AUTUMN BOOK LEAVES: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

 No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace
   As I have seen in one autumnal face.

John Donne writes of people as though they are the seasons. But we can take those two lines from his ninth elegy and just think of them as the seasons themselves. Yes, I’ve reduced his work’s symbolism to the mere observation of changes in the weather.
   Donne has been on my mind of late, as I plan to quote him again, as well as paraphrase him, in a far-off video production. Its time will come soon enough. I am steeped in autumn, and in delays – autumnal and otherwise – leading to the late delivery of this blog post.
   The Hound of the Baskervilles ate my homework. Honest, guv’nor. For two weeks, I haven’t caught a break when firing up the blog machine. If I had the time, hell, I didn’t have the topic. And I never had the topic. Having no time didn’t seem to matter, in the end.
   Summer’s perpetual high pressure area over the Atlantic is barely a memory. If it rained, I blinked and missed that way back when. August threatened another uncharacteristic long spell of heat, but the threat proved empty. September performed according to ancient custom, and rained like a bastard.
   Going by the opinions of the eighth Henry’s wives, he reigned like a bastard. October has settled back into familiar Mordor Mode™. And I’ve enjoyed the wind and rain tapping at and rattling around the house.
   Pre-winter repairs and maintenance kept me away from the keyboard when it mattered most. Typing 1,500 words or more for this blog. Too great a task for me. Send for Herakles. Then I was almost trapped in the stacks again. I’d lost an entire shelf of books.
   Not a bookcase. But one shelf. I wandered low and high, about and around, to some avail. As much as possible, I preserve books in order. If the bookcase falls into disrepair and must go, then, yes, it goes. But the books relocate, intact, and all is right with one small cranny there in the library.
   True, I no longer have a unified library. My books have spread across three rooms into slightly different libraries. Here is the office library. Across the landing there’s the old library. It houses more books than the new library sitting next to it.
   I’ve taken on a few portable bookcases. They sit, comfortably, on the landing itself. This was forbidden by law. Until I finally ran out of space. I spent too long looking for these missing books. Fallen leaves.
   How autumnal.
   I wandered the three libraries and I wandered them again. The second time I dropped a reminder to me, myself, and I: look up. So I looked up and found that these books, which once rested at eye-level, definitely weren’t any higher than that. Nice try, though.
   Then I dimly recalled there was a U-turn I could make: all the way to the end of the new library, and around into the deadest of dead-ends. There, I might find a half-bookcase sheltering the missing items.
   But no. What did I find? Nothing. And I was surprised to find nothing on the bottom shelf of the half-bookcase there. It is a truth universally acknowledged that an author in search of space for books always begins by filling the bottom shelf of a bookcase. The heaviest books must live nearest the floor. Only flimsy paperbacks, spry, and airy, make it to the top of the tallest bookcase peaks.
   If nothing else, I discovered more space. An empty shelf. Against all the laws of storage, the bottom shelf housed no books at all. I’m sure there was a reason for the arrangement…just as I am certain I haven’t a fucking clue what that arrangement was.
   With the addition of portable library carts, my libraries are now all complete as far as storage is concerned. At this point, I cannot add fixed bookcases anywhere. I may only send the older, more venerable, storage units into genteel retirement. Then I bring in the replacements. There is nothing genteel in watching a broken bookcase face pulverisation as it is taken away to the dump. The sound is something shocking, also.
   That’s it. I’m done. The floor is exhausted. I can reorganise book storage on the shelves. Remove the dead wood and measure like hell to fill a vacated space. But only a vacated space. I’m permitted to shuffle the deck-chairs at an ever-increasing angle on this sinking ocean liner. Nothing completely new. Not to house books in. Unless…on wheels. And I quickly exhausted that last desperate ploy.
   My quest for books reminded me books almost always only come into the house. Few leave. If a book disintegrates and I can find a replacement, okay, then I’ll make the arrangements. Hardly any books fall apart. Occasionally, I’ll take a wild notion and realise some books have to go. And to charity they are sent.
   Yes, I had a few books by an author whose work would never interest me these days. And, yes, I sent those to the recycling bin. I refused to clog up charity shops with them. This is a rare state of affairs for me. With all of that in mind, where the fuck did an entire shelf of books vanish to? Books have leaves, it is true. But they don’t fall off bookshelves in the autumn.
   I hunted low and high. Then, realising what I was looking for and where, I returned here. To the office library. And I looked in a place that was once dangerous. For there I trapped myself in my library when moving a bookcase in…not to go all Dickensian…a most injudicious and highly inappropriate manner.
   And, in a wildly different way, I almost trapped myself in the same place all over again. What the fuck is this? The Bermuda Fucking Triangle of Books? Where books and authors go to disappear? It’s been a disappearing month. Long. Memorable. Eternal. And yet blink in the eye of a gone.
   All I have is this dog-ate-my-homework blog. The usual I’ll-fill-the-blank-space ploy of filling the blank space with the phrase I’ll fill the blank space, and I’ll hope no one notices the unconscionable levels of shameless padding involved in generating unconscionable levels of shameless padding.
   I found the missing shelf. Low down, on the floor. And I struggled not to be trapped in my own library all over again. This should be harder, now. The first time involved the moving of a bookcase. But, portable book storage aside, I won’t face the prospect of moving a bookcase again until another one bites the dust and I call up the glue factory to take delivery of its shattered spine.
   My mismanagement of the situation was legendary. There I was, not even moving a bookcase, and I nearly trapped myself between a hard place and a hard place. No rocks were harmed in the making of this anecdote.
   When you store books where they fit…
   And when you preserve the books when the bookshelf falls to bits, even moving the books to another room…
   When there’s risk to life and limb deep in the stacks…
   You know your library has developed quirks capable of ending you. And you accept the truth. The truth is…even had I stored these books in alphabetical order and by author and genre…yay, even unto the last letter of the alphabet…I’d still misplace whole shelves anyway. And I’d still risk being trapped inside the stacks.
   But there’s a cold view preserving what little sanity remains. I could never store a library alphabetically. Doing so would force the books to take up more space. In the name of efficiency, the books are crammed into every corner – real and imagined.
   To stack the books alphabetically, I’d need another two libraries bolted to the building’s outside walls. Possibly the rooftop. And books are no friends to rain, just as rain is no friend to books.
   Luckily, I’ve cut down on book purchases this year. I’m sure I still bought plenty, on reflection, but I cut back. For reasons of space, yes. I could have so many books here in digital format.
   Books on shelves possess more than a huge chunk of the room. They offer a physical presence acting as a reminder to read them. I never have that weight to my reading choices when they are digital. There’s no heft to an electronic file.
   I go back to that conversation in a bookshop, with the American woman who sold me some volumes. We agreed that physical books would never truly be replaced. In the nightmarish future dystopia of five minutes from now, books will be boutique products in gentrified streets, sold to niche customers at absurd prices measured in kidneys.
   Fuck off when it comes to the idea of writing stories by manual typewriter. That notion can die in a fire. If I occupy a Venn diagram, it’s a barely-visible dot. I type at the computer keyboard. My stories are digital. But I read physical books. And I divide those books into paperbacks for cheapness and hardbacks for durability.
   I demand an index for all non-fiction books, but the books in my bookcases could never be sorted alphabetically: only by the memory of how I stored those volumes initially. Memory of which books sit next to each other is all I have to go on, when the original bookcases disappeared around the back of the barn so long ago, to the sound of a shotgun blast, and with the sight of autumn’s crows scattering to the darkening horizon.

UNCOVERING THE FLANDERS PANEL: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Adaptations again. Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s book The Flanders Panel was made into a movie called UNCOVERED, starring Kate Beckinsale, and I only just now heard the news. Reverte’s books are easy enough to find. But hunting down cinema adaptations is a tricky prospect.
   I’ve seen ALATRISTE, starring Viggo Mortensen, and The Ninth Gate with Johnny Depp. But it looks as though I must delve into the depths of legally spurious internet video sites to catch a glimpse of The Fencing Master.

 

*

 

True. I stopped blogging to watch some dodgy Russian site. Comrade Cyrillic asked me, in Russian, to prove I wasn’t a robot. I answered by robotically ticking a box. There’s a mechanical flaw in that plan, somewhere. You could set a robot up to click the box proving you aren’t a robot. That’s what I did. Brrr-whizzz-click.
   Okay. I’ve now watched two Pérez-Reverte adaptations in one day, and I viewed them in the same order that I tackled the books in. UNCOVERED plays out like a TV show, and that’s okay. Not a criticism. I suspected, with the book’s title changed from The Flanders Panel, that we’d see the whole thing moved to a loft space in an edgy corner of London. But no. The story still takes place in Spain. Not in Madrid, though.
   Maybe the movie was set in Barcelona to gain a tax-break. Madrid, Barcelona, it’s all still Spain, right? Oof. The character of Julia is still Julia. Who is she, exactly? This is where your movie mileage may vary, and by vary I mean tank all the way to the bottom of the ocean if you restore paintings for a living. Or if you are really into chess, say.
   Julia restores very old paintings. This is her passion in life. If you restore very old paintings for a living, look away now. I imagine restorers sitting down to watch this murder mystery/art story/chess problem movie and…then exploding with rage to such an extent that their lungs fly in different directions and their stomachs end up painting the ceiling.
   For Julia, arty painting restorer, lights up a fucking cigarette. Then she gleefully starts restoring stuff. I suspect this isn’t something real restorers do. Ever. In a bajillion years. That would get you sent to art jail in the restoring community. And kneecapped if you even think of going near an art gallery or museum collection.
   Also, I don’t imagine restorers ever contaminate the art by kissing the fucking paintings. Just follow the movie rule, I guess. Restore like no one’s watching. Dance like you’re drunk and make your excuses. They restore paintings differently in Spain, I guess. (No, they don’t.) In movies, they do things differently. Leave it at that.
   So much for the movie and restoring art. In the book, Julia lights up a cancer-stick on page one, and contemplates the light coming in through the window. I’m going out on a limb here with the idea that paintings should be restored in windowless rooms. And the restorers should be dressed as though investigating a bloody murder.
   It was a different time. The nineties. And paintings from the 1400s, especially fictional ones, are incredibly robust. Or something. Especially the fictional paintings. But this is also a chess mystery novel adaptation, and, as far as I can gather, the chess is a tiny bit dodgy.
   The author Reverte is mentioned by name in an arty aside. It’s that kind of movie. Julia restores a painting: The Game of Chess. Two men play that game while a woman looks on. Additional painting covers the original art, hiding an inscription. Who killed the knight? As one of the players in the painting is a knight, the hidden message asks for the solution to a murder mystery.
   Spoiler. Five hundred years later, everyone in the painting is dead. However, Julia’s search for the solution to that mystery brings murder all the way up to the modern day. Of the 1990s. Someone continues the game of chess from the painting, and more death follows. Piece by piece.
   The book is the book. With a bit of tweaking, the movie follows as much of the book as it can in the time available. This was an early-career role for Kate Beckinsale and a late-career one for James Villiers. Michael Gough also puts in an appearance, just to chew a bit of scenery for the sake of it. This is the sort of movie that casts Art Malik in a role on the basis that his name ties in rather neatly with the cinematic theme of art.
   I’ll try not to genuinely spoil anything for you. In a fairly reduced cast, with bodies piling up, there aren’t really that many suspects. Here and there you work your way through a few painterly moments. There’s a flashback to the murder of the knight. The painting is brought to life for a few scenes. People play far less chess in the movie than you’d expect.
   The soundtrack is either quirky or conventional. Ominous music is ominous at ominous moments. If you feel the ending is a bit sudden, a bit Italian Horror Flick™, then know this: the movie gives you the satisfaction of seeing the endgame played out on a suspiciously-tiled floor. We see what they did there, all the way from outer space. The book doesn’t do it that way.
   Over in the movie, there’s the wonderful absurdity of a chess showdown with Budget Salvador Dalí. And I’m there for that. Admittedly the book, with its attendant chess diagrams, takes a bit of perseverance if you aren’t really into chess.
   You can get by with the diagrammatic assistance. The chess explanations in the movie are mercifully brief whether you are into chess or not. What makes sense in a chess game may make far less sense in a chess game devoted to murder.
   Rabid chess players are bound to create far more inventive moves that are logical while gaming. The chess here fuels murder, serving a different master. Let’s leave it alone as a concept. Rabid chess players shouldn’t fuss too much.
   Painters, restorers, and chess players may froth at the mouth over the wilder excesses of that adaptation. I turned my attention to The Fencing Master. Here, I suspect those who wield whippy swords are in awe or in shock from moment to moment.
   This adaptation had a budget the other film could only dream of. It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships… It is a time of turmoil in Spain. Guns are in. Swords are on the way out. Ben Kenobi… The Fencing Master is part of a vanishing world of honour and chivalry, where the sword meant something. An elegant weapon for a more civilised age.
   Against the backdrop of political turmoil in the 1800s, the ageing Fencing Master concentrates on his dwindling group of students. He ignores politics. But political forces don’t ignore him. A woman approaches the Fencing Master and asks to take lessons. He refuses. But she somehow charms him into taking on the role.
   He is obsessed with finding the perfect attack: a move that cannot be defeated. She, too, seems obsessed with technique, and asks to be taught a special move which the Fencing Master charges a lot of money to share. She offers above his asking-price. And he teaches her this move.
   Spoiler alert. She’s learning this stuff for a reason. You may suspect so from the moment she enters the story. Political matters come to a head and bodies start falling. The Fencing Master works his way through layers of mystery, and shady conspiracy, realising his involvement costs those around him dear.
   I’ll not say more. Except this. There’s a part of the plot that stays with you. This does not even involve fencing. But it does involve one of the Fencing Master’s acquaintances. Book and movie share this scene, though, for time-restraints, it is handled a little differently in the film. The plot point concerns highly conspiratorial paperwork. And there’s a neat piece of storytelling built into that.
   Strong on mood, depicting a man who is skilled in things that no longer seem to matter overmuch to a modern world lacking in chivalry, the movie is the perfect accompaniment to the book. I came to the books first, and then saw the films.
   And I’d say…if you are going to chase them down, then make your own decisions. Having read The Fencing Master before seeing the movie, I was looking for the broad points of the story conveyed through cinematic atmosphere. And the film certainly has that in buckets. But you could see the movie first and then seek out the book, and you’d be okay. Yes, you could seek out the movie on a legally grey streaming site.
   The other story, The Flanders Panel/UNCOVERED, is best-viewed in that order. Read the book. Follow the chess diagrams. You aren’t spoiling the movie for yourself if you read the book first, as the list of suspects isn’t exactly a mile long. In an ideal world, we’d always read the source material before the adaptation. But that often really is another story.

COMIC BOOK BELGIANS IN THE CONGO: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Now that I see it sold separately, should I buy TINTIN IN THE CONGO, y’know, just to complete the collection…

…Non. Nein. Nee.

 

BINGE-READING RAYMOND CHANDLER.

Where did I start? The same place I started from originally: with Raymond Chandler’s books about the detective Philip Marlowe. When I decided to read them, I chose to read the books first and the short stories after. This was, accidentally, the best move I made.
   If you want to read Chandler’s detective stories, start with the books. This is for an obvious reason. He wrote the short stories and then welded a few stories into one book: The Big Sleep. And he would do that again for other novels. So read the books first. If you read the short stories and then the novels...you’ll think the books are awfully familiar in places.
   You owe it to yourself to read the books before the short pieces. I started there. Recently I decided to read Chandler again. All in a rush. So I started there, all over again. What is the body of work? Novels. Completed ones. Detective books. Big on mood, and atmosphere. Plotting takes a back seat. That’s Chandler’s style. What did I binge-read?
   The Big Sleep.
   Farewell, My Lovely.
   The High Window.
   The Lady in the Lake.
   The Little Sister.
   The Long Good-Bye.
   Playback.
   No Poodle Springs fragment completed by another hand after Chandler’s death. All Chandler, and all books. In order. But not quite in the order I’d like. I’ll return to that bit. But first, what is it you read, if you binge your way through Raymond Chandler’s books?
   There are no two-minute eggs in this collection. These stories are boiled hard, for at least ten minutes and maybe longer than that. There’s a lot of world-weary talk in these novels. Chandler pretty much hates everyone and everything. The books started up in the late 1930s, and continued through the 1940s and into the 1950s and Chandler’s death. It’s difficult to keep on writing after that. Brain-in-a-jar technology is always five years away.
   Hates everyone? In other words, expect racism. Chandler isn’t nice to black people. Mexicans, he generally doesn’t care for. He has a bit of a hate on for the Native American. It’s the mid-1940s, so hating on the Chinese sits next to detesting the Japanese. If there hadn’t been a Japanese sneak-attack, he’d have scorned the Japanese anyway.
   Chandler finds time to hate a lot of rich white people. And poor white people, too. He certainly hates himself. When television starts to appear in his fiction, he hates that as well. He finds time, through his character of Marlowe, to hate crooked cops and corrupt politicians. Hollywood-coded homosexuals fare no better. Chandler finds the time to hate the homophobic cops who hate the Hollywood-coded homosexuals. If he’d lived longer, he’d have written up a murder mystery about the death of Santa Claus.
   Women get their own separate category of hatred.
   If there’s a soft-boiled woman within Marlowe’s view, he’s sapped over the head before he can comment. Men murder men in Chandler’s books. And men murder women. Women do their share of murdering, too. Marlowe does kill. But he also spends a lot of time taking guns off people or having guns grabbed away from him.
   I bought these books one at a time, even though I could have picked up the whole collection at once. Then I bought the volumes of short stories and dived on in. Later, I’d return to a book to remind myself of the mood. The mood: desperate people commit all sorts of crimes. Marlowe trails along in the bloodied wake, finding bodies as he goes.
   One book stood out. I remember enjoying the story. Until I revisited the book, in isolation. For whatever reason, the novel fell flat for me. There seemed to be less in it than I remembered. That was The High Window. I guess I was in a mood myself, that time.
   Now, over the past week, I binged on Marlowe’s exploits. Reading each book hot on the heels of the last, I gained a deeper appreciation for the things Chandler did well. His stories are coffee-strong on mood and atmosphere. People will tell you Chandler wasn’t all that interested in plot. He was interested. Mood and atmosphere, the style, interested him a hell of a lot more.
   So what did I notice, this time around? Coffee and booze and cigarettes – oh, and pipes – don’t inhabit the landscape. They are the landscape. Cigars: not so much. In that time period you could buy information by waving a dollar around. Every story Marlowe hears from a suspect is screwy. And everyone Marlowe interviews is a suspect.
   If a bird turns up in a tale, chances are it’s a hummingbird. Radios blat, more than once. Chandler’s stories seethe with blatting radios. Climbing the corporate ladder inside a building involves sitting in a corner office. Occasionally, some of Chandler’s characters might even be sober as they get behind the wheel of a car.
   Los Angeles becomes a character, but not a character anyone could learn to like. Marlowe finds it difficult to cope with straight cops. The default setting is crooked. Big business could only grow big off the back of big crime. Chandler was an oil-man, and didn’t have to be told twice about that.
   Over the span of these books, Marlowe moves from the 1930s to the 1950s. He does so a little slowly, not quite ageing one year for every year that passes. That puts him in the same general area as a lot of fictional detectives. As the tales move into the 1950s, Marlowe and Chandler are both painfully aware that the world is leaving them both behind.
   It is jarring to read of television, helicopters, jet aircraft, and science fiction. Why would Marlowe bother mentioning them? He dances to his writer’s voice. Chandler decides. If we skip the details you could pin down to a specific time, what else covers the atmosphere in these books?
   Driving. Marlowe has to travel around to interview people, crumple under a sap, face bullets, crack wise at dirty cops, and so on. Driving gives Marlowe time to think. He doesn’t think very well of the world in general or California specifically. Driving time is time spent crossing California. To Marlowe, it’s such a chore.
   These, then, are the things you’ll notice if you binge-read Chandler’s books: closeted homosexuals and the cops who hate them a little too much for their own reputations, women as damaged goods, coffee, cigarettes, cigarette-holders, booze and lots of it only more so, corner offices, the smell of sandalwood, hummingbirds, the blatting of the radio, driving, being knocked out, violence, cracking wise to tough guys, tough guys cracking wise back, Hollywood as a cess-pit only more so…
   You’ve got the wrong attitude, reader. You’re not human tonight.

The Big Sleep. This is the novel brewed up using a formula. Take a few earlier stories, stitch them together, amplify on the text, square away most of the holes generated by a new overall plot, and ratchet up the mood. Place emphasis on the mood.
   Chandler gives us the detective caught up in two separate cases that somehow dovetail into the same case. There’s a hallucinatory feel to the book, starting in the unwholesome greenhouse where Marlowe is given his assignment. Do one thing. But don’t look into the other thing. Everyone assumes Marlowe is hired to look into the other thing.
   This brings a million complications. It’s a tough old world, boiled and uncompromising, and Marlowe is sent stumbling through it. Occasionally bruised and battered, he survives to go off into the sequel. And if you thought that was a plot spoiler, go fry a stale egg.
   What emerges from this first book? Marlowe wasn’t the character’s name, originally. He was going to be Mallory. Why? We dig deep into Arthurian legend here. Sir Thomas Malory had a huge hand in tales of King Arthur. And Chandler’s work is full of references to knights.
   This first book sees Marlowe on his way to that greenhouse. Before he reaches it, though, he catches sight of artwork at the entrance to the mansion. Or castle. A knight, but not one in shining armour, is untying a naked damsel in distress. We get plenty of knight references after this.
   Marlowe enjoys chess puzzles. And the knight is that peculiar piece in chess. It makes a sideways move to go forward. And Marlowe as a detective has to make a load of side-moves to gain any forward progress. It’s no surprise that Marlowe could have been Mallory, after Malory. He’s Marlowe, after the playwright Kit Marlowe. An outright Shakespearean name-reference would’ve been too close to the bone when dealing with tragedy. Chandler was no slouch in throwing Shakespearean references at the readers.
   Having revisited Chandler’s first book, what did I find? The jump from one case to another works. Here begins the recurring theme. Was a suicide a murder? Maybe a murder was actually suicide. The big question about the death of the chauffeur – who killed him – goes away if Chandler/Marlowe writes it off as suicide.
   It’s a great beginning to a detective series. And I still rate it highly.

Farewell, My Lovely. Arthurian references abound. Ultimately, Marlowe is on a quest for a woman named Grayle. And that’s no coincidence. A grail-quest is just the right sort of mission for a slightly tarnished knight like Marlowe. Again we have two cases and nothing to connect them. The connective tissue is there, though, and Chandler is far more adept at welding older stories together here.
   It’s one thing to write a classic introductory mission for a detective. But it’s really something else to create a classic follow-up. The atmosphere here is built up through unconnected stories merging strangely in the night. Of all the characters Chandler gives us, he gives us Marlowe. But he remembers to throw a Shakespearean supporting cast his way, too.
   Moose Malloy, a force of nature and a storm at that, flits through the story with all the grace of a vampire bat – tied to the back of a raging bull in a China shop. Everything is larger than life in Chandler’s fiction, and Moose Malloy is the poster-child for that theme. It’s the switch to pursuit of jade in the second case, tied to the first case, that still fascinates on returning to this book.

The High Window. I liked this, read it again and it left me cold…but reading them rapidly one after another creates more of an atmosphere inside these books. This time around, I appreciated far much more was going on and it didn’t leave me flat at all. It jumped up off the floor and took its rightful place back there in the series.
   You’ll notice I’m trying to limit myself to the details of the plot. I’ll throw this at you, instead. Another Arthurian reference. Marlowe is almost Sir Galahad. But worn-out. World-weary. Shop-soiled. Given his womanising, he’s more like Lancelot after accidentally-on-purpose sleeping with the Queen while the King is away. More chess pieces, of course. Yes, I returned to liking this one. Maybe it is the overall package, reading book after book, relentlessly, that helped.

The Lady in the Lake. There’s little that’s more Arthurian than a reference to a lady in a lake. Here, we are in the mid-1940s and America is at war. This is the home front that American troops are defending, and what a crime-ridden setting it is. Or is there a crime? The lady found in the lake might have died there accidentally or suicidally. Sure, there’s a murder suspect. But there’s always a murder suspect. The lakeside setting takes Marlowe out of his usual stomping-ground, but he goes back and forth.
   We have series continuity, with Chandler building up the corrupt Bay City. Characters from one book turn up in another. Marlowe sees a few familiar faces across the seven-novel series. At this point, we’ve reached that peculiar blip in the road.
   Chandler worked in Hollywoodland, and detested it. He turned in a script called Playback. Chandler was paid for this, but the movie was never made. Nice work if you can get it. Later, at the end of his career, Chandler took elements of the screenplay and worked his way up to a book of the same title.
   But. The best place for Playback, in the series, is after The Lady in the Lake and before The Little Sister. If Chandler had worked up the energy, he could’ve rewritten Playback to follow in the trail of continuity after The Lady in the Lake. I still believe that’s where it should have gone, in the reading order. Alas, it was not to be. Playback became something else, entirely.

The Little Sister. Chandler throws Shakespeare at us early in this one, with a reference to Lady Macbeth. The devastating level of world-weariness in this book is something to marvel at. I’m talking about chapter thirteen. Chandler, through Marlowe, has a go at California, Los Angeles, and Hollywood and he takes no prisoners. Expect blatting from the radio.
   Chapter thirteen is a driving scene, giving Marlowe a platform on which to rage against California. It’s one of the standout pieces of writing in this novel. Chandler gives us more bile in a later driving scene when he’s heading to a confrontation. He’s not done.
   Of the plot I can say nothing. If you had a hard time working out who killed the chauffeur way at the start of these books, you’ll be scratching your head over the murder confessions in this one. When people turn up to cover for someone else, bending Marlowe’s ear with an agenda, where does the truth lie but dead in the dust…
   Much of the book turns on the murder of Moe Stein. He deserved murdering, of course. I’ll draw your attention to a doctor: Vincent Lagardie. We’ll return to that point in The Long Good-Bye. Anyway, this entry in the series stays with you. It’s later Chandler, and he’s still on top form.

The Long Good-Bye. Everything builds to this. It’s the finest finish to a detective series that I can think of. Yes, it is followed by Playback. But the series ends here. You know it. I know it. This is a much longer book, and Chandler uses the space to let characters breathe a little: Marlowe, in particular.
   There’s a piece of plotting around finding a crooked doctor. The letter V features big-time. No, Marlowe isn’t hunting for Vincent Lagardie. But isn’t it strange that, across two books, there are four doctors associated with the letter V, and all of them are crooks…
   Marlowe finds the crooked doctor almost immediately. But he can’t be sure. So he follows up on the other leads. Dead-ends, barely worth the shoe-leather. But I liked the depiction of chasing after loose ends and tying them off before returning to the better prospect and hunting the true culprit down.
   In a shorter novel, Chandler would have limited himself to one suspect. To save space in the book, if nothing else. But this novel opens up, takes its time, and builds to that ending. This is as late as Chandler gets. The series ends here. Except that he dusts off a screenplay from the 1940s and has one more go.

Playback. This is a much shorter book. Lean. Chandler gets on with it. And I like it. There are great moments in here. It’s no way to end a series, not after The Long Good-Bye. But here we are. More tough guys making with tough guy acts. I remember one character vividly, and that’s an old man in the hotel, the man who could lip-read. Call it a hunch. I felt sure Raymond Chandler was writing himself into the story. No, I’m not the first to think that, and I won’t be the last.
   This is the end, and it is okay. It would be much better to shunt this story back before The Little Sister and to edit accordingly. That’s where this one truly belongs. After this, there was an attempt to write again. Chandler produced a fragment completed by Robert B. Parker. That’s called Poodle Springs. But we’re not talking about that here.
   What did I think of the series? It worked. In its time, it was steeped in the 1930s and 1940s. Here and now. Fresh. If you go wading through the fiction and find it cliché-ridden, remember those clichés had to start somewhere. Marlowe, for better or worse, became a template for the tough private detective.
   Chandler’s writing endures. Readers waltzing unawares into the fiction will discover that hard-boiled gritty writing isn’t terribly nice to women. It doesn’t show men in a great light, either. Everyone and everything is tough. The toughest character in the books? Los Angeles. Not even an earthquake could erase the stain of it.

 

IN TIMES OF DRAGONS.

Time for a double album by Tori Amos. This isn’t a review. At this stage in her career, many reviews come in two flavours.
   One: Delighted. I haven’t enjoyed an album of hers so much since I listened to ALBUM OF HERS I ENJOYED SO MUCH.
   Two: Disappointed. I haven’t enjoyed an album of hers since LAST ALBUM OF HERS I ENJOYED.
   By the presence of these typed words, go with the idea that I consider this double album a hit. Here, we have an artist looking to the future and how the fuck we got there. So, yes, there are references to the past on this sonic sprawl of a musical map. One of those references I found jaw-dropping, but we’ll get to that bit.
   Direct musical reference that jumps off the album and slaps you hard with candy-floss? SILENT ALL THESE YEARS. Tori sang that on her first…I keep reminding myself of this. Her second first album. There was a first first album, but we don’t talk about that in case we frighten the horses. Y KANT TORI READ was her first first album. It died foaming at the mouth, shot in the street and left for the coyotes to fight over. The winning coyote feasted on the remains and then died of dysentery.
   Her album dived, bombed, dive-bombed, sank, tanked, stiffed, corpsed, croaked, and came into foot-based contact with the bucket. There’s this thing in Hollywoodland. You walk into a place and people stare at you to see if you are famous. Then the same people try not to look as though they’ve recognised you, presuming you are famous.
   After that awkward moment, people go back to their drinks, meals, drugs, or whatever entertains them on their phones in the dying minutes of a society that’s about to replace phones with brain implants.
   In Tori’s case, she’d appear on the scene and people instantly recognised her as the girl whose album just dived, bombed, dive-bombed, sank, tanked, stiffed, corpsed, croaked, and came into foot-based contact with the bucket. Awkward moment is awkward.
   So we don’t talk about that album as her first. It’s a pre-career foray into pleasing the record company and no one else. Come to think of it, not even the record company – pointing at its watch, and eyeing the contract for those other albums in the works.
   For a long time, I didn’t buy the damned thing. Hell of a long time. I guess talking to someone else who was really into her music, I learned it wasn’t the end of the world if you listened to those early tunes. By the time I bought the album, somewhere along the way, I’d learned that CYNTHIA ROTHROCK IS CHINA O’BRIEN.
   Tori reeled from how shitty the music business can be. Some diseases it’s best to catch early in life. So she hired herself out to sing on the soundtrack of Cynthia’s martial arts movie. I’m guessing I saw the film seconds before I encountered Tori’s first album, Little Earthquakes. We don’t talk about the earlier album.
   Y KANT TORI READ. Why can’t Tori spell? Then she’d be Tori Spelling. What of this album? There are enough prototype songs on there. With a spot of music production wizardry, hell, they wouldn’t be too out of place on Tori’s first two albums: Little Earthquakes and Under the Pink. After listening to the pre-album album, I realised the world kept rolling through space.
   Of interest to see where she was heading, certainly. Everything around the album was forced through the soul-destroyer, pressed into the cookie-cutter, and slapped against the wall of popular culture to see what would stick. Not much. She was fucking buried under over-production. No one came to the funeral, so she clawed her way back out.
   Not today, Satan, not today. And so she bounced off the headstone, felt the pain of seeing a blurry career inscription there, and carried the fuck on. Carrying on brought the world Little Earthquakes. Two songs behind her, Tori sings Silent all these Years. And many albums later, in these times, IN TIMES OF DRAGONS, Tori references that song.
   It’s one of several references to the past as a reflecting wall, distorted in the heat-haze, showing us how the fuck we reached the future. Yes, there’s a harpsichord. And when you hear it on this release, you are legally obliged to think of BOYS FOR PELE. The harpsichord album. PELE was so much more than that. The first album she produced. PELE was so much more than that.
   Incidentally, Tori placed a reference going back to an earlier work long before all this. BOYS FOR PELE gave us HEY JUPITER. The line took my leather off the shelf is a direct reference to Little Earthquakes and the song LEATHER. Fight me, internet, but not too hard. Play the songs. Peace in our time. You believe me, now. Wasn’t so difficult, was it?
   So. No. She’s not new to referencing earlier albums.
   Tori has played the harpsichord since BOYS FOR PELE gave us a song about a PROFESSIONAL WIDOW. But the harpsichord reference here is deliberately throwing us back to that place in space-time. Y’know the place. Where she threw men into the volcano for reasons of peace and understanding. BOYS FOR PELE is so much more than that.
   IN TIMES OF DRAGONS. Harpsichording back to earlier times. The jaw-dropping reference, if you know, you know, but we’ll never really know…is a reference to an album, a band, the lead singer of that band. Holy fuck. What is going on here?
   This line, from the first track, SHUSH…
   Preamble. Before we hit the line, Tori asks CAN I LIVE THROUGH THIS? Okay. Let’s list the line. Courtney, thank you. The album referenced is Live Through This, by the band HOLE, fronted by Courtney Fucking Love. What was the feud about? Was there ever really a feud? If you know, you know. But we’ll never truly know.

YOKO ONO: Why the fuck do they all hate me so much?

COURTNEY FUCKING LOVE: Hold my fucking beer that I just pissed in. Wait. It’s someone else’s beer. Hold it anyway. I’ll come back and piss in it. Like an autograph. You’ll want to freeze that. For posterity and shit. I’ll come back and shit in the piss in the beer before you freeze it. Wait there.

Tori and Courtney had a feud. Or didn’t have one. If they’d never met, where was this feud? How could they feud with a door between them…how close did they come to meeting? And who was it all about? Trent Reznor? Was he the war-wounded neutral Swiss teddy bear these two fought over, with everyone discarding everyone else long before the non-dust settled, and tell-all tell-nothing songs written after the non-fact…just subtracted from the lore…
   I don’t know. The whole thing plays out like an alternative universe history, stuck in a feverish supervillain movie. Occasionally, the supervillain action is punctuated by intrusive superhero moments, but the villains soon triumph. We can rewind as much or as little as we like. All we can genuinely say is…there’s a persistent idea of a feud that involved those three people or none of those three people. Mr Reznor, that TRON album, though.
   But to reference an album by HOLE and to follow it up with a thank you to Queen Courtney. Yes, that’s jaw-dropping. The harpsichord callback. Many other ingredients here. A lot of looking at things way over yonder in that other country of the past. They record things differently there.
   That girl who wrote and sang SILENT ALL THESE YEARS. Where did she go? Across the world. What did she see? More things to write songs about.
   There’s rumbling, grumbling, from people who preferred her early work. “When she was angry.” You do know she’s angrier now, right? She sets fire to pianos by playing them, not soaking them in petrol. Anger is a scalpel in her hand. Before, in the early work, it was a flamethrower on her back. And I’m all for the flamethrower, believe me. But the scalpel is the tool of choice, now, when it comes to anger. And it is a delight to hear Tori wield it.
   I didn’t come here to review the album, or her other albums. Though I quickly revisited Little Earthquakes, BOYS FOR PELE, from the choirgirl hotel and Unrepentant Geraldines. And I heartily recommend you do the same. I always misremember from the choirgirl hotel as greetings from the choirgirl hotel. Can’t seem to shake that. (Phrasing from an earlier blog post that’s seared into my brain.)
   Underrated Geraldines. I underrate that one myself. It’s a hazy misty experience walking away from it. When I return to it, I remember the album while I’m there. Now choirgirl, documenting turmoil, stays with me long after the music stops. IN TIMES OF DRAGONS sent me back through a winding path that looks different now, from way over here in the future.
   The sparkles on the pathway are the same. But the path itself changed, with time’s perspective. What does the album imagery remind me of, in the accompanying booklet? The artwork of Dave McKean. I’ll just leave that thought on the part of the pathway blocked off by thorns, nature’s defence mechanism telling us to go around, and move on.
   What of my retrospective, in light of listening to the dragon-themed songs? I paid particular attention to BOYS FOR PELE and the song PROFESSIONAL WIDOW. And I still don’t know. We’ll never know.
   What we do know, though, is that Tori sings to and about Courtney Love this time around. The themes, the concept to the concept double album, these I leave you to discover, uncover, ponder, meander across, and wade through by yourself. What I really came here to talk about…was this. Technical issues.
   I took the CD from the cardboard, as I’ve done countless times when opening albums up to inspection. Love me some physical media. I had a decision ahead of me. Pop the disc into a machine that would play music. Or pop the disc into a machine plugged into my computer, and rip the CD to my hard drive.
   Just so you know. When I pay for a CD, I can legally make a back-up copy for my own emergency use. Tori isn’t done out of her royalty payment. I get to play the album without hunting around for it. If the CD pressing rots away, I have my back-up in the fantastical musical archive. Emergency thwarted. Inconvenience foiled. Some companies give you digital access to a copy through Amazon when you buy the disc anyway. Lose the Amazon account, though, and. Smell that? I love the smell of physical media in the morning.
   Which brings me to the fantastical musical archive known as Windows Media Player: it is not what it once was. I liked the best version best, and everything “updated” and “improved” after that has been, frankly, rubbish. Summary. I decided to rip both discs, one after the other.
   First, I turned the volume off. The music starts up during the ripping process. Didn’t want to hear the album ahead of hearing the album. I’d copy both discs, and then start playing.
   Well, I copied both discs over. (Or did I?) In the olden times, you’d copy the disc and all the information sat there. Album. Artist. Year of first publication. Titles of every track. You didn’t have to type nuthin’. Nuthin’, I tells ya. That’s all changed. Scoured away. You can’t search for it and match it all up from internet sources. Laboriously, you must type everythin’. Everythin’, I tells ya.
   I glanced at the track titles on the cardboard. Information, just waiting. First of the two album listings. Last track caught my eye. STRAWBERRY MOON. I wouldn’t look to the lyrics until I’d listened to the music. So there I am. The music is queued up and ready. I have to make the time to listen to it, and I do.
   Of course I enjoy the album. Double album. Concept. What am I looking for? Tori putting the word girl into yet another song. Anything else? Tori putting the word here into yet another song. She does...and she does.
   First disc. That last track, though. It builds like a full song, but it stops short abruptly, leaving me wanting more. I guess that’s her aim. Leave the listeners hungry and then dive on in, tackling the second disc. Right? It stays with me. STRAWBERRY MOON. Ominous. Lasts about 22 seconds.
   Then I am into the second album. Builds and builds. Theme. Musical styles. The piano. I came for the piano, and stayed for the harpsichord. After that, there was no walking away from Tori’s work. Harpsichord. Damn. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.
   It is time to go back in and do all the typing for the musical archive. And I see that the first album is one track short. Technical difficulties. Wait. Which track is missing? If STRAWBERRY MOON is 22 seconds and there’s something missing, then the copying procedure cut out before ripping the whole album. I do some cross-referencing, and I find tracks with each duration listed.
   Okay. STRAWBERRY MOON never made it to the computer at all, and the 22 seconds I listened to…that slice came from a song called VEINS: it cut off at a pause in the lyrics that left me thinking this was an incredibly bold move for a song – just fucking stopping. Even by Tori’s standards, way out there. And she’s way out there. Obviously, I didn’t know it was a pause in the lyrics. To me, the whole thing stopped. Now I knew better.
   Time to fix this. I added the two full songs to the album. What I thought was the STRAWBERRY MOON, up close, proved to be VEINS. Not STRAWBERRY MOON at all. Then it was time to listen to STRAWBERRY MOON. And that’s when the album spoke to me. Throwing in a joke. For the hell of it.
   Out of the aether, and I do love me some aether, came the words: THAT IS NOT STRAWBERRY MOON! I know many a true word is spoken in jest, but, fucking hell…

 

REVISITING A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Upon revisiting To Kill a Mockingbird, reading the graphic novel, I decided to revisit another story adapted by the same artist – Fred Fordham. And so…
   I turned to A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula Le Guin. No Tolkien world-building here. Her creation is made of earth and sea rather than a vast continent, and features a mighty wizard in the days when he was not so mighty. It takes hard work to furnish a tale that’s an easy read. And I’d throw in the use of heavy thought to create a world as though made with a light touch.
   It wasn’t made with a light touch. Ursula used sleight-of-pen to give the impression that it all came easily to her. There’s no Gandalf here, or any of that wizard’s predecessors. No Merlin. And yet…
   Ursula gave herself over to the notion of a very famous magician. What was he like, back when he wore short trousers? Merlin, the Boy Wizard. How do you tell adventures of Gandalf the Kid? Do you just let the youngster magick his way around the world, or is there some mystical college you send these young enchanters to?
   Her story is not a story of Gandalf. More of a question. Where do all these Gandalfs and Merlins and Väinämöinens come from? Earthsea is about getting away from the overly-familiar story of a powerful wizard, especially in using the basic building blocks of wizardy tales. The quest, in Ursula’s fiction, is internal.
   Gandalf serves the rhythm of a mighty quest against relentless evil. And that’s a tale of Frodo’s exploits more than it is a tale of Gandalf’s. Merlin is a frequent visitor to another character’s story: Arthur – the Boy King.
   Strip that powerful wizard stuff away. Start with the foolish youth who has a point to prove to the world and to himself by showing he is no foolish youth. Watch as the future legend falls flat on his face in the early days, the youthful fool.
   Ursula’s story is one of magic. Magic comes to the forefront of this book. Authors are notorious for writing stories packed with magic rules…that serve the plot at the time, flash-in-the-pan style. Very much of the moment. The moment passes, and the rules of magic are altered, misplaced, forgotten, revived, reversed…
   Maybe there’s precious little magic in the fantasy world. There’d still be a place for wizards. And they’d be powerful, no matter how little magic they made use of.
   Bill Seligman, in a piece published in 1977, put rules to the framework of Tolkien’s magic by slotting Gandalf into the roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons. Going by Gandalf’s exploits in the books, and turning to the D&D magic system, Seligman proposed that Gandalf was no more powerful than a fifth level Magic-User.
   (March, 1977. The Dragon: GANDALF WAS ONLY A FIFTH LEVEL MAGIC-USER. I’ve sworn off footnotes. There’s an overwhelming sense of wanting to use them for comedy purposes alone, and no good would come of that.)
   Some context, for non-gamers. Your wizardy chappie starts out at first level and, through adventure after adventure, rises in level, power, and stature. Broadly, the first three levels of the character’s game-life are about survival. The next three levels offer more options for adventure. Truly powerful world-altering characters are of much higher level. So, in a game sense, at fifth level, Gandalf would be versatile, but not awesome.
   This doesn’t track with the reputation Gandalf wields in Tolkien’s world. There’s a very good reason for that. Roleplaying games are not novels. The concept of the hobby as a business did not exist when Tolkien finished writing The Lord of the Rings.
   Tolkien died in 1973 as Dungeons & Dragons was being put together for publication in 1974. Several Tolkien-based references appeared in early D&D and had to be removed on pain of litigation. Hobbits were out. Halflings came in. It was that or pay Saul Zaentz a load of money.
   Official Tolkien roleplaying games came and went, as rights were rented out or expired. (While I sat typing this, an advert for a Tolkien-themed roleplaying game dropped into my e-mail.) Each new game offers a magic system. Magic exists in Tolkien’s writing. But it doesn’t match the magic system used in D&D. That takes inspiration from the writing of Jack Vance.
   D&D magic has literal rules to it. Much of the spellcasting is flashy. You’d increase the movie budget significantly just by welding D&D magic onto The Lord of the Rings. There’s before The Lord of the Rings in terms of fantasy stories and there’s after. There’s also before Dungeons & Dragons and after.
   Today, if you feel like writing a fantasy novel, you might delve into a game rulebook or two for ideas on how magic works in a setting. D&D magic is casual. Magic = spells, and spells are plentiful. You’d ignore how spells distort the world, only concerning yourself with how spells save the characters, or else you’d embrace the chaos…
   Do you need hospitals in your fantasy world if magic healing is plentiful? If you can create water on a whim, the Great Inaccessible Desert doesn’t sound so uncrossable after all. Turning lead into gold will flood the market. So the magician who can do this is a threat to society as a whole. He must be stopped. Or bought off. Not with gold, though. I see a flaw in there, somewhere.
   Magic has rules. Story demands structure.
   Back to Ursula. She, too, was writing before the first copy of D&D was sold, and didn’t need to consider the game of magic. Incidentally, if Gandalf is only fifth level in a game…which edition of the game would that be? Just let it go.
   All a writer has to do is consider the blank page. Ursula had to rewrite the wizard story, rather than just write it. And so. Our hero, Ged, is powerful. He’s heading places. The future is awesome. But first, the early years. Conflict. Drama. Tension. Mistakes. Learning from some of those mistakes. Making more mistakes.
   Magic, in Earthsea, comes at a price. There is balance. And if you push the balance in your favour, the balance shoves back. In this way, Ursula doesn’t trap herself into writing up a D&D spellbook. (Though, if she’d done that, Gary Gygax would’ve certainly perked up his ears and started scribbling notes.) Instead, she shows that magic is about making choices. Also. Actions have consequences.
   The magic in Earthsea is one of the most elegant depictions of magic I’ve encountered. Edward Eager, let’s call him an American disciple of E. Nesbit, gave us Half Magic. Magic wishes abound in the tale, but only at half-strength and for comedy. Characters wishing to benefit from full wishes have to double the description to gain the full wish. This also leads to comedy, and trouble. Yes, Hijinks. Shenanigans. Misadventures.
   Eager controls the rules with an iron glove. Tolkien has a loose hand on the tiller. C.S. Lewis provides this bit of magic here and that bit of magic there. Some of the magic is very old and deep, and woe unto ye if you seek to quote the rules of magic to any entity who was there when the deep magic was written.
   Ursula…gives us balance. A quest for equilibrium in an ever-changing world. Action and reaction. She sciences this up. There is a cost to making magical alteration. You could see an ecological theme in here. (For it exists.) What does magic cost the magician? Is there anything in the awkwardness of a young wizard’s journey that’s going to teach the much older character when looking back?
   A Wizard of Earthsea barely reminds me of anything else. It feels fresh. New. There are, perhaps, a few touchstones. Ursula wasn’t born when John Masefield wrote The Midnight Folk. Susan Cooper’s magical cycle, The Dark is Rising, shares something with John Masefield and Ursula le Guin. There’s a sense of flow.
   Random events in The Midnight Folk tune themselves into a sense of flow. And that goes on in Susan Cooper’s books. It seems to be everything in Ursula’s story. Granted, the flow is aided by the maritime nature of the tale.
   It’s not something I can put a finger on, and point to, in an illuminated manuscript. I sensed it, and I recognised something similar in the writings of Masefield and Cooper. Tolkien’s world is too vast, detailed, and intricate to give me that particular sense of flow. The gears grind slowly and relentlessly in Tolkien’s grand design.
   C.S. Lewis offers a mosaic feel to the tales set in far-off Narnia. Not this vague notion I’m trying to convey. Perhaps the vagueness in conveying it is part of the atmosphere. But even here, in good company, Masefield and Cooper, there’s a distinction worth making.
   Tolkien, certainly with The Hobbit, where his saga began, E. Nesbit, Edward Eager, C.S. Lewis, John Masefield, Susan Cooper…all have had this label applied at some point. They wrote books for children. To some, the Earthsea books are seen as for children.
   No. Recreating a story of wizards and magic so that it seems new, fresh, and hard to pin down…was not something Ursula did for children. Granted, children weren’t banned from reading those books. If you had the stomach for it as a child, maybe you gained something from The Lord of the Rings. And if you discovered The Chronicles of Narnia as an adult, you weren’t breaking any laws.
   Some books read in childhood may interest you enough to return to them when you are older and supposedly wiser, it’s true. I realise I’ve not mentioned the plot. Haven’t I, though? Ged is a young wizard, in need of training.
   He magicks his way through a maritime world, and learns the hard way that magic has a cost. Ged learns that striking the right balance is a difficult thing, hard to pin down. He heads off on a quest of his own making, for he is his own worst enemy and must leave to confront the error of his ways.
   Oh, yes, and something about a dragon. I’ll leave you to discover that for yourself if you haven’t read the book. The graphic novel adaptation is another John Fordham work. What to say of adaptations? I’ve seen adaptations of The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, the sequel to The Midnight Folk – The Box of Delights – some stuff by E. Nesbit, nothing by Edward Eager…and I’ve only seen the trailer for a fucking awful attempt at The Dark is Rising.
   Yes, I can judge the movie as quite awful based entirely on the atrocious trailer. It would make you reach for a Susan Cooper book if you felt in need of an antidote to the travesty on screen. Which takes me…nowhere. Certainly not in the direction of adaptations of Ursula’s works.
   I haven’t watched any of that stuff. And I won’t watch any of that stuff. If you seek an adaptation, try the graphic novel. There’s a sense of scale to the world, an atmosphere of menace in even considering the use of magic. And character aplenty.
   What level of wizard would Ged be, in a Dungeons & Dragons game? He wouldn’t be in a D&D game at all. (Ged faces the challenge of a dragon in one book. And there’s a dungeon later, but we mustn’t run ahead of the story sequence.) As I type, there is no commercial roleplaying game based on A Wizard of Earthsea. There’s the book, and a graphic novel adaptation. Steer clear of the moving image for now. Perhaps someone with passion for the story will take a decent crack at the whole series, one day. On big screen, or small.

 

HEAT 2: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Wading into a movie by Michael Mann. That scene, in a diner, where those two characters have a truly mad conversation? You look at that chat and, on the surface, it’s a regular talk. Underneath it all, though, the conversation is mad. Elsewhere in the movie, there’s criminal activity involving the use of a drill.
   And the main criminal in that film wants out. He’ll do one last big score. This guy contemplates his fate while staring at water. Why? He’s a Michael Mann Man. And he uses a lot of…Michael Mannerisms.
   His name is Frank. The movie is Thief. In another diner his name is Neil. The movie is HEAT. That scene, in a diner, where those two characters have a truly mad conversation? You look at that chat and, on the surface, it’s a regular talk. Underneath it all, though, the conversation is mad. Elsewhere in the movie, there’s criminal activity involving the use of a drill.
   And the main criminal in that film wants out. He’ll do one last big score. This guy contemplates his fate while staring at water. He knows that whatever time he gets…is luck.
   In the Miami Vice movie, Gong Li manages to tell us, twice over, that TIME IS LUCK. This blog post is hidden in the wheel well, to fool you into thinking it’s the only one.
   HEAT 2 is the book prequel/sequel to a movie by Michael Mann. We’ll see if the book is made into a movie sequel. The one thing stopping that would be Mann’s death. He’s 83 as I type this, and I guess he’s looking to make one last big score. Whatever time he gets is luck. So. What does all this have to do with the price of tea in China?
   To have any hope of enjoying HEAT 2, you must be steeped in the Michael Mannverse.
   The book is a sequel to a movie. Think on that for a second. There is no novelisation of the film itself. That throws a few curves into what should otherwise be a straight road of a book. Mann teamed up with a novelist to bring HEAT 2 to life.
   I don’t know which novelist for sure, but a casual glance at the internet hints at two writers being in the frame for the job: both men. When the collaboration finally hit the shelves, crime writer Meg Gardiner had her name on the cover.
   HEAT 2 is the first Meg Gardiner book I’ve read. I’ve watched an unholy amount of Michael Mann movies, television products, and analysis of same. Mann likes to fix things after the cinema release of a movie.
   No. Better to say that he hates to fix things, but he fixes. So Frank, contemplative, looking on a seascape from an alien world, comes from a scene restored to Thief. Filmed, but cut out for the cinema. Sometimes things go the other way...
   Mann removed the word detritus from HEAT. It’s there in HEAT 2. The word stood out in Mann’s movie, was conspicuous by its absence when cut, and is therefore notable for its appearance in the Meg Gardiner collaboration.
   Again. To have any hope of enjoying HEAT 2, you must be steeped in the Michael Mannverse. Okay, maybe Meg Gardiner’s readership came on over to see what the fuss was about. But. This book is for people who have seen and enjoyed the film. That’s a bare minimum requirement.
   It helps if you’ve watched…
   The Jericho Mile.
   Thief.
   Manhunter.
   Miami Vice for television and the Miami Vice movie.
   Crime Story. L.A. Takedown. Robbery Homicide Division. Luck. Tokyo Vice. All for television.
   The car advert with Benicio del Toro. This is for Mercedes-Benz, with the title Lucky Star.
   Go beyond HEAT and watch the deleted scenes from that movie as well.
   Then there’s the cluster of films: The Insider, Ali, Collateral, the other cut of Miami Vice, Public Enemies, both cuts of Blackhat, and interviews with Michael Mann.
   Yes, all the other stuff. He had a hand in The Kingdom. It feels like a Michael Mann film. Speaking of which, I’d recommend To Live and Die in L.A. It’s an attempt at a Michael Mann movie without Mann as the director. This features William L. Petersen, who has a bit-part in Thief and is the Michael Mann Man in Manhunter.
   What else? All the other stuff I didn’t mention. The Last of the Mohicans, and so on. If you want to go above and beyond the call of duty in watching a series put together by a bunch of people who went above and beyond the call of duty, there’s the gargantuan ONE HEAT MINUTE, which analyses HEAT cinematically, one minute at a time.
   I’d think about the length of the movie before you even contemplate diving deep on that one. Every minute of a very long movie is given its own episode. If you think you have the patience to handle a 40-minute discussion of one minute of film footage, try it on. And on and on. Half an hour, 40 minutes, an hour…minute by filmic minute.
   An unholy amount of content, right there.
   Where to start? Chuck Adamson. Chicago police. On the hunt for Neil McCauley and his whole fucking crew. Adamson co-created Crime Story for television. You’ll spot him in the movie Thief, on which he advised. He told Mann a whole bunch of anecdotes…
   Neil McCauley was a criminal who called off a heist when he heard a sound in an empty building. McCauley correctly realised the noise was from cop surveillance on the site. This story is worked into the movie HEAT. The cops and the robbers know who they are in this whole situation. Adamson meets the criminal on the street and decides to have coffee with McCauley.
   That scene becomes the biggest scene in HEAT. I know. For some of you, the action is the juice. I’ll settle for it…you know what I mean…I’ll buy that. Moving on. Adamson is in on an ambush of a heist, leaving McCauley and his crew nowhere to go. One guy temporarily escapes. At the movies, he becomes the character of Chris. Adamson shoots McCauley dead.
   Mann writes it up as a script of 180 pages. In the movie business, a page of script generates one minute of film. The time isn’t right, the stars don’t align, so he guts the script and turns it into a television movie called L.A. Takedown.
   Pre-production on a project is a huge thing for Mann. He spent longer filming the bank scene in HEAT than he spent on pre-production for the TV movie version. It took days to film for television and months to make the story fit on the big screen.
   Mann recycles things. Xander Berkeley is on television in Miami Vice. He’s Waingro in L.A. Takedown. And he’s a very nervous Ralph in HEAT. Ralph’s actions lead to the destruction of a television set. You’ll find that scene in Crime Story.
   What’s my point? If you had to write a prequel/sequel to a Michael Mann movie, you’d have to deliver a lot of Michael Mannerisms. You’d need to serve up a montage. Highlights. There’d be no way around that.
   But it’s okay. Mann did that already, across movies and television. Driven men, good at what they do, do bad things. They stare at water. Obsess over time, and luck, and the price of tea in China. They are Michael Mann Men.
   And they must deal with Michael Mann Women. There are two types of Michael Mann Woman. The first: she’s seen some shit. And the second: she’s not seen any shit, but she’s gonna see a shitload of shit soon. None of this ends well.
   In HEAT, Diane Venora plays Justine. She’s married to the driven detective, out on the edge, Vincent Hanna. It’s Diane who has her line about detritus cut from the movie. She gives a great speech after everyone’s gone home.
   The detective returns to the restaurant to pick up his wife after dealing with the fallout of Waingro’s murderous inclinations. Waingro of the television movie is incredibly different from Waingro of the big screen outing.
   Justine lays into Vincent and his inability to be there. (Vital, given Vincent’s command to a snitch to BE THERE elsewhere in this film.) Justine’s speech is riveting. It nails Vincent to the restaurant floor. Sets out his faults. He responds by stating, pretty much, that these faults are assets in the hunt for criminals.
   Faults, in trying to keep a marriage going. His third. HEAT unfolds with criminal inevitability. Cop and robber are tuned in to an exclusively shared frequency. Both understand each other. More than that. They understand that they are the only two players on this field who understand each other. This field is the entire world. A whole planet, and only these two guys relate to their opposites.
   How do we know they are opposites? Vincent Hanna picks up a gun and leaves his home. Neil McCauley arrives home and sits a gun down. Both are driven men on opposite sides of the law. Mann spells it out using everything. Cinematography. Sound. Editing. The guns, clothes, everything. Both men, home, strike a pose on opposite sides of the law. This is all deliberate.

In the case of Neil McCauley, we’re treated to his scene contemplating water in a colour called Michael Mann Blue™^. What is this? It signifies mood, setting, terrain, forthcoming actions, choices, mistakes within choices, and fate. Mann recycles this colour or variations of it across his works.
   The movie leads to a clash. And, leading away from that clash, into possibilities. Clash. The bank robbery goes to hell. Only Neil and Chris make it out, and Chris is barely in any shape to carry on. All Neil has to do is drive to the airport and he’s gone. Possibilities.
   But he’s not the guy to let things go. His way out is for absolutely ever. Never coming back. A multimillionaire. He’s off to Fiji, to stare into the ocean and contemplate life. Except. He has to kill Waingro, who set him up to take the biggest fall. And so he does stop by to kill Waingro.
   Neil has brought a woman to the scene of the impending crime. Eady is the Michael Mann Woman who has not seen any shit. From the moment Neil is exposed as a participant in an ultra-violent robbery, Eady sees a shitload of shit. And none of that ends well for her.
   Adamson killed McCauley. The movie gives us the same story. Cop kills robber. It’s a Warner Brothers movie, by way of Regency. Turns out that crime does pay, but at what cost? Neil’s friend Chris escapes, knowing he can never be with his wife or child again. And? There’s a prequel/sequel book to this? Where the fuck can that even go?
   We’re told on the cover that the book deals with 1988 to 2000. Meg Gardiner had to give the audience the Michael Mannverse. But that’s okay. Michael Mann already handed us that. It is difficult, to move fixed pieces into a story. Playing with someone else’s building blocks, according to certain – very certain – rules and expectations.
   Clearly, Meg Gardiner faced the same problem everyone else ever had with Michael Mann. He’s thorough. Driven. I guess he stares at seas, oceans, lakes. Contemplating his existence. HEAT featured pretty rough shooting locations. Anyone who worked on that movie and The Last of the Mohicans just shrugged it all off.
   What did Meg Gardiner do? She got on with it, and had a blast. Is it a Michael Mann crime story? Yes, it is. What must that feature? The idea that time is luck. We tick that box off. Someone must stare out into water and contemplate the meaning of things.
   Movie: Mann gives us Neil McCauley staring out at water. Michael Mann Blue™^. Book: Meg Gardiner offers us the detective, Vincent Hanna, discovering the same location and staring out at the same body of water.
   We have confirmed lore. It is hinted at, in Al Pacino’s performance as Hanna, that the detective indulges in cocaine from time to time. We had this revelation in discussions of the movie. It’s in the book as part of the official fabric of the story.
   There are loads of tiny details here, from across the Mannverse. I mentioned deleted scenes from HEAT. One is a short but memorable sequence with a visit to a fence/informant in a place packed with cheap television sets. Cut. Gone. Lost.
   Recycled as a scene for use in the book.
   How does the story unfold? It opens with the consequences of the bank job. Eady has seen some shit. She puts in an appearance to tie off a loose end or two. Then she’s out. Justine and her daughter Lauren are given a few moments in the narrative.
   We learn that Vincent Hanna did not divorce all of his wives. One died. Does this contradict the movie? When Nate is discussing Hanna’s career with Neil McCauley, there’s a mention of two divorces. Current wife is Justine. Maybe Nate got the details wrong. Nate makes a few errors of judgement in the movie.
   He misjudges a businessman, leading to the betrayal at the bank. And he misjudges Neil, in giving away Waingro’s location…believing that Neil won’t give a shit. Neil gives a shit and blows Waingro away – creating the inevitable cops-and-robbers collision that ends the film. So here and there, Nate slips up.
   Looking back, I liked the use of current wife in the movie. It’s a small set-up for Justine’s ejection from Vincent’s life. Maybe he’s into women on Prozac. This is where he goes wrong. There’s a scene near the start of the film with Hanna in a stressful family situation. Wife and stepdaughter in the building. Hanna being asked about…well, being there…and he has to duck that responsibility to go and fight crime. So he dashes downstairs.
   And we have that near the end of the film. Hanna in a very stressful family situation. Wife and stepdaughter in the building: now a hospital rather than a home. And another conversation about, y’know, being there. He dashes downstairs to fight crime.
   Maybe his earlier wife had just barely divorced him and he still thought of her as his wife when he raced to be with her as she died. That would square away the story.
   Where are these characters in the book? Justine, Lauren, and Eady are mentioned. But there’s a shift in focus to the flashback. It’s 1988, and Neil is still alive. Still taking down scores. He has another Michael Mann Woman to encounter. She’s seen some shit.
   Chris meets his future wife Charlene for the first time, and becomes obsessed with her. She’s seen some shit. The other members of the crew, Michael and Trejo, are given almost no time in the story.
   It’s Chicago, Chicago, Chicago. Hanna blew a guy away there, and we’re talking about a fucking maniac. Expect violence. Loose ends? In the immediate aftermath of the bank robbery in the nineties, we have Hanna not doing something.
   Waingro’s corpse is on a slab. There’ll be a DNA sample to try to tie him to unsolved crimes. He’ll be revealed as the serial killer Hanna was tracking in a movie subplot. We never reach that scene.
   Back to the eighties, in Chicago. Here are scenes we’ll never get, for reasons of story integrity. Hanna can only have a vague brush up against Neil and his crew. That must be maintained and it is maintained. Playing with other people’s building blocks.
   The narrative needs a Waingro villain. And it gets one. Neil is in town, planning to take down scores. The home invader, Wardell, is Waingro – but packing double the worst trouble anyone ever had. Neil is interested in scores. Wardell becomes interested in Neil. Hanna is there to take down Wardell. All sorts of cats running around after mice.
   Hanna is with the Chicago force. The only familiar person on his crew is Casals, who leaves Chicago with Vincent Hanna and goes to Los Angeles for the movie portion of the story. We get virtually nothing on Casals as a character.
   This is the Neil show, the Hanna show, and the Chris show, with Wardell flitting between sideshow and main show. There’s a theme here, concerning Wardell. In the movie HEAT, Hanna has a cop on his crew: Bosko.
   Bosko is played by Ted Levine. A Michael Mann regular. In Crime Story, Ted Levine plays a villain who just keeps getting away. And I was reminded of that character thread in this book. Crime Story is Chicago, through and through. In HEAT 2, Wardell, as scummy as he is, just keeps getting away.
   This is foreshadowing. Introduce your villain in the flashback. Give Neil and Chris more character background. Show that Vincent Hanna is the edgiest cop on the edge. Build Wardell as a stone killer.
   In the past, the action is the juice. We’re concerned with a high-risk score that has to go just right or everyone is dead. It’s taking the cartel’s money and vanishing into nowheresville, fast.
   This more or less plays out okay. What’s not okay is Wardell, who has cut into this crew. His plan is to throw his men at Neil’s men, post-heist, and reap the rewards.
   Everything is fucked up. We see why Neil avoids attachment after this. His crew has to fade away. Wardell, being the villain we’ll definitely return to in the future, escapes with loot. Building blocks. Plot set-ups. It’s very Chicago.
   Belongs to the Thief and Crime Story segments of Mann’s career. HEAT, before there was HEAT. This part of the job, Meg Gardiner does well. She does the other part well, too, but…before we even get into that…
   Time passes. Many characters are dead and gone. Vincent Hanna is still in Los Angeles, with his crew. Drucker. Casals. Who is left? Nate. Chris. His wife Charlene. We go through what happened to Chris and where he is now. Building a criminal empire. Staying away from his wife. Longing for her. In the movie…
   This part is super important. On the run, Chris can’t resist trying to see Charlene. It’s a trap. The cops are waiting. Charlene gives a signal. Warns him off. He drives out. Cops brace him on the street anyway.
   His identity holds up. And then we see him lost in despair in his car, as he is about to head off into a new life – leaving Charlene behind for eternity. That’s what we take away from the movie. The Michael Mann Woman sends the Michael Mann Man away. Cut and dried. That is it.
   So where can this book go? Wisely, it sticks to that level of finality. Chris does distantly see Charlene again through a window. They talk on the phone, but that is all.
   He knows he still has to let her go as the book unfolds. This could have been easy to fuck up. But finality is finality. We don’t want them to get back together, and we don’t need that. The characters don’t need that.
   Instead, we have this new criminal empire. It carries Chris back to Los Angeles. He wants to take down Vincent Hanna. Wardell resurfaces as the villain. What’s the tone of this later part of the book?
   It is generated from a cluster of movies: The Insider, Ali, Collateral, the other cut of Miami Vice, Public Enemies, and both cuts of Blackhat. For the cops-and-robbers stuff, you have Public Enemies. Mann occasionally dipped into biographical pictures. John Dillinger died in Chicago, so this is very Chicago.
   As for the other stuff. The Insider and Ali both feature dense layers of paranoia. Collateral, Miami Vice, and Blackhat are certainly involved in crime…but they give us something different. Collateral does what HEAT did before. It made Los Angeles seem new, fresh, showing us a hidden visual side to Hollywoodland that’s normally so generic in cinema.
   Pause for thought. HEAT did that. And then Collateral did that, all over again. Fresh, twice. Which brings me to Meg Gardiner. She has to give us these characters again. Fresh, twice over. So she leans heavily into areas that interested Mann to a greater degree in his later films. Oh, he was always interested in this stuff.
   However, there’s a shift from the earlier work. This exists in Collateral to an extent, but comes to the forefront in Miami Vice and leaps from the screen in Blackhat. Massive criminal organisations. Heavy on the tech-stuff. No borders. International activity.
   Electronics to the left of you, computers to the right, and people in the shadows. Driven. Dedicated. With high-end skill-sets.
   It’s hard to write about Miami Vice without stating underrated, or deserves a second look. Maybe check out the alternative cut of the movie. Barry Shabaka Henley, and we’ll call him a Michael Mann regular, is one of America’s best-kept acting secrets. He’s part of a cast dedicated to bringing the story to life.
   There are Michael Mann fans who walked away from fare like Miami Vice, Blackhat, and the television show Luck. “Mann had lost his touch.” They want HEAT. Okay. HEAT 2 isn’t for those people. HEAT 2 is for people who were into HEAT, Collateral, Miami Vice, and Blackhat.
   I know Blackhat is a hard sell. Cyber crime. Was it a movie out of time? Right on the edge of what was happening, and yet somehow a decade ahead of itself?
   A movie that was going to inform the mainstream audience of internet criminality’s all-pervasive threat – all the way up to government level. No one wanted to know. Shit like that’s all over the news on the daily, these days. In the fabric of existence, at breakfast and on through to sunset and after.
   If you don’t like Miami Vice or Blackhat, I have news for you. Put the HEAT movie on. Enjoy what you have. No one has ruined your movie experience. Coming up into the year 2000, HEAT 2 gives you a party like it’s 1999 vibe.
   Songs are referenced. But beyond those, you can feel the soundtrack. Mann sometimes employs multiple composers for his movie work. Across different eras, I could see Mann dividing the musical tasks accordingly. A little bit of Elliot Goldenthal here, James Newton Howard there, Lisa Gerrard with Pieter Bourke. Maybe the unused finale track Goldenthal created for HEAT. Mann likes to recycle, after all.
   Would HEAT 2 work as a movie? To get the job done, it’s pretty much a full recast of HEAT. Tom Sizemore, Val Kilmer, and Tom Noonan are gone. Noonan would have been a great return actor: the character of Kelso has a cyber security role to play in the book.
   The book works as a book. Once you are through the immediate aftermath of the bank heist in 1995, and the building of a villain back in 1988, the conflict escalates into 2000. Mann wasn’t happy, having to change the finale of Miami Vice. You can see the locations being used in the book. Unfinished business for Mann, perhaps.
   Things go phenomenally bad in Neil’s past. We are treated to the origin of Neil’s desire to visit Fiji. He never gets there. Chris is the one who is home-free at the end of the movie.
   In the book, the three-way firefight involving Vincent, Chris, and the beyond evil Wardell…that’s the payoff to Chris setting up a new life for himself. He’s closing in on a big score so that he can get out. But he turns from that to take a chance on extinguishing the detective who killed his buddy.
   If you can’t stand Miami Vice, this is no-go for you. Same for Blackhat. That’s on the basis that Chris involves himself in the life of a Michael Mann Woman. It’s a lengthy sequence. He has to be doing SOMETHING that’s going on far from Los Angeles. And if that global cyber criminal enterprise doesn’t float your boat, you’ll wonder why you are reading all of that stuff.
   This is meant to be 1,500 words, and I’ve gone over that for obvious reasons. The movie. And the Michael Mann world-view across many movies and television shows. I had to mention those things as a backdrop to a few references in the book.
   The book works for me. It is not about doing thrill-seeker liquor-store hold-ups with a born to lose tattoo on anyone’s forehead. Meg Gardiner gave us a mini-series that would barely be contained as a movie. You might not be into the technological criminal empire that Chris goes for.
   It’s there to beef Chris up as a character who has changed somewhat over time. The build-up to the finale, the shootout, is terrific. I feel there’s a finality to the ending…that isn’t about opening the possibilities of a sequel: HEAT 3. More…setting a mood saying we’re done here, and the protagonists never see each other again. A door is left open, but not much.
   In the end, Meg Gardiner shows that in giving us driven people doing intense things, she is herself a Michael Mann Woman. She’s seen some shit. I’d write more, but this blog’s transponder has been put on a bus to San Clemente. Or possibly Des Moines. So long, reader. You take it easy…you’re home-free.