comics and the reading habit

For a while now, I have had to boostrap my reading habit. Short stories have usually sufficed in the past. But I might have hit a new low when I reached out for a stack of unread graphic novels this time. This isn't to reflect my view about comics and graphic novels. Quite the contrary. They are a bit easier on me as a reader. I can cheat with a readymade visualisation of ideas instead of trying to do that in my head while reading the words in a short story or a novel. Of course there are many exceptions. Luckily, my stack wasn't biased in favour of exceptions.

I started off with the rather interesting compilation Knight and Squire: For Six, a limited series from writer Paul Cornell with some great art by Jimmy Broxton. This explores the world of Cyril Sheldrake/Knight ("Batman in England!") and his sidekick Beryl Hutchison/Squire. The British atmosphere is a refreshing shift from the darkness of Gotham (although the darkness does survive, balanced by glib takes) and there are generous doses of Cockney slang (none of which is really meant for young eyes and ears) and to top it all, there is the not-unexpected welcome reference to Monty Python.

Next up in the stack came the only example of the exception I wrote about earlier. It was Kissing Mister Quimper, the sixth volume in the Invisibles series. Grant Morrison is clearly on a trip. The work is loaded with references, many of which I am sure I missed; it's also quite graphic; there's a reference to a real-life celebrity that has been redacted by the publishers (a little bit of Googling will tell you what that was). The volume succeeded in leaving me confused. And a tad unsettled. Given that it has been more than 10 years since I read Volume I in the series, I have to wait till I -- if ever -- read all the volumes in a reasonable span of time, before I decide if the point of the series is to send the mind down tunnels where no mind has gone before.

The next item was something from more familiar territory. Tarnished Angel, the fourth collection in Kurt Busiek's excellent series Astro City. Busiek continues to make impressive exploration of the idea of regular life in a world filled with super heroes (and super villains). Good art from Brent Anderson and lovely covers from Alex Ross.

The final item in the stack was a great way to finish off my boostrapping. Neil Gaiman's The Books of Magic. Just like the Sandman series, there's a load of great writing balanced by the style of a different artist in each entry in the collection. And there are appearances from several familiar characters from the DC Comics Universe, including Gaiman's own creations and interpretations for the Sandman series. It all comes through cohesively instead of feeling like a pencil holder of creative flourishes.

After all this, I found myself adequately invested (a fancy way of saying "past the introduction and well into chapter one") in my first Elmore Leonard novel after all these years. It's called The Hunted and it's part of a collection called Dutch Treat. Not a bad way to rejuvenate the reading habit. All I have to do now is keep the flame burning. Otherwise, I'll have to hope I get lucky in the comics section of the local used book store for another kickstarter.

exposition done nicely

After finding bearable exposition with Michael Connelly and being disappointed at finding Dan Brownian exposition in Michael Crichton's earlier books, I was relieved to find a nice sample of exposition in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon:

(Now, standing there waiting to have his passport stamped, Randy can see it clearly. For once he doesn't mind the wait. He gets in a lane next to the OCW lane and studies them. They are Epiphyte Corp.'s market. Mostly young women, many of them fashionably dressed, but still with a kind of Catholic boarding-school demureness. Exhausted from long flights, tired of the wait, they slump, then suddenly straighten up and elevate their fine chins, as if an invisible nun were making her way up the line whacking their manicured knuckles with a ruler.)

But seventy-two hours ago he hadn't really understood what Avi meant by lanes, so he just said, "Yeah, I've seen the lane thing."

"At Manila, they have a whole lane just for returning OCWs!"

"OCWs?"

"Overseas Contract Workers. Filipinos working abroad--because the economy of the Philippines is so lame. [...]

See how he uses a flashback at the right place?

There's more than just good exposition to relish in this book and it's time I turned a few more pages. So much for all the regular reading material awaiting my attention.

miscellaneous thoughts

despair is an anagram of diapers. I am sure we are supposed to learn something from that but I don't know what.

The Ninth Configuration and Legion convince me that William Peter Blatty has a way with dialogue, surrealism and plotting. All I need to do now is find a copy of the film adaptation of the former book. He did a good job directing The Exorcist III (adapted from Legion).

The blurb on the back cover of Ramsey Campbell's Obsession is terribly misleading. You would think this was going to be an extended take on The Monkey's Paw or a thinner elder cousin to Stephen King's It. Mercifully, it's neither. This is a rather simple psychological tale that works quite well even if you discount a supernatural presence completely.

Another pick from my pile of random acquisitions from library sales is Headhunter, a book credited to Michael Slade, a pseudonym for three trial lawyers in Vancouver (it is now used, evidently, by just one of them and his daughter). The novel chugs along with three narrative threads set in three different times. It employs additional devices (like switching the standard third-person narrative to a first-person narrative that misleads you with its purpose) to good effect to elevate the standard serial killer piece to something more rewarding.

Love Kills by Dan Greenburg is another example of a novel that makes the standard serial killer piece interesting with narrative devices. Right from the first chapter till the end, this novel goes back and forth in time with each successive chapter and switches focus (chapters told with the hunters as the protagonists mixed with chapters from the point of view of the killer). Also tossed in for good measure are the occasional police report and generous doses of humour.

stephen king liked munson's book and that worked for me

I stood before my shelf of paperbacks wondering which one to read next and finally decided to try Ronald Munson's Fan Mail only because its dark cover had nothing else but the title and the author's name in red and a glowing blurb from Stephen King (A fantastically crafty nail-biter in the Ira Levin tradition. I loved it!) instead of a tantalising drawing or sketch.

And I found it hard to find good places in the narrative to put the book down while life and sleep took over.

This doesn't mean that I had discovered a rich trove of literary achievement. It just means that it was the proverbial page-turner for me. For good reasons (more about that below).

This also doesn't mean that an endorsement from Stephen King is a guarantee of any kind that you will like the book (although in this case, it did for me).

The story of a beautiful TV anchorwoman who is the object of the obsessive creepy attentions of a secret admirer on the deranged side of the fence called "The Watcher." It is told entirely using emails, faxes, messages left on answering machines and transcripts of recorded conversations. I've had mixed results with such a device (worked for me with The Anderson Tapes and didn't with Death of a Politician). This alone can make this book seem unfilmable (something that has happened with an Ira Levin work before). Although Sidney Lumet managed to do well with The Anderson Tapes, a similar exercise with Munson's book would require a significant departure in material and setting. A heaping bowl of To Die For and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind along with generous doses of John Waters might work, but it still feels too stale. Perhaps some David Lynch and David Fincher for good measure. Oh! And perhaps Oliver Stone in his Natural Born Killers mood.

But I digress.

Not entirely.

Just like in Condon's book, you find yourself laughing at and with some of the characters in the book. Unlike Condon's book, though, the turning of pages ends appropriately. There's almost no fat in the book.

And of course, no flights of expository fancy. What a relief.

Back to the bookshelf now to find the next rabbit. Thank you so much, Mr. King.

did crichton have a dan brown phase?

I just finished reading a copy of The Terminal Man, Michael Crichton's second novel after doing really well with The Andromeda Strain. There's woefully little to the plot and the bulk of the book is dedicated to exposition showing off all the research in the areas of mind control, psychomotor epilepsy, police reports (there's even a recreation of a report for a death in the book), advances in cutting-edge medical research (call it "bleeding edge" if you will) and the like.

And I thought of Dan Brown.

And then I remembered writing that I had preferred Crichton over Brown for doing a far better job at exposition than Mr. Brown ever could.

And yet, here I was looking at a novel that could well have been written by Dan Brown, except that the actual narrative was written crisply -- had Mr. Brown written this novel, it would have been thicker with some more exposition and with more pages devoted to the narrative recovering after an ambitious dive into the sea of exposition.

And now some questions float through my head.

Did Michael Crichton have a Dan Brown phase?

Does Dan Brown represent a stage in the evolution of a commercial writer of pulp thrillers?

Does Michael Crichton represent a later stage in this evolution?

Will Dan Brown evolve into Michael Crichton?

Will Dan Brown ever evolve?

connelly tosses in another cinematic reference

But without challenging the temporal dimension. In the latest Mickey Haller novel The Fifth Witness, Connelly tosses another nod of appreciation to Matthew McConaughey's fine performance as Mickey Haller in the very watchable adaptation of The Lincoln Lawyer, the first Mickey Haller book. Connelly had been very pleased with the adaptation and McConaughey's performance so this reference is no surprise. It also happens to be very current -- the film was released in March 2011 and the book was released the following month. Connelly's note of appreciation was dated November 12, 2010.

(page 115 of the hardbound edition) "One more thing," the producer said. "I was thinking of going to Matthew McConaughey with this. He'd be excellent. But who do youthink could play you?"
I [Mickey Haller] smiled at him and reached for the door handle.
"You're looking at him, Clegg."
I pulled the door closed and through the smoked glass watched the confusion spread on his face.

manneys memories

Reading an eloquent blog post from JR is how I find out that one of the defining bookstores of my life in Pune is closing down. After all these years of standing strong while chains sprung up around it. While Adidas stomped over Naaz. While Planet M came, conquered and collapsed. While Landmark appeared and crossed the street. While Crosswords sprouted and withered across the city. I am sure more happened, but all this is what I remember from my visits back to the city. The distance made a regular yet infrequent relationship with Manneys even more thin-strung.

The last time I was there (a few months ago), I still enjoyed browsing the sections generous in their selection; I am sure I would have found some gems in stacks of the discounted books. I had, however, found succour in the marvellous library sales here in the US and there was no way any bookstore back home was going to beat a box of hardbacks for $10. I still enjoyed digging through the large section devoted to Indian fiction in the English language, only because this was one of the few bookstores that did not think Shobha Dé defined the section. I still enjoyed browsing through the offerings in the entertainment section. I didn't have to reach up or squat anymore. I had grown taller over the years. The shelves also did not have as much dust as memory told me they did years ago. This was the store that I had bought my cherished copy of Hitchcock, the collection of interviews of the master by Francois Truffaut. A gift coupon (won either in a competition of some kind or in one of the games of general proficiency in school) helped, because it was an imported edition (no Eastern Economy Edition for such things).

Jaunts to various raddii stores also yielded gems of different kinds, but Manneys was one the places that I liked going if I wanted a fresh edition and not a used book.

Things have changed so much since then. Flipkart has started changing the way things work and I had found myself using Flipkart more during my last visit and refraining from buying things on impulse from Manneys (or from Crossword or Landmark, for that matter, except for a few items languishing unfairly in on a discount table). All the other chains got my attention only for the music and the movies. With the kind of product that companies like Moser Baer and the like are churning out, however, it seems more prudent and unfortunate to go seek uploaded rips and spend the money at special film festivals or second-run theatres.

But I digress.

With Manneys shutting down, we are left with just a few bastions of yore. The International Book Service near Sambhaji Bridge is one of them. Once again, it's all about the memories. For a generation that is more used to the chains and the air-conditioned inclusion of toys, music, movies and a host of other things that really have nothing to do with books, neither Manneys nor TIBS will have much to offer. The bibliophile, on the other hand, will once again find out what it means to be in a minority. You might just find yourself joining the crowd.

Thank you Mr. Mani for something that was an important part of growing up in Pune.

a nitpicking new year to you too: a review reviewed

Stephen King's fiction enjoys a large readership not just in the US but abroad and especially India. His forays have primarily been in horror and Indians love horror. He also manages to take interesting ideas, observations and characters and explore them in a rather simple welcoming style. Despite almost always working with a few genres, he manages to churn out books that are notches above the average bestseller.

Unfortunately, reviews of genre fiction in India still have miles to go before they reap. There are the unfortunately few reviews like this and then there are people who don't understand the works of Stephen King and foolishly dare to review them. It seems fit to begin my new year in this neighbourhood by ranting about a piece of fluff that, when all things are considered at Judgement Day, will be quite inconsequential. Yet, it is to griping about people and things that don't even deserve a modicum of attention that I am destined to devote my time.

The exhibit for the occasion is a review of Stephen King's recent novel 11/22/63 in the Deccan Herald by someone named Payel Dutta Chowdhury. If this public LinkedIn profile is the right one, the reviewer is a professor at Garden City College in Bangalore and also the head of the English department. This also makes a lot of what follows even more unpleasant. This is someone who should have known better.

We are off to a flying crash with the opening

Stephen King's latest magnum opus, 11/22/63, promises to be a rare juxtaposition of facts, fiction and much more.

The use of magnus opus is troubling. Does the reviewer wish to imply that King has been churning out great works for a while? There is no doubting that this is a work on a larger scale than perhaps anything that King has tried before, but have there been others?

Does anyone know any of the other rare juxtapositions of facts, fiction and much more? (I know only one: the coefficient of the linear).

The second sentence darkens the lentils even further

A master of the science-fiction genre, King's recent novel blends historical fiction and real life events.

Let's pick the grammatical nit first. Any editor worth his or her salary would have fixed this sentence. As it stands now, A master of the science-fiction genre refers not to King (as it should have) but to his recent novel. Let's now look at a problem that's arguably a more important one. I wonder if anyone familiar with Stephen King's ouevre would call him a master of the science fiction genre. It's a perfunctory label that only suggests that the writer's knowledge of King's work might be limited to a subset comprising either his works like The Gunslinger and Firestarter or absolutely nothing at all.

What follows next is a complete synopsis in précis, which reduces King's novel to basic elements of the plot, stripped of everything that actually made the novel interesting. The synopsis also pays tribute to Taran Adarsh in its completeness. It also constitutes the majority of this review. That should tell you that if you were looking for an interesting examination of the novel, if you were looking for reasons to read this novel (or not), if you were looking for a useful point of view, this is the wrong county to be in. Unless a grammatically incomplete line like Definitely, an interesting and insightful read is enough for you (in which case, just scroll down to the bottom of the page, read that line and get on with your life). The synopsis owes a lot to the Wikipedia page for the book (search for "recently-divorced high school English teacher"), King's reason for abandoning the idea in 1971 and other bits about the background of the novel (search for "price of a pint of root beer").

This brings us to the rest of the bits in the review, which, thanks to that very popular search engine called Google, were clearly swiped without attribution from elsewhere. A few bits come from Janet Maslin's review in the New York Times: the opening (which means that I must redirect my criticism above to Ms. Maslin), the premise (search for "revisit and even revise"), the description of the book's cover (search for "happy and unscathed").

With all this plagiarism, one wonders why the number of pages of the novel according to this novel (850) is different from the actual number of pages (849; 842 pages for the actual novel starting from chapter 1 and 7 pages for King's afterword). When both Ms. Maslin and the Wikpedia page agree that 849 is the right number, why would someone invent a different number? If you add the extra pages between the hard front and back and subtract the two protective thicker sheets, you get 864, which matches the number listed on the book's official site. Since no official paperback edition appears to have been released yet, the plot, as they say, only thickens.

The seemingly original contributions only offer more evidence that the amateur writings on Rediff are not alone; consider this:

King wants to remind his readers that the past does not want to be changed and in order to reaffirm his views, he examines the "butterfly effect" — a phenomenon whereby a small change at one place in a complex system can have large effects elsewhere.

Something tells me that King's novel is likely to lose a few readers thanks to this review. I only hope that the book reviews in the Deccan Herald do not have a large bunch of faithful readers.

Meanwhile, let us mourn the fact that someone got paid for this sorry piece of plagiaristic piffle.

PS: I wish someone from the New York Times would fix the date in the title of Ms. Maslin's review; the date (and the title of the book) is 11/22/63 and not 11/23/63.

revisiting wallace

After I had tried to catch up with the works of Sidney Sheldon and Robin Cook, it was inevitable for my attention to turn to Irving Wallace, another name familiar to fans of Sheldon, Cook, Ludlum, Cussler and Clancy. Wallace, if you didn't know it already, was responsible for encouraging Sidney Sheldon to publish his first novel The Naked Face. This might explain why s*x features a lot in the works of both writers. Research was more important to Irving Wallace than to Sheldon and he made sure his books were full of its fruits (consider books like The Seven Minutes and The Word); the experience for me as a reader was hardly as unpleasant as it was when I was unfortunate enough to read the works of Dan Brown, another purveyor of research.

But I digress. I just finished reading an old hardbound copy of The R Document that I had picked up at a book sale organised by the public library. I was surprised at how fast I had finished it, but I was also relieved that it was not as painful as The Pigeon Project. The latter also tried to be a travelogue of Venice while we follow Tim Jordan in his attempt to save the formula for yet another elixir for youth. The biggest problem with the novel is that it isn't hard to predict the end and once you have done that all the suspenseful goings-on are just not suspenseful anymore.

The R Document, on the other hand, is a conventional thriller with the appropriate twist and surprise tossed in ever so often to season the proceedings. The novel follows Christopher Collins, the Attorney General of the United States, as he races against time to find out more about a mysterious "R Document" that seems to be a rather nasty side of the 35th amendment (which is a new amendment to the Constitution that allows the powers-that-be to suspend the Bill of Rights during times of national emergency). Once again, you can predict how this is all going to end. But this time, Wallace does not try to do more than deliver a standard thriller while showing off his research on politics and the constitution of the United States. There is no travelogue. There is no sequitur into unrelated sub-plots. This is the stuff of efficient black and white low-budget thrillers (and in the hands of a competent journeyman that black and white thriller would have been a far better piece of art than this piece of pulp). Since this is fiction for the masses, it would be unfair to expect complex characters or a genuine sense of intrigue and dread. This novel was written 45 years ago, but could easily have been written today about the Patriot Act of 2001. That topical stroke of luck makes The R Document more memorable (is that too strong a word?) than The Pigeon Project.

bearable exposition

I get the feeling that all writers churning out candidates for the mainstream bestseller lists have to deal with exposition a lot more often than writers of works that are less mainstream. Some of these writers turn this devil around and decide to take the opportunity to show off all the research they have done (Crichton did this well; Dan Brown does not).

Intermission: Can you imagine Anthony Burgess writing A Clockwork Orange in the style of Dan Brown? The book would have been thicker and loaded with interleaved explanations of nadsat and descriptions of the prison, its architecture, its history and who knows what else. A title like Fruits and Mechanics would have topped this cake of futility.

I'm on a Michael Connelly buffet right now and the 8 books I have read have introduced me to exposition of various flavours and of varying levels of subtlety (or the complete lack of it, in some cases), but his exposition never strays beyond the realm of the police procedural and the court room. This, I think, is a good thing. It would have been unbearable to wade through a mini-treatise on the architecture of the courthouse just as we were about to begin an interesting trail.

Some of the books are written in the first person. This allows the writer to be more liberal in the exposition, because, after all, this is supposed to be a man or woman telling you a story. The more details you get, the better. A lot of exposition that might otherwise stick out like a sore elephant in a regular third-person narrative goes down easier when Jack McAvoy or Mickey Haller is writing to you, dear reader.

I tend to prefer little to no exposition (which is why I admire the bold stroke of the glossary in Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games: you read the tale with its natural rhythms and later use the glossary to understand the vernacular), but I can understand the need for it in mainstream fiction. Besides, fitting it into the narrative without losing the reader is not trivial. Given this, I liked the few examples from the 8 books I had read so far, where the exposition was adroitly placed just like a shot/reverse shot scene where the cutting didn't bother you. Here's an example from The Brass Verdict (I have taken the liberty of marking the relevant sections):

"Two arrests. ADW in 'ninety-seven and conspiracy to commit fraud in 'ninety-nine. No convictions but that is all I know for right now. When the court opens I can get more if you want."
I wanted to know more, especially about how arrests for fraud and assault with a deadly weapon could result in no convictions, but if Cisco pulled records on the case, then he'd have to show ID and that would leave a trail.

send the BSIFA back in time

Although Edward X Delaney was perhaps his most famous creation, Lawrence Sanders also created another interesting detective called Timothy Cone, an ex-Marine working as an investigator for Haldering and Company, a Wall Street firm specialising in corporate intelligence (in plain English: he investigates deals and mergers that reek of foul play). He is, needless to say, brilliant; he is also rather eccentric (otherwise he probably wouldn't be an interesting character). The tales of Cone are short, all written in the simple present tense (for creative reasons unknown) and collected in two volumes, The Timothy Files and Timothy's Game. Their lasting value, however, lies not in the plots and the twists (a lot of which are just surprises -- only Cone really can really put the pieces together), but in the scenes of intimacy between him and his boss Samantha Whatley (yes, they are having an affair unbeknownst -- they hope -- to the other people in the office). I was not surprised that Sanders valued such scenes, since he had devoted entire novels to desire, lust and coupling (you can't go wrong with titles like The Seduction of Peter S and The Passion of Molly T). What I was not prepared for was that his descriptions of the moments between Cone and Whatley seem to almost parody themselves with poetic flourishes, pithy phrases and often laughably inane choices of words. Allow me to present a sample from the works collected in The Timothy Files:

but they cannot deny their bodies' appetites, and when their hormones take over, they go berserk.

they're two stick figures, all bony knobs and hard muscle. their mating is a furious battle, not against each other so much as the emptiness and lunacy of their lives. when they strain, it is not to punish but to break out into another world. oh, look at the meadows and the daffodils! the lawn they seek is bliss.

it's such a sweaty wrestle, not quite hysterical but frantic enough. and
when they're done, staring at each other with dulled eyes, reality comes
seeping back, the real world takes over again. but something remains ...

they're like two rough hawsers, braided, rasping against each other and welcoming the scratch. in no way are they gentle or tender, because they are both hard, hurt people, wanting to get out. and this is the only way they know.

so there are no proclamations of love or undying passion. instead there is is a gritty intenseness, both of them serious and hoping. their coupling is a partnership of two bankrupts, as if all their liabilities combined might show up in black ink and make them wealthy.

they really do get out with each other, as attuned as a duo of violinists, howing and scraping in unison and losing themselves in mutual harmonies. carried away and lost with closed eyes and seraphic smiles, loving life and its surprises.

finally, ignited again, they come together in a different mood: all murmurings and soft twistings. they couple in a drugged tempo, slow and lazy, as if this night might last forever.
later, drowsy and satiated, they lie entwined, peering at each other with dazed eyes. they say nothing of what has happened, not wanting the moment to slip away -- as it inevitably does.

BSIFA was a reference to this

a reference in time

I often start reading books by authors after watching films based on them. Sometimes it takes just one film. This was the case with Tell No One that got me started on Harlan Coben or the case with The First Deadly Sin, which sent me off on a Lawrence Sanders trip.

With Michael Connelly it took two films years apart. I caught Blood Work, simply because it was a Clint Eastwood film. Years later (a few weeks ago, to be precise), The Lincoln Lawyer provided an example of competent handling of familiar tropes (see also: Vacancy). A visit to the library yielded my first Michael Connelly book, Angels Flight. The absence of an almost certain apostrophe in the title may be a coincidental nod to a similar flourish in Finnegans Wake. Although this was part of a series of books featuring Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch (no relation to but named for the Dutch painter with the same name), it worked well as a work in itself. The end of page 76 of the hardbound edition yielded an interesting surprise:

Next to the stairs a lighted bus stop had been cut into the steep hill. There was a fibreglass sunshade over a double-length bench. The side partitions were used to advertise films. On the one Bosch could see there was an ad for an Eastwood picture called Blood Work. The movie was based on a true story about a former FBI agent Bosch was acquainted with.

Things get clearer on page 78:

The bus stop hadn't been used. Rider came up next to him and followed his gaze.

"Hey, did you know Terry McCaleb over at the bureau?" she asked.
"Yeah, we worked a case once. Why, you know him?"
"Not really. But I've seen him on TV. He doesn't look like Clint Eastwood, if you ask me."
"Yeah, not really."

This was a reference that proved very interesting, not just because it linked my first Connelly book to the first film that I had seen based on his work, but also because the reference seems to break the rules of time: Angels Flight was published in 1999 and Blood Work was released in 2002 (the book was published in 1998). I know what you're thinking -- did Connelly do to this book what George Lucas did to the Star Wars trilogy years later? He probably did not.

A more reasonable explanation would be that Eastwood had optioned the book, but that the actual filming started late and consequently the film hit the marquee in 2002. An interview hosted at the Barnes and Noble page for the book suggests that this is indeed what had transpired:

Jim Charter from Ames, IA: Hi, Michael. I just finished ANGELS FLIGHT and loved it, of course. I have to know, though, if you were just playing with us, or is Clint Eastwood really going to make BLOOD WORK?

Michael Connelly: Your guess is as good as mine. Eastwood optioned the story last year and hired an Academy Award-winning screenwriter to adapt it. That is where it stands right now. In that respect the mention in ANGELS FLIGHT is fantasy

There you go.

hitchgopal varma?

In chapter three of his book Spellbound by Beauty, Donald Spoto writes:

Hitch could certainly take credit for his visual inventiveness, and for his brilliance in adding to a script precisely the right images, the proper tone and atmosphere. But screenwriters from [Charles] Bennett in the 1930s to Ben Hecht in the 1940s, Samuel Taylor and Ernest Lehman in the 1950s and Evan Hunter in the 1960s all quickly realised that this director's gift was not for writing dialogue but for minimising it and allowing action and reaction, gaze and glance, to tell stories. Perhaps because he wanted to write the script entirely on his own but could not, he often resented his writers, who quickly knew not to expect gratifying compliments.

As I read this passage, I found myself thinking about a similar problem with Ram Gopal Varma, whose Factory promised to offer cinephiles different stories interpreted without the trappings of mainstream convention, with interesting technique and in different creative voices. Unfortunately, if one looked at just his jaunt in Bollywood, one noticed that his writers (who even turned director under his wing) were soon fleeing the coop and trying to make hay elsewhere. The reasons may have been myriad and most of them have always acknowledged the value of their formative time with RGV. But the steady departure of competence has left RGV and his Factory hollow. Without decent writers, the quality of his recent output has been on the decline. Long gone are the likes of Saurabh Shukla, Anurag Kashyap, Sriram Raghavan, Shimit Amin, Prawaal Raman and Manish Gupta.

Spellbound by Beauty is Donald Spoto's third book on the life and work of Alfred Hitchcock. It is also likely his most controversial, because it describes the often "difficult and even painful circumstances" under which the leading ladies in his films had to work. I own a copy of (and highly recommend) The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock, the second book in the series.

pithy words in the style of a bestseller

In the third part of The Tenth Commandment by Lawrence Sanders, our protagonist Joshua Biggs has just participated in a ploy to get one guilty party to spill the refried beans on the other (arguably more guilty) and begins to wonder about justice and how it does not always seem absolute:

I should have been exultant but I wasn't. It was the morality of what I had done that was bothering me. All that chicanery and deceit. I would have committed almost any sin to demolish [primary guilty party], but conniving in the escape of [guilty party that was the object of the ploy] from justice was more than I had bargained for. And I had connived. I had worked almost as hard as [police office] to convince [guilty party that was the object of the ploy] to betray [primary guilty party]. It had to be done. But as [police officer] had said, [guilty party that was the object of the ploy] was going to walk. An accomplice to murder. Was that fair? Was that justice?
I realised I didn't really know what "justice" meant. It was not an absolute. It was not a colour, a mineral, a species. It was a human concept (what do animals know of justice?) and subject to all the vagaries and contradictions of any human hope. How can you define justice? It seemed to me that it was constant compromise, molded by circumstance.
I would make a terrible judge.

Edward X Delaney managed to find his own way of dealing with this dilemma, but Sanders unfortunately never wrote another novel featuring Joshua Biggs, so we'll never know what Mr. Biggs did.

the deadly sins of lawrence sanders

Ever since I first watched David Fincher's Se7en and read about the Deadly Sins series by Lawrence Sanders, I had meant to try reading them. Years later, I caught the cinematic adaptation of The First Deadly Sin starring Frank Sinatra and mourned the lack of a DVD release that was faithful to the film's original aspect ratio. It took me another two years to finally settle down to read one of the books in the series. Since I had already caught the cinematic adaptation of the first edition, I would have found it hard to start at the beginning (Edward X. Delaney had already appeared in The Anderson Tapes, but that book had nothing to do with the deadly sins). I started instead with the last book in the series The Fourth Deadly Sin. The book told me a lot about Edward X. Delaney's weakness for sandwiches (Sanders, like Hitchcock in Frenzy, appreciates how well murder and food go together) and what a good role model he would have been for software development teams. I liked the details about the procedural often mundane aspects of the investigation of a murder and the rather uncomplicated revelation of the murderer and the motivation for the crime. Although I was not completely impressed, I saw enough to make me want to try another entry in the series.

I decided to go back to the beginning and read The First Deadly Sin and was pleasantly surprised. Lawrence Sanders was on a creative roll with this book. The book opened with a section dedicated to Daniel Blank, the serial killer whom Delaney is forced to pursue and begins to explore his character. We do not see a murder until a few chapters later. Sanders then switches to a section dedicated to Delaney and continues moving between Blank and Delaney as circumstances and the investigation bring them closer to each other. There are only hints of Delaney's weakness for sandwiches, unlike the remaining books in the series that devote time and pages to the different sandwiches he makes for himself. The ending of the book is unlike that of the movie (which, for me, was tonally more appropriate) and, in addition to offering geographical closure (we begin and end the book at Devil's Needle with Blank) also offers food for thought if you are looking for allegories. The police procedural got its due but Sanders also found time and space to tell us more about both Daniel Blank and Edward X. Delaney. Cop and Killer often seem like "doubles" and Delaney needs to think like Blank in order to try and understand him and his killings.

I turned my attention to The Second Deadly Sin and began to see patterns, some of which made me uneasy. I started getting the feeling that Sanders either lost the creative muse that fuelled The First Deadly Sin or had managed to pick a leaf from the assembly-line writing of Sidney Sheldon. The book opened with a murder, just like The Fourth Deadly Sin and, again just like the The Fourth Deadly Sin,it was clearly committed by someone whom the victim knew well. Everything else until the revelation of the killer's identity is an engaging exploration of Delaney, his familiar battle with departmental politics, his almost secretarial approach to detective work and more sandwiches. The book was a satisfying page-turner, but offered nothing else, unlike its predecessor.

I just finished The Third Deadly Sin yesterday and the feeling that Sanders had run out of gas got even stronger. The book opens like The First Deadly Sin by introducing us to the killer, but Sanders does not seem interested any longer in giving Zoe Koehler as much room as he did Daniel Blank. The first chapter ends with a murder just like the second and fourth editions in the series. The second chapter opens with Edward X. Delaney and his sandwiches and also makes this book structurally similar to The First Deadly Sin as we switch between Zoe Koehler and Delaney's investigation. Once again, we see Delaney dealing with the idea of the killer being a woman, but he does not seem as interested in understanding her as he was when trying to track Daniel Blank down. Sanders tries something different by having Delaney and his wife argue about women's liberation -- it doesn't help that the killer, who suffers from the rare Addison's disease, embarks upon these killings when she deals with the crimson curse. It's a pity that he does not choose to explore the idea of blood-letting and the nosebleed in Australia. Sanders seems to have instead dedicated his time to churning out a bestseller. As things move to a conclusion, the writing gets sloppy. We get expository dates and times that insult our intelligence. The novel also ends with geographical closure (Zoe's apartment) in tribute to the first book, but in a more tonally sound fashion.

After having read all four, I can see why Sanders never got around to writing any more. I would like to think that he just never got an idea that would justify an entire book offering something more than the now-familiar tropes (Delaney getting pulled out of retirement, Delaney's sandwiches, Delaney's notions of crime and punishment -- the Dostoyevskyian angle appeared in the first book and never came up again). If I had to rank the books starting with the one I liked most and ending with the one I liked the least, I'd choose The First Deadly Sin to head the list, followed by The Third Deadly Sin (I have a weakness for serial killers and books where I don't have to sit and wait for a "grand revelation"), The Second Deadly Sin and The Fourth Deadly Sin (being a weak shadow of the second book).

smart little 555

I've just started reading The Third Deadly Sin by Lawrence Sanders, the last (I had started with The Fourth Deadly Sin, returned to The First Deadly Sin and wrapped up The Second Deadly Sin two days ago) and page 15 had an interesting little nugget:

Homicide at the Grand Park on February 15th. Victim of stabbing: George T. Puller, 54, white male, of Denver, Colo. Anyone with information relating to this crime please contact Detective Sergeant Abner Boone, KL-5-8604

KL-5 is nothing by 555, that favourite exchange of movies and TV shows (and books, as this exhibit reveals).

And now, back to familiar tropes and Delaney's sandwiches.

when wisecracks collide

I was watching Taken once again and there was a point in the film where Liam Neeson meets an old collaborator in France and utters one of many memorable lines I am retired, not dead.

Some time later, I was back to reading The Second Deadly Sin by Lawrence Sanders. Edward X. Delaney has struck a conversation with bartender Harry Schwartz, who has recognised him from when he was Chief of Precinct 251. As the content flows from page 12 to page 13, Schwartz has asked Delaney what he has been up to, since he is no longer with the force:

"This and that," [Delaney] said vaguely. "Trying to keep busy."
The bartender spread his hands wide.
"What else?" he said. "Just because you're retired don't mean you're dead. Right?"

Go figure.

cobb county's evil sense of humour

National Library Week starts on April 10. This makes the timing of the shocking blow to the Cobb County Library System (CCPL) proposed in the budget for the County of Cobb in Georgia rather unfortunate. In brief: 13 of the 17 CCPL branches will be shut down indefinitely. If you are a resident of Cobb County and care about the library system, please consider getting the word out, joining the community set up on Facebook, sending an email supporting the libraries to BudgetComments@cobbcounty.org or even attending the Cobb County Board of Commissioners Meeting on Tuesday, April 12, 2011 at 9 a.m. in the BOC Room, 2nd Floor, 100 Cherokee St., Marietta. You can even send an email to the commissioner of your district; the email addresses are available on this page hosted by the Save Cobb Libraries community on Facebook.

PS: For what it's worth, you're living in a county that (a) deems it financially sound to add faux brick linings on Akers Mill Road (b) proposes trimming firefighting and emergency services (c) runs a crippled limited bus service that does not run on Sunday (and also faces cuts for the 2011 budget).

april 12, 2011: The BOC meeting ended today morning and the libraries will stay. You could look at this as a victory for all those patrons of the libraries, who made their support known or wonder if the governing entities of the county were merely emulating what their cousins on Capitol Hill did last week with the scare of a government shutdown. In any event, venture forth to your friendly neighbourhood library and greet the relieved staff with your biggest smile and check out a few books, a movie or two or just flip through the newspapers or magazines. Don't forget, it's National Library Week.

the king has not left the building

I love the cover of Full Dark, No Stars. I also like how it assures me that Mr. Stephen King has not cast off his writing cape and settled down into a chair to watch the sunset. A diet of Harlan Ellison seems to have eroded my ability to welcome and relish a large novel. I seem to prefer starting off with a few short stories before progressing to novellas. This might explain why Lisey's Story still stands unread on my bookshelf. This was despite the fact that Cell and Duma Key went back to the library shelves after I had read and enjoyed them, as did Under the Dome. Then again, Just after Sunset didn't work that well for me. It was as uneven as King's previous collections, but Full Dark, No Stars has changed all that. Perhaps this is because novellas seem to strike a good balance between short stories and novels. The four stories in this compilation contain all the elements familiar to fans of King's work -- 1922 mixes times of depression with an ode to Bonnie and Clyde and serves it up with elements from Poe. The story is narrated by Wilfred James, who confesses to and describes the murder of his wife. The narrative isn't as feverish as that of The Tell-Tale Heart and when the story is done, you may wonder if Mr. James was lying.

I had saved this novella for the end, but it was not a great way for me to end the collection. I should have tackled this right after my first pick, Fair Extension, where King explores the familiar Faustian bargain. Once Dave Streeter has signed the dotted line with George Elvid (hint: shuffle the letters in the last name), a cousin of Leland Gaunt, no doubt, King describes the unfolding of events like a long news story. It reminded me of Frederick Forsyth's The Art of the Matter.

Big Driver is the story of a woman who pays the price of taking a shortcut and then exacts her revenge. This is the stuff of EC comics with all humour of any kind stripped away. Rape is serious business and King makes sure every smile we crack is with Tess and never at her. The appropriate presence of films like The Last House on the Left and The Brave One is an Eastwoodian touch -- they do not beg to be treated as clever as they would have been in a Tarantino script.

A Good Marriage explores a good idea that I would imagine has been explored before (pointers welcome): imagine that you were the wife of someone like Mr. Brooks. Darcy Anderson discovers her husband's dark secret in a way that a character in a Stephen King story would and then tries to come to terms with it. King was inspired to write this story after the general public refused to accept that Paula Radar, the wife of Dennis Radar, the BTK killer, had been married to him for about thirty years and never knew anything about his evil deeds. The possibility is chilling as is the story.

Each story has a character killing someone (indirectly in Fair Extension) and ends with the character coming to terms with the deed, perhaps even being at peace after experiencing the moral conflict familiar to those who abhor violence. The writing is uncomplicated and boasts the ease, comfort and familiarity that King surely has come to enjoy after all these years. It's time to find a copy at a book sale and fill the spot once I (hopefully) manage to begin Lisey's Story.

reading list for word snobs in the wings: a guest post on tender leaves

My dear friends BVHK and Sudarshan have been kind enough to solicit a guest post from me, wake me out of my lassitude to get it done and finally publish it on the Tender Leaves blog. It's verbal diarrhoea dedicated to some books on the English language and its usage that I have enjoyed reading. You won't find any stuffy academic tomes listed there; only doses of the best medicine to season interesting ways of learning things that seemed so tedious in school.

What is Tender Leaves, you ask? It's an unreasonable question if you're from Pune. I have the public libraries to sate my hunger for the printed word, but you really don't. Look no further. Sign up and start turning 'em pages.