Boulevard of Broken Dreams

Hollywood killed Scott Fitzgerald and drove William Faulkner to drink. Nathanel West warned writers to stay away in The Day of the Locust, and the films Barton Fink and The Player seem less like parables and more like bitter reality tales. Still most novelists cannot resist the siren call (respect to JD Salinger and Thomas Pynchon who have turned down millions) and history, alas, shows that the money is never an adequate compensation for the pain inflicted by those bright young execs in the City of Angels. I was thinking about this while reading a great article in The Onion about the writers who have particularily hated what Hollywood did to their book. I liked this anecdote about Hemingway:

Hemingway had a special hatred for Frank Borzage’s 1932 version of A Farewell To Arms, starring Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes. He thought it betrayed his original ending, and that it heavily favored the romantic elements of the story over his depiction of wartime brutality. As a special show of contempt, Hemingway actively worked to keep the film from premièring in Piggott, Arkansas, the tiny town where he wrote much of the book. He was unsuccessful.

The rest of the piece (including the whole Clive Cussler Sahara debacle) can be read and enjoyed here though they forgot about Raymond Chandler who famously said: "If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, but if they had been any better, I should not have come."

Alaska Schmalaska

I originally posted this review on Declan Burke's blog a few months ago but I'm reposting it here not just because of laziness, but also because, according to Variety, the Coen Brothers are turning this into a film, which has the potential to be very interesting indeed.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union
In Michael Chabon’s universe Alaska isn’t a frontier bastion for singsongy dimwitted governors and moose-killing survivalists but rather is the transplanted home for two million cosmopolitan Jewish refugees crammed into the sprawling city of Sitka just south of Juneau in the Alaskan panhandle. This is the central conceit of Chabon’s THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN’S UNION, a murder mystery and alternative history noir, that follows Detective Mayer Landsman’s quest to find the person or persons who killed the quiet chess master who lived in his overcrowded flop house.
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In what used to be called ‘the Jonbar Hinge’ among us sci-fi geeks, the moment Chabon’s Earth diverged from ours was sometime in the late 1930s, when the US government allowed unlimited Jewish migration from a Hitler dominated Europe to refugee camps in Alaska. The book is a kind of a ghost story, imaging the unlived lives of hundreds of thousands of people who, in the real world, were murdered by the Nazis. Chabon’s fantasy is that instead of this vibrant, rich, literary Yiddish culture becoming extinct in 1945, it crossed the Atlantic and survived in America.
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That’s the premise but what of the book? In many ways it’s a standard police procedural of the Ed McBain / Mickey Spillane school that Chabon has composed in an affectionate pulp 1940’s style. He writes in the urgent present tense with a great deal of panache and economy. Chabon’s metaphors aren’t quite as rich as Raymond Chandler’s (whose are?) and his steeliness isn’t up there with Hammett, but his jokes are as good and sometimes better. His humour is Yiddish humour. Dry, slightly surreal, dark. There’s a gag or Chandlerism every few pages: ‘She took a compliment the way some people take a can of soda that they suspect you’ve shaken first.’ The plot takes a while to get going but that’s ok, as you want to get to grips with Chabon’s Alaska, the alternate time-line and the offbeat characters. When the murder mystery does start to unfold, Chabon spins the yarn with intelligence, style and tight plotting. Alternative History novels are en vogue and a different outcome for World War II is by far the most popular scenario. Philip Roth’s THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA covered similar terrain only three years ago and we’ve also had FATHERLAND, SS GB among many recent others. Chabon himself is a fan of Philip K Dick’s AH novel THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, which towers above all contenders in the ‘Nazis win the war’ field.
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So although Chabon isn’t quite off in terra nova, what really stuck with me was the idea that every single person in Sitka – the former capital of Russian America (now there’s an idea for an AH novel) – was speaking Yiddish. There’s Yiddish TV, newspapers, radio, songs. Even the Irish newspaper hack talks a kind of low German.

I liked this notion because although now virtually extinct as a literary tongue, Yiddish produced an extraordinary corpus of poems, plays and novels in its brief flowering, and today its influence can be felt in everything from Woody Allen films to Mel Brooks and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Irony is the default stance of Yiddish prose. Irony, embedded with black witticisms and a kind of grim fatalism. I have read a critique that Chabon’s style is ‘not Yiddish enough’ and certainly compared with Nobel Prize winner’s IB Singer’s it seems mannered and even a little forced. But actually Chabon does have a precursor in the lesser known Yiddish master Lamed Shapiro, whose American stories were influenced by the US hard-boiled school and seem strikingly similar to Chabon’s mix of paranoia, violence and defiant logic-inverting humour.
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THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN’S UNION is a thoughtful, introspective, novel - my only existential criticism is that I don’t think the AH scenario really adds that much to the narrative and I wonder if the novel might not have worked just as well in our universe. Chabon said that the AH was necessary because ‘the Yiddish world is dead’, and while it is true that the Nazis destroyed Yiddish Europe (and the survivors mostly migrated to Israel where they had to speak Hebrew), Yiddish did not die out completely. My own wedding ceremony was in Yiddish at a Yiddish-Bundist commune in Putnam Valley, New York, and anyone who’s been to Kiryas Joel, NY, will find an entire town of 20,000 Haredi Jews with Yiddish newspapers, Yiddish street signs, Yiddish coffee shops, Yiddish schools, self published Yiddish spy novels. And yes, Kiryas Joel even has Yiddish speaking policemen.

I Want To Ride My Bicycle

But I can't because some scumbag stole it from in front of my house. I was absurdly attached to that stupid bike and I'm quite upset (think of the emotional climax of Di Sica's Bicycle Thief crossed with the flying bike bit in ET and you'll have some idea.) I got the bike in NYC in 1995, it was an old Peugeot 10 speed from the 70's - very heavy and clunky, but it was great and I loved it. I shipped it to Denver and then to Melbourne and replaced almost every part and now it's in the greasy paws of some druggie. I spent today scouring bike stores and thrift shops to no avail. Probably just as well because I've been walking around clenching and unclenching my fists for the last 10 hours. It's my third stolen bike. The first was at Bell's Shop in Carrickfergus in 1982, the second was in front of my house in Oxford in 1993. In that case it was actually locked up but the thieves, apparently, poured liquid nitrogen onto the D lock and then snapped it with a hammer. This time it wasn't locked but it was so old and scrappy looking I didn't think anyone would take it. I should warn the thief that every gear slips except 2 and 3 and the back brakes don't work. I should warn him but of course I can't, so here's hoping he breaks his bloody neck. . .Too much? Aye, ok, well here's hoping he at least snaps a tibia.

Booklist's Verdict on 50G & A Secret Revealed!

I got the final trade review of Fifty Grand this week from Bill Ott at Booklist. People have said nice very things about 50G in the trades and on various blogs (thank you again bloggers) but for some reason the book still isn't really taking off. The economy's tough out there and newspapers are cutting back on professional reviewers so I'm not entirely sure what I can do at this stage apart from - finally - letting everyone know that I am Fidel Castro's secret love child and getting a succes de scandale - but, you know, that's just not my style; so if anyone has any other PR ideas, I'd sure appreciate them. Anyway this is the link to the reviews on Amazon and here's Bill Ott's take below:

Changing direction from his celebrated Forsythe trilogy, starring an Irish immigrant who runs afoul of the New York Mob, McKinty offers a hard-edged noir about a female police detective from Cuba who travels illegally to Fairview, Colorado, hoping to make sense of her father’s death in an apparent hit-and-run on a frozen mountain road. Beginning with a gripping set piece in which Detective Mercado, disguised as a man, smuggles herself across the Mexican border and into the U.S., the novel jumps between Mercado’s under-the-radar investigation (Why was her father, a celebrated Cuban defector, posing as a Mexican immigrant?) and flashbacks to her own life in Cuba before Dad abandoned the family. Posing as an illegal maid from Mexico, Mercado infiltrates a group of supercilious Hollywood types who may hold the answers, all the while constructing a macabre revenge plan. McKinty tightens the screws on his heroine effectively, forcing her into a classic noir conundrum from which there appears to be no escape. An impeccably constructed thriller supported by a cast of finely rounded, Elmore Leonard–like characters - Bill Ott

I'm Lee Marvin

I'm Lee Marvin of course is cockney rhyming slang for "I'm starvin" and all his life, oddly enough, Lee Marvin himself was hungry for new experiences as an actor, as an artist and as a man. Marvin joined the USMC and was wounded in the Pacific theatre and after the war he fell into acting. John Boorman made this terrific documentary about his friend Lee, who was memorable in so many films, not least The Dirty Dozen, Point Blank and even in his final role as the villain in Gorky Park. Double click to go to YouTube and watch all five parts, or just try part 1 here.

The Guy's Apple Laptop To Who?

More proof that dying is a good career move for an artist but a bad one for a novelist came from The Times yesterday. Swedish crime writer Stieg Larsson author of the Millennium Trilogy died in 2004 of a massive heart attack at the age of 50. Book 1 of the trilogy was translated into English last year and became a world wide smash as The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Mr. Larsson had made an old will leaving all his assets and monies to the Communist Party, however it was unwitnessed and thus invalid under Swedish law. Now his father, brother and girlfriend are fighting each other for royalties, film rights, an apartment, and even a laptop that supposedly contains up to six unpublished novels. What was a feel good industry story akin to the posthumous publication of The Leopard and A Confederacy of Dunces is now a horrible mess. When I briefly clerked as a lawyer I saw the damage that could come from not making or poorly making a will. It's understable that no one wants to think of their own mortality but honestly that's no excuse. In the common law tradition its very easy to make a legal will. You can get free readymade wills online and in most libraries but really all you need is a clear letter of intent, a named executor and a couple of witnesses. Still, as a famous literary case I studied in college shows even the clearest wills are no protection against the greedy.

Chassis To India

In 2002 I was fortunate enough to ride a Royal Enfield motorcycle in India. A few years later I rode one again in Cambodia. Along with Triumph and Norton, Enfield was the last of the three great British motorbike manufacturers; all three however went bust under the pressure of fierce Japanese and German competition. Norton and Triumph got resurrected in the 90's and if any of you were reading this blog last year, you'll know of my love for Triumph's stylish machines. But the Enfield story is more interesting. Yes Enfield went broke in the UK but they sold the chassis and blueprints to the Indians and they've been making Enfields continuously for the last half century. Late last year in Madras the Indian Enfield company had exciting news: the first completely new Enfield model in 54 years - the Bullet Classic C5. As of May 1 the BCC5 is now available in the US and Europe for a relatively inexpensive 6000 dollars. With 500cc of power, 80 MPG and enough charisma to cure Angelina Jolie's baby fever this is a lovely piece of equipment. The reviewer the NYT sent to test the Enfield was too chicken to ride it in the streets of Madras but the rest of his justifiably gushing review and some very nice pics are here.

Hitchcock 51 - 61

Fox Movies here has been showing a Hitchcock retrospective all month and what's so great about Hitch is that none of his films ever seem like homework. I'm a fan of the early period Hitch esp The 39 Steps (maybe my favourite Hitchcock of all) The Lady Vanishes and Rebecca but the era 1951 - 1961 is simply stunning, producing amazing film after amazing film. I can't think of a director who came up with such a strong second act to his or her career. Anyway, here's the complete list, have a read and tell me that I'm wrong:

Strangers on a Train (1951)
Farley Granger in a must-see classic story from Patricia Highsmith (screenplay by Raymond Chandler) of two strangers who take on each other's murders. You'll never ride the carousel again without thinking of this film.

I Confess (1953)
Montgomery Clift and Anne Baxter in a thoughtful and influential character study of a priest who hears a murderer's confession.

Dial M for Murder (1954)
Ray Milland wants to kill Grace Kelly. Is he nuts? You gotta love the police inspector and the dimwitted boyfriend and the- wait a minute there's the doorbell, now where's me key?

Rear Window (1954)
The other contender for my favourite Hitchcock. James Stewart is a photographer who doesn't want to marry Grace Kelly (again, is he nuts?). He's laid up at home with a broken leg (and a sassy masseuse) and, bored out of his mind, he begins spying on his neighbours; of course he finds himself caught up in one of their murders - or maybe not.

To Catch a Thief (1955)
Cary Grant resists the charms of Grace Kelly (what is the matter with everyone?) on the Cote d'Azur while a mysterious stranger carries out a rash of burglaries. Think of the finest dessert you've ever had - this is just like that.

The Trouble with Harry (1955)
A pretty, short haired Shirley McClaine finds a corpse in the woods and black comedy ensues. This one's more of a B+.

The Wrong Man (1956)
Henry Fonda and Vera Miles star in a cheapo noir about a wrongly-accused jazz musician. Another B+. Fonda does a terrific job though.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)
Hitchcock's remake of his own 1934 movie involves an American (Jimmy Stewart) sucked into an assassination plot via Morocco, London and Doris Day's pipes. Nice work by everyone including the orchestra.

Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock (1958)
Yes that is the actual title. Considered by some to be Hitchcock's masterpiece. Jimmy Stewart is snared in a tragic spiral of lies, deception and obsession as Kim Novak tries to commit suicide by half assedly jumping into San Francisco Bay when there's a perfectly good bridge to leap off just to her left.

North by Northwest (1959)
My second favourite. A frothy mousse of a movie that I first saw on the big screen in Bryant Park. The crowd cheered Cary Grant all the way through and who wouldn't? Eva Marie Saint (last seen in Superman Returns playing Jorel's mum) is the charming female lead in this cross country crossed identity caper.

Psycho (1961)

Booed at the time and now recognised as one of the most influential films ever made. Hitch makes you root like mad for nutter Tony Perkins when poor Marion's car doesn't sink in the quicksand. How does Hitch do that? He's a genius that's how.

Who Is That Masked Man?

Until Colin Bateman and Ken Bruen came along crime fiction in Ireland was a genre in, er, the morgue. Crime writing was largely seen as a low form composed for slightly seedy people in anoraks who were obsessed by serial killers. These two gentlemen single handily revived Irish crime and mystery writing, imbuing it with panache and intelligence, so that now with the likes of John Connolly, Dec Burke, Dec Hughes, Brian McGilloway etc. etc. crime fiction almost gets the respect in Ireland that it does in the United States. Paradoxically Bateman (rather like Terry Pratchett) is an author who is huge in the UK, but not quite as well known in the US, which is surprising because CB lived in America for a while and set one of this funniest books, Empire State, there (and his TV series "Murphy's Law" plays on BBC America all the time.) All that, I think, is about to change with the publication of his latest novel Mystery Man. It is, I reckon, Bateman's best book to date; it's already become a smash in the UK and world domination cannot be too far behind. I was going to review MM, but I really like this non spoiler rev from Ger Brennan here, so please read that instead. I will say that I loved MM, laughed out loud dozens of times, and really enjoyed the Belfast setting. Tired of being the last to hear about cool stuff? Get ahead of the curve, do yourself a favour and read MM now before the BBC TV series and Bateman's inevitable move to Monaco where he will become an insufferable recluse.

Aarrggghhh! - I've Been Attacked By Pirates

Not of the dastardly Somali variety nor even by the camp Mr Depp and his ilk, no these are the kind who upload your song, film or - in my case - audiobook onto a free server for the whole world to enjoy. All you have to do is get a bit torrent program and as long as someone keeps seeding it you can now download Fifty Grand for nothing. Of course I do not recommend this policy, for although I don't get any royalties from the audio versions of my books it probably hurts the company's bottom line; still I can't but be impressed by the speed of the little rapscallions, the audio version of 50 G only came out a fortnight ago and already its on p2p software. Nice work lads. And no I'm going to give you a link, that's just being too cheeky by half; however if you do download the torrent and like the book and are troubled by a guilty conscience afterwards you could do worse than give me a wee review on audible or amazon. Karma will no doubt bless you with an encounter with Keira or Johnny or (if you're 13) Orlando.

Way To Beat The Stereotype Guys

I found this on Andrew Sullivan. We're all so proud.

The Freakiness of Google Street View

Marcel Proust needed only a taste of Madeleine to time travel back to his childhood. For us its even simpler and much more disconcerting. If you Google Carrickfergus the first thing that comes up is the Google map, if you click the map, there's a bigger map and inside it a picture with the label "google street view" if you click the pic, one of those houses that comes up is my mother's. I'm not going to say which one but there it is after a couple of clicks. This evening I went on a virtual tour of Carrick and I was well weirded out. After googling Carrickfergus and clicking the map and the street view picture, you find yourself at the bottom of Victoria Road. If you go straight on following the arrows you immediately pass my local supermarket, chippie and off license and if you continue up the road 100 yards to the first roundabout and turn left on Princes Way (you'll also need to look left on the little compass thingy) you come to my old school, Victoria Primary. If you then turn right on Coronation Road you're on the road where I spent most of my childhood and eventually you'll pass the house, indeed the very bedroom, where I was born. I was quite shocked by all this, especially when I continued up Coronation Road, turned left again and went past Victoria Cemetery, for there with its name blurred for privacy was my father's grave. After the initial shock came a feeling of happiness and I thought how wonderful it was to see and virtually walk around Carrick from 10,000 miles away.
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My former philosophy tutor John Gray is at the forefront of an anti Enlightenment movement which claims that fundamentally there has been no progress in human affairs. They make a few mealy mouthed exceptions for science, of course, but some of their ilk even skip that. On another occasion I will attempt to demolish this trendy (at least since Rousseau) view but for now I'll just say that they can keep their pre antibiotic world of slaves and servants, I'm happy with medicine, warm baths and Martian Rovers and although I don't have Proust's imagination, memory, concentration, talent or cork lined study where I can explore the recesses of my brain, thanks to the brilliance of Wifi, Apple and Google Street View I can go for a walk around my old haunts in Carrickfergus anytime I want and that's pretty cool.

Genius Is 100 Percent Perspiration, Apparently

For some reason there have been a lot of books about where geniuses come from recently. PR, er, genius Malcolm Gladwell seems to have written most of them and in his column in the New York Times David Brooks has ploughed this furrow even deeper. Brooks says that there's no such thing as god given talent, its all about practice:

What Mozart had, we now believe, was the same thing Tiger Woods had — the ability to focus for long periods of time and a father intent on improving his skills. Mozart played a lot of piano at a very young age, so he got his 10,000 hours of practice in early and then he built from there. The latest research suggests a more prosaic, democratic, even puritanical view of the world. The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It’s not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess. Instead, it’s deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft...

Of course neither Brooks nor Gladwell or anyone else talks about the downside of this supposedly "democratic" view. In the old days you could look at Hitchcock or Mozart or Dickens and say "well what do you expect, mate, he's an effing genius that bloke" but if we all could be like him it's just another stick to beat yourself up with. What haven't I made it to the big time? you wonder and the answer's simple: you're just a lazy git.

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Another thing these gurus never consider is who gets to call someone a genius in the first place. I think the "genius" label says more about contemporary fashion than anything else. Tiger Woods' golf swing? Utterly and completely useless for the last 99.9999999 percent of human history. Mozart's genius? Almost entirely posthumous. Stephen Hawking? What did he win the Nobel Prize for again? Writers in particular are ships in a sea of shifting fashions. Reputations rise and fall and fall and rise. When Melville died several of the obituaries got his name wrong and didn't even mention Moby Dick. When Philip K Dick died the New York Times gave him a 3 paragraph obit, whereas Isaac Asimov got the cover and an entire inside page. History is stuffed full of authors who died or killed themselves after scores of rejections only to have their manuscript published to general acclaim. (A Confederacy of Dunces and The Leopard are two genuine masterpieces that spring to mind.) Were the rejectors wrong or did fashions change? Who knows? To this day people try to convince me of the literary merit of Ayn Rand or Dan Brown or Ayn Rand again (she has a lot of persistent, lunatic fans) so far to no avail, but maybe they're right. Time will shake it out. JS Bach finally became more famous than his offspring, Mozart more appreciated than Salieri, PKD seen as more of an original talent than Asimov. And all of that of course can flip again. Do you remember this great scene in Star Trek IV ? The punchline is right at the end, where Mr. Spock gives us a little perspective.