Spring is here! And that of course means it’s time for another Aimée LeDuc novel from the inimitable Cara Black.
This much loved series, set in Paris, seems to grow in popularity with each book, and the latest offering shows great promise of introducing Aimée to a whole new cohort of readers.
The book, Murder Below Montparnasse, allows Cara to respond to her many readers who wanted Aimée to finally involve herself with one of Paris’s most distinguishing treasures: art.
As the Book Passage website explains:
In Murder Below Montparnasse, a long-lost Modigliani portrait, a grieving brother’s blood vendetta, and a Soviet secret that’s been buried for 80 years are all involved in Parisian private investigator Aimée Leduc’s current case. In this latest in the celebrated series, Cara Black pits her detective against an art heist, an absent partner, and a gruesome murder as she tries to solve her most exciting case yet.
In trying to come up with a new angle on the old author interview, Cara tipped me off to Bernard Pivot, a famous French journalist and interviewer. He’s most well known for the group of questions he asked each of his guests on his show called Apostrophes. Each question was designed to better define guests in the eyes of those watching and more importantly helped to cast aside their celebrity in favor of a more human view. Pivot adapted his questions from Marcel Proust’s Questionnaire that was created to understand personality.
Cara is in the middle of her most ambitious (read: hectic) book tour ever, complete with numerous WiFi disasters and meltdowns and a five-hour drive through snow to speak at an Ohio library, but she took time to answer these questions, however laconically, by thumbing them into her iPhone.
So, with gratitude and appreciation to a severely overtaxed Cara, not to mention Monsieurs Proust and Pivot, and with some minor, meddlesome tweaking from yours truly, let us commence the Q&A:
What is your favorite word—in English? In French?
Radiance is probably my favorite word in English. French? Louminosité.
Is there a word in either language whose cognate in the other just doesn’t work for you?
Plouff. (Note: Your trusty interviewer tried to find a definition for this word as spelled, and came up empty. He did find “plouf” which was translated as the sound something makes when it hits the water. However, when he used the spelling “Plouffe,” well, things got rather interesting—and not (merely) because of David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager. (Follow the link.)
What is your least favorite word—again, in both English and French?
Oink and quelconque.
What exhilarates or inspires you creatively, spiritually, or emotionally?
Light—sunlight, lamplight, moonlight—glinting off the flowing Seine.
What repulses you creatively, spiritually, or emotionally?
Small-mindedness.
What sound or noise invariably makes you happy?
Waking up to rain on the roof.
What sound or noise invariably makes you shudder or snarl?
A child’s cry at night. (I’m guessing she means shudder, not snarl – David)
What is your favorite curse word? (Or, if you’d prefer, what is Aimée’s?)
Merde!
What profession other than your own would you like to pursue?
Bookbinding for rare books.
What profession would you never attempt except at gunpoint?
Opera singing.
If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? (Other than, “Wow. Love what you’ve done to your hair.”)
“About time. Your friends and family have been waiting.” (Apparently Cara intends to outlive them all.)
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So Murderateros: What questions would you like to ask of Cara (with the understanding she may be facing but another on-the-road disaster and may not be able to respond promptly)?
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Jukebox Hero of the Week: Well, I think we have to go French here, don’t you? How about the “Flower Duet” from Lakmé by Léo Delibes—one of the most stunningly beautiful and universally loved duets in all of opera -- which is why you hear it in so many movies and commercials...
In my last post, I mentioned the need for near perpetual publicity in this day and age of publishing meltdown and online promotion.
A little over two weeks after my book release, I feel like I understated the matter considerably. I need seven more hours a day, five more days a week, and a bottomless bowl of Wheaties to tackle everything.
As for sleep…
There are the events and readings I’m doing in the Bay Area and Los Angeles—please come out if you’re nearby—including a wonderful panel I did with Ellen Sussman this past weekend at the San Francisco Writer’s Conference (they sold out of my book!).
There are the workshops I’m conducting—again in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, and also at Left Coast Crime in Colorado Springs, where I’ll be serving as toastmaster, and then in various northern California locales, at the DFW Conference in Dallas (where I’ll be co-keynote speaker with the lovely and charming and gifted Deborah Crombie), and finally, Memorial Day weekend, at the High Sierra Writers Conference in Reno.
There’s the various blogs I’ve posted for—call it Bombing the Blogs—including:
An interview with the writing community at Scribophile, with an extra forum for additional Q&A at the Scribophile Forum. (The interview is open to the public; the forum requires a free signup to join the community, which is much like Goodreads, but more writer oriented.) Scribophile will also soon be sponsoring a contest with free books and a free critique session as prizes: Stay tuned.
I’m pitching an article I wrote called “The Politics of Plot” to the Huffington Post, and one titled "Secrets & Contradictions" for the New York Times' The Opinionator/Drafts column.
And then there’s the constant drafting of event invites on Facebook, keeping up with the ever-changing world of Amazon, communicating with everyone who responds to the book giveaway on Goodreads (and inviting others I know), answering comments on the Scribophile blog, updating what I’ve already done, building my Twitter base (hey guys, over here, follow me, follow me, no me, over here, I said here, hey guys?) …
Plus I have my online course through UCLA Extension -- incredibly wonderful, hard-woring students from around the world -- a new one I’m pitching to LitReactor, three manuscripts to review and edit, a novel to finish (close, I’m very close)...
I've yet to inload any financial date into Quickbooks for my 2012 taxes, I’m refinancing my house (don’t get me started), my car needed new tires and a new radiator before I headed south to LA, my computer keyboard has developed a new glitch where -- only in Word -- the forward cursor moves backwards and no one at Microsoft has a clue…
Then there’s the happier end of Things to Prepare For: My other half, Mette, is driving cross-country next month with Hamley, the Wonder Dog, and moving in with me.
(I’ll be traveling to Norway and Turkey this summer to meet Mette's extended family. Yes, she’s descended from Vikings and Turks. This is not lost on me.)
So, let’s just say I’m keeping busy. Or busier. Make that busiest.
Every now and then, I get to read a book—which reminds me: Cara Black’s latest, Murder Below Montparnasse, is coming out on March 5th, and you can win a trip to Paris with Cara if you pre-order now. (I'll be interviewing Cara about the new book on Wildcard Tuesday, March 26th.)
Oh, and lest I forget, you can buy copies of The Art of Characterhere.
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So, Murderateros—what’s keeping you up these nights?
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Jukebox Hero of the Week: Robert Earl Keen, Jr., one of the great Texas singer/songwriter/storytellers, with one of my favorite tunes ever, and something of an anthem for my life right now, thus the title of today's post:
There's nothing quite like the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. It's a two-day extravaganza that was for many years held at UCLA, but has now found its home at USC.
The Festival consists of hundreds of small and large press publishers as well as booths for popular book stores, newspapers, comic book publishers and just about everything else related to books. There are stages for poetry reading, performance art, musical acts and children's story-telling. Dozens of lecture halls hold author panels that run dawn to dusk.
Thousands of authors appear at tables to sign copies of their books. Every genre is represented. It's a huge celebration of the written word.
In years past I've had the opportunity to rub shoulders with the likes of James Ellroy, Walter Mosley, Michael Connelly, TC Boyle, Buzz Aldrin, Barbara Eden and Bernadette Peters, among others. A couple years ago Bono poked his head into the Mysterious Galaxy tent and stared me right in the eye. We smiled at each other and he walked away. I'm still kicking myself for not stuffing a copy of Boulevard into his hands.
This year the celebrity guests ran the gamut: John Cusack, Julie Andrews, Rodney King, Betty White, Marilu Henner, Ricki Lake, Sugar Ray Leonard, Anne Rice, Molly Shannon and Tori Spelling.
This is my third year at the Festival and each year I've been blessed to be on a panel. Last year I sat with Miles Corwin and Marcia Clark, and this year my panel included April Smith, Ned Vizzini, Jerry Stahl and John Sacret Young. Our panel was actually featured in Sunday's issue of the L.A. Times.
Everybody's experience of the Festival is different. There are just too many cool panels, parties and events for anyone's experience to be the same. Between my panel and the booth signings I did I was only able to attend two other panels. My wife and son split off to see their favorite YA authors while I caught Gar Anthony Haywood and Kelli Stanley at a crime panel.
(YA panel)
(Crime panel with our Murderati member Gar Anthony Haywood and Kelli Stanley)
Saturday evening featured an author bash at the Los Angeles Central Library, a beautiful Art Deco backdrop for the literati crowd.
I caught dinner before the event with authors Lee Goldberg, Boyd Morrison, Lissa Price and Barry Eisler. It was the best "panel" on non-traditional publishing I've ever attended.
My son Noah has become quite the event photographer and I let him go hog-wild documenting the event. Noah might not have had such an interest in photography if it hadn't been for the encouragement of one beautiful woman who no longer walks among us.
Publicist Diana James, the late wife of author Darrell James, gave Noah his first paying job as a photographer, hiring him to take photos of authors at last year's Festival of Books. She gave him a wonderful letter telling him to follow his dreams and continue taking pictures, something we've framed along with a copy of that first check. Her kindness had an impact on our lives.
The following are images of the Festival from an eleven-year old's point of view. It's not everyone's experience at the L.A. Times Festival of Books, but it was ours...
(Denise Hamilton and Cara Black)
(Tough Guy Gary Phillips)
(YA author Maggie Stiefvater)
(Ned Vizzini and his wife at the library party)
(Naomi Hirahara)
(Jerry Stahl)
(Lissa Price, YA author of Starters hanging out with my lovely wife)
Tuesday, February 28, 2012 at 3:01AMin David Corbett
Cara Black is the author of the Aimee Leduc mysteries, each set in a different arrondissement of Paris.
Her latest, Murder at the Lanterne Rouge, is set in one of the French capital’s four Chinatowns.
The book, the twelfth in this stellar series, isdue in stores on March 6th, or you can order it here.
I met Cara when my first novel came out. We were doing an event together, and I remember her telling the crowd that her books were set in Paris, and that she traveled there at least once a year for reseach.
I, on the other hand, had just written a book that took place in a barren stretch of California flatland known for meth and rednecks. I thought: Wow, she’s got this gig figured out WAY better than I do.
Indeed, she does.
Cara seems to gain not just a broader readership with each book but ever more extravagant praise. her latest, Murder at the Lanterne Rouge, earned a starred review from Publishers Weekly:
"Outstanding.... Readers will relish realistic villains and an evocative atmosphere that begs for a trip to the City of Lights."
The New York Journal of Books added:
“The pace accelerates as fast as Aimee’s Vespa. The details of the series, Aimee’s love of vintage couture, her love life, and the specter of her mother’s disappearance, all make welcome appearances here. Murder at the Lanterne Rouge is wonderfully plotted, and Cara Black ties together the past and present with élan.”
Cara has graciously agreed to join us here as she prepares to launch her new tour, indulging a few questions about her latest:
1) Aimee’s reached the twelfth offering in the series: Murder at the Lanterne Rouge. Where in Aimee’s life do we find her now? What changes have occurred over the course of the series—is she sadder but wiser, stronger because of all the things that haven’t killed her, resigned to the tedious routine of a ho-hum life in Paris?
It's January 1998, a little over four years into the series (we first met Aimée in November 1993). There’s snow on the ground, and she's broken her rule about dating 'men in the police force' and is in a relationship with Melac, a Brigade Criminelle officer with a lot of family baggage. Something inside Aimée thinks he might be ‘the one’ until he's summoned to undercover surveillance in a new clandestine position and he can't reveal anythng about his new caseload.
Par for the course, she thinks, wondering why she thought Melac could be different from any other 'flic' like her father. She’s resigned, yes, but a little wiser too, especially about danger after her last case. She's now resolved to focus on building her business, and Leduc Detective Agency continues with its bread-and-butter computer security contracts.
But now her partner René, a dwarf, normally the most level-headed, business-minded and cautious of the two, has a coup de foudre—love at first sight—and thinks he's found his soul mate: Meizi. René's only known her for two months and she comes from a traditional Chinese family, or so he believes. Then Meizi gets connected to a brutal murder and disappears. Aimée's reluctant to investigate—suggesting she’s a bit wiser, perhaps. But given the deep involvement of René, her best friend—who's heartsick when he discovers Meizi isn't who she claimed to be—Aimée can't refuse, and plunges in.
2) Where is the Lanterne Rouge, and how did it come by its name? What arrondissements have you yet to cover? What will you do once you’ve killed somebody off in every single one?
Actually the story takes place in the northern edge of the Marais, in the smallest and oldest of the four Chinatowns in Paris. The Lanterne Rouge refers to an alley where a shrink-wrapped body is found—but if I tell you anymore, David, I’ll have to kill you.
As for the second half of your question: Twelve arrondissements down, eight more to go. I’ll figure out what to do when I’ve written about all twenty when I get there.
3) Why pick this Chinatown? What makes this one different from the other three Chinatowns in Paris?
My friends live nearby and coming from the Metro I always walked through the area. It intrigued me and I discovered that this warren of several medieval streets is home to inhabitants from Wenzhou, a southern province below Canton, who engage in selling wholesale bags, luggage and costume jewelry. They’re known as ‘entrepeneurs’ and are quite different from the residents of the other Chinatowns, many of whom are political émigres.
As I walked these narrow fourteenth-century streets I heard the slap of Mah Jong tiles and the pounding of machines from behind closed doors and in the old courtyards. There’s a whole substrata below the surface of sweatshops with illegal immigrants who come to France to work but become almost indentured slaves to pay off their passage. A conversation with a man in the Renseignements Generaux, the RG, which is the domestic intelligence service, really sparked this book after he told me: ‘No one dies in Chinatown.’
4) How did you persuade several law enforcement officers—not to mention a Chinese documentary film maker—to talk to you about the clandestine working conditions and life for most of the inhabitants in Chinatown? How many bottles of wine did it take? Or did you go with pastries this time?
Wine, pastries whatever it takes. Seriously, I was acquainted with this man in the RG for several years after an introduction from a friend. He'd give me fifteen minutes sometimes—he's a busy person and runs a major department—but when I mentioned how this Chinatown interested me his eyes lit up.
Turns out he's in charge of collecting information about the quartier—he wouldn't reveal exactly what that meant, but he was excited with my idea. He encouraged me. I even ran the murder scenario, the motive and the suspects by him to check for plausibility and he gave me a heads up. After that validation he introduced me to the Chinese documentary film maker—one of his sources—who was a great help about the living and working conditions that are below the surface and never seen by tourists or local Parisians. He insists that I keep his name quiet and refer to him only as Monsieur X.
5) Did you really find the remnants of the Knights Templars tower in a courtyard? And did a Polish workman shoo you out when you went to investigate? And what was a Polish workman doing in Paris?
Yes, the tower remnant survives on rue Charlot in the back of a courtyard which was undergoing renovation when I happened upon it. Very cool. The Polish workcrew—lots of Polish plumbers and construction workers find jobs in Paris because of the EU—wanted to go home after a long day working. The guy who saw me snooping around wanted to go with his buddies after work for a beer and he was irked because I was holding him up.
I came back the next day because I'm that kind of person—anything for a story—and apologized to him. That did the trick—he beamed and let me snoop some more. Can you imagine living in a building with a Templar tower in your courtyard? I had to use it in the story.
6) How did you find out about the Engineering Grands Écoles with its medieval student hazing practices still in use today? Does that really happen? Are the practices really as severe as you portray in your book?
Those Grands Ecoles hazing practices exist and for my book I even toned them down a bit. My source was a Parisian engineer, a friend of my neighbor, who had attended this school and had first hand experience of the customs—writing Latin verse on small matchsticks, for example; or being rousted from bed at 4 AM then forced to do exercises and chanting until sunrise; or, if he didn’t conform to the rules, put into isolation deep in the bowels of the medieval abbey where the campus is located. He suffered what we'd call abuse and brutality for two years. Yet he hung in there and did graduate.
A lot of the graduates work in the Ministry or are CEO's, but he's now ostracized from the 'old boy’s network.' He works in Silicon Valley and started several companies—he's a brilliant man and not only can come up with the concept for a product, but diagram it, issue its plans and build the thing. He credits this to the rigorous standards of the school and its unique education. Today he feels it was worth it.
7) We see Aimée and her best friend Martine rushing off to the January sales as true fashionistas must. Do you get a product-placement discount from designers you mention in your books?
I wish. Brilliant idea. I could use a Dior pencil skirt and Louboutin heels for my Vespa scooter.
8) Your books are so rich with the daily culture of Paris, the things that make it come alive as a city for the people who actually live there. But what of the cultural touchstones identifiable to those of us who know Paris only from afar – does Aimee have a favorite French painter, composer or singer, for example? Do you?
Aimée likes:
The female Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot
The singers Pat Benatar and Edith Piaf
The poets Gerard Nerval and Baudelaire
The novelist Honoré de Balzac
The dancer Margot Fonteyn
The opera Les Paladins by Rameau
Cara likes:
The painter Gustave Caillebotte
The composer and singer Jacques Prevert and Georges Brassens
The poet Baudelaire
The novelists Romain Gary and Honoré de Balzac
The dancer Fred Astaire
The opera Tristan and Isolde
Okay, so Fred Astaire is American* and Tristan and Isolde is by Wagner.
Sue me.
* Turns out Fred Astaire was almost as Teutonic as Wagner: He was born in Omaha with the name Friedrich Emanual Austerlitz, of German and Austrian parents -- DC.
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Jukebox Hero of the Week: In thinking of my own favorite French musicians, I remembered the group Les Negresses Vertes, a kind of gypsy cabaret punk outfit -- half Pogues, half Charles Aznavour -- that my late wife Terri and I saw in San Francisco early in our relationship—one of the best live hows I ever attended. Here’s a tune of theirs remixed by Massive Attack (for the original, go here):
Wednesday, August 31, 2011 at 3:02AMin David Corbett
David Corbett
One of the most gratifying compliments I ever received was from fellow writer Jane Ganahl, who remarked that I was one of the few men she knew who could actually be friends with a woman. One always loves to hear “one of the few” in the context of a pat on the back, and yet on reflection, I wonder if what she said is true.
I know a great many male-female friendships, and my own life is full of them. The writing community is rife with cross-gender friendships—I’m close to several of my fellow Murderati members, for example, as well as numerous other writers, and several frequent commenters here, like Shizuka and Allison Davis. I work with a local neighborhood watch program, and I have several women friends there, not to mention my neighbors, etc. I bet if we poll those reading this blog, we’ll learn of dozens if not hundreds of such friendships (please feel free to Comment re: same).
And yet, you’d hardly know such friendships exist from what one finds in books and films.
The frisson of romance, if not rampant sexual tension, routinely hovers about a man and a woman in fiction and cinema like a cloud of static electricity. The great Stella Adler, in a drama workshop I attended in my twenties, chastened two students who were tiptoeing through a courtship scene: “Every time a man and a woman are on stage they are totally in love. All they’re discussing is terms.”
This is an incredibly powerful insight. And yet it also seems like a great loss—unless one views male-female friendships merely as romances in which the terms are somehow less than "totally in love."
My life would be severely impoverished without my women friends. Yes, there’s an element of flirtation about many of them, and every peck on the cheek provides a whiff of perfume, the brush of skin against skin, a hint of la difference. But they are not “friends with benefits” (or the possibility thereof), or “romances in limbo,” any more than my marriage was “sex with equity.”
Why is this seemingly ubiquitous aspect of modern life so absent from films and fiction?
In her novel Finding Nouf, Zoë Ferraris provides a fascinating psychological portrait of Nayir, an orphaned and unmarried Palestinian Bedouin living in Saudi Arabia. Ferraris, who was married to such a man, knows intimately not just the misconceptions that a strictly segregated society creates between the sexes, but the longing for a better understanding felt on both sides. In particular, Nayir wishes he had a sister, for that relationship would provide him with someone he could talk to about a woman’s thoughts and feelings, subjects Saudi culture strictly forbids he so much as bring up with a woman who is not a wife or a family member.
In the contemporary West, we can often be far more candid with our cross-gender friends than we are with a lover, at least in the early stages of a relationship. I think that male-female friendships serve a serious purpose in this regard, though many I'm sure never plumb the depths Nayir was hoping for.
Marriage, of course, is the great opportunity in this regard. George Eliott remarked, “Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings.” To which Louis de Bernières, in his novel A Partisan’s Daughter, somewhat savagely added, “Sooner or later, at best, your wife turns into your sister. At worst she becomes your enemy.” Both these statements get at the singular intimacy a good marriage provides a man and a woman. Men are particularly needy of such intimacy, which is why so many widowers marry soon after a wife's passing or pass away themselves.
But like Saudi Arabia, fiction and film discount the possibility of this nearness occurring anywhere else but with a sister or a wife.
And gay male/straight woman friendships skirt the core issue (as it were), which is the possibility, despite all that the sexual divide entails, to bridge it like responsible adults, to put aside or control the erotic charge we are expected to experience, and play nice.
But perhaps my belief that such friendships are easy and frequent is misguided. In an intriguing article for Slate on this issue, Juliet Lapidos expresses bewilderment and frustration at why male-female friendships seem so problematic in the culture. And rare.
Lapidos outlines the reasons men and women routinely give for their cross-gender friendships—men cite the ability to talk about feelings without judgment, and women cite the ability to discuss topics most women find irrelevant or boring, or the chance not to obsess on the emotional connotations of what does get discussed. She then suggests that only “less-gendered” men and women can enjoy such connections, citing her own experience. In her cross-sex friendships, “the traits that supposedly make men and women so separate (excluding physical differences) are hardly in evidence.”
To which I can only scratch my head. Are we really so devoid of self-control or insight that we can’t enjoy each other’s company without neutering ourselves?
I’ve asked a number of friends to come up with examples of cross-gender friendships in film and fiction, and boy, are the pickings slim.
Allison Davis suggested Dorothy and the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. I like that, but would their friendship abide if Dorothy were just a wee bit more, shall we say, developed? Maybe. I want to think so. And yet there’s also a kind of big-brother aspect to these friendships. That’s not so bad—Cara Black, one of my best friends on the crime fiction beat, routinely refers to me as her “little brother.” And my nickname for Harley Jane Kozak is "L'il Sis." I like that. I love it, in fact. And yet it also screams to everyone who might misunderstand: It's okay. We're not up to anything …. Like it's anybody's business in the first place, or they can't tell just by seeing us together. Sheesh.
Catherine Thorpe, another good friend, brought up True Grit, but there again Mattie is fourteen. Does a woman lose her friendship cred once she clears puberty?
Jane Austen abounds with some very tender friendships—but they are almost always romances-waiting-to-happen. And in Remains of the Day, Stephens and Miss Kent share a lovely friendship—but it’s only because the romantic longing goes only one way.
The same is true of Midge and Scotty in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. This sort of romantic gridlock has been codified, one might say cheapened, by the modern put-down, “He’s just not that into you.” Hitchcock, a devotee of Freud, knew there was a great deal more to it than that (why else would Midge say, when caring for Scottie after his breakdown, “You’re not lost. Mother is here”?).
In Peter Carey’s Theft, the connection between the mysterious Marlene and her lover’s brother, Hugh, is one of the great joys of the book: “And there she was—a type—one of those rare, often unlucky people who ‘get on with Hugh.’” As you might guess, Hugh is troubled. As in violently insane.
Two of my own favorite depictions of male-female friendship are in fact chaste romances. The major attribute of both stories is how and why the sexual tension is controlled: one through Victorian rectitude—Charlie Allnutt and Rose Sayer in C.S. Forester’s The African Queen—the other through a nun’s vows—Sister Angela and Corporal Allison in Charles Shaw’s Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison. (Apparently such tales had a particular appeal for the director John Huston, for he brought both to the screen: with Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn in the one, Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr in the other.)
In the early stages of my last big romance, my lover and I sent pseudo-questionnaires back and forth, purportedly from the HR Department, seeking to determine whether the respondent was “right for the position.” One such question was: favorite love scenes. And I listed two from Heaven Knows, Mister Allison. It really is a love story, a very touching one for all the schmaltz, precisely because they cannot be together “that way.”
The workplace generates a great many cross-gender friendships, in both life and fiction, but there again the issue of repressed sexual tension heads its ugly rear due to the frequency of office romance.
The introduction of women into police forces has been particularly generous, inspiring a whole new onslaught of buddy storylines, with men and women fighting crime shoulder to shoulder: Mulder and Scully of X Files, David and Maddie in Moonlighting. Of course, both these pairings ended up in romance, to the fatal detriment of both shows.
A far more intriguing example appears in Tana French’s In the Woods.
The friendship between Dublin homicide detectives Rob Ryan and Cassie Maddox begins with the former remarking, “I had no problem with the idea of Cassie Maddox.” First, he disdains the “New Neanderthal” competitive locker-room overtones of the job, and he in general prefers women to men. Secondly, she’s not his preferred type physically—she’s boyish, slim, square-shouldered, where he’s always preferred “girly, bird-boned blonds.” (All of this would seem to corroborate Juliet Lapidos’ contention that only “less-gendered” men and women can truly connect non-sexually.) Even so, Rob becomes vaguely attracted and lets it slip out backhandedly in a feeble attempt at banter, to which Cassie responds that she’s always dreamed of being rescued by a white knight, only in her imaginings he was always good-looking. This snaps Rob out of his dog-on-the-hunt thinking, and he “stopped falling in love with her and began liking her immensely.” It’s a friendship developed deeply and satisfactorily throughout the book, until the inevitable night together near the end, when the sexual tension breaks and they make the awful mistake of, as Pinter would say, “going at it.” Things are never the same, and it is a testament to the hunger we have for such connections that we feel this shipwreck of affection viscerally, as the great loss it is meant to be.
In the end, the best example I could find—maybe I should say only example—was the novel The Chess Player by Bertina Heinrichs, adapted for the film Queen to Play.
It’s about the cerebrally intimate, sexually charged but ultimately Platonic bond that develops between Hélène, a Corsican maid, and her chess tutor, an American widower. The sexual tension is there from the start—Hélène’s first glimpse of chess takes place as she’s cleaning the room of a honeymoon couple playing a game on the deck, and the man and woman clearly share an intriguing intimacy. Hélène’s own marriage has reached that sister/enemy impasse, and this sets the stage for a possible affair.
But something far more interesting happens. (One of the best lines in the film is when, after her husband has followed Hélène and seen she is not having sex with Professor Kröger, her tutor, but simply playing chess, he confronts her, and tells her that what he saw was “much worse.”) Hélène becomes intrigued with chess for reasons she cannot explain, and reveals an innate gift for the game that cannot be taught. As for Professor Kröger, he remains haunted by grief; though he has lovers, he sees in Hélène something else, something more unique and impressive. And yet she also reminds him of his late wife—a gifted woman who struggled to accept her very real talent. His fondness for Hélène is tragic, tender and genuine, and she for the first time pursues something that is not for the sake of others—her employers, her husband, her daughter—but hers alone.
Murderateros: Do any of you have a favorite story about male-female friendship—or any at all? Fictive, fact, filmic. Were they with "less gendered" men or women? Or have your most gratifying connections with members of the opposite sex always been with lovers, siblings, spouses?
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Jukebox Heroes of the Week: On the theme of cross-gender friendship, here are Rodrigo y Gabriela, a pair of guitar gypsies who gave up playing in Mexico City thrasher/metal bands and now play acoustically together. All friendships should make music like this:
Tuesday, March 26, 2013 at 3:01AM in 
