryan, though interestingly, like D'Onofrio, her intensity seems better suited to the smaller screen, or at least smaller movies, where her talent isn't subsumed by monosyllables and explosions.

It's directed competently by Mikael Hafstrom, who seems to specialise in horror, which when you look at it, is very close to what this movie is--two action figures trapped in the ultimate haunted house. I was impressed by the design; production designer Barry Chusid plays on the blueprints of the prisons Stallone is breaking down, but works in elements of sf, MC Escher-like, and even musical sets--I kept seeing Elvis doing 'Jailhouse Rock as I was distracted by my mini-bottles of wine. But even on the tiny seat-back screen, he keeps it interesting. 

I particularly liked the guards wearing expressionless plastic masks--by coincidence on the return flight I watched the opening 40 minutes or so of Cool Hand Luke. I'd write an extended comparison of the two films, but it would be useless: Luke makes you care about the people (even though I let my melatonin work and went to sleep; but then I've seen it 3-4 times already) while Escape Plan asks you to care only about the plan. Anyway, those masks are the 21st century equivalent of the mirrored shades worn by the chain-gang bosses in that film. But nothing is made of the masks, just as nothing was made of Stallone's rendition. Wider points are beyond the remit of Escape Plan.

So who cares if the headset is broken, the guy in front keeps changing the angle, and the captain can't make up his mind about wanting those seat belts buckled because of turbulence? Stallone just fell 100 feet down an industrial strength air vent, and wasn't hurt at all. What could happen to us?

BOB HOSKINS: AN APPRECIATION

Bob Hoskins was one of the key crime actors of the past forty years, and though he was a better and far more nuanced actor than his posthumous typecasting as a cockney or gangster might suggest, he was integral to a number of films which helped open up and redefine the crime genre. I would see Hoskins around occasionally, especially in Soho, often unkempt and dishevelled-looking, and always radiating an intensity which I think reflected in a very intelligent way through his films. He used that sense of intensity to suggest violence and dare you to miss what was happening underneath.

Starting with The Long Good Friday, which came out of nowhere (well, the Edinburgh Festival) to captivate me and rest of the London Film Festival and then go on to huge success. The film remains eerily prescient about Thatcherism and the 'New Britain' it spawned, and Hoskins' Harold Shand is absolutely perfect in his greedy arrogance. It remains perhaps the best British noir. And what's interesting too is the way Shand was the dark side of his Arthur Barker from Dennis Potter's Pennies From Heaven, who was actually dark enough underneath, which was partly why his Arthur is better than Steve Martin's, the other part being Hoskins' reluctance to play as much for sympathy.

He was a fine Owney Madden in Cotton Club, before playing George in Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa (itself a sort of companion piece to The Crying Game) and in a non-crime context, opposite Maggie Smith in The Lonely Passion Of Judith Hearne. I mention the latter, which I think is one of his great roles, because his character in the film plays on the qualities he brought out in Pennies From Heaven and in Mona Lisa, a combination of need and very mundane hubris that he is never afraid to show.

Then of course came his signature role, as Eddie Valiant in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. If The Long Good Friday was prescient about Thatcherism, Roger Rabbit is, underneath the animation, like a sequel to Chinatown, or Chinatown crossed with Pennies From Heaven. It never stretches the audience's suspension of disbelief, at least not until the finale, and it plays with the conventions of the detective movie (and of cartoons) with far more conviction and far better than say Bugsy Malone.

Hoskins had a sideline playing historic figures. In crime terms, his J. Edgar Hoover in Oliver Stone's Nixon is as telling a stroke of supporting casting as Anthony Hopkins' was of casting a lead. I doubt anyone else will ever play both Hoover and Laurent Beria, which Hoskins did in Konchalovsky's The Inner Circle. Or, on a less notable level, could anyone else play both Pope John 23 and Mussolini? Hoskins did, though not in the same movie. Or both Churchill and Manuel Noriega?

He was an out and out villain, but with a cuddly exterior and at least some sense of guilt Felicia's Journey, opposite Elaine Cassidy, whose intensity makes his performance all the

 more disturbing. He was Verloc in Christopher Hampton's strangely listless version of The Secret Agent, but he was at his hardboiled best in Hollywoodland, in which Adiren Brody plays a detective investigating the suicide of George Reeves, the actor who played Superman on TV. The film falls just short of excellent, partly by Brody's overly louche interpretation, but playing Hollywood fixer Eddie Mannix Hoskins is again superb, playing for contrast against Diane Lane, his wife, who is having an affair with Reeves, which may be why Reeves' suicide wasn't suicide at all. Lane deserved a Supporting Actress Oscar, and Ben Affleck, as Reeves, gave what may be his best performance; Hoskins plays off both of them brilliantly.

There are a number of other excellent, often small, roles in non-crime movies throughout Hoskins' career, I'd single out his Mr Micawber in the BBC's David Copperfield for special notice. He could be comic, which everyone knew from Roger Rabbit or Mario Bros. and he could be absurd to the point of surreal, which is why he was so good in Brazil: he is one of the actors I would have most liked to see do Beckett.

But it is for crime movies that Hoskins' is likely to be remembered, for George in the star-shaped sunglasses, for Eddie Valiant with the toons, for Harold Shand looking back from the rear of a taxi, his dreams of a rich new world disappearing into the old violence. He was a great actor, and leaves a great legacy, even beyond those crime classics.

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

HURRICANE CARTER: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obit of Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter is online at the Guardian now (link here) and should be in the paper paper soon. It is pretty much as I wrote it, which is good because it was very hard to write and stay within the word limit I was given; in the end, I exceeded it anyway.

I might have gone deeper into his boxing record had I the space, and one comment in the Guardian took me to task, but missed the point. I can't remember watching Carter fight at the time; oddly enough I watched more fights when I was slightly younger. But I have watched tape, and his record shows an umistakable decline after the loss to Giardello, his last fight of 1964, for which year Ring ranked him third among middleweights. He had dropped only two places, to fifth, in the 1965 ratings (published in March 1966) despite a record of 5-4 for the year. One loss was a unanimous decision to Dick Tiger, Ring's champion of the year (ironically Tiger would lose his title to Emile Griffith, whom Carter beat in '64). Tiger dominated the fight, knocking Carter down three times along the way. But Carter also lost in '65 to Harry Scott in London, and twice to Luis Manuel Rodriguez, neither of whom was ranked at middleweight.  Rodriquez was, however, the long-time number one contender (and brief champion) at welter behind Griffith, to whom he lost three out of four classic contests. Rodriquez was a master boxer, exactly the type who would give Carter the most problems. Of Carter's first four fights of 1966 (ie, before his arrest, I would discount the one afterwards, which he also lost) he won only one, losing to tenth-ranked Stan Harrington and unranked Johnny Morris. Obviously, Ring would not rate him for 1966.

The main element missing from the obit is the story of John Artis, 19 at the time, who was driving the car that night. After his arrest, and consistently throughout his imprisonment, Artis was offered the chance to testify against Carter, in return for lesser charges, or even, at one point, in return for taking the death penalty off the table. Some attributed that reluctance to fear, but when Carter was diagnosed with terminal cancer, Artis spent two more years of his life helping care for him, something you do not do for a man who has led you into trouble, or of whom you were afraid. 

The big problem was trying to explain the murder case succinctly, and the secondary problem was that, as you do so, the basic question of guilt and innocence becomes more and more difficult to resolve. I was too young to follow the trial at the time, but later I found it hard to totally accept his innocence--not least because The 16th Round seemed so self-serving, designed to push the right buttons. I've also heard second-hand hearsay, from a friend I trust, who knew someone closely involved in the campaign of support for Carter, who told him the only problem with the success of the campaign was that Carter was guilty. When Carter beat up Carolyn Kelly while free between his trials (she was the Muslim bail-bondsman sent by Muhammad Ali to help raise funds) it opened the window of disbelief that for many people had been shut.

But my mind remained open because it's important to remember the times, and I did and do. Not only was Paterson a racial powder keg, but Carter had been portrayed in the Saturday Evening Post as encouraging violence against, as we used to say, 'the man', particularly a police force that was at best still committed to enforcing a sort of de facto segregation. The idea that Carter was a marked man because he was some sort of activist leader is an exaggeration, but there is no doubt that the police knew who he was, because of his celebrity, his violent criminal record, and perhaps because of the Post comments (which Carter always denied). And there is no doubt that as an ex-con who was flaunting his success, he might have been a target of opportunity.

The case is a mess. The police work is at best sloppy, but it is quite easy to examine it and see the loopholes that would lead you to suspect witnesses were coached, coerced, or encouraged to testify in the most helpful way to the police case. The idea that they found in Carter's car one bullet each for a 12 gauge shotgun and a 32 pistol seems too pat, and the fact that the bullets took five days to be entered into evidence is in itself suspicious, as well as the fact that the .32 didn't match the bullets at the scene but did match police bullets.

And of course the witness testimony is fraught with problems, way beyond the utter lack of trustworthiness from Al Bello and Arthur Dexter Bradley. At best the police seemed to be trying to over-egg the testimony, which Bello of course retracted and then unretracted. At worst they used the leverage they had over the two to get what they wanted. That he may have received offers from the Carter camp to retract doesn't boggle my mind or reverse what else might have been done. One of the interesting ideas I picked up while researching was to compare Bello and Carter, their records, their lives. Willie Marins' inability to identify Carter is a positive, but Hazel Tavis, the third victim, apparently did identify him before dying; even were that ID allowed in court, it would be have been challenged.

The police may have missed the boat by not using the revenge motive at the first trial. It not only provided an explanation of why, it fitted the angry profile of Carter at the time. Eddie Rawls' stepfather had been shot by the white man who'd sold him his bar; it was a business dispute but the killing was racially charged. If Carter had headed out on an impulse for revenge, it would then explain his car's movements after the shooting: including stopping at Rawls' place where weapons might have been stashed. By the time it was introduced at the second trial, it was indeed a play on racial prejudice (though, as I noted, it was not an all-white jury this time).

The hardest piece of evidence to dodge, so to speak, was Patty Graham (Patty Valentine) and her ID of the car, its taillights, and its plates. Her testimony never wavered, so you have to go back to her first statement and ID, and assume they were coerced or coached.

A conspiracy as badly organised as this one seems unlikely until you consider the spur of the moment nature it might have taken--if you're willing to consider the idea Carter killed on impulse, you must also consider the idea he was framed on a similar impulse. And it's hard to doubt that the malfeasance which freed Carter was real.
 
But the stongest argument in his favour is probably the post-facto: the man he turned himself into. Researching, I discovered that the young Rubin was a stutterer (possibly a response to a domineering father) who overcame it while in the Army. He made himself into a boxer, and he made himself, in prison, into a figure who could command respect for his non-violent efforts. After his release, he worked for victims of injustice. He was, I think, ill-served by the bio-pic, and I found the layer of ambiguity which persists something difficult to work around when writing his obit. But buried there is a tragedy and a story with inspiration; it is a morality tale from a violent time.

CRYSTALS IN THEIR HEARTS: A Poem via Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Writing about Marquez this morning reminded me of this poem. I wrote Crystals In Their Hearts in July 1988, in London. The story was told to me by the woman to whom the poem is dedicated--she had attended the wedding of one of Marquez' sons in Mexico City and it did snow during the ceremony. It was Rania who, noticing the shelf of Latin American novels in my flat, gave me my copy of Love In The Time Of Cholera. It hardly seems 25 years ago. The poem was originally published by the marvelous Angela Ball in issue 52 of the Mississippi Review, in 1989. It was later published in Canada, in Shadowplay 3 (1992) and in Britain in Foolscap 17 (1993). I have revised it only slightly. 

CRYSTALS IN THEIR HEARTS

                                                      for Rania

In the still & solemn silence of

A chill English summer,

Where things are things as they are.

You remembered for me

Marquez's son's wedding in Mexico City,

How his garden filled with snow which fell

From a sunny sky in the middle of May,

How it covered the maguey,

Formed fragile drifts

On bourgainvillea & hung

For long & frozen instants between the bars

Of the parrot's giant bamboo cage.

You said you were not surprised to find yourself

Covered with snowflakes that didn't melt.

It seemed natural in that setting that snow should fall,

That heat itself might disappear yet still

Be all around you, that the festering simmer

You also recalled, the tale of tropic disease

You told me, not be frozen out,

Not eradicated completely from your life.                                                             

                                                                         

                                                                          I felt

There was a shadow sitting shivering somewhere close

Behind us. Everything we said included

A sentence that was somehow left unsaid.

Next day, driving through the dimensionless

Countryside beyond Ware we felt

The temperature drop at least ten degrees

In half an hour. But we saw no snow.

This was just a flat & wet & gray landscape

Laid out by drizzle on a twisted road,

As magical as it would ever get for us. Yet

We waited. We said nothing more.

Still no snow fell.

GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ: AN INCOMPARABLE, ILLIMITABLE VISION

You could argue that Gabriel Garcia Marquez was the best, and possibly the most influential, novelist of the second half of the last century. One Hundred Years Of Solitude was near the top of my own list of the 20^th Century's greatest novels, and it's one of those rare books that both appeals to critics and to the general non-literary public. Love In The Time Of Cholera is not all that far behind Solitude, and he wrote a number of other fine books.

He's often described as the major figure in 'magic realism', though that was a term he didn't have much time for. You might say he, and his contemporaries, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Manuel Puig, and others who made Latin American fiction so dynamic in the 70s and 80s were influenced by Jorge Luis Borges, and Julio Cortazar and Alejo Carpentier—but they were also influenced by many more traditional story-tellers, not just in the Spanish language. And they were able to find a kind of fiction that reflected the illogically fantastic world of history and reality in Central and South America. What sets Marquez apart from his contemporaries is his sense of historical scope, matched only by Vargas Llosa, combined with a wide humanity, and a loving, humorous approach which can easily be absurdist, a sort of Vonnegut without the stand-up punch lines.

Gene Wolfe once said that magic realism was 'just fantasy written in Spanish' and there is a certain amount of truth in that too—I think these Latin American writers in the 70s were also using elements of that post-modern revolution of the Sixties, breaking down boundaries of fiction, and giving their own familiar tales a new spin. A similar thing was happening on a smaller scale in Canada; you'll think immediately of Michael Ondaatje, maybe early Margaret Atwood, but there were others, most notably Ray Smith and his novel Lord Nelson Tavern, who reflected a similar approach. Later, as the term magic realism took hold, its influence spread, and you can see it in everything from Salman Rushdie to Toni Morrison to Tom Robbins.

I'm surprised that, as magnificent as One Hundred Years Of Solitude is, I don't remember better when and where and how I came to read it. But I don't. I recall vividly my beautiful Avon/Bard edition, which wasn't published until 1971, so it had to have been sometime after that, probably not long.

I do know by then I had read Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch, in its 1967 Signet edition, another handsome paperback not unlike Pynchon's V, and with much of the same appeal. Hopscotch would later be reissued in a later Avon/Bard reprint—I should say that I could fill a shelf with those Bard translation of Latin novels, with their uniform look and imaginative covers. Hopscotch was what we might call post-modern; you read the novel and then went back and re-read it in a different order selected by Cortazar. You can see the link with Borges, and in its playfulness, the link to Marquez. The translation was by Gregory Rabassa, who would later do Solitude, and for it win the first-ever National Book Award for translation. Marquez has been well-served by his translators—Rabassa and then Edith Grossman.

So I may have come to Marquez via Cortazar, which would mean via Paul Blackburn. I remember reading Blackburn's poem 'The Watchers' in an old New Yorker in a doctor's waiting room; I think I was getting my head stitched up. A little research reveals it was the 10 December 1966 issue of the New Yorker, which means it was probably early 1967, and I was either 15 or 16. My poetic eyes had been opened by E.E. Cummings, but this was something new, another step forward. From there I then noticed somehow that Blackburn was the translator of End Of The Game, a collection of Cortazar's stories that would soon be retitled Blow Up, after the movie based on that story came out. That led me, in my own literary hopscotch,  to Hopscotch, and at some point, to Solitude.

And years later I would meet a woman who had attended Marquez's son's wedding in Mexico City, and it had snowed. I wrote a poem about that, which you can read here.

I have to say I knew even as I was reading the novel, it would be one of the greatest I would ever read, and nothing in the past four decades has changed that opinion. I have huge admiration for his other writing, Autumn Of The Patriarch and The General In His Labyrinth in particular, and as I say, with Cholera he came up with another novel whose beauty resonates on a vast human level. He was an astute journalist and a courageous figure politically—he was barred from the US for decades before Bill Clinton at last invited him to the White House. His politics remained on the left even as Vargas Llosa moved past the third way into a run at the Peruvian presidency as a free-marketeer. The feud which disturbed their friendship was personal, but the political differences widened and strengthened the rift. His memors read almost exactly as you'd expect, as if the magic and the realism were blended together out of personal history. His is an incomparable, illimitable vision.