HELP 7: Poison Blonde

The 2003 Amos Walker novel was the first from Forge, Estleman's current publisher, and sees the HELP project coming into the homestretch.

There are two problems with Poison Blonde from HELP's point of view: the minor one is that it recycles quite a bit of plot set-up from Sweet Women Lie. In Sweet Women, Walker is hired by a washed-up actress for a job that turns out to be a test to see if he can do the real job. And, in Poison Blonde, a sexy blonde Latina pop singer who is most certainly not Shakira (perish the thought) named Gilla Cristobal does the same thing. The plots diverge pretty quickly after that, so it's only a minor complaint.

The major complaint is, however, a huge plot hole. Gilla tells Walker that she has a Deep Dark Secret in her past, and she would be deported to Unnamed Carribean Island Hell-Hole if it comes out, and she would certainly be judicially murdered there.

I'll need to underline these next few points, and their connections:

• She tells him this in Detroit.
• Detroit, which is in sight of, and easy driving distance of, Canada.
• Canada, the nation that would no more give up a beautiful fugitive to a brutal totalitarian regime than it would fail to say "Thanks, eh" to compliments about Tim Horton's donuts.

(And that all assumes that the US government would be eager to ship a rich, popular, successful, gorgeous singer off to a third-world hell-hole to her near-certain death, and that the public wouldn't be outraged. This book is set in February of 2002, so I'll grant Estleman that...but forgetting about Canada is unforgivable.)

Anyway, Poison Blonde (which should have been titled The Lincoln Question, but never mind that) gets tangled up with a new murder and a murder many years ago in a foreign country (Ross Macdonald Disease popping up again), and an old enemy of Walker's turns up as well. I kept expecting spies to pop out of the woodwork (as they did in Sweet Women Lie; another parallel), and I think I shouldn't say whether they do or not.

Other than that one unforgivable hole at the very center of the plot, Poison Blonde is a solid, twisty mystery novel, another strong entry in a consistent series. I've got three more of these to read, and I'm not tired of them yet.

Movie Log: Becoming Jane

My wife is not a big reader, as I might have mentioned. But she's a medium-sized Jane Austen fan, so we had to go see Becoming Jane this weekend. I'm not a big enough Austen fan to explain exactly how this movie was hogwash, but I could detect quite a bit of pig-soaping going on, so I'm sure someone already has done that, somewhere on the Internet.

(For just one thing, I'm pretty sure Austen didn't even start to write Sense & Sensibility until a good decade after this movie was set. And, while I in no way begrudge two hours looking at the radiantly lovely Anne Hathaway, I believe Jane was somewhat plainer and less outgoing.)

It follows exactly the well-trodden Period Movie path you expect it to, stealing widely but not well from Austen's best-known books, like the world's prettiest, best-corseted magpie. Every time it has a chance to make its own, idiosyncratic way, it slips back into doing exactly what you thought it was going to do. Every chance it has to try something interesting is studiously ignored.

(For example, Austen's great love -- the young, poor Irish lawyer Thomas LeFroy -- clearly is only interested in seducing her at first, and a cynical viewer like myself has no reason to believe that his protestations of deep and abiding love later on aren't simply another tactic to get her into bed. The real-world Jane Austen would be very familiar with that type, and would have something -- veiled and proper, yes, but cutting -- to say about it. In this movie, we're apparently meant to simply believe that Jane is so amazingly wonderful that his intentions are now purely honorable.)

(And, for another, her other suitor -- whom The Wife and I have taken to calling "Lurch," since we forgot the character's name -- is actually much more interesting, and seems closer to what little I know of the historical Austen's character. But he's not a great talker and doesn't like to dance, which means he's doomed in a Period Movie.)

This is a very pretty movie, and looking at Anne Hathaway for two hours is a very pleasant way to spend time. Serious Janeites will probably hate the liberties the plot has taken, but, for those of us married to people who love Period Movies in all their splendor, this is a decent example of that not-particularly-exalted form.

Wordless Growl of Frustration

All of my phone calls -- today and nearly every other weekday recently -- are bored telemarketers or chipper recordings trying to sell me a new mortgage (with one odd phone survey about wills from a local news organization thrown in for spice). These are not the people I want to call me...

HELP 6: Sinister Heights

And Sinister Heights was the last "Amos Walker" novel from Mysterious Press; I hope he moved on because he got a better offer from the new publisher (Forge), not because Mysterious dumped him. This was the new book for 2002.

The family of Commodore Leland Stutch, the fictional auto and petrochemical magnate whom Walker met (at the age of a hundred-and-something, soon before his death) in Downriver, makes a reappearance here. This time, Stutch's much younger widow hires Walker to find a bastard child of the old Commodore -- from long before her time -- and cut the bastard girl in for a small share of the family fortune. (The widow is doing this, she says, to forestall a potential suit for a large share of the fortune, as that side of the family keeps increasing -- the child has grown up, and has had a daughter who in turn grew up, married, and had a young son.)

Walker finds the bastard daughter without much trouble, but the next generation is a bit trickier to uncover -- and digging them up leads to car crashes, murders, accidental deaths, kidnappings, and a final exciting but unlikely confrontation on the site of an auto plant fortified like a castle.

This is one of the best of the Walker novels, even if the ending gets a bit large-scale for a private-detective story. If anyone out there is looking to try this series, I'd recommend this novel. Walker doesn't insult anyone for no good reason that I can remember, and there are interesting and varied female characters. It's got a great atmospheric cover, and one of the better plots of the series. If this book did get him dumped by Mysterious, that was a damn shame.

No Comment

Reuters on Bertlesmann's Direct Group.

Hopeless Savages by Jen Van Meter, Christine Norrie and Chynna Clugston-Major

Hopless Savages is a graphic novel written by Jen Van Meter, illustrated by Christine Norrie (with some flashback sequences illustrated by Chynna Clugston-Major), with original covers by Andi Watson. I really wanted to like this, partially because I went to college with Van Meter and partially because I want to enjoy the books I read. But it ended up being a bit too "comic-booky" for me in the end.

What do I mean by that? Well, in mainstream American comics, the way to solve a problem -- any problem -- is to hit somebody in the face. Fifty years of the increasing domination of superheroes has ground in the idea "comics = fight scenes" so deeply into our mental fabric that no detergent can get it out. (Forgive me, I'm doing laundry as I type this.) Hopeless Savages started out like a story about people with real lives, and ended up being about punching The Bad Guys in the face to solve all of the protagonists' problems.

Hopeless Savages is the story of the four children of punk superstars turned suburban middle-class homeowners Dirk Hopeless and Nikki Savage. The kids have the names Rat, Arsenal, Twitch, and Skank Zero. (The last engages in made-up pseudo-curses all of the time, as well.) So far, the self-indulgence level is high, but tolerable. But the plot is kicked off by the parents being kidnapped (for what turns out to be an utterly inadequate reason), and so the three younger children have to "re-program" Rat to be A Punk, so that they can go and beat up the people who took Dad and Mum. Oy. The plot is pretty generic "regroup the team and investigate the Deep Dark Secret in the Past that we allude to but never explain," with added punkitude for flavor.

The punk-ness of the protagonists strikes me as entirely being on the level of a pose -- they seem to be serious about their music, don't do drugs or engage in other self-destructive acts, live in what looks like a very comfortable suburban setting, and seem to have no discernible politics. The extent to which they are "punk" is entirely clothing and attitude -- and, yes, attitude does go a long way with punk, but I think this is a bit too far.

The short form: I didn't believe in these characters. They're supposed to be fun caricatures, yes, but they didn't work for me even on that level. And the whole face-punching thing struck me as a bad direction from the beginning, but that's my prejudices speaking. Sorry, Jen; I guess it just wasn't for me.

Movie Log: Cashback

Cashback is a pleasant movie about a young man who is a nearly complete wanker, a film which tries desperately to mask its mildly exploitative softcore heart under soulful narration and seriousness of purpose, and basically succeeds. It also has quite a lot of lovely female nudity in it (all absolutely necessary for the plot, luckily), which The Wife and I both appreciated. And it's the expansion of a short film -- from what IMDB says, the entirety of the short of the same name is embedded in the feature-length Cashback.

Sean Biggerstaff plays Ben Willis, a third-year student at an art college somewhere in the UK, who has just broken up with his girlfriend, Suzy (Michelle Ryan). Although he seems to have been the one behind the break-up, he's taken it badly. Very badly. Hard-to-believe-even-in-a-comedy badly.

He stops sleeping entirely due to his ennui and malaise, and mopes around (narrating intensely) for about two reels. (Luckily, this also includes some pleasant flashbacks and some scenes with Ben's best mate, Sean Higgins (Shaun Evans) -- who is the usual wacky best friend required for every soulful young movie hero -- so it's not unrelieved oh-woe-is-me.) Since Ben needs money, and has an extra eight hours in the day to waste, he takes a job on the night shift of a Sainsbury's supermarket.

There's the expected motley crew of misfits and oddballs working at the market, including the requisite megalomaniacal manager, Mr. Jenkins (Stuart Goodwin). There's also, apparently, only one woman, Sharon Pitntey (Emilia Fox), who is young and pretty and for whom Ben falls as quickly as you'd expect. (Ben should be about twenty or twenty-one in this movie, but he has the emotional maturity and steadiness of a particularly tormented twelve-year-old.)

But I'm getting a bit ahead of the plot (and the point). Ben's narration (which isn't as self-obsessed and moody as it could be, though there is a bit too much of it) points out that each of the night-shift oddballs has a way of dealing with the long stretches of boredom at night, and Ben's is...that he's learned how to stop time, to freeze the world around him. And he uses that ability to undress attractive women in the aisles of the market and sketch them. (So it's creepy, but, compared with all of the other things he could potentially do with that power, it's only mildly creepy. And Ben is such a sad sack that he doesn't come off as a predator.) And this is where the nudity comes in, as you may have guessed. This sequence -- about how everyone deals with their time at work -- is apparently the original short.

The plot of Cashback is a bit thin: Ben loses girl, Ben gets job, Ben discovers power, Ben falls for new girl, Ben eventually gets a girl after travails. Even the "travails" section is pretty standard, with some conflicts with a co-worker, the big (soccer) game against a rival store, and, finally, a big party with all of the characters present. But it's pleasant, and the actors -- none of whom I recognized from anything else -- are all solid.

There's only the one major montage of Ben sketching half-naked shoppers (from the original short), but there's a couple of scenes of strippers, and one of a Swedish exchange student from Ben's ill-spent youth, for those who like such things. (I see the British are still obsessed with the sexual availability of Swedes, for whatever reason.)

I wish the plot had a bit more originality to it, and that perhaps Ben had been allowed to have a more original personality. (Perhaps he could have been not so obviously a "nice guy" -- seeing as how his major leisure activity is taking advantage of unknowing women -- which could have given him scope for more interesting actions.) And the very obvious lesson at the end was unnecessary and corny. The movie is also puffed out by Ben's narration; you can feel that there wasn't quite enough story for a feature, but the filmmakers got around that by having Ben talk everything to death.

Still, this is the first feature-length film from writer/director/producer Sean Ellis, so you have to give him credit: it's an original idea, handled pretty well and turned into an entertaining movie. If he can get better from here, he could do a lot of great work. And this is a pleasant, entertaining romantic comedy with a new angle...and a lot of nudity. It could be a great date movie for the right kind of couple.

HELP 5: A Smile on the Face of the Tiger

2001's Amos Walker mystery was the fourth from Mysterious Press, and the first this century. It also marks the halfway point in HELP; I have five more novels after this one.

Downriver had a backstory involving the 1967 Detroit race riots, but Smile goes further back to the 1943 race riots, and a (I presume fictional) hero cop who emerged then. Walker is hired by a devastatingly sexy female book editor from New York (I fear he's indulging in the most obvious stereotypes here) to find a missing author. Eugene Booth wrote a bunch of pulpy paperback originals in the '40s and '50s, the best of which, Paradise Valley, was a fictionalization of the '43 race riots and which the sexy editor had a contract to republish. Booth apparently changed his mind, and then disappeared.

There's also a reformed Mafia hitman in the book; he turned state's evidence, ratted on his bosses, and is on tour with a book about his life and murders. Walker searches for Booth, finds the hitman, and then things get complicated.

This turns into another Ross Macdonald-esque novel, with a murder from twenty years ago in Canada fifty years back becoming entangled in new deaths. As always, Walker solves the various cases.

I don't know how many different ways I can say it: Estleman is old-fashioned, but in the best ways, like a big 'ol muscle car, all solid steel and gleaming chrome. He doesn't take the hardboiled idiom to the point of parody (like Spillane and his ilk), and doesn't exactly update it to the modern day, but he does set his stories in the real world, among real people committing real crimes, and uses that structure to probe the limits of what people are capable of under pressure. And A Smile on the Face of the Tiger is another darn good Amos Walker novel.

Movie Log: Happy Endings

The Wife and I are on a roll: we got two movies at the beginning of last week, and actually watched them both together! (Of such little triumphs is a life made.)

Wednesday night was Happy Endings time; it's an overly-narrated dramedy that has some good performances but takes itself a bit too seriously. It's aiming, I think, to be the gay version of Crash, with somewhat more humor.

Lisa Kudrow and Steve Coogan play step-siblings, and each anchor one of the three loosely related plotlines of the movie; it starts with a brief, surprising scene in the present day, and then flashes back for a couple of quick scenes in the mid-80s (when they were in their teens), but then returns to the modern day for the rest of the movie. Kudrow's character learns that a blackmailer has information on the son she gave up for adoption back then, and so she and her masseur boyfriend try to scam the blackmailer with a film project about the masseur giving rich women "happy ending" massages.

Meanwhile, Coogan's character, now gay and in a long-term relationship, suspects that a lesbian couple did use his partner's sperm to conceive their young child -- they claim that they tried it, but that it didn't work, so they went on to use anonymous sperm from a sperm bank. As one might expect, poking into such things makes more secrets spill out before long.

And the third plot centers on Maggie Gyllenhaal, a vixen who seduces a young gay virgin after getting a gig as fill-in singer with his band, and then trades her way up to the young man's father (Tom Arnold), a rich and successful businessman. Her story doesn't work out quite the way she'd like, either.

The three stories intersect a little, but not all that much; the movie mostly shuffles among them. This movie also seems to be scared to death of voice-overs; there are extensive explanatory captions on screen throughout the movie that could easily, and more gracefully, have been voice-overs.

Happy Endings isn't a great movie, and it isn't consistently a comedy (as it looks to be), but it has moments of drama and humor, and a large cast of good actors who all have solid material to work with. It's a bit diffuse, and requires more reading than you'd expect of a movie in English set in LA, but it tells its stories well and its worth a rental for people who like character-driven stories.

HELP 4: The Hours of the Virgin

For the second time, I have a scratch: The Witchfinder, Estleman's 1997 book in this series (the second from Mysterious Press), wasn't easily available. So HELP 4 is instead the 1998 novel The Hours of the Virgin.

The title refers to several pages of medieval illuminated manuscript; as usual, there are no real-world virgins to be found in Amos Walker's world. This is also the novel in which, inevitably, Walker has to solve the murder of his partner, twenty years before. (And I think the late '90s was when my colleague Jane Dentinger started to complain that the plot of every other mystery novel involved a twenty-year-old murder, as if they were all mainlining Ross Macdonald at the same time.)

It's a solid mystery that moves well and features colorful, believeable characters; if I hadn't read another two Walker books since I finished it, I'd probably be able to give a better precis of it. It's just as good as all the others; Estleman writes the American hardboiled mystery as if it never went out of style.

Three Days of Links

My recent ComicMix link-posts:

• Play Ball!
• Definitely Not Kansas
• Astro Boy Goes West

Stately, plump G.B.H. Hornswoggler...

Another one of those memes everyone is doing -- in my case, I picked it up from James Nicoll:

You're Ulysses!
by James Joyce

Most people are convinced that you don't make any sense, but compared to what else you could say, what you're saying now makes tons of sense. What people do understand about you is your vulgarity, which has convinced people that you are at once brilliant and repugnant. Meanwhile you are content to wander around aimlessly, taking in the sights and sounds of the city. What you see is vast, almost limitless, and brings you additional fame. When no one is looking, you dream of being a Greek folk hero.
Take the Book Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

Itzkoff on Gibson

Our Man Itzkoff returns to the New York Times Book Review this weekend, with a full-page review of William Gibson's new novel Spook Country. I haven't yet read Spook Country -- I still haven't read Pattern Recognition, and Spook is a sequel to that -- so I can't say if I agree with Itzkoff's judgments on it. But Itzkoff doesn't make any laughably sweeping pronouncements along the way, which I guess counts as a win for his side.

And we see once again that having been a SF writer is not necessarily a detriment to one's being seriously reviewed in the pages of the NYTBR, but one should have already given up the dirty genre stuff if one wants to be taken seriously.

A lesson for us all.

Incoming Books, Week of 8/25

There may be a couple here from two weeks ago, but the bulk of this is from a trip into the city on Wednesday, when I hit both the Strand and my usual comics shop. There are also a couple of publicity things that I hope to get to quickly; we'll see how that goes.

• Gregory Frost's new fantasy novel, Shadowbridge, coming in late December from Del Rey -- I don't know Greg well (and I don't think I've read any of his books), but I did have dinner with him once at a Philcon, so I want to get to this one.
  
• The Great Mortality by John Kelly, a history of the Black Death -- I was idly poking through the $1 shelves outside the Strand, ready to head on to my next errand and virtuously not spend two hours shopping inside, when I found this...and it was all over.
  
• Millennium People by J.G. Ballard -- I've been waiting for so long for his latest novel to be published here that I found a remaindered UK trade paperback. That's good enough for me.
  
• The Discomfort Zone by Jonathan Franzen -- I haven't read The Corrections (in part because of Oprah), and I'm not sure if I even have a copy of it. But I did read and enjoy Franzen's subsequent essay collection How To Be Alone, so I expect to also enjoy these autobiographical essays.
  
• Chance in Hell, Gilbert Hernandez's new standalone graphic novel. I hope to review it soon.
  
• Monkey Food by Ellen Forney, collecting her "I Was Seven in '75" comic strips. I was six in '75, and this was cheap -- and I've seen it and thought about buying it several times now -- so I finally got it.
  
• The Complete Peanuts, 1965 to 1966 by Charles M. Schulz -- if you don't know about Peanuts by now, there's probably no hope for you.
  
• Bound to Please by Michael Dirda -- a big, big book all about great books. I don't know if I'll be able to sit down and read many classics until my kids get older, but I'm stockpiling books just in case.
  
• Tricked by Alex Robinson -- I've been vaguely thinking about buying this or Box Office Poison for ages, so, when I saw this for half-price at the Strand, I knew I had to try it.
  
• Olive or Twist? by Jack Ziegler -- a collection of cartoons from the New Yorker, all about drinking. I love books of single-panel cartoons, I cannot deny it.
  
• Is Nothing Sacred? by Gahan Wilson -- more single-panel cartoons by one of the all-time greats, featuring one of my very favorite cartoons on the cover. And for three bucks!
  
• James Sturm's America, collecting three previously-published (short) graphic novels.
  
• and Margo Lanagan's Red Spikes, her third short-story collection. I now have all three, so I'd better read at least one of them.

And what I've been reading this week has been a whole lot of Loren D. Estleman. Next week will be mostly the same, though the most recent books are a bit shorter, so I may speed up. After that, I dunno. Maybe back to the fields of SF and Fantasy.

I Can Give It Up Any Time I Want

Snatched from John Klima:

55%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

Mingle² - Dating Site

(Though I should admit it could have been higher if I was more honest about the "how many hours a day do you spend reading blogs" question.)