Hard Case Crime (via Derek Raymond)

I remember when I first discovered Hard Case Crime. In 2000, when I U-turned from writing speculative (or slipstream) fiction, I turned to crime. Not literally, you understand; just crime fiction.
I'd grown up surrounded by my dad's voracious love of crime novels, but hadn't myself caught the bug until a fellow writer, Joel Lane introduced me to the novels of Derek Raymond.

Raymond was the nom de plume of UK novelist Robin Cook, who in the 80's started the Factory series, his sequence of pitch black police procedurals, a kind of metaphysical noir journey into the heart of darkness of an unnamed police detective.

The book Joel introduced me to, I Was Dora Suarez is the most highly regarded and grimmest book of the bunch. Its manuscript caused Raymond's publisher Dan Franklin to vomit over his desk, such was the intensity of the work.

And It's fair to say that after that book, Raymond changed everything about my writing direction and style. Before Suarez, I was writing pretty dark stuff, but like most fledgling writers, was still finding my voice. I was hugely influenced by Joel Lane's work, and by his friendship and guidance, but by 2000, I felt I was chasing my tail. Then I sat down and began writing something entirely different: Leaving Seven Sisters was about two floundering men in middle age, broken marriages and the beautiful dead daughter of a corrupt MP. It was a dark, bizarrely romantic piece of British noir, and got me nominated for the Crime Writers' Association Short story Dagger. After that,I didn't look back. Finding your voice is one of the hardest things to do in writing, but when you do, it's immensely liberating. I've returned now and then to horror and SF, but the sense of noir lingers in those stories too. It's what I do now. My novel, Secret Skin is a hard-boiled foray into the private eye genre. I love playing with the cliches and tropes of noir, updating them to apply to our current ways of life. In a previous post, I reprinted an excerpt from The Remains of the Richest Man in The World, which contains an ex-con ex boxer, another failed marriage, a young prostitute and a grand old double-cross. All noir cliches, refracted through an English modern-day sensibility.

After Raymond, I began to devour crime fiction: Ian Rankin was recommended by one of my oldest friends, Chris Monk. I loved Rebus: he's one of the great British cops; an angry cop, operating from the fringes of the law. Then there was Mark Billingham's Thorne books, Mo Hayder's staggeringly bleak Birdman and The Treatment. And James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux, one of crime fiction and indeed literatures' great creations.

But of course, noir to me (and to most) is epitomised by the paperback crime novels from the 30's to the 60's. James M. Cain (Double Indemnity), Jim Thompson (The Grifters, The Getaway), Cornell Woolrich (Rear Window). There's nothing finer than finding a shabby paperback in a second-hand bookstore by Mickey Spillaine or Lawrence Block or Carter Brown. Not just for the raw hard-boiled thrills contained within, but often just for the jaw-droppingly beautiful covers by artists like Robert McGinnis (featured in one of my earlier posts (Let The Pictures Do The Talking).

And this of course brings us to Hard Case Crime. Charles Ardai and Max Phillips' love for the form of those dime-store thrills just leaps from these books. As well as publishing new fiction by up and comers as well as established pros like Stephen King and Lawrence Block, they bring back into print some lost classics of the pulp era.

It's all about noir: determined detectives and dangerous dames, fortune hunters and vengeance seekers, criminals on the lamb, jewel smugglers and hired psycopaths...

I'd recommed you go and just buy a handful of them. Pick any; they all have their own charms to offer. But I'd particularly recommend Ardai's pseudononymously-penned Little Girl Lost and its sequel Song of Innocence; George Axelrod's (screenwriter of Breakfast At Tiffany's and The Manchurian Candidate) Blackmailer; King's Colorado Kid; and the recent Money Shot, by the outrageously talented Christa Faust.

And even if you don't like the books, then you could just buy them for the covers. All new original art that perfectly captures the era of pulp noir by Robert McGinnis and Glenn Orbik.

Just recently Ardai published Fifty-To-One, the fifty book anniversary of Hard Case Crime. Told in fifty chapters, each named after the fifty books published. Of particular interest to me is the upcoming Honey In His Mouth, by Doc Savage creator Lester Dent, a book that has never seen print until now.

So go visit Hard Case here, and grab yourself some hard-boiled thrills. It's good to know that in fifty years time, some young writer will track these paperbacks down in a second-hand bookstore and keep the noir flame alive.

Photobucket fun

I've never used Photobucket before tonight, but I'm pretty pleased with the results of my manipulation of the photo below, now transformed into my new blog title header, above. As Photoshop continued to resist my best efforts, I decided I'd have to resort to something simpler and a little more user-friendly.

Remains Of The Richest Man In The World - short excerpt

A brief excerpt from one of my favourite of my children, The Remains Of The Richest Man In The World, published in Crimewave 6: Breaking Point.
Available from Amazon marketplace.

Had she at some point sat down - as Gillespie had himself in some less focused way - and looked at her life. A really good hard look: forty-odd years. All those mad times, growing up too fast, living rough, then, after becoming a Gillespie, in each other's pockets; the kind of life you always hoped for. Never quite managing to savour the moment, because there had been so fucking many, but in living so fast, turning around finally to find it crumbling quickly, like a house full of rot. And then living the last fifteen, twenty years, looking back at it with at first fondness, then regret, and then finally bitterness at what was remaining, and worse: still to come.
Sometimes a rented terrace , a pretty little garden and a Jack Russell terrier seemed like a poor result for a life that had once been just fucking luminous.

Lovecraft Art

Possibly only a thing of beauty to me and a handful of other like-minded pulp fans: two Astounding Stories that featured At The Mountains of Madness, and The Shadow Out Of Time. As I'm knee-deep in pulp/Victoriana/Steampunk/Atomic SF research for my next writing project, these two covers appealed to me today...

Happy Enough: Waitress - A Belated Review

The sad fact about most movies that you see is that they're often entirely predictable fare. Strap yourself in for 90% of horror/thriller/comedy films and you know what you're going to get: your standard A-Z of movie cliches and tropes. This is all well and good; sometimes it's comforting to sit down to something you know and love: horror invades normality, boy meets girl, hero versus villain etc.
And of course when someone comes along with something fresh, with a vision, with a twist on old cliches, it's all the more refreshing to welcome them into our hearts and minds, and follow them wherever they may go, because - to borrow from one such auteur - they had us at hello.
Step forward Chris Nolan, Paul Thomas Anderson, Darren Aronofsky, David Lynch... you all have similar lists.
And so where does this leave us with Waitress? I'm a little late to the party with this movie, I admit, but I couldn't pass up the chance to write a few words about a movie that's so delightful and sweet, and that should have promised a bright future for its writer/director Adrienne Shelley.
Of course, that's not to be. Shelley was murdered before the release of the movie, and if there's anything optimistic to take from such a tragic waste of talent, it's that Waitress is a quirky little gem of a movie, and as lovely a creative legacy that one could ask for.
Jenna (Keri Russell) is a maker of extraordinary pies in her local diner. She's also trapped in a marriage to the worlds worst husband, Earl (Jeremy Sisto) and in a life she didn't expect for herself. When Jenna discovers she is pregnant and her plans to leave Earl are thwarted, she finds herself having an affair with her new doctor (Nathan Fillion).
Waitress lives in the white-picket world America of David Lynch. There are no dancing dwarfs on display here, but it does shares a penchant for stylised dialogue and vivid Blue Velvet photography. With the pie-making (each named with whatever is on Jenna's mind at the time), there's also a similarity with Pushing Daisies; both share that primary colour palette and slight deadpan tilt away from reality.
What Waitress does brilliantly is tease some beautiful performances from its cast.
Keri Russell (whose work I've thus far missed entirely) is endearing and walks the fine line between the sweet absurdities of the script, and the emotional heft that it ultimately delivers. Jeremy Sisto (whom I know ostensibly from Six Feet Under) plays the overbearing and abusive monster of Earl with the sense that his whole personality is a house of cards. Despite having no back story, he invests Earl with a brittle vulnerability. And of course, Nathan Fillion brings the same charm he brings to everything he stars in. How this man isn't a huge star is beyond my comprehension. His subtle, ever so slightly anxious doctor is measured perfectly all the way. Andy Griffith too bears mention with his grumpy pie customer Old Joe, who forms the heart and message of the film: make the leap away from your life if it's not the one you want for yourself.
Everyone is given an affectionate arc, but the core of the movie is Jenna's self-discovery. And it also returns us to the start. What begins as a simple charming romantic comedy ends as something else. Self- discovery, but with the child Jenna has convinced herself she doesn't want, and not with that seemingly perfect other man.
There are a few places where the movie loses its footing near the end, but they feel almost as if they might have been decisions made in the absence of its writer/director (although I could be wrong).
But they're slight misgivings. Waitress manages to transcend the simple romantic comedy with a lot of warmth and a beautiful sense of whimsy. But it's also laced with a sense of sadness; there's a particular sense of poignancy to the final scene of Jenna walking away into her future with Shelley's real life little daughter. One less auteur in the world.

Jenna: Cal, are you happy? I mean, when you call yourself a happy man, do you really mean it?
Cal: You ask a serious question, I'll give you a serious answer: Happy enough. I don't expect much. I don't get much, I don't give much. I generally enjoy whatever comes along. That's my answer for you, summed up for your feminine consideration. I'm happy enough.

Let The Pictures Do The Talking Part Five: Dick Sprang

Ah, childhood. When you're a kid, you don't care about the names on the comic books. You don't really see Adam West's Batman as being any different to the stories you read in the funny books. When you're young, it is, as they say, all good.
Looking back, I remember a large Batman anthology that my dad had that I read from cover to cover on a regular basis. The only other superhero that got a look in at that time was Spider-Man; I had a small paperback collection of the first six or seven Lee & Ditko stories that every time I cracked open those pages, my mind went BOOM. Literally B.O.O.M. I don't have that collection any more but I do have the first six or seven Essential Spider-Man collections, and if I went over to the bookshelf right now, my mind would do the damn same thing. BOOM. I wouldn't return to this entry until I'd flicked past that first Sandman story, or the Doc Ock intro, or that timeless Face it Tiger, you just hit the jackpot.

But I digress. That Batman anthology started with those crude Kane and Finger tales, moved through Jerry Robinson and a variety of other artists, ending with some of those gloriously gothic Denny O'Neill/Neal Adams tales from the seventies. But the bulk of this anthology featured the art of a man who depsite my not knowing his name, came to represent Batman to me more than any other artist in my youth: Dick Sprang.

It wasn't my fault that I didn't know his name. Up until the sixties, all those Batman stories were simply attributed to Bob Kane. You could spot stylistic changes, but heck, I was a kid. I thought Adam West trying to spray shark repellent and trying to dispose of that BOMB on the pier was high drama. (For the record, I still love that movie, and I wish they'd release the TV series on DVD.)
Sprang was hired to ghost on Batman in 1941 when it was anticipated that Bob Kane would be drafted to fight in World War II, and that the then current artist Sheldon Moldoff's workload was growing increasingly large. In complete anonymity, Sprang received his Batman script, drew it and sent it off to be inked. Having no creative authority, it all seemed to imply that he would just be another Batman artist.
But Sprang worked at DC for twenty years, and on the flagship characters at that. Just Supes and Bats. He was Golden Age royalty.

When I look back at those reprints I have of Dick Sprang's work, I have that same frisson that I get with those Lee/Ditko Spidey stories. The art leaps off the page at you. Every panel is alive with detail and frenetic angles. Sprang's Gotham was filled with oversized everyday props that Batman and Robin would almost certainly be swinging into the scene from, or dodging as the Joker loosed them as he made his all too brief escape. Sprang used all the weapons that the great comic artists had in their arsenal: insane perspectives, aerial shots, worm's eye veiws, compositional variation from panel to panel... and he used with the utmost panache. No one drew a more insane Joker, terrifying Two-Face or affecting Batman or Robin.



Although Sprang retired in the sixties, in 1995 he created a gorgeous lithograph, The Secrets Of The Batcave, signed and numbered and limted to 500, and then in '96, Guardians of Gotham. They're both reproduced above and they're simply gorgeous. They crop up on ebay from time to time, and one day I'll buy one, as the very sight of them takes me back to my childhood. Before the bills and the problems and the day to day that gets in the way of the simpler and more beautiful things in life. Ah, childhood. Thanks, Mr Sprang.

Objects Of Inexplicable Desire # 4: Lamponi's Lamps

This is just plain cool. Mr. Lamponi and his cool lamps. This 50's spaceship with halogen lights would look just awesome over the fireplace. Alas there aren't any prices on his website, and I dread to think what they might cost...
Lamponi's Lamps

Gran Torino

There have been a lot of reviews referencing Dirty Harry in Gran Torino, Clint Eastwood's supposed acting swan song. It's part of what attracted me to the film to be honest. I was brought up on a diet of Eastwood movies, my dad being a major fan. I've seen the Dirty Harry movies many, many times, and I've heard my dad yearn often for a final return to Harry Callahan before it's too late. Well, Gran Torino isn't that film. And although there are references to all those Eastwood hardasses that he's played before in Torino's Walt Kowalski, there's also a bittersweet twist to all that simmering violence that's one of the most suprising things about this movie.
Gran Torino takes it's title from the 1972 Ford automobile parked in Walt's garage, a symbol of an idealised past while Walt spends his days on the front porch, glowering at the immigrants who supposedly threaten his patch of suburban Detroit.
Thao (Bee Vang), the son of the Hmong family from next door tries to boost Walt's car as part of a gang initiation, but when Walt catches him, the boy is forced to work for him. Walt puts him to work doing up the eyesore of a house opposite, and gradually the old man and the boy begin to bond. The thaw continues when Thao's sister, Sue (Ahney Her) stands up to Walt's racial slurs and invites him round to sample her fatherless multi-generational family's food and beer.
If it sounds a little cliched and over-earnest, you're right; it is. Gran Torino's script by newcomer Nick Schenk, is clunky in places and you can hear the gears grinding (no pun intended) at times as the movie changes tone and mood. Only Eastwood's surefire direction keeps the movie on track at times.
Initially Walt is Dirty Harry in the suburbs, it's true; when the gangbangers invade on Walt's territory, Eastwood cocks his rifle, squints at them down the barrel and growls: "GET. OFF. MY. LAWN." Then when, the same gang attack Thao after his first day at a job that Walt has arranged for him, Walt heads over, waits them out and stands on the head of the last guy left until he gets the message.
But what makes Gran Torino more than the sum of it's parts is the ending that turns that myth of the cliched Eastwood hero on it's head. It's an audacious and bittersweet twist that more than makes up for the earlier lapses in the script.
It goes without saying that Eastwood is terrific. He takes the caricature of the obnoxious and bigotted curmudgeon Walt and infuses him with subtlety and a sly humour. Now, as much as any time in his prime, Eastwood is a magnetic prescence on the screen, one of the last Hollywood legends. He also elicits some excellent performances from the first timer Hmong cast; both Bee Vang and Ahney Her more than a match for the 78 year old veteran on his swan song.
Gran Tornio is no Unforgiven. Although both movies flirt with similar themes, Torino is a little generic, a little too simple and predictable. But its final act that flirts with the notion of the Eastwood hardman, cleaning up the neighbourhood for one last time, only to turn into something far more moving and redemptive is more than enough to be a fitting close to the man's acting career, and more than enough to recommend it.

Dollhouse

When it comes to Joss Whedon, it's hard for some of us to be impartial. Perhaps it's the feeling of being the underdog. Whedon has always been at his best when he writes about the disadvantaged in society, even if said disadvantage is being an immortal soul or the chosen one of your generation to protect the living from the dead.
I fell in love with Joss Whedon's writing within the opening seconds of Buffy The Vampire Slayer's pilot. Who could resist a perky cheerleader with a destiny, a bookish wallflower and the bumbling but lovable fool who make up the core of their self-proclaimed Scooby Gang?
Very few TV pilots have you at hello: The X-Files for sure; Twin Peaks too; but beyond that you find you have to put in a little work, have a little faith. Angel, Buffy's spin-off and former squeeze, took it's sweet time in reeling you in with its own spin on the dysfunctional family that its parent show took as its paradigm. Cordy and an Irish half-demon as Angel's side-kicks? Really? But by the time Doyle had sacrificed himself and his unrequited love for Cordy to make way for the wonderful Wesley Wyndham-Pryce, you knew you were in for the long haul, or however long the network would allow it.
Five seasons; it seems like a lot of episodes, but it also seems like a woefully short allowance for something you didn't just like if you were a Whedon fan. No, you loved that show, possibly even more than Buffy. By the end of both, your heart had been broken several times over: for Willow when Tara is killed by a stray bullet, for Xander as he walks away from Anya on his wedding day, for Wesley when he finally wins the love of Fred, only to have it stolen away at her transformation into Illyria; and for Buffy... oh, so many times that we don't have the space for here.
And then of course, we have Firefly. We hardly had time to realise how much we loved that band of underdogs before Fox snatched them away from us after fourteen episodes. At least we got ourselves a movie to say our goodbyes with, and it was, as they say, shiny.
And so, here we are, a little while later, hearing the news that Joss Whedon is returning to TV and making a new show for Fox. Dollhouse. At the time of the announcement, my thoughts were (and I'm sure many shared them) A: Why go back to that network, when Showtime or HBO would be such a better fit, and B: Dollhouse... I've seen that show already; it was called Dark Angel.
So the optimism was cautious, but it was optimism, nonetheless. Whedon says they're new people at Fox, they've changed. OK. And as for B, well, Buffy The Vampire Slayer didn't sound like that good an idea on paper, did it?
But then that cautious optimism starts to crumble. Fox have some problems with the pilot; then they can it altogether and Whedon reshoots it. Production closes down for Whedon to reassess the writing, the direction, etc. Then Dollhouse is placed onto a Friday night slot that to us none US viewers is considered the graveyard for TV shows. It all sounds strangely, depresssingly familiar.
But still... the same thing happened with Angel and Firefly, and look how they turned out.
And so to Friday, and the premiere of Dollhouse.
By this time, I admit, my initial excitement for the show had diminished somewhat. There was the sense that I didn't want to invest in something that would get cancelled a few shows in (although from what I gather, that Friday night slot is a blessing rather than a curse, having little to perform against). And the idea simply wasn't lighting a fire under me like Buffy and Angel and Firefly did. But still, as we sat down to Dollhouse, there was that flicker of excitement, bubbling away, despite myself: a new Whedon show, new characters to fall head over heels for, new Whedon dialogue to call your own and endlessly quote...
Except...
Eliza Dushku plays (let's make no bones about it) uber-hot Echo, an 'active' without any discernable memory or free will, controlled by a stealth organisation who regularly brainwash and reprogramme her to be whatever the Dollhouse's ultra-rich clients want them to be.
When we first meet Echo, she's a motorcycle racing escort in a dress so small, it's pretty much a belt. Later in the pilot, Echo is reprogrammed to be the negotiator in a child kidnap, and arrives with her new persona dressed in specs and a tight secretarial outfit. Mixed in with all this is the boss (or madame) of Dollhouse who comes on like a British dominatrix, Echo's handler of the older (but not-Giles-in-any-way-at-the-moment) persuasion who raises all the ethical and moral questions that the audience has early on, a computer geek who does the imprinting and offers the only character in the pilot to feel Whedon-esque, a largely dull FBI agent trying to uncover Dollhouse's secrets and a slightly vague naked nutter on a coffee table looking at videos of Echo pre-mind wipe.
It's a lot to take in, and it feels deeply bogged-down with trying to get all of the pieces into place. This isn't to mention the spa-like Dollhouse itself (that looks suspiciously like Wolfram and Hart to me), filled with robot like 'actives' who sleep in strange pods and all shower together for no other reason than it's titillating to the audience.
I can forgive many of the initial faults that spring to mind in that first hour, but the main thought that springs to mind is: where in all of this is Joss Whedon? All the hallmarks of a Whedon show are largely absent. The characters are curiously uninvolving and make little or no impression. There's none of that light touch that Whedon can bring to even the darkest of stories; indeed Dollhouse is utterly devoid of humour, and it's this that jars the most. It's always been that feeling of Whedonesque that made us fall in love with his work in the first place. Perhaps that rewrite and reshoot of the pilot left no time for fine tuning and lightness of touch.
In fact the only thing that made me feel the need to tune in next time was the fact that this is Joss Whedon. I can't imagine what the rest of the world would think. But I'm still cautiously optimistic. The prescence of so many of the Buffy alumni of writers who've returned along with Whedon, and the surefire knowledge that it will only get better because it's Whedon will take me back week after week.
Here's hoping it finds it's legs and the network leaves it alone long enough...

A Girl Called Eddy

American born Erin Moran trades under the name of A Girl Called Eddy. Her debut album, written and performed with the outrageously brilliant Richard Hawley (whose album Coles Corner should be in everyone's collection) is one of those overlooked gems of recent times. It's languid and bruised, warm and wistful, and full of the kind of perfect melodies and lyrics you could swear you've known all your life; songs that sound like the child of early Scott Walker or Roy Orbison.

There are too many highlights to mention but The Long Goodbye ("...take your records, leave me mine / you're the one who said that we lived it all on borrowed time.") and People Who Used To Dream About The Future ("...Drinking our coffee/It's a quarter to three/No one in this place/Just us and our mistakes...") are particular gems.

She has a new album, You Get The Legs You're Given due this year, and I hope it garners the success she deserves.

Find a sample her music at http://www.myspace.com/agirlcallededdy

I'm scattered like newspapers all over the street

I see your face in everyone I meet

I'm avoiding the corners

I'm avoiding your name

I know that I loved you but I loved you in vain

And this city's too small for two

My melancholy friend and you

And these tears all over town

Too many tears all over this town

Tears all over town

Tears All Over Town - A Girl Called Eddy

To a new world of gods and monsters! Bride of Frankenstein

Like many of us of a like mind, Bride of Frankenstein affected me at a young and impressionable age. I grew up on a diet of Hammer Horror (usually watched through parted fingers), and from time to time one of the 'classics'. Psycho was one of them, and I could still watch that particular Hitchcock movie on a daily basis and never tire of it. I never much cared for the Bela Lugosi Dracula, but I suppose by that time, I had become used to the near pant-soiling terror of Christopher Lee's turn as the the Count, and Lugosi's version simply seemed too tame to make any kind of impression.
But as a child, the movie that made the largest impression on my psyche was James Whale's tremendous sequel to his own Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein.
Barring the relative oddities of The Godfather II, The Empire Strikes Back and The Dark Knight, there aren't many sequels that surpass their predecessors. But Bride is one of those oddities.
Of course as a child, all that lingers in the mind is imagery, particularly if it's as vivid as that of the beautiful Elsa Lanchester being brought to life by the greatest of 'weird science' moments in cinema history, that electric-shock hair, those birdlike movements and that scream upon meeting her intended mate, Boris Karloff's sublime monster.
I've had the original movie and its sequel on one of those classic Universal special edition DVD sets for a while and simply hadn't gotten around to sitting down to watch Bride of Frankenstein again, until tonight.
And I was suprised by the movie for many reasons.
Of course, Lanchester's appears in what amounts to less than five minutes of screen time (not including her dual appearance as Mary Shelley in the movie's prologue). But of course, those five minutes, and the laboratory sequence leading up to Frankenstein exclaiming, "She's Alive! Alive!" are a delicious concoction of special FX, set design, pure camp and surrealism.
Whale came to Bride with a degree of reluctance, and only after several script passes with numerous contributions by himself, did he agree to the sequel. What stands out about Bride is the air of high camp about it all: the whimsy of various bit part performances, the bizarre miniature people in jars and the outrageously flamboyant turn by Ernest Thesiger as Frankenstein's mentor, Doctor Septimus Pretorius. The homosexual overtones of this queen of a mad scientist, luring Frankenstein away on his wedding night to meddle in some nefarious non procreative life-making is pretty clear, but still delightfully tongue in cheek.
There's also some quite overt religious imagery in the film, despite Whale's lack of any such conviction: the bread and wine with the blind hermit (and this scene again plays with the homosexual inferrence of two men living together, only to be torn apart by two gun toting villagers), the monster strung up in a cruciform pose when captured, the obvious act of scientist's 'playing God', and a scene apparently cut from the script where the monster attempts to rescue the stone figure of Jesus from a cross in a graveyard.
Aside from all of this contentious stuff, there's also the stuff that you'll remember from that first viewing as a child, but had no context for: the gorgeous sets and imaginative camera work lifted from German Expressionist cinema, the iconic make-up for Karloff's monster by Jack P. Pierce (adjusted with more scars and burns after the first film, and simplified for Karloff's comfort, befitting his increased status in Hollywood), the generally impressive cast (even Colin Clive as Frankenstein, who was reportedly drunk for most of the shoot and died just two years later), and the splendid score.
And of course, we return to Elsa Lanchester, the girl from Lewisham, who modelled the Bride's hissing on the hissing of swans protecting their young after feeding the birds at a pond back in England. Those five minutes of quintessential horror iconography, now tied thirty years later with a better understanding of the wit and subversive genius of James Whale.
Mad science at its best.

The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril

"Let me tell you a story. And you tell me where real ends and pulp begins..."
If, like me you get a kick out of the classic pulp of yesteryear, then it's highly likely you'll enjoy the heck out of debut novelist Paul Malmont's The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, a book replete with all those dime-store novel thrills and spills, but also a piece of fiction about the men who created them.
The pulps pre-dated comic books, inspired movies and serials, and became a cornerstone of pop culture that's as pervasive now as it was then. In creating a fictional homage to the pulps, Malmont's book also manages to be a lightning paced dash that takes in post Depression America, warlord-plagued China, the creepy mist filled waterfronts of Rhode Island and the secret temples and opium dens of New York's Chinatown. It also introduces us to Lester Dent, creator of Doc Savage and Walter Gibson, creator of The Shadow, two writers at odds with each other and wrestling with the notion of self-identity (both men published under the enforced pseudonyms of Kenneth Robeson and Maxwell Grant respectively).
The death of H.P. Lovecraft, at the time a relatively obscure pulp writer, serves as the catalyst for the mystery that draws Gibson and his young protege, Ron Hubbard (yes, that L. Ron Hubbard) into a mystery at a medical lab right out of a Lovecraft story, and to an island full of zombies. Meanwhile Dent and his wife, who are a beautifully drawn couple, struggling to get past a recent miscarriage, find themselves investigating an old Chinatown tong murder that leads them to an abandoned theatre, a golden statue and whip wielding assassin.
To say more would spoil a rip-roaring three hundred-odd pages. But along the way to the action-packed finale are treasure maps, secret codes, Chinese warlords, barrels of toxic nerve gas and femme fatale (who also happens to be a psychic with a pet chicken).
In addition there are a cornucopia of cameo players for the geeks: Orson Welles (who starred as The Shadow on the radio for several years, and who was a comic and pulp fan), Robert Heinlein, Al Capone (Gibson wrote his biography) and Louis L'Amour, among others. There's even a cameo for Seigel and Schuster: two young fledgling comic artists who are in New York to sell their Super-Man idea; Hubbard tells them not to bother - comic books will never take off...
It's a wonderful and irresistable immersion into 30's America, a pulp story with some of the breadth of Michael Chabon's Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier and Clay, and bears a real sense of compassion for Dent and Gibson as men who despite their fame, lacked the respect of literary authors like Hemingway.
A ripping yarn, as they say. Well worth a trip to Amazon for...

Henri Cartier-Bresson

After compiling the previous list of favourite items about my humble abode, I neglected to mention a small postcard that I obtained in a small store near the Pompidou Centre in Paris. I'd never seen the image before (this was a couple of years back) but, having instantly fallen in love with it, I handed over my fifty cents and took it home with me.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, the author of the above photo on my postcard was a French photographer, and the godfather of the candid street photography that has influenced countless generations that followed him. And although there are other far more famous photos attributed to the man (and well worth looking up on Google images as the man was a genius), the above image, entitled Brasserie Lipp, 1969 Paris inspired me in all sorts of ways.

I returned from Paris with the outline and much of the dialogue for my novella, 101 Ways To Leave Paris hastily scrawled into a small notepad, all inspired by the photo. (I recall composing an entire conversation in my head mid-way down a Parisian avenue, and having to lean against a wall to write it down). And then, mid-way into the writing of the novella, a three or four page section of it became the seed of the idea that became my novel, Secret Skin. Marianne, the character that Cartier-Bresson's photo drew from me, is the life-long love of two very different sets of brothers in novella and novel.

And the first time we meet Marianne, she is that photo:

1977. Marianne: they see her first in Montparnasse at La Closerie des Lilas; the café where Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises, Jack notes to Victor (who could care less). The streets seem perfectly still around her. The blue sky of Paris suddenly flooding with clouds. On theBoulevard du Montparnasse the cars are turning slowly. Marianne is seated outside the café in the shade of a ring of trees, with a glass of wine and a copy of Le Parisien spread out before her on the table. She is wearing a short diaphonous summer dress that reveals her thighs. She continually piles up her chestnut hair with her hands to allow the cool morning air to her pale neck, then lets it fall. Through the window, some of the tables still have chairs upturned on them.

Authonomy and Secret Skin

Last week I heard a news story about a Birmingham writer who sold her novel to Harper Collins after previewing it on their Authonomy site. This obviously piqued my interest, so I decided to go have a look and find out if it might be helpful to me and my novel.
Basically you build a profile similar to the other networking sites, then upload at least ten thousand words of your book for other people to read, discuss and rate. Authonomy counts the number of recommendations each book receives, and uses it to rank the books on the site. It also spots which visitors consistently recommend the best books – and uses that info to rank the most influential trend spotters.
Once a month Collins pull out the top five books from the Editor’s Desk Chart, and passes them on to their Editorial Board. HC editors will read from the first 10,000 words of each manuscript, feed back their comments to the appropriate authors and, if the book's good enough push it up the ladder with a view to publishing.

After a bit of hesitancy (mainly due to a reluctance to having a chunk of my book available for anyone to read) I decided to bite the bullet and join up. It doesn't hinder your chances to submit the work to other publishers or agents, so it seems like a win-win situation.
So tonight I uploaded a photo, a profile, a pitch, a working cover for the book (cribbed from one of my Paris photo stash) and then the first eight chapters of my book, Secret Skin.
Here's my profile page and here's the page for the novel.
If anyone wants to join up, you can and should! You don't have to have a book to join; you can just sign up as a reader. That way you can back my book and push it up the charts.

Avery Manor: The Tour (Part Four: The Miscellaneous)

The fridge. I started buying stuff from wherever I went to attach to the fridge door. Slowly it got out of hand. Postcards, photos, magnets, stickers, badges, from all over Europe and beyond. This is just a small part of the whole. Pics of Amanda at a burlesque night, one of Joe and Ade at Brian's wedding, some Vargas girls, BPRD, Bettie Page, Rolling Stones stickers, Kirby, Ditko and Loisel artwork, some Beatles and Doctor Who magnets, along with various items from Paris and The Village itself. A work in progess at all times...

A christmas present from Amanda, currently residing in the kitchen beside the Superman Returns poster. This is a huge print of some of my favourite photography.

And finally, the current view from the sofa where I'm typing this. And yes, that's Christina Aguilera on the laptop wallpaper (it's artistic)...

Avery Manor: The Tour (Part Three: The Signed Stuff)

These are all prized possessions. Bill Hicks, the legendary comedian who died back in '94 signed this cassette (remember them?) and a video when we met him at the Town Hall in Birmingham. We saw him twice; he was a genius. His comedy will never be matched. Alas the video was lent out to the artist Chris Baker, and I've never managed to get it off him. Chris, if you ever stumble across this blog, I want it back!Back when I worked in Andromeda Bookshop (an SF/Horror bookstore) in the nineties, Clive Barker was one of the regular authors to visit whenever he had a book out. I was a huge fan back then, and he was always an affable and hugely entertaining man, willing to talk to everyone who came to the signing sessions, and sometimes do you a drawing in your book.
Once, due to Barker having a signing session in a nearby Waterstones, our signing at Andromeda had to be a low-key un-advertised affair. Ade and I took full advantage, and spent a fantastic hour or so talking about movies and books with him, while he did us a couple of drawings on some A4 sheets. It's gotten a bit yellowed with age, but it's still a prized possession.

Nowadays, everyone knows who Jeff Buckley is. His one album, Grace is a masterpiece. But I can claim to being there before most. I bought Grace on its week of release and shortly after Buckley and his band came to Birmingham to sign copies in the Plastic Factory, a brilliant record store way back when. He was a lovely chap, stopping to chat to everyone and make sure everyone had something signed. Being a bit of a muso at the time, we chatted about a guitar sound he acheived on one of the songs, Eternal Life. Jeff died far too young, and the world was denied one of its great songwriters.

A relatively recent addition to the collection, this. A Hamlet programme, signed by Patrick Stewart, Oliver Ford Davies and David Tennant when we visited Stratford last year. This being a play featuring Doctor Who and Captain Picard, there were huge crowds every night. Amanda and I persisted and got our autographs. This RSC production of Hamlet (which we finally caught in London a few weeks ago) was incredible. One of the best evenings of theatre I've ever seen.
A Superman Returns poster, signed by Supes himself, Brandon Routh at a Collectormania in Milton Keynes. Currently residing in the kitchen.

A panel from Chasing Amy, signed by Kevin Smith, obtained from the View Askew site.

A poster obtained from a Tori Amos gig way back in the early nineties, and signed by Tori herself after an excellent show at Warwick University. She hugged me twice. It was a good night.

Avery Manor: The Tour (Part Two: The Objects)

We've made two visits to Venice, and it's a city like no other. Barring the McDonald's and a Toys 'R Us, the stores are unique and beautiful. The first time we got completely lost in the back streets and canals and took an hour or so to reach the harbour before our boat left. The second time, the Piazza S Marco was flooded, and tourists were queuing on trestle tables to get across the square. We on the other hand just took off out shoes and waded across. Such was the Mediterranean heat, our feet were dry within seconds of reaching dry land.
The masks are a huge part of Venice. Every February the city holds the carnevale and dresses to impress in gowns and masks. So every other store in Venice is a mask store. They're quite delicate, so it's pretty difficult to transport too many of them, but I have four now, and I love them all.
On our last visit, we discovered a tiny mask store on the edge of the Ponte de Rialto. We communicated with the owner in some rough English/Italian and he talked about making masks for a lot of the Hollywood movies when they come to Venice to film. The masked orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut utilised this man's designs (of which the central mask in my collection is based on), as well as Heath Ledger's Casanova and many others. I could have spent a fortune. Next time I go back I almost certainly will...

This plaster head was bought from a Cologne market when we visited it on a Winter break a few years ago. There were some incredible designs, and if I'd had enough space in the suitcase, I would have bought more. Amanda has one in a Devil's face design that is equally impressive. This one of mine seemed to appeal to something in my nature...

My Nightmare Before Christmas cookie jar. Always full of biscuits for guests. A christmas gift from Amanda a couple of years back.

My Sinatra trilby in the foreground. Originally purchased from a fantastic vintage clothes store in Walsall for a Shadow costume intended for a burlesque night out. In the end I went for old time magician and didn't need it. (But Joe did go as The Shadow, so it got some use). It's been loaned out to others since then for various events.

In the background is a graffiti artist's print of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin. The artist's name escapes me now, but it's signed and it's very striking.

A small amount of my collection of Marvel superhero statues, currently residing in front of some of my DVDs.
Whenever Amanda's parents head off to some exotic location (and they go to some strange Eastern places), they pick me up a new mask. The weirder the better is the only proviso. These two are my favourites (possibly from Vietnam). They remind me of something from a Sax Rohmer Fu-Manchu book. They reside over the toilet, keeping watch while you do your business...

Avery Manor: The Tour (Part One - The Art)

Some of the visitors to this blog will be aware of most of the 'sights' on this tour of my humble abode. But as I've noticed that there has been a fair bit of traffic from elsewhere (from Japan, Russia and the US), I thought I'd take you visitors on a whistle-stop tour of my home and its admittedly deeply geeky contents.

So welcome, gentle viewer. And try not to touch anything...

The Art...

I carried this framed print all the way from Paris, from a simply incredible comic book/cd/dvd store that escapes my memory at the moment. I've long been an admirer of European comic art and Blacksad is one of the most popular and easily obtainable of the great Bande Dessinées.

Blacksad, by Juan Díaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido is film noir populated by anthropomorphized animals. The art by Guarnido is beautiful detailed watercolour and once I saw this, I had to part with some euros and carry it back across the pond to live on the wall above my TV.

Check out this Blacksad site for some more examples of this beautiful comic art.

http://www.blacksadmania.com/
A couple of German reproduction prints of Metropolis and Cabaret. Both obtained from one of my favourite stores in London. VinMag is located in the depths of Soho, and is full of movie memorabilia - T-Shirts, posters, old magazines and books and a whole lot more besides. It's a guarantee that I'm going to part with some cash whenever I step over VinMag's threshold...

http://www.vinmag.com/

This print was bought from the US off ebay. Various Golden and Silver Age comic book artists were commissioned to produce new art for a very expensive portfolio. Luckily some of these portfolios have since been split up and the prints sold separately. Variations On A Theme, by Jerry Robinson is one of my favourites. Robinson was responsible for co-creating The Joker, and this print is a riff on one of those classic Golden Age Batman covers. It's also signed and numbered by the great man himself.

Following my recent conversion to all things Audrey Hepburn, I'd had my eye on this huge canvas of

Breakfast at Tiffany's. Not only is it one of those iconic movie images, it's also painted by Robert McGuiness(check out my post on him in my Let The Pictures Do The Talking Part One).

Amanda bought it for me as an early Valentine's Day gift, and now sits at the back of the living room beside my bookshelves.

I obtained these two prints from Paris too. Sky Doll is a series of comic books by Alessandro Barbucci and Barbara Canepa. It's a slickly produced bit of adult SF about religion, mass media and life-like androids. The art for Sky Doll is all over Parisian comic book stores, and I fell in love with it while there. It's got a slight manga quality, but with a 60's/70's psychedelia element to it. I picked up the translations re-printed in Heavy Metal magazine, but now they're also available from Marvel.

http://skydoll.lesite.free.fr/

Albums Of A Lifetime # 1: Tilt by Scott Walker

I was brought up to the sound of Scott Walker. When I was a small child my parents lived in a tower-block; I don't remember much of that time save for the view from the window and a vague recollection of fire-engines racing down the road when a fire began in one of the floors below. What I do recall is being rocked back to sleep by my dad to the sound of one of Scott Walker's four solo albums from the late sixties. I didn't sleep well as a child and nowadays I sleep even less. Similarly I was as beguiled then as I am now by the sound of Walker's deep baritone and his singular idiosyncratic approach to words and music.
I vividly remember being drawn to the words from Plastic Palace People on Scott 3:

Plastic palace people

Through fields of clay and granite grey

They play without a sound

Plastic palace Alice

Blows gaping holes to store her fears

Inside her lovers head

I had no idea as a child that Walker's vision was virtually unique. Not everything I heard subsequently would be quite this strange and beautiful.

It wasn't until I was a little older that I 'rediscovered' Walker's work and claimed it for my own. It seemed like a well-kept secret, which is how I usually like my music: A little out of step, a little hard to like immediately, the sense of depth and of hidden currents that only repeated plays and investigation would reward with something rich and for all time.

By that time of course, Walker was already an enigma. Beyond the four solo albums (Scott 1-4) in the sixties, a few aimless recordings and what he refers to as 'bad faith' on his own part, Walker had withdrawn. Only The Electrician on a re-united Walker Brothers album in the mid-seventies hinted at a future. And it was a dark future. I recall the writer Joel Lane describing it to me in his flat, years ago as something that sounded utterly terrifying; a love song between a torturer and his victim:

He's drilling thru the spiritus sanctus tonight

Thru the dark hip falls

Screaming oh you mambos

Kill me and kill me and kill me

When I finally did hear it, I was back in Walker's pocket again. The Electrician is both dark and angular and thrillingly lush with its swelling orchestra and Spanish guitar at its crescendo. Every time I play it, it sounds like the first time. The same goes for Plastic Palace People.

Climate of Hunter followed in the eighties, then Tilt in the nineties and The Drift in 2006. Despite becoming more obscure, more arcane with his allusions, and more abrasive with his composition, Scott Walker isn't so obsure anymore. The brilliant 30 Century Man documentary film to accompany the release of The Drift celebrated his work with contributions from fans and collaborators including David Bowie, Radiohead, Brian Eno and Jarvis Cocker (among others).

But Tilt. I could have picked any of Walker's albums, because there's plenty to say about all of them, but Tilt fascinates me. I've returned to it often since it's release in 1995. It's funereal and elliptical and sounds like nothing else in the world. The words are obtuse, like riddles to tease apart and understand. The music is overtly percussive, punctuated by slabs of noise or orchestra. Sometimes the clouds clear and it sounds like the sun coming out for a few breatless seconds. I come back to it again and again, seeing new angles to approach it from, hearing new things to appreciate. How many records make you want to do that, fourteen years on?

Farmer in the City, the first track is dedicated to the Italian filmmaker, Pier Paulo Pasolini, a man whose murder by a seventeen year old hustler while out cruising has subsequently been speculated upon as political, mob-related or extortion, depending on who you talk to. Farmer in the City is like an ember of the Walker of old; it swells with strings and pained emotion:

Paulo take me with you,

It was the journey of a life...

Certain themes and metaphorical imagery in Farmer in the City crop up time and time again in the rest of Tilt (and indeed in much of Walker's post-sixties work). Animals feature heavily: harness on the left nail... I knew nothing of the horses. And further into Tilt, imagery of horses, swans, cockfighting, butterflies and buffalo prevail. The aforementioned harness suggests another theme in Walker's work: an almost sadomasochistic fetish that vascillates between torture and sex, or sometimes both. There's a similar obsession with the body that permeates vitually everything Walker writes; the suggestion of the fragility of the meat that is us, the torture of it, the death of it, the horror of its failings. Often there's two sides to everything presented in Tilt; something tender can all too easily slide into violence, torture can lead to something like love, however twisted. Tilt is like a jigsaw puzzle: all the pieces are there in front of you, but how do they all fit together?

The Cockfighter, a song about the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the 'architect of the Holocaust' is atonal, a frightening counterpoint to Farmer's lush sound. The Holocaust and the industrialisation of mass death is very Tilt. The lines... All the calcium planets/growing in the darkness/all over the body/the flapping body.. seem to suggest the loss of control when the body fails, and then... That ribbon cracks like this one can be read as the gentle ribbons in her hair, or the more sinister cut her to ribbons.

Papa danced four feet away, in the rubbing and fusing, the sealing and pivoting...in Bouncer See Bouncer tie the act of sex with dancing while a bare but insistent drum pounds away in the background. Later in that same song, the percussion gives way to a moment like the sun coming out, only for the darkness to reprise again moments later. It's a song laden with religious and sexual imagery.

In Manhattan and Bolivia '95 Walker returns to themes of torture and prsioners in their last moments. In Manhattan, Scalper in the lampglow and ...stickwiped shirt and his arm somewhere suggest interrogation and worse. While in Bolivia '95 (possibly referring to Che Guevara's death in Bolivia)... I journey each night like a saint to stand on this straw floor and ...The tiles speckling darker and darker around my feet both summon images of the schoolhouse where Guevara was executed. It returns to The Electrician's ambiguity of the relationship between executioner and executed.

Walker has subsequently offered some explanation to Patriot (a Single), saying, "It's simply about a character, perhaps a spy, wandering the desert outskirts of Iraq," and that it "ends as it begins, with the bombing of Iraq." It's a typical Walker song with its fractured words where beautiful transforms suddenly into something altogther more dangerous.

The title track returns to the metamorphosis between animal and man that Walker had previously considered on Climate of Hunter. Aside from dual references to a jacket and a skin as the same thing, Tilt the song is strangely impenetrable, but features guitarist David Rhodes playing minor and major keys at the same time, which sounds slightly unsettling.

The final song, Rosary is stripped of all adornments, and the only recent song in the last thirty or so years that Walker has performed live (and this on Later with Jools Holland, alone before any of the studio audience had arrived - find it on YouTube). It again suggests more body horror: With all the trembling vein that you can bare... Its spare arrangement and raw vocal bring Tilt to a desolate close.

Tilt is an initially infuriating and claustrophobic album that grows into something else upon repeated listens. It's place in the geography of music is unmatched (save for the even darker and more obtuse follow-up The Drift) but it's worth the investment. Only a handful of albums will repay your investment with something so rich and rewarding.