Some Like It Hot

I watched Some Like It Hot last night for the umpteenth time. The story never seems to date, and it doesn’t matter how many times I watch it, I giggle along. The plot is relatively simple, but perfectly pitched and paced. The script is snare drum tight, with just the right amount of witty banter, slapstick and pathos. And the actors are flawlessly cast and give stellar performances. The best comedy film of all time? Quite possibly. Oh, to be able to write a script this hot.

Lazy Sunday Service

Another long day in the garden and phase one of the great wall rebuild is complete. Heaven knows how many hours this has taken, but hopefully it won't need rebuilding again in my life time. Photos are before and after. I think the original construction was simply a piling up of stones that were then covered in soil (we dug wheelbarrow loads of soil out).

My posts this week:
Review of Trail of Blood by S.J. Rozan
A dictionary of sheep
Sheep continued
Review of The American Envoy by Garbhan Downey
Northern housing market on the road to recovery?
Self-flagellation and cultural memory
In defence of ignorance

In defence of ignorance

I’ve been dipping into Damian Corless’ GUBU Nation again. There’s always a bit of anti-intellectualism at work in every country, and it’s been no different in Ireland over the years. The following quote is from Oliver J Flanagan TD in an anti-contraception speech from 1971. Flanagan was first elected in 1943 with one of his first speeches an attack on Jews (‘There is one thing that Germany did, and that was to rout the Jews out of their country. Until we rout the Jews out of this country, it does not matter what orders you make. Where the bees are there is honey, and where the Jews are there is money’).

‘The Irish people should give serious thought to what the intellectuals of our Parliament have in store for them. The demand for change in the law in this regard is called for by professors, journalists, economists, the doctors of everything and of nothing. They regard themselves as having a monopoly of brains, ability and intelligence. They pride themselves with knowing all things for all men, but when it comes to the real essentials of life they are the most ignorant bunch you could imagine, as with all their intelligence they display great ignorance in relation to the law of God. While some of them profess to be Catholics they openly treat the teachings of Pope Paul IV with contempt, and laugh, sneer and jeer to try and belittle the advice and guidance given by the bishops of this country on a matter in which they have spoken for the good of the nation. God save Ireland from intellectuals … It is as well for the Irish people that there are in high places, a few poor ignorant men in public life, looked down on by the intellectual know-alls, but who are not afraid to stand up in defence of the law of God in a Christian country. … A computer must be fed with truth and correct material in order to produce correct results, and so it is with our conscience. ... Let us hope and trust that there are sufficient proud and ignorant people left in this country to stand up to the intellectuals who are out to destroy faith and fatherland and to replace the law of God and the law of the land with the law of the jungle. There is no such thing as a liberal Catholic ... and the sooner our people realise this to be a fact, the better for success and good luck to fall upon our country.’

Thank heavens for the few poor ignorant men in public life! Contraception was eventually made legal for married couples on prescription in 1979, from 1985 it could be bought by anyone over 18 in a pharmacy, and from 1993 condoms could be sold via a vending machine.

Self-flagellation and cultural memory

Always interesting to read the international medias take on what has been going on in Ireland. Two good overview pieces have recently been published in the Financial Times and The Guardian, and come recommended if you want to get a rough handle of what has been going on here. I thought the following two quotes were particularly interesting, one from a worker who has lost his job, the other from a protestor who has found it difficult to mobilise foot soldiers.

"We never really believed the boom. During the celtic-tiger period we were like, jeez, look at us, this will never last. Irish people were used to shit homes, shit education, shit hospitals. In England, there is a cultural memory of things working. There is no cultural memory in Ireland of things working. The self-flagellation gene in Ireland is very strong – 'cut us to fuck because we're used to being the downtrodden victim'. We almost feel better for it."

"The Irish are the good children of Europe. They take the rod, they don't complain and they all will get sweets at the end. Anger is a private thing in our country; it's there, but we don't express it in public."

The cultural memory of a few hundred years of colonialism, followed by a heavy dose of Catholicism, has seemingly produced a certain amount of fatalism and an expectation of failure and suffering. That the famine statues are placed next to the international financial services centre in Dublin is an interesting juxtaposition given the causes of the present crisis. If some of the recent analysis is correct ('It is no longer a question of whether Ireland will go bust, but when'), then the crises of the 1950s and 1980s are going look like minor blips. Personally, I'm reasonably optimistic that the country will muddle through without going completely bust, but its going to be a bumpy ride, and the self-flagellation gene could to get a good workout.

Review of The American Envoy by Garbhan Downey (Guildhall Press, 2010)

Dave Schuurman, a Boston journalist with political connections, expects to get a plum posting from the new US Secretary of State. A minor indiscretion and a YouTube video ensure that the posting is as the US Envoy to Derry in Northern Ireland, helping to build cultural and economic relations between the two countries. On arrival, he’s taken under the wing of Tommy ‘bowtie’ McGinlay, a criminal lawyer with political connections. Schuurman is soon a member of McGinlay’s poker circle that includes the local mayor, newspaper editor and senior cop. He’s also tangled with Tommy’s ultra-feminist niece and local shock radio host, Ellie, and started to date Chris Diaz, the beautiful and ambitious manager of an American pharmaceutical company. Just as he seems to be finding his feet, helping to organise a trip to the US to try and encourage other companies to locate in the area, local teenagers start to die as a result of contaminated drugs seemingly imported from Scotland. Schuurman decides to use his investigative skills and new group of contacts to shut down the drugs gang. But things are not quite what they seem.

Downey, following in the footsteps John B. Keane and others, tells the story of an American envoy’s adventure in Derry through the correspondence between Schuurman and his father and the members of the poker circle. Given the prevalence of email, in an early letter Schuurman spells out the logic of using formal letter writing as security. It seems like a weak argument, used purely to justify the format of the book. And whilst I enjoyed the story, the weakest element for me was the concept of telling it though the letters sent or received by Schuurman. I think my main problem was that the letters were not credible, being too well written by all parties (everybody writes nicely structured, grammatically correct correspondence). They are also too long – who writes really long letters these days, especially when you are either meeting face to face, talking on the phone or webcasting regularly? And how many busy people attach extensive cover notes to letters? They also spell out things on behalf of the reader that would not have been included in correspondence between confidants (for example, at one point Schuurman documents the text messages to which both parties had been privy). Occasionally, the letters are interrupted by notes from Tommy ‘Bowtie’ which add nothing to the story. For me, it would have been preferable for the story to be told in the usual mode of a novel, where the plot and characters could have been explored a bit more extensively. Whilst the format didn’t really work for me, the story was good fun, and Downey demonstrates he can produce a savvy, humorous narrative, with an interesting cast of characters. And the quality of the writing was enough to convince me that I should read some of his other work.

Sheep continued

I spent last night and part of today reading Derek Brawn's, Ireland's House Party, which makes for pretty scaring reading with regards to where the Irish housing market is heading - at this stage 40-60% drop in prices, 50% of mortgaged homes in negative equity, and years and years to recover. I've just finished the first full draft of our report on the property crisis in Ireland and, as someone in negative equity, researching it has been a sombre experience. Brawn has a nice description of estate agents (which he was very briefly, and before that an investment banker - so he has a good pedigree in fleecing people):

'Estate agents treat their fellow-countrymen like sheep, to be sheared for all the money they can possibly extract from them, just so they can claim to be a home-owner.'

The subtitle to his book is, 'What estate agents don't want you to know.' He makes a pretty convincing case as to how they tried to pull the wool over people's eyes for as long as possible to keep the party bubbling along. And we all kept dancing like lambs to the slaughter.

A Dictionary of Sheep

I was driving round the countryside at the weekend when out of the blue my visitor said, 'I wonder what the dictionary of sheep is?' pointing into a field where a flock were all sporting blue smudges. Interesting, I thought. Dictionary of Sheep. The guy's losing it. Turns out there is a dictionary of sheep. According to Adopt-a-Sheep website, every five years in the UK, "The Shepherd's Guide" is published, listing every marking from every hill farm in the UK. The markings consist of an amalgam of marks and letters. I would have thought that the markings would have been quite localised to prevent sheep grazing on common land becoming mixed-up. I didn't think they'd collate them all together for the whole UK. An example of an old guide can be found here. I can't find a guide for Ireland, but I'm sure there probably was one. It seems to be all electronic tags these days.

Review of Trail of Blood by S.J. Rozan (Ebury Press, 2009)

Lydia Chin tries to mix being a dutiful daughter with operating as a private investigator, but doesn’t always get the balance right. Having recently returned to New York from a trip to California, she’s hired by her mentor, Joel Pilarsky, to help Alice Fairchild, who specialises in holocaust asset recovery, to trace a Chinese official who has fled China with some valuable jewellery. The Shanghai Moon is a mythical brooch formed from two other pieces – jade from an heirloom of a Chinese dynasty and diamonds from an Austrian Jew’s necklace. The necklace belonged to the mother of Rosalie Gilder. Rosalie and her younger brother Paul were amongst the twenty thousand European Jews who made their way to Shanghai before the second world war, her mother hoping to get a later boat, but never making it. Fairchild claims to be representing the interests of the children of Rosalie’s uncle and is keen to reunite the missing jewellery with the family. Whilst trying to track down the missing official, Lydia starts to become acquainted with Rosalie’s story through a number of letters now housed in a holocaust museum. But when Pilarsky is shot dead, the case takes a more sinister turn as it becomes clear that a number of people hope to gain possession of the famed, Shanghai Moon.

Trail of Blood had a number of common characteristics with Fred Vargas’, Have Mercy on Us All, which I reviewed a couple of weeks ago. Like Vargas’ book, the novel has a strong historical component, with the present day story very much connected to family and wider political and social events in the past. Similarly, it trundles along at a fairly quick pace, has good backstory, appealing characters, and interesting plot. That said, the story had a number of elements that I found detracted from my enjoyment. Sometimes the storytelling is a little too explicit, with some clear plot devices used to introduce certain pieces of information or push the story in a particular direction. There are a number of somewhat implausible coincidences and conveniences in terms of people being in the same places at the same time or having access to certain knowledges or information that are very difficult to locate and highly specialised. The dialogue was a little clunky at times and did not always have an authentic ring. And for me, the book was at least fifty pages too long. I noticed that it is published as The Shanghai Moon in the US, which is actually a much better and more appropriate title than the rather generic, Trail of Blood. Overall, a fairly entertaining read, but could have been much more given the strength of the conceptual idea underpinning it.

The Lazy Sunday Service

A scorcher of a day. Spent seven hours digging out a collapsed and grassed over wall (the neighbour says he last saw the stones over fifty years ago) and laying foundation stones. Truly shattered. There was a reason that ice cold beer was invented. The end of this afternoon is as damn near to being at one with that reason as I'm likely to get.

My posts this week:
Review of The Devil's Garden by Ace Atkins
Appeal of crime fiction?
Review of Chickenhawk by Robert Mason
Many steps ahead - Peeler
Drunk on power
Will dig for food

Will dig for food

Picture right is of a Harvard professor, a regular visitor to Ireland, who I invited out to the house for the weekend. The deal is - must dig out old wall (covered in grass and nettles) and build a new one for food. Pretty good exchange for both of us, I reckon. He's making a good job of it, except for dropping a rock on my hand (and he's fairly lethal with that crowbar). I must try this more often. I'm sure there are a load of academics out there who could do with the exercise. I only have about another 100 metres to rebuild. Since he's here, and is based up in the North, I've made a start on Garbhan Downey's, The American Envoy, so I can pass it on to him. In exchange, he has given me Philip Kerr's, The Shot. Can't wait to get stuck into that one sometime soon.

Drunk on power

John Charles McQuaid was rarely drunk on power, but he was seldom sober. The Archbishop was used to getting things his own way, but on an October day in 1955 over twenty thousand people turned out to let Ireland’s most powerful cleric know he was over the limit.

This fantastic quote is taken from GUBU Nation by Damian Corless a collection of short essays detailing some of the more ‘grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented’ things to have happened in Ireland’s post-independence history. This particular essay concerns a visit to Ireland by Yugoslavia’s soccer team to play a friendly match. Slighted by the fact that he was not consulted about the match (as he had been three years earlier) and no fan of ‘foreign games’, Archbishop McQuaid mobilised his influence to try and get the match cancelled. First, the Department of Justice told the Football Association of Ireland that they would need to seek permission for the players to enter the country (the first time they’d ever had to do such a thing). Second, the Army band withdrew their services. Third, the FAI were bombarded with public criticism from the forces of Catholicism and its various agencies. One of these groups even wrote to all the Yugoslav players to tell them that they were not welcome. Feeling the pressure, the national broadcaster withdrew its radio coverage. The Yugoslav team arrived at Dublin airport to be met by protestors at godless communism (although no such protest met a Russian delegation that had arrived in Ireland a month previously). The day before the match the Irish trainer withdrew from the game under pressure. The game went ahead and Ireland lost 4-1. McQuaid’s power is legendary and it is said that he got to read and edit all legislation before it was seen by most of the cabinet, let alone the Dail (the Irish parliament). Drunk on power indeed.

Many steps ahead - Peeler

At the tail end of last year I started a story about Harry Rutherford, an Anglo-Irish cop who survived the trenches of the First World War and is working for the Dublin Metropolitan Police in the period immediately after the Irish War of Independence and the Civil War. The working title is A Nowhere Man and I put up a draft of the opening section. I ploughed on for a while and have about about 15,000 words written. The period is fascinating and Harry provides an interesting way to explore a whole set of tensions, caught as he is between two worlds - Protestant/Catholic, gentry/working class, British/Irish, old order/new order, etc. Then yesterday I read a great guest post by Kevin McCarthy over on Crime Always Pays whose book, Peeler, is out next month. And low and behold he had the idea of writing a crime novel set in 1920s Ireland a couple of years ago, and it sounds like he's done a great job of it. Flip-it! Peeler is now on my order list. Hopefully Kevin's left enough room for someone else to squeeze into the same territory.

Review of Chickenhawk by Robert Mason (1983, Penguin)

After dropping out of university, and recently married, Robert Mason fulfils a childhood ambition and enrols in the Army in 1964 to learn how to fly helicopters. After scraping through flight school, in 1965 he’s sent to Vietnam to fly Hueys. During his time there he flies over 1,000 missions, dropping off infantry into the jungle and taking out wounded soldiers, often under heavy, sustained fire and/or from booby-trapped sites, and sometimes from barely accessible clearings. Mason spends his time in Nam making deep friendships, watching many of those friends die, dealing with Army inefficiencies, learning how to deal with near death experiences on a daily basis, trying to make do in temporary accommodations, and craving to return to his family.

I rarely read autobiographies, but Chickenhawk caught my eye when visiting the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. It is widely touted as one of the best accounts of the Vietnam War from the perspective of a soldier serving there. And for good reason. Mason’s narrative is well written, engaging, and often gripping, having the feel of an authentic account given its matter-of-fact, conversational, and unpretentious style that details both highs and lows, often portraying Mason in a poor or ambivalent light. He captures in detail the everyday training, missions, conversations, action, frivolity and mundanity of Army life. Over the course of the book, one comes to know Mason intimately, his buddies, and the drama and trauma experienced. One thing is clear, Mason and his ilk were performing a role not of their making or choosing, undertaking incredibly brave and foolhardy adventures, all the time blind to the politics playing out both in Nam and at home. And they paid the price in multiple ways – either through injury or death, or post-traumatic stress disorder, or social isolation or family break-up on their return. Chickenhawk is a powerful account of a soldier following his dreams to fly helicopters and finding himself on the front line. The only weakness is around the wider, contextual framing - I would have liked the account to have some further discussion of the conflict, the unfolding politics guiding what was happening, and an overarching sense of the battles and how Mason’s missions fitted into them. Other than that, Chickenhawk is a compelling read.

The appeal of crime fiction?

I read two posts yesterday that made an argument as to why crime fiction appeals to so many readers as a genre. Over on Petrona the case was made that crime is social criticism par excellence, examining the full diversity of social relations and their dysfunctions (through character/action driven plots). Over on International Crime Authors Reality Check, Matt Beynon Rees makes a similar case that crime fiction provides an entertaining and informative dose of social realism, but extends the argument to suggest that in doing so it makes unpalatable places knowable and bearable by revealing their social complexities, histories and politics, and placing an order and rationality on them.

I agree with both analyses, but I also want to suggest that crime fiction also provides a mirror for readers to reflect on, think through and make sense of their own lives, rather than simply coming to understand the Other (other people, other situations, other places). In particular it opens up vistas in which to critically reflect on the diverse, complex and contingent workings of power and its resistance, and our own experiences of them. In crime novels, a consistent feature is that the various manifestations of power (inducement, manipulation, coercion, seduction, exploitation, domination, intimidation, violence) and resistance (non-consent, non-cooperation, negotiation, disobedience, protest) are examined in a plethora of contexts.

Now, if I was Margot over at Confessions of a Mystery Writer I would now launch into a series of well honed essays on each of these forms of power and resistance and provide loads of examples from the crime fiction canon. But alas, this is as far as my insights go for today, other than to say that Hans Fallada’s brilliant novel, Alone in Berlin, explores all of them (and my review provides some engagement with the contingent and relational mobilisation and effects of power in Nazi Germany).

In short, my two cents worth is that crime fiction appeals because it whilst it does provide social criticism and open up the world of the Other, it also allows us to critically reflect about ourselves and our place in the world, especially in relation to how power is mobilised and expressed.

Review of The Devil’s Garden by Ace Atkins (Berkeley, 2009)

In September 1921, the silent movie star, Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle, travelled to San Francisco to spend two weeks partying in a set of suites in the St Francis Hotel. In a haze of bootleg booze and dancing to jazz, Arbuckle and his cronies entertain minor starlets and nightclub dancers. But something goes awry and the actress, Virginia Rappe, starts to writhe, twist and groan, before expiring. The D.A. alleges that Arbuckle crushed Rappe to death and the newspapers are having a field-day peddling the scandal, but there is much amiss about the case. The accounts of those attending the party conflict, the prosecution is hiding witnesses denying the defence access to them, certain body parts are missing after the autopsy, and Randolph Hearst’s newspapers in particular seem to be baying for Arbuckle to be convicted. Arbuckle’s defence team hire the Pinkerton detective agency to counter the prosecution case, assigning a young Dashiell Hammett to investigate. Struggling with illness, and with a young wife who is pregnant, Hammett works to discover the truth, despite the fact that all parties, including Arbuckle, have secrets they want to remain hidden.

As Ace Atkins details in a behind the book feature included at the end of the book, Dashiell Hammett is one of his heroes. The author of The Maltese Falcon, Red Harvest and The Thin Man, did indeed work on the famous ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle case for Pinkerton’s. Plotted through meticulous research, The Devil’s Garden charts the full case, and the actions of the various protagonists, especially Arbuckle and Hammett. At one level, the research is the book’s great strength, placing the reader in the geography and social life of San Francisco of the 1920s. At another level, it is its weakness, with the narrative feeling like a popular history text written in the format of a novel. Indeed, it is impossible to know what are historical facts and what is the product of Atkins imagination. In some ways, the story is much more complex than would usually be plotted in a novel; the Arbuckle case was multifaceted, with many central and bit part actors, tied together through messy and convoluted relationships and plot. Whilst Atkins does a reasonable job to put a shape on it all, the narrative is quite bitty, and the characters feel oddly flat at times, lacking in depth and substance. Atkins is clearly a skilled writer, but by so slavishly following the history of the Arbuckle case, and all its various threads, he has ended up with a story that is weakened somewhat by it. It might have perhaps worked better to have just followed the case through the eyes of Hammett to provide a single, coherent thread in which a smaller number of characters are elaborated in detail. That said, on balance I enjoyed the book, and I’d be interested to read some of Atkin’s books, especially Crossroad Blues of which I have heard good things.