Neeson is Not Our Scudder

Matthew Scudder, the private-eye protagonist of Lawrence Block’s series of mystery novels, is the alcoholic detective of the movie A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES, based on Block’s book of the same name. Alcoholic? Come to think of it, maybe Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade were too, although they never identified themselves as such, the way Scudder does. Maybe a lot of mystery writers are alcoholics, for that matter. You could call Hemingway an alcoholic (and a misogynist, but let’s not pile on), and he created the Nick Adams stories, and Nick Adams was another hardened, hard-drinking and disillusioned knight in tarnished armor, like a lot of private investigators are.

One of the things a hard-boiled detective story has to do is come up with a detective that is wounded, but in some novel way. Scudder is scarred by the loss of his wife, and the alcohol. Or not by the booze per se, but by how he screwed up his life and those of those close to him with his drinking. And so he must find a new way to deal with the darkness that surrounds him without going to a bar to make it go away. And like all good anti-heroes he insists on a moral code in a universe that seems to be completely unconcerned with any kind morality.

Maybe it is a sign of the times, to have a detective that struggles with an addiction, or some other problem that comes from within. And unlike when Chandler and Hammett wrote of Marlowe and Spade, the ability to consume large quantities of alcohol is no longer considered a sign of machismo. Nowadays, tough guys get help. Still, they sometimes get to kick some ass, too.

Some of the current, or at least relatively recent, private eyes have some other interesting pathologies. Mark Haddon gives us an autistic teenager as sleuth in THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHTTIME, and Jonathan Lethem gives us an orphaned, tic-ing and Tourette-ic one in MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN. On TV, we have “Monk” (OCD), “Ironside” (wheelchair) and probably the weirdest, and most chilling, “Dexter,” who is a serial killer who tracks down other serial killers and kills them.

I don’t think detective mystery writers keep imitating the formula of the flawed and hurting hero just because the two archetypes of the private eye story mentioned above were such. The flawed hero has been around for a lot longer than since the 1930s and 1940s—Achilles suffered from overweening rage and pride (and that unfortunate heel) and Odysseus was a little long on self-regard himself. As was Lucifer in PARADISE LOST. Love for a woman, the femme fatale (Cleopatra, Delilah, even Eve, in a way) is another common problem for the heroic and their existentially disappointed anti-heroic descendants.

Detective story writers have to stick to some of the conventions of the genre, but come up with some interesting variations too. In the book, Scudder has a high class prostitute for a girlfriend (but not in this movie), but she is anything but a femme fatale. In fact, as a fallen woman, she is the least compromised character Scudder encounters in his dark journeys through the rotten (Big) apple. She is a worthy companion for Scudder, and at times is the only thing standing between him and the bottle and the oblivion lurking behind it. In both book and movie, Scudder has a sometime side-kick, a teenaged kid with sickle cell anemia, a computer savant who lives on the streets, named Dante.

The kid is one of the best parts of the movie, a homeless kid who refuses to give in to his illness, or to allow anyone to pity him, who is an avowed vegetarian devoted to drinking a gallon of water a day, and who asks a waitress why she assumes he wants a soda just because he is a poor black kid. The kid is the one connection Scudder seems to have with the rest of mankind, and the two form a motley and misanthropic duo which nevertheless manages to invoke sympathy in the watcher. In good hard-boiled fashion, they take turns pulling each other out of the fire, without acknowledging either a debt or a sense of gratitude to one another. In what is perhaps the best scene of the movie, Scudder convinces the kid in a few tough sentences that carrying a gun around is the best way to get himself killed. Putting together that many words seems hard for the laconic Neeson/Scudder, but he does it because he can’t help but care for the kid.

The story in A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES is not great, but then again, who can even figure out the plots in THE BIG SLEEP or THE LONG GOODBYE or THE MALTESE FALCON, much less miss the plot holes in them?

Early on, we learn that Scudder has a history with the sauce. He is approached by a young fellow from an AA meeting he attended whose brother’s wife has been kidnapped, tortured and killed by a couple of psychopaths. The brother is a drug dealer. The two psychos are floridly sadistic and unglued, which you might expect. Liam Neeson as Scudder goes wandering the city putting together the story on the dastardly duo, which has gone on to kidnap another young girl whom they plan on murdering after they collect a ransom on her. Pretty standard stuff, and without Block’s usual dark humor and Scudder’s acerbic wit.

Neeson is a somewhat menacing presence, but he doesn’t come across as particularly conflicted or guilty about anything, much less tortured. There are only a few scenes about AA, and these are pro forma. On the other hand, he doesn’t beat up an enormous number of guys in spectacular fashion like he does in those TAKEN action flicks, either. It’s kind of a tepid movie as a result.

There are other detective story staples too—there are a lot of night-time scenes, and the daytime ones are of a blighted city landscape, for one. And when Scudder meets and fights the killers in a cemetery there is a voice-over of the ten steps, which is particularly weird and ineffective (as is a scene where, in a departure from the dark, piano-bar kind of instrumentals we get through most of the movie, the killers sit in a truck salivating over a pre-teen aged girl walking her dog, to the tune of Donovan’s “Atlantis”). When one of the psychopaths gets the drop on Scudder, Scudder manages to kill him anyway, while the voice over talks about turning yourself over to a higher power. I am still wondering what the hell that was all about.

Anyway, from there it is pretty de rigueur. Gun battles, a cat and mouse chase, the young associate Dante in danger but managing to show pluck and ingenuity and to help save the day. The homicidal maniacs turn on each other (I guess the old lesson here is there is no honor among thieves, or between sexually sadistic serial killers either) and one offs the other before Scudder catches the survivor. Then, Scudder lets the drug dealer whose wife gets killed early on decide what to do with the remaining killer, leaving him alone with the brute to confront the humanity, or lack thereof, of the both of them. Is revenge justice? Yawn. I don’t know, and the scene was a cliché anyway. I would have preferred something weirdly and darkly funny to happen, but the movie was as serious as a heart attack.

Pretty standard stuff to that point. And then, of course, there is one more expected scene that is supposed to be unexpected. Why can’t anyone tie an effective knot in these movies? The last killer gets away. Temporarily, but he kills the drug dealer (I guess you can’t let a drug dealer live happily ever after, or even just live). Scudder and the savage then have the inevitable fight to the death. Ho hum.

The whole thing left me pretty unmoved. Even Scudder’s guilty past is pretty unimpressive. The guilty act that drives him to reform is a mistake he could have easily been made sober. There is no real moral ambiguity here. Scudder is a force for good, and it seems like Gotham is going to live happily ever after. To make sure we know this, the final scene is of Dante lying on Scudder’s couch as the sun rises in a beautiful, pink sky (over a nevertheless still crummy, scummy city).

Ham-handed, predictable. Neeson is the usual Neeson, which is to say not the Scudder I know from the Block books. That Scudder sometimes barely scrapes through a day sober, and lives in a much more morally ambiguous universe. And he is more of a wise guy, and a guy who is wise, than he is a tough guy. Tough is how Neeson plays him (and how Neeson has played everyone he has ever played) The movie would have made a pretty good movie of the week, maybe a scene from your usual detective TV show, but as a big screen production it was mediocre.

© 2015 Mike Welch

Where to Hide Out

I'm in a good place right now.

As I may have mentioned, I'm trying to write a spy thriller, which is a genre outside of my usual field of expertise. I like to read them, but I've never written one. They need to be highly structured before they can actually thrill. This is a lot of work.

And it's all on spec. Nobody has asked me to do this. I haven't even got an agent, and if I did I would have nothing fit to show her yet.

The way to get things written, as we all know, is basically to apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair. One of the reasons this is working for me right now is sensory deprivation. I quit the TV. We have no TV anymore. My Facebook presence is limited by the number of funny cat videos I can actually absorb. I watch movies only in my living room when we have guests over and get out the projector. As a result my main form of entertainment is making up stuff to go in this book.

And the dreams I have at night. Very vivid dreams, sometimes quite disturbing. I lost a good friend a few weeks ago, and when something as bad as that happens what I usually do is sleep a lot, lose myself in another time period, and write. So here I am, happy as a clam, completely split off from reality. Here's a picture of the model room of the New York Yacht Club, which has hardly changed since 1915. I might as well be there, sitting comfortably in one of those leather chairs, except that I don't think they let women do that.

Also I have new tools. Scrivener, for example, is turning out to be the most wonderful thing, especially for a historical work with a lot of real people in it. Instead of fumbling around amongst a whole file folder of documents looking for my World War I Sabotage timeline, and trying to remember what I named the file, I can simply scroll down the left-hand sidebar of Scrivener and there it is. Together with character notes and Wikipedia entries for Franz von Papen, Karl Boy-Ed, Guy Gaunt, and any number of other folks who were active on the New York espionage scene in 1915. As well as my fictional characters, of course.

Scrivener does wonderful tricks with the word count. You can set a target count for every session. You can set a target count for every scene. You can figure out beforehand where the plot points are supposed to go, mathematically. You want structure? This is structure.

You should try it. You get to play with it free for thirty days. So many bells and whistles! (A great mode for writing screenplays, too.) So far I've written six thousand words on the first draft, and going like a house afire.

© 2015 Kate Gallison

Whistling Something Other Than Dixie

I spent some years of my childhood and adolescence attending school in Jacksonville, Florida. When I entered 7th grade, I attended school at Jefferson Davis Junior High School. I sang in a girls’ choir called the Confederettes.

After I finished at J. D., I enrolled at Nathan Bedford Forrest High School. Our chief rival in football was Robert E. Lee High School. Sports were big at Forrest. We had good football and basketball teams and many early school day pep rallies.

The pep rallies were popular. We would stand quietly as The Star Spangled Banner was played. Then the band would break into Dixie and the crowd went wild. Now I went to three different high schools and ten schools in all during my early life and so I was something of a particpant observer to all of this. I did wonder how black students felt about this glorification of the Old South but I didn’t interview them about it.

Nathan Bedford Forrest was a Confederate general who was reported to have killed black Union soldiers after they surrendered. He went on to become the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Forrest High School reportedly got its name because the Daughters of the Confederacy pushed for it. Other folks, including students, wanted to call it Valhalla High School. Wikipedia tells me that Valhalla is Old Norse for “hall of the slain.”

It also brings to mind Richard Wagner who appears to have had some odd notions about racial purity. In 2014 Forrest High School was renamed Westside High School. This might bring to mind the popular Broadway musical except that nothing about Jacksonville ever reminded anyone of New York City.

There is one other interesting fact. These pep rallies featured another song that students adored—Night Train. It was written by Jimmie Forrest and recorded by many people including Duke Ellington and James Brown.

It's Brown's version that you'll find below:

Stephanie Patterson

Nostalgia, the Season Finale

One of my other quibbles about the current era is that childhood is disappearing. Kids don’t just get up on a summertime morning and get on their bikes to round up their friends and play ball, or go fishing, or to the movies. Everything is sponsored and supervised, chaperoned and “for the kid’s own good,” and development, which to me guarantees that it won’t do any good and will cause no development. My other nephew Kevin was on a travelling basketball team before he was even a teenager. Kids spend the summer practicing the violin or competing in swim meets, being tutored for the SATS, or working in a soup kitchen so it will look good on their transcript when they apply for college.

It seems there is something good about kids being removed from the world of adults for long periods of their adolescence. Let them figure it out for themselves. And let them critique us while they do so. Huckleberry Finn escapes from the “sivilizin” influence of Aunt Polly, and Holden Caulfield wanders Manhattan during the Christmas Season alone, his encounters with adults, teachers, nuns, and the mothers of classmates all comically absurd or tragic. He is only safe and happy with his little sister.

Let Ryan spend the hours I did on the playground, alone with my dreams except for the ghostly apparitions that defended me as I drove to the rim. What dreams do kids get now, except ones that are manufactured for them?

And what kind of world are we leaving them? Baby Boomers, what have we wrought? All that idealism, and sex and drugs and rock and roll, came to this? Dancing with the Stars? Survivor? The Biggest Loser? Obsessions with the Kardashians, and with Bruce Jenner as a woman? Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have gone on for ten years, with nothing to show for it and no one screaming about it because it is not their sons and daughters who are dying there, but the urban poor who have no better alternative than to sign up and take their chances? We are less concerned with feeding the poor than ever, and there are going to be a lot more poor as time goes on.

It’s not just the entertainment industry that has gone south. We were shocked by Watergate, at least a little, but now there are scandals worse than that in the news daily. The government continues to facilitate the sinful financial shenanigans of the rich. And a credulous country stands by—The S and L scandal, Enron, the subprime mortgage debacle. And the government keeps telling us that if it weren’t for the War on Terror we would all be blown to bits. And so they take more and more of our freedom away in the name of freedom. How do you argue against something like that? It is like George W Bush defending his service in the Texas Air National Guard by pointing out that the North Vietnamese never attacked Houston.

Everyone seems to be a fanatic, or has become fanatical in their opposition of those they would consider fanatical. Conspiracy theorists all—the vaccine naysayers, the ones who insist President Obama is not a citizen, those who state flatly that AIDS was created by white scientists in order to infect blacks. Then there is David Koresh, and Scientology, Timothy McVeigh, our unwillingness to restrict gun sales and ownership. And finally there are those whackos who put their faith in charlatans, those who spend all their time and money on doctrines that tell them how to succeed without spending any time and money on succeeding. It works, if you are the one selling the book.

I can’t help but think that everything now is bread and circuses. Distractions to divert us from what really matters. We even have gladiatorial combat, in the form of mixed martial arts, where serious and even fatal injury is almost a surety. Boxing is bad enough (although I am a fan) but letting guys and girls fight with what are basically their bare hands while using use their feet and elbows, and allowing them to “choke each other out” is so beyond the pale that I am disgusted.

And how about these gripes: Arguing about illegal aliens while our children are among the most poorly educated in the first world. Ignoring the fact that we incarcerate more of our population than any other democracy in the world. That we have the highest percentage of the obese and the highest infant mortality rate in the first world, and yet go on and on about how we are the best country on earth, as if being founded on democratic principles was a guarantee that you will remain a democracy, and that the above problems can all be ignored since we all still have the vote.

Yes, there are those who still cry out for social justice. But not as many and not as loudly as in days gone past. And more and more we are not marching to free others but to make sure that we get ours. In a culture of victimization, we are suing and whining about what we deserve. I swear that it is as if everyone feels that every time life proves to be not fair, it means that somebody needs to compensate you for that.

I was too young to have to fight in Viet Nam. So I don’t speak from a place of piety and righteousness. I sometimes smile sadly at myself when I make my meager contributions to the Sierra Club, Amnesty International, The Food Bank. But at least I recognize the value of sacrifice.

And what of the idea that this generation feels that it is owed a living. I don’t know if that is true. My niece and nephews compete for unpaid internships. All that education and they have less opportunity than we did. Will we reach the point where an education is no longer a guarantee of a middle class lifestyle? I think we will. When Ryan is 52 like me, I am afraid he will still be renting, or just going out on his own, having lived with my brother until my brother and his wife have moved on from this world. I hope not, but if he does, at least he will be entertained.

Yes, we had selfishness and shallowness in the mid 70s. In some ways, it was the bitter end of the 60s and to postwar prosperity. The return of Ronnie Raygun (Reagan) in 1980. Stagflation. Inanity on TV. But the news was the news, and it was separate from, and expected to be separate from, entertainment. Now I don’t see the difference.

OK, that’s it. It’s not that I think today’s youth are any less intelligent or compassionate or self-sacrificing than past generations were. But they need to be less distracted by what doesn’t matter, and more aware of what does.

© 2015 Mike Welch

Spanish Tortilla (Potato Omelet)

Harold took a picture of the dinner I gave him the other night, and when I asked him why he did that he said it was for his lawyer. Luckily, he was kidding. (Neither of us really wants to go through all that again, and besides, we still like each other.) No, he was taking the picture for the recipe database he keeps on his computer called "Kate and Harold's Recipes."

I wish I could hook you up with the entire database. Someday, maybe, when he installs a server in the house and I get a bit more technically sophisticated. (Hey, it could happen, even at my time of life.) Failing that, I'm going to give you my recipe for Spanish Tortilla right here, having had one or two requests for it. It's a great recipe for when you have nothing in the house to eat except eggs, onions, and potatoes. And olive oil and salt. Maybe a little pepper. It always takes half an hour longer to cook than you think it will.

Spanish Tortilla:

Heat in your trusty cast iron frying pan

Two tablespoons of olive oil

add

A big onion, sliced thin

Cook until soft, about twenty minutes, reducing the heat as they cook. Put the onions in a bowl.

Add to the pan and heat,

Three more tablespoons of olive oil

Put in the hot oil

Two big potatoes, or six little bitty ones, peeled and sliced thin. If the potatoes are small and the skins are tender you can leave the skins on. Cook, turning, until brown. Drain on paper towels.

Add to the onions,

Six large eggs
1/2 teaspoon salt
Ground black pepper to taste

Sprinkle the potatoes with salt and ground black pepper to taste. Add to the egg mixture.

Heat the pan. When hot, put the egg mixture in and reduce the heat. Shake the pan from time to time but otherwise do not disturb the omelet. When it's cooked on the bottom—browned a little bit—put the pan under the broiler to cook the top. Cut in wedges and serve. Mighty tasty.

Kate Gallison