HELP 3: Never Street

Estleman had a big gap between 1990's Sweet Women Lie and 1997's Never Street, so it's appropriate that it took me five days (and a family vacation) to get to the end of Never Street, adding my own gap.

Never Street brought Amos Walker back after Estleman had spent half a decade mostly writing his big Detroit novels, and it began the second stretch of Walker books, of which there have now been nine, at mostly yearly intervals. (Since there were ten novels and a short-story collection in the first burst of Walker books, the series is almost but not quite symmetrical now.)

This is the point in the series where other characters start bluntly pointing out that Walker is an anachronism, and Estleman starts hanging his plots from that assumption. In this book, Walker is hired by the wife of a documentary filmmaker to find her missing husband, who has apparently taken his obsession with '40s film noir way too far, and may have lost his marbles. (Estleman even organizes the novel into four sections, using film terms that don't entirely correspond to the action of the book.)

Never Street is also notably longer than the previous books; it clocks in a bit north of 300 pages. Even given that I read it in mass-market, it's still about 25% longer than the earlier books. (And the narrative shows it; the first plot seemingly peters out at the end of the second section, to be replaced with a second, related case in what might be a homage to The Long Goodbye or might show that Estleman is struggling slightly to get Walker's plots up to the length his publisher wants.)

Walker is still a grumpy bastard, but his dialogue is all conversational at this point; the hardboiled non sequiturs that cropped up occasionally in the earlier books are now gone. (Oh, he's still a fifteen-minute egg -- that hasn't changed -- but he doesn't crack wise for no good reason any more.) And Estleman's plots are still detailed, intricate, and a joy to follow. There even is a strong, relatively positive female character in this one, though it looks like she won't be returning. (And Walker's main contact on the Detroit PD is switching from his old friend John Alderdyce, now an Inspector, to Mary Ann Thaler, his protege and a new Lieutenant -- she doesn't do all that much in this book, but she becomes a more important, and positive, female character in the subsequent books.)

I still would hesitate before recommending this series to female readers, but it's one of the very best traditional hardboiled PI series running in the modern day. And Walker is a real person with a real personality (along certain genre-accepted lives, given) who gets involved in some tricky, well-plotted cases. So I'd better go and keep reading the second half of my stack of Walker novels!

Movie Log: Hot Fuzz

The Wife surprised me by wanting to watch this -- I'd tried to get her to see Shaun of the Dead last year, but she wasn't interested. I guess cops are more mainstream than zombies?

Anyway, we both really liked Hot Fuzz. My only real complaint is that the DVD didn't support subtitles, and we could have used them, given some of the accents. (Also given that we had to keep running the volume down for music montages and up for dialogue scenes, and that we had children trying to get to sleep above our heads.)

The relationship between the characters played by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost is even more homoerotic than it was in Shaun of the Dead, possibly because (IMBD tells me) the character of a girlfriend for Pegg was eliminated during the script-writing, and her lines mostly given to Frost. But making it that blatant is actually a brilliant move, since these buddy cop movies are all about two guys bonding, pseudo-sexually, over gunfire and explosions.

Oh, right, the plot. If you don't already know, Pegg plays a ridiculously driven cop from London who is bumped up to Sergeant and sent off to a quaint village because he's making the rest of the metropolitan force look bad. The village, and its police force, are a very obvious (and very funny) collection of cliches...up until we discover a slightly different set of secret cliches underlying the whole set-up, just in time for the big ending. Frost is his new partner, the son of the local chief of police, who thinks or wishes that police work was all explosions and diving to the side while firing two guns.

It has exactly the sort of ending you'd expect, given the box cover (and given Frost's character's fascination with Point Break and Bad Boys 2). And that ending is great. The movie leading up to it is a lot of fun, too -- this is easily one of the best comedies I've seen this year. (Though the violence may be too much for some people.) It's the kind of movie with lots and lots of tiny details -- lines of dialogue, background music, shot choice, and so on -- done exactly right, and with lots of good actors in medium-sized roles playing it absolutely straight. I probably missed most of the film references, and I was still laughing out loud every minute or two.

Regular Blog Service Resuming

I spent the entire day yesterday at the Bronx Zoo with the family (the weather was great, and we'd never been there before), and the evening working on something that has a slight chance of getting me a job, so I'm afraid Antick Musings was completely neglected.

More posts will come today, I hope: I'm three books behind in the HELP project (despite the books taking about two days to read, instead of my projected one), and two movies in the hole as well.

Fingers, do your stuff...

The Annoyance of Uncommentable LiveJournals

Poppy Z. Brite misread the news the other day and thinks the recent poll showed that 25% of Americans did read a book last year. (It's the other way around: 25% of Americans didn't read a book, so 75% of us did.)

But she doesn't allow comments, so I couldn't tell her directly. And I doubt she reads this. Oh, well. At least she didn't write the long rant and go all Emily Litella on us.

Quote of the Week

The details of my lack of phone calls are very different, but I've been feeling a bit like this kid lately:

"Oh, son! Son, how many girls called you today? Zero? And how many girls called you yesterday? Lemme guess -- zero? Well, you know what they say, son. Zero plus zero equals fag! Zero times any other number always equals fag! Think about it, ya little mathematician."
- The Kids in the Hall, from the skit "Daddy Drank"

What's Making Me Grind My Teeth Today

Alex Remington in the Huffington Post:

Once upon a time (really just a decade or two ago), it seemed you could buy almost any title with any sort of wide appeal, no matter how hifaluting, no matter how thick, in a format called "mass-market paperback"...Nowadays, however, more and more literary books are foregoing the mass-market format for what's known as a "trade paperback,"

A) Despite what he thinks, 'twas always thus.

2) See "wide appeal," above. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: a mass-market paperback is an implicit contract between the publisher and the reading community. The former agrees to publish a cheap edition; the latter agrees to buy a lot of copies of it quickly. If the latter is unlikely to happen, the former won't, either.

iii) He can't spell "highfaluting," either.

And he goes on:

But this means that the democracy of the least expensive books, once a mix of high and low and the one place where Jonathan Kellerman and John Updike could sit side by side, is fast becoming the exclusive province of genre fiction. High literature now comes exclusively at high prices.

No, genre books come out in trade paper, too. But only the books that will sell well enough to justify the format come out mass-market. If you literary types don't like that, you need to get more people to buy the books you like.

Oh, and then he says this:

In other words, the only universal fiction is non-literary fiction. That is not necessarily a good thing. Nowadays, people of different backgrounds follow different books, different magazines, different websites, different cable news channels; where there is no common experience, there is no shared truth.

Right. Because, in the glorious days of yore, vast numbers of Americans read William Gaddis and liked him. Go and pull the other one; it has bells on it.

Universal fiction is only very rarely "literary" fiction at the time. It may be studied a hundred years later, and become literary fiction, but it wasn't at the time it was universal.

And he goes on from there, whining that $18 novels are out of the budget of poor downtrodden working folks. Since we just learned that the Americans who read books only read about seven a year, we can thus deduce that Mr. Remington thinks $126 a year is far more than those poor souls can afford. And that just over $10 a month is beyond the means of folks that typically spend $3 each morning on coffee drinks.

Do I also need to note that sales of hardcovers and trade paperbacks have increased over the last decade or so? (And that mass-markets have been stable at best?) And that there are plenty of ways to get books cheaply (remainders, used books) or even free (libraries)?

What we have here is a very large amount of whine squeezed out of very few grapes, with little in the way of facts to confuse the issue. I think Mr. Remington is really saying is that the books he wants to buy cost more than he wants to spend. And, for that, I have the world's smallest violin, playing a sad song just for him.

Play the Home Game!

I'm not sure if this is a meme yet -- I got it from Mike Sterling's Progressive Ruin.
Get your own Atari game pak at Labelmaker 2600.

The Ol' ComicMix Shuffle

My recent linkposts:

• Today's Hot Comics Links
• Metal Men, Naruto, and Other Unfathomable Things
• Women Spotted at Comics Convention
• The All-New 1982 Show

Reviews:

• LoserPalooza
• "Shenanigans"

Movie Log: Starter for 10

Things I often enjoy in movies: small stories about people, British settings, coming of age stories, romantic comedies. (I'm also, I've noticed recently, quite fond of stories about people living lives very much like my own at the same point in time.) So Starter for 10 was inevitably coming my way.

It's an English romantic comedy, set in 1985, about a young man in his first year at the University of Bristol, trying to get on the University Challenge team and interested in the proverbial two girls (one blonde, one brunette). It's based on a novel I haven't read by David Nicholls, and I'd bet a substantial sum of money that it's at least partially autobiographical. And, as if to completely fill up the stereotype, it takes place almost entirely during that first year of university.

It's amiable but a bit lightweight -- it never gets really funny, or really romantic, or really dramatic, but doesn't try to do so, either. It does evoke its time and place well, from hair-styles and bad fashion choices to a lot of well-chosen (and footnoted on screen, for some odd reason) New Wave music. It's a movie that tries to do a lot of things decently -- with two romances for our lead and the main plot about the University Challenge team, plus sub-plots about coming to terms with his mother's new boyfriend and about his best friend left behind at home -- instead of doing any one thing very well. In the end, it's an appealing comedy with moderate aims and decent, believeable performances. Don't expect anything deep, and you won't be disappointed.

(Side note: the host of the University Challenge TV show has such an unlikely name that I knew it, must be the real thing. But I was slightly surprised to find that, though Bamber Gascoigne -- and, I have to say, only an English family of certain means would ever hang a name like that on an innocent child -- is real, and the long-time host of University Challenge, he was played in this movie by an actor, Mark Gatiss. Why? I dunno. Gascoigne seems to still be kicking around, and was credited on IMDB as appearing in a UC special in 2006.)

Those Whom The Gods Wish To Destroy...

This has not been my summer, and, to add insult to injury, my glasses broke this morning. Luckily, I'm in the middle of getting a new pair anyway, but damn! some supernatural entity seems to have it in for me this year.

So if there's anyone out there with pull in those areas, or a spare goat to be sacrificed to Poseidon, any help would be appreciated.

HELP 2: Sweet Women Lie

Both Silent Thunder (the 1989 Amos Walker novel) and General Murders (a 1988 collection of Walker stories, whose existence I hadn't previously suspected) are scratches; I couldn't get copies of them easily and quickly.

So day 2 of HELP is the 1990 novel Sweet Women Lie, tenth and last in the first sequence of Amos Walker novels by Loren D. Estleman. It continues in Downriver's footsteps, since the plot begins when not-Annette Funicello (ex-'60s beach movie star Gail Hope) hires Walker for a job...that turns out to be an audition for another job...which itself isn't what it seems.

The plot quickly gets complicated and runs away from the initial set-up, so I don't want to go into details (even on a seventeen-year-old novel). But I will say that we rapidly get into a Spy vs. Spy in the streets of Detroit, with various CIA guys (some of whom claim others of whom are rogue, and vice versa) engaging in clandestine meetings, shoot-outs, and other exciting stuff.

It's a bit out of the norm for a PI novel, and I wonder if market pressures to be more "thriller-y" pushed Estleman in that direction. (As I said, this was also the last Walker novel for several years.) The dialogue isn't quite as hardboiled as in Downriver, but Walker still persists in hiding evidence from cops, which never ends well. And as to the female characters...well, let me just point you back at the title.

All in all, it's a solid PI novel of its era -- searching around a bit for a new paradigm, but with a good narrative voice and a twisty, entertaining plot.

HELP 1: Downriver

Hornswoggler's Estleman Loren Project (hereinafter HELP) kicks off with Estleman's 1988 "Amos Walker" mystery Downriver. Amos Walker is a Detroit PI who first appeared in 1980's Motor City Blue; this was the eighth book in the series. I read it just over a week ago, and have read two-and-a-half more Walker mysteries since then, so let's see if I can untangle them in my head...

This is very much a mid-80s mystery; it's pretty short (just over two hundred pages) and concerns a very DeLorean-esque upstart car-maker. (Down to the gull-wing doors on his first model, in case we don't get the reference.) Walker is hired by a black man named DeVries -- just out of prison after a twenty-year stretch for arson during the '67 riots -- to track down the people who used him as distraction for an armored-car robbery. (Walker somewhat demurs on the second half of the job, which would be to retrieve the money and give it to DeVries -- but he does take the case.)

The white guy that DeVries insists incited his firebombing now works as a top executive for the DeLorean figure, and skulduggery ensues. Estleman is very readable, but he's pretty derivative at this point -- the dialogue is intensely hard-boiled, even when that keeps it from making much sense. Walker in particular is trying to live up to his own (or Estleman's) idea of what a real PI should be, and that's straight out of Raymond Chandler.

But the Chandleresque poses don't always fit the plot -- Chandler's Philip Marlowe dealt with intensely crooked cops; Walker with smart and mostly honest ones. But Walker still cracks wise in the same ways, and hides evidence as Marlowe would. Even for 1988, Walker was exceptionally old-fashioned; Downriver reads like a 1970s mystery. The role of women here make it feel even earlier than that -- I won't say all of the women in the early Walker novels were femmes fatale, but the archetype crops up a lot, and decent human beings who happen to be women are rare.

Still, I really like PI stories -- they've been my favorite kind of mystery since I was a teenager -- and Estleman has a detective who is Chandleresque without being a slavish copy of Marlowe, inhabits a real city with depth and nuance, and navigates his way through interesting, well-crafted plots. The male characters are all pretty well-drawn, and the women are each individually believeable -- it's just in aggregate that you start to wonder if Detroit really is inhabited only by hard-bitten, gold-digging dames. Surely there must be some women, too?

(I read Downriver in the original hardcover from my local library, as seen above. Byron Preiss's ibooks operation republished all of the Walker novels through Downriver before Preiss's fatal accident in 2005, and those editions are probably easier to find -- though ibooks itself is no more. There's not a whole lot of book-to-book continuity in this part of the series, so an interested reader could start anywhere in the first eight, and fill in as he finds the missing ones.)

The Heart of a Goof by P. G. Wodehouse

Wodehouse's second collection of golf stories (after The Clicking of Cuthbert) was originally published in 1926, which puts it just a bit before Wodehouse's best period.

There are nine stories here (naturally!), all of which are golf stories narrated by the Oldest Member. The O.M. is not quite as wonderful a storyteller as Wodehouse's Mr. Mulliner, but he's close. The stories here are all also boy-girl love stories, in which true love wins out in the end through the judicious use of a mashie-niblick, or something like that.

I know nothing about golf, so I can't judge the details as described herein. But the stories are entertaining, and the golf details are mostly in support of the stories being told. (And I suspect that golfing terminology has moved forward from the 1920s, anyway, so even really avid golfers might be as unclear as I was about the difference between a mashie and a niblick.)

Wodehouse has done better than this -- Clicking of Cuthbert, as I recall, is a bit stronger. (And, from Wodehouse's introduction, I suspect Heart of a Goof was rushed out because Cuthbert was successful -- publishing was ever thus.) But he wrote pleasantly breezy and entertaining short stories for a good fifty years, and these are some of them -- they may not be his very best, but they're better than a whole lot of the alternatives. And I very much doubt a more purely entertaining writer ever turned his hand to love stories about golf.

World Fantasy Award Liftetime Achievement Awards

Locus Online has the news that the winners of this year's Lifetime Achievement World Fantasy Awards have been announced early, in a one-time change in procedure.

The winners are Diana Wynne Jones, who will be unable to attend the convention, and Betty Ballantine, who will be there.

Both women are very deserving of the award; I'm slightly surprised that Betty Ballantine hadn't gotten it before now. And I'm particularly glad to see Diana Wynne Jones get this honor; she was on my personal short-list last year when I was a judge.

Movie Log: Underdog

Hey, my title rhymes...and that's very appropriate.

Underdog has gotten bad reviews, mostly because it's a live-action kids movie based on an old, beloved, badly-animated show (which was for kids at the time, but whose target audience is now all grown up and sophisticated). I'll admit, looking at the poster, that creature doesn't much look like the Underdog I know. But, on its own terms, Underdog the movie is fun and even witty.

Patrick Warburton, as Cad, the sidekick (he's prefer to be called "partner") of our villain, Simon Barsinister, continues his streak of being wonderfully funny in any project for kids he's cast in. Sure, he plays essentially the same part every time, but his voice is superb and his facial expressions wonderful. If he's in a movie for kids, you know it can't be that bad. (I also just learned from IMDB that he was born in Paterson, New Jersey, which is just down the road from me and also the birthplace of Lou Costello.)

Also good in this are Peter Dinklage (who I wish would work more, since he's great every time I see him) as Barsinister and Jason Lee as Underdog's voice. Oh, and the kid is decent, as well, though I spent most of the movie wondering "Is that the kid from Ned's Declassified?" (And it is.) Yes, it's got the plot you'd expect, and turning Underdog into live-action was an odd thing to do, and it is definitely designed as a movie for kids...but, on its own terms, it's quite entertaining. There are a lot of references to the TV show (down to "It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a frog"), so the people who made this knew what they were doing.

If you're the world's biggest Underdog fan, you'll inevitably be disappointed. If you vaguely remember the TV show fondly, and want to take some kids to a fun summer movie, you'll probably like this. Honestly, given the initial decision to make a live-action Underdog movie, this is probably the best possible movie that could have resulted. (My kids are already saying that they want it on DVD.)