Iceland Rules!

I first heard about this story a few weeks ago on The Bugle podcast: The new mayor of Reykjavik is a comedian, crank phone caller and former punk rocker at the head of a protest joke party. Bjork is his wife's best friend and he knows everyone in Sigur Ros. He campaigned on a platform of free towels in Icelandic swimming pools and a new polar bear for the zoo. He refused to go into coalition with anyone who hadn't seen all five seasons of The Wire. Now he's the mayor. Normally I say death to the hipsters but for these guys I make an exception.The New York Times has a good profile here
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Leah and I went to Iceland about five years ago. We loved it there. It was like being in the Smurf Village: charming, quirky, colourful and a little bit creepy. After two hours in Reykjavik I felt confident about giving other tourists directions and I had bathed in two different hot springs. Iceland punches above its weight in art, literature, music, strange breakfast foods, volcanoes, trolls, cuteness and nearly other category except boxing. Iceland is joining the EU so in theory I could move there if I wanted and if it wasnt for the high price of booze I'd be sorely tempted.
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(Peter Rozovsky has had many interesting posts on Icelandic Crime Fiction over at DBB however my favourite Icelandic literary works are the amazing Saga of Burnt Njal (which has a nice scene at the Battle of Clontarf with Brian Boru) and the terrific Independent People by Haldor Laxness).

Peter Temple Wins Miles Franklin

Great news for we hacks toiling away in the tenebrous mines of genre fiction: Peter Temple has won the Miles Franklin Award, Australia's most important literary prize, for his outstanding novel Truth. Well done that man!
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Unless you're in the literary fiction racket, no one writes a novel with awards in mind; science fiction novelists write science fiction because they love the genre and crime writers write crime and mystery novels because they love those. But Temple's win of the Miles Franklin is important and perhaps a sign that the literary establishment is beginning to take crime novels seriously. Clive James's dismissal of crime fiction as "mere travelogues" says more about James's lazy reading habits and less about a genre that is multifarious and diverse and pretty much the only thing keeping bookshops above water these days. Borges, Jacques Barzun, John T Irwin et. al. are among the critics who have always treated crime fiction with respect and maybe others will now see that crime fiction is a lens through which to view the world without all the middle class wanking about. For a couple of years I've held the belief that the two Peters - Temple and Carey are Australia's two most important novelists, but Temple has had the harder job convincing the elites to take what he does seriously.
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Do I sound a little prickly? Perhaps. A few months ago I was at The Perth Writers Festival waiting for a bus and a fellow writer asked me what I did. "I write mystery novels," I told him. "Oh dear," he said "that must be frightfully boring." "Why do you say that?" I asked. "Well, those books are so dull." My literary bus stop friend was long listed for the Miles Franklin Award this year, but he didn't win. Crime writer Peter Temple did instead. A brokh tsu dayn lebn, asshole... as my dear old gran never used to say.

Win A Book!

The paperback of my last novel, Fifty Grand, is out this week. You can get it at Amazon.com or in mystery bookshops. Fitty G won the 2010 Spinetingler Award and seems to have divided the people on Good Reads, Audible.com and Amazon into those who really hated it and those who really liked it. My feeling is that that's what you want as a novelist. Avoid the squishy middle at all costs. I suppose I should be showing you a cover of the pbk and all that jazz but I'm not going to. It's my blog and I'll do what I want. So instead here's a question. Who is the dapper old gentleman in the photograph? First person with the correct answer gets a signed 1st pbk edition of Fifty Grand. (The answer has nothing to do with the book.)

20 Years of Millers Crossing

The rough cut of Millers Crossing was turned in twenty years ago this month. To me it still seems as fresh as ever. But maybe its an Irish thing. Happy belated Bloomsday.

FIFA IS WRONG

In the post before last I wondered whether Mario Mendez of Uruguay was really the youngest footballer to have played in the World Cup Finals as FIFA now claim. On the FIFA website and in places like The New York Times, Wikianswers etc. (which slavishly follow FIFA) thats what we are told. As I said in the previous post I think Norman Whiteside of Northern Ireland is in fact the youngest footballer to have played in the World Cup Finals and I suspect the FIFA information to be incorrect.
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After some more digging I found the website of Planet World Cup which gives you the entire squad of every team in every world cup. I have cut and pasted the Uruguay squads for 1954 and 1962:

1954

Coach: Juan Lopez

Apps Gls
Roque G. Maspoli 5
Victor R. Andrade 5
Luiz Cruz 5
William Martinez 5
José Santamaria 5
Nestor Carballo 2
Eusebio Tejera
Juan A. Schiaffino 5 2
Julio C. Abbadie 4 2
Javier Ambrois 4 1
Obdulio J. Varela 3 1
Juan E. Hohberg 2 3
Roberto Leopardi
Carlos Borges 5 4
Omar O. Miguez 3 3
Omar Mendez 1
Rafael Souto 1
Julio Perez
Luis Castro
Mirto Davoine
Julio Maceiras
Urbano Rivera

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1962

Coach: Juan Lopez

Apps Gls
Roberto Sosa 3
Eliseo Alvarez 3
Emilio Alvarez 3
Mario Mendez 3
Horacio Troche 3
Nestor Goncalves 3
Pedro Rocha 2
Ronald Langon 1
José Sacia 3 2
Luis Cubilla 3 1
Domingo Perez 3
Ruben Cabrera 2 1
Julio Cortes 1
Mario Bergara

As you can see Mario Mendez did NOT play in the 1954 World Cup Finals. FIFA is wrong. Someone called Omar Mendez did play in those finals and I think this is how the sloppy stat compiler at FIFA made this mistake. As the Gaffer explained in my other post FIFA is also wrong about its #2 player. Norman Whiteside of Northern Ireland therefore is the youngest footballer to have played in a World Cup final in 1982 at 17 years and 41 days. I hope FIFA will correct this mistake soon. I wont hold my breath.

Funnily enough in the official FIFA report of the 1982 World Cup they say this:

Italy's other heroes included 40-year-old goalkeeping captain Dino Zoff and 18-year-old full-back Giuseppe Bergomi. Yet while Bergomi became the youngest Italian to appear on the world stage, Northern Ireland's Norman Whiteside surpassed Pele's record as the youngest player in the tournament's entire history – aged 17 years and 41 days. And his team provided one of the main shocks by beating Spain 1-0 to reach the second round.

This all makes me wonder what other disinformation FIFA has been churning out for decades without anyone noticing.

The Baseball Codes

As the World Cup begins and sleep vanishes from my life for a month, of course, I feel the urge to blog about, er, baseball. You know why baseball is the greatest sport? Because no other sport is as geeky, arcane and downright strange as baseball. Baseball is a spectator sport for math majors and science nerds. It also attracts more historians and biologists (well Stephen J Gould) than any other game. Baseball is an art form and a kind of secular religion. Like all good religions baseball is full of mysterious rules and codes that insiders (i.e. ballplayers and the elect) know about, but lay people often do not. For instance I knew about a couple of the rules surrounding a no hitter: 1) you must never talk about the possibility of a no hitter for fear of attracting the wrath of the mighty jinx 2) once a no hitter is a possibility (say around the seventh inning) the opposing team is no longer allowed to bunt a man on, but there are many more conventions. I also knew the home run rule: you must never stand in the batters box after you hit a home run because this shows up the pitcher, a la Barry Bonds, instead you must run around the bases. There are dozens of other honor codes, hidden rules and unspoken niceties that are fascinating for that baseball nut in your family. The Baseball Codes by Jason Turbow and Mike Duca takes you into the heart of the secret society by violating the number one code of the playground, the jailhouse and the baseball diamond - you don't snitch. Ever. But I'm glad they did.
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I also liked the cover which reminded me of Allie's baseball mitt in Catcher in the Rye.

Who Is The Youngest Player To Have Played In The World Cup Finals?

Northern Ireland don't hold too many World Cup records. We've qualified 3 times, lost more than we've won, never even made the semis and unfortunately we didn't qualify at all during the years when George Best was in his prime. One record we do hold is the youngest player ever to have played in the World Cup Finals. That young player was Norman Whiteside who at 17 years and 41 days played in Espana '82. I remember at the time the commentators stating that Whiteside had just broken Pele's record for the youngest player and that record still stands today. Or does it? Or was it even a record at all? I was glancing through Ben Schott's New York Times World Cup Miscellany, and under Youngest Player To Have Played in World Cup Finals he's got "Mario Mendez, Uruguay, 16 y 36d, 1954". Like any self respecting lunatic with way too much time on his hands I immediately went to the FIFA website to confirm this information and lo it was confirmed. I then went to the Ask The Gaffer Website to ask the Gaffer about this astounding so called fact. Three people had been there ahead of me as the Gaffer explains:

Oddly three people have emailed me today with the same question. This is very intriguing. Like you, I've always known for a fact that Norman Whiteside is the youngest ever World Cup player, breaking Pele's record in the 1982 finals. Checking out this Mario Mendez impostor, however, throws up a mystery. On the official Fifa squad lists for the 1954 finals, there's no mention of Mendez (although curiously squad number 20 is missed out), but look at the match stats for the third place play-off match against Austria and there he is, bold as brass, wearing squad No.20. His player profile has him born on 11th May 1938, which sure enough would have made him 16 years, one month and 23 days old when Austria beat Uruguay 3-1 in Zurich (younger than Whiteside, who was 17 years and 41 days). However, the Fifa website is the only place I can find any reference to this. Every reference book I own and all other reputable websites have no mention of Mendez at all, and all list Whiteside as the record holder. I can only assume Fifa have committed a massive blunder or (less likely) that we've all been terribly misled. As for Edu of Brazil, he was in the Brazil squad in 1966, but didn't play a game until the 1974 finals, so Fifa are definitely wrong with that one!

The Gaffer, like Obi Wan Kenobi, is a wise old man of the desert and I trust his instincts but instincts are not facts. At Footbalistic their ref for Mario Mendez. has him playing for Uruguay in the 1962 finals when he would have been 24 years old. Meanwhile The Times newspaper recounts a story about Whiteside and Pele being on a plane together and Whiteside teasing Pele for only "being only the second youngest" now (when of course he should have teased him about letting Sylvester Stallone play nets in Escape to Victory.)

Despite what the Gaffer says there are other websites out there that follow the FIFA party line. Who is right? Can anyone out there help me? (The picture incidentally is of Eva Mendes who I'm pretty sure is a relative or something.)

SUNDAY UPDATE
So nobody knows the answer? Great. I shall go to my grave in a state of cosmic uncertainty. BTW, nice result for the USA v England. Did Americans give a damn? Well in my favourite NYC neighbourhood they did: Dominican Washington Heights was ecstatic according to a commenter here.

The Killer Inside Me

Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me has all the elements of a film that I should have loved: a dusty West Texas landscape, the period setting of the 1950's, Jim Thompson's great pulp novel as its source material, the always underrated Casey Affleck in the leading role. The film has generated some moral outrage in the UK and my friend and colleague Declan Burke has written about that in the Irish Times and in his review here.

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My problem is with the picture itself which is an interesting character study oddly unbalanced by a ghastly, luridly-filmed act of misogynistic violence in the first half. Remember when the cop got his ear cut off in Reservoir Dogs while Michael Madsen danced to Steeler's Wheel? No, actually you don't remember that, because Quentin Tarantino had the camera cut away during that scene to look at a blank wall for four or five seconds. TKIM's director, Michael Winterbottom, feels that the human imagination is not rich enough to visualise a woman getting beaten to a pulp and that that act must be shown in hardcore close up. Winterbottom has defended himself by saying that he is being true to the novel which will surprise anyone who has read the book. Unlike say Thomas Harris or Patsy Cornwell, Jim Thompson has no patience for pages and pages of torture (or pages and pages of anything). Winterbottom doesn't get off the hook by claiming that this is Jim Thompson's vision, it isn't, it's his.

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I had part of the same problem with Kick Ass which I felt was creepy and unpleasant, made more leaden by dull schoolboy humour and then that penultimate scene where a child is viciously beaten in lingering detail. I'm with Roger Ebert on this one, not the hipsters. But back to TKIM, Michael Winterbottom has attempted to do the trick of having his cake and eat it too: in theory condemning brutal sadistic violence against women but also being careful to show us every blow that disfigures a beautiful face. TKIM reminded me of one of those True Detective magazines or those shows on serial killers that pretend to be factual studies but actually appeal to the more salacious instincts of humanity.

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Can one dreadful scene ruin a great film? Probably not, but can it ruin a good film? Yeah, I think so. I couldn't quite concentrate on TKIM after that and was quite glad when it was over.

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Of course every generation complains that the world is going to the dogs but the triumph of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, the Saw franchise, Kick Ass etc. leads me to wonder if our culture has been sufficiently desensitised so that brutal violence against women is now considered to be as necessary for the success of a book or film as the obligatory sex scene or the fight between the hero and the villain at the end. God, I really hope not.

The Sandwiches Are Wicked And They Know You At The Mac Store

I've finally caught up to the current series and the most recent episodes of Breaking Bad. I was worried about whether they could sustain the quality throughout seasons 2 and 3, but so far they have. The opening five minutes of Sunday's episode was as dark and ironically counterpointed as anything I've seen on TV. The whole of season 3 has been on fire: nuanced, funny, well acted, compelling. Yes the violence has gotten a bit cartoony but Walter White is becoming the kind of vulnerable, amoral, superhero that DC Comics could only dream about creating. Additionally Bryan Cranston no longer needs to carry the show on the back of his brilliant acting, because everyone around him has raised their game too. New Mexico is as beautiful as ever and the scripts are tight, tense and humorous.
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BB is still a minority taste so if you dont believe me, check out what some of the critics are saying. For my money the best weekly reviews/analyses of BB are by Tim Goodman in the San Francisco Chronicle. Here's one (with big spoilers) where he talks about the colour palate in New Mexico which is what I was trying to get at when I first posted about BB, aqui.
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And now onto the sandwiches...When I was being published by Simon and Schuster I used to go down to the Star Trek books division not just to hang out with my own kind but also to try and wriggle my way in to ghosting a Star Trek novel for William Shatner. My ambition was to go to a diner with The Shat while he spit balled ideas for the book and I wrote them all down and sassy waitresses kept bringing us pie and coffee. It would have been the coolest thing evuh. Alas it never quite worked out. I still have that ambition but now I have a new celebrity craving - I want Bryan Cranston to make me one of his Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwiches of Death from Breaking Bad. His loving and persnickety preparation of those PB&J's does my heart good and I fully believe that if we all prepared our sandwiches that carefully not only would the world would be a better place but our meth would be of superior quality too. The chemistry must be respected, but so my friends must the sarnies. I don't know who's in charge over there at AMC, but if you're ever looking for a Breaking Bad novelisation, I'm available for a small and tasty price.

Norn Iron Noir

If you're gonna be in Belfast on June 10 why you don't you tootle on down to No Alibis bookshop where the crime collection Requiems for the Departed is being launched. The cream of the Irish crime writing crop will be there and there will be wine and cheese and probably crackers...I'd guess Ritz reduced fat crackers, although I wouldnt be surprised if they served a generic Marks and Spencer water biscuit style cracker which, don't get me wrong, I like, but sometimes they can be a little dry - completely fine if the cheese is Brie but if it's a good stiff Edam or something then - watch out - the sensation isn't going to be that pleasant especially if you've got a tannic white wine working with it..., er, what was I, uh...oh yes Requiems. I've got a story in the book and although I wont be at the launch I will be there in spirit, or, possibly, asleep. This is the official NA notice:

No Alibis Bookstore is pleased to invite you to the launch of Irish crime fiction anthology, REQUIEMS FOR THE DEPARTED, edited by Gerard Brennan and Mike Stone, on Thursday 10th June at 6:30PM.

Along with co-editor Gerard Brennan (of Crime Scene NI fame), we're expecting appearances from the following contributors: Brian McGilloway, Stuart Neville, Arlene Hunt, T.A. Moore, Tony Bailie, John McAllister and Garbhan Downey, so this is sure to be an evening to remember.

If you want to hear something hilarious get Brian and Garbhan talking about ciars, er, I mean cars.

Dangerous Days - The Making of Blade Runner

If, like me, you're a sad Blade Runner fanboy you'll be fascinated by the three hour doc Dangerous Days by Charles de Lauzirika which the mysterious SME1984 has uploaded onto YouTube. It explains pretty much everything you've ever wondered about: the fate of the fifth replicant, the unicorn, who invented city speak, who wrote Roy's last line, the voice over, the endings. It is utterly compelling stuff and seemingly everyone has been generous with their time and thoughts. Near the end of the documentary Guillermo del Toro talks about how he left Blade Runner as a completely different person than when he went in, embracing this vision of the future. I felt the same way except I didn't really see this as vision of the future at all. I saw the movie in an empty cinema in Belfast in 1982. I went home in the rain, past the bomb sites and security check points, as the army APC's and Land Rovers drove past me and the intelligence corps's observation gazelle helicopter hovered continously above at 1000 feet. To me Blade Runner was always more about the now than the future and it seems more nowy than ever.

Sex and the City Strikes Back

Everybody knows that men are the minority gender on planet Earth. But we're also an increasingly large minority of law school graduates, book buyers and teachers - you know: the things that will be really important in about a decade. If the war between the sexes could be distilled into one battle, say the 1943 German attempt to pinch out the Kursk salient, men would be Field Marshall von Manstein gaily advancing into the trap laid out by women who in this analogy would be the formidable Marshall Georgi Zhukov sitting behind rows and rows of gleaming T-34's.
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Of course I'm only going on about the West. Women in Africa and the Middle East get treated very badly, but everyone's heading West eventually. Remember that dude who was talking about The End of History? Turns out he was right. No, really, you'll see.
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What has this got to do with Sex and the City? Everything. Straight men hate Sex and the City. All straight men, everywhere. Women apparently like Sex and the City. A lot. The fact that there is now a second Sex and the City movie is mere triumphalism. Ok you've won. We get it. Please. No Mas. First you made us talk about our feelings, then you told us that we had to start putting plastic stuff in the bin with the yellow lid, then you stopped us throwing a punch at that really obnoxious guy in the bar, then you made us see that movie where the Japanese killed all the dolphins and the Atacama desert could not have contained our tears. But please all we have left is the DVD store. And if the DVD store has big pictures of Sarah Jessica Parker all over it we wont even have that.
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Roger Ebert reviews SATC here. Good old Roger. Mark Kermode rants about SATC here. (Kermode's tirade almost made me flip the other way - I mean men have their war films and dull witted comic book movies so why arent women allowed to indulge their silly fantasies? And why is it always the people who went to fancy private schools who get so worked up about the rich? )