Incognegro - Mat Johnson

Having grown up in the Fifties and Sixties, my taste in comics runs mostly to superheroes, but I sometimes read the more offbeat stuff, too. This new graphic novel from DC/Vertigo by Mat Johnson, for example, is set in the 1930s and concerns a light-skinned black reporter from the North coming to the South and passing as white so he can investigate lynchings. Since he’s working undercover, so to speak, his stories are by-lined “Incognegro”. His current assignment is more personal than usual, because his brother is in jail, accused of killing a white woman.

In the best tradition of hardboiled mysteries, and very appropriately in this case, not everything is what it appears to be. The investigation revolves around moonshining, murder, and a number of secrets that have little or nothing to do with race. It won’t come as any surprise to the reader that the deeper the reporter digs into things, the more danger he’s in, and not only because he’s a black man pretending to be white in 1930s Mississippi.

This is an excellent example of crime fiction in the graphic novel format and ought to be of interest to anyone who enjoys hardboiled historical mysteries.

Mr. Brooks

Earl Brooks (Kevin Costner) is a successful businessman in Portland, a family man with a beautiful wife and daughter. He’s also a serial killer with an imaginary serial killer buddy. Things start to unravel for him when somebody discovers his crimes but instead of trying to blackmail him for money, the guy wants in on the killing. Meanwhile, the millionaire cop (Demi Moore) who’s after the Thumbprint Killer, as Brooks is known to the police, has other troubles of her own: she’s going through a messy divorce, and another serial killer she put away in the past (the Hangman!) has escaped and is looking for her to take his revenge on her.

Then things get really complicated.

This is a weird, creepy movie that’s so unpleasant that it’s hard to watch in places. But it’s very well made and I have to admire the twistiness of the plot. I’m not a big Demi Moore fan, but she’s pretty good in this movie, and so is Kevin Costner, who succeeds in making a guy who’s basically a monster seem sympathetic at times. The action scenes, some of which really come out of nowhere, are very effective. But I still don’t know if I like the movie or not. I didn’t doze off during it, though, that’s for sure.

Forgotten Books: The Ghosts of Elkhorn - Kerry Newcomb and Frank Schaefer

The Wind River Kid is an old, old man, an aging gunfighter living out the last years of his life in an isolated ghost town during the 1920s, kept company only by phantoms of his own past. Then this relative calm is interrupted by the arrival of a young couple with plenty of trouble following them in the form of tommy-gun-toting gangsters. Wanting only to be left alone, the Wind River Kid is forced to take sides in this fight against varmints worse than any he ever came up against back in the Old West.

You couldn’t ask for a better Old West vs. New West novel than this one from 1982, nor a more mystical, beautifully written elegy for days gone by. In the spirit of full disclosure, one of the co-authors, Kerry Newcomb, has been a good friend of mine for nearly thirty years, but I read this book back when it first came out and it’s lingered in my mind for all that time, especially one evocative line towards the end. When THE GHOSTS OF ELKHORN was published, Kerry and his writing partner Frank Schaefer were already very successful authors, having written bestselling historical romance novels under the names Christina Savage and Shana Carrol, as well as historical adventures as Peter Gentry and a well-regarded thriller, PANDORA MAN, under their own names. There was talk of a movie deal for THE GHOSTS OF ELKHORN, but it never came about. As far as I know there was never a paperback edition of the novel, and it gradually faded from most memories as Kerry went on to a long and successful career as a solo novelist, producing several dozen excellent historical novels and Westerns. His books about the Anthem family of Texas, published first under the pseudonym James Reno and later reprinted under his own name, are some of the best traditional Westerns of the past twenty years. Anything you pick up by Kerry will give you a great story peopled by well-drawn characters.

But to my mind, THE GHOSTS OF ELKHORN is his masterpiece and deserves not to be forgotten . . . which is the whole point of posts like this, after all.

The Cat's Meow

I’d never heard of this movie, but it was directed by Peter Bogdanovich, once one of the hottest directors in Hollywood for films like THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, PAPER MOON, and WHAT’S UP, DOC (all movies that I like a lot). And it’s set in 1920s Hollywood, another interest of mine, and one of Bogdanovich’s as well, since he was the director of the forgotten and underrated NICKELODEON. So I figured it was worth watching, and turns out it is.

It purports to tell the story of what really happened to director and producer Thomas Ince, who died mysteriously during a cruise on a luxurious yacht belonging to newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst. Also figuring in the plot are Hearst’s mistress, actress Marion Davies, Charlie Chaplin, gossip columnist Louella Parsons, and novelist Elinor Glyn. There’s lots of brittle, witty dialogue, a little depravity (what would Hollywood be without it?), and movie colony backstabbing and intrigue.

Probably nobody alive today really knows what happened to Tom Ince, but the movie makes a good case for the version it presents. It reminded me somewhat of HOLLYWOODLAND, the movie about the death of George Reeves (which I also liked), although it’s not as open-ended as HOLLYWOODLAND. If you’re interested in the silent film era, as I am, I think you’ll enjoy THE CAT’S MEOW.

Hardluck Stories: The Pulp Noir Issue

The latest (and final) issue of the great webzine HARDLUCK STORIES is now on-line and includes a story by me entitled “The Red Reef”. The theme for this issue is Pulp Noir, so I decided to pay tribute to a little-known pulp subgenre with my story. When most people think of pulps, they probably don’t think of South Seas yarns, but such stories appeared often in the general fiction pulps like ARGOSY and BLUE BOOK. “The Red Reef” is an homage to the South Seas stories of H. Bedford-Jones and Donald Barr Chidsey, a couple of my favorite pulpsters. (That’s one reason I was reading so much by those guys a couple of months ago. Also, they’re really good.) There are nods to both authors in the story, although the ones to Bedford-Jones are pretty obscure. I also borrowed a couple of stylistic touches from HB-J for this story. I think it’s a pretty good yarn.

I’ve also had a chance to read the other stories in the issue, and they’re all excellent. My favorite is Bill Crider’s “Crossroads”, but I’m prejudiced, of course, since I’ve known Bill since we were both roaming the earth in the pre-Cambrian Era. You should read all the stories, and while you’re there, go back and read the previous issues of HARDLUCK STORIES if you haven’t already. You definitely won’t be disappointed.

Sandstorm - James Rollins

Talk about your mixed emotions. I was predisposed to not like this book: it’s too long, and the author is too successful. (Writers are just as prone to sour grapes as anybody else.) On the other hand, James Rollins is a veterinarian in real life, or at least used to be, and seems like a nice guy, so it’s hard to envy him for his success. And he’s admitted in interviews that he’s a big fan of the Doc Savage novels, my all-time favorite pulp series, so in that respect I was predisposed to like the book. The verdict: I liked it. Quite a bit, actually.

It opens with an explosion at the British Museum that destroys a display of Arabian artifacts, but it’s not the terrorist attack you might expect. Instead, it’s a natural occurrence caused by the convergence of an electrical storm and something hidden inside one of the artifacts. This sends a large and varied cast of scientists, explorers, billionaires, and spies racing off to Oman in a quest to find a lost city buried under the sands before the natural catastrophe that’s developing threatens the continued existence of the entire world. Of course there’s action aplenty along the way, as well as a smidgen of soap opera.

I hardly ever even attempt to read a book that’s almost 600 pages long anymore, and when I do I usually make it thirty or forty pages and then decide that I don’t like it well enough to stick with it for the five or six days it’ll take me to read it. Usually there’s nothing really wrong with the book; it just doesn’t compel me to make that investment of time. That never happened with SANDSTORM, though. I was able to stay with it without any problem . . . although it wouldn’t have broken my heart if it had been a hundred pages shorter. Still, there’s a lot of plot in it, and Rollins seems to be very good about planting things that don’t pay off until two or three hundred pages later. He also writes decent action scenes and has good characters. Things get a little far-fetched now and then; Rollins leads the reader right up to the edge of saying, “Oh, come on!”, but doesn’t quite get there. And he winds up with at least semi-plausible scientific explanations for everything.

I liked this one enough so that I’ll certainly read more by Rollins, and if you like big, epic adventure novels, I think his books are worth a try.

American Gangster

This movie begins with a guy getting doused with gasoline, set on fire, and then shot multiple times at close range. After watching this opening, my daughter Joanna commented, “Well, it’s no BEAUTY AND THE BEAST” (which she had watched earlier in the day).

No, it’s certainly not. There’s a lot of bad ****in’ language, a ****load of **********in’ violence, a bunch of ********er’s shootin’ up, and numerous nekkid women. Other than that there’s really nothing objectionable in it.

AMERICAN GANGSTER is the story of Frank Lucas (played by Denzel Washington), who took over the drug trade in New York in the late Sixties by the simple means of going to Thailand and buying directly from the suppliers. Russell Crowe is Richie Roberts, an honest but otherwise messed-up cop from New Jersey who winds up trying to take down Lucas’s drug operation. It’s based on actual events, but as usual, I don’t know how much of the story was invented for the movie.

I do know that I enjoyed it, despite the fact that some of it is pretty unpleasant. This is a relentlessly old-fashioned movie that looks and feels like it could have been made in 1975. The pace is a little leisurely, but the acting is good all around, and at two-and-a-half hours, it definitely has an epic feel to it. I liked this considerably more than some other cops vs. gangsters movies that got a lot more acclaim. (cough* THE DEPARTED *cough) It’s well worth your time if all that cussin’ and killin’ and dopin’ doesn’t bother you.

Forgotten Books: Rope Law - Lewis B. Patten

Over the past few years, Lewis B. Patten has become one of my favorite Western authors. The West he writes about is often a dark and dangerous place, where no one can be trusted completely, not even your best friend or the woman you love, where good men sometimes do bad things and bad men do even worse. His Gold Medal novel ROPE LAW, originally published in 1956, fits right in with that description and is probably the best Patten novel I’ve read so far.

The story begins in the middle of the action, with a posse chasing down a fugitive atop a rugged plateau. When the man they’re after holes up in an old cabin, the posse members surround the place, but then the sheriff throws them a curve by riding up to the cabin and walking in to confront the outlaw . . . who, as it turns out, is the lawman’s adopted son.

From there, as the posse waits for nightfall so they can close in, Patten backtracks to fill in the story of what brought the characters to this point, and it’s a years-long saga of drunkenness, prostitution, robbery, and murder worthy of any of the more contemporary Gold Medals. Sex serves as the motivation for most of this, and while the scenes aren’t graphic, there are quite a few of them for a traditional Western published in 1956. He also puts his heroes through a lot of torment, both emotional and physical, that was unusual for the time period. Patten’s tendency to come up with somewhat happy endings keeps his books from falling completely into the Western noir category, but they come close enough to satisfy most readers of crime fiction, I think. ROPE LAW certainly does.

A couple of words of warning, though: Not all of Patten’s novels are as dark as what I’ve described here. Some of them are very traditional Westerns with nothing really to distinguish them except a competent readability (not something to be taken lightly in its own right, mind you). And he’s also an inconsistent writer, especially in his later books which are carelessly written to the point that I’ve started some of them and not finished them. But pick up ROPE LAW or LYNCHING AT BROKEN BUTTE or THE SCAFFOLD AT HANGMAN’S CREEK (Patten likes hangings as plot instigators, too) or any number of other novels, and I think you’ll be thoroughly entertained.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

Continuing our revisiting of the Indiana Jones films, we watched this second entry in the series recently. I remember being somewhat disappointed in it when it came out, and I hadn’t seen it since then. I was curious to see how I’d feel about it now. And, as it turns out, I still don’t like it very much.

No need to go into the plot, surely, other than the fact that there’s not much of one. This movie seems like a prime example of sequelitis to me: take whatever worked in the first film and make it bigger, noisier, more frantic, and more special-effects-laden. I actually kind of liked the opening scene in the nightclub, although it gets a little busy and cutesy before it’s over. The kid sidekick isn’t quite as annoying as I remembered. But once Indy and the kid and the girl get to the palace, with that gross-out dinner scene, things start to fall apart for me. After that it’s just one mindless action scene after another. And the ending certainly lacks the ironic kicker of the first movie.

Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t a terrible film. And I know I should judge it on its own merits rather than compare it so much to RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. But INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM just never really quite works for me.

Father's Day

It was a quiet, peaceful Father's Day around here (the best kind). I worked on the current manuscript and wrote 26 pages, so I certainly can't complain about that. The girls gave me assorted CDs and DVDs, plus a good fishing cap and a fedora. Pictures on here eventually, more than likely. And it's always nice to get a reminder that while I'm proud of my career, the absolute best thing I've ever done is to be a dad.