Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007): written by Kelly Masterson; directed by Sidney Lumet; starring Philip Seymour Hoffman (Andy Hanson), Ethan Hawke (Hank Hanson), Marisa Tomei (Gina Hanson), Albert Finney (Charles Hanson), Rosemary Harris (Nanette Hanson), Aleksa Palladino (Chris), Michael Shannon (Dex), Amy Ryan (Martha), and Brian F. O'Byrne (Bobby):
The great humanist director Sidney Lumet's final film is an acting showcase for everyone in it, as Lumet's films generally were. It feels like a great, lost Jim Thompson novel re-earthed -- a twisted tale of crime, incompetence, chance, and family. Philip Seymour Hoffman has a scene in a car that's an all-time great freak-out.
Revealing much of the plot actually spoils the plot really quickly. Suffice to say, Hoffman and Ethan Hawke play desperate brothers, Marisa Tomei spends an ultimately unsettling amount of time topless, and Michael Shannon does an early version of his Unsettling Michael Shannon Character.
Filmed in and around NYC, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is the last addition to Lumet's catalogue of urban, paranoid (melo) drama. The weirdest trivia about this movie is that it reunited Lumet and Albert Finney after more than 30 years. Lumet directed Finney as Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot in the 1970's all-star film version of Murder on the Orient Express. The two movies -- and two Finney performances -- couldn't be much more different while still sharing a 'detective' arc for Finney's character in both movies. Highly recommended.
Gun Machine (2013) by Warren Ellis: Warren Ellis, a long-time comic-book writer (Transmetropolitan, The Authority, and Planetary, among many others) and acerbic futurist, creates one hell of a smart Pop detective thriller here.
Lonely, burned-out, never-was NYPD detective John Tallow starts Gun Machine with a bad day that quickly gets worse. The violent events of the first few pages open a door into a secret Manhattan world of murder and weird maps. And guns. Lots of guns. Hundreds of guns from flintlocks to modern, near-metal-less handguns. An otherwise empty apartment filled with guns arranged into a mysterious, incomplete pattern. And every gun attached to either an unsolved murder or a murder now known to be incorrectly solved.
Tallow's detective instincts get jump-started by this room of mystery, especially after the case is dumped on him because the NYPD not-so-secretly wants Tallow to fail and the cases to vanish as quickly as possible. A bad detective gets born again, though that rebirth may be short-lived. Conspiracies of power don't want the secret of the guns solved.
Ellis' prose is as pungent and cynical as ever, densely packed with information. The plot rockets along. Tallow and the other characters are sharply drawn. Sharply drawn, too, is our attention to the secret maps of Manhattan which Tallow discovers. A financial map based on the time it takes for financial offices to communicate with Wall Street. A map of gun crimes in Manhattan and the other boroughs. And the map the killer carries in his head, of Manhattan before Europeans came, a map that still surfaces in surprising places in the postmodern landscape.
It's a dark romp that engages with social and technological questions as it zips along, dialogue crackling and sparking, the narrative casting a cold eye on the modes of NYPD evidence collection, the surveillance state, the technical specifications of guns used in famous murders, the difficulty of parking in New York, the meaning of Occupy Wall Street, the malign rise of private policing, the dangers of too much exercise, an assortment of Native American tribes and rituals, and the politics of the police bureaucracy.
Gun Machine is too densely packed to make a great movie, but it would make one hell of an HBO miniseries. Highly recommended.
The Two-Minute Rule (2006) by Robert Crais: On the day bank robber Max Holman gets out of jail after a ten-year sentence, his son is murdered. Holman had been estranged from his son for more than a decade. And his son was a police officer. So begins The Two-Minute Rule.
Best known for his Elvis Cole and Joe Pike detective thrillers, writer Robert Crais here builds a compelling and sympathetic character in Holman, dubbed "the Hero Bandit" by the press because he got arrested at his last robbery while performing CPR on one of the bank's customers. As his son's murder looks fishier and fishier, and while the LAPD deems it closed, Holman calls on the help of the former FBI agent who put him away, Katherine Pollard.
Crais makes the nuts-and-bolts of crime, law enforcement, and bank robberies entertaining. More importantly, Holman is his most fully developed character, at least within the pages of one novel rather than a series. Holman is believable even when the plot gets twisty and turny. So too Pollard, retired early to raise a son, left alone when her estranged husband died of a heart attack, and now bored -- and in debt -- in her unwelcome retirement.
Everything builds to the sort of climax that seems ripe for a decent Hollywood director. Crais is an expert choreographer of action sequences, and this is one of his best -- and at points funniest. Recommended.
Mystery Street (1950): written by Sydney Boehm, Richard Brooks, and Leonard Spigelgass; directed by John Sturges; starring Ricardo Montalban (Det. Morales), Sally Forrest (Grace Shanway), Bruce Bennett (Dr. McAdoo), Elsa Lanchester (Mrs. Smerling), Marshall Thompson (Henry Shanway), and Jan Sterling (Vivian Heldon): Solid noir procedural has some nice visual touches. It's a fairly ground-breaking movie for two reasons. For one, Ricardo Montalban gets to play a police detective after generally playing Latino Lotharios in his previous American work. And he's very good as that detective -- one wishes he'd gotten more roles like this.
The second reason would be that Mystery Street's crime-solving detectives get a lot of help from a forensics expert at Harvard University. One is basically witnessing the birth of the CSI genre, with Montalban's detective slowly being sold on the expert's value to this investigation and many investigations to come. Like a crazy cherry on top comes Elsa Lanchester as a seemingly dotty, secretly malign landlady. Really a hidden gem of a movie. Recommended.
The Little Sister (1949) by Raymond Chandler: The Little Sister is the fifth (of nine) novels featuring Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles PI Philip Marlowe. Marlowe gets involved in the madness that is Hollywood this time around, along with gangsters and tabloids and a particularly nasty killer who enjoys sticking an ice-pick into the base of his victims' skulls. As is often the case, Marlowe doesn't seem to end up being paid for his cynical, dogged, heroic efforts on the parts of all the people who need his help.
A seemingly naive young woman from rural Middle America hires Marlowe to find her brother, who moved to LA to see the lights and hasn't been heard of in months. As with every Marlowe case, this initially simple proposition blossoms into a labyrinth of corruption, blackmail, and murder in which almost no one is what she or he appears to be.
Chandler's style was so influential that it permeated hardboiled detective fiction, as he added a level of pungent description and social criticism to the prior pinnacle of hard-boiled fiction (and still influential and excellent, then-and-now), Dashiell Hammett and his detective Sam Spade.
Both characters were played by Humphrey Bogart, appropriately and memorably, in movies: Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon and Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep. An odd but enjoyable movie version of The Little Sister was made in the 1960's with James 'Jim Rockford' Garner as Marlowe.
The Little Sister moves fast and tight, plot-packed without neglecting Chandler's strengths, deployed through first-person narrator Marlowe, at character study and subtly metaphoric descriptions of the California setting. Highly recommended.
The Underground Man (1971/ Lew Archer #16) by Ross Macdonald: The fickle Santa Ana winds bring wildfires to Los Angeles as a preamble to murder and sorrow in this late-career Lew Archer hard-boiled-detective novel from Ross Macdonald. It's one of a handful of Macdonald's best-reviewed novels, and one can still see why: it's about as mournful and minutely observed a psychological study as one could ask for.
Lew Archer was certainly one of the most rueful detectives in American detective fiction, haunted by his own personal failures and by the seemingly endless sea of woe that each and every one of his cases plunged him into. This time around, Archer gets pulled into the disappearance of a neighbour's young son. Murder soon follows, along with the possible revelation of much earlier murder: there's more than a whiff of Greek tragedy in the ways in which the past shapes the present in Macdonald's novels. But there's also a sense of Existential randomness -- the effects often seem to have no moral relation to the causes.
This is a fine novel, detective or otherwise, shot through with cynical wit and sharp observations about character and landscape. While the hills around Los Angeles burn and then suddenly shift to life-threatening mudslides when the rains finally come, Archer searches for the best available solution to the case. Highly recommended.
The Monkey's Raincoat (1987/Elvis Cole #1) by Robert Crais: The first of Robert Crais's nouveau-noir novels about Los Angeles PI Elvis Cole and his laconic partner Joe Pike sets the model for many of Cole's subsequent adventures. Cole narrates in a snarky, cynical, but often heart-felt first-person voice.
Cole minutely (frankly, too minutely) details everything he does: you'll know what he had for lunch, where he bought the ingredients, and what beer goes best with it. It's Crais's way of showing that as dippy as Cole's comments seem, he's always observing and evaluating everything around him in detail. Or maybe of offering the reader sandwich-making tips,
Hollywood coughs up a missing father-and-son case for Cole. But things quickly go bad. The Monkey's Raincoat shows Los Angeles at its best and worst, and Hollywood at its corruptive nadir. Guns and drugs and femmes fatale show up. There's an incompetent agent to be reckoned with, and an extremely sleazy producer.
There are a few flaws. Crais doesn't quite have Pike's character down yet -- a flaw only apparent in comparison to later novels. Cole's ability to sleep with every woman in a narrative is in place here, though Crais would later remove this element from the series. And the climax is almost hilariously "cinematic" -- which is to say that it's a blood-soaked, bullet-popping Assault on the Impregnable Fortress. Was it written with a movie deal in mind? Hey, Crais lives in Los Angeles too! Recommended.
L.A. Requiem (Elvis Cole #8) (1999) by Robert Crais: The Southern California-set Elvis Cole hard-boiled detective series (well, soft-boiled -- Elvis is an emotional softy) always pays off in terms of tightly plotted, minutely detailed detective fiction, almost always with a large side portion of the procedural. There's a lot of procedural in this one, as the police and Cole investigate a murder together thanks to the power and influence of the victim's father.
As was the case for several Cole novels, the only real drag is Lisa Chenier, Cole's love interest who sucks all the joy and energy out of the novel whenever she appears. It doesn't help that Cole suddenly inspires romantic obsession in a female L.A. cop in this one. Crais is at his best when delineating complicated investigations or dropping the occasional witticism. His romantic writing stinks.
L.A. Requiem stylistically opened up the Cole series when it came out in 1999, mixing as it does the traditional first-person detective narration with third-person flashbacks involving Cole's hyper-competent detective pal Joe Pike and a number of other characters (including the killer) and third-person narration for events Cole is not present for.
Overall, the novel's greatest strength lies in its depiction of the course of an investigation. The Los Angeles police are depicted sympathetically, for the most part, with a lot of nuts-and-bolts descriptions of just how a murder case is investigated. Good stuff. Recommended.
The Forgotten Man (Elvis Cole #10) (2005) by Robert Crais: Robert Crais explores L.A. private-eye Elvis Cole's tortured childhood in this novel, in which a man claiming to be Cole's long-vanished father is found murdered in an alley. As always, Crais's depiction of the details of an investigation is top-notch. The flashbacks are also fascinating, as are many of the supporting characters.
Crais also brings in a character from a non-Cole novel, Detective Starkey from Demolition Angel. She's a former bomb-squad officer forced into other police work after getting blown up. She's a fun counterpoint to Cole until she becomes romantically obsessed with him, a sub-plot that Crais used with another female cop in the earlier L.A. Requiem. And it's annoying here too. And while Cole is estranged from gal-pal/wet-blanket Lisa Chenier in this novel, she shows up just enough to put a damper on a number of scenes.
The novel is otherwise solid and twisty and thoroughly enjoyable. The indomitable Joe Pike appears, as does Cole's diffident pet cat. Crais opens up the narrative to third-person material not witnessed by Cole, who otherwise traditionally (for the hard-boiled detective) narrates in first person. The climax is thrilling, though it repeats certain plot elements from the earlier Cole novel L.A. Requiem. And the killer is fascinatingly depicted, though he shares a lot of similarities with the killer in L.A. Requiem. Maybe I shouldn't have read these books back to back. Recommended.
The Deceased (1999) by Tom Piccirilli: The late and much-lamented Tom Piccirilli's early horror novels were uniquely strange. Strange events, strange creatures, strange protagonists. The simplest of plot-lines could suddenly stop dead for disturbingly violent and/or sexual set-pieces. Characters might spend pages immersed in their own poetic maladjustment. The prose would push the limits of the purple and the florid, sometimes going way, way beyond the red-line. And it all worked as the expression of someone who wanted more out of the horror novel than simply plain prose and A-Z plotting.
The Deceased embodies Piccirilli's approach to horror. Indeed, there's almost no point describing it in all its pulpy, poetic, weird glory. It's about a young horror writer wrestling with the demons of his terrible past. Some of those demons are deceased members of his own family. There's pathetic fallacy and incest and tips on writing (seriously). There are strange things in the forest surrounding the ancestral home. There's that ancestral home with its weird construction and hideous facade. There are ghosts and monsters and voices from the past.
To borrow a phrase from somebody, it's all a bravura frenzy. It's also the sort of writing that seems to drive a certain type of reader, one looking for the straightforward and the plain style, completely nuts. You're watching a gifted writer assemble and disassemble himself simultaneously. It may not always be pretty, coherent, or even 'good' in a traditional sense, but it's compelling and very human. Recommended.
The Midnight Road (2007) by Tom Piccirilli: 40ish Flynn is a case-worker for New York City's Child Protective Services. He's a broken soul due to childhood tragedy. But he's also dogged and committed to child welfare. And a huge fan of film noir. So of course he gets involved in a noirish case with hints of (possible) supernatural horror.
The late Tom Piccirilli wrote a string of noirish thrillers beginning in the early oughts. This is one of them. It lacks the exuberant stylistic flourishes of some of his earlier horror works, but it's plotted beautifully, with twists that are difficult to see coming.
Flynn is very much the damaged would-be knight of noir and hard-boiled detective stories, emotionally stunted but heroically struggling against demons inside and outside. The character's own investment in noir makes for a sort of running meta-commentary on the action, as Flynn notes ways in which his own story does or does not resemble the noir films he loves so much.
Piccirilli tamps down his stylistic flourishes for, I assume, reasons of commercial viability: a person has to eat. But they also suit the noir and hard-boiled genres he's working with. Stylistic outliers like James Ellroy exist, but for the most part the hard-boiled heroes and anti-heroes and straight-out villains of Piccirilli's genre antecedents work within a world of flavourful but not wildly experimental or impressionistic prose.
The result is that old chestnut, a page-turner, one which doesn't end until Flynn has dealt with his internal demons. The identities of the antagonists come as a shock, but a fair one. Flynn, sympathetic and self-lacerating, makes for a fine protagonist. And touches of the absurd -- Flynn finds himself haunted by the talking ghost of a French bulldog, probably the result of slight brain damage incurred early in the novel. In all, a very satisfying ride on The Midnight Road. Recommended.
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington: written by Sidney Buchman, Lewis Foster, and Myles Connolly; directed by Frank Capra; starring Jean Arthur (Saunders), James Stewart (Jefferson Smith), Claude Rains (Senator Paine), Edward Arnold (Jim Taylor), Thomas Mitchell (Diz), and Harry Carey (President of the Senate) (1939): When the forces of political evil and chicanery in the far-flung year of 1939 in America order the police to turn fire hoses on peaceful protesters and the police happily comply, when the bad guys start attacking and injuring children trying to get the truth out and the authorities do nothing to stop them, one is reminded that the authorities have been knobs for a long time in America.
Frank Capra's beloved classic is a winning combination of Juvenalian political satire and gentle Horatian optimism -- Jimmy Stewart's character has a naivete that's funny to begin with before experience (and the love of Girl Friday Jean Arthur) gives him the power to defy corruption. If you thinks it ends abruptly, well, boy does it ever! A 15-minute epilogue that tied off every loose end was cut by the studio before release, and I think the movie's better for it. Capra's usual cast of supporting actors, along with the always great Claude Rains as a senator gone wrong, are terrific, as are leads Stewart and Arthur. Highly recommended.
The Big Heat: adapted from the William P. McGivern serial novel by Sydney Boeham; directed by Fritz Lang; starring Glenn Ford (Sgt. Bannion), Gloria Grahame (Debby), Jocelyn Brando (Katie Bannion), Lee Marvin (Vince), and Alexander Scourby (Lagana) (1953): Almost the Ur-Text for every movie in which a heroic cop turns in his badge and goes it alone (or with one loyal partner) against the forces of Evil. Ford is terse and violent as Sgt. Bannion, who's up against the Mob in an unnamed East Coast city. Gloria Grahame plays a mobster's mistress who ends up siding with Ford. A young Lee Marvin plays Grahame's gangster. This movie deals with many of German expatriate director Fritz (Metropolis, Fury, M) Lang's dominant tropes, most notably the corruption of the Elite and the heroic efforts of a few to combat that corruption. As was always true of Lang's direction, the movie looks terrific -- it's a dandy piece of police noir. Recommended.
The Mouse That Roared: adapted by Roger MacDougall and Stanley Mann from the novel by Leonard Wibberley; directed by Jack Arnold; starring Peter Sellers (Grand Duchess/ Prime Minister/ Tully Bascombe), Jean Seberg (Helen Kokintz), William Hartnell (Will Buckley), David Kossoff (Professor Kokintz), and Leo McKern (Benter) (1959): Peter Sellers plays three characters delightfully, with able supporting work from Leo McKern, First Doctor Who William Hartnell, and others.
The tiny European country of the Duchy of Grand Fenwick finds itself bankrupt, so its Prime Minister hatches a plan. They will declare war on the United States, quickly surrender, and then watch the aid dollars flow in from the United States to its vanquished enemy. In theory, this explains the Iraq War. There's some pointed satire here about atomic brinksmanship, but the whole thing is remarkably gentle and pleasant, with many laugh-out-loud moments. One of the early high points of the career of Peter Sellers, it wouldn't be the last time he played multiple roles in a movie. Recommended.
Hell's Angels by Hunter S. Thompson (1966): Thompson's first full-length book points the way towards what was dubbed his 'Gonzo Journalism' (heavily rearranged, partially fictionalized, intensely subjective reporting) while nonetheless remaining fairly straightforward. 50 years after the events and people Thompson covers, the book still packs quite a punch.
Thompson managed to insinuate himself into a West Coast Hell's Angels chapter for about a year during what was really the first mass-culture awareness of the Hell's Angels (which were, at the time, a fairly small assortment of West Coast motorcycle gangs). Amidst fairly quick snapshots of the history the rise of motorcycle gangs (in America, a post-WWII, California-centric phenomenon at the beginning), Thompson also critiques the various hysterical media and public response to biker gangs.
But while Thompson takes care to contextualize and humanize the various bikers he comes into contact with, he doesn't sentimentalize them: this is a book that does end, hyperbolically, with Thompson quoting Heart of Darkness in relation to the Angels ("Exterminate the brutes."). Some of Thompson's sociological speculation about the roots of biker culture lying in America's long-standing, migratory White Trash community comes across as less than a little half-baked -- but he also seems to be on to something.
Thompson's Hell's Angels -- swastika-wearing, rape-culture-glorifying, knee-jerk violent, loyal to one another, fascist in their essential make-up, deeply racist -- ultimately come across as being the barbaric forebears of such things as today's Tea Party.
Obviously, Thompson couldn't make that connection in 1966. But his lengthy exegesis on the nihilistic tribalism of the Angels could just as well be describing the ultimately nihilistic, destruction-worshiping, violence-loving Far Right of the American 21st century. Loyalties exist only within one's own tribe. People outside that tribe aren't just disposable -- they aren't really people. And everyone is against you. As the jacket copy says, a strange and terrible saga. Highly recommended.
Savage Night by Jim Thompson (1953): Prolific thriller writer Jim Thompson wrote the sort of pulp that literary critics came to love over the course of his lengthy career. There's a fully realized sense to the worlds he created in his novels, even an early one like Savage Night, that makes them unforgettably bleak.
He most often focused his narratives on murderers and monsters; Savage Night makes its first-person narrator, a Mob hit-man who's been on the run for years only to be pulled back in for one more assassination, pitiful and human and utterly awful. But so is almost everyone around him, as is typical in a Thompson novel: there are very few good people in the world his characters inhabit.
For more than half a decade, the narrator 'hid' inside the guise of a poor but honest man. And he truly believes that he was a decent person for those years. But by the end of the novel, even that assessment will be in doubt. Thompson's characters often possess radically destabilized senses of self. Nothing is certain.
Savage Night hums along in its brevity. Our narrator becomes, if not sympathetic, than at least pitiable. And the oft-discussed final thirty pages take the characters into the realms of broken consciousness and the almost surreal. It's one hell of a denouement. Highly recommended.
Pop. 1280 by Jim Thompson (1964): Famously moved to French Africa and adapted to film by Bernard Tavernier in 1981 as Coup de Torchon, Pop. 1280 occurs in novel form in the pre-World-War-One American South, in the smallest county in its state. And possibly the most corrupt.
Our first-person narrator, the sheriff of this small county, makes the psychotic narrating lawman of Thompson's earlier The Killer Inside Me look like Sherlock Holmes by comparison. His sole redeeming feature is disgust at the racism of the poor whites around him. That's it. That's all he's got.
Well, perhaps he's redeemed also by his role as Nemesis to some pretty terrible people -- but as he also wipes out the innocent, he is, ultimately, no saint. Our narrator has spent his life as a lawman gliding by, doing little, taking bribes, protecting the status quo -- and pretending to be far, far stupider and more guileless than he truly is. Or maybe he's always been doing terrible things behind the scenes.
Among other pleasures, Pop. 1280 offers the reader a grad course in unreliable narration -- an escalating, almost vertiginous lesson in this by the end of the novel. The inside of the narrator's head turns out to be a labyrinth. But the Minotaur seems to be all the bloody, terrible, despicable things people do to one another because they're damned and because they can. There is no Theseus, and no thread leading to safety. This is perhaps Thompson's bleakest depiction of humanity in general and America in particular. Highly recommended.
