You never know what's coming around the curve

From Suspense to Dread

by Paul Hoffman

Sep 03, 2010 in Books, Film

Florin Court LondonI was idly watching the end of an old TV episode of Poirot the other day wherein the world’s third most famous Belgian had, as always, gathered the eight or so suspects together in the drawing room and began pointing the finger of suspicion at each of them in turn. It seemed to me that there were two types of suspense on offer here: the identity of the murderer, and what, if any, small changes would occur in this strictly adhered to formula of going through each suspect one by one. (No, not the sweet old lady!) As long as the audience knows all the possibilities, then quite small variations can generate suspense as we try to outguess the detective. In other words, complete familiarity offers a way out of complete boredom: as long as everyone knows the rules in detail, even small variations will generate suspense. It’s almost impossible by now to create a major surprise in this particular setup, mostly because Christie herself pretty much mined them out (they all did it in Murder on the Orient Express). This almost equal knowledge between reader (or watcher) and writer is what creates suspense but also limits it (unless the adapter, gone mad after years of writing minor variations on the same ending, has Poirot or Miss Marple being revealed as the murderer). Suspense has, I think, its limitations when it comes to engaging the emotions of the audience — it’s the emotion of a game.

Consider Seven as an alternative. The setup is grislier than a Christie and the setting, a corrupt city, as far away as you can get. But it’s still about a series of carefully planned murders by someone unknown and cool and ruthless in his execution of the crime. Written by Andrew Kevin Walker, Seven takes us on certainly an original journey with a brilliant concept at its heart — a moralizing murderer sardonically reenacting the seven deadly sins. But what is alleged to have happened before Fincher took over as director is revealing. It’s said that the studio insisted that while they were prepared to finance the film, they would only do so if the writer changed the last quarter of the film, when the script completely departs from the murder thriller and creates something utterly new. It stops being a game of suspense for the insider/viewer by abandoning the game altogether. The identity of the murderer, blasphemously, is revealed not by the detached intelligence of the detectives but by the murderer himself. By rejecting the fundamental desire to get away with it, the killer takes command just at the point where we are waiting for the forces of good to squeeze him into a place of abject failure by revealing the fundamental things he does not want revealed, his motives and his guilt. Apparently the studio forced Walker to undo all this and rewrite the ending so that Christie reigns supreme.

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The Mulholland Muse

by David J. Schow

Sep 02, 2010 in Books, Film, Guest Posts, Mulholland News

Most people know the name Mulholland Drive from the eponymous David Lynch movie. If you go deeper, you recognize the roman à clef elements that were interpreted into the plot of Chinatown — the Noah Cross character played by John Huston is heavily derived from the machinations of William Mulholland during the period know as the “California Water Wars.”

An Irish immigrant who became chief engineer of the Los Angeles Water Department, it was Mulholland who conceived and oversaw the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, that “stone river” that bisects most of the San Fernando Valley, scene of innumerable auto chases in cinema (you’ll know it when you see it) and best remembered as the place a gang of giant, atomically mutated ants established an L.A. beachhead in Them! Mulholland also helped build the Panama Canal, the Colorado River Aqueduct, and the Hoover Dam.

Mulholland’s biggest folly was the construction of the St. Francis Dam near Saugus in San Francisquito Canyon. Built in 1926, the dam burst at three minutes before midnight on March 12, 1928, wiping out a sixty-five-mile swath between Oxnard and Ventura, virtually destroying everything between it and the Pacific Ocean under twenty-five feet of water, with blast waves cresting at seventy-five feet. More than five hundred people died. Mulholland, acquitted of malfeasance, later committed suicide in 1935 at the age of seventy-nine. The sole monument to him is a fountain in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles.

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Doorstep Horror

by Conrad Williams

Sep 01, 2010 in Books, Guest Posts

Policeman at the Barbican Building SiteOctober 1977. I’m eight years old. Dad’s at work. I’m sitting at home hunched over a chessboard waiting for him. White and black plastic. Pawns and pieces on a foldout board fraying at the edges and along the central crease. Knights in profile facing the King and Queen. I’ve been teaching him to play.

A radio on in the kitchen. Mum’s getting ready to go out. She has a part-time job at the Imperial pub on Bewsey Road, a five-minute walk away, serving pints of mixed and pints of tan and black to wire-factory workers: No-Danger Joe, who has his own chair by the door. Nodding Kenny, who’ll agree with anything his boss says. Varley, the pisshead with eyes the color of verdigris, trying it on with the barmaids. She serves them all until they’re too drunk to speak, at which point the manager, a gruff Belfastard, points to the door.

Dad works at the police station in Chester. Top floor. I’ve been to the canteen there. You can look out at the river Dee and the Roman wall while you eat your pie and mash and tea (two sugars). This was in the days before healthy eating. Healthy anything. This was smoker’s cough with your cake and a pall of undigested whisky fumes at breakfast. Bring the lad in to work for the morning. Nice treat while Mum’s in hospital. The receptionist — Brenda or Beryl or Olive — asks if I want a Quality Street sweet while I hide behind Dad’s legs. He’s all smiles and muttonchop whiskers. The clatter of typewriters vibrates through the building. I can smell carbon paper and Quink ink and wet dog and leather. Hoops of sweat under armpits, rings of grime on loosened collars. Brylcreemed hair and Hamlet cigars in top pockets. The world is filled with villains and slags and bastards. Some of them work here.

That radio. Chat and comment and opinion. All buzz. All background. Dad comes in. Winter’s breath full of bonfires and petrol fumes. Kiss, kiss. Dinner’s in the oven, cold lips. Mum goes out into crystallizing darkness. Dad and his brown, steaming hot pot, slashed through with red cabbage. I can’t look at his plate. Newspapers. Can of beer. I wait. I listen.

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Once Were Mysteries

by Ken Bruen

Aug 31, 2010 in Books, Guest Posts

The former chairman of the Booker Prize committee said last month,

“A mystery has as much chance of winning the Booker as a donkey winning the Derby.”

I ask myself, in pretty much all honesty, Who won the Booker last year?

Um…

I can rattle off who won the Edgar, the Hammett. But you could say my interest lies solely in mystery.

My daily reading consists of an eclectic mix of biography, and books on writing, poetry, philosophy, psychology. Because I’m fascinated by all of them.

John Arden, the acclaimed playwright, activist, author, recently domiciled in Galway. On the publication of The Devil, he met me after a signing, not a literary critic on the horizon, said,

“Crime novels are the new social conscience.”

I wrote a children’s book, was assaulted on most all sides by

“What?”

“You’re selling out?”

“You can’t write a children’s book .”

And you really have to smile, move it from drama to light entertainment.

I ask my own self,

“Have you ever heard of a literary writer transcending the genre and writing a mystery novel?”

Um…yes.

But their excursions into the second grade are excused by terms, no kidding, like

“Slumming.”

Yah gotta love ’em.
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Enter the Void

by Keith Breese

Aug 30, 2010 in Books, Guest Posts

1.

I think it takes much greater courage to create things to be gone than to create things that will remain. 

—Christo

I mostly get the question at parties. The answer is something of an icebreaker. Someone will ask me about the craziest, trashiest books I’ve ever read — “the books that made you want to pull your eyes out” — and I relate the following:

I have a thing for bad books. Not just books that are poorly written, incompetently edited, and morally irredeemable, but books that make you question man’s place above the animals. Books that, under most circumstances, would not be missed if they were burned.

Yeah, those books.

My slide into this literary gutter didn’t happen overnight. I didn’t go from reading Wallace Fowlie’s translations of Rimbaud straight to Paul Ross’s Chopper Cop No. 3: Dynamite Monster Boogie Concert.* I was a good kid, a good student. I studied Thomas Pynchon and Donald Barthelme, wrote dense essays on Derrida and deconstructionism. But like the anonymous teen protag of any confessional young-adult memoir, I met a few shadowy people who took advantage of my weakness for pulpy science fiction and European trash cinema. One vice led to another, and before I knew it my bookshelves were filled with titles like Frank Colter’s Death Squad and Phillip Atlee’s Joe Gall, The Nullifier.

I first stumbled across the dreaded “men’s adventure” pulp through a review of the Mack Bolan novels in the back pages of a now forgotten zine. This was the late nineties, and I was looking for anything shocking. Anything outrageous. The Sharpshooter series by Bruno Rossi fit the bill perfectly. Marketed in the mid- to late seventies as men’s crime novels, they were cheap, and most used-book stores had entire shelves bowing under the weight of their gaudy, bloody covers.

Rossi’s Sharpshooter series (after his adoring family is gunned down by mafia goons, Johnny Rock becomes a mobster-eating machine fueled by bullets, pasta, and cheap gasoline)** and its identical twin The Marksman series*** were the gateway drugs. And these Don Pendleton rip-offs soon led to better, more-deranged fare like Marc Olden’s Black Samurai  (“The Black Samurai tangles with a human Satan in a hellish den of torrid sex and deadly violence!”),**** Wade Barker’s Ninja Master (“Japan taught him the world’s deadliest art — now . . . vengeance is his!”), William Crawford’s Stryker (“She was a beautiful coed model . . . until she was forced into heroin addiction, pornographic exhibitionism and a gruesome death!”), and Nelson DeMille’s early, outrageous Ryker/Keller series (“The terrorists splashed the streets with innocent blood. It was Sgt. Ryker’s job to seek and destroy them — one by one!”).*****

Two years into my craze, red-eyed and twitching, I found the non plus ultra of trashy crime novels, the craziest, trashiest books I’ve ever read: Dean Ballenger’s Gannon series.******

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A Donkey in the Grand National

by Ray Banks

Aug 27, 2010 in Books

Congratulations must go to crime novelist Peter Temple who last month won the Miles Franklin Award, Australia’s oldest literary prize. But before we seal and send that particular “well done, mate” package, let’s just drop a sharply delivered head slap in there, too. Because as much as Mr. Temple obviously deserves his accolade, he’s also prompted an additional round of Booker bleating.

For those of you not in the know, I’ll keep it brief — the Man Booker Prize is a cash award (originally £5k, now a whopping £20k) for the best novel written in the English language, written by a Commonwealth or Irish citizen, and published in the UK. It’s arguably the most prestigious literary award in Blighty, and for some reason crime writers want in on the act. The difficulty is, of course, that publishers have a limited number of entries, and according to former chairman of the Booker judges John Sutherland, if publishers were to nominate a crime novel, “There’s a feeling that it would be like putting a donkey into the Grand National.”

Which, y’know, if you want the press to go pestering Ian Rankin and Val McDermid for their already well-recorded thoughts on the matter, then that’s a fine way of going about it. The problem is crime novels have consistently made the Booker shortlist, along with other genres. In the past ten years alone we’ve seen Margaret Atwood’s 2000 winner The Blind Assassin (crime), Peter Carey’s 2001 winner The True History of the Kelly Gang (crime), Tim Winton’s Dirt Music (thriller), Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (sci-fi), Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal (thriller), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (sci-fi), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (sci-fi), Aravind Adiga’s 2008 winner The White Tiger (crime), and Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger (horror).

Now, yes, maybe I’m playing fast and loose with genre definitions there, but I still believe that whatever line there is between literary and genre, it’s easily blurred by quality. Case in point, and homework for you if you want it: compare and contrast the work of Richard Price and George Pelecanos with a particular reference to genre bias. Price’s first novel was a coming-of-age story about gang warfare; Pelecanos’s, a considered contemporary spin on the PI novel. Both have written extensively for The Wire, and both have had their most recent books branded with The Wire graphics, at least in the UK. Price’s novels frequently have cop protagonists and some kind of street-level mystery to be solved; Pelecanos has written variously of cops, PIs, and music-store clerks and tends to eschew mystery, especially in his later novels. So the question is, why does Richard Price have the popular literary label, while Pelecanos remains apparently stuck as a crime writer? Quality isn’t a factor — both are accomplished novelists. Is it a stylistic issue? Are Price’s prose pyrotechnics what make him literary? Do we still attribute being prolific with being poor? Pelecanos has written almost a book a year since his debut in 1992; Price has written four books since that time. Or is it simply geographical snobbery, where New York is seen as more artistically credible than Washington? Or is there an artistic glass ceiling, a real “us and them” situation? Because I have to say, I’m beginning to think it’s more just an “us and us” situation.

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Why Mark Billingham is a Badass

by George Pelecanos

Aug 26, 2010 in Books, Guest Posts, Mulholland Authors

Viaduct, Birmingham, England 1982Mark Billingham has been a crime-fiction sensation in the UK since his first novel, Sleepyhead, was published in 2001 to great acclaim and success. The protagonist of that book, Detective Inspector Tom Thorne, has appeared in many subsequent novels and is now a beloved figure in British crime lit.

Billingham earned his success. Raised in Birmingham, he has been an actor, screenwriter, and stand-up comedian for most of his adult life. He continues to work in those fields, but it’s obvious from reading his books that his major love is writing novels. He’s ambitious in the best way; he wants to write good books, and, like any author worth a damn, he’s getting better at it over time. I’ve enjoyed all of Mark’s books to varying degrees, but I do think his last few have been flat-out fantastic. Bloodline, which Mulholland Books is bringing out in the States, is one of my favorites.

In Bloodline, a series of violent deaths are linked by relation to the work of an infamous, long-deceased serial killer. Thorne and his coinvestigators (Hendricks, Holland, Kitson, et al.), an intriguing bunch, all finely drawn, methodically go about the task of finding the murderer who is committing the deadly tribute. Mystery and police procedural aficionados will be very satisfied with the proceedings and will also be treated to a rich character study and a heady snapshot of contemporary London. The dialogue is drolly, organically funny, and the plot speeds to a gripping denouement. It’s a boss performance by Billingham, through and through.

This fall a television series based on two of the Thorne novels, Sleepyhead and Scaredy Cat, will be broadcast on British television. It stars David Morrissey as Thorne, Aiden Gillen (Tommy Carcetti on The Wire) as Hendricks, Sandra Oh, and Natascha McElhone, memorable from John Frankenheimer’s excellent Ronin.

Billingham’s books are as compulsively readable as Michael Connelly’s. I’m on record as saying that Connelly is the best mystery writer in the world, so I can’t give you a more respectful recommendation than that. Don’t let the British milieu or slang scare you; trust me, you’ll get it. American readers will be highly rewarded by giving Billingham a try.

George Pelecanos is the author of fifteen crime novels set in and around Washington, D.C. He is an award-winning essayist who has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, Sight and Sound, Uncut, Mojo, and numerous other publications. Esquire magazine called Pelecanos “the poet laureate of the D.C. crime world.” He was a producer, writer, and story editor for the acclaimed HBO dramatic series, The Wire, winner of the Peabody Award and the AFI Award. He was nominated for an Emmy for his writing on that show. Pelecanos lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with his wife and three children. He is at work on his next novel.

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Heating Up the Cold Case Files

by Michael Capuzzo

Aug 25, 2010 in Books, Guest Posts

NoirI found the remote mansion of the “living Sherlock Holmes” before noon. Richard Walter was a withered, thin man with the face of Poe and a suit that stank of menthol Kools. I sat in the Victorian parlor where baffled cold-case detectives and federal agents came to glimpse the heart of darkness. My host offered me a “spot of tea,” in his formal English accent. Then he handed me a thick book documenting the la cuisine au beurre of a London cannibal killer. Scotland Yard had rushed the book by diplomatic pouch to the forensic psychologist in the Pennsylvania mountains they know as “the guru of perversity.”

On the shelf was I Have Lived Inside the Monster, the book by legendary FBI agent Robert Ressler, whose work inspired Silence of the Lambs. It was inscribed, “To Richard, my friend and fellow monster slayer.” There was also a flattering inscription in Signature Killers by Dr. Robert Keppel, the PhD criminologist and Seattle investigator famed for developing computer programs to chase down Ted Bundy and the Green River Killer. Keppel and Walter are renowned for describing the personality subtypes of murderers in a scientific fashion a generation more advanced than the FBI. Nearby was the grand piano the thin man plays, classical pieces of his own creation — only when he is alone, only when he can create unique pieces no one else will hear and he will never play again — to stimulate the subconscious mind.

“He had served ten years for murder, then the do-gooders let him out,” my host said, his aquiline nose wrinkled in distaste. “And now this. It’s quite a marvelous tale, actually.”
I began to turn through the pages of photographs, close-ups of the iron skillet sizzling with chopped brain and fillet of scalp with bits of dark hair.

“Young man,” my host said, “would you like some cookies? Chocolate chip. I bake them myself, an old recipe with some modifications, real butter, proper chemistry. They’re quite good.”

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The Dark Heart of Noir

by Charles Ardai

Aug 24, 2010 in Books, Guest Posts

Chess BoardSeven years is a long time for anyone to do anything; on the basis of stamina alone you gain a reputation for being some sort of expert. Perform cerebral commissurotomies for seven years, and you lose the right to start sentences with, “Well, I’m no brain surgeon, but . . .” Edit a line of noir crime novels for seven years, and people will look to you for insights on what makes the genre tick, doubly so if you’ve been foolhardy enough to write three of the things yourself.

Which is why I periodically get e-mail asking me to explain what noir is.

It’s a question germane to Mulholland Books because although the line has a much broader mandate than just noir, its initial presentation to the world — even its name — owes much to iconic elements of film noirand noir literature, and several of its authors are ones sometimes thought of as noir writers.

So, what does it mean when people describe a crime novel as “noir”? That it’s dark, to be sure (sometimes, that it’s dark and French).  But all crime fiction is dark. Even comic crime fiction concerns matters such as murder, assault and robbery, incidents that are dark in substance, however light the presentation might be. And even the stoniest noir purists wouldn’t deny the existence of noir comedies.

What, then, is the particular shade of darkness that we label “noir”?

The five dozen books I’ve published in the Hard Case Crime series would offer at least five dozen different answers to this question, as would the squabbling denizens of the invaluable Rara-Avis discussion group, who lob competing definitions at each other like soldiers manning mortars on the Maginot Line. But there’s a definition that I haven’t seen bandied about that has grown on me in recent months, and I present it here for your consideration:

Noir is crime fiction written by pessimists.

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See You in the Darkness

by Megan Abbott

Aug 23, 2010 in Books, Guest Posts

Barbara Stanywck and Fred MacMurray - Double Indemnity 1944One chilly February evening back in 2008, mystery writer Alan Gordon drove me home from a book launch for Queens Noir (Akashic, 2008), an anthology of dark tales set in my home borough. Both Alan and I live in Forest Hills, a pretty serene neighborhood set deep into Queens. As we approached the police precinct at the corner of Yellowstone and Austin that night, we noticed a burst of activity out front, including TV cameras and roving reporters. The next day, Alan e-mailed me: “So, all those camera crews at the precinct last night were about the arrest of the orthodontist’s wife for contracting his murder. My wife said, ‘I always knew she was crooked.’ ”

I knew the case vaguely. Back in October 2007, Daniel Malakov, a local man the newspapers described as a “prominent member” of Forest Hills’s Bukharian Jewish community, had been shot and killed in a nearby playground in full view of his four-year-old daughter. Ultimately, his estranged doctor-wife, Mazoltuv Borukhova, was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiring with a distant cousin to kill Malakov, with whom she was embroiled in a fierce custody battle. The key piece of evidence: a homemade silencer discarded at the scene. The silencer was traced to Borukhova’s cousin, whose fingerprints were on file for evading a subway fare. Shortly thereafter, police found that an astounding ninety-one calls had been made between the cousin and Dr. Borukhova during the three weeks preceding the murder. The jig was up.

In my reply to Alan’s e-mail, I remember noting that the whole story was in fact the classic noir tale — wife hires man to kill husband, only to find herself trapped in her own web of deception. Double Indemnity come to life. But, of course, beneath the genre staples, the case speaks to something far more elemental about the enduring attraction of crime fiction — particularly noir, with its emphasis on the fickle finger of fate. There is a tendency to dismiss crime novels as lurid, as trivial, as escapist. These dismissals always strike me as anxious attempts to diminish the genre’s actual, visceral lure. That, instead of being disposable yarns to be consumed quickly and tossed aside, crime novels speak to our very essence, to the often painfully compelling (impelling) emotions that, for all the layers of “civilization” and modernity that lay atop us, still can’t be soothed. Desire. Greed. Wrath. Envy. Revenge. These are timeless drives. Universal ones.

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