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.
The Chronicles of Conan Volume 2: Rogues in the House and Other Stories, written by Roy Thomas, illustrated by Barry Windsor-Smith, Sal Buscema and Others (1970-71; collected 2003): This second volume of Thomas and Windsor-Smith's pivotal Conan Marvel comic-book work of the early 1970's offers one fairly faithful adaptation of a Robert E. Howard Conan novelette (the eponymous "Rogues"), a lovingly rendered adaptation of short story "The Frost-Giant's Daughter", and several other stories of young Conan as he wanders around thieving, getting arrested, escaping arrest, and fighting wizards, gods and monsters.
Windsor-Smith's art grows more splendid and idiosyncratic throughout this volume as he changes from Kirbyesque super-hero artist to lush, pre-Raphaelite-influenced illustrator at a fairly astonishing rate of progression. He wouldn't stay on Conan much beyond this point, but he'd remain the acknowledged, definitive comic-book Conan artist ever afterwards, though John Buscema would soon surpass him in page count if not in overall effect.
Writer Roy Thomas thuds along as if he were paid by the word (which he wasn't). He'd work on Conan's comic-book adventures at Marvel for a decade and become the "definitive" Conan comic-book writer through sheer weight of output. Occasionally, the artwork creaks and shudders under the weight of all that obscuring prose. Uk wuk. Recommended.
Dark Passage, written and directed by Delmer Daves, based on the novel by David Goodis, starring Humphrey Bogart (Vincent Parry), Lauren Bacall (Irene Jansen) and Agnes Moorehead (Madge Rapf) (1947): Enjoyably loopy film noir sees Bogart play a San Francisco businessman wrongly imprisoned for his wife's murder. He escapes from San Quentin. Shenanigans ensue. And for the first 45 minutes or so, we get first-person camerawork from Bogart's perspective, seeing his character only fleetingly in a newspaper photo.
I'm guessing film cameras got smaller some time after the end of WWII, as first-person POV shows up in a couple of other films of the time, only to be abandoned because, frankly, it's annoying as hell. And you can't see your star. Though here the POV serves the story -- Bogart's character gets plastic surgery to change his face, and once he's got that new face (Bogart's normal face) the POV switches to the traditional third-person. Got all that?
Coincidences drive the plot. Lauren Bacall's character is obsessed with Bogart's character being railroaded. Luckily for him, she's driving around near San Quentin when he escapes so she can pick him up. Luckily for Bogart, the first cabbie he hails later in the film knows a good plastic surgeon who makes a living operating on criminals and the wrongly accused innocent. Unluckily, there are so few characters that the revelation of the real murderer's identity lands with something of a dull thud. Really, who else could it be?
Nevertheless, it's all quite a bit of fun, with the level of coincidence and accident reaching a crescendo so as to resolve pretty much everything. Lauren Bacall is cute as a button, and Bogart stretches a bit here, playing a guy who's definitely not cool under pressure until the last few minutes of the film. Not a great film, but worth watching. Recommended.
Vertigo Resurrected: Petrefax, written by Mike Carey, illustrated by Steve Leialoha (originally published 2000; this edition 2011): Enjoyable nouveau-fairy-tale romp starring Petrefax, the young mortician from the Sandman arc World's End. Petrefax hails from Litharge, the land of morticians, and he's struck out on his own to see the world and offer his services as a journeyman.
He comes to the land of Malegrise, where magic reigns, and soon finds himself caught up in the efforts of a young woman, Calcinia, to bring the awful man to whom she's promised to justice for the murder of his brother and nephew. Naturally, he falls in love with her.
The story delivers a lot of wit in its depiction of the magic-based Malegrisean society, where demons and ifrits rub elbows with citizens and Roma. Apparently, gypsies are some sort of constant in the universe. Petrefax's mastery of ways of dealing with dead bodies comes in extremely handy on more than one occasion. He has to keep Calcinia, whose body has died, mobile and at least semi-unputrefied, and he has to deal with a few other unwieldy bodies along the way.
Old pro Steve Leialoha's art remains fantastic and yet grounded, and the muted colour scheme suits the storyline. Carey's deft hand with the fantastic is on display here; the fire-demon lawyer is an especially nice touch. Recommended.
John Constantine Hellblazer: Original Sins (Revised Edition), written by Jamie Delano and Rick Veitch, illustrated by John Ridgway, Rick Veitch, Tom Mandrake, Alfredo Alcala, Brett Ewins and Jim McCarthy (1988-89; collected 2011): Liverpudlian occult investigator and magician John Constantine's first solo adventures (he'd been introduced in Swamp Thing by Alan Moore, Rick Veitch, Steve Bissette and others in the mid-1980's) get a new collection here, with two stories from Swamp Thing added to the volume.
Writer Jamie Delano really made the character his, giving Constantine an even more jaded and cynical bent. But Constantine, a dangerous man who gets his companions killed, a lot, nonetheless fights the malign schemes of Heaven and Hell alike. And protecting humanity requires a lot of booze and a lot of cigarettes.
And a lot of politics. Thatcher's Great Britain and Reagan's America are the primary settings for Delano's initial 40-issue run on the title, and both places are drenched in blood and intimately and intricately tied to the apocalyptic plans of Heaven and Hell. Good times, good times!
Delano had a real flair for twisted updatings of traditional supernatural threats. His demons are stockbrokers in souls and day traders in damnation, literally at points. Soccer hooligans get transformed into hideous monsters. Computers strain to reach the shores of Heaven. Heaven has put a new group on the board, the Resurrection Crusade, believing it destined to create the next Messiah. Hell has countered with the Damnation Army, led by long-time Constantine nemesis Nergal.
Constantine also faces an ancient hunger demon in New York and a horrifying resurrection of Viet Nam veterans in the American heartland when he's not stalking the nightmarish streets of jolly old England. John Ridgway's art is, for my money, the best Constantine ever had in his own book -- grimy, realistic, grotesque. It perfectly suits Delano's exploration of Constantine's damned yet heroic psyche, and the terrible new ways evil works in the go-go 1980's. How Hollywood got a Keanu Reaves movie out of this is anyone's guess. Highly recommended.
The Creeper Omnibus, written by Steve Ditko, Dennis O'Neil, Don Segall, Sergius O'Shaughnessy and Michael Fleisher; illustrated by Steve Ditko, Jack Sparling, Mike Peppe, and Mike Royer; introduction by Steve Niles (1968-69, 1975, 1978; collected 2010): Artist and occasional writer Steve Ditko co-created Spider-man and Dr. Strange at Marvel in the early 1960's. By the late 1960's, fed up with Stan Lee, Ditko left Marvel to work at a variety of comic-book companies that included Marvel's arch-rival DC Comics.
Similar to its later handling of fellow Marvel defector Jack Kirby was DC's handling of Ditko -- they shunted him into his own corner doing his own sometimes inspired, sometimes oddball creations rather than being put to work on any of DC's major titles. If you thought a Ditko Batman would be a natural...well, then you don't know DC in the late 1960's and early 1970's. While Marvel caught up to it in sales, DC flailed around, the short-lived hit Batman TV series being one of the few bright spots for the company as the turn of the decade approached.
As a character, the Creeper is both odd and inspired. For one thing, he's got the most garish costume in superhero history, with yellow dominant and the other two colours being red and green. He looks like a jaundiced Christmas tree. His origin is severely odd, even for a medium in which heroes can get their powers from mongoose blood, hard water, or a soft drink.
A multi-tasking scientist manages to create both a super-soldier serum and a dimensional shifter kind of thingie. Shades of Walter Bishop! Former reporter and current TV-station security-guy Jack Ryder, disguised for a Hallowe'en party in leftover clothes and makeup that include a red-dyed fur wrap and a yellow body suit, gets mortally wounded while trying to save the aforementioned scientist from Communist collaborators at that fateful party.
Before he dies, the scientist injects Ryder with the only vial of the super-serum and, um, hides the dimensional shifter thingies (sans its control pad, which he leaves with Ryder) inside Ryder's mortal wound. The wound heals almost immediately thanks to the super-serum, which also gives Ryder superior strength and agility. And so is born the Creeper, whose costume will no longer come off when Ryder uses the shifter's control pad to phase into Creeperdom. But he can always phase back to normal just so long as he doesn't lose that remote control.
This volume collects all of Ditko's work on The Creeper, whom he created for DC and worked on for short runs in the late 1960's and late 1970's. Ditko was still a strong artist in the late 1960's, and there's a certain bizarre charm to an urban vigilante who's as brightly coloured as a neon sign. The villains, though, are mostly terrible and indifferently designed, continuing a Ditko trend from his last few issues of Spider-man.
By the time we get to the 1970's material, Ditko is well into his decline. It's still interesting work from an old master, but the balloony bonelessness that characterizes Ditko's post-1960's, non-creator-owned work is on full display here, though it wouldn't become painful to look at (even when heavily inked by others) until Ditko's brief return to Marvel in the 1980's.
I'm not sure this is essential stuff, but it entertains and occasionally exhibits flashes of Ditko's importance to the superhero genre. An introduction that places The Creeper in historical and artistic context would have been nice, rather than a brief bit from 30 Days of Night writer Steve Niles, who wrote a Creeper reboot series a few years ago. Recommended.
Journey into Darkness by Frank Belknap Long (1967): Long was one of H.P. Lovecraft's closest friends. He also had a long writing career, one that extended from the 1920's until his death in the 1990's. He's most notable now as a memoirist who defended Lovecraft's memory in Dreamer on the Nightside and as one of the earliest contributors to HPL's "shared universe" that would come to be known as The Cthulhu Mythos after Lovecraft's death.
Long's "The Space-Eaters" and "The Hounds of Tindalos" would help establish the more outre, non-representational otherworldly denizens of Lovecraft's sinister universe (the eponymous hounds appear to be sentient geometric shapes rather than more 'normal' beings). And his "Second Night Out" is one of the great short stories in that surprisingly robust sub-sub-genre of horror stories that take place on cruise ships. It certainly gave me nightmares for months after I first read it as a child in the Shudders horror anthology for children.
Freelance writers don't have pension plans or the promise of steady employment, and so Long had to keep writing and publishing long past retirement age (which would have fallen in 1966) just to keep himself and his wife afloat. Only a charity drive by fans after he died got his name inscribed on his family tombstone in the Bronx.
In this too-short novel, Long seems to have been handicapped by limitations on the length of the project. It really feels like fifty or more pages have been summarily cut from the manuscript to make it fit into a small, cheap paperback, resulting in a pretty jarring jump from gradually escalating horror to a rushed and somewhat anti-climactic climax.
Journey into Darkness depicts the beachfront invasion of "our" universe by some nebulous, murderous entity or entities from Outside who have been accidentally summoned by a psychiatrist's experiments with what basically seems to be the most dangerous proto-Power Point Presentation ever put on screen. Colours and shapes projected on a screen by a weirdly complex slide projector can summon extra-dimensional Death, can, indeed, BE extra-dimensional death.
With this explicitly referenced Lovecraftian set-up (one character mentions the HPL short story "The Colour Out of Space") in place, Long throws in some other vaguely real material, including Jung's theory of archetypes and the always bizarre saga of Wilhelm Reich's Orgone Box. Some of the material also recalls William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki the Ghost-Finder and his battle with the extra-dimensional demon known as "The Hog."
I wouldn't describe this a great book, or even a very good one. Long was always a workmanlike prose stylist at best, and his intellectual reach generally far out-extended his writerly grasp. The horror remains fairly firmly in the realm of exposition, in part because much of the second half of the novel IS clumsily delivered exposition. Still, there are some interesting ideas here, and I was never bored. Occasionally frustrated, but never bored. Lightly recommended.
