Detectives, Inc. (Collected Edition)

Detectives, Inc. by Don McGregor, Marshall Rogers and Gene Colan (Material from the 1970's and 1980's; this IDW edition 2009): IDW is really winning my heart with its reprints of great comics from the 1980's and 1990's. 

This B&W collection of writer McGregor's Detectives, Inc. comic stories comes along with several prose pieces on the genesis of the detective comic, along with a piece on the filming of the Detectives, Inc. movie. My only caveat about the volume is that it's unfortunate that it couldn't be reprinted in a larger format -- the hyper-detailed art of Marshall Rogers on "A Remembrance of Threatening Green" originally appeared in a larger album size, and things do get a little squinty at times.

Still, this is a tremendous achievement both in writing and art. The world of McGregor's private detectives, Rainier and Dennings, gets the hypercrisp, hyper-detailed treatment from Marshall Rogers (best known for his Batman work in the 1970's), and the moodier, more humanistic approach from Gene Colan (best known for Tomb of Dracula and about a dozen other books). 

Both art styles work, and both look great in black and white. Indeed, this may be the late Rogers' greatest work. The attention to detail is stunning, and Rogers experiments with some really fascinating one and two-page designs.

Private detectives aren't all that common in comic books unless they wear costumes or have occult powers. Rainier and Dennings remind me a lot of revisionist 70's PIs from the movies -- not so much Jake Gittes in Chinatown, as Rainier and Dennings are less cynical than Robert Towne's PI, but more the characters we see in films like Night Moves (with Gene Hackman on the case) and Cutter's Way (in which non-PI's John Heard and Jeff Bridges try to solve a case). They're battered and bruised sometimes, emotionally as well as physically, but they stay on the case. 

McGregor invests his characters with a lot of heart -- he's one of the great comic book writers in terms of creating sympathy and empathy, at creating plausibly flawed and self-doubting protagonists, and at incorporating both sex and romance into a comic book without being prurient or exploitative. Highly recommended.

Now I'm All Outta Elvis and Pike

Stalking the Angel (1989) (Elvis Cole/ Joe Pike #2) by Robert Crais: The theft of a priceless Japanese book from the Los Angeles home of an American businessman sends PI Elvis Cole and kick-ass pal Joe Pike up against dark family secrets and Japanese organized crime. Pike's character begins to come into focus in this, the second Cole/Pike novel, though the blurb on the back still refers to him as a sociopath (he isn't). 

The mystery is a bit thin. The climax is an inspired, epic shoot-em-up that seems to have been written with the movie screen in mind. And for foodies and lovers of brand names, Cole's obsessive recounting of the foods he eats and the brands of clothing people wear is at full-throttle. Recommended.

Lullaby Town (1992) (Elvis Cole/ Joe Pike #3) by Robert Crais: Elvis Cole and Joe Pike head to Connecticut in search of the son a famous Hollywood director abandoned years ago before he was famous. Well, his ex-wife took the son with her and disappeared, and the director didn't care then. Now, he wants to reconnect. 

The detective work leads Cole to the missing woman quite quickly... and into yet another big mess quickly after that. There's a certain amount of stereotypical fuzzy-mindedness about the Mafia along the way, along with another massive action climax. Crais, who's worked in TV and movies, seems to enjoy skewering Hollywood pretensions and pretenses here without turning the director into a completely unlikable cliche. Recommended.

Free Fall (1993) (Elvis Cole/ Joe Pike #4) by Robert Crais: The estranged fiancee of an LA cop comes to PI Elvis Cole in search of answers as to why her high-school sweetheart has become furtive and distant. And of course it's not simply another woman. Soon, Cole and best friend Joe Pike are fighting both the police and LA gangs as they search for answers. Things lead to a tightly choreographed, bloody climax. Recommended.

Voodoo River (1995) (Elvis Cole/ Joe Pike #5) by Robert Crais: A Hollywood celebrity hires Elvis Cole to track down her birth mother back in Louisiana. Nothing is ever simple in an Elvis Cole adventure. 

Along the way to an explanation, Cole runs up against small-town crooks, the world's worst PI, a 200-pound napping turtle, a Lurch-like enforcer, and a whole lot of Louisiana cooking. This novel also introduces the series' one major drag, love-interest Lucy Chenier, who will spend the next few Cole novels boring the bejesus out of the reader even as she entrances Cole. Recommended.

Indigo Slam (1997) (Elvis Cole/ Joe Pike #7) by Robert Crais: Three kids aged 8 to 16 hire Elvis Cole to find their father, who's gone missing from their LA home. As Cole feels sorry for them, he takes on the case rather than calling Child Protective Services. But what seems simple isn't, leading Cole and hyper-competent partner Joe Pike into a Battle Royale between Viet Namese and Russian organized criminals. Recommended.

Angel Heart (1987)

Angel Heart (1987)

Further Investigations

The Drowning Pool (Lew Archer #2) (1950) by Ross Macdonald (pen-name of Kenneth Millar): The second Lew Archer detective novel presents a twisty, psychologically weighted mystery for PI Archer to solve -- and that's before the bodies start piling up. Hired to discover who's blackmailing a Southern California heiress, Archer soon finds that the blackmail is just the beginning. Of vengeance? Of business shenanigans? Of old family grievances? Well, that's what Archer has to discover before everyone ends up dead. 

Ross Macdonald's writing is crisp and nuanced, mixing often elegant metaphors with clear and straightforward attention to making the mechanics of a complicated plot seem inevitable. Archer is already a rueful, committed PI at this point, and his first-person narration can alternatedly sing and sear with insight and pithy observations. Adapted in the 1960's into a movie starring Paul Newman. Recommended.

I love this cover

The Far Side of the Dollar ((Lew Archer #12) (1964) by Ross Macdonald (pen-name of Kenneth Millar): About as dark as the always dark Lew Archer hardboiled-detective novels get, all of it under those sunny Southern California skies. A rebellious teen-aged boy (hey, it's the 1960's) escapes from the psychiatric facility/ reform school his parents have just committed him to. Archer is called in, and soon descends into the underbelly of the family's upper-class American dream. Memorable characters and a fascinatingly twisted path of murders make this Archer novel especially good. Highly recommended. 

The Sentry: A Joe Pike Novel  (2012) by Robert Crais: Crais takes Joe Pike, sometime-second-banana to his other Southern California PI hero Elvis Cole, out for a mostly-solo spin. A random stop by Pike to check his Jeep's tire pressure leads him, chaos-theory style, into a rapidly escalating series of events centered around an imperiled LA sandwich-shop owner and his niece. Elvis Cole shows up to help Pike solve the mysteries that seem to keep erupting as the novel hurtles along, but much of The Sentry devotes itself to a third-person examination of Pike's thoughts and actions. 

As Pike is pretty much a hyper-competent pulp hero, one's interest in the novel depends on how much one likes hyper-competent pulp heroes. I do, but Pike's abilities tend to pull the Cole novels out of the realms of believability when he's just a supporting character. As the lead, he might as well be Doc Savage's occasionally melancholy grandson. The plot hums and whirs like a beautifully constructed machine, and the plot twists are about as twisty as they can get without becoming self-parodic. As seems to be a trope in later novels involving Elvis Cole, at least one female police detective dies. Hmm. An enjoyable entertainment. Recommended.

His Name Was Archer

The Moving Target (Lew Archer #1)  (1949) by Ross Macdonald (a.k.a. Kenneth Millar): Ross Macdonald's first novel about California P.I. Lew Archer sets the tone for everything that will follow. While bits of information will be doled out about Archer himself in his first-person narration, the focus will remain on the case he's trying to solve. Archer's strengths as a narrator (or Macdonald's as a writer, really) are his careful attention to detail, his understanding of character, and his skill at creating appropriate, revealing metaphors.

Lew Archer really ruled the American hard-boiled roost from the late 1940's until the 1970's, garnering praise from mainstream critics. The praise is deserved. These are fine novels, period, not simply fine detective novels. Macdonald's understanding of characterization and setting are already highly developed in 1949. Only the novel's period-specific references and some of the euphemisms indicate its time period. Otherwise, this could just as easily have been published yesterday.

The plot involves Archer's pursuit of a missing millionaire through various fascinating settings, including the rural compound of a New Agey cult leader. Nothing is as it seems, and no one. Welcome to post-war California. Recommended.

The Doomsters  (Lew Archer #7)  (1959) by Ross Macdonald (a.k.a. Kenneth Millar): More than a decade in and the Lew Archer P.I. series remains fresh, with only the deepening, heart-sick mordancy of its protagonist-narrator Lew Archer to mark the passage of time. Archer's past mistakes surface in this novel, as a now-heroin-addicted man he tried to mentor as a teenager sends a client his way -- straight from an escape from a mental institution. The twists in this case are wild and tangled and horribly human. The tragedy of the narrative is only heightened by the use of a Thomas Hardy phrase for the title -- a phrase repeated from one of Hardy's poems in the narrative. Macdonald portrays mental illness starkly and sympathetically, especially for the late-1950's time of the novel. Highly recommended.

The Goodbye Look (Lew Archer #15)  (1969) by Ross Macdonald (a.k.a. Kenneth Millar): More than 20 years into his career, California P.I. Lew Archer continues to wend his way through the tangled pasts and presents of his clients, often finding things they themselves wished had remained buried. The case here is a complicated one, navigated and explained with Archer/Macdonald's patented observational and metaphorical skills. Archer gets more personally involved than normal in this one, but he still works the case to its necessary conclusion -- one set up with complete fairness but impossible to clearly see until one is almost upon it. Great character writing, great and sad depictions of the damned and the lost and the searching. Highly recommended.

Hustlers

Back Issues: The Hustler Magazine Story: written by Flynn Hundhausen and Michael Lee Nirenberg; directed by Michael Lee Nirenberg (2014): Fascinating documentary about the history of Hustler magazine from its creation in the early 1970's to today. I'd never really considered the fact that Hustler founder Larry Flynt "won" the American pornography wars. Hustler is still a vital, successful online porn presence. The other three major American porn magazines -- Playboy, Penthouse, and Screw -- have all either dwindled, been sold off, or completely disappeared.

With the McKinnon-Dworkin Anti-Porn Goofiness behind us, one can see how important porn was to free speech in the United States. Both Al Goldstein's Screw and Larry Flynt's Hustler fought multiple battles against censorship and obscenity laws. That isn't to say Flynt was a saint -- the film does a nice job of laying out all his weird moments, with Flynt himself commenting on his own weirdness with the benefit of hindsight. His completely bananas, muck-raking Presidential campaign in 1984 is probably Flynt's crowning moment as a social commentator.

As the song goes, it's hard to kick against the pricks. Was Hustler important? Yes. How? Well, it de-mechanized the female body in American pornography, following Screw's lead in eschewing airbrushing and other photo touch-ups. It actually ran real investigative journalism. And Flynt was almost fearless. You may not always get the free-speech advocates you want, but sometimes you get the one you need. 

Made by the son of one of Hustler's early art directors, Back Issues does fall down in two places. The timeline sometimes isn't clear. And the movie takes vast jumps in time to get to its 90-minute length. But a fascinating documentary nonetheless. Highly recommended.

No Clue: written by Brent Butt; directed by Carl Bessai; starring Brent Butt (Leo), Amy Smart (Kyra), David Koechner (Ernie), Kirsten Prout (Reese), David Cubitt (Horn) and Garwin Sanford (Nelson) (2013): Pleasant spoof of film noir and hardboiled detective movies, starring and written by Corner Gas's Brent Butt. It looks and feels like a nice time-waster of a TV movie, very much in the pleasant, mildly observant comedy tradition of Corner Gas. And it admits that it's set in Canada (Vancouver, to be exact). Boy, though, did the director fall in love with his overhead helicopter shots of the city. Recommended.

Stubborn Angels

Falling Angel by William Hjortsberg (1978): Top-notch melding of the horror and hard-boiled detective genres by Hjortsberg, whose bibliography seems to contain more unproduced screenplays than anything else. He did adapt this novel into the 1987 movie Angel Heart (a.k.a. the movie with controversial nude sex scenes featuring The Cosby Show's Lisa Bonet playing a voodoo priestess), though there are significant differences between the two works. In terms of location, the novel stays pretty much in New York while the movie headed to New Orleans, I'd assume to make the voodoo action more... believeable?

Hjortsberg nails the cynical prose-poetry of the classic hard-boiled detective novel, with P.I. Harry Angel handling the world-weary, occasionally cruel but mostly well-meaning first-person narration. Angel repeatedly comes off as the world's oddest New York City tour guide as we move in and around the New York of the late 1950's.

A mysterious client hires Angel to track down a popular singer in the Frank Sinatra mode who was supposed to be in an upstate mental asylum after injuries sustained during World War Two left him mentally and physically disabled. The only problem is, the singer -- stage name Johnny Favorite -- isn't at the asylum, and hasn't been for years. And the trail is cold. But as Angel pursues Favorite, everything starts to heat up, and people start dying in increasingly horrible ways.

Variations are worked on the usual suspects and usual characters of hardboiled detective fiction and film, from shadowy businessmen through shady lawyers to jilted heiresses. As Angel's case proceeds, odder characters arise, and previously introduced characters get odder. There will be voodoo. There will be Satanism. There will be horoscopes and morphine addicts and one weird trip to the theatre.

Hjortsberg's period and genre-specific style works wonderfully throughout Falling Angel, falling always just on the serious side of near-parody. Angel's a tough customer with no friends and his own troubled past, but like all great hardboiled detectives, his essential quality is absolute stubbornness. He'll solve the case regardless of the cost. And what a cost! Highly recommended.

Hardboiled Magic

Hexes by Tom Piccirilli (1999): Odd, engaging horror novel with a lot of black magic thrown into the mix. 24-year-old Matthew Galen returns to his relatively small hometown after five years away for a reckoning with the Satanic force that calls itself the Goat. Thanks to the subterranean presence of the Goat, the town of Summerfell is a supernatural hotbed, with demons and ghosts running around all over the place.

The novel's strengths rest almost entirely on the quality of its prose, which is suitably overheated without slipping into the purple too often. Red herrings and undeveloped plot and character threads abound to such an extent that the novel almost seems as if it's been heavily edited down from a much longer work. This isn't necessarily a bad thing once one realizes that many of the Chekov's Guns one would normally expect to go off by the end of the narrative are actually never coming off the wall.

Piccirilli, who also writes non-supernatural suspense novels, often gets cited as a sort of hybridized hardboiled horror writer. It's a suitable judgment for this novel, which has the structure and the atmosphere of a detective novel. And Matthew Galen is one of those tarnished knights.

If there's a major complaint, it's that Matthew and his friends seem much too young to support the mournful nostalgia of the 'You Can't Go Home Again' portions of the narrative. Magic and loss may have prematurely aged Galen and company, but the weight of lost time seems out of proportion to the actuality of the time passed. What festers in nearly everyone and everything associated with Summerfell never entirely feels earned by the diminished time-scale of the narrative. It's as if the kids in Stephen King's It returned to Derry right after college graduation to finish the job, rather than 28 years later.

That Galen has become a critically lauded New York playwright in the five years he's been away also seems odd. Actually, the whole idea that he's a playwright is never developed in his internal narrative -- we mainly have people saying things like 'Wow, you're a famous playwright now!' and nothing beyond that. Why is he a playwright? It's an occupation made anomalous by the lack of development in the text, suggesting either the removal of much of the material about his career, or a nod to Jack Torrance's writing career in The Shining that stays entirely at the level of a brief tip of the cap.

But this is an early-career novel, and there's much that's laudable about it. The sequences that deal with the theory and practice of magic suggest that Marvel could do an awful lot worse than to hire Piccirilli to revive Dr. Strange. Recommended.

Tombstone Blues

A Walk Among the Tombstones: adapted by Scott Frank from the novel by Lawrence Block; directed by Scott Frank; starring Liam Neeson (Matt Scudder), David Harbour (Ray), Adam David Thompson (Albert), Dan Stevens (Kenny Kristo), and Brian 'Astro' Bradley (T.J.) (2014): It looks like one thing the American box office doesn't want is a movie starring Liam Neeson that doesn't suck. Oh, well. Adapted by screenwriter-turned-director Scott Frank from one of Lawrence Block's hardboiled, modern detective novels featuring world-weary ex-NY-cop Matt Scudder, A Walk Among the Tombstones is refreshingly old-school noir in its sensibilities.

And such grim sensibilities, with little of that bang-bang, pop-pop revenge crap Neeson's been doing so much of lately. As Scudder, Neeson takes punishment but only reluctantly dishes it out. Frank lets Scudder loom in certain shots, taking full advantage of Neeson's over-sized presence. And the actor occasionally known as 'Astro' throws in a solid performance as T.J., the smart-ass street kid who decides he wants to be a private detective because Neeson makes the whole enterprise look sorta cool.

The case involves unlicensed P.I. Scudder being hired by the brother of a fellow A.A. member to hunt down the kidnappers-turned-rapists-and-murderers-and-dismemberers of his wife. But this isn't one of those movies about loveable innocents being screwed over by a harsh and uncaring world until Shane rides into town. The brother is a dealer in hard drugs ("A trafficker, if you understand the difference," he tells Scudder). And it turns out that the kidnappers have been targetting the families of other mid-level drug dealers because the dealers won't notify the police.

Remembrances of Scudder's own sins form a structural element in the film, used to good effect especially in the climax, which is brutal and messy and jarringly realistic. Like Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe (both of whom T.J. namechecks), Scudder walks down the mean streets mostly alone, but not quite. The characters he meets will be colourful, to say the least (when one asks Scudder how he figured out that he had something to do with the murderers, Scudder tells him, "You're a weirdo."). And the depiction of the violence is unsettling, never moreso than in the opening credits. 

Frank situates much of the action among decaying streets and cemeteries and houses and rooftops in Brooklyn, with a few forays into the high-toned habitats of highly successful drug dealers. Set in 1999, the film uses the Manhattan skyline and the planes flying over it as a pre-9/11 commentary on cultural doom in some scenes: "People are afraid of all the wrong things," one of the killers notes, amused by the Y2K fears that dominate the newspaper headlines. It's a smart, faithful adaptation of the novel, and a fine addition to cinema's hardboiled detective films. Highly recommended.

Lex Talionis

361 by Donald Westlake (1962): Ray Kelly finishes his European stint in the U.S. Air Force and returns home to meet his father in New York City before returning to their hometown in Upstate New York. And then hell breaks loose, and keeps breaking loose for the rest of the novel.

An early novel from thriller maestro Westlake, 361 offers a lot of hardboiled thrills and reversals in its 200 pages. The strength of the novel lies in its plot, and in Westlake's sympathetic, somewhat genre-busting characterization of Ray Kelly. Events force him to be a tough guy. That doesn't mean he likes it, or likes committing violence. Kelly throws up a lot both before and after moments of violence, though there are subtler bits of characterization as well.

One can see, in Kelly's characterization, Westlake working against the dominant mode of hardbitten, almost sadistic protagonists of similar novels of the 1950's and 1960's that include the super-popular Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer. Indeed, during a lull in the action Kelly tries to kill time by reading some (unnamed) paperback thrillers, only to discover that he can't suspend his disbelief at how violence has no lasting psychological effects on the protagonists. It's a lovely, subtle moment of metacommentary on the genre that Westlake would soon be an acknowledged, boundary-pushing master of. Recommended.

Amends

A Drop of the Hard Stuff written by Lawrence Block (2011): It's been 35 years (!) since Block's hardboiled Manhattan-based detective Matt Scudder came on the scene. Scudder's adventures have been one of the high points of detective fiction over those years, taking him through near-fatal drinking bouts to hard-won and hard-maintained sobriety, all while solving cases the police have given up on.

Herein, Block returns to a format he first used with Scudder in When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, with the present Scudder narrating a much earlier case. We go to Scudder's first year of sobriety in the early 1980's, just after the events of Eight Million Ways to Die. Sympathetic Irish gangster Mick Ballou cameos as the person to whom Scudder tells the story.

An acquaintance from Scudder's childhood comes back into his life, a small-time hood who's gone sober and now, per the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, is in the 'Amends' phase of his eternal recovery. But someone kills him. His guilt-stricken sponsor, who'd pushed him to work fairly quickly through the 12 Steps, hires Scudder to find out who and why. And off we go.

Block does a lovely job of fleshing out Scudder's early-recovery self throughout the narrative. We also get an in-depth look at the workings of Alcoholics Anonymous and those who've sought it out to save themselves. Booze is as much a nemesis as the hidden murderer for Scudder, and the two dovetail neatly in a climactic sequence.

The ending may not satisfy everybody -- there is closure, but not of the bow-wrapped, justice-always-prevails variety. It satisfied me, but, then, I'm always glad to reacquaint myself with Scudder, and after the super-smart serial killer adversary of a couple of the most recent Scudder novels, I liked seeing things return to a more normative scale. Highly recommended, though it you've never read a Matt Scudder mystery before you should probably start at the beginning with A Stab in the Dark and work your way forward.

Harper

Harper, based on The Moving Target by Ross MacDonald, screenplay by William Goldman, starring Paul Newman (Harper), Lauren Bacall (Mrs. Sampson), Julie Harris (Betty Fraley), Arthur Hill (Albert Graves), Janet Leigh (Susan Harper), Pamela Tiffin (Miranda Sampson) and Robert Wagner (Allan Taggart) (1966): The Ross MacDonald novel this film adapts first appeared in 1949 and starred MacDonald's recurring private eye, Lew Archer. The film changes the PI's name to Harper and updates the setting to the go-go sixties, but Newman still embodies the tarnished virtues of Archer/Harper. The movie also bounces a number of ideas and characters off noir classic The Big Sleep, making Harper play sometimes like the missing link between The Big Sleep and The Big Lebowski.

Hired to find a missing millionaire, Harper soon finds himself neck-deep in weird California shenanigans, from aging starlets and wheelchair-bound misfits to cult leaders, cult financiers, and trafficking in illegal immigrants. Harper takes a lot of punishment along the way, and dishes some out, while trying to put the pieces of an increasingly bizarre mystery together.

William Goldman's screenplay is sharp and funny, the sort of writing one doesn't get a lot of from Hollywood any more. Harper, another wounded knight errant, really does take an astonishing amount of physical punishment -- like Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, he takes so many blows to the head that he should probably start wearing a helmet.

A subplot involving Harper's soon-to-be-ex-wife (Leigh) offers some character depth, though it could probably have been jettisoned to streamline things a bit more -- in this sort of film, it's the twisty plot and weird characters we want more of, not the domestic travails of the hero. Newman is charming as ever. Harper chews gum with such violence throughout that one one wonders if he's quitting smoking -- or if Newman was. Followed by an inferior sequel, The Drowning Pool. Recommended.

Chinatown 2: Electric Boogaloo

The Two Jakes, written by Robert Towne, directed by Jack Nicholson, starring Jack Nicholson (J.J. "Jake" Gittes), Harvey Keitel (Julius "Jake" Berman), Meg Tilly (Kitty Berman), Madeleine Stowe (Lillian Bodine), Perry Lopez (Lou Escobar), Richard Farnsworth (Earl Rawley) (1990): This much later sequel to the much-praised neo-noir Chinatown sees Jake Gittes ten years older (it's now 1948) and much more successful as the head of a private detective agency specializing in cheating husbands and wives. It was a critical and commercial dud at the time, though it now looks pretty good: it only suffers by comparison to Chinatown.

Nicholson's direction (this is either his third or second directorial effort) is solid but unspectacular, though the golden and brown hues of the cinematography make the whole thing go down pretty smoothly. Robert Towne, who also wrote Chinatown, returns here, in good form.

You can follow the plot of The Two Jakes without having seen Chinatown, but I wouldn't recommend it. A lot of the emotional heft of this film comes from its connections with the events of the first film, in which Gittes was inexorably pulled into a wide-ranging scheme with both personal and professional repercussions.

The always welcome Richard Farnsworth gets shoehorned into this film as a sort of substitute for the awful antagonist of the first film (played with jolly, sinister menace by John Huston), but ultimately has nothing to do. This leaves Nicholson and the other Jake, Harvey Keitel, with a lot of heavy lifting to do as actors, and they do it well.

A somewhat overstuffed cast of characters keeps things interesting (Tom Waits's cameo as a cop is pretty funny), and the plot actually does make sense, though red herrings and reversals do make the scheme behind all the other schemes look more complicated than it really is. Keep an eye out for an anachronistic ATM in one shot. Recommended.