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| 0451496108
| 9780451496102
| 0451496108
| 3.58
| 1,987
| Mar 21, 2017
| Mar 21, 2017
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it was ok
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My introduction to the fiction of Melissa Scrivner Love is Lola. Published in 2017, this should've been in my wheelhouse: the power behind a tightly k
My introduction to the fiction of Melissa Scrivner Love is Lola. Published in 2017, this should've been in my wheelhouse: the power behind a tightly knit drug ring in South Central L.A. is the twenty-three-year-old Lola, girlfriend to the gang's public-facing leader. There are a lot of thrillers or mysteries about women investigating bad behavior, but a much smaller sub-genre feaaturing women behaving badly: the con artists, killers, or queenpins. Lola proudly belongs in this second class, but its summary prose and plot-heavy story had me skimming through it in a day. The first major problem with Lola is that Love--a writer on the TV series CSI: Miami and Person of Interest making her debut as a novelist--tags a lot of her dialogue with explanations about what's going on between the ears of her protagonist, translating plot or character development like a sign language interpreter would for the deaf. I don't want to read a summary, I want to experience an author's story through dramatization. Excessive telling also kills any momentum. This is not an enjoyable novel to read. Love has to know that the A-class of the drug kingpin sub-genre is Breaking Bad and its spinoff, Better Call Saul. The plot machinations her novel lean so heavily on are just not interesting: Lola's gang has been given territory in exchange for servitude to middle management of the Mexican cartel. Considered expendable, they're ordered to take out a rogue distributor and find out who his supplier is, but Lola's kid brother screws up the operation, giving the gang 72 hours to recover the cartel's product or they'll torture Lola to death. Unlike Don Winslow, Love doesn't possess the punchiness or pathos to tell a compelling story in this milieu. Given that disappointing a drug cartel guarantees many fates worse than death, Lola isn't confronted with enough tests. She isn't forced to make a tough choice. She isn't tasked with developing new skills. I skimmed through to the ending, spoiled by the presence of a number in the title. As readers, we know Lola is in no danger of meeting a tragic end and if she did, the reader isn't given enough reason to care. First paragraph: Lola stands across the craggy square of backyard she shares with Garcia. He mans the grill, rusted tongs and Corona with lime in hand, making the center of a cluster of men, their biceps bare and beaded with sweat. Crenshaw Six tattoos evident in their standard uniform of wife-beaters and torn cargo pants. If Lola were alone with Garcia, she would take her turn over the smoking meat, too, but as afternoon transform Huntington Park from light to shadow, Lola stays away from the heat. Her place now is at the center of a cluster of women, their necks craning toward any high-pitched squeak that might be gossip, each one standing with a single hip cocked, as if at any second someone might place a sleeping child there for comfort. Memorable prose: The only people who knock on front doors in this neighborhood are cops who've exchanged their battering rams for bad news. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 27, 2024
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Apr 27, 2024
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Dec 16, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 0593187733
| 9780593187739
| 0593187733
| 3.17
| 1,649
| Nov 17, 2020
| Nov 17, 2020
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it was ok
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Market research read. If anyone knows any novels published 2019 forward about women plotting to commit or caught up in crime, let me know. The Lady Ups Market research read. If anyone knows any novels published 2019 forward about women plotting to commit or caught up in crime, let me know. The Lady Upstairs is the debut novel by Halley Sutton, a frequent contributor to the CrimeReads website. Published in 2020, I had high hopes for this due to its terrific cover design (by Erika Verbeck) and promise of a noir-soaked thriller about a blackmail agency in L.A. First-person narrative, while not a dealbreaker, signaled trouble. Even when a narrator is delightfully peculiar, or wields snark like a superpower, first-person often runs its course by the 30% mark. A novel is a long time to spend in someone else's thoughts or opinions, if the author isn't bringing much else to the potluck. Sutton's narrator, Jo, is about a tenth as witty or clever as most narrators. Jo spends most of the novel drinking with her gal pal Lou, who works with her in an employment agency that serves as a front for "the Lady Upstairs," their mysterious boss who runs a blackmail ring and who Jo has never met. A blackmail ring should inspire a harrowing paranoid filled thriller or mystery, but Sutton doesn't offer the reader much in the way of an exciting plot. Jo talks. And drinks. And haphazardly puts together honeypot schemes using other women. And it's all very boring. The novel's irreparable flaw is telling instead of showing. An incessant amount of dialogue is accompanied by what Jo thinks this means or that indicates or what might be going on here. This overwriting completely kills whatever tension might be building in the scene. There is entirely too much editorial aside, too much of the Writer, for a novel that has a handful of characters and isn't complex. Two stars for some well-written description and enough sleaziness to keep me engaged, though I skimmed often. I did want to find out what tragedy might befall Jo. Neither the climax or the ending are satisfying. ...more |
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1
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Dec 20, 2023
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Dec 25, 2023
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Dec 15, 2023
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Paperback
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| 3.48
| 94,926
| Jun 07, 2022
| Jun 07, 2022
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did not like it
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My introduction to the fiction of Kirsten Chen is Counterfeit. Published in 2022, this novel was mentioned by a literary agent--not Chen's--I'm submit
My introduction to the fiction of Kirsten Chen is Counterfeit. Published in 2022, this novel was mentioned by a literary agent--not Chen's--I'm submitting my work to as being an example of the type of "secrets and lies" suspense novel she loves, so I wanted to read it. Upmarket fiction, complicated women, suspense where you get to know the characters, all of these boxes check what I plan to submit. I abandoned this one on page 50/274. Summarization vs. dramatization. The author tells the reader everything. We're told about a law school grad living in San Francisco who's given up her career to raise her tyrannical two-year-old with her nanny while growing distant from her surgeon husband. We're told about the reunion with a mysterious college roommate who invites her to join her operation in trafficking counterfeit luxury goods. We're not shown anything. The telling is so overwhelming that Chen doesn't even use quotation marks for dialogue. The novel is just a run-on recap of action or dialogue. Several days after the Neiman's fiasco, Winnie called me to apologize. She said she hadn't been thinking straight. Dealing with Guangzhou remotely was such a colossal headache that the stress had gotten to her. She was about to pay top dollar for a shipment practically sight unseen--she cut herself off then. You've made your views clear, she said, so that's the last thing I'll say about your work. But, Ava, I want you to know that I've loved spending time with you and Henri. I hope we can remain friends. I don't want to read Cliff Notes, I want to read the original version. Foreshadowing indicates the main character is being questioned by police, but is glib beyond the point anyone being questioned by a detective would be, especially if she'd committed a crime. I generally dislike foreshadowing due to how amateurish it often feels, and unnecessary. 70% of the first fifty pages involves the tantrums the main character's infant is throwing. No judgment here, but I lost interest in the main character due to how incompetent she appears to be in parenting, requiring a full-time Mexican nanny to help her not quell her son's outbursts. First World problems: Main character unfulfilled giving up a legal career to be a mother and wife, as well as grow distant from her surgeon husband, who's working surgeon hours to give them the lifestyle she covets. Can authors either pretend not everyone graduates from Stanford, marries a doctor, and hires a nanny to help them manage the household, or, make me care? Through fifty pages, Counterfeit isn't suspenseful, so to call it a thriller would be a stretch. It doesn't present a crime or a puzzle to be solved, precluding it from mystery. It isn't funny, so it's not comic. There aren't any aliens, robots, or time travelers, so it's definitely not science fiction. What is this? Boring. This is not a debut, it just reads like one, so I'll have to give it my usual rating when I abandon a book. This is an unpopular opinion. Chen has drawn admiration from a top literary agent who probably wishes she represented her, as well as selection for Reese's Book Club, so, more power to her. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 27, 2024
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Feb 27, 2024
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Dec 14, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 0316457914
| 9780316457910
| 0316457914
| 3.75
| 8,756
| Jan 10, 2023
| Jan 10, 2023
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it was amazing
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Everybody Knows is the second novel by Jordan Harper and surpasses his excellent debut She Rides Shotgun as exhilarating crime fiction and the epitome
Everybody Knows is the second novel by Jordan Harper and surpasses his excellent debut She Rides Shotgun as exhilarating crime fiction and the epitome of Los Angeles noir. Published in 2023, the book weaves the investigations of a publicist and her ex-lover, a private security contractor, and is one of those I stayed up past my bedtime to finish. And I rarely miss my curfew. Writing in close third person, Harper begins Everybody Knows alternating between two equally compelling narratives: Mae Pruett is a publicist entrusted with catching and killing stories damaging to the reputations of her firm's wealthy clients. Mae's boss asks her to meet him at the Beverly Hills Hotel for a drink, triggering concern. Rather than solicit her sexually, he proposes partnering with him on something he's working on off the books. Mae senses blackmail, but before she can find out what he's got his big toe in, her boss is gunned down by a man with gang affiliations. The LA County Sheriff's Department catches and kills the shooter, with what to Mae's trained ear sounds like a cover story. Ex-sheriff's deputy Chris Tamburro works for the private security firm BlackGuard as hired muscle. He's the guy wealthy men call when they need to send a message to someone who won't file assault charges. BlackGuard's owner summons Chris to his home and employs him to use his contacts in the LASD to find out whether the shooting is on the up-and-up. Mae and Chris soon discover they're pursuing the same answer and work together to get to the truth. Harper exhibits great finesse articulating the cynicism of his characters as they sift through the garbage of some of the worst human beings in Los Angeles County, which puts them in the running for worst human beings on Earth. He writes like a thief, breaking into mansions and reporting back on what he found in the bedrooms and closets. -- Blackmail isn't unheard of in the black-bag world. Shakedowns happen. Too many secrets worth too much money float through people's hands. Too many cell phone videos and scorned employees. Usually the shakedowns happen UNSAID. You triple-charge the client and dare them to ask you why. The bill is saying here is what the secret is worth. -- Here’s what being an ex-cop teaches you: There’s all these invisible walls that keep everybody in line. And if you refuse to see them, they just aren’t there anymore. Once you walk through the walls, they never come back up again. Harper's choice of narration limits the whiplash of head-hopping I usually experience with books that bounce from narrator to narrator. There's some summarization, but the plot is so crackerjack that I didn't mind some telling here or there where showing might've been more compelling. I didn't know where the story was headed or what might become of the protagonists. While I usually dislike novels that fabricate celebrities--Harper name drops real ones who aren't required to contribute depraved behavior--those in Everybody Knows are credible. Thinly veiled versions of tweener sitcom producer Dan Schneider and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein are featured. Disgust rises, like it should in great fiction. In addition to depicting how a conspiracy works--things go UNSAID instead of said out loud--the book's refrain is that in LA, nobody talks, but everybody whispers. Rather than titillate with sleaze, Harper offers the only way for an industry--which among many things, preys on child actors--to change is for the whisperers to go public with how they participated. Easier said than done. Non-Angelenos might skim the descriptions of neighborhoods or freeways, but I loved seeing details of my city, accurately reflecting how spread out LA is, why Hollywood is completely different than Brentwood, and why Venice has a whole other vibe from Koreatown. Ignore the terrible cover art. Wildfire, not earthquake, is illustrated by Harper as the region's most disruptive natural disaster. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 19, 2024
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Mar 22, 2024
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Jan 13, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 1616205628
| 9781616205621
| 1616205628
| 3.29
| 3,904
| Jun 06, 2016
| Jun 07, 2016
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did not like it
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My introduction to the fiction of Gina Wohlsdorf is her debut novel Security. Published in 2016, this was hyped by CrimeReads, whose standards, I'm le
My introduction to the fiction of Gina Wohlsdorf is her debut novel Security. Published in 2016, this was hyped by CrimeReads, whose standards, I'm learning, for a good thriller seem to be that it's not a telephone or a cow but a book. Recommended three times ("9 Crime Novels You Should Read In August," "Six Great Novels with Mysterious Protagonists," "Six Thrillers That Use Unusual Structures To Build Suspense"), the story seems to involve a luxury hotel in Santa Barbara which on the eve of its grand opening is plagued by a killer on the loose. What's going on or what the nature of reality is seem to be at play, but I abandoned this on page 36/229 due to its perplexing points of view, unconventional formatting, bewildering action and superficial characters. The author tips her hat to Daphne du Maurier and Rebecca, but that was a novel with concise and powerful prose, excellent dialogue and vivid characters. We wanted to figure out what type of novel it was exactly--gothic romance, murder mystery, ghost story--because the scenario was so intoxicating. Reading Security is like being hung over. Wohlsdorf introduces a hotel manager named Tessa who seems to be the protagonist. A daredevil who may be either a foster brother or ex-boyfriend shows up to follow her on her rounds. The hotel's owner has personally berated every employee before leaving for the day, you know, like wealthy men do. A killer (referred to as The Killer) wearing a Michael Myers mask speaks in first person. A chef darts out of a door and slices Tessa's hand with a knife accidentally then farts while she continues on her rounds with the daredevil following her around for God knows why. At the 15% mark, I had no idea if this was a slasher movie script in book form, a video game simulation, or a dream. I am not at all the reader for these postmodern slasher novels like The Last Final Girl that attempt to reimagine what a novel is, not because I dislike '70s or '80s slasher movies, but because I hate writing that calls attention to itself. I don't want to read a construct, I want to read something real. This book seems to have designs to be a puzzle for reader. That's easy: puzzle me whether the author has ever read a book. I see no evidence Wohlsdorf has. ...more |
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1
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Apr 12, 2023
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Apr 12, 2023
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Dec 27, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 006265635X
| 9780062656353
| 006265635X
| 3.59
| 2,614
| Nov 07, 2017
| Nov 07, 2017
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it was ok
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My introduction to the fiction of Ivy Pochoda is Wonder Valley. Published in 2017, this is literature (I'd shelve it as fiction as opposed to mystery/
My introduction to the fiction of Ivy Pochoda is Wonder Valley. Published in 2017, this is literature (I'd shelve it as fiction as opposed to mystery/ suspense or crime) that starts off well, with an attention-grabbing prologue and excellent writing. The prose is sharp, almost journalistic, propelling the story forward. Pochoda hops between characters and timelines, but maintains one consistent narrative voice throughout. But as the book went on, my attention waned. Then it became the sort of novel I tend to hate because of how improbable it came off. The story begins in Los Angeles of 2010 during morning rush hour at the four-level interchange where the Pasadena Freeway meets the Hollywood Freeway. Tony is a family man on his second chance after he derailed a promising legal career. Ren is a young ex-con driving a stolen car. Blake is a career criminal who buys prescription drugs off residents of Skid Row and sells them in the suburbs. They bear witness to a man jogging naked through traffic. Tony abandons his car in an attempt to join the mystery man, only to be tackled by cops in MacArthur Park. The naked runner disappears. Jumping back in time to 2006 and the town of Twentynine Palms, Britt is a college tennis player who fled a car accident in which her passenger may or may not have been killed. She ends up in the middle of nowhere, also known as Wonder Valley, a chicken farm whose patriarch leads a loosely structured cult, permitting those lost in the desert to camp at the farm, help with chores and find themselves at his evening group therapy sessions. His fifteen-year-old sons James and Owen search for themselves in their own way. Meanwhile, Blake and his murderous best friend Sam make their way to Wonder Valley, laying low from the law. Pochoda's prose is economical, descriptive and has strong momentum as far as language. This is a novel that deals with complex urban issues with prose anyone who finished eighth grade should be able to follow. I liked that. The best sections are those set on Skid Row, where Ren searches for and then tries to rescue his mother. Here are a few rules to live by: Keep one eye in front, the other in back. Avoid the worst of the addicts. Avoid the slingers. Avoid those out to exploit whatever remains of you. Find the right crew--people who will look after you, who are down but not entirely out, who are trying to elevate, to get housed, to get their medical needs looked after. Find the neighborhood's activists, the men and women trying to make Skid Row a better place, who fight against the thousands of tickets given to the homeless for loitering, for the public possession of their own private property, for jaywalking, who fight for the liberties and human rights of the undomiciled. Confusion set in for me over why characters were where they were. A college athlete crashes her car and then wanders into the desert to join a cult. The son of the cult leader is too sensitive to participate in the chicken harvest, but shoots a hawk out of the sky, runs away and moves in with two hardened criminals. A man is unhappy so he abandons his car on a freeway. Real people murder their spouse or rip off drug cartels, but they're not impulsive enough to abandon their cars and wander Los Angeles on foot. This happens in movies like Falling Down making a point about how apocalyptic L.A. is. Melodramatic nonsense is what it is. The college athlete would favor community service over hiding in the desert with a cult. The son would probably process his angst quietly through a friendship or mentorship rather than hiding in the desert with criminals. The unhappy man would've driven somewhere in his car rather than abandon it. Those are real outcomes to real problems, but this novel is rhetorical. Pochoda writes about Skid Row in a way that made me believe she had been there, which is commendable. I can't say the book is. Wonder Valley is ultimately a sketchy perspective on Southern California. Characters are uniformly worn down like #2 pencils that have been through too many tests. They're worn down by bad decisions, worn down by their pasts, worn down by the company they keep, worn down by the elements. This is true for people all over the world, but not all people. The human experience is a lot more diverse and so is L.A. Fiction trying to convince me that people are always at their worst is as shallow as fiction trying to convince me people are always at their best. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 27, 2023
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Mar 04, 2023
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Dec 24, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 0425264955
| 9780425264959
| 0425264955
| 3.72
| 743
| Apr 01, 2014
| Apr 01, 2014
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it was ok
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Imagine you have two friends. One is in trouble a lot. Let's call her "Angelina." She rebels against virtually every rule her affluent parents--both a
Imagine you have two friends. One is in trouble a lot. Let's call her "Angelina." She rebels against virtually every rule her affluent parents--both attorneys with little inclination toward parenting--could set for her, has been ejected from every private school she's been enrolled in and fired from every job she's ever held. Unsolved crimes such as destruction of property seem to follow Angelina around. Jail doesn't seem to intimidate her. She is a subject matter expert on death metal, dye-making processes and locks. Then there's "Anne." She is very well-behaved and always has been. Her parents are corporate middle managers who were very attentive to her growing up. Anne was a pretty good student who graduated from a fine public college and has opportunities to work in a legal or accounting firm, where by virtue of hard work and diligence she can earn a nice living, perhaps one day own property in California. Anne has a nice boyfriend she met at a trade convention, drives a Prius and treats others very nicely. Which of the following statements is more true for you? "I'd like to hear more about Angelina." Or, "I'd like to hear more about Anne." Unfortunately, the first novel I've read by Naomi Hirahara is all about Anne. Published in 2014, Murder on Bamboo Lane is about an LAPD bicycle cop in her early twenties who gets drawn into the homicide investigation of a former classmate. The bicycle cop's name is Ellie Rush, but she is "Anne" by any other name. Ellie doesn't drink, smoke, gamble, use profanity, sleep around or abuse her authority, what little of it she has holding the rank of "Police Officer II." This is very proper behavior for a rookie cop, particularly one who's aunt is Assistant Police Chief of Los Angeles. Good for Ellie. I did not want to hear any more about her. Hirahara is the author of two wickedly good short stories--The Chirashi Covenant and Number 19--which were among the very best of two different collections of Los Angeles noir I've read. Her novel isn’t a bad witch, it’s a good witch (yawn). Ellie is surrounded by family, a BFF, college friends, her supervisor and a dog who are all very good. There's a corpse, but no one Ellie or the reader will miss (thank goodness!). Other than chasing a sixty-year-old anticommunist down the Bunker Hill Steps (Ellie takes the escalator, thank goodness!) doesn't encounter physical or existential danger. I skimmed this novel from middle to end. Hirahara, who grew up in Pasadena, incorporates astute descriptions of Los Angeles, as well as introduces a multiethnic female protagonist (white father, Japanese American mother). History doesn't play the role it does in a lot of L.A. based mysteries, though Hirahara has written novels that take place in the past. I'd be willing to give one of those a shot. Murder on Bamboo Lane is so cozy, so glib (Ellie narrates the story in first person in a very casual manner) and so ho-hum I couldn't possibly recommend it. "Angelina" sounds vaguely like Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis) from the AMC series Halt and Catch Fire. Cameron was a gifted computer programmer who helped clone an IBM computer, slept with her boss, designed games, launched one of the first online chat startups and departed her own company under dramatic circumstances. She was a Viking funeral who always perked me up when she came around. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 2023
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Jan 02, 2023
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Dec 15, 2022
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 1250301831
| 9781250301833
| B07QSPPLQQ
| 4.09
| 3,388
| Feb 04, 2020
| Feb 04, 2020
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really liked it
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My introduction to the work of Sam Wasson is The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood. Published in 2020, the book covers the making
My introduction to the work of Sam Wasson is The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood. Published in 2020, the book covers the making of Chinatown, cited by many as the greatest screenplay ever written. Even more so than Peter Biskind's supreme account of 1970s Hollywood (Easy Riders, Raging Bulls), Wasson recreates entire conversations. I found that approach a little dubious, got accustomed to it and most enjoyed the chapters devoted to author Robert Towne's writing process and the genesis of his script, particularly the help he received from his friend Edward Taylor, girlfriend Julie Payne, dog Hira and director Roman Polanski, uncredited for his work on the script. -- "You had Paris in the 20s, Hollywood in the 60s," said record producer Kim Fowley. "And you wanted to get there because these places had hope. If you could get the bus ticket to get to paradise, even if you were a waiter, at least you were there." L.A.'s music scene, Fowley added, was so hungry for talent that "anybody who had charisma or a line of bullshit could walk into any record label and get a deal--maybe just one record, but that's how it worked." -- Towne had never read Raymond Chandler before--his old roommate, Edward Taylor, was the big mystery reader--it was the loss that got him. Chandler's detective novels preserved prewar L.A. in a hard-boiled poetry equal parts disgusted and in love, for while Chandler detested urban corruption, the dreaming half of his heart starved for goodness. Poised midway, the city held his uncertainty; Philip Marlowe, his detective, bore its losses. "I used to like this town," Marlowe confessed in The Little Sister in 1949. "A long time ago. There were trees along Wilshire Boulevard. Beverly Hills was a country town. Westwood was bare hill and lots offering at eleven hundred dollars and no takers. Hollywood was a bunch of frame houses on the interurban line. Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but goodhearted and peaceful. It had the climate they just yap about now. People used to sleep out on porches. Little groups who thought they were intellectual used to call it the Athens of America. It wasn't that, but it wasn't a neon-lighted slum either." "In reading these words and looking at these pictures," Towne said, "I realized that I had in common with Chandler that I loved L.A. and missed the L.A. that I loved. It was gone, basically, but so much of it was left: the ruins of it, the residue, were left. They were so pervasive that you could still shoot them and create the L.A. that had been lost." -- Nicholson was playing tennis at Quincy Jones' when Towne first proposed the idea. "Look," Towne said. "We can't get The Last Detail going right now. What if I write a detective movie for you? It'll be L.A. in the thirties." "Sure. Sounds great. What's it about?" "I don't know." Then: "Water." Jack would be Towne's detective. That right there gave him a clue to the character. Nicholson, Towne knew, was a popinjay, a clothes horse. He loved his shoes, his vintage Hawaiian shirts, and leather jackets. Towne remembered Nicholson admiring himself in the mirror. "Look at my perfect teardrop nostrils," he would say, smiling. Towne's detective would have a little of that vanity. He would mind his hair, his fresh pressed suits, his Venetian blinds. He would be class conscious, maybe a little Hollywood, and if those qualities opposed traditional concepts of a movie detective--gruff, high-minded, ascetic--all the better. This detective would be different. Towne said, "[In] most detectives I have ever seen--[and] in Chandler and even Hammett--all the detectives are too gentlemanly to do divorce work. 'If you want someone for that go down the block.' But I knew in fact that that's mostly what they did." For his detective, Towne would go against genre; his detective would do divorce work. Unlike Chandler's Philip Marlowe, Towne's hero would do it for the money. That would give the character someplace to go, emotionally; it would give Towne the beginnings of a character arc. "I thought that taking someone like that," Towne said, "maybe venal and crude and used to petty crime and people cheating on each other, and then getting him to see the larger implications and then to draw the distinctions would be interesting." He decided, whenever possible, to counter movie myth with real life. "So I decided to do a movie about crimes as they really were," he said, "because the way they really were is the way they really are. I didn't want to do a movie about a black bird or anything. A real crime, with a real detective." [image] -- Under Towne's desk lay Hira, the giant Komondor, toying with the phone cord he took for a water snake. Man, he thought, I never saw such purity in a living thing. Every walk, the same fire hydrant, the same look of happiness. At the most fundamental level, he thought, that purity is what people fall in love with. Distraction--this was how it always started. "So much of writing," he said, "is trying to avoid facing it." -- For a while Towne would walk in circles. He couldn't know who the characters were until he knew who they needed to become, and he couldn't know who they needed to become until he knew who they were. He wouldn't start to write scenes until he had a full scene-by-scene outline, and he couldn't outline until he saw his people in detail, what they thought they wanted and what they really needed. But didn't he have to have a good story first? Mystery plotting was a snake eating its tail: does character move the story, or does the story move the character? Towne would have to discover them both simultaneously and proceed with caution, allowing one to inform the other, slow, one short inch at a time. -- By the fall of 1971, some six months after he had begun, Towne was still writing outlines. Some he discarded incomplete. Others ended unsatisfactorily. "'Chinatown' by Towne'" one began: "Only a few years back, when Gittes was working for the D.A.'s office, he got involved in the tong wars. He had been forewarned by his superior, Leon Whitaker, not to fool around with any of the goings on in Chinatown." If you had to go into Chinatown, Whitaker had told him, "do as little as possible." -- Towne was in agony. Writing Chinatown was like being in Chinatown. A novelist could write and write--and, indeed, Towne wrote like a novelist, turning out hundreds upon hundreds of pages of notes and outlines and dialogue snippets--but a movie is two hours; in script form, approximately a minute a page. What could he afford to lose? He needed to be uncompromisingly objective, but not so hard on his ideas that he ended up losing what may have been good in them--that is, if there was ever anything good about them to begin with. Was there? The question had to be asked. Was any of this good, and if so, would anyone care? A civics lesson on water rights and the incestuous rape of a child? From one vantage point, it was dull; from another, obscene. Who would ever make such a movie? -- "To say Edward Taylor was Robert's 'editor' was an understatement," said Mike Koepf, who knew Taylor well and shared credit with him on several screenplays. "They had a working relationship that although it was secret was significant. [Taylor] didn't take the lead a lot, but when he approached a scene, he was always correct. He would never argue, never criticize. He would say something smart and it was so goddamned smart you'd have to take it. He had a great read on human nature. If there was something wrong with the logic, or against human nature, he'd pick it out really quick. Robert was the strong one and Edward was the weak one, but Edward was the brilliant one. I mean the guy was smart. Character psychology and motivation were his forte. The guy deserves credit, a lot of credit indeed." [image] -- By 1972 Towne and Payne were nearly broke. "In those days," Payne said, "you could not pay Robert to write if he didn't want to write. He just wouldn't do it. He wrote only for love." Warren Beatty would call Payne: "How's it going?" "Slow. Robert won't put a word on the page until he thinks it's perfect." "If he ever asks you what you think, don't say anything, because he'll stop." And then, as it always had, the moment came. He handed her pages. "What do you think?" Julie glanced, but her answer was ready-made. "Shorter." She hocked her diamond earrings. -- Julie exiled him to Catalina Island to get it done once and for all. It was the cheapest place she could find. At sixty-four dollars, she could rent an entire seaplane--room enough for Robert, Eddie, Hira, two IBM Selectric IIs, and provisions--and a room at the Banning Lodge, a funky bed-and-breakfast between Cat Harbor and Isthmus Cove, wasn't much more. The trouble was the restaurant, the only place to eat in the area. It wasn't open on Sundays, so Julie would have to fly out on the seventh day, every week, with food for all purchased, in part, with money Jack Nicholson delivered to Payne while Towne was away. Money was that scarce. On Catalina: Towne sat in his bungalow, before his Selectric, before his window before the sea. -- "They wrote the script out there on Catalina Island," Koepf said, "and the script they came ashore with was like 340 pages." -- "It's a sucker's game," Towne said of his profession. "But sometimes you do get those moments when it all comes together. And that's exciting. Nothing can match that." "Sometimes"--a dreamer's word. -- Arguments persisted on all fronts for another two months. "Robert was absolutely resistant to changing anything," Julie Payne said. Polanski had to fight to subdue, it not eliminate entirely, the disquisitions into Los Angeles politics that were personally and politically crucial to Towne. He was demanding a universality from a story Towne had scrupulously grounded in specifics. "Initially," Towne said, "I was more specific about the story in Chinatown. I wanted what happened to [Gittes] to be ridiculous--a humiliation--and instead Roman wanted to emphasize the tragedy, but he didn't want to be specific about it." But the more detail Towne revealed Gittes' first tragedy in Chinatown, Polanski argued, the farther they would stray from metaphor and the harder it would be to emphasize the cyclical nature of Gittes' tragedy--and it had to be a tragedy, total tragedy. Polanski was still adamant about that. "My own feeling," Towne said, "is if a scene is relentlessly bleak ... it isn't as powerful as it can be if there's a little light there to underscore the bleakness. If you show something decent happening, it makes what's bad almost worse ... In a melodrama, where there are confrontations between good and evil--if the evil is too triumphant, it destroys your ability to identify with it rather than if its victory is only qualified." This was not the way the world worked, Polanski maintained. "You have to show violence the way it is," he said. "If you don't show it realistically, then that's immoral and harmful. If you don't upset people, then that's obscenity." Catastrophe happens, Roman would argue. That's life. Towne, a romantic, advocated somewhere, for hope. It did exist. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 10, 2023
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May 27, 2023
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Dec 12, 2022
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Kindle Edition
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| 0063112582
| 9780063112582
| 0063112582
| 4.06
| 11,284
| Oct 2022
| Oct 25, 2022
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it was amazing
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Cinema Speculation is everything I hoped it might be and more. Published in 2022, this book of film history and criticism is by two-time Academy Award
Cinema Speculation is everything I hoped it might be and more. Published in 2022, this book of film history and criticism is by two-time Academy Award winning screenwriter Quentin Tarantino, who's directed nine feature films from his screenplays--Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill among them--with no bad ones. The "worst" feature in Tarantino's filmography--my vote there is for Django Unchained--is better than the very best some other filmmakers can boast of theirs, and as this book demonstrates, his ideas for movies he could make but would prefer just to speculate about are more compelling than a lot of what gets produced. Tarantino bookends with a memoir, sketching for the reader what "Little Q" was up to in Los Angeles of the 1970s, not only what movies he was watching as a boy, but where he was watching them, who he was with, and how those adults impacted his development. The core of the book are enthusiastic essays on more than a dozen films he bought tickets for in this formative period, from 1972 to 1981, with many footnotes and asides along the way, as well as sourcing from directors he's talked to, like Peter Bogdanovich, Walter Hill and "Big" John Milius. -- Because I was allowed to see things the other kids weren't, I appeared sophisticated to my classmates. And because I was watching the most challenging movies of the greatest movie-making era in the history of Hollywood, they were right, I was. At some point, when I realized I was seeing movies other parents weren't letting their children see, I asked my mom about it. She said, "Quentin, I worry more about you watching the news. A movie's not going to hurt you." Right fucking on, Connie! After being exposed to all these images, did any of them disturb me? Of course, some did! But that didn't mean I didn't like the movie. When they removed the naked dead girl out of the hole in Dirty Harry, it was totally disturbing. But I understood it. Just making a list of the wild violent images I witnessed from 1970 to 1972 would appall most readers. But just listing grotesque moments--out of context of the movies they were in--isn't entirely fair to the films in question. And my mother's point of view--that she later explained to me--was always a question of context. In those films, I could handle the imagery, because I understood the story. -- Now, I knew of Super Fly because she already owned the smash hit soundtrack album, and it was played constantly in the apartment. The movie was also advertised heavily on Soul Train. And in our apartment, come Saturday, we never missed Soul Train. By this point I was living with my mother in a pretty hip apartment building that she shared with two cocktail waitresses that were her best friends at the time, Jackie (black) and Lillian (Mexican). All three were young, hip, good-looking women in the funky seventies, with a penchant for dating athletes. Three sexy women (at the time my mother looked like a cross between Cher and Barbara Steele), one white, one black, one Mexican, sharing an apartment with the white one's ten-year-old son: we were practically a sitcom. -- The importance of Neile McQueen to Steve's success as a movie star can't be overemphasized. It was Neile who read the scripts. It was Neile who narrowed down the material. It was Neile who was good at choosing material that would be best for Steve. Steve's agent, Stan Kamen, would read ten scripts that were being offered, then narrow that down to five and send those off to Neile. She'd read those five scripts, write a synopsis on the material, narrow it down to the two she liked best, and then tell Steve the stories and explain her reasons why she liked them for him. Which would usually end up in him reading the one Neile liked the most. Now of course the director was important, how much they were paying him, the location they were shooting the film at--all those things were important. But so was Neile weighing in. Naturally, directors who'd worked with Steve before--that he liked--got preferential treatment. But if Neile didn't like the script, it was an uphill battle. And it was thanks to Neile's good taste and her keen understanding of her husband's ability and his iconic persona that she steered her husband, starting with The Cincinnati Kid, into the biggest winning streak of the second half of the sixties (a Neile McQueen is what Elvis needed). -- I've always had an alternative reading of the Body Snatchers movies (Siegel's, Kaufman's, and Ferrara's). Each movie presents the Pod People in a sinister light. Yet really, almost nothing they do on screen bears out this sinister interpretation. If you're one who believes that your soul is what makes you you, then I suppose the Pod People are murdering the Earthlings they duplicate and replace. However, if you're more of the mind that it is your intellect and your consciousness that make you who you are, then the Pod People transformation is closer to a rebirth than a murder. You're reborn as straight intellect, with a complete possession of your past and your abilities, but unburdened by messy human emotions. You also possess a complete fidelity to your fellow beings and a total commitment to the survival of your species. Are you inhuman? Of course, they're vegetables. But the movies try to present their lack of humanity (they don't have a sense of humor, they're unmoved when a dog is hit by a car) as evidence of some deep-seated sinisterness. That's a rather species-specific point of view. As human beings it may be our emotions that make us human, but it's a stretch to say it's what makes us great. Along with those positive emotions--love, joy, happiness, amusement--come negative emotions--hate, selfishness, racism, depression, violence, and rage. -- I saw Alligator three times that year (one of those times was on a triple feature with Rolling Thunder and a Canadian trucker flick called High-Ballin' with Peter Fonda and Jerry Reed), and I agreed wholeheartedly with Kevin Thomas about the charm of Forster and Riker. So much so, when I did my top ten movies at the end of the year, and wrote my little awards (best actress, best actor, best director) it was Robert Forster who was my choice for best male performance of that year (Robert DeNiro for Raging Bull was number two). Fifteen years later, I was writing my adaptation of Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch (which I retitled Jackie Brown), and I had to consider who was to play the novel's likable lead male character, bail bondsman Max Cherry. I had a few choices. Gene Hackman was an obvious choice, as was Paul Newman. I also considered John Saxon. But there was something about Forster in Alligator that really stuck with me. I watched the movie again and felt that the character from Alligator could be Max Cherry, just fifteen years earlier. So I started writing the script as if he was, right down to the discussion with Jackie about his thinning hair. Would I have done that without Kevin Thomas highlighting Forster so positively in his review? No. In the end, what made Kevin Thomas so unique in the world of seventies and eighties film criticism, he seemed liked one of the only few practitioners who truly enjoyed their job, and consequently, their life. I loved reading him growing up and practically considered him a friend. In 1994 I won an award for Pulp Fiction from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. When I stepped up to the podium and looked out before the audience of L.A. critics, my first remarks to the room were: "Gee, thanks, now I finally know what Kevin Thomas looks like." -- I remember, before seeing Stallone's film, being at some neighborhood kid's house and the TV spot for Rocky came on. The kid wondered out loud, "What's that?" And his mother glanced at the TV screen and said dismissively, "Oh, just another movie about some guy and his problems." Today it's very easy to romanticize that cynical seventies era--especially since it's long gone--seemingly never to return. But from 1970 to at least 1977, every other movie that came out did seem like it was about "some guy and his problems." Part of the elation tied to the audience's response to the climactic fight in Rocky was after five years of seventies cinema, we didn't really expect things to work out for Balboa. And I don't even mean we didn't expect him to win the heavyweight championship of the world. He was never going to fucking win! We just hoped he didn't look like a fucking joke. That's why the ending was so surprisingly moving and cathartic. That's why when he knocked Apollo Creed flat on his back we hit the roof. Because from that point on, no matter whatever else happened, Rocky proved he wasn't a joke. But by the time you get to the last round--and Rocky has Apollo Creed on the ropes--hitting him with a left and a right and a left and a right and the crowd in the boxing arena was chanting: "Roc-ky ... Roc-ky ..." Oh my fucking god! There had simply never been anything like it. -- So who exactly was this Floyd character I was referring to earlier? His name was Floyd Ray Wilson and he was a black guy of about thirty-seven, who for about a year and a half in the late seventies lived in my house. He used to date my mom's best friend Jackie and he hung around in their circle. Years earlier, from time to time, he would visit the apartment my mom and I shared with her roommates Jackie and Lillian. And every time he came by it was exciting, because I thought Floyd was really cool and I could talk movies with him. And since he was a hip guy who saw a lot of shit, he could keep up (at least compared to the adults I knew). He especially knew all the action movies and Blaxploitation films. I remember when Jackie introduced us (I was ten), she said, "Quentin, Floyd's who you should talk to about movies. He knows as much as you." So I--a ten-year-old white boy--started testing this grown-ass black man on his knowledge of black movies. "Do you know who Brenda Sykes is?" I tested. "Of course I do," he said. I told him, "I think she's the prettiest black actress in movies." "You damn right she is," he answered. "What's your favorite Jim Kelly movie?" Again a test. If he answered Enter the Dragon, he's just like everybody else. "Three the Hard Way, obviously," he answered correctly. Lillian just stared at the two of us and said to the room, "I don't know who any of these people are." So from that moment on, whenever Floyd visited the apartment, it was practically like a holiday for me. Because finally, I was going to be able to talk to somebody about movies who knew what the fuck I was talking about. So when Floyd would come over I'd attach myself to him like a tick. But also during this time, I realized the hard way that Floyd was a flakey guy who couldn't be counted on. On at least two occasions when Floyd was visiting, he played the big man and told me he'd come over next Saturday to take me to the movies. In spite of its fantastic title, Tarantino devotes just one chapter to "cinema speculation,” imagining Brian DePalma—one of his favorite directors from this era or any other—directing Taxi Driver instead of Martin Scorsese. (Tarantino envisions a political thriller in DePalma's hands, with Jeff Bridges playing Travis Bickle instead of Robert DeNiro, Amy Irving or DePalma's future wife Nancy Allen playing Betsy with more screen time, and a bravura assassination attempt edited like the prom massacre in DePalma's Carrie). Diagnosing movies like The Getaway, Deliverance and Rolling Thunder, he does inevitably tease us with what a Tarantino remake of those guy classics might look like. It's the autobiographical sections of Cinema Speculation that struck a chord with me. By no means comprehensive--his biological parents are sketched more like older siblings than parents and with no explanation, Tarantino casually mentions his mother sending him to live with his "alcoholic hillbilly" grandparents in Tennessee--but I recognized the devotion to watching, cataloging, writing about and even making scrapbooks on movies as a child, as well as his education working at a video store (Tarantino refers to Video Archives the way college grads do their alma maters). Cinema Speculation also did something that's almost unheard of when I finish a book. When I was done, I sat down and wrote a film essay of my own, speculating how director John Carpenter's career might've turned out if The Thing, today regarded as a masterpiece, was a commercial or even critical success in 1982. While I wouldn't put Tarantino's book on the shelf right next to On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King (Tarantino doesn't instruct anyone how to write or direct a good movie, per se) they are related in that I came away with a profound appreciation for the craft and my own potential. ...more |
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Jan 15, 2023
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Jan 19, 2023
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Nov 26, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 0374108994
| 9780374108991
| 0374108994
| 3.70
| 3,433
| 2011
| Sep 27, 2011
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did not like it
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My introduction to the fiction of Héctor Tobar is his 2011 novel The Barbarian Nurseries. This has garnered a few comparisons to The Bonfire of the Va
My introduction to the fiction of Héctor Tobar is his 2011 novel The Barbarian Nurseries. This has garnered a few comparisons to The Bonfire of the Vanities and that might be true if nothing happened in The Bonfire of the Vanities and the characters all got along. I abandoned this at the 16% mark. The craft is excellent in regard to prose and character detail, but Tobar colors his characters with 64 Crayons when 24 would've been plenty. As a reader I got details, details and more details told to me, but no story. I wish I could give this a higher rating because the novel is clearly about something, much of it the Mexican housekeeper/ nanny class in Orange County. I would've liked a novel that focused mainly on the stoic housekeeper Araceli and revealed her background and character through a story. I don't need a car accident or domestic crime straight out of a Dick Wolf-produced TV show, but I can only catalog so many details about so many characters without a story, and 422 pages of this is a lot to ask of me as a reader. Tobar popped onto my radar by virtue of his debut novel The Tattooed Solider that appeared on a list of the 20 best L.A. noir. My library didn't carry that one, so I gave The Barbarian Nurseries a try. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Nov 15, 2022
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Nov 15, 2022
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Nov 15, 2022
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| 0525950559
| 9780525950554
| 0525950559
| 3.77
| 2,398
| 2008
| Feb 05, 2008
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it was ok
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I pulled L.A. Outlaws off the library shelf on a whim because I enjoyed T. Jefferson Parker's latest novel, A Thousand Steps, I can't get enough of cr
I pulled L.A. Outlaws off the library shelf on a whim because I enjoyed T. Jefferson Parker's latest novel, A Thousand Steps, I can't get enough of crime novels set in Southern California, particularly as I write one, and the synopsis for this one, published in 2008, seemed compelling. A bandit calling herself Allison Murietta is on a crime spree, holding up fast food restaurants and donating the proceeds to charity. Allison, who is actually a history teacher and mother of three named Suzanne Jones, snatches a bag of diamonds and her life gets even more complicated as rookie sheriff's deputy Charlie Hood starts romancing her. Parker writes about law enforcement with aplomb. The paragraphs he devotes to grand theft auto, or smuggling at the Port of Long Beach were interesting. His characters weren't. Their backgrounds are fleshed out sufficiently but narrative voice alternates oddly between Allison/Suzanne's first-person accounting and Hood's third-person investigating. The latter is pointless because the reader already has the information Hood is seeking. The opportunity to make Allison/ Suzanne the focus or generate suspense while she's sleeping with the "enemy" is fumbled away. What's here is a dime-a-dozen tale of stolen gems and the maniac killer pursuing them. ...more |
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Nov 27, 2022
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Dec 03, 2022
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Nov 15, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 1631492330
| 9781631492334
| 1631492330
| 3.43
| 2,923
| Oct 16, 2016
| Oct 11, 2016
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it was amazing
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The Red Car by Marcy Dermansky may be the best book I've read in a while. Published in 2016, this short novel made me laugh more often and at greater
The Red Car by Marcy Dermansky may be the best book I've read in a while. Published in 2016, this short novel made me laugh more often and at greater volume than I did reading Dermansky's previous two novels, which is saying something. Rather than a coming-of-age story or femme fatale story, The Red Car is about a woman who seems to have checked the boxes of adulthood: a college education, marriage, a job she can do from home and even the completion of a novel. Closer inspection reveals she's anything but okay and the way the author edges her out onto a tightrope made for a harrowing read. The story is the first-person account of Leah Kaplan, introduced as a twenty-three-year-old executive assistant to the Human Resources director of a state university in San Francisco. Leah wants to be a writer and while she looks down at office workers, her boss recognized Leah's value as a confidant and friend. Her boss is Judy, a divorcée twenty years Leah's senior whose preference for direct communication doesn't seem to intimidate Leah the way it does others. A platonic love develops between the women but ultimately, Judy encourages Leah to quit her job and go back to school. Ten years later, Leah is living in Queens with her husband Hans, a writer she met at graduate school and married because his student visa was expiring. She tells herself that he's thoughtful and loves her in spite of his codependency and hot temper. Then an email arrives from a former coworker notifying her that Judy has been killed, slammed into while driving the red car she cherished. Leah learns that Judy has left her that car, as well as a letter and some money. When an attractive former coworker puts her airfare on the company credit card, Leah returns to San Francisco for two weeks. She begins to hear Judy's voice, or perhaps her own voice, speaking to her. "You shouldn't always believe the things you tell yourself," Judy said. Judy, there she was again. Talking to me. I did not understand it. I could hear the timbre of her voice, the inflection, but, of course, no one else could hear her. And I didn't actually believe that she was actually talking to me. For years, when I started graduate school, and then, when I moved to New York, I could hear Judy talking to me, giving me advice, taking note of my decisions and offering her approval. Her disapproval. But it stopped once I had gotten married. I gradually stopped sending her emails and I could not hear her voice. She was gone. The stupid thing was that it was not until after I learned that she had died that I realized that I missed her. "Pretty stupid," Judy observed. In the hands of a lot of other authors--those who write books with cute, comforting illustrated covers--The Red Car would've been another novel about a major life event that pulls a woman back to her old neighborhood, her old friends and an old romance she might rekindle, all while processing where she wants to go next in her life. And strangely enough, this book checks most of those boxes. There's a moment where Leah walks by her old apartment in the Mission District and not only meets the woman now occupying her old room, but a woman also writing a novel who nearly shares the same first name. They become intimate, but it's a relationship not built to last. "You see," Judy said. But I did not know what she meant. You see, you are writing? I knew I was a writer. I knew I had written a book and I even knew that it was probably good. I just wanted to keep that quiet. Make sure. Protect myself from disappointment. You see, you are a lesbian? You see, you should have never gotten married? You see, you should have never left San Francisco? It worried me that I did not understand Judy's chiding. If the voice was coming from me, wouldn't I understand my own meaning? I bit the back end of my black pen, which burst onto my hand. I used a napkin to contain the ink. "You're pretty," the other Lea said. She had stopped writing. She was appraising me. I wondered for how long. My fingers were covered in black ink. "You have a girlfriend," I said. "Damn," Lea laughed. What I loved about The Red Car is the illusory filter that Dermansky applies to everything from the sex to the conversation to the red car. I was convinced that Leah had died on her way to San Francisco and everything there was occurring in her afterlife. The events developing around Leah are at times distant and odd but her irreverence and self-doubt comes through so strong that it gave me something to chomp down on. And as corny as it sounds, this book helped me believe in myself, to stop listening to negative voices in my head and write my book. I read this in about 24 hours but wish my time with Leah had lasted a lot longer. ...more |
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Mar 30, 2023
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Mar 31, 2023
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Oct 26, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 3.50
| 3,277
| Apr 1982
| unknown
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really liked it
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L.A. Woman is the first book I've read without realizing it was fiction. Published in 1982, it's the first person account of Sophie Lubin, daughter of
L.A. Woman is the first book I've read without realizing it was fiction. Published in 1982, it's the first person account of Sophie Lubin, daughter of a film studio violinist who grows up in Los Angeles of the 1960s and devotes herself to partying on the Sunset Strip. Author Eve Babitz, writing about herself. But rather than indulging in sex, drugs and rock 'n roll (hi-jinks would be the technical term), Babitz is all about the lo-jinks, sketched as if she were your Auntie Eve, and with panache, taste and several glasses of champagne tells us about her family and friends, slipping in her own exploits, just not very cohesively. I loved it. -- Just bothering to go someplace other than Santa Monica was incomprehensible when I could just wake up every morning at dawn, yank on my bathing suit still on the floor from the night before when I'd yanked it off, hurry down to Hollywood and Gower to catch the 91S bus down to Hollywood Boulevard and then Santa Monica Boulevard to Beverly Hills and transfer to the 83 going straight out to the beach until finally there I'd be, at 8:00 A.M. or so, able to feel the cool sand get warm as the morning sun glazed over the tops of the palm trees up on the palisades while waves of ocean crashed down day after day so anyone could throw himself into the tides and bodysurf through eternity. -- In my day, growing up in Southern California meant you didn't grow up, at least not like girls did elsewhere. Having not grown up myself, like Lola, I know what it was exactly -- what it is -- to be a woman-looking person in your twenties with none of the trials and tribulations bogging down your whole life, driving you from one predictable crisis of adult life to the next until it's too late. I, like Lola, was unable to take adult life seriously in my twenties at all and in fact sometimes I wonder, when I look at adult life even now, how on earth I got myself anywhere past my teens. -- When Lola first went to live in San Francisco with Sam, she married into a time and place which had nothing to do with her. It was WWII and she had to completely abstain from speaking German--any German at all--since the whole country including herself couldn't hear it without boiling over, and though she was used to occasionally dropping German flourishes into her everyday speech, she no longer dared even for fun. Plus, in San Francisco, a woman from L.A. had to resign herself to hats and gloves and stockings because no woman could go out wearing a belly dancer outfit for fun. Women were respectable. Perhaps the real reason Lola married Sam wasn't to be polite or to oblige her mother, but really because she thought she ought to do something that wasn't fun -- to strengthen her character -- something womanly like sacrificing her life. But then I still couldn't see why anyone would marry Sam just to get character. -- The truth was, I couldn't act at all, because anytime I had to say someone else's words, they turned into marshmellows sticking my mouth into lumpy resistance, refusing to blithely tumble into the air like they should even in Beckett and not just Shakespeare or Noel Coward, for whenever I had to speak anyone else's words I put up a fight. My word, I deep down thought, were just as brilliant and original as theirs (more original inf act, since everybody had heard their words, whereas they were just finding out mine that very moment). I was just a lousy actress, in other words. -- The Oriental was a "neighborhood" theater, only since the neighborhood was West Hollywood, the neighbors were Jack Nicholson and Stravinsky. I ran into nuns from Immaculate Heart in line too, and married couples, people on dates, lonely movie stars sneaking in to see themselves fourteen times a week, artists wrecked on mescaline who came for the cartoons, people of "the industry" and kids from Hollywood High just down Sunset a few blocks. Before my bell jar gazebo passed the best minds of my generation, to say nothing of the cars. Lotuses and Rolls-Royces and chopped Plymouths and immense convertibles went back and forth, back and forth, before my eyes, with people inside--Afghans, ladies with blonde hair spread a yard on either side of them, and men--elegant men, crisp sophisticated originals (including Cary Grant), James Dean slouchers, mad Marlons, confidential smoothies, awkward European guys who wore sandals with socks, slinky invisible guys whom girls committed suicide over. If you asked me, for the first year or two it was enough. I mean, plus they paid me. -- Sheila, a girl my age who went to L.A. High and lived next to me in the court, worked part time in a travel agency and looked like a Botticelli--and she was worse than me. I mean, when I moved into that court and had tea with Sheila the first day, we decided to list all the men we had slept with--we were both not twenty-one yet--only I forgot their names counting to 50 I remembered, and Sheila got to 150 (she could even remember last names) before she got confused. Stuff like jealousy and outrage and sexual horror tactics like that, which had been used to squash girls like us and keep us from having fun for thousands of years, now suddenly didn't stand a chance because Sheila and the rest of us weren't going to get pregnant, die of syphilis, or get horrible reputations around L.A. -- where an L.A. woman had always pretty much painted the town anything she wanted. The commercial way to write a novel like L.A. Woman would have been to sort everything into conventional "funny women's fiction": Sophie is a Hollywood princess who works at a movie theater box office by day, parties by night, has a fling with hot rock star/ cute movie star while loyal friend who's a writer or some serious person waits for her to grow up (or more accurately, settle down). I think there's AI that can generate a novel like that in the time it takes to watch the most recent Sex and the City reunion and eat a Ben & Jerry's Mini Cup. Sophie Lubin is absolutely a passive character and that does hold the novel back a step for me. She's in the running for the least ambitious person in Los Angeles County, dedicated neither to fame or fortune, or to bottoming out. Either would be "something." The story never "takes off" or "goes anywhere." It won't be for everyone. But as keen as I am for a story, I'm also big on Los Angeles based fiction, and if I take L.A. Woman at face value as a mediation on what an L.A. woman believes an L.A. woman to be, the novel sings. I had guys coming out of my ears like streetcars. Only instead of one coming by every ten minutes, like they were supposed to, the old ones never left so my life grew dense with simultaneous romance. Lovers were like the lantana before the trellis caved in. What separates Eve Babitz from writers who've monetized their address book into a publishing career is that tell-all authors tend to focus on the rats. Babitz is more interested in the maze. Her characters live and breathe, though. These inevitably fall into three categories: actresses or dancers who the industry must replenish, boy geniuses who need care and handling, and the women who support the boy geniuses. Many have used the term "groupie" to describe Babitz but rather than sleep their way through contrived plots and lazy prose, but Babitz's writing is alive. ...more |
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Jan 21, 2023
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Jan 27, 2023
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Sep 18, 2022
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Paperback
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| 0316843881
| 9780316843881
| 0316843881
| 3.87
| 292
| 1973
| Jan 01, 1973
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really liked it
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To Die In California by Newton Thornburg feels like the most eloquent and finely crafted entry of a mystery sub-genre I've grown to dislike, the "some
To Die In California by Newton Thornburg feels like the most eloquent and finely crafted entry of a mystery sub-genre I've grown to dislike, the "some man and his problems" story. Published in 1973, it's a novel of its time, in which a man's duty or sense of himself was thrown helter skelter by the collapse of society. Thornburg is author of Cutter and Bone, the Santa Barbara noir whose pirate esprit de corps sets it apart, and continuing in my jag of Californian noir, I was interested in giving this one a try. David Hook is a farmer in southwestern Illinois introduced burying his oldest son, Chris. Hook went into farming by accident, graduating from the University of Illinois with a bachelor's degree in English and comparative literature. He met his wife at college but found teaching did not suit him, and took over his grandfather's farm, expanding it to 300 acres and three hundred head of beef cattle. A widower for seven years after his wife was killed in a car accident, Hook flies to Santa Barbara, California to identify Chris's body and return home with him. The official explanation is that his son, hitchhiking through the area, committed suicide by throwing himself from a cliff at Hope Ranch Beach. No one back home including Hook believes Chris killed himself and a week before Christmas, he returns to Santa Barbara. The police believe that Chris was picked up by Elizabeth Madera, a twenty-five-year-old society girl who comes from an old Santa Barbara family. She took him back to the beach house she shares with a woman named Dorothy Rubin who works for a public relations firm, and the women maintain that Chris became despondent over not being able to perform sexually with Liz and threw himself to his death. They and others seem devoted to protecting Jack Douglas, a local politician being groomed for a U.S. Congressional seat. For answers, the Midwestern farmer enters the hippie scene. Following him, Hook stepped into the sort of room he had seen before only in magazines, a careful assemblage of the mod, the outrageous, and the simply unlivable. the wood floor was painted black, the walls red, the ceiling pink. There was a polka-dot mattress on the floor, an Eames chair, an old double car seat, a legless dining room table painted lie a checkerboard, and a huge inflated clear plastic doughnut in which a young Negro male with a huge halo of Afro hair lolled sleepy-eyed. Overhead, a mobile made of mirrors of many colors and shapes turned slowly, catching the room's candlelight and bouncing it off the walls, which were covered with collages and protest posters and beautifully framed photographs of nude models, mostly male, the work of Icarus, Hook assumed. On the mattress a girl in a granny dress and rimless spectacles lay on her side, insouciantly studying Hook as she toyed with the shoulder-length tresses of a lean muscular young man sitting in front of her on the floor, with his head resting back against the swell of her hip. He was wearing an Indian headband, a threadbare serape, jeans and sandals, as he watched Hook with a look of weary contempt, as if the two of them were old enemies. As Icarus introduced Hook, not one of the three said a word. To Die In California is an overcast day in a California beach city, "June gloom" as it's called. The coastal ambiance and natural beauty of the area is evident but gray skies obscure much in the way of delight. A young man's senseless death and efforts to discredit it are given appropriate thought by Thornburg as opposed to being used to set off a violent tale of revenge. I appreciated how deep the novel cut. Politics and counterculture are portrayed as dens of moral depravity, and taken at their most extreme, Thornburg does have a point. But thte book unloaded a lot for me to drag around. The prose, however, is expressive and powerful. Montecito was to Santa Barbara as Beverly Hills was to Hollywood--adjacent, separate, unequal. In Santa Barbara people lived and worked; in Montecito they only lived. It was a bedroom community, and to Hook's eyes it looked as if each bedroom had its own dressing room and bath. It also had trees, great drooping sycramore and eucalyptus and live oak crowding the narrow serpentine streets so tightly Hook wondered how drunks ever managed to negotiate the maze at night, as he was trying to do now, sober, driving slowly, watching for street signs. What houses there were sat far back from the road, looking as dimly lit as forest cabins through the trees, and in front of each there was usually a rustic stone wall or iron-bar fence, the kind Carl Sandburg said would be penetrated only by death and rain and tomorrow. As great as the writing often is, what holds me back from loving this novel is how little empathy I had for the main character or his problems. His oldest son wants to see the country before Uncle Sam comes for him, hitchhikes out west, is in the wrong place at the wrong time and is killed. This is no more tragic than anything servicemen and women in Vietnam experienced or what people in urban communities occupied by police or National Guardsmen experienced. Hook owns a profitable farm which is a lot more than most people had at that time. I'd definitely read another novel by Thornburg, but probably wouldn't recommend this one without a lot of qualifications. p.s. I bought a used hardback copy at a reasonable price that the seller claimed is signed by the author, but based on the signature, I can't tell. I'll allow my optimism to defeat my cynicism and believe this is Thornburg's signature. Who else but authors signs their books? ...more |
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Jan 28, 2023
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Feb 09, 2023
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Jul 17, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 125079353X
| 9781250793539
| 125079353X
| 3.67
| 3,819
| Jan 11, 2022
| Jan 11, 2022
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really liked it
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My introduction to T. Jefferson Parker is A Thousand Steps. Parker was born, raised, schooled, and has lived and worked in Orange County, California a
My introduction to T. Jefferson Parker is A Thousand Steps. Parker was born, raised, schooled, and has lived and worked in Orange County, California all his life, starting as a reporter for the Newport Ensign in 1978 covering police and city hall. His first novel, Laguna Heat, was adapted into a movie by HBO in 1987. Published in 2022, A Thousand Steps feels like a book that had been percolating deliciously in the coffee urn of the county sheriff. Set in Laguna Beach in the summer of 1968, its more coming of age story than thriller, in which a sixteen-year-old boy goes in search of his missing sister and becomes an adult. Matt Anthony lives day to day on a paperboy's salary, delivering the Orange County Register from his bicycle. His mother Julie exists in a state of arrested development. With her waitress hours at the Jolly Roger cut (the beach town's burgeoning hippie population scare away tourists and don't tip) it's often left to Matt to feed himself. His brother Kyle is on short time finishing his tour of duty in Vietnam, while his father Bruce has been AWOL for six years, a rugged individualist who struggles to hold down a job in law enforcement but is also infuriated by the drug culture that pervades Laguna Beach. Matt is developing into a painter and a fisherman. He doesn't experiment with drugs like Julie but does spend time at a head shop called Mystic Arts World, where Timothy Leary and a variety of characters hang out. The store is owned by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a legally registered church rumored to be illegally smuggling hashish. Matt finds this scene "funny and crazy and maybe a little dangerous," while his eighteen-year-old sister Jasmine, who cultivates a cool and removed vibe, calls the shop "horny." After watching police pull the body of his sister's classmate Bonnie Stratmeyer out of the surf, Matt is concerned that Jazz didn't come home last night. Out in the garage, Matt stashes his fishing gear and takes off the poncho for the warming June day. He leaves the big door up to let in some sun. The garage has two windows, the heavy spring-loaded door for cars, and a narrow convenience door for people. His mattress, sleeping bag, and pillow are on the floor. There are orange-crates stacked for his books and painting supplies, a desk and a chair. One overhead light operated by a wall switch. There's a pulsing blue lava lamp, a gift from Jazz. His current painting is a mess of a seascape, half-done if that, propped on a wounded thrift-store chair. Matt keeps his garage clean but creatures get in under the doors, mice sometimes, earwigs and spiders, and once in a while, a scorpion. Now his mother stands just outside the garage, framed in sunlight. Julie's wearing her Jolly Roger Restaurant waitress uniform--a red wench's blouse with a plunging neckline and off-the-should sleeves, black pantaloons, red socks, and hideous black buckled slippers. Her dark hair up, Matt thinks she looks too young to be his mom. "I'm off to work, Matty. Are you copacetic with what you saw?" "I've never seen a dead person before." The dead frogs in biology were bad enough. The smell of formaldehyde. Bonnie looked so cold. What's dynamite about A Thousand Steps is how Parker charts Matt's development into an adult with his investigation into his sister's disappearance. His childhood has already left the station. Matt lives in a garage, works full-time and scraps for his next meal. But any hope for an endless summer evaporates quickly. Jazz's disappearance defines Matt's relationship with his absentee parents, his sweetheart Laurel Kalina and the authorities who want Matt to snitch. He can't remain a kid and follow his sister down whatever hole she's fallen into. The mystery forces him to confront big questions about who he is and what he believes. Parker writes in historic present tense, which I don't believe I've encountered before. This is a vivid and casual narrative choice that seems cut from Parker's background as a journalist. I was thrown into the story, invited in, like a movie script would do. Since I prefer action-oriented novels that I can picture moving across a screen, I liked this choice. With a jump of heart, Matt recognizes the Kalina sisters, Laurel and Rose. Laurel is his age and he's had a crush on her since fourth grade. He's gone to school with her all his life. Rose goes to college but Matt doesn't know where. Laurel told him once that they are part Hawaiian and part German-English. They're olive-skinned and dark-haired and to Matt, thrilling. One of this first fourth-grade cursive sentences was, She's beautiful!, which he tore off and wadded up and put in his pocket the second he'd written it. Whereas every character in an Elmore Leonard novel feels like someone I could run into at the hardware store, the Lagunians in this book didn't seem like people Matt would. They seemed more like characters he'd encounter on a TV show, colorful but superficial. Maybe this is how teenagers view adults, but it left me wanting more depth. As far as the kidnapping plot, I could only hope that child abductions followed a script like this. Because I do live in Southern California and am always looking for a good L.A. novel, I appreciated the panache Parker carried this off with and how tender it was, a welcome vacation from the hard-edged cops or private eyes of other mysteries. ...more |
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1
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Jun 16, 2022
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Jun 28, 2022
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Apr 24, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 1948226227
| 9781948226226
| 1948226227
| 3.97
| 1,678
| Aug 06, 2019
| Aug 06, 2019
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really liked it
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Readers wondering where the John Steinbecks of today are should look no further than Susan Straight. Author of nine novels and much short fiction, Str
Readers wondering where the John Steinbecks of today are should look no further than Susan Straight. Author of nine novels and much short fiction, Straight was raised in Riverside, where she co-founded an MFA program for creative writing at the University of California Riverside and is a Distinguished Professor of Creating Writing. Published in 2019, In the Country of Women is her first work of non-fiction. Her memoir is abundant with beautiful writing and powerful stories, many of them addressed to her three daughters and telling of her family history and their father's African-American family history. -- To my daughters: They never tell us about the odysseys of women. They never say about a woman: "Her passage was worthy of Homer ... her voyage a mythic quest for new lands." Women don't get the Heroine's Journey. Men are accorded the road and the sea and the asphalt. Men get The Iliad and The Odyssey. They get Joseph Campbell. They get The Thousand Faces of the Hero. They get "the epic novel," "the great American story," and Ken Burns documentaries. But our women fought harder than men--they fought men! Men who claimed to love them, to protect them, to help them--men who trapped and tried to kill them. They fought for sons and daughters, they had the battalions of their sisters and mothers and aunts. Some bad-ass aunts. The women used their cunning and their bullets, the power of their ancestors and of the other women in the wagon or the truck with them. They survived passages that would have made a lot of men quit. Sometimes the men did quit. Sometimes the women quit the men--to stay alive. -- Here in the land of tumbleweeds so immense and fiercely mobile, a windstorm in November sent so many skeletal balls of thorn blowing across the fields that the small house where my mother and I lived was buried in brown. It was a valley of granite boulders and turkey ranches. Tumbleweeds six and eight feet across packed in drifts around the windows, which were coated with dust from the famous Santa Ana winds. "It was like a snowstorm," my mother told me years later. "I couldn't even open the door." -- That we could control death and violence by writing about it was transforming. I had seen drug deals, wildfires, a man who held a woman so tightly by her hair that her temple puckered. Sometimes I was terrified. There was the man waiting on the narrow dirt path on the way to school, who opened his coat, a clichéd pervert (who the hell wears an overcoat when it's 100 degrees?), but I'd read A Tree Grows In Brooklyn four times by then, and Francie's mother shoots the pervert (he's called the pervert) in the groin, so I just glanced at him (pale and gross and oddly just like the novel) and ran into the weeds, wishing I had Francie's mother or her gun. The summer of 1970, the bookmobile arrived in far-flung neighborhoods like mine. No one wanted to accompany me, and I was thrilled. I walked alone through fields of wild oats, past the pepper trees under which older kids smoke marijuana and drank Coors and listened to Grand Funk Railroad and James Brown on transistor radios, across the railroad tracks, down into the steep arroyo where a green trickle of water was my creek, and up into the grocery store parking lot where for two hours inside the air-conditioned hum of a converted buis, I read about death. I found S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders, with desperate, joking, hardworking boys as close to my own neighborhood as anything I'd ever read, and then, shaken, walked back home as the branches of the pepper trees shivered with electric guitars and laughter. Tulsa, I whispered. -- Fine as wine and just my kind. Bring your fine self over here. So fine you like to blind me when I saw you. This is what she heard, again and again. Daisy's first husband is listed in one census document as Calvin Morris, but no one left here has ever said they actually saw him. Daisy's cousin Jesse Wall, who'd also been born in Sunflower County and brought to California, told me back in 2014, when he was eighty, "Oh, Daisy was fine. Back in Arkansas, that man told her over and over, 'You're so fine, some fool's gonna take you away from me, and I can't have that, so I might just have to kill you first.' He had the gun on the table by the bed, and he'd sit there with it in his hand at night. And Daisy had the baby, Mary Louise. She had to wait until one night when when he left and she could get away. She took the baby and went to Oklahoma to find Sweet Annie." That was Daisy's aunt, Sweet Annie Tillman, legendary in her own right. -- I went to Planned Parenthood the week I turned sixteen because I was terrified almost every day of my life. I went to Planned Parenthood because I was poor and prey, and girls had told me where the building was because they, too, were afraid of the same thing. We were certain we'd be raped at some point, and we didn't want to have babies because of that. We didn't want to have to marry our rapists. -- My husband had become a mystery to me. He wanted more freedom to spend with his brothers and friends; he'd bought the Kawasaki, and a Ford Ranchero, which seemed another message as the back seat clearly couldn't hold three girls, the baby in a car seat. His mother was gone. She could not chase him home from the couch on Michael Street. We had gotten married too young, he said; he wanted to learn to be independent, he said. Every time I heard that word, I imagined Herbie, the elf who wanted to be a dentist, in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. I couldn't help it. I heard the word in four syllables--in-de-pen-dent--in Herbie's nasal pronunciation, and had to keep myself from laughing. "You gonna be a dentist?" I'd say, and Dwayne would shake his head. In addition to the beauty of her prose, there are two other aspects of Susan Straight's writing that I draw inspiration from and both are present in In the Country of Women. As in John Steinbeck, Straight's characters desire, come together, get drunk, steal cars, throw punches, break up and struggle against authority (in no particular order). They're not concerned with being "nice." They're concerned with surviving in America. The other aspect that Straight demonstrates is that you don't have to go on expensive vacations to be a writer. You can bloom where you're planted, even if it's just above the poverty line in Riverside, and contribute to American literature. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 16, 2022
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May 28, 2022
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Apr 23, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 1501165739
| 9781501165733
| B07CL53HNN
| 3.92
| 2,506
| Sep 18, 2018
| Sep 18, 2018
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really liked it
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The Infinite Blacktop is the latest in a series of ultramodern mysteries by Sara Gran and narrated by her self-proclaimed "best detective in the world
The Infinite Blacktop is the latest in a series of ultramodern mysteries by Sara Gran and narrated by her self-proclaimed "best detective in the world" Claire DeWitt, a San Francisco private eye who in sharp contrast to literary detectives that attract people to them--usually at a party or the social event of the season--can't stand herself and can barely stand or stay sober. Published in 2018, I'd notch this installment no higher or lower than Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead or Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway, though it's unnecessary to have read either. They're all very good, but I think "innovative" might describe them best. Beginning moments after the conclusion of Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway, our detective has survived an attempt on her life in Oakland, her rental car smashed into by a mystery man driving a Lincoln Continental. Feeling unsafe at the scene or in a hospital, DeWitt disarms a policewoman, steals her radio and flees. Despite looking and feeling like an accident victim and having no cash on her, she remedies this by stealing a purse and enough cars to get her to her first stop, protecting a woman who witnessed her accident. The next stop will be finding who's trying to kill her and why. While DeWitt begins what she'll refer to as "the Case of the Infinite Blacktop" in 2011, the novel shifts back to 1999, when Claire has been run out of the Bay Area by police and attempts to fulfill the state requirements of the powerful California Bureau of Security and Investigative Services. She finds a licensed private eye in Los Angeles willing to supervise the remaining 400 hours of case work required for her PI license and he throws her a cold case involving a painter named Merritt Underwood who died in a car accident six years ago. The artist's parents--now deceased--believed foul play was involved. So begins "the Mystery of the CBSIS." I didn't really know why I never had any money. I would ask for, and get, a lot for a case. I'd been working since I was a kid. No one came to me unless they were desperate and well prepared to pay, whether they could afford it or not. I didn't have an office and I didn't advertise so people generally found me the way people found a drug dealer or a bootleg movie: ask around, look for people who knew; try to read the signs. By the time a client found me they were usually willing to pay and usually I made sure they did. But I only took the cases I wanted to take and I didn't like to think about money before or after I spent it and I never bothered to collect for expenses or keep track of tax deductions or pay taxes or deal with any of it. So maybe I did know why I never had any money. Those were pretty much the reasons. Also I'd do things like give a couple hundred bucks to a cop I knew in New Orleans who was out of work or give even more to a lady I met in an Ecuadorean restaurant who was trying to get a dog shelter off the ground. I didn't do those things to be nice so much as for the cocaine-like rush of good feelings and self-aggrandizement that they brought. I didn't try to kid myself otherwise. And now, of course, I wasn't getting paid at all. Gran adds one more time loop, hopping back to Claire's childhood in Brooklyn of 1985. With her two best friends Tracy and Kelly, she was obsessed with the Cynthia Silverton Mystery Digest, a limited-print monthly magazine. As teens, the girls formed their own private detective agency, guided by Jacques Silette, an enigmatic detective whose 1959 handbook Détection became their bible. Silette was less focused with collecting facts or working cases as he was in finding truth and solving mysteries. Silette's perfect solve rate was marred by the unsolved disappearance of his infant daughter. For all her brilliance, Claire DeWitt has likewise been unable to locate Tracy, who disappeared from a subway platform in the '80s never to be seen again. The Infinite Blacktop (for the sake of continuity, I wonder why "Claire DeWitt" has been removed from the title) has creativity to spare. DeWitt references all her past cases by a colorful name (the Case of the Kali Yuga, the Case of the Miniature Horses). Most novels that cycle between two or more stories inevitably offer one much stronger than the other, but here, I was equally enthralled by both mysteries. Claire DeWitt does drink, fuck, smoke and snort her way through existence but those are just the vices she indulges in to fill what she's missing--the whereabouts of her sisterly friend Tracy--and not what the book is about. Having read Sara Gran's latest novel The Book of the Most Precious Substance, it clicked that what she really loves and writes about is printing: rare books or magazines, booksellers, printing shops, paper, envelopes. The Cynthia Silverton Mystery Digest--a very clever critique of Nancy Drew--isn't there just to provide a major clue in the Case of the Infinite Blacktop. It's a wonderfully imaginative book-within-a-book. California, cars or printing are to Sara Gran what Florida, boats or real estate are to John D. MacDonald. While dreamlike and sometimes hard to wrap my arms around--a teenage detective agency sounds a lot cooler than it's made plausible--I really enjoyed visiting this world. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Mar 24, 2023
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Mar 27, 2023
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Feb 12, 2022
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Kindle Edition
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| 0316225983
| 9780316225984
| 0316225983
| 4.11
| 91,897
| Jul 11, 2017
| Jul 18, 2017
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liked it
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My Year of (Mostly) Mysterious Women continues with series fiction featuring women detectives. Published in 2017, The Late Show is the debut of LAPD d
My Year of (Mostly) Mysterious Women continues with series fiction featuring women detectives. Published in 2017, The Late Show is the debut of LAPD detective Renée Ballard and an exception to my "no cops" purview because it's by Michael Connelly, the best author of Los Angeles police procedurals we have. My late father ordered every new Connelly book, those featuring or set in the world of the LAPD's Harry Bosch numbering thirty. Connelly hasn't written a female lead detective before and doesn't do anything remarkable here, but it is solid vacation read Connelly, or TV pilot Connelly. Checking off all its promises, the novel does introduce Detective Renée Ballard who does work the midnight shift, responding with her partner John Jenkins to cases simply requiring an initial report be taken from a police detective after hours for somebody on the day shift to work. The late show is typically the terrain of those who've run afoul with LAPD bureaucracy. Jenkins prefers nights because it allows him to take care of his cancer stricken wife during the day. Ballard has been ejected from the elite Robbery-Homicide Division (just like Bosch) and exiled to Hollywood station (just like Bosch) because she filed a sexual harassment complaint against her former superior Lt. Robert Olivas, which her partner Ken Chastain failed to back her up on. Ballard & Jenkins take a statement from a woman reporting bogus charges on her Amazon card, which she believes resulted from a burglary. The detectives are then sent to Hollywood Presbyterian where a young transvestite prostitute has been tortured for days with brass knuckles and was left for dead in an abandoned lot. Ballard feels "big evil" around this case and commits to working it herself. Ballard & Jenkins are then called to assist on a "three-ring circus," a shooting at a Hollywood nightclub where four men are dead and a young waitress codes at the hospital. Ballard heads to the crime scene, where her old boss Olivas and former partner Chastain are leading the hunt for the shooter. Ballard walked up the steps to the second level and then turned around to look down and get a better view of the crime scene. Lieutenant McAdams had said the shooting erupted in a booth. With that as a starting point, it was easy to figure out what had happened in basic terms. Three men were shot where they sat. The shooter had them pinned in and pivoted efficiently from one to the other with the aim of his weapon. He then moved from the booth and down the lane separating the pods. This put him on a collision course with the bouncer, who had drawn his Taser and was moving toward the problem. The bouncer was shot, most likely killed instantly, and dropped face-first to the floor. Behind him stood waitress Cynthia Haddel. Ballard imagined her standing frozen, unable to move as the killer came toward her. Maybe she was raising her cocktail tray up like a shield. The killer was moving but still able to put the one shot dead center in her chest. Ballard wondered if the gunman had shot her simply because she was in the way or because she might have been able to identify him. Either way it was a cold choice. It said something about the man who had done this. Ballard thought about what she had said earlier to Jenkins about the person who had assaulted Ramona Ramone. Big evil. There was no doubt that the same callous malignancy moved through the blood of the shooter here. Michael Connelly knows exactly what his readers want and delivers it, not just in a novel but with criminal justice. As with Bosch, Renée Ballard is an easily relatable protagonist a lot of us wish we could be. Born and raised in Hawaii, she paddleboards in the morning and accompanied by her rescue dog Lola, often sleeps afternoons in a tent on the beach. Like most cops, Ballard is driven by work and forms few close attachments, though she is sexually active, lately with a handsome parole officer she's worked with named Rob Compton. As with Bosch, Ballard sees every victim's case through, even when that conflicts with the political interests of peers or superiors. As with Bosch, she's highly motivated and working alone, gets shit done. Ballard was a quick writer. She had a degree in journalism from the University of Hawaii and while she had not lasted long as a reporter, the training and experience had given her skills that helped immeasurably with this side of police work. She reacted well to deadline pressure and she could clearly conceptualize her crime reports and case summaries before writing them. She wrote short, clear sentences that gave momentum to the narrative of the investigation. This skill also paid dividends when Ballard was called into court to testify about her investigations. Juries liked her because she was a good storyteller. It was in a courtroom that the direction of Ballard's life had changed dramatically fifteen years earlier. Her first job out of the University of Hawaii had been as one of a phalanx of crime reporters for the Los Angeles Times. She was assigned to a cubbyhole office in the Van Nuys courthouse, from which she covered criminal cases as well as the six LAPD divisions that comprised the north end of the city. One particular case had caught her attention: the murder of a fourteen-year-old runaway who had been snatched off the beach one night in Venice. She had been taken to a drug house in Van Nuys, where she was repeatedly raped over several days, and then eventually strangled and dropped in a construction site trash hauler. The police made a case and took two men to trial for the murder. Ballard covered the preliminary hearing of the case against the accused. The lead detective testified about the investigation and in doing so recounted the many tortures and indignities the victim endured before her eventual death. The detective started crying on the stand. It wasn't a show. There was no jury, just a judge to decide whether the case should go to trial. But the detective cried, and in that moment Ballard realized she didn't want to just write about crime and investigation anymore. The next day she applied to enter the LAPD training academy. She wanted to be a detective. Connelly knows his turf and as always, fills in detail on how the LAPD, the courts or the law work. Civilians often challenge Ballard on whether she needs a warrant for them to cooperate with her and she explains why she does not. I also learned that plastic zip ties are no substitute for steel handcuffs and can be broken, though at significant injury to your wrists. Connelly weaves together two or three seemingly unrelated crimes in a way I always appreciate in a detective story, but the novel, as one in a series of thirty, does have a factory-made feel to it. It came off the assembly line and I can already feel it being shipped out on a truck, never for me to ponder again. While reading, I imagined Evangeline Lilly as Renée Ballard. She's roughly similar in appearance to Mitzi Roberts, the LAPD detective who Connelly based the character on. [image] [image] ...more |
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Feb 07, 2022
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Feb 10, 2022
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Dec 27, 2021
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Hardcover
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| 4.00
| 31,855
| Dec 07, 1999
| unknown
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really liked it
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My Year of (Mostly) Mysterious Women continues with series fiction featuring women detectives. Published in December 1999, Void Moon is a standalone n
My Year of (Mostly) Mysterious Women continues with series fiction featuring women detectives. Published in December 1999, Void Moon is a standalone novel by Michael Connelly that's a departure from his L.A. police procedurals as well as my amateur detective jag. It's set firmly in Elmore Leonard territory, featuring an ex-con named Cassie Black whose path to the straight life is complicated by her need for One Last Job. You could fill a shelf at Blockbuster Video with the One Last Job subgenre, but this one is a work of high wire suspense with two terrific adversaries and all the detail I savor in a Connelly novel. Set on the eve of the millennium, the story introduces Cassie Black acting distracted. She tours a California Craftsman bungalow in Laurel Canyon that's hit the market due to the young owners moving to Paris with their six-year-old daughter. Cassie clearly has no intention of buying the house and seems more curious about the girl. Employed as a saleswoman at "Hollywood Porsche," Cassie's mind isn't on the twentysomething screenwriter she takes on a test run on Mulholland Drive. During an appointment with her tough but fair parole officer Thelma Kibble, Cassie shares her interest in relocating to Paris and nearly has her parole status elevated to High Control. Cassie phones an associate named Leo Renfro she hasn't spoken to since her five-year prison term in Nevada. She asks for two passports and work. Cash. One job. Leo is half-brother to a man who Cassie was intimately involved with before her imprisonment named Max Freeling. Leo fields Cassie a hot prowl in Las Vegas, burglarizing the hotel room of a mark who's checked in with $500,000 cash in a briefcase. The job would take her back to the "Cleopatra," the site of Cassie's arrest and also the place Max met his fate, falling out--or being helped out--of a penthouse on the twentieth floor. Cassie takes the job and prepares. She bought screwdrivers, iron files, hacksaw blades and hammers, bailing wire, nylon twine and bungee cords. She bought a box of latex gloves, a small tub of earthquake wax, a Swiss Army knife and a painter's putty knife with a three-inch-wide blade. She bought a small acetylene torch and went to three hardware stores before finding a small enough battery-powered and rechargeable drill. She bought rubber-tipped pliers, wire cutters and aluminum shears. She added a Polaroid camera and a man's long-sleeved wet suit top to her purchases. She bought big and small flashlights, a pair of tile worker's knee pads and an electric stun gun. She bought a black leather backpack, a black fanny pack and belt, and several black zipper bags of varying sizes that could be folded and carried inside one of the backpack's pockets. Lastly, in every store she went to she bought a keyed padlock, amassing a collection of seven locks made by entirely different manufacturers and thereby containing seven slightly different locking mechanisms. Leo is a superstitious man who consults the stars before making plans. He warns Cassie of a void moon on the night of the job, a sixteen-minute period when the moon will move from Cancer to Leo at four o'clock in the morning. He considers this bad luck time and warns Cassie not to make her move during the void moon. Her bad luck begins in Las Vegas buying special equipment from a contact she used on her last job, a man named Jersey Paltz who works for a lighting wholesaler that supplies the casinos. Picking up on Cassie's desperation and the news she's working alone, Jersey complicates her job. Using a key card an insider at the Cleopatra leaves for her, Cassie rigs the mark's room with cameras that will allow her to monitor his movements and detect the combination to his closet safe. She's trapped in the closet during the void moon and almost makes her escape before the mark stirs awake. The story then jumps to the aftermath, with the mark shot dead and the hotel's chief of security Vincent Grimaldi hiring private investigator Jack Karch to recover the money, which the boss puts at $2.5 million. Grimaldi wants to keep the cops out of this because the money was a bribe by Cuban gangsters in Florida looking to win a bid on the aging casino. Karch--a Las Vegas local whose father was a stage magician--has been resigned to missing persons work or burying problems for casino bosses in the desert. Grimaldi did him a favor six years ago when Karch caught Max Freeling on a job and the thief dove out, or was pushed out, a penthouse at the Cleo. Karch sees an opportunity to secure his independence. Using video surveillance from the casino, he tracks the mark to Cassie to the vehicle she parked at a neighboring casino. This leads Karch to Jersey which eventually leads him back to Hollywood Porsche, where Karch gets Cassie alone by pretending to be a customer. Cassie reached her right hand up and gripped the top of the windshield brace. Her mind was moving as fast as the car as she tried to come up with a plan, an escape. "Actually, Lankford's not my name," the man next to her was saying. "I got it off a book I found on a shelf at Leo Renfro's last night. It's called Shooters and I started taking a look at it. I thought it was about a guy in my line of work but it wasn't. But, hell, when your boss came up to me in the showroom and asked my name, it's all I could come up with on short notice, you know. My name is Karch. Jack Karch. And I've come for the money, Cassie Black." Through the terror building inside Cassie a thought pressed forward. Jack Karch, she thought. I know that name. Void Moon reminded me of those kitchen magnet sets that have keywords you can arrange into the sentences of your heart's content and stick to the fridge. "Woman," "cat burglar," "Porsche showroom," "Mulholland Drive," "Y2K," "sleazy private investigator" and "astrology" are some of these words. Most everything Michael Connelly plugs into the novel was cool or compelling to me. Details are sharply researched. (There's actually far more information here about GPS tracking in 1999 than I wanted). I am a sucker when it comes to lists and could read about Cassie's kit or how she trains for high-line burglary all day. In the small bungalow she rented on Selma near the 101 Freeway in Hollywood, she spread her purchases out on the scarred Formica-topped table in the kitchen and readied her equipment, wearing gloves at all times when she handled each piece. She used the shears and the torch to make lock picks from the bailing wire and hacksaw blades. She made a double set of three picks: a tension spike, a hook and a thin, flat tumbler pick. She put one set in a Ziploc bag and buried it in the garden outside the back door. The other set she put aside with the tools for the job she hoped would be coming from Leo very soon. She cut half a sleeve off the wet suit and used it to encase the drill, sewing the sound-deadening rubber tightly in place with the nylon twine. From the rest of the wet suit she could quietly carry her custom-made burglary kit. While I swear I've seen this plot done in a Kim Basinger movie called The Real McCoy, Void Moon gets close to being as good as the best Elmore Leonard I've read to date. It's both taut and colorful. Connelly lacks Leonard's facility with dialogue and the novel isn't one I'll reread, but I loved the way he withheld information rather than telling everything about Cassie in the first three chapters. He puts her on a collision course with a terrific adversary in Jack Karch and mines a criminal underworld in which nobody can rely on help from the police. It's a superb western caper in that way and very exciting. While reading, I imagined Diane Lane as Cassie Black. She was attached to play the character in a movie that almost went before cameras in late 2003 with Mimi Leder directing. Al Pacino was set to play Jack Karch. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Feb 14, 2022
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Feb 16, 2022
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Dec 24, 2021
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Kindle Edition
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| 1888451416
| 9781888451412
| 1888451416
| 3.99
| 1,448
| Apr 01, 2003
| Apr 01, 2003
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really liked it
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My introduction to the fiction of Nina Revoyr is Southland, published in 2003. I'm not sure if this was conscious on Revoyr's part, but the rich tapes
My introduction to the fiction of Nina Revoyr is Southland, published in 2003. I'm not sure if this was conscious on Revoyr's part, but the rich tapestry of her book mirrors the John Sayles film Lone Star (1996), in which the skeleton of a vile sheriff reported missing in the '50s is discovered. Who killed him? The question by the new sheriff invites uneasy answers from the town's Anglo, Mex and Black inhabitants, all struggling with how much of their past they should carry and how much they should let go. Revoyr follows that paradigm, but with an L.A. story. In 1994, Jackie Ishida is a third year law student at UCLA. She's summoned by her Aunt Lois to review personal items belonging to Jackie's recently deceased grandfather Frank Sakai. A veteran of the Japanese internment camps of the early ‘40s as well as World War II, Frank owned a convenience store in Watts. He sold it shortly after the Watts Rebellion of 1965 and Lois has discovered proceeds from the sale--$38,000 cash. According to an early will, Frank intended this to go to a Curtis Martindale, who apparently worked at the store. Lois asks Jackie to locate him. Jackie's search ends with James Lanier, a community activist. He reports that Curtis was his cousin and was killed in the Uprising. He was found dead, along with three other Black boys, in the freezer of her grandfather's store. Jackie is hearing this story for the first time. The community believed the murderer to be an LAPD officer named Lawson, a menace seen taking the boys into the store the night they died. To help Lanier bring a case against Lawson, she agrees to speak to her family about these events and work with Lanier as he runs down some of his people. The more questions they ask, the more answers they wish they didn't know are exposed. His father's generation. That was the way he thought of men that age--fifty-five or sixty. They belonged to his father's generation. The phrase both less powerful than it should have been, and more powerful too, because Lanier didn't know his own father. Hadn't laid eyes on him, in fact, since he was four. So he took his knowledge and ideas of the older men around him and tried to reconstruct an image of his father. Most of the men he knew of that age were either bitter or resigned. They were already grown by the time the Movement came along, many of them crushed, dry and fine, like powder. The bitter ones hated all their dealings with the white world, and abused themselves or their loved ones to forget it. The resigned ones shuffled in the shadows of their lives, looking up only to see the step directly in front of them, or to find the mouth of the bottle. A few stayed optimistic, like Carrier, the finance man at Marcus Garvey, by dint of will or God or just plain foolishness. And the even rarer men even succeeded; who made their way in the world without anger or alcohol, Lanier could only wonder at. One of the things I loved about Southland is how Revoyr, born in Tokyo to a Japanese mother and Polish-American father, explores the relationship between a gay Asian law student in her twenties and a straight Black community activist in his thirties. I find most people create like bubbles and rarely step out of them to associate with those who look or think differently than they do. In fiction, characters of different strokes can mix and Revoyr not only tackles this superbly, but rejects turning the relationship into a romance. Revoyr deviates from Jackie or Lanier's storyline to jump back in time. Every other chapter, which is too often. Introducing multiple points of view works for me in some novels, but this wasn't one of them. Reading about Frank's past, his wife Mary's past, Curtis's past, etc., stalled the momentum and made it a real push for me to finish the last 100 pages. Revoyr illuminated historical injustices in a tactful and powerful way, exploring how families were sometimes torn apart, and she does so without melodrama. Susan Straight provides the cover blurb, " ... a remarkable feat ... Revoyr's novel is honest in detailing Southern California's brutal history, and honorable in showing how families survived with love and tenacity and dignity." ...more |
Notes are private!
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Nov 16, 2022
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Nov 19, 2022
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Dec 17, 2021
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Paperback
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my rating |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 3.58
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it was ok
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Apr 27, 2024
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Dec 16, 2023
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| 3.17
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it was ok
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Dec 25, 2023
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Dec 15, 2023
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| 3.48
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did not like it
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Feb 27, 2024
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Dec 14, 2023
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| 3.75
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it was amazing
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Mar 22, 2024
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Jan 13, 2023
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| 3.29
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did not like it
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Apr 12, 2023
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Dec 27, 2022
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| 3.59
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it was ok
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Mar 04, 2023
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Dec 24, 2022
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| 3.72
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it was ok
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Jan 02, 2023
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Dec 15, 2022
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| 4.09
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really liked it
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May 27, 2023
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Dec 12, 2022
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| 4.06
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it was amazing
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Jan 19, 2023
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Nov 26, 2022
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| 3.70
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did not like it
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Nov 15, 2022
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Nov 15, 2022
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| 3.77
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it was ok
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Dec 03, 2022
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Nov 15, 2022
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| 3.43
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it was amazing
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Mar 31, 2023
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Oct 26, 2022
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| 3.50
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really liked it
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Jan 27, 2023
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Sep 18, 2022
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| 3.87
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really liked it
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Feb 09, 2023
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Jul 17, 2022
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| 3.67
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really liked it
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Jun 28, 2022
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Apr 24, 2022
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| 3.97
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really liked it
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May 28, 2022
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Apr 23, 2022
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| 3.92
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really liked it
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Mar 27, 2023
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Feb 12, 2022
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| 4.11
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liked it
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Feb 10, 2022
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Dec 27, 2021
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| 4.00
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really liked it
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Feb 16, 2022
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Dec 24, 2021
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| 3.99
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really liked it
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Nov 19, 2022
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Dec 17, 2021
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