Q&A: Hilary Davidson

At a reading in New York last year I met Hilary Davidson. I was already familiar with Hilary’s work having read her short fiction; her chilling story Beast had won an award only days before. Hilary’s debut novel The Damage Done was published this week and is in stores now. I thought I’d mark the occasion by conducting the first-ever VKDC Q&A. My thanks to Hilary for playing along.

Q: Tell us about The Damage Done. Hang on, that’s not a question. (Sorry, it’s just ... I don’t normally do this.) Let's try, what can you tell us about The Damage Done? And who is this ‘us’ I keep referring to?

I think “What can you tell us about…” is what every interviewer is supposed to say. It means, “Hey, buddy, I’m not being nosy. Invisible people want answers!” I’m honored to be your first interviewee, you know. And since you asked about my book, I don’t have to accost you, like I did to two strangers in an elevator today.

The Damage Done is my first novel, and it’s about a travel writer, Lily Moore, who is called home to New York when she’s told that her sister, Claudia, has died, only to find that the body belongs to a woman who’d stolen her sister’s identity and that Claudia is missing. Lily and her sister haven’t spoken in months — partly because Claudia’s a drug addict and something of a con artist, and partly because Lily can’t cope with Claudia unless she thinks she’s fixing her problems for her. But when the police start to suspect that Claudia’s responsible for the death, Lily instinctively feels she has to find her first, because she still wants to protect her sister.

Q: Your protagonist Lily Moore shares your background as a travel writer. Did any of her experiences come directly from your life?

The professional background, definitely. Not only because we both write about travel, but because we’ve traveled to some of the same places, like Thailand and Turkey. But Lily’s career has been more exotic and glamorous than mine. My books have been about Toronto and New York, my hometown and my adopted home, while Lily is on the road most of the time. She lives in Spain, which makes me just a little bit jealous of her.

Our personal lives are very different: I don’t have a sister, though I do have two brothers. I used to think about trading them in for a sister. Lily’s single and I’m married. When I started writing the book, I was wary about having her be my alter ego, especially since we share the day job. When I pictured Lily, Ava Gardner came to mind, so I put a print of Ava on my desk. I ended up thinking of Ava as Lily’s role model.

Q: How did travel writing prepare you for novel writing? Were there any habits you needed to break?

The worst habit was probably my attachment to deadlines. By that, I mean I wouldn’t do anything without a deadline. Also, I found it hard to take any time away from paying work to write fiction. When I started freelancing, I was single, and “time is money” was tattooed on my brain. But once I decided to really work on fiction, it was addictive.

Travel writing was helpful in terms of pacing my work, though. I’ve written 18 nonfiction books, and the one thing I know is if you write a thousand words a day, you will have a book in three months.

Q: What’s your favorite place that you’ve written about as a travel writer? What remains on your list of places you would love to write about?

It’s so hard to pick one. The first travel story I ever wrote was about a New Orleans cemetery, and it’s still one of my favorites. Easter Island was great to visit and write about, and so were Thailand and Peru. The list of places I’d love to write about is long. Cambodia is at the very top of that list.

Q: You wrote the Frommer’s Guide to your birthplace of Toronto. On a whirlwind tour of the town, what are the must-sees? What’s the city’s best-kept secret?

I love telling people about the Malcove Collection, which is hidden inside the University of Toronto’s downtown campus. It’s this incredible little art gallery that’s open to the public but is a secret… or at least it was, until I started blabbing about it. It has everything from Lucas Cranach’s 16th-century “Adam and Eve” to Byzantine artifacts.

On a whirlwind tour, I’d start at Casa Loma, which is perched above the downtown core and gives you a truly gorgeous view of the city. I can’t tell you how much nicer it is than the view from the CN Tower, which is what everyone goes to instead. It’s a castle dreamed up by a crazy rich guy who lost all his money building it a century ago, so it’s got that going for it, too. I’d also see the Art Gallery of Ontario, Kensington Market, and Chinatown. One of Toronto’s real virtues is its downtown parks. One of my favorites is Trinity Bellwoods, where you can watch for the mutant albino squirrels. At the end of the day, I’d hit Ossington Avenue for its fabulous cocktail lounges.

Q: You broke through as a fiction writer with short stories that had nasty kicks to them. Can you go to darker places in the short form?

That’s definitely been true for me. When I start a short story, I have a scenario in mind, and the characters are there to play it out. “Insatiable,” which ran in Beat to a Pulp and got the Spinetingler Award this year, would be a good example. I had an image in my mind of a man watching his wife at a party. He sees her check out other men and he knows that she would soon be sleeping with someone else. Everything in the story came from that initial image. I tend to think in scenes, almost like there’s a movie playing in my head but I can only catch glimpses of it. That scene made me think about what kind of man would watch his wife do that. Why is he accepting that his wife cheats on him? Everything in the story came from answering that question.

Several of my short stories have been set inside the minds of really sick, depraved people, though the reader doesn’t necessarily realize how twisted they are in the beginning. But I know, and there’s only so much time I want to spend in their heads. That said, The Damage Done is a book with a dark heart. But it’s not dark because Lily is actually a serial killer — she isn’t! Hopefully no one will be disappointed by that spoiler.

Q: What’s the novel that truly got you hooked on crime fiction?

I discovered William Golding’s Lord of the Flies when I was 12. That book made a huge impression on me. It’s a brutally dark vision of human nature. I’ve re-read it several times, and it still hits me hard.

Q: You’ve appeared in Needle, your debut novel is called The Damage Done, and you’re Canadian. How big an influence is Neil Young on your life?

Huge! He’s such a brilliant lyricist and musician. The title of my book is taken from his song “The Needle and the Damage Done.” When I wrote to Ken Bruen asking him to read the book, Ken asked me if the title was a Neil Young reference. He was thrilled that it was. When you read Ken’s books, there are all kinds of Neil Young mentions in them. I guess we’re members of the same cult.

Baseball Q: Are you a Toronto Blue Jays fan? If so, isn’t it hard to be one while living in New York City? How tough is it to root for one of the “other” teams in the same division as the Yankees, Red Sox and Rays?

I am a Blue Jays fan, and when I moved to New York in 2001, I decided that I had to become a Mets fan, since there was no way I was going to root for the Yankees. Truthfully, I’m a lazy fan who rarely goes to more than one game a season, so my rooting for anyone isn’t very impressive.

Movie Q: You’ve spoken elsewhere about your love of film noir. What’s your favorite of those films, and why?

It’s so hard to pick a favorite! For a long time it was The Lady From Shanghai because the husband and wife at the center of it are so irredeemably evil. It’s like an inverted Beauty and the Beast, with them dragging each other — and other people — to their doom. But when I was writing The Damage Done, I watched every Ava Gardner film I could, and I fell in love with The Barefoot Contessa. I’ve never heard it talked about as a noir film, but it really should be. The story is about how we can never escape our essential natures, even if that leads us down a dark path. Humphrey Bogart and Edmond O’Brien are brilliant in it, too.

Cocktail Q: You’re in a bar. What do you order?

Since The Damage Done is being released this week, I’m going to say a Kir Royale. Nothing else says celebration quite like that!

Tony Curtis, R.I.P.

The greatest thing about Tony Curtis is that he never stopped being Bernie Schwartz, a kid from the Bronx who didn’t completely buy into his stardom but loved being a star. He was terrific in Some Like It Hot and The Boston Strangler, scorching as Sidney Falco in Sweet Smell of Success. But Tony Curtis was the role of his lifetime, and he was wise enough to know it.

It’s amazing how often I think of something Tony said to writer Jeffrey Wells back in 2000.

Can I tell you a story? In 1948, when I was 23 or 24, when I first came out here I lived in a house on Fountain Avenue ... I rented a room there. And they had a swimming pool. I had an appointment and I got on a trolley car ... they were running right down the middle of the freeway back then.

Then I got back, I jumped in the pool, I took a shower, got dressed and got into the car, and drove up here to meet you. That’s how quick these fifty-fucking-two years have gone ... quick as that.

Movie: Death on the Diamond (1934)

The Mets have played their last meaningful game in 2010 and are currently battling for a .500 finish and third place in the NL East. The Mariners, meanwhile, are on the verge of having the worst record in the American League. With no vested interest in the remaining pennant races, I had to get my baseball fix somewhere.

Death on the Diamond is based on a novel by Cortland Fitzsimmons, whose work as a screenwriter includes the gotta-see-it-to-believe-it The Devil with Hitler. Pop Clark is both owner and manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, a state of affairs that happens regularly in professional sports. He’s mortgaged the team to his eyeballs but is sure they’ll take the pennant thanks to fireballing phenom Robert Young, who immediately falls for Pop’s daughter (Madge Evans, a dead ringer for Kristen Bell). The Cards start winning in spite of Young’s deranged windmill throwing style, which is still better than Anthony Perkins’ form in Fear Strikes Out. A gambling syndicate does not like.

This is the sort of lighthearted comic mystery in which a baserunner is killed by a sniper as he rounds third and another player dies after slathering poisoned mustard on his hot dog. There’s time for things to get maudlin as an umpire tells the dead slugger he’s been feuding with for the entire movie that “you’re not out, you’re safe!” A character literally comes in from left field and is introduced with “As you know ...” dialogue so atrocious that it instantly identifies him as the killer. There’s no nationwide panic as one Redbird after another goes down swinging, just changes in the odds. The mystery is solved in the best Scooby Doo fashion, and the happy ending has a pitcher hitting a walkoff inside-the-park home run that sends the Cardinals to the World Series with most of their starting nine six feet under. The Gashouse Gang they are not.

It’s a terrible movie. It was still better than watching the Yankees clinch again. With Mickey Rooney.

Local Tourist: Queen of Seattle

After a summer of hearing the mighty whistle of the Queen of Seattle from her office, Rosemarie insisted that we go aboard. The Queen is the largest steam-powered paddlewheel boat west of the Mississippi. It offers a two-hour cruise of Lake Union and the Lake Washington Ship Canal. Berthed next door is the Arthur Foss, featured in the 1933 film Tugboat Annie. Rosemarie, a Marie Dressler fan, was pleased by this no end.

Seattle history is covered throughout the cruise, with special emphasis on the Klondike gold rush era. My two favorite stories: then-mayor William F. Wood resigned as soon as he heard about the strike and went north to Alaska. Then there’s the one about the unscrupulous outfitters who’d sell sled dogs to a would-be prospector, only to blow a high-pitched whistle as the sap’s ship left the pier. The animals would jump overboard and swim home to be foisted off on the next poor sucker.

As we tooled around the lakefront, a piano player plinked out period tunes. On the return leg he climbed to the top deck and went to work on one of the world’s few remaining steam-powered calliopes. Then came the Klondike Cabaret, which really ought to be spelled with a K. Our tour guide, kitted out in appropriate attire, sang a few turn of the last century songs and followed up with a stirring rendition of Robert Service’s The Cremation of Sam McGee. Rosemarie, whose father would recite the poem regularly, was ready to step in if the need arose.

It’s all a little hokey, yes, but exactly the right kind of hokey. Rosemarie bought our tickets through a deal-of-the-day website, and kept reminding me about the voucher for what she called “the awesome boat ride.” The thing about Rosemarie is that she meant this. She genuinely believed that this boat ride was going to be awesome. And she was right. The cruise was a splendid way to spend an afternoon. It was nice to be the reason why the Fremont and Ballard drawbridges were going up for a change.

More photos at my Flickr page.

Gloria Stuart, R.I.P.

The actress passed away at the age of 100. She was a contract player in the 1930s, working with director James Whale in The Old Dark House and The Invisible Man, and Busby Berkeley in Gold Diggers of 1935. Roles were few and far between in the 1940s, although she did appear in the first of The Whistler films. She has a lovely scene in My Favorite Year in which she doesn’t say a word, simply dances with Peter O’Toole.

And then, of course, came her role as Old Rose in Titanic.

I spent an extraordinary morning listening to her speak in January 2002 when she visited Seattle. In her nineties but still sharp and vibrant, she told one amazing story after another. About her long friendship with Groucho Marx, hosting Humphrey Bogart at dinner parties, meeting Dorothy Parker, organizing the Screen Actors Guild. It was a small gathering, and it snowed while she talked.

Rosemarie bought a copy of her memoir I Just Kept Hoping that day, and used the short version of her name when she asked Miss Stuart to sign it. Which is why our copy is inscribed, “Best wishes to (another!) Rose.”

Grab Bag: Westerns, Welles & Whiskey

I haven’t been posting as frequently as I once did. Lots going on. But sometimes that hectic pace is a boon for the blog. A little distance allows you to see what’s truly worthy of comment.

Like Death Ground, by my friend Ed Gorman. I’ve got a copy of Ed’s latest book Stranglehold, already winning raves, but the urge to read a western came on me like a fever so I picked up this 1988 novel. Bounty hunter Leo Guild is marking a joyless 54th birthday when he hears that his current boss has been murdered. The prime suspect is mountain man Kriker, and Guild joins two deputies in tracking him down. Their journey takes them to Kriker’s settlement, full of misfits determined to make their own way but woefully ignorant of how vulnerable they really are.

There’s a great feel for landscape and the elements. None of the characters is what you expect, Kriker in particular. I loved the cardsharp priest, the twisted dynamic between the deputy brothers, Guild’s bone-deep weariness. Ed later said, “westerns are where I do my noir,” and that’s what Death Ground is. A dark, glittering gem.

Also worth recommending is the coming of age tale Me and Orson Welles (U.S. 2009). Zac Efron is the aspiring actor who finds himself cast in a small role in the Mercury Theater’s 1937 production of Julius Caesar. It’s always fun to see actors playing other actors like Joseph Cotten and George Coulouris, but Christian McKay’s Welles is pure wizardry. The offhand smiles, the cock of the head, the bravado. It’s as if Orson is among us again.

Then there are the constants in life. The Zig Zag Café, where everybody knows my name, has again been crowned the finest cocktail bar in America, this time by GQ Magazine. Congratulations to Murray and the entire ZZ team. It’s also nice to see Needle & Thread, the upstairs bar at Tavern Law, rate a mention. I’ve been to a few of the New York and San Francisco outposts on this roster, and intend to hit more during Bouchercon next month. Who’s with me?

Movie: Cell 211 (U.S. 2010)

I heard the premise of this Spanish thriller and started salivating. “Yes. When can I see this? Is now possible?”

Juan Oliver, a young man with a pregnant wife, needs to make a good impression at his new job as a corrections officer. He shows up at the prison a day early for orientation and during his tour an accident knocks him out cold. He’s temporarily put in the title room. Seconds later a riot breaks out. When he comes to, the inmates are in charge. To survive, Juan must convince them he’s a new fish – and on their side.

Admit it. That’s genius.

Cell 211 is a little too slick at first, playing like the studio remake that is undoubtedly coming. It doesn’t help that Alberto Ammann, as Juan, is criminally handsome. But the script does a convincing job of explaining how Juan could so quickly become part of the inmates’ inner circle, led by Luis Tosar as the aptly named Malamadre. It’s also rich, weaving in material about Spanish politics (Malamadre has timed the takeover to coincide with the arrival of Basque terrorists held by the government), institutional corruption, and Juan’s wife on the outside. Yet for all that Cell 211 still moves, building up a hell of a head of steam and crashing through preconceived notions in time for a third act where you have no idea what’s going to happen next.

I’d missed the movie on the festival circuit but didn’t mind, because IFC picked it up and planned to show it on demand. Diligently, I checked their offerings every week. Cell 211 never showed up. One night I was goofing around with the remote and discovered a separate section of “IFC Midnight” movies. That’s where Cell 211 was hiding – but only for another day. I’d stumbled onto it just in time. The movie may still be available on some cable systems, is playing in a handful of theaters, and will be on DVD soon enough. Look for it.

Passings: Too Many, Too Close

I’ve been remiss in not acknowledging the deaths of several people of late.

Claude Chabrol was often described as the French Hitchcock, but over the course of his career his movies evolved into their own genre: dark comedies of manners about the correlation of means and morality.

Kevin McCarthy will always be remembered for his performance in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But he was one of the great character actors, his toothy bonhomie uniquely American, his presence improving everything he appeared in.

I never met bookstore owner and publisher David Thompson, but our paths crossed online frequently. I planned on introducing myself at Bouchercon next month. Now, sadly, I won’t have the chance.

Plus the Liberace Museum that was a high point of my last trip to Las Vegas will be closing its doors.

Book: The Reapers Are the Angels, by Alden Bell (2010)

When did the zombie apocalypse achieve cultural singularity? A couple of years ago I’d never heard the phrase. Now I half-expect to open my interfaith calendar and find Z-Day listed.

Another harbinger of the walking dead bringing about the fall of mankind is the birth of a new genre: zomlitfic. Alden Bell is a pseudonym for Joshua Gaylord, who wrote last year’s novel of teachers and students Hummingbirds. In The Reapers Are the Angels, his teenage protagonist is facing something worse than a clique of mean girls.

15-year-old Temple has never known a world not plagued by what are known variously as meatskins or slugs, and as such she’s made her peace with it. She keeps moving and knows how to find what beauty remains. Reapers is a Gothic picaresque, following Temple as she roams the American South. She encounters survivors coping in different ways, some attempting to start society over in the face of this new reality, others content to stay trapped in a distant past. She also acquires a sworn enemy who stalks her across the countryside.

Bell writes in an ornate vernacular. “But the family, it’s an iron fierce thing.” Temple grouses that “... you can’t put nothing past these southern boys. They just sit around waiting for somebody to kill their brother so they can get started on some vengeance. It’s like a dang vocation with them.” Picture Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird grown up and in a Flannery O’Connor novel filled with the undead. Reapers is a potent, unexpected, and ultimately moving book. Considering that I’m genuinely unnerved by zombies, that’s strong praise.

Movies: Animal Kingdom/The Square (U.S. 2010)

Why haven’t I posted lately? Blame competing deadlines, promising developments, and the busiest weekend of my life. I spent the last few days at the Penny Arcade Expo, directing willing con-goers before a green screen in vignettes that may allow them to be background characters in a video game. Am I a director? No. But I’ve seen more movies than anyone else at the company, so the assignment naturally fell to me.

I put more than 300 people through their paces in three days, and for the most part the cast seemed to enjoy themselves. It’s surprisingly exhausting work. You wouldn’t think telling other people what to do would be so draining. Fortunately I remembered an essential piece of directorial advice I’d heard years ago: wear sensible shoes.

Here’s another tidbit that some of you are already aware of. They know how to make crime dramas in Australia.

In theaters now is Animal Kingdom, which I’ve been waiting for since seeing the trailer. (NOTE: You will never hear Air Supply the same way again.) In David Michôd’s electrifying film, a teenaged boy is returned to his distant extended family of armed robbers. Michôd never shows us their crimes; it’s as if they’re wanted primarily because of a grudge on the part of a deeply crooked police force. Every performance is worthy of praise. There’s Guy Pearce’s understated honest detective, Jacki Weaver as the mother who loves her sons too much. Ben Mendelsohn’s Uncle Pope is the most realistic criminal this side of Elmore Leonard, a man whose ruthlessness is made necessary because of his stupidity. It’s all held together by James Frecheville, unbelievably making his debut. His Joshua is a heartbreakingly real teen, all awkward impulses and silences. Frecheville’s face actually seems to physically change onscreen as he feels his way through a treacherous world with no one to rely on but himself.

Joel Edgerton has a key supporting role in Kingdom. He co-wrote and co-stars in The Square, directed by his brother Nash and now available on DVD. It starts with a conventional noir premise: two lovers married to other people and desperate for escape, and the promise held by a bagful of cash. Unlike many neo-noirs there’s not a wink in the entire enterprise. The Square has a true blue collar sensibility. The lives of these people would in fact be changed by the relatively meager sum of money involved, so the stakes are that much higher. And the small town setting, where everyone knows everyone else, only ratchets up the claustrophobic feel. Two relentless films, beautifully engineered.

DVD: New York Confidential (1955)

New York Confidential was once thought of as “the holy grail of missing noir films.” The only thing harder than finding a decent print was untangling who owned the rights. Both problems have been solved, and the movie finally debuted on DVD last month.

One of the many exposé films made in the wake of the Kefauver hearings into organized crime, NYC packs a dizzying amount of story into a fast-paced 87 minutes. I would expect no less from the team of Clarence Greene and Russell Rouse, also responsible for the sublime trash of Wicked Woman.

The movie prefigures The Godfather and Point Blank in terms of depicting the rackets as a corporate enterprise. The coiled spring that is Richard Conte plays a syndicate man from Chicago with the unimpeachably badass name of Nick Magellan. He’s sent to the Big Apple when boss Frank Lupo (Broderick Crawford) needs an outsider to handle some dirty work, and quickly makes himself indispensible.

The revelation of NYC is Anne Bancroft, whose Kathy is desperate to escape the stigma of being Lupo’s daughter. For a brief period early in her career Bancroft was groomed as the next Ava Gardner. She didn’t care for the roles but she was awfully good at them, as evidenced by her sexy and heartbreaking performance here. The DVD also features an informative commentary track by my Noir City Sentinel cohort and friend Alan K. Rode and Kim Morgan that’s well worth a listen.

On a related noir on home video note: the Red Riding trilogy comes out today, and should be in your queue already.

Miscellaneous: Kodachrome and Kon

Surfacing during an unbelievably hectic week to share two extraordinary items.

First, this gorgeous Kodachrome color film test – from 1922. I can’t stop watching it. Read more about it.



Next, this week brought the terrible news of the death of Satoshi Kon. The fact that he worked in anime may have obscured the fact that he was easily among the world’s finest filmmakers. Millennium Actress and especially Paprika are brilliant stories about storytelling, and movies in particular. (Paprika, I will say again, has one of the most perfect endings of recent years.) After Kon’s death, his family posted his final message on his website, which in turn was translated by blogger Makiko Itoh. Read it. It is a beautiful, heartbreaking document that makes me want to watch his films all over again.

Miscellaneous: Vamping

I’m juggling several deadlines amidst the mad rush at work to get ready for next week’s Penny Arcade Expo. So I have been remiss in not posting this.

That’s right. It’s Army of Lovers time. The band featuring my first wife, my half brother Nils, and the guy who handles my landscaping. And I ain’t talking about yard work. When I get swamped, you get ‘Crucified.’ Regular broadcasting to resume eventually.

Book: Beast of Burden, by Ray Banks (2009, U.S. 2011)

Since walking out of prison, Manchester’s Cal Innes has accomplished a hell of a lot more than he expected. He’s set up a detective agency (of sorts), become something of a local hero, even journeyed to Californ-eye-ay.

But it’s taken a ferocious toll. At the start of Ray Banks’ fourth novel about the character, Cal is a physical and emotional wreck. And for all his accomplishments, his world is still defined by the people who knew him when: crime boss Morris Tiernan, his lunatic son Mo, and hardheaded flatfoot “Donkey” Donkin. It turns out Mo’s taken a powder, Morris only trusts Cal to find him, and Donkin ... well, Donkin just wants to wind Cal up and grind him down.

Beast of Burden, need it be said, is funny as hell. Cal’s dyspeptic but decent voice remains one of the great pleasures of recent crime fiction. But Banks, the bugger, turns half the narration duties over to Cal’s nemesis Donkin, a decision that renders the copper human and allows you to feel for the prick without diminishing his prickishness one iota. And the ending will leave you reeling. There’s daring to spare here.

The book won’t be published in the States until 2011, which gives you ample opportunity to devour the three previous novels first. As I’ve said before, it’s best to think of the Innes series as a single, darkly hilarious, and ultimately moving novel. I’ve had my copy of Beast of Burden for over a year, and the highest compliment I can pay is that I wish I’d held out on reading it a little longer. It’d be reassuring to know that it was still in its metaphorical glass case, that I had a Banks book on hand in the event of emergency. Now I have to wait for him to write another one.

Book: Left Coast Libations, Ted Munat/Michael Lazar/Jenn Farrington (2010)

As a transplanted New Yorker I am loath to say this, but the West Coast doesn’t get nearly enough credit for a lot of things. For instance, its role in current cocktail culture. Left Coast Libations pays tribute to the core of dedicated bartenders, particularly in San Francisco and Seattle, who are the heroes of this renaissance.

Featured in this collection of one hundred original cocktail recipes are some of my favorite watering holes. Bourbon & Branch and Alembic in San Francisco, Spur and Tavern Law in Seattle. And of course my home away from home, the Zig Zag Café, reigned over by the man recently declared America’s best bartender by his peers, Murray Stenson.

For the most part, I can’t prepare these drinks myself. I don’t keep a variety of sherries or arrack in my personal bar, and I’m not about to make “smoked cider air” although I now know how to do so. I’d rather let a skilled professional do the hard work for me. Good bartending is an art – equal parts host, teacher and chef – and the book is an incentive to get out and enjoy it firsthand. Plus the photographs are great.

Book: Speak No Evil, by Martyn Waites (U.S. 2010)

Bad Vince. You know not to jump into a series in the middle. But sometimes these things can’t be helped. And the praise Martyn Waites has received made the leap worth the risk.

In the fourth novel about Joe Donovan, the journalist turned private eye lands an assignment that draws on his former profession. He’s asked to collaborate on a book with Anne Marie Smeaton, who decades earlier killed a child when she was but a child herself. Anne Marie has a son of her own now and is trying to make something of her life. But stirring up the past is awakening impulses that she can’t control, leading her to fear the worst when a teenager is murdered on her housing estate and she wakes up with blood on her hands and no memory of where it came from.

Speak No Evil, need it be said, is a dark book. It’s also an ambitious one, with multiple plotlines and a host of viewpoint characters. (Several of them are adolescents, whose rage, awkwardness and curiosity Waites depicts with unstinting honesty.) No doubt I’d have gotten more out of the book had I read the previous novels about Donovan and his compatriots at the Albion agency. Donovan’s young son has disappeared, his relationship with the rest of his family is strained, and there’s fallout from his previous cases to deal with. But Waites weaves the material in smartly so that newcomers can keep up. The greater measure of his skill is the compassion he engenders for Anne Marie, a woman who has been denied such mercy anywhere she goes. Speak No Evil is strong stuff that goes down smooth.

Book: The Cold Kiss, by John Rector (2010)

Noir has been described to me thus: the main character knows what he or she is about to do is wrong and does it anyway. The debut novel from John Rector certainly fits that bill. Then there’s the other stripe of noir, where it’s the universe that goes bad, using some poor fool for its sport. Think of it as the Detour variety, the lesson being that “fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me for no good reason at all.” The Cold Kiss is that kind of noir, too. In spades.

Nate and Sara are young lovers heading west, away from harsh childhoods and ahead of a ferocious blizzard. They give a lift to a man clearly in need of one. When the storm forces them off the road and into a forgotten Nebraska motel with a handful of other refugees, they discover that their passenger has died – and that he had two million dollars cash in his possession. Nate and Sara decide to keep it. And the snowball begins its downhill descent.

The novel moves with the inexorable logic of a bad dream. Ask yourself at any point “What is the absolute worst thing that could happen now?” and sure enough, that’s what happens. Rector relays it all without wasting a word yet still finds rich veins of deadpan humor. Reading it I was reminded of Scott Smith’s A Simple Plan, along with the corkscrew plot mechanics of Red Rock West. The Cold Kiss will put a chill into your summer reading in more ways than one.

DVD: Discs I Should Have Mentioned Last Month

Night Train to Munich (1940). It’s hard to believe that a thriller written by the team of Gilliat & Launder (The Lady Vanishes) and directed by Carol Reed (Odd Man Out, The Third Man) could be forgotten. Luckily the Criterion Collection has rescued it from oblivion. A Czech munitions expert is able to flee the German invasion of his homeland, but his daughter (Margaret Lockwood) is left behind. She escapes a prison camp and makes her way to England, where her father is under the watch of singing spy Rex Harrison. (OK, he doesn’t sing, exactly. He sort of ... Rex Harrisons it.) Only her lucky break isn’t what it appears to be. Soon Harrison is in Germany, masquerading as a Nazi officer mere hours before war is declared, trying to spirit Lockwood and her father back to freedom. It’s grand entertainment in the Hitchcock mode: romantic badinage (of a sort, given that the prickly, preening Harrison only loves himself), derring-do and a slam-bang climax at an exotic locale. Charters and Caldicott, the upper-crust gents played by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne in several films beginning with The Lady Vanishes, lend a stiff upper lip here.

It Came From Kuchar (2009). Jennifer Kroot’s engaging documentary about the brothers George and Mike Kuchar, stars of the 1960s underground film circuit – John Waters cites their alternative take on Hollywood genres as a huge influence – who have never stopped making movies and plundering their own lives for material. (For decades George has taught a legendary hands-on course in filmmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute.) A low-key look at the obsessive need to create.

Movie: Mother (U.S. 2010)

Joe Queenan is the latest to claim that “2010 is the worst year in the history of motion pictures.” I disagree. I’d call 2010 a banner year, nay, an embarrassment of riches ... provided you’re talking about first-rate crime dramas from outside the United States. Yet another example is now on DVD.

The middle-aged title character in Mother doesn’t have a name, only a responsibility: taking care of her mentally-impaired son Do-joon. When a schoolgirl is murdered in their South Korean town and circumstantial evidence points toward Do-joon, the police are content not to look any further. His mother, however, is determined to get justice for the son to whom she has devoted her life, even if it means conducting her own investigation and angering local hoodlums. Hye-ja Kim is a powerhouse as a woman who has spread herself thin only to discover that she hasn’t come close to reaching her breaking point. Director Bong Joon-ho, now three-for-three after the cracked police procedural Memories of Murder and the monster movie The Host, has scaled down his ambitions but made his most emotionally satisfying film yet.

And for the record, Mr. Queenan, I would see The Four Amigos. There are plenty of questions the first movie didn’t answer.

Book: Savages, by Don Winslow (2010)

Sweet Jesus, the voice.

That’s what I keep coming back to when I think about this book, and I think about it often. The astonishing voice that Don Winslow uses – omniscient yet friendly, benevolent but wised-up – in this electrifying novel. It’s like God himself has beckoned you closer after a long afternoon on the beach. He watches the sun douse itself in the Pacific with a wry smile on His face. He turns to you, the smell of cervezas and fish tacos on His breath. And He says, “Let me tell you a story. About some people I know.”

The people: Ben, Chon and O. Ben grows the finest marijuana in the Southland and plows his profits into saving Mother Earth. Chon came back from several tours in Iraq with badditude to spare and a pronounced lack of post-traumatic stress. O shops and loves both her men.

The story: The Baja cartel comes calling and says you work for us. Ben and Chon say, no we don’t. Trouble ensues. It’s a SoCal Jules & Jim directed by early ‘90s John Woo.

And, of course, told in that voice. One that manages to be relentless while still finding time for digressions on politics and the spoiled golden promise that is California. If Savages has a flaw it’s that Winslow’s style is too intoxicating; you want to pump the brakes so you can savor the ride, burrow a little deeper into the characters. But they don’t slow down. There just isn’t time. They act and react. So should you. Pick up Savages, and be blown away.

On The Web: Ed Gorman, The Whistler & Me

Over at his must-read blog, Ed Gorman, for reasons known only to him, interviews me about The Whistler movies. It’s inspired by the article I wrote for the current issue of the Film Noir Foundation’s magazine, the Noir City Sentinel. Go and be edified.

Your Weekend Viewing: Wicked Woman (1953)

I’ve told the story before. But it’s a favorite movie-going memory, so I’m telling it again.

It’s the final night of Noir City 2007. The lights dim in advance of Wicked Woman, which Eddie Muller assures us is one of the sleaziest movies of the 1950s. A man I haven’t seen before slips into the seat in front of me, a figure of a certain age wearing a cologne equal parts Marlboros and hair tonic.

The film starts. And as the dulcet voice of Herb Jeffries belts out the title song, the guy in front of me croons along, his hands aloft conducting the orchestra he’s assembled in his head for the occasion. He’d waited a long time to see Wicked Woman again, and now they were back together.

Wicked Woman, amazingly, lived up to that opening, and that’s because of its star. Beverly Michaels, to put it kindly, is not an actress. What this six-foot tall blonde is, however, is a presence. Some kind of dark magic takes place the second she appears, glaring out a bus window in what she’d call “a bad yuma,” ogled with the dead-eyed camera of a stag reel. There’s an undeniable aura around her character Billie Nash (the ultimate B-movie femme fatale name), a sense that she has used her body and had her body used, and she’s getting pretty damn tired of it. She comes on screen and your first thought is: That woman looks like nothing but trouble. Think I’ll buy her a drink.

The movie calls to mind the old saw about academic politics being so brutal because the stakes are so low. There are no murders in Wicked Woman, no crime plotted more grandiose than a little run-of-the-mill fraud. Those threadbare ambitions give the movie its power; Billie aspires to nothing more than a few months in Acapulco (I love how Beverly pronounces the name as if it’s four complete sentences), but stupid men keep fouling up her meager plans. There’s a true desperation in this movie, borne of small lives lived in furnished rooms.

Not to mention a last call, somebody-take-me-home sexiness. The movie is in love with every inch of Beverly Michaels, content to watch her do anything. Exhibit A: the scene in which Beverly settles into her new digs, puts on a record, takes off her shoes, and points her huge bare feet toward the camera. Where they stay for what seems like an eternity. Director Russell Rouse would go on to marry his leading lady, who would leave movies soon after. He would later win an Academy Award, and their son Christopher would take home a statuette himself decades later for editing The Bourne Ultimatum.

And now more good news. It turns out Wicked Woman is on YouTube. In nine installments, the first of them below. I guarantee you will not spend a better seventy-seven minutes this weekend. Watch it for Percy Helton’s performance as the first poor sucker who falls under Billie’s sway. Watch it for the erotic magic of Billie knotting her robe, over and over. Watch it for the one-of-a-kind Beverly Michaels. Watch it now.

Book: The Wolves of Fairmount Park, by Dennis Tafoya (2010)

Lives and worlds collide outside a dope house in Philadelphia, where two middle-class teenagers miles from home are gunned down. The fathers of both boys – Brendan Donovan, a veteran police officer, and George Parkman, Sr., a businessman who barely knows his son at all – want answers, and think they can be provided by Brendan’s junkie half-brother Orlando, found not far from the scene of the crime.

Dennis Tafoya skillfully weaves together several viewpoints – the grieving parents; Orlando, the wounded outsider seeking connections in every sense; a streetwise detective convinced he’s being played and the dealers who may be playing him – in this dense and satisfying novel. It’s about the bonds between family and friends, discovering which ones are fragile and which are surprisingly durable. There’s real darkness in these pages, which makes the rare break of sunlight that much more brilliant. Fans of Dennis Lehane and George Pelecanos would do well to start reading Tafoya.

Movies: Solitary Man/Harry Brown (U.S. 2010)

I haven’t kept up with the exploits of centenarian vampire Edward Cullen in the latest Twilight movie. I’ve been hanging with guys who are a few years younger but have more problems.

In Solitary Man, Michael Douglas plays Ben Kalmen. Once the biggest car dealer in the tri-state area and now a train wreck, he’s pulled off the neat trick of screwing everything that moves as well as himself. Familiar faces abound in this rich character study with a sharp script by Brian Koppelman (who co-directs with Rounders screenwriting partner/crime novelist David Levien). But it’s Douglas’s show. He’s in every scene, giving a sensational, swaggering performance that nails the victimhood beneath the surface of every egomaniac. Not that Douglas’s old dog tricks don’t work in a young man’s game; when he successfully beds a woman a third his age, you understand why both of them do it. The movie has a real feeling for well-off New Yorkers. The way Douglas says “lobster Cobb” to an associate giving him the brush-off over dinner is priceless.

Michael Caine is Harry Brown. So say the titles. The movie is not entirely successful; the story of an aged ex-marine who launches a bloody vendetta against the hoodies who rule his housing estate eventually strains credulity. But the parts that do work cut deep. Caine and the gifted director Daniel Barber give us an entire life in the wordless sequence of Harry fixing himself breakfast before visiting his dying wife in the hospital, the familiar spaces of his flat terrifying now that he knows they are soon destined to be empty. Barber’s shots – a sucker punch intro of Harry at a funeral, a long look at the self-loathing on his face as he chooses to take the long way around instead of walking past some raucous teenagers – are brutally communicative. And the hair-raising scene in which Harry tries to buy a gun proves that, with this and the Red Riding trilogy, Sean Harris is now the scariest mofo in movies.

Speaking of seniors with attitude, here’s the scoop on the upcoming Damn Near Dead 2, edited by Bill Crider.

Extra, Extra!: Noir City Sentinel

Can you have too much of a good thing? We’re about to find out.

The latest issue of the Noir City Sentinel, house rag of The Film Noir Foundation, streets today. And this one is truly epic. 53 – count ‘em! – 53 glorious pages of news that’s red hot and ice cold. Feature:

* An extensive overview of British noir!

* My pal Alan Rode’s exclusive interview with Eleanor Parker, Oscar-nominated star of the greatest of all women in prison movies, Caged!

* FNF kingpin Eddie Muller on Walk Softly, Stranger, crippled by “one of the worst endings of all time,” and on the career of Paul Stewart!

* The one and only Woody Haut on the one and only Elisha Cook, Jr.!

* Jake Hinkson counts the ways of voiceover!

* Yours truly on The Whistler, the only film noir series produced by Hollywood!

* And a hell of a lot more!

Donate at least ten bucks to the Film Noir Foundation and all this can be yours. Everybody’s gonna be talking about it come Monday. Don’t be left out.

Book: Don’t Point That Thing At Me, by Kyril Bonfiglioli (1972)

The Keenan family motto, Eo sensim quod etiam supervenio, loosely translates from the Latin as “We’re slow, but we get there.” (Bear in mind that translation is exceedingly loose. Bear in mind also that’s not the Keenan family motto. I’m simply lobbying for it to replace the one that has served my clan in good stead for generations: “Are you going to finish that?”) I read this New Yorker article about the novels of Kyril Bonfiglioli in 2004 and bought one that very day. I finally got around to plucking it off the shelf a mere six years later.

Bonfiglioli wrote a trio of tales about one Charlie Mortdecai, a shady aristocrat who toils in the art world along about the patch where it becomes a racket. Charlie’s a sweetheart whose only vices are haberdashery, alcohol and sloth. In his employ is a manservant blessed with the name Jock Strapp, the crudely effective Jeeves to Charlie’s sociopathic Wooster. Here’s our Charlie on a thuggish policeman who has come to call:

Somewhere in the trash he reads Martland has read that heavy men walk with surprising lightness and grace; as a result he trips about like a portly elf hoping to be picked up by a leprechaun. In he pranced, all silent and catlike and absurd, buttocks swaying noiselessly.

Why should I prattle on when Charlie can regale you with a description of the meal he’s served on an international flight?

... plastic smoked salmon, rubber chop in vitreous aspic, chicken turd wrapped in polystyrene bacon and weeping half-thawed strawberry on dollop of shaving soap ...

Most every chapter begins with Charlie rousing himself from slumber and closes with his return to that blissful state. (“I suppose I went to bed at some stage.”) Other that than, I’m not entirely sure what transpires in Don’t Point That Thing At Me. The plotting is, shall we say, casual, a lot of complicated business involving a stolen Goya and some nasty government types. What matters is that Charlie is forced to go to America – which he adores, especially the Cattleman’s Breakfasts – to deliver a Rolls Royce containing the purloined painting, and then kill the recipient. I never understood why.

Don’t Point That Thing At Me is hilarious – until it’s not. The story grows so dark that the savage playfulness of Bonfiglioli’s voice eventually seems out of place. I can also say, at the risk of spoiling the ending, that considering there are two more books in the series with the same characters Bonfiglioli didn’t care a whit about continuity, either. It’s a strange one, this book. It’s funny while not being that good. Or is it not good while still being funny? Yes, that’s the way to think of it.

Book: Hunt Beyond the Frozen Fire, by Gabriel Hunt as told to Christa Faust (2010)

The latest Gabriel Hunt extravaganza begins in media res with our two-fisted adventurer eyeballing a treacherous ex-lover across “a murky, nameless Moldovan hole-in-the-wall” in pursuit of a bejeweled dagger. I tore through the action-packed opening pages expecting to catch my breath in Chapter Two, as the histories of the kindjal and Transdniestrian unrest were explained.

Nope. A furious chase on horseback. Chapter Three, then, will certainly –

Huh. An assault on an ancient fortress. No time for backstory, Mr. Hunt. Exposition comes on the fly. Even more astonishing, this mayhem is merely preamble. Hunt returns to his Foundation offices in Manhattan just long enough to get sent on an another expedition. This one involves the requisite beautiful woman, her missing scientist father, and the possibility of a lost civilization beneath the South Pole. Before it’s over, there will be more derring-do and generous helpings of sex. My friend Christa Faust never lets the pace flag for an instant. As fast as it moves, you’ll read it even faster. A wild, fun ride.

Bookstores don’t have “men’s adventure” sections anymore, so I never know where to look for the Hunt novels. Asking for them only baffles clerks. “They’re written by Gabriel Hunt. Well, technically, they’re not, because he’s a fictional character. They’re credited to him, but this one is written by ...”

After two chain stores and an independent let me down, I bought Frozen Fire on my Kindle. It felt wrong; the Hunt books, with their gloriously overripe covers, demand to be read in paperback. But it worked out for the best. I wasn’t entirely certain what spavined and portcullis meant, and could look them up instantly without breaking the story’s flow. I’ve read some highbrow stuff on my Kindle, but who’d have thought a pulp adventure novel would crack the whip on the dictionary function?

Sort Of Related: Nobody’s Angel, by Jack Clark (1996)/Two O’Clock Courage (1945)

For personal reasons, I’m a fan of taxi noir. Two examples of the form recently came my way.

Cabdriver Jack Clark wrote Nobody’s Baby in the 1990s. After repeated rejections he self-published the book. Until Hard Case Crime brought out a new edition last month, the only way to score a copy was to hail Clark’s rig in Chicago.

Eddie Miles has seen plenty in his years behind the wheel, but nothing prepares him for being at the center of two different murder investigations. A veteran driver is shot to death at the same time Eddie prevents a killer of prostitutes from claiming his latest victim. Eddie doesn’t exactly investigate either crime. But he sticks close, his own fate seemingly bound up in the outcome.

Both cases are ultimately solved, but neither is the point of the book. Nobody’s Angel is about broken people in a broken place. Eddie – tired, cranky, certain he’s about to be screwed by the world and whoever’s in the back of his cab – knows only he’s to blame for the sorry state of his life. He struggles to find compassion for his fares, and on the rare occasions when he does it’s powerful stuff. In pared-to-the-bone prose Clark offers a street-level view of the city, always changing and forever breaking hearts.

A cabdriver is the only thing Nobody’s Angel has in common with the frothy nonsense of Two O’Clock Courage. Amnesiac Tom Conway flags down a hack driven by Ann Rutherford. Conway realizes that he’s implicated in the murder of a theatrical producer and Rutherford, as any cab driver would, ferries him around town trying to clear his name. This overplotted B-movie hooey, complete with strained comic relief, is made bearable by Rutherford, who can only be described as adorable, and strong early work from two noir stalwarts. Jane Greer, still Bettejane in her first credited appearance, makes a great venomous party girl. And director Anthony Mann keeps the meter running with some nice business in the backgrounds of shots. For the record, even Eddie Miles would look fetching in Ann’s sporty cap.

Movies: Recent Release Roundup

Toy Story 3. It’s a Pixar movie. What do you think I’m going to say? I don’t know what’s more impressive, introducing a complex philosophical thought about life and death in what is ostensibly a children’s movie without a line of dialogue, or following it with a plot twist that was set up in the first movie fifteen years ago.

The Extra Man. This adaptation of Jonathan Ames’ novel was the opening night film at SIFF last month. It’s now available via on demand prior to a limited theatrical release. Paul Dano plays a disgraced prep school teacher, detached from the modern era and his own desires, who moves to New York to find himself. But first he finds Henry Harrison (Kevin Kline), asexual academic, justly forgotten playwright, and escort to moneyed women of a certain age. It’s a slight movie but an enjoyable one thanks to the two leads; Kline has his best film role in decades. The directors of American Splendor capture the real Manhattan, where abject squalor is cheek-by-jowl with wild excess and you barely notice either because you’re too focused on what’s in front of you.

Winter’s Bone. Seventeen year old Ree Dolly (the astonishing Jennifer Lawrence) riles up her extended Ozark family in order to save her immediate one when her no-good daddy jumps bail and disappears. You’ll find no thriller more low-key than this one based on Daniel Woodrell’s spare novel, but bet your ass that it thrills. Its every casual act of violence has more impact than an entire summer’s worth of blockbuster explosions and fireballs. A movie packed with formidable women, and no scene of late has rocked me like Ree’s conversation with an Army recruiter.

Movie: The Killer Inside Me (1976)

After seeing the new adaptation of Jim Thompson’s novel, I decided to check out the earlier film version. This in spite of its less-than-stellar reputation among the hardboiled cognoscenti. That’s the level of service you can expect around here.

The story, at least in terms of incident, is very much the same. Deputy sheriff Lou Ford seems like a right guy but he ain’t. Things go bad and get steadily worse. Folks die.

But this is an actual adaptation, for better or worse. The action has been shifted from Texas to a Montana mining town. The burg is nicely captured in the film, populated as it is by familiar ‘50s faces like Charles McGraw and Keenan Wynn. The biggest change is in terms of Lou Ford’s backstory, which has been simplified to the crudest Freudian terms.

That puts additional pressure on Stacy Keach, who comes through in spades. His Lou Ford is still deeply nuts, but there’s more of a sense of Lou fighting desperately to keep the lid on his psychosis. His collapse is all the more frightening because his mask of sanity never completely slips off. Susan Tyrrell, so good with Keach in Fat City, gives a great performance as Joyce, the prostitute whose desirability and greed are tinged with and intensified by laziness and anger.

Director Burt Kennedy was responsible for one of my favorite neglected noirs, The Money Trap. He deploys some elements here that have dated badly – there are too many pointless ‘70s zooms, and the soundtrack is truly lousy – but overall the film holds up. It’s less faithful to Thompson than the newer film, but more cohesive. That there are two such different approaches more than three decades apart is a testament to the power of the novel. And really, that’s where you ought to start.

Book: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, by Stieg Larsson (2010)

In the beginning, Stieg Larsson created The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. And it was good.

I stand by that verdict. Yes, the prose was clunky, but it worked for a story of modern characters – Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist who splits his time between crusading and preening, and Lisbeth Salander, the damaged genius of the title – in an anachronistic setting.

(ASIDE: I’m in the minority on this, but I saw the Swedish film adaptation and, aside from Noomi Rapace’s Salander, found it a dreary slog. Stripped of Larsson’s idiosyncratic style the story came across as formulaic. Rosemarie, who hadn’t read the book beforehand, summed it up thusly: “Horrible things happen to women, then and now.” An American remake, especially one directed by David Fincher, can only be an improvement.)

Next was The Girl Who Played With Fire. Actively disliked it.

Comes now Hornet’s Nest, picking up mere seconds after Fire ends. Salander has been reunited with her more-than-estranged father, a Soviet defector turned gangster, and as these things usually go each tries to kill the other.

I’ve stuck with the series for one reason, and that’s Salander. So naturally she spends almost the entirety of this book incapacitated. Instead we follow a cover-up carried out by septuagenarians and their dimwitted factotums.

The granularity of Larsson’s plotting keeps the pages turning, but the writing has not improved. Here’s Salander’s doctor as she’s wheeled into the ER.

“And now the murderer herself had been shot, which was surely poetic justice of a sort. But that was not his concern. His job was to save his patient’s life, irrespective of whether she was a triple murderer or a Nobel Prize winner. Or both.”

The critical term we’re looking for is yeesh.

Once again terrible things happen to women. The book is further padded with a stalker storyline involving Blomkvist’s lover Erika Berger that Salander unravels without leaving her hospital bed. Admittedly, personal and institutional misogyny is Larsson’s true subject. He even has Blomkvist say so for those who haven’t tumbled to that fact.

“When it comes down to it, this story is not primarily about spies and secret government agencies; it’s about violence against women, and the men who enable it.”

But too often Larsson wallows in what he professes to decry. And seriously, who uses a semi-colon in dialogue?

Lisbeth Salander is such a singular creation that I read all 1,500+ pages about her. I just didn’t care for most of them. But Stieg Larsson has single-handedly saved publishing and created a tourism industry, so take my take with a grain of salt. Preferably washed down with an Akvavit.

UPDATE: Nora Ephron has some problems with the books as well.

Miscellaneous: Life in the Cheap Bastard Section

Whenever I told someone in Seattle that we were spending a few days in Las Vegas, I always got the same response. Never “When are you going?” or “Where are you staying?” but “Why?,” the assumption being that I was heading to Sin City against my will. I’ve stopped trying to explain that I actually enjoy Las Vegas. I’d simply say that my client insisted that’s where the job go down and then change the subject.

On this trip we decided to honor the city’s bygone glory days by attending a Rat Pack tribute show. Trouble is there are two of them, one borne of the other, and they’re feuding, at times in true old-school fashion. We opted for The Rat Pack is Back because it’s the older show and it would allow us, at last, to visit downtown Las Vegas. That its home, the Plaza, served as Biff’s casino in Back to the Future Part II and the devil’s headquarters in The Stand was another plus, as was the fact that the Plaza’s showroom had essentially been neglected for decades prior to a renovation that preserved its Nixon-era glamour.

The show is modeled on original Rat Pack concerts but flexible enough to allow for late-career hits and Viagra jokes. The impersonations are variable, yet offered with energy and palpable affection. And the band is terrific, so a good time is had by all.

I knew that there was some audience participation in the show and sought out seats in the second tier. What happened next taught me a valuable lesson. Halfway into Frank’s set, the doors behind us burst open and “Joey Bishop” came down the aisle pretending to sell T-shirts. “I’ve got an extra large here, and looks like I’ve got another extra large right ... here.”

Guess who the spotlight hits.

I have limited recollection of the next few minutes. Rosemarie assures me that I was a good sport. I do remember Frank yelling at Joey from the stage and Joey hollering back, “I’m over here, in the cheap bastard section!” I did get a free T-shirt out of the deal, and in the men’s room after the show a guy pointed at me and said, “Hey, you’re the cheap bastard!” Recognized in a Las Vegas casino. Easily the high point of the trip.

Also crossed off our Las Vegas to-do list was an excursion to the Liberace Museum. Located in a mini-mall off the Strip, it’s more fun than it has any right to be. Liberace’s showmanship, turning his excesses into part of his act and inviting the audience to enjoy his ostentation right along with him, was ahead of its time; the museum is cannily marketing him to a new generation as “The King of Bling.” I hope it works, because the exhibits also underscore his skill as a performer. There’s no flash photography allowed – all those rhinestones are blinding enough as it is – so the pictures of each of us wearing a Liberace-style cape came out blurry. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

Random Las Vegas thoughts –

* Everywhere we went, we ran into fighting couples. In restaurants, at neighboring slot machines. The worst was in the shuttle coming in from McCarran Airport. I wanted to lean forward and say, “If you two came here to rekindle something, I think it’s too late.”

* I was amazed at the floor space given over to penny slots in the high-end casinos. On previous trips I only saw them in B-list joints. Considering that Rosemarie won money on them, I’m not complaining.

* Casino themes are spoiled by staff tattoos. Historically, cowgirls and antebellum Southern belles did not have tramp stamps.

* I know it’s hot in Las Vegas. But that doesn’t mean everyone has to wear flip-flops everywhere. And if you must, at least pick up your feet. A guy scuffing along in front of us lost his sandal three times in a block and a half. I’m fairly sure he didn’t make it out of town alive, killed in some horrific moving sidewalk accident.

Movie: The Killer Inside Me (2010)

This adaptation of Jim Thompson’s chilling 1952 novel has stirred controversy since walkouts occurred during its Sundance screenings this year. Word was that it was faithful to its source. That is undoubtedly true, perhaps to a fault. The film is uncompromised, uncompromising and ultimately unsuccessful. Yet despite its flaws, I’m finding it awfully hard to shake.

Lou Ford is a deputy sheriff in Central City, Texas. He’s also a high-functioning sociopath who has managed to hide his derangement for years, even from his steady girlfriend. In order to exact revenge against the town kingpin (Ned Beatty) he sets into motion a plot that starts with Lou murdering a prostitute he himself has been sleeping with. But nothing goes according to plan, and the blood continues to flow.

Thompson’s novel is not a descent into madness. It can’t be, because Lou is already there. It’s a brief ascent into lucidity. Lou Ford knows that something is wrong with him, and is intensely curious about what it might be. That sense of self-observation, of a man watching himself with great if detached interest, has no obvious cinematic correlative, putting any film version behind the eight-ball from the start.

Director Michael Winterbottom and screenwriter John Curran hew very closely to the book in what Winterbottom himself calls a “very literal film.” It’s as if they believe that because Thompson’s prose is so spare, even stark, Lou’s story is to be taken at face value. But this approach is essentially playing the notes and not the music; as Bertrand Tavernier, who made the finest Thompson adaptation with Coup de Torchon, observes, there’s a metaphysical element to all of the author’s work that’s too often ignored.

The violence is brutal, callous, and almost impossible to watch. It’s also exactly as Thompson describes it. More to the point, though, it’s exactly as Lou Ford describes it. He’s an unreliable narrator, so maybe we don’t believe him when he claims that the women involved not only refuse to defend themselves but profess their love as the blows rain down. And the film’s increased emphasis on the sadomasochistic nature of the relationships has the unpleasant side effect of suggesting that the women are complicit in their fates.

Still, this is a serious, thoughtful adaptation, and the filmmakers deserve credit for sticking to their point of view to the bitter end. Plus they get so much right. The movie looks terrific, nailing the period, the place, the desolation. Casey Affleck gives a fearless performance as Lou Ford, hiding a host of demons behind a boyish, placid mask. The offhand manner with which he delivers the most disturbing moments – his parting words to Jessica Alba’s Joyce amidst his attack on her, telling a fellow deputy not to say anything because “I haven’t given you any lines” – only heightens their effect. And the supporting performances are first rate, like Elias Koteas as a cunning union leader and especially Bill Pullman’s barnburner of a late cameo, spouting dialogue straight from Thompson’s book (“A weed is a plant out of place”). It’s not a perfect film. But it’s one I won’t soon forget.

The movie opens in theaters on June 18 but is available via IFC On Demand now. I’ll echo what was said in the last issue of the Film Noir Foundation’s Noir City Sentinel: by releasing this film and the Red Riding trilogy, IFC has proven that it’s the best hope for contemporary film noir in America.

UPDATE: I watch the 1976 film version here.

Book: The Nearest Exit, by Olen Steinhauer (2010)

Maybe my problem is that I don’t like origin stories.

Steinhauer introduced diffident spy Milo Weaver in last year’s The Tourist. A veteran of the Department of Tourism, a CIA black-ops shop, Milo had found solace as an administrator, husband and father. Then a personal history more tortured than even Milo suspected forced him back into his old life. In Exit Milo has, to his surprise, been welcomed back to full-time Tourism, a existence both rootless and ruthless. Case in point: an assignment to kidnap and execute a 15-year-old immigrant girl living in Germany. Milo, desperate to reconnect with his own family, concocts an asymmetrical solution that fools his superiors. Having earned their trust he’s then tasked with investigating a security breach, but both matters are linked in a way that delves into Milo’s past and threatens the future of Tourism.

The Tourist, alas, left me somewhat cold; it’s a big, expansive book that at times is too self-conscious about its ambition. Still, it contained enough passages on par with Steinhauer’s dazzling series of crime novels set in an unnamed Communist country for me to pick up Exit. I’m glad I did. Freed of the burdens of establishing the world it’s a completely different animal, densely plotted yet fleetly paced. You want globe-trotting derring-do, hidden agendas and suspense? They’re here, but not at the expense of character. Steinhauer never loses sight of the human costs of intelligence work. Milo is a truly good man in a genuinely bad world, always and only wanting to go home. And the ending delivers. I’m fully on board with Milo now, and await his next adventure.

Miscellaneous: Cable Box Theater

Ondine (U.S. 2010). The latest film from Neil Jordan is in theaters and on demand. Colin Farrell, continuing his string of strong performances, plays a down-at-the-heel Irish fisherman who catches a mysterious woman in his net. Farrell’s young daughter suspects that she’s a selkie, an outlandish explanation that Farrell himself is inclined to believe even in the face of evidence suggesting a more earthbound – and dangerous – origin. It’s a lovely, delicate film, essentially a fable, helped enormously by Christopher Doyle’s cinematography that captures an Ireland where sea, sky and sod are at times indistinguishable.

Jordan is one of the few filmmakers whose work I never miss no matter the venue. In a spoiler-packed interview in Cineaste, he explains his move into television. Depressing quote of the day: “... the kind of cinema that we used to make is drying up, I’m afraid. The distribution is vanishing. The funding is vanishing.”

Related depressing story: Variety on the fate of literary adaptations in a world where “Clint Eastwood is single-handedly holding up the adult drama at the studio level.”

The Special Relationship (2010). Peter Morgan and Michael Sheen’s third collaboration about Tony Blair, now on HBO, focuses on the PM’s tricky relationship with Bill and Hillary Clinton (Dennis Quaid and Hope Davis), especially post-Lewinsky. The familiarity of the material makes it the least successful of the trio, but it deepens their joint portrait of Blair as a glib leader with sharp instincts who is all too easily starstruck, at times even by himself.

I Knew It Was You: Rediscovering John Cazale (2009). Cazale only appeared in five movies before his death at age 42, but every performance still haunts. And all five films – The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather: Part II, Dog Day Afternoon and The Deer Hunter – were nominated for Best Picture. Director Richard Shepard (The Matador) has assembled a lively tribute featuring those who worked with and loved the actor (Al Pacino, Sidney Lumet, Meryl Streep) and those who were inspired by him, like a very astute Sam Rockwell. My favorite observation comes from one of Cazale’s friends, who says that the secret to his technique was to find what caused his character pain and build the performance around that. On HBO.

Movie: Hollywood Story (1951)

It turns out that I possess heretofore unsuspected powers. If I express my displeasure on the internets, the universe will make things right. All I had to do was grouse about not being able to see the rarity Hollywood Story at Noir City Los Angeles and a reader of the blog, the redoubtable John Hall, sent me a copy of the movie.

Now to use this gift judiciously. Friday should be National Donut Day. I’d like to see Armando Galarraga pitch another, official perfect game. And I wish Hollywood Story were better.

William Castle directs this B-movie riff on the previous year’s Sunset Blvd. Richard Conte is Larry O’Brien, a New York producer who finally moves to the Left Coast. When he learns that the mothballed studio he’s taking over was the scene of Tinseltown’s most famous unsolved murder, he’s found his first new project. And he’s not about to let the police or the box office stop him from tracking down the killer.

Hollywood Story is loosely based on the case of silent film director William Desmond Taylor. (For a better fictionalized unraveling of that sordid affair, may I suggest Nina Revoyr’s The Age of Dreaming.) After a great opening sequence featuring early ‘50s L.A. street scenes, things go off the rails in a hurry. Jim Backus is playing an agent only peripherally involved with what’s going on. So why give him the voiceover?

Silent era stars like Francis X. Bushman appear – but as themselves, in a single scene in which they talk about how great it is to be working on a movie before they toddle off, never to be seen again. Conte gives his usual solid performance even though he’s saddled with a ridiculous character who insists on investigating the crime himself in the interest of verisimilitude. (Although, to be fair, Jerry Bruckheimer did personally demolish some space junk prior to the shooting of Armageddon.) The movie’s greatest problem is the paucity of viable suspects. Only a handful of characters were present during the events of twenty years earlier, and most of them can be eliminated by the ham-fisted way they’re introduced. The reveal of the guilty party is no big surprise, but it is cleverly staged.

On the whole Hollywood Story is a talky disappointment. I’m still glad I saw it. It has a genuine love of showbiz lore on its side. Not to mention a pretentious hack writer named Vince. For that reason alone, I’m in John’s debt.

By coincidence, I watched the 2007 documentary Spine Tingler!: The William Castle Story around the same time. It (understandably) overlooks the interesting crime dramas Castle made in the 1940s and ‘50s like my beloved Whistler series in favor of his gimmicky horror films like, well, The Tingler. But it’s a lot of fun.