End-of-the-Month Update

I plan on doing a post like this at the end of every month, just to sort of sum up things on various fronts.

WRITING

Between my mother's stroke and some medical problems involving Livia's parents that required me pitching in with a little help, I didn't get as much written this month as I intended. Even so, I only fell short of my goal by about 15 pages, so that's not too bad. I'd say that I'll make it up next month, but that may be difficult since February is a short month. (Blast! I need those extra two or three days!)

READING

These are the books I read in January, minus the one I panned a few posts back. Not being a critic, I can make arbitrary rules like not ripping a living author by name, even when I don't like his or her work.

A MAMMOTH MURDER, Bill Crider
HUNDRED-DOLLAR BABY, Robert B. Parker
JUDGE & JURY, James Patterson and Andrew Gross
BLACK FRIDAY AND SELECTED STORIES, David Goodis
THE CASE OF THE SILENT PARTNER, Erle Stanley Gardner
KILLING FLOOR, Lee Child
THE AVENGER #11: RIVER OF ICE, Kenneth Robeson (Paul Ernst)
GUNS AT GRAY BUTTE, Lewis B. Patten

MOVIES

I saw five movies in January: OUTLAW JUSTICE, THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA, MATERIAL GIRLS, NACHO LIBRE, and INHERIT THE WIND. A nice varied selection.

Inherit the Wind

I remembered watching this movie many years ago and enjoying it, so when I noticed that the local PBS affiliate was running it tonight, I decided to watch it again. I'm happy to report that it holds up quite well.

It's the story of the Scopes Monkey Trial, with Spencer Tracy playing Clarence Darrow, Frederic March playing William Jennings Bryan, and Gene Kelly cast against type as H.L. Mencken. The characters have different names in the movie (and the play it's based on), but it's obvious that's who they all are. The cast is good from the big names all the way down to the character actors and bit parts, although Frederic March does some pretty shameless scenery-chewing. But that's the way his role is written, so you can't really blame him. The movie is rather heavy-handed at times, which you'd expect from a Stanley Kramer production, and often stage-bound, revealing its origins as a play. But the good writing, the crisp black-and-white photography, and the fine job by the actors, especially Tracy and Kelly, all combine to make a very good film. I'm glad I watched it again.

Killing Floor -- Lee Child

I've spent a lot of this week in various doctor's offices and hospitals, dealing with assorted medical crises. The book I carried around with me to read while I was waiting was KILLING FLOOR, the debut novel by Lee Child and also the first novel in his Jack Reacher series. People have been recommending this series to me for several years, the latest being Mary Kelly, one of my NOAH'S RIDE co-authors, so I decided to give it a try.

I wasn't too sure about this book starting out. The style took some getting used to. There are the occasional turns of phrase that sound just a little too British. And the plot seems to be driven by an incredible coincidence.
However . . . boy, the action scenes are good. The style really works once you get used to it. Sure, Jack Reacher is pretty much a superhero, but I'm an old pulp guy, so I don't mind that too much. Every time I thought I had everything figured out, Child threw in another twist. Some of them are rather far-fetched, to be sure. Child makes them seem believable, though.

So, despite some reservations, I liked this book quite a bit, and I'll definitely be reading more of Child's novels.

Karl Edward Wagner Essay

Today I received my author's copies of BLACK PROMETHEUS: A CRITICAL STUDY OF KARL EDWARD WAGNER, a new chapbook published by Gothic Press that includes my essay "Gunslinger From Prussia: The Adrian Becker Stories of Karl Edward Wagner". I'm no expert on Wagner or his work, and I'm certainly not what you'd think of as a scholarly, academic critic. But the Becker stories (there are three of them) are pretty darned good blends of Western, horror, and alternate history, and I enjoyed writing about them. I'm looking forward to reading the other essays in the book.

Plot Complications

I've been working on a house-name Western based on an outline I wrote while I was in Austin for the World Fantasy Convention (scribbled on a hotel notepad, actually). I thought I had worked out a simple but compelling plot that would make for a pretty easy book to write. But once I started working on it, I found myself thinking, "Hey, what if I made this guy the villain instead of this other guy?" No, I decided, that would be too complicated and would take too much setting up. So I kept going. But then I thought, "If I did this and this and this, it would set things up so that the other idea would work after all." Once I decided to go for it, though, I realized I had to set up half a dozen other things. Still, the twist was nice and all the clues I was planting seemed to work, but I was having to go through the book and plant those clues, and it got to the point where I had to write a whole new outline just to keep track of everything I needed to do . . .

I feel like I should stand up and say, "My name is James, and I'm a plotaholic."

Nacho Libre

After my last few movie-related posts I can't have much credibility left as a film critic, so I figured I might as well continue that trend. We watched the DVD of this movie tonight, and while I don't think it's a great film by any stretch of the imagination, I enjoyed it. I get the impression that most people either like Jack Black or can't stand him. I've seen most of his movies and liked them fairly well (although I think he was badly miscast in KING KONG). In this one he plays a cook in a Mexican monastery/orphanage who moonlights as a masked wrestler so he can afford to buy better food for the kids. I don't know if "whimsical and off-beat" or "just plain weird" is a better description of how it all plays out. It's crude and silly a lot of the time and not really laugh out loud funny, but the film's heart is in the right place and the wrestling sequences are pretty effective. If you like Jack Black, NACHO LIBRE is certainly worth watching. If you don't, you'd be wise to avoid it.

The Case of the Silent Partner -- Erle Stanley Gardner

What's a good antidote to a ponderous, over-written book like the one I was talking about in my previous post? How about a Perry Mason novel from 1940, when Mason still wore a fedora, smoked cigarettes, and didn't mind mixing it up with some tough guys if he had to? (Although there's not any real hardboiled action in this one, it does crop up from time to time in the Mason novels from this era.) Not surprisingly, in this book you get a fast pace, an incredibly complex plot, and seldom a wasted word. From the first book, THE CASE OF THE VELVET CLAWS, in 1933 until about the mid-Fifties, the Mason series is consistently entertaining, at least to me.

However, THE CASE OF THE SILENT PARTNER isn't really in the top rank of Perry Mason novels. The motivating action -- the battle for control over a chain of flower shops -- isn't particularly compelling, and Gardner's writing seems a little less crisp than usual. I nearly always get confused when I'm reading a novel by Gardner because the plots are so complicated, and that was true here, too. I did spot a fairly important clue early on that Gardner kept up his sleeve until near the end of the book. There's no big courtroom scene at the end. I know they're hokey, but I like them anyway. The book is notable for being the novel that introduced the character of Lieutenant Tragg. Up to this point in the series Mason's chief antagonist on the police force had been Sergeant Holcomb of the Homicide squad. Paul Drake is mentioned but never appears on screen, and there's no Hamilton Burger at all.

Despite the flaws, I enjoyed the book, and the solution to the murder is pretty darned clever. Worth a look if you're a Perry Mason fan and haven't read this one yet, but I wouldn't recommend it as a starting point for the series.

Bestseller Bloat

I just finished reading a big political/espionage thriller by a bestselling writer. This author isn’t in the absolute top tier as far as sales go, but he’s still ’way up there. And I hope this doesn’t sound like sour grapes, but I didn’t think the book was very good at all.

The plot – a simple revenge yarn – was okay, although a little predictable. And there were a few nicely done action scenes. For the most part the style was strictly functional but effective.

The problem was that at nearly 700 pages the blasted thing was about three times longer than it needed to be. Scene after scene accomplished nothing, not adding to the plot, the characterization, or even the atmosphere. You’d get a long paragraph explaining what the hero was thinking, followed by another long paragraph restating what the hero was thinking, followed by yet another long paragraph summing up what the hero was thinking. The same thing was true of the assorted villains. Page after page was like that. I’ve heard readers of the Shadow pulp novels by Walter B. Gibson complain about the padding in them, as Gibson tried to stretch the word count, and I can see that at times in the Shadow novels. But I’ve never encountered anything in them as blatantly superfluous as I did in this novel.

And yet not only was the book highly successful, so were all the earlier ones by this author. I don’t get it. What’s there that I’m missing? There must be something.

Material Girls

I said I was going to write something about every movie we watch this year, so . . . In this one, Hilary and Haylie Duff play sisters who inherit a cosmetics empire from their late father. Hilary is the brainy one, Haylie the hard-partying one. Through some skullduggery, they lose their fortune and have to live like normal people, which of course teaches them many valuable lessons. Then, while watching ERIN BROCKOVICH, they decide to become private eyes and find out who was responsible for their downfall. Oh, yeah, along the way they meet a couple of cute guys. While watching this movie, I kept asking myself, "Were the Olsen twins out of town that week?"

But I actually stayed awake through nearly all of it, and since I'm obviously not the target audience for a movie like this, that must say something for it. Plus Brent Spiner is in it, although I didn't recognize him until I saw the credits at the end. Livia knew who he was right away, and she found a particular shot where I had to admit that he looked exactly like Data. I don't know how I missed him.

So, this is a fairly watchable film of its type, and to tell you the truth, I'd much rather watch something like this than some ponderous, angsty, indie drama where nothing happens except people sit around and brood for ninety minutes.

The Devil Wears Prada

Anyone who knows me knows that I am nothing if not a fashionista. Seriously, we watched THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA tonight, or rather, the rest of the family watched it. I, uh, dozed off for most of the movie. Actually, from what I saw it seemed like a fairly good film. The cinematography looked great, I liked the music on the soundtrack (what I heard of it), and Anne Hathaway is a really nice-looking young woman. Livia said she expected a blog post on the movie, even though I slept through a lot of it, so that's about all I can honestly report.

I had already decided, though, to at least mention all the movies we watch this year, whether I have anything intelligent to say about them or not. I think we all know which category this post falls into.