I spent last weekend attending the 2012 Noircon, the biannual lovefest to all things noir devised and convened by Lou Boxer and Deen Kogan in Philadelphia.
I love this festival, which is far more intimate and writer-centric than most others I’ve attended. The participants largely form a congress of equals, and there is never a great divide between the contributions of the various panelists and the comments from the floor. It’s a smart group, widely read and not shy, and I always come away learning more that I could have imagined.
This year was particularly exceptional, with what at times seemed to be a continuous string of highlights. That said, one presentation stood out for me—the keynote talk by Robert Olen Butler.
Butler’s a gracious, witty, generous man with a knife-like body and a steel-trap mind. An astonishing talent, he’s written thirteen novels, six story collections, nine screenplays, an essential guide to writing (From Where You Dream—trust me, read it), and has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and a Guggenheim Fellowship in addition to an almost unseemly bundle of other awards and distinctions.
Why, I hear you ask, is such a literary hotshot slumming at Noircon?
Well that’s an interesting question, one ironically answered by Otto Penzler the day before Butler spoke. Otto explained how, after studying English and American Literature at the University of Michigan, he discovered crime fiction and promptly realized that its best practitioners owe apologies to no one.
Butler agrees, not just in theory. His most recent novel, The Hot Country, is a historical thriller set in Mexico in 1914, combining intrigue from both that country’s revolution and the worldwide cataclysm routinely known as World War I. The plan is for nine more novels in the series, all to be published by Otto Penzler’s Mysterious Press.
But what Butler chose to discuss at Noircon was craft—specifically, the way in which fiction mimics the cinematic portrayal of events in the mind. (His remarks, I now know, were a distillation of his chapter, "Cinema of the Mind," within From Where You Dream.)
The American filmmaker D.W. Griffith, Butler informed us, once remarked that he owed everything he knew about cinematic technique to Charles Dickens—who died years before the advent of film.
By way of example, Butler turned to the following passage from Great Expectations, which appears shortly after the narrator, Pip, sets the stage, identifying himself and his family, then continues:
Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things, seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain, that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond, was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.
“Hold your noise!" cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. "Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!"
A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.
"O! Don't cut my throat, sir," I pleaded in terror. "Pray don't do it, sir."
Butler called our attention to several techniques here, all of which have cinematic elements, and there are two particular points that stuck with me, involving the first and the third paragraphs.
Butler noted that the first paragraph serves as what in film is routinely called the establishment shot—setting the story in its initial setting. We start at a distance in a long shot then move in to the nettles of the churchyard and the headstones in arresting close-up, then look out across the landscape again, as though to put those deaths in perspective.
That perspective is not local. Dickens moves beyond the "low leaden line" of the river to : “the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing ... the sea.” A great many writers might leave that phrase out. Such an omission, he argued, would be a mistake, for the establishment shot doesn’t just lay out the scenery. This crucial phrase broadens not just the physical landscape but the thematic one, extending our view not just to the immediate environs but to the world at large, setting the stage for so much of the story to come, and hinting at its universality.
And then, with incredible boldness, Dickens snaps us back again to "the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry," the narrator himself, Pip.This movement in and out creates a marvelous sense of the larger savage world and the small scared soul that form the essential focus of the tale, and do it subtly with this implicit, cinematic movement in and out of the action.
Similarly, the third paragraph might readily find itself in many a writer’s Dead Darling file—another error. It’s not just the unnerving description of Magwitch we’d lose. Note the suspense that builds by separating “I’ll cut your throat” from “‘O! Don’t cut my throat, sir,’ I pleaded in terror.” Note also how that tension is created and how it builds. There are no independent verbs in the main clauses of any of the sentences, for the desired effect is one of attenuation—Pip staring in terror at the man emerging before him—and verbs in grammatical structure are the device for conveying movement in time. Omit them, and you're standing stock still.
The next example was one with which more of the crowd was familiar, the first few paragraphs from the second chapter Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon:
A telephone-bell rang in darkness. When it had rung three times bed-springs creaked, fingers fumbled on wood, something small and hard thudded on a carpeted floor, the springs creaked again, and a man’s voice said:
A switch clicked and a white bowl hung on three gilded chains from the ceiling’s center filled the room with light. Spade, barefooted in green and white checked pajamas, sat on the side of his bed. He scowled at the phone on the table while his hands took from beside it a packet of brown papers and a sack of Bull Durham tobacco.
Cold steamy air blew in through two open windows, bringing with it half a dozen times a minute the Alcatraz foghorn’s dull moaning. A tinny alarm-clock, insecurely mounted on a corner of Duke’s Celebrated Criminal Cases of America—face down on the table—held its hands at five minutes past two.
Spade’s thick fingers made a cigarette with deliberate care, sitting a measured quantity of tan flakes down into the curved paper, spreading the flakes so that they lay equal at the ends with a slight depression in the middle, thumbs rolling the paper’s inner edge down and up under the outer edge as forefingers pressed it over, thumbs and fingers sliding to the paper cylinder’s ends to hold it even while tongue licked the flap, left forefinger and thumb pinching their end while right forefinger and thumb smoothed the damp seam, right forefinger and thumb twisting their end and lifting the other to Spade’s mouth.
He picked up the pigskin and nickel lighter that had fallen to the floor, manipulated it, and with the cigarette burning in the corner of his mouth stood up. He took off his pajamas. The smooth thickness of his arms, legs, and body, the sag of his big rounded shoulders, made his body like a bear’s. It was like a shaved bear’s: his chest was hairless. His skin was childishly soft and pink.
He scratched the back of his neck and began to dress. He put on a white union-suit, grey socks, black garters, and dark brown shoes. When he had fastened his shoes he picked up the telephone, called Graystone 4500, and ordered a taxicab. He put on a green-striped white shirt, a soft white collar, a green necktie, the grey suit he had worn that day, a loose tweed overcoat, and a dark grey hat. The street-door-bell rang as he stuffed tobacco, keys, and money in his pockets.
As with the Dickens example, the main focus again resided on the creation of a series of mental images that form a vivid film-like sequence, visually clear in our minds, even including camera angles—the ceiling light shot from below, followed by the close up of the rolling of the cigarette, both mimicking Spade’s own focus.
But there’s more than that, too. Once again, suspense gets created through the use of detail an impatient writer might discard—or never visualize to begin with. Spade rolls himself a smoke right after learning his partner, Miles Archer, has been killed. We don’t know as yet for sure that the two o’clock phone call concerned Archer, and it’s not until later we’ll learn Spade was sleeping with Archer’s wife. Instead we get this enigmatic, slow-motion rolling of a cigarette. Its intrusion into the scene piques our interest, precisely because it doesn’t quite fit. It suggests without stating outright that Spade has something serious on his mind, and yet in the casualness of the activity we also sense no great alarm. There’s even a hint of relief.
Note: Interestingly, the day before, Lawrence Block had remarked that Hammett, sensing that his literary success might well depend on his novels being made into films, deliberately limited his descriptions to only what could be seen and heard. This wasn’t, as many have believed, a nod to Hemingwayesque technique. It was a professional calculation.
In the Q&A that followed his talk, Butler noted that as a teacher in the Ph.D. program at Florida State, he encounters some of the best aspirants to literary fame to emerge from the various MFA programs across the country. And all too often, “They know the second through tenth most important things about writing, but they don’t know the first.” The first, he explained, was that stories are about yearning.
He suggested that genre writers often understand this point well—if they sometimes have an insufficient grasp of the next nine most important things about their craft—because genre often has the yearning built into the premise of the form. Crime fiction is driven by the search for justice, romance novels by the craving for love, science fiction by the need to humanize technology, etc.
His talk burned a nasty little hole in my brain, and as soon as I could I got my hands on a copy of From Where You Dream and I’ve been devouring it ever since.
So, Murderateros -- how does the cinema of the mind guide you in your writing? Do you take time to envision camera angles? Do you consider tempo in your descriptions? Do you play with quick alteration betweeen and long shots and close ups to create a dramatic effect between thematic or narrative extremes?
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There were a great many other excellent presentations at Noircon, including but not limited to:
—Well-deserved awards bestowed on Lawrence Block and Otto Penzler, with interviews of both men, giving Block a chance to, among other things, recount his days as a writer of lesbian romance novels, and Otto an opportunity to discuss how obscenely cheap real estate was when he bought his first store in Manhattan.
—A panel on music with SJ Rozan and John Wesley Harding (who writes crime fiction under the pen name Wesley Stace), complete with songs.
—A wickedly lurid, funny, and confessional true crime panel with Megan Abbott, Allison Gaylin, Wallace Stroby, and Dennis Tafoya.
—A blackly comic panel of cautionary tales from Hollywood featuring Lawrence Block, Duane Swierczynski, Anthony Bruno, and Ed Pettit.
As I said, I had a gas, and I fully intend to return in two years. Even without Lulu Lollipop.
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Blatant Self-Promotion Segment: For all the month of November, Open Road Media/Mysterious Press is featuring 100 titles for less than $3.99, including The Devil’s Redhead at a nifty $2.99.
If you haven’t yet read it, pick it up. If you have, share it with a friend. (Or an enemy. I can live with that.)
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Jukebox Hero of the Week: In tribute to John Wesley Harding, who so graciously regaled us with song, here's "Ordinary Weekend," which he wrote after reading Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me. (In his performance for us, he remarked somewhat sheepishly he should have practiced, and ended up forgetting several verses, only to offer some of the best advice I've ever heard: He said years of performance had made him utterly un-selfconscious about fucking up. Not that anyone cared. We were enthralled):
Note: Much of this same material was also posted by Jeremy on the Bouchercon and Crimespree blogs.
We broke the history of film into five time periods (see below), picked three films from each era, then named our absolute favorites. We then bickered and snickered about each other’s picks, and had a generally grand old time.
The hour deadline prevented us from discussing all but the first two time periods, though, and the last two “conceptual” categories, which we added for fun: Sacred Cow I Would Most Like to Gore and Little Known Film Worth Seeking Out (go to the end for these categories, which are probably the most fun).
The great joy of the panel was shooting ideas back and forth with other obsessive film lovers whose tastes both conformed and contrasted—or flatly contradicted—my own. And I was often glad someone brought up a particular film because it got so close to being one of my top three, and I hated not being able to include it. I wish we could have just hung around and talked movies for hours, because what everyone had to say about film always got my engine running.
But it was also fun to see how vehemently perfectly bright, well-informed people can disagree: Todd praisedThe Silence of the Lambs while Megan considered is a sacred cow in need of goring. Todd reveres Rear Window while that was my sacred cow, etc.
I thought you might enjoy seeing which films got chosen by whom and why. I’ll go through my fellow panelists’ picks after naming my own, which I chose largely to play the crank, the iconoclast, the connoisseur of the obscure—I know, you’re stunned.
Note: This is a tediously long posting, so just scroll through till you see a title you either know about or would like to learn about, or something else catches your eye. Where a film title bears a link, it leads to a trailer or other video concerning the film.
Classics (Pre-1945)
Top Pick:
M (1931) Director: Fritz Lang; starring Peter Lorre
The reason this is my top pick is because it provides one of the greatest performances on screen, ever: Peter Lorre’s confession as the child killer during the trial sequence near the movie’s end. This feverishly impassioned monologue is one of the most psychologically and morally complex in all of film, combining dread with self-pitying manipulation and the very real horror of helpless self-recognition. The film also fuses a brilliant story with a stunning visual technique without sacrificing a gritty urban realism. The irony at the heart of the film—that a child killer so energizes the police, without making them efficient, he obliges the city’s criminals to search for him themselves—is compounded with the resonance of the rise of Nazism. M is by no means an allegory—Lang was far too sophisticated a storyteller for that—but on reflection, even as one continues to root for the criminals, who seem to provide the ironic moral anchor for the film, it’s hard not to recognize an unsettling subtext: The social element that proclaims to want to protect children (while secretly pursuing its own illicit agenda), that goes about it with efficiency and skill and even with the trappings of due process, may in fact be, well, a bunch of criminals. (The fact Lang’s first film in the US after fleeing the Nazis, Fury, would focus on mob justice is hardly surprising.)
Remaining Two of Top Three:
Le Jour Se Leve (1939) Director: Marcel Carné; screenwriter: Jacques Prévert; starring Jean Gabin, Arletty
From the same director/screenwriter team who created Les Enfants du Paradis, a beautiful, tough love story that begins with a murder and ends (surprise!) tragically.
Scarlet Street(1945) Director: Fritz Lang; starring Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, Dan Duryea
Another offering from the great Fritz Lang, this one made in America, and a gritty, uncompromising remake of Woman in the Window (1944), which Lang felt had been sentimentalized and sanitized by studio bigwigs.
Other Panelist Picks:
Megan Abbot:
Top Pick: Double Indemnity (1944) I was with Megan all the way, until she brought up the “vaguely homoerotic rapport” between Fred MacMurray and Edward G. Robinson. What can I say, I just can’t go there, even on a bet, when very drunk. But Barbara Stanwyck is breathtaking, even when she’s guilty as, well, sin. Maybe especially then.
Remaining Two Picks: Roaring Twenties(1939) and Laura (1944)
Russel McLean
Top Pick: Public Enemy (1931) Russel, a Scot, said his idea of America and Americans was largely formed by this film and others like it. "No list is complete without it."
Remaining Two Picks: Murder My Sweet "Dick Powell brings a very different kind of Marlowe to the iconic one we all know from Bogie’s performance."
The Maltese Falcon"With apologies to all those who have recently jumped on the cool-to-bash-the-falcon bandwagon" (meaning David Corbett, who considers it a sacred cow).
Todd Ritter:
Top Pick: Shadow of a Doubt (1943) “Hitchcock's warped love letter to small-town America. Joseph Cotten has never been more menacing and Theresa Wright never more plucky.” (Todd’s a Hitchcock scholar, btw.)
Remaining Two Picks: M“Fritz Lang's dark procedural makes criminals the cops on the hunt for child killer Peter Lorre in pre-war Berlin. No one comes out looking good.”
The Thin Man “As effervescent as champagne and as snappy as a stick of Wrigley. The plot is a throwaway. The keepers here are the dialogue and the chemistry between Myrna Loy and William Powell.”
Wallace Stroby:
Top Pick (tie): Public Enemy(1931) and Dead End (1937): “Crime in a social context: Prohibition and the Depression, and how American gangsters are made.”
Remaining Pick: The Maltese Falcon (1941): “Dashiell Hammett’s world view invades popular culture. An obvious pick, but any film you can easily name multiple characters from 70 years after its release deserves to be included.”
Cold War Crime (1945-1965)
Top Pick:
Il Bidone (“The Swindle”—1955) Director: Federico Fellini; starring: Broderick Crawford, Richard Basehart, Giulietta Masina
Filmed between the shooting of La Strada(1952) and Nights in Cabiria (1956), with a typically beautiful score by the incomparable Nino Rota, it tells the story of an aging smalltime hustler plagued by his own feckless past who seeks to redeem himself by supplying the money for the schooling of a daughter he has rarely met. The story was inspired by anecdotes Fellini heard from a petty thief on the set of La Strada. Bogart was Fellini’s first choice for the film’s “intense, tragic face,” but the actor’s lung cancer made that impracticable. The director recruited Crawford after seeing his image on a poster for All the King’s Men (1949). Plagued by Crawford’s alcoholism, shooting was difficult and critical reception scathing. The film did miserably in Italy and was not distributed abroad until 1964. Pity—it’s a rare gem.
You can watch the movie online in nine ten-minutes segments, starting here.
Remaining Two of Top Three:
Night and the City (1950) Director: Jules Dassin; starring Richard Widmark, Gene Tierney, Googie Withers)
Seriously, this might be my true favorite from this era. A visually stunning film with crackling dialog and mesmerizing performances from some of the greatest British character actors you’ll ever see. But it’s Widmark’s film, and he’s incandescent.
Sweet Smell of Success (1957) Director: Alexander Mackendrick; starring Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis
Okay, it’s not a crime movie, so shoot me. It sure feels like one. Criminals could learn a few things from J.J. Hunsecker (modeled after Walter Winchell) and Sidney Falco. Absolutely some of the best dialog ever written. (“The cat’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river.”… “I’d hate to take a bite out of you. You’re a cookie filled with arsenic.”) Stunning visually, with Lancaster and Curtis in their best roles.
Other Panelist Picks:
Megan Abbot:
Top Pick: In a Lonely Place(1950) A subtle exploration of post-war male violence. Megan admitted this might just be her favorite film of all time, even though as an adaptation from the Dorothy Hughes novel it veers off-track to the point the two versions are irreconcilable. But Gloria Grahame was never better, and Bogart got to play a bad guy (almost).
Remaining Picks: Naked Kiss (1964) —“The eeriest, sexiest first five minutes of a film you’ll ever see,” from the great Sam Fuller—and Gilda (1946).
Russel McLean:
Top Pick: Psycho "With apologies to Todd but to my mind its a goddamn perfect movie."
Remaining Picks: The Killing "The heist is perfection."
A Touch of Evil "Yes Charlton Heston plays a Mexican, but what an opening…"
Todd Ritter:
Top Pick: Rear Window “Hitch's finest hour, with James Stewart and a never-more-luminous Grace Kelly watching the neighbors across the way. Pure cinema. Pure fun. Pure suspense.”
Remaining Picks: The Third Man “A zither-scored tour of war-ravaged Vienna, full of shifting alliances and looming shadows. Orson Welles' entrance is one of filmdom's most memorable.”
Sunset Boulevard “Gloria Swanson's titanic performance anchors this dark-as-night Hollywood noir. Maybe the most cynical movie about the movies ever made.”
Wallace Stroby:
Top Pick: Rififi (1955): “Influenced by American gangster dramas, this brilliant French heist film (directed by Jules Dassin, by then blacklisted from America), it went on to influence a generation of crime novelists (Donald E. Westlake, etc.) and filmmakers (Stanley Kubrick), who in turn influenced more French films, etc., etc.”
Remaining Picks: Kiss Me Deadly (1955): “Atom-age noir: Thuggish detective Mike Hammer chases the “Great Whatsit” and nearly unleashes the Apocalypse.”
The Killing (1956): “The heist as a complex machine, slowly breaking down. Stanley Kubrick plays with time, directing a cast of noir veterans in a script co-written by Jim Thompson.”
Revolution (1965-1980)
Top Pick:
Chinatown (1974) Director: Roman Polansky; starring Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston
My one safe, obvious pick. But it’s a no-brainer. Polansky and screenwriter Robert Towne argued violently over the ending, and parted ways. Polansky’s ending won, and became iconic. (Towne mocked it as “the tunnel at the end of the light,” but decades later conceded it was the right choice.) The story is based in part on Oedipus, with art direction that makes the most of the self-blinding that serves as the core metaphor of the Sophoclean version (note how many times eyes, eyeglasses, windshields, etc., are key to the film—and foreshadow the ending). But the most important and impressive aspect of the film is the way it turns the detective genre on its head. Instead of the PI hero digging deeper and deeper until he uncovers the truth, we see him as intrinsically self-deluded, uncovering clues and unraveling the scam but always missing an essential truth, until he winds up once again in Chinatown as though driven by Nietzsche’s dictum of eternal return.
Two years later, Penn would direct Beatty again in the spectacular Bonnie and Clyde. But this remains a sentimental favorite of mine. With Penn's stunning photography and buzzsaw editing, Eddie Sauter's brutal score (with Stan Getz on sax), it was called French New Wave from Hollywood (and yes, that was intended as a compliment). I saw it maybe five times over a marathon weekend of TV showings in LA, and was mesmerized. Beatty’s performance is every bit as electric as Widmark’s in Night and the City, but in much tighter confines. He plays a stage comic who—for reasons he’s never able to determine—has alienated someone in the Detroit mob, forcing him to flee. He’s trying to pick up his career in Chicago, hoping for the impossible—that he can both be a success and not be noticed. Guess what happens.
Cassavettes is one of those directors you’re supposed to like even if you don’t. The “art as medicine” metaphor—even if you hate it, it’s good for you. Normally I loathe such nonsense, and parts of this film are damn near unwatchable. (If you ever go to a strip club in LA and a guy named Mr. Sophistication is introducing the girls? Run.) But the film is also frightening in ways more conventional films never get to. The emotions are genuine and therefore shocking in places—as when, at an underground casino, a wife derides her dentist husband when they’re brought before a roomful of gangsters to discuss the extent of the man’s losses. She’s clearly, viscerally terrified, and her contempt for her putz of a hubby crackles. So too, the actual murder scene and the subsequent attempt by the gangsters to clean up a situation they thought they had under control—all these scenes generate a kind and a level of fear I just don’t feel often at the movies. So I forgive a lot of cinematic sins that maybe I shouldn’t, especially given how many other great films came out during this era (like Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Dog Day Afternoon, Scarecrow, Cool Hand Luke, King of Marvin Gardens, Serpico, The Godfather—all brilliant.)
Other Panelist Picks:
Megan Abbot:
Top Pick: Chinatown (1974)
Remaining Picks: Mean Streets (1973), Badlands (1973)
Russel McLean:
Top Pick:Point Blank "Lee Marvin embodies the tough guy aesthetic in a way no one else can match."
Remaining Picks: Get Carter"The ultimate in so-called Brit Grit – “Your eyes haven’t changed, still two pissholes in the snow”
In the Heat of the Night"They call me MISTER Tibbs – a perfect film that’s stood up to the test of time, imo."
Todd Ritter:
Top Pick: Chinatown “Forties noir as seen through the haze of the seventies. The script is genius, Polanski's direction rules and Nicholson and Dunaway have never been better. A masterpiece, pure and simple.”
Remaining Picks: The Conversation“Sound is a character in Coppola's other classic from 1974. Captured the paranoia of the Watergate years right as it was happening.”
Dressed to Kill “Violent and absurd. There's not a subtle bone in Brian De Palma's body, and thank God for that. A film worthy of the era in which it was made.”
Wallace Stroby:
Top Pick:Get Carter (1971): “Brit gangster Jack Carter (Michael Caine’s greatest performance) comes home to Newcastle to avenge his brother’s death. An almost perfect film, without a single false note.”
Remaining Picks: Mean Streets(1973): “Dead End, 70s style. Smalltime hoods in Little Italy make choices that seal their fates.”
Rolling Thunder(1977): “Vietnam vet returns to a world he doesn’t understand, hits the vengeance trail with a sawed-off shotgun and a sharpened hook for a right hand. Half arthouse, half grindhouse.”
Reaction: Reagan, Glasnost and the Tech Boom (1980s & 1990s)
Top Pick:
Bellman & True (1987) Director: Richard Loncraine; screenplay: Desmond Lowden; starring Bernard Hill, Derek Newark, Richard Hope
I have sung my praises of this film, and the novel on which it’s based, before on Murderati. It’s not just one of my top five favorite crime films, but one of my top five favorite films of any kind. A British bank caper with a father-son love story at its heart, it’s smart, brisk, unique and moving, with gripping and at times heartbreaking performances from a cast comprised largely of character actors, and a script that strips bare the folly in all human longing but leaves the odd, chimerical dignity of its characters fully if tragically intact.
Remaining Two of Top Three:
Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) Director: James Foley; screenplay: David Mamet; starring: Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Ed Harris, Alec Baldwin, Jonathan Pryce, Alan Arkin, Kevin Spacey)
Again, not really a crime film—though, unlike Sweet Smell of Success, a crime actually does occur and get investigated in the course of the story—but it qualifies because it strips bare the greed, hunger, envy, deceit and rage that motivate so much of the behavior we think of as criminal, reveals how embedded that behavior is in human affairs—specifically business—and shows us how intrinsically human, if also shameful and repellant, those motivations are. When I first saw this movie, I told a friend, “I just saw a monster movie, and all the monsters were salesmen.” Substitute “crime” and “criminal” for “monster” and you’ll see why I include it in this list.
(A note on the director: James Foley did indeed direct crime films, including two of my favorites from this same period: At Close Range (1986)—with Sean Penn and Christopher Walken, call it Redneck Noir—and After Dark, My Sweet (1990)—with Jason Patric (in his first lead role), Rachel Ward and Bruce Dern, my personal favorite Jim Thompson adaptation.)
Garde à Vue (1981) Director: Claude Miller; starring: Michel Serrault, Lino Ventura, Romy Schneider
Another tense, poignant, gripping film that shamefully remains an obscurity. A wealthy socialite, dragged in his tuxedo from a New Year’s Eve Party, is interrogated for the murder of a teenage prostitute. It was remade as Under Suspicion with Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman, but this version is almost unwatchable. The remake removes the key element that makes the original so compelling: It takes place almost entirely at night in the cramped confines of the police station. The claustrophobic effect of that setting is crucial, especially with the chiaroscuro lighting and the spider-with-a-fly patience of the cops. Heightening the tension is the portrayal of the cop by the legendary Leno Ventura, and the socialite by an arrogant, restless, übermasculine Michel Serrault, most famous (ironically) for his quirky, super-femme turn as Albin in La Cage aux Folles. Romy Schneider appears late and only briefly, but she is deadly.
Other Panelist Picks:
Megan Abbot:
Top Pick:Goodfellas(1990)
Remaining Picks: Blue Velvet(1986) and Dressed to Kill(1980)
Russel McLean:
Top Pick: Midnight Run "One of my ultimate comfort movies."
Remaining Picks: Shallow Grave"D’you think I wouldn’t sneak a Scots film on here? For my money the only truly decent film Danny Boyle made."
LA Confidential"Filming the unfilmable and doing it well."
Todd Ritter:
Top Pick: The Silence of the Lambs “Much ink has been spilled about the cat and mouse game played between Jodie Foster's Clarice Starling and Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lecter. The emotional resonance, though, comes from watching Foster as a damaged striver facing down inhumanity everywhere she turns.”
Remaining Picks: Fatal Attraction “The thriller that defined the eighties. It wouldn't be nearly as good without Glenn Close, who infuses a madwoman with humanity while simultaneously scaring the shit out of every American male with a libido.”
Wild Things “The greatest movie Russ Meyer never made. Look past the lesbian liplocks and teacher-student threeways and you'll see a film that sets the bar low but clears it by a mile. Brilliant.”
Wallace Stroby:
Top Pick: At Close Range (1986): Crime as a family affair. Sean Penn and Christopher Walken give two of their best performances as father and son criminals who come to a violent parting of the ways.
Remaining Picks: Goodfellas(1990): The greatest film about workaday gangsters ever made. Brutal, funny, invigorating, exhausting.
Thief (1981): Michael Mann’s first look at the inner life of the high-end professional criminal, vastly superior to his later Heat.
Quite possibly my favorite film of all trime. Despite having so many elements of a crime picture—bank robbery, corrupt cops, underground dog-fighting with gang members putting their pit bulls in the ring, and a former revolutionary turned hired assassin—it's actually a drama of the human heart. (I seem to possess an undying quest to see a crime film where none exists.) But like the other great films from this director—21 Grams and Biutiful—without the crime elements, the movie would lack much of the tension that makes it work. Narratively ambitious—without the preciousness that sometimes mars Tarantino’s efforts—it’s a multi-layered, intertwining story of two couples and a broken father, all searching for, trying to preserve, or hoping to reclaim the great loves of their lives. As the title suggests, it takes an almost dog-like ferocity to pull it off. Because, as the title suggests, love is a bitch.
Remaining Two of Top Three:
The Secret in their Eyes (2009) Director: Juan José Campanella; starring: Ricardo Darín, Soledad Villamil, Guillermo Francella
This time period (2000 to present) presented my biggest problem in picking a top film, because so many of the good films were great, and equally stunning. I love this picture, and consider it almost flawless. Its wedding of past and present into a single seamless narrative, and its subtly underplayed portrayal of political events at the time of the Peron restoration in Argentina, give the film its intelligence, while the love stories at its core, one tragic, one bungled but not yet lost, give it an elegiac heart. Ricardo Darín, like Vincent Cassel, is one of those leading men in the Bogart tradition with an intrinsically flawed face you can’t take your eyes off of. His performances (see also El Aura and Nine Queens) are understated, intelligent, witty and mesmerizing. But it’s not just Darín who makes this film work. The performances are stellar across the board—especially that of Guillermo Francella, an Argentinian comedian in his first dramatic role; and if you don’t fall in love with Soledad Villamil, you just might be an alien life form.
Sexy Beast (2000) Director: Jonathan Glazer; starring Ray Winstone, Ben Kingsley, Ian McShane, James Fox
Another flawless film, imho. The old trope of the gangster who’s left the trade only to get sucked back in gets a stellar makeover in sunny Spain and rain-drenched London. Witty, brutal, gorgeous, with some of the best dialog ever written and Ben Kingsley’s most stunning performance ever—call it the anti-Ghandi—it’s another British bank caper but so much more. Just slightly less narratively innovative than Memento (which came out the same year), it nonetheless moves in and out of present and past with deft fluidity, creating suspense, not confusion. Ian McShane has never been so steely or menacing, James Fox more weasly, Ray Winstone more endearingly rough—and Amanda Redman, as “Dirty Deedee” Dove, will steal your heart, even after the shotgun scene (maybe because of it).
Other Panelist Picks:
Megan Abbot:
Top Pick: Zodiac(2007)
Remaining Picks: Mulholland Drive (2001) and American Psycho (2000)
Russel McClean:
Top Pick: Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang "Perfection – the Russian Roulette scene alone is worthwhile."
Remaining Picks: Narc "The kind of gritty crime drama it feels like we’ve forgotten how to make now."
The Limey "Essentially an update of Point Blank in style – Stamp’s the toughest guy on screen since Marvin."
Todd Ritter:
Top Pick: Zodiac“Not so much about murders than about how those crimes can burrow into the consciousness of a city and stay there for years. Gorgeous and terrifying in equal measure.”
Remaining Picks: Match Point “Woody Allen transplants the plot of An American Tragedy to modern London and lets our anti-hero get away with it.”
Mulholland Drive “Wonderful weirdness from David Lynch. It could be seen as the flipside to Sunset Boulevard. Or it could all be a dream. I don't know, and I don't care.”
Wallace Stroby:
Top Pick: The Pusher Trilogy (1996-2005): “Three films about the Danish drug trade, following different characters in the same environment, hot-wired and supercharged by Drive director Nicholas Winding Refn.”
Remaining Picks: Zodiac(2007): “Real-life noir, scrupulously faithful to the facts of the case. It gets under your skin in a way few movies do, not immediately, but stealthily and insidiously. A puzzle without an answer, a door without a key, an obsession with no catharsis.”
Gomorrah (2008): “The real Godfathers. A multi-storyline crime epic, based on a nonfiction book, about how organized crime corrupts nearly every strata of Italian society.”
SACRED COW I WOULD MOST LIKE TO GORE
Rear Window (1954) Director: Alfred Hitchcock; starring James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Raymond Burr, Thelma Ritter
My problems with Hitchcock are that his films, despite their flawless pacing, brilliant cinematography, heart-stopping surprises and witty repartee, are too cerebral, too contrived, too conspicuously “artful” for my tastes. I rarely stop realizing I’m watching a movie. (I have this same problem with a lot of Tarantino’s films, and with Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges, even though I enjoyed them all.) As I said on the panel, Hitchcock has never broken my heart—though he came close in Vertigo—and this for me is the bright line between very good and great. Admittedly, he’s scared the bejeebers out of me once or twice, largely because I know he doesn’t give a damn about human beings, and will toss a character off a cliff—or Mount Rushmore, or the Statue of Liberty—in a heartbeat. But in Rear Window he completely lost me. I just don’t care. It’s all set-up without a payoff I can buy into, a contrivance not a story, too precious, too neat. I don’t hate it. I just don’t care if I never see it again, and wonder why everyone else seems to venerate it. (It’s Todd Ritter’s favorite Hitchcock film; he considers it “perfect” in every way. That’s why there’s horse races, as they say.)
P.S. Hitchcock’s taste in blonds tends toward the impeccably bland. I loved a woman who called herself a dirty blond mutt, and she was sexier in a heartbeat than Grace Kelly, Kim Novak and Janet Leigh combined.
Other Panelist Picks:
Megan Abbott:Silence of the Lambs (1991) “Phony feminism.”
Russell McLean:Lethal Weapon "The movie that typifies Mel Gibson’s career; a film that somehow blinds people to how truly muddled its plot is and more importantly how clearly awful Mel is in a part that might have been amazing if given to another actor – say Bruce Willis or Jeff Bridges. Its just a mess, and I will never understand how people could have fallen for it at the time and how it spawned so many goddamn (increasingly worse, too) sequels."
Todd Ritter:No Country For Old Men“Sometimes a movie should deviate from the book, even if said book is written by Cormac McCarthy.”
Wallace Stroby:The Usual Suspects (1995): “Half-smart, and nowhere near as clever as it thinks it is. Doesn’t play fair narratively. A piffle of a film, hanging on a single fine performance by Kevin Spacey.”
LITTLE KNOWN FILM WORTH SEEKING OUT
Well, my whole list seems to fall into this category. But for the sake of adding one more—because few joys are greater than discovering something rare you never knew about, but wonder how you missed it:
Cry Terror (1958) Director: Andrew L. Stone; Starring: James Mason, Rod Steiger, Neville Brand, Jack Klugman, Angie Dickinson, Inger Stevens
How, I hear you ask, did a film with a cast like this ever fall between the cracks? Blame the vagaries of corporate distribution. I forget the particulars, though Eddie Muller explained them to me once, but it had something to do with the rights lapsing and the successor no longer existing so no one could assert ownership of the rights to the film—ergo, it languished. Pity. Eddie’s shown it twice at the LA Film Noir Festival, and I saw it on TV when I was a kid. Rod Steiger leads a group of extortionists who kidnap a whole family to dragoon the husband/father (Mason) into their scheme. Neville Brand has never been more sub-humanly creepy (with Inger Stevens in a slip), Rod Steiger scarier, James Mason more haplessly heroic. And Angie Dickinson as the moll: Now there’s a blond you can sink your teeth (or whatever) into.
Good news: The film’s once again available, on DVD, as of September 30th. (I’ve already pre-ordered my copy.)
Other Panelist Picks:
Megan Abbott:Fingers (1978)
Wallace Stroby: One False Move (1992): “Flawless blend of character and action in Arkansas-set crime story about a trio of killers coming home one last time, and a local sheriff (Bill Paxton) who’s in way over his head.” (I totally agree with Wallace on this.)
* * * * *
So, Murderateros—did we miss a crucial film you believe deserved mention? Do you disagree with our logic or our choices? What film would you have fought for had you been on the panel?
* * * * *
Jukebox Hero of the Week: Well, if you've gotten this far, you deserve a cookie. To redeem myself just a bit among those who think of Hitchcock as God—and consider me an apostate, a heretic, a heathen for refusing to genuflect before the altar—and to mend a fence with Gar, who listed Vertigo as a romantic touchstone, let me concede that Hitchcock had, among many other virtues, the best scores of any filmmaker of his time, due to the inimitable Bernard Hermann, my favorite composer of film scores ever, and that the love theme from Vertigo is a particular favorite:
Wednesday, September 14, 2011 at 3:01AMin David Corbett
David Corbett
It’s Wednesday, which means I’m packing my writerly clothing—anything that looks okay wrinkled (jeans, a denim shirt, a Hawaiian shirt--what I wouldn't give for a decent bowling shirt), a pair of suitably retro spectators, the blue guayabera from Mexico—and getting ready to rise tomorrow morning at 4:00 AM to join my fellow crime-writing heathens as we descend en masse on poor, unsuspecting St. Louis to attend the year’s grand event for crime writers: Bouchercon.
As Captain William Lewis gaily quipped when happening upon the same territory after Thomas Jefferson's unconstitutional Louisiana Purchase:
"These are the vilest miscreants of the savage race, and must ever remain the pirates of the Missouri, until such measures are pursued, by our government, as will make them feel a dependence on it..."
Prescient bastard. But I digress.
Sadly, only a handful of the Murderati Mob will be there: Alafair, Alexandra, JT, Zoë, and Jonathan. But a great many other first-rate writers and fans and assorted publishing wonks and weasels and wonderful joes are migrating in, and I’m on two great panels with a number of folks I admire, as well as a few writers who are new to me and whom I’m incredibly jazzed to meet.
The first panel (Friday, 1:00 PM) is titled SHADOWS RISING—Movies for the crime fiction fan, and we will try to come up with a canon of must-see films for the crime buff. It will include a stellar group: Megan Abbott, Russel McLean, Todd Ritter, Wallace Stroby, with Crimespree’sJeremy Lynch moderating.
Trust me: This panel is going to be an unqualified kick in the pants.
We’ve divvied up the history of crime film into five time periods:
Classics (Pre-1945)
Cold War Crime (1946-1965)
Revolution (1965-1980)
Reaction: Reagan, Glasnost and the Tech Boom (1980s & 1990s)
The Reign of Terror (2000 to present)
And added a final category titled:
Sacred Cow We Would Love to Gore
Each of us gets to propose three films from each time period and one sacred cow, and we’ll slug it out as to who has the savviest take on cinematic crime. It’s not as easy as it sounds. I’ve suffered over my choices, and agonized over the ones that didn’t make the cut.
I don’t want to give anything by away blurting out here the films I’ve chosen but let’s just say I intend to be the panel’s contrarian. Unless Stroby beats me to it.
But here's a sampling of the films that made my final cut:
Classics (Pre-1945)
Double Indemnity FuryM
La Bete HumaineScarlet StreetWoman in the Window
LauraPhantom Lady
Cold War Crime (1946-1965)
RififiLe SamouraiTry and Get Me!
Asphalt JungleOut of the PastForce of Evil
Il BidoneNight and the CitySweet Smell of Success
Pickup on South StreetNightmare AlleyOdds Against Tomorrow
Revolution (1965-1980)
ChinatownMickey OneThe Killing of a Chinese Bookie
The GodfatherBonnie & ClydeTaxi Driver
The ClockmakerCoup de TorchonMean Streets
King of Marvin GardensDog Day Afternoon
The Friends of Eddie Coyle
Reaction: Reagan, Glasnost and the Tech Boom (1980s & 1990s)
Donnie BrascoThe GriftersAfter Dark, My Sweet
Mona LisaBellman & TrueThe Long Good Friday
Glengarry Glen RossGarde à VueFollowing
LisboaLA ConfidentialReservoir Dogs
Pulp FictionTrue RomanceJackie Brown
Out of SightThe LimeyDrugstore Cowboy
The Color of MoneyPrizzi’s Honor
The Reign of Terror (2000 to present)
Mesrine, Parts 1 & 2Red Riding TrilogyMemento
El AuraAmores PerrosThe Secret in their Eyes
Sexy BeastAnimal KingdomThe Town
Dirty Pretty ThingsTraining DayLondon to Brighton
The ProphetTrafficIn Bruges
OldboyInfernal AffairsZift
Sacred Cow I Would Most Like to Gore:
InceptionRear WindowMaltese FalconNorth by Northwest
Whew! See what I mean? Hard work. Now—I need a nap and a bowl of Wheaties.
The second panel (Saturday, 1:00 PM) is titled WITNESS TO AN INCIDENT—The Human Element, and will focus on the role of human witnesses—not forensics or other techy whoop-de-doo—in both the real world and crime fiction. And the panel features some of the most impressive bios it's ever been my privilege to be humbled by, belonging to: Deborah Crombie, Clea Koff, Taylor Stevens and Amanda Kyle Williams, with Meg Gardiner serving as moderator.
The keen observer will have noticed that all of the panelists are women, with the sole exception of you know who. Fear not, brave brothers: I fully intend to hold my own. (Wait—not quite sure I worded that as well as I might have…)
I know Deborah, having met her at the Book Passage Mystery Conference a few years back, where we became fast friends. She’s not just a brilliant, best selling writer with an international audience, she’s one of the most charming, generous, sweet-natured human beings you will ever meet. (If only all Texans were the same.)
Clea Koff likes to pretend she’s nervous to be the “newbie” on this panel—afterall, the only thing she’s accomplished in life is getting chosen by the UN International Criminal Tribunal to join a crack team of scientists to go to Rwanda to unearth physical evidence of crimes against humanity. Oh, and she was twenty-three at the time. Her book, The Bone Woman, recounts her experience in Rwanda and also additional work she did in the Balkans on behalf of the UN. (I know. What a lightweight.)
Taylor Stephens is another slacker whose bio is an utter yawn. She grew up in an apocalyptic cult, begging on city streets from Zurich to Tokyo, culminating in four years spent in East and West-Central Africa—the primary setting for her critically acclaimed first novel The Informationist.
Important note: The woman who will be appearing on the panel is Taylor Stevens, the author:
Not Taylor Stephens, the porn star:
If this news comes as a disappointment, my guess is you’re not much of a reader.
Amanda Kyle Williams also likes to play the neophyte debutante, claiming she’s just happy to be on a panel with such experienced old hands—despite having written for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and working as both a private investigator and a court-appointed process server.
Oh, and who gets to corral this herd of cats? Meg Gardiner, another underachiever—Stanford Law grad, Edgar winner, author of nine novels.
What a pack of wannabes.
Seriously: I can only imagine what the visual experience will be for the audience, looking up at four smart, witty, accomplished and attractive women—and wondering who invited Uncle Fester.
If you’re coming to Bouchercon, make sure to come up and introduce yourself. If not, stay tuned. I’m sure one or more of the Murderati Poohbahs will be letting you know right here how it all panned out.
So, Murderateros: What films would you pick as the best in each of the time periods I and my fellow Shadow panelists have designated? What sacred cow crime film would you most like to gore?
What would you like to ask my world-wise partners-in-crime on the Witness to an Incident panel? (I'll try to sneak them in, if Meg will let me.)
*****
Jukebox Heroes of the Week: Well, Bouchercon is one big unabashed bash, more or less, so why not have a party anthem—say the theme from Psycho Beach Party, by the one and only Los Straightjackets:
Quick: What do the following upcoming films and television shows all have in common?
If you said they all feature poster art suitable for the Louvre, you're wrong. And you're blind.
If you said they all feature A-list talent whose work you never miss, well . . . I don't quite know what to say about that. Though the expression "get a life" does spring to mind. (Taylor Lautner??)
If, however, you said all four are burdened by an incredibly unimaginative and dumb-as-a-stick title, you nailed it. And therein lies the tale of this Murderati post.
Several months ago on my own blog, I wrote a post describing how much it mystifies me when creative people consciously decide to attach a one-word, generic title to something they've spent months, sometimes years to produce. This is what I wrote in part:
"Now, I know not every writer cares to spend a thousand sleepless nights trying to come up with a title for their book or film that's as fresh and original as it is memorable. It's a pain in the ass process and, sometimes, it hardly seems worth the effort. . .
"But here's where I'm coming from with all this: A writer busts his ass for months, maybe even years, to write a novel or a screenplay. He puts his heart and soul into the work, trying with all he's got to make it something special, something different, something he and he alone could have written.
"After all that, why on earth would he want to give the work a generic, overused, blatantly obvious title that anybody with a fifth-grade education could have come up with?
"I don't get it."
I was careful to point out in that post that this sort of thing happens far more often in the realms of film and television because the creative process in Hollywood, as Alex and Stephen know far better than I, is almost designed to produce something ridiculously simplistic at every turn, so as not to confuse our feeble minds when it comes time to turn on our TV or buy a ticket at the box office:
"Hollywood has a long tradition of treating the movie-going public like a herd of mindless cows that would forget how to chew cud if you gave them anything other than grass to think about. And its penchant for dumbing down titles to their most obvious and uninspiring form is only getting worse."
And every published novelist knows that the title his book winds up with is not always the one he chose for it, because publishers make the final call on such things. So my gripe is not with authors in any medium who are forced to live with a Dumb-Ass-Title (hereafter referred to as a DAT) by forces beyond their control. Authors who go with a DAT by choice are the ones with whom I take issue.
What, in my opinion, constitutes a DAT in the literary world? The following trifecta of death, "death" in this case being no interest from me whatsoever in reading the book so afflicted:
A length of one word (or two, if you include a preceding and pointless "the"). Think about it --- the entire scope and breadth of your novel can be reduced to ONE WORD? What kind of message is that to be sending to potential readers?
Ubiquity. If the word you choose for your title is as commonplace and ordinary as sliced bread, why should anyone expect your writing to be any different?
And most importantly:
Predictability. "Detective" is a nice word, and it really comes in handy when you write crime fiction, but I think we can all agree that it's rather lacking in multiple meanings, yes? Chances are, if the title of a book is DETECTIVE, its storyline involves someone who could most accurately be described as. . . well, a detective! Big surprise, huh? Yet another way to appeal to potential readers --- announce by way of your book's title not to expect anything unexpected.
To really qualify as a DAT, a title has to meet all three of the criteria above. For instance, BEAT may only be one word (yeah, Schwartz, I'm talking about you), but is that word particularly ubiquitous? And does BOULEVARD immediately suggest what the book is about? The answer in both cases is no, so these titles don't make my DAT cut. (Okay, Stephen, you can exhale now.)
In the comments to my original post, I engaged in a rather lively debate with a crime writer who objected to my assertion that he'd given his latest book a DAT. He argued that the title he'd chosen was in fact an ingenious one because, as readers of the book would discover in the end, it had a secret meaning. I won't rehash all the ways I debunked that argument here, except to say that the cleverness of a title with a "secret" or double meaning is completely lost on somebody who hasn't yet read the associated book --- i.e., somebody cruising the shelves at their local book store looking for something great to read. Like a duck, if it looks like a DAT, sounds like a DAT, and smells like a DAT, people are going to be inclined to assume that it is a DAT, and won't grant you 389 pages to disabuse them of that notion. The time to impress potential readers with your capacity to surprise is at the start of your book, not the end of it, and that start --- even before page 1 --- is your title.
If you're beginning to get the idea I could go on and on about DATs if left to my own devices, you wouldn't be far off the mark. This phenomenon doesn't just confound me, it saddens me a little, in the same way that all avoidable, self-destructive behaviors we humans sometimes engage in do. However, as I've beaten this poor, dead horse into the ground online once already, and don't particularly feel like being the negatron I usually am, what I'd like to do today is turn my old post on its head and devote the rest of this one to singling out some relatively recent crime novel titles that I think are the polar opposite of a DAT. The following are Kick-Ass Titles (KATs), the kind a reader can't help but notice and be drawn to, and in my estimation, all are no less exceptional and creative than the fine novels --- and authors --- they represent.
(As an added bonus, I'm including an Alternative DAT for each, just to demonstrate what might have been, had the gods not smiled upon us all.)
This title has blown me away since the moment I first heard it. Its primary message is immediately and abundantly clear: Somebody in Littlefield's terrific book is about to suffer the effects of a full can of whup-ass. And seriously, what more should the title of a crime novel ever need to say?
Shit. This title ticks me the hell off, and always has, because I wish to God I'd thought of it first. It makes all the jacket copy for Stroby's debut noir thoroughly unnecessary, as everything you need to know about his story is right there: Love; pain; sex; betrayal. No title in the tradition of Chandler and Ross Macdonald could be a more a fitting homage to the masters than this one.
All of Block's titles for his Matthew Scudder novels are memorable --- A DANCE AT THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE, TIME TO MURDER AND CREATE, etc. --- but this one, I think, is his best. Some reference to death in the title of a mystery or crime novel is a no-brainer, but it's hard as hell to work it in in a way that isn't blatantly obvious or unoriginal. Block managed that trick here.
Blondes are a fixture in classic crime fiction, and concrete is often used as a metaphor for the cold, hard city. Put these two things together and you have a title that promises nothing but trouble for a beautiful woman --- and by extension, Connelly's homicide detective Harry Bosch.
One thing a great title does, even as it's offering hints as to what kind of book it belongs to, is raise questions. Note that Child didn't title this Reacher novel 24 HOURS, or 48 HOURS --- it's 61 HOURS. And what in the hell can happen in exactly 61 hours? You have to read the book to find out, and Child is counting on you becoming curious enough to do just that. Clever. Very clever.
Lehane's another author whose book titles all tend to stick in the mind --- MYSTIC RIVER is a prime example --- but this one, for his second Kenzie-Gennaro mystery, which deals with a serial killer who targets children, is my favorite. It alludes to the temptation evil sometimes holds over us all, and what could be a more ominous intro to a crime novel than that?
Nothing conveys life-altering heartache quite like the expression "cut to the bone," and Sakey's title for his debut novel evokes this experience brilliantly. Could there be any doubt that this is a noirish thriller with serious attitude? None whatsoever.
Though Swierczynski is capable of dropping a DAT of his own every now and then --- THE BLONDE? Really? --- more than a few of his titles hit the Kick-Ass Title sweetspot for me. It's a toss-up which title I like better --- this one or POINT & SHOOT --- but they both speak volumes about Swierczynski's old school, pulp-era sensibilities, and the emphasis he places on entertainment above all else.
Actually, my appreciation for this title to Mosley's 2006 Fearless Jones/Paris Minton novel is entirely selfish, because it immediately reminds me of a debut novel near and dear to my heart that was published 19 years earlier:
Remember what I said earlier about THE BARBED-WIRE KISS being an homage to Chandler and Ross Macdonald? Well, that's got to be what this was, right? An homage to me? So I'm flattered. Really. I swear to God.
Alternative DAT: SPOOKED
One last word before I sign out: There's another level to the moronic-title descent into hell that I call "Just Plain Stupid." JPSTs can be of any length, yet still manage to be even more obvious and devoid of originality than DATs, and the reason I chose this subject for today's post is a JPST that's been all over billboards lately that makes me want to tear my hair out, rather than shave it cleanly from my scalp:
Hmmm. You think maybe this film has something to do with horrible bosses? Talk about a title that requires zero brainpower to interpret. The only mystery in it is just how long the geniuses behind it took to come up with it: four seconds or a whopping fourteen?
Pathetic.
Questions for the class: How about you, my fellow 'Ratis? Do DATs make the top of your head come off the way they do mine? If so, name a few that really bent you out of shape. Or conversely, name some titles that you think qualify as KATs instead.
Wednesday, November 14, 2012 at 3:01AM in 
