Review of The Cold Dish by Craig Johnson (Penguin, 2005)

Walt Longmire is the long-time sheriff of Absaroka County, Wyoming.  Having recently lost his wife, he’s looking forward to finding a worthy successor and hanging up his spurs.  As winter approaches his plans are dashed by the murder of Cody Pritchard on the edge of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation.  Two years earlier, Pritchard and three other boys had received a suspended sentence for the rape of a local Cheyenne girl.  Given the general dissatisfaction with the verdict, there’s no shortage of potential vigilante killers.  There’s also the thorny issue of identity politics clouding the investigation.  Longmire’s job is to solve the case, whilst at the same time keeping the three other boys alive and maintaining good relations between all members of the remote, rural community.

There is lots to like about The Cold Dish.  The characterization, sense of place and prose are all excellent.  Johnson places the reader into Absaroka County and its colourful and complex characters, its social relations, local politics, and myths and legends.  All of the principle characters are very well drawn and there’s a good, even balance of strong male and female leads.  The landscape is a character in itself, fully fleshed out and realised, and used to good effect. Johnson draws on his own long law enforcement career to detail the nuances of police procedure and cop dynamics and personalities.  For the most part the plotting is very good, with the story unfolding at a nice pace, progressively becoming more complex and layered.  Several plausible characters are all viable suspects, keeping the reader on their toes.  However, in the last fifth of the book, the story becomes a little overly melodramatic and the resolution felt contrived to create a twist for the reader and just didn’t feel ‘right’ - difficult to discuss without spoilers, but it undermined what had been until then a really excellent read.  Nevertheless, this is superior fare and well worth a read.  I’m looking forward to reading the second book in the series - Death Without Company.

April reviews

I'm surprised that I've only written seven reviews in April.  It felt like I'd read many more books than that.  I do have one review outstanding, but somehow the month seems to have slipped by in a blur.  It was, however, a good month of reading.  Difficult to select one book of the month, but I'm going for A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore, with Charlie Stella's Johnny Porno close on its heels.  Very different kinds of books, but both very enjoyable.
 
Where the Devil Can't Go by Anya Lipska ***.5
Old School by Dan O'Shea ****
Johnny Porno by Charlie Stella *****
Hill Country by R. Thomas Brown ****
Death in the City of Light by David King ***
A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore *****
White Heat by M.J. McGrath *****

Shots of noir

I think I'm well behind on my challenge to read 365 short stories this year.  I have managed, at least, to read a couple of flash fiction pieces published last week by two of my favourite short writers, Kieran Shea and Matthew Funk.

The Key by Kieran Shea is up at Shotgun Honey
Voodoo Love by Matthew C Funk at Flash Fiction Offensive

Check out these stories and also their others, which can be found all over the crime fiction flash sites.

Lazy Sunday Service

Over the past couple of days I've been reading through one of my draft novels - Stiffed.  It's been in the drawer for about six months.  I thought it was pretty clean, but I've found myself doing a lot of minor tweaking - rejigging sentences, fixing typos, etc.  It hasn't extended as far as major revisions and changes to the plot, thankfully, but I'm starting to wonder if it needs some thickening out in places.  It's certainly interesting to read it through having not worked on it for a good while.  It's the first book I've written in the first person and it's kind of odd to read a story in which the first person perspective isn't your own but it's written by you.


My posts this week:

Flash, bang, miss ... Bloody Idiot
Review of Old School by Dan O'Shea
Tron talk rendered Tron-like
Census 2011: Town and Country data
Review of Where the Devil Can't Go by Anya Lipska
Bulldog Salts

Bulldog Salts

Jake Salts had a face like a bulldog given a swift kick to the balls and a temperament twice as mean.  The cell door opened, the local sergeant filling the frame.

‘Bulldog.’

‘Home.’

‘More like prison.’

‘Didn’t do nothing.’  Prone to bouts of deep melancholy and unholy tempers Bulldog led a mostly solitary existence on a dilapidated small holding.
 
‘Threatening behaviour.  Again.’

‘They were on my land.’ His prime entertainment was chasing startled walkers from his fields, waving a shotgun and hurling obscenities. 

‘Doesn’t matter.’

‘Matters to me!’

‘This scene is getting tired, Jake.  Like a dog with three legs.’


A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words

Review of Where the Devil Can’t Go by Anya Lipska (Tadeusz Books, 2011)

Janusz Kiszka left Poland for London in the 1980s, disillusioned and grief-stricken.  Thirty years later he’s a respected member of the Polish community, dabbling in the shadier side of life to make ends meet and keeping an eye on the new generation of migrants to the city.  When a priest asks him to find a young waitress that’s gone missing he reluctantly agrees to try and track her down.  Without knowing it, he’s let himself in for a whole heap of trouble.  Part of that trouble is DC Natalie Kershaw, a newly promoted cop who’s ambitious, spiky and prone to jumping to conclusions.  She’s been assigned the task of identifying a naked girl fished from the River Thames and tracking down her killer.  She soon has Janusz in her sights, though it seems the answers to both their mysteries actually lie in Poland.

Where the Devil Can’t Go is a competently written thriller with a political subtext.  The strength of the book is the sense of place and community relations in London, the characterisation of Janusz and Kershaw, and interweaving of the two main plots as they twist round each other and intersect.  The writing is generally engaging, though the plot was a little uneven, with the first half of the book stronger than the second.  The first half was very good and demonstrated Lipska’s undoubted talent as a writer.  However, the time in Poland was a little rushed and underdeveloped, and the rise to the climax somewhat contrived.  It’s difficult to discuss the ending without giving spoilers, but in the age of photocopiers, scanners, the internet, smart phones and so on the set-up played weakly and undermined credibility.  Overall, an enjoyable read that will appeal to police procedural fans looking for something slightly different to normal fare.

Tron talk rendered Tron-like

Below is a picture put up on twitter earlier this week of the talk I presented in London last week at the screening of Tron organised by Passenger Films/UCL Urban Labs. Pretty cool rendering of the venue into a Tron-like state.

Review of Old School by Dan O’Shea (Snubnose Press, 2012)

Old School is a collection of 16 flash fiction stories.  Unlike many short story collections, Old School has a theme - getting old - and is organised into three parts: Middle Aged; The Golden Years; The Afterlife.  The stories are all tight and punchy, with some nice expressive prose.  Evenness in quality is sometimes a problem with collections.  In general, Old School is strong throughout and most stories pack a solid blow or twist.  There are a couple of stories that are perhaps a little too short and could have done with a tad more elaboration, but there are definitely no duds.  The standout stories for me were Sheepshank and The Summer of Fishing.  Interestingly, Sheepshank was longer than the other pieces and those extra words allowed some real depth to be developed.  As a side issue, given the book is published in an e-format it could really do with an interactive table of contents - without it it’s difficult to jump around the book, which for a short story collection is very useful (especially when it comes to writing a review and you want to revisit some stories).  Overall, an enjoyable collection of stories that are a cut above average fare.

Flash, bang, miss ... Bloody Idiot

Below was my entry to the Flashbang writing challenge - 150 word or less crime story.  The long list was announced yesterday and I didn't make the last 25.  No great surprise - I got hung up on playing with the form (two sections, four paragraphs each, first and last lines echoing) rather than the story.  


Bloody Idiot

An idiot.  He’d been made to look an idiot. 

Well he’d have his revenge.  Rolly Thompson was a dead man walking.  Assuming he took the usual route home from the pub. 

His wiped his sweating palms on his jeans, felt his stomach knot and twist. 

A swaying figure came into view.  His fingers flexed on the knife handle, trying to get a comfortable grip as he prepared to launch himself out from behind the bushes.

***

Barry Halpin stared at the bathroom mirror.  The man staring back looked defeated; pasty skin, black bags under bloodshot eyes. 

Revenge had seemed a good idea with a skinful of beer and whisky chasers.  It had lost its appeal the second he tasted the blood spurting from Rolly’s neck.

There was a crash downstairs, the cry of ‘Police!’ and the thump of heavy boots on stairs. 

An idiot.  He’d been a bloody idiot.

Lazy Sunday Service

A busy week of work and travel.  After a night out in Warwick, I'm now in Birmingham airport waiting for flight back to Ireland.  Thankfully they have free wifi, so I've been able to catch up on some email and internet stuff.  Rather than mess about online for the next three hours though, I'm going to dig the kindle out of my bag and read Anya Lipska's Where the Devil Can't Go.  I'm about a third of the way in at the minute and enjoying it.

My posts this week
And half of nothing is?
Tron - some observations
Cover design - Killer Reels
Moving on
Grading planning in Ireland: An Taisce's verdict
Review of Johnny Porno by Charlie Stella
Title advice needed

And half of nothing is?

‘You have next to nothing now, but when I’m finished with you won’t even have that!’

‘You’re a cold hearted bitch, Maggie. Yeah, I’m ... we’re bankrupt, but I can start again.’

‘I’ll take whatever you make. I’m going to bleed you dry, Darren. You’ll be on life support.’

‘At least I’ll have a life without you.’

‘One not worth living. You’re going to have to keep me in the life to which I’m accustomed.’

‘That shouldn’t be too difficult, since act like you were born in the gutter.’

‘You’re ... You’re a big nothing!’

‘And half of nothing is?’


A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words

Tron: Some observations

I gave a talk last night at the Passenger Films/UCL Urban Labs screening of Tron in Bethnal Green, London. Some short films were also shown - Augmented City by Keiichi Matsuda, and two films by FactoryFifteen (check out both sites from some really innovative film making). The films were shown in St John's, a working church, which was interesting in itself. The screen (larger than the one below) was strung between the pulpit and a statue of St Mary. Pews do not make comfortable cinema seats! Below are my notes about the films.

Tron charts the attempt by a video arcade owner, Kevin Flynn, played by Jeff Bridges, to hack into ENCOM, the company he used to work for and whose boss stole his video programs. His attempts at hacking are blocked by ENCOM’s Master Control Program (MCP). One night, after breaking into ENCOM yet again, Flynn is forcibly pulled into the virtual world by the MCP. In the virtual world, programs (who are the doubles of their users) are subjugated by the MCP, who tries to get the programs to pledge their allegiance to the MCP and renounce their users. If they refuse to do so, they are forced into gladiatorial contests in a Game Grid until they de-rezz (die). In order to defeat the MCP, Flynn must find and help TRON, a system security program. At its heart it’s a typical Disney movie of good against evil (or in the films terms blue against red).

Tron pioneered the use of computer generated special effects and also provided influential representations of virtual space within computer networks. Visually it reminds me of Spectrum and Atari graphics mashed with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Star Wars’ Death Star and a bit of The Wizard of Oz (also in plot). Somewhat oddly, however, its landscapes are peculiarly empty - a massive grided space with singular bits, isolated programmes, and lacking in busy activity and millions of packets flying everywhere. (Not much it seemed happened in computer networks in 1982). It was made at a time when writers, artists and film makers were just starting to think about the form, meaning and social, political and economic consequences of everyday computing. It’s the nascent era of cyberpunk - William Gibson’s Neuromancer was published in 1984 - and Tron is Disney’s addition to the emerging genre - slightly dystopian but with a Disney ending where the people triumph and get their just rewards.

And like cyberpunk, Tron opened up windows through which to explore a series of Cartesian dualisms that new, networked computing seemed to trouble: nature/technology; fixed/fluid; embodied/disembodied; real/virtual; public/private, as well as explore notions of artificial intelligence and power within new technological landscapes.

Somewhat oddly, however, the world of 1s and 0s - inside the machine - is very Cartesian - built of Euclidean geometry and having the same spatial qualities as the geographic world - there are x, y, z coordinates, there is gravity, there is scale, there is distance (which cannot be jumped), there is linear time, there is materiality and death, there are distinct power geometries in terms of how the landscape is organized and governed. In fact the gridded world of the mainframe and network mirrors almost precisely the real world (even down to programs mirroring visually their users or creators), and yet it is distinctly separate from it. Throughout the movie there is a very clear division between ‘the world in the machine’ and ‘the real world’, though that starts to dissolve in the end frames as the city turns to neon, perhaps giving some inkling to a new world and era emerging.

This thinking of the virtual in Cartesian terms extends well beyond Tron. Early virtual worlds and game-spaces are distinctly Euclidean in nature and mirror the spatial geometries and social norms of ‘real space’. Even domains that possess no spatial qualities are rendered so through spatialisations.

In our book, Mapping Cyberspace, myself and Martin Dodge created a basic topology of the geometries of material and immaterial attributes in geographic and cyberspace and how they are visually rendered. Maps and spatialisations dominate. Such maps and spatialisations however are almost exclusively Euclidean in nature. The only variations are various forms of site maps such as file structures that used a graphing metaphor. It seems we find it difficult to imagine space other than Euclidean or scaled.

The same kind of spatial imaginings are evident in Keiichi Matsuda’s Augmented City, where the various interfaces are projected into and arranged around body spaces - but how can it be otherwise? After all, these are virtual projections into geographic space. The same is also true of Factory 15’s videos, though they are more playful around notions of space and time, the geometries of form and matter, ideas of travel and the past.

What Matsuda’s augmented reality videos do, unlike Tron, is two things. First, they bring the inside of the machine outside revealing their intermeshing rather than separation. Second, they illustrate the extent to which everyday life and spaces are now infused with software: the existing state of everyware wherein computation is available at any point on the planet - either through networks or embedded into objects; how the systems we engage with are thoroughly coded and the extent to which we are all software workers (in its broad sense, those that engage with software on a regular basis to perform tasks) and our lives shaped by code. And Factory Fifteen work projects everyware forward to envisage new space-time relations, especially with respect to notions of the past (and the effects of life-logging) and of place (and ideas of placelessness through abundant connections).

In Tron, software is in the game arcade and in ENCOM. It has found a foothold in entertainment, business and government. Software workers are relatively small in number. Today, software is deeply and pervasively embedded into the systems and infrastructure of the urban and rural lives and in the management and governance of societies. Software-enabled technologies and services augment and facilitate how we understand and plan places, how we manage services and utilities, and how we live everyday lives. Software provides the core tools underpinning the use of technologies and infrastructures essential for the development of smart cities (smart buildings and environment, intelligent transport and utility systems, dense telematic and informatic infrastructures), is facilitating the generation and analysis of ‘big data’ (enormous, dynamic, interconnected datasets relating to people, objects, interactions, transactions and territories), and providing the tools and services of the knowledge society and economy. It’s not overstating the case to note that across a diverse set of everyday tasks – domestic chores, work, shopping, travelling, communicating, governing and policing – software makes a difference to how social, spatial and economic life takes place. Even systems that at first appear dumb - e.g., water system - software is at work.

In our more recent work, Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life, myself and Martin Dodge examine the present state of everyware. We detail a basic typology of how software is embedded in everyday life: coded objects, coded infrastructures, coded processes, and coded assemblages

coded objects - rely on software to perform as designed, includes objects that can log their own use thus create their own histories

coded infrastructures - that link coded objects together or are controlled/managed by code

coded processes - the transactions and flows of data across coded infrastructure

coded assemblages - where coded objects, infrastructures, processes are bound together into a dense assemblage of inter-related and connected systems (e.g. par excellance is the airport)

These coded entities transduce coded space and code/space - produce particular spatial relations and forms; software is necessary to bring space into being. If the code fails then the space is not produced as intended.

To return to Tron from the present then, it is perhaps worth reflecting on two questions: what would it mean to be ‘in the machine’ when the machine is everyware and becoming inside out? And is there any way past the Cartesian imaginary?

Cover design - Killer Reels

I got loads of great feedback on the potential title for the short story collection I've put together. It was very much appreciated and really helped my thinking and decision making. In the end I decided to go for one that no-one selected or put forward - Killer Reels. I like the double play of the title - binding 'death/movies' on the one hand, and signalling 'great stories' on the other. Also, the stories are all pieces of flash fiction - 700-1500 words each; in Irish music a reel is a quick dance and they are ofter strung together in sets with no pause between them. Killer Reels is a set of interlinked short stories where each story refers back to the previous and gives a taster of the next. Below is the cover as designed by JT Lindroos, which I'm very pleased with. If you're looking for a cover, he's your man. Excellent to work with.

Moving on

After a couple of years with an agent I'm moving on. It's a week since we parted on good terms. It took a fair while to get an agent in the first place, so deciding to part company was a difficult one. In the end, it was time to try something different as what I was submitting was not fitting the 'big commerical thriller' brief and the feedback from publishers was the material was 'too Irish'. To be honest, I'm not interested in writing big commercial thrillers and think Ireland is a fascinating place in which to set stories. I want to write to my ideas rather than to the seemingly narrow, mainstream publisher's perception of the market. I write fiction for enjoyment, not simply profit. I'm not saying I wouldn't mind some success, but I also want to have integrity. Naive? Probably. Anyway, I'm going to have a bit of a think and a re-group and work out how to proceed. I've four novels in the drawer - the third McEvoy novel and three comic crime capers. The first thing I'm doing is releasing a collection of short stories. After that we'll see.

Review of Johnny Porno by Charlie Stella (Stark House, 2010)

It’s 1973 and John Albano is barely scraping by driving for a local car service having lost his union-card construction job after an altercation with the foreman. Albano has a good heart, but has a habit of getting into trouble with his fists. A run in with a corrupt police officer leads to an offer of work from the mob - shuttling porn films to underground cinemas and collecting the takings. It’s less than ideal, but he has an ex-wife and kid to support and he needs the money. His new side-job, however, has placed him in the crosshairs of a converging set of forces: anti-corruption cops seeking to purge their own, the FBI seeking to take down the mob, his ex-wife and her other ex-husband who’d like to get their hands on a weekend of takings, the deranged cop ousted from the force due to the earlier run-in, and a low level mobster feeling threatened by the new guy. Every which way he turns trouble lurks.

Johnny Porno is an ambitious novel, telling a quite complex story from the multiple perspectives of a fairly large cast. That it hangs together without becoming incoherent or the reader getting lost is testament to Stella’s skill as a writer. And whilst relatively slow at the start, as various characters and subplots are set in place, the story gently and insistently tugs the reader along. By the end, it is cantering having turned into a real page-turner. Interestingly, nearly every single scene could be published as a standalone piece of flash fiction. Whilst the plotting is very good, creating a believable story and recreating the sense of place and social relations of 1973 New York, where the novel excels is with respect to characterization and the various social interactions. All of Stella’s characters are fully realised with clearly defined personalities, traits, and motivations. Few are pleasant company, but all are vividly portrayed with a fine eye for social realism. How they interact is very well done, especially the dialogue which is excellent: reading the conversations feels as if you’re eavesdropping. There are a number of references to George V Higgins in the book and Stella is a worthy successor. In short, Johnny Porno was an engrossing read.