Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 7

BOOK REVIEW: EVELYN WAUGH'S "MEN AT ARMS" (SWORD OF HONOR #1)

"After all, he reflected, his whole uniform was a disguise, his whole new calling a masquerade."

Evelyn Waugh (1903 - 1966) remains a towering figure in British literature, and unlike many successful authors of yesteryear has not been cast aside by history in part because his works, at rather long intervals, continue to be adapted for television and film: BRIDESHEAD REVISITED was turned into a successful mini-series starring Jeremy Irons in a breakout role, and his SWORD OF HONOR trilogy was compressed into a single movie starring Danile Craig just a few years ago. Marcel DeCoste labeled him "one of the great prose stylists of the English language in the 20th century," and whether one agrees or disagrees with this characterization, it is fair to say that Waugh, who was a former soldier, a prolific writer in many mediums including biography and journalism, a world-traveler and a devout (converted) Catholic unafraid to tackle taboo subjects such as abortion and homosexuality, had a lot to say and said most of it with considerable ability. At the center of his style was a dry, arch-eyebrowed, self-depreciating sort of wit that lends itself to satire -- not of the surrealist degree pursued by, say, Joseph Heller, but satire of a more foot-planted variety: realistic without forgetting that fiction is, after all, make-believe.

I do not want to write a biography of Waugh, a task for which I am unsuited anyway, but it is important to note two aspects of his personality which seemed to have shaped his writing more than any other. The first is that he was notorious for his devotion to the British class system and for his personal snobbery, which seems to have taken a very deep root during his Oxford years, and which never wilted thereafter despite his religious feeling. When he refers to the "lower classes" in his writings, there is no doubt that he regards them as just exactly that: lower, lesser, and well deserving of the place they occupy. George Orwell noted with exasperation that "Waugh was as good a novelist as one could possibly be...while holding positions which were untenable."

These traits were unsurprisingly mixed up with a reverence for the past and a dislike of everything new, especially egalitarian ideals like socialism, which began to push its way earnestly into the British system during the First World War and never stopped pushing. Indeed, the crumbling of the old, pre-1914 class system and all the traditions, decadence and pomps that came with it, is a frequent motif in British literature flowing from the pens of men who were part of, or deeply admired, that system, and Waugh was such a man on both counts. One of the last passages in BRIDESHEAD REVISITED scathingly notes the "these men [aristocrats] must die to make a world...so that things might be safe for the traveling salesman, with his polygonal pince-nez, his fat, wet handshake, his grinning dentures." Like many of his class, Waugh's outlook was feudal: the lower classes existed to support the strata above them, and any attempt to shift their place in the stratum could only lead to calamity and collapse. This view was not merely selfish: it was founded in a belief that the system existed for a reason, that the cream rose to the top by its own nature, and that all art, architecture, music, literature, etc. flowed out of the upper classes. To tamper with them was to bring down not only a system but culture.

The second factor worth noting is Waugh's devout Catholicism, which he came to by conversion and which he regarded as a partially successful brake upon said snobbery. To quote his biography: "Strictly observant, Waugh admitted to Diana Cooper that his most difficult task was how to square the obligations of his faith with his indifference to his fellow men. When Nancy Mitford asked him how he reconciled his often objectionable conduct with being a Christian, Waugh replied that "were he not a Christian he would be even more horrible".

That having been said, let us turn to the subject of the review, the first installment of his famous "Sword of Honor" trilogy: MEN AT ARMS (1952). This was the first of Waugh's novels I had ever read, and what struck me almost immediately was the influence they plainly had upon Derek Robinson, an English novelist who followed Waugh and who is one of my favorites. It contains the same satirical tone, the same facetious banter, the same obsession with ironical outcomes, Murphy's Law, and the sense that everything important turns on trivial incidents and throwaway events. The very name Waugh uses to describe the trilogy, pompous as it is, is the first hint of the satire to come. Though the books are set in WW2 and draw heavily from Waugh's own military experience, they are the furthest things from "hot lead and cold steel" war stories you can imagine. He is utterly uninterested in the glorification either of war, the military, or the Allied cause. Indeed, one of the most stinging quotes in the novel is, "the news quickened the sickening suspicion he had tried to ignore...that he was engaged in a war in which courage and a just cause were quite irrelevant to the issue."

So let us begin at the beginning and discuss MEN AT ARMS. It is the story of Guy Crouchback, a hag-ridden thirtysomething Englishman, just about the last of a decayed, once-distinguished line of academic adventurers, whom divorce has rendered a dried-out husk of a man: intelligent but lifeless. As WW2 begins, the brooding and passive Crouchback fights a quiet personal battle, not against the Nazis, but rather the British military, which doesn't want him due to his age and the incorrect assumption he is of pro-Fascist sympathy. Eventually he lucks -- if you want to call it luck -- into the Royal Corps of Halberdiers as an officer candidate, and spends much the rest of the book trying to navigate the incredibly complex, often silly, periodically insane traditions and realities of British military life. When at last he finally does get a taste of battle in Dakar (West Africa), it goes exactly like you'd expect: badly, comically, and tragically.

At the same time, Crouchback is plagued by his unfaithful ex-wife, a beautiful, parasitic sociopath who had an affair with Guy's good friend Tommy Blackhouse, who – of course – ends up Guy's superior officer. In an American novel this would lead to fisticuffs, but Guy hardly resents the destruction of his marriage: indeed, as a devout Catholic he refuses to acknowledge his marriage is over. Virginia Crouchback seems to represent not only the utterly useless, callow, self-serving, pleasure-seeking upper-upper class of Brits which found itself increasingly on the margins of both political and financial power as the war went on, but those British people who, by virtue of money, selfishness or honest disinterest, simply viewed the entire war as a bore and an inconvenience. Virginia's only sympathetic quality is her indifference to the war: from a woman's perspective, it must have seemed a ghastly inconvenience, a bore and a waste, engineered primarily so men could put on uniforms and have adventures in which she was not permitted to share. I found her character particularly interesting for the fact that Waugh was willing to let her be so loathsome. He, after all, wanted to preserve the society that allowed tapeworms like Virginia to exist. He seems to have found this segment of the Upper Crust to be ridiculous and amoral, but also curiously fascinating: he was both drawn to and repulsed by their vulgar wealth, lack of intellectual prowess and amoral behavior.

Like Siegfried Sassoon's famous "Sherston" trilogy, which was also largely autobiographical, Waugh mines his own experiences during the war as raw material for his story. And a ridiculous story it is. Poor Guy Crouchback is intelligent, decent, feckless, cuckolded, lonely, determined, faithful, and decidedly unlucky. Desperate to see battle, what he mainly sees is shortages, confusion, nonsensical, bullying regimental traditions, and quite frequently, madness under color of authority. The military service was always a refuge for eccentrics in Britain, but the degree to which functionally insane men could hold rank and in some cases rise to high command is a theme Waugh returns to again and again with obvious relish. He also seems to have resented social inferiors who achieved such rank and takes great pains to eviscerate them in the story. It is not always clear when he is poking fun at these unfortunates or the men who conspire to snub and blackball them despite their rank.

Many novels have been written on the absurdity and madness of war and military life, but Waugh flips the script by passing this through the lens of the ultimate straight man, Crouchback, whose very name speaks volumes about his approach toward life.
There is an almost Henry Miller-esque quality to Crouchback's passivity: it is so passive that it becomes aggressive by its sheer tenacity. In his own way he is of the "bulldog breed," though admittedly a bulldog who would prefer to read Greek philosophy on a silk-cushioned divan.

The more I sank into MEN AT ARMS, the greater my interest in it became, but it is the ironical outcomes and not the plot, such as it is, which really carry the novel. Waugh builds tension not through the impending terror of battle, but through trivial incidents which invariably escalate to climax with terrible results: such objects as a boot, a bottle of whiskey, and a portable Victorian toilet determine the ultimate fate of more than one man; a misunderstood conversation and a coincidence involving surnames portend to even darker outcomes in a subsequent novel. In Waugh's universe, no good deed goes unpunished, few evil deeds have any consequences, and capricious judgments determine entire destinies. Through it all, Guy Crouchback slogs along with grim determination and a stiff upper lip, his faith and sense of decency a shield against the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune."

When one embarks on a trilogy, it is reasonable to ask if one wishes to continue the journey when the first leg of the voyage has been completed. In this case, when I finished MEN AT ARMS, I immediately purchased the second and third volumes of the series. It was not that I found the book a blistering page-turner or was overwhelmed by its profundity or even the beauty of its prose. Rather what I felt was that I was traveling along a strange axis, looking at the world through a lens which was mostly unfamiliar to me: the hero was manifestly someone who was fighting for the past rather than the future: his war was not against Hitler or Mussolini but against change, against time, against the social upheavals which he himself knew were inevitable and could not be long denied whether they bode for good or ill. His intellect, his sense of decency, his physical courage and ultimately even his life were placed wholly in the service of an impossibility: regardless of who won the war, Crouchback would lose, at least spiritually. This view is so un-American in outlook -- because what was the America soldier fighting for in WW2 if not a different future? -- that it is almost alien to me, an American, and therein lay my fascination. But I'll let the character himself close out this review, for despite the book's humor it takes the bleakest possible view of the great conflict which Western culture has relentlessly romanticized for 80 years now:

“This war has begun in darkness and it will end in silence.”

BOOK REVIEW: TIM O'BRIEN'S "GOING AFTER CACCIATO"

Imagination, like reality, has its limits. -- Tim O'Brien

This is a remarkable book, meaning literally worthy of remark. It is not going to be to everyone's taste, and was often not to mine; I cannot however help admiring author Tim O'Brien for writing it.

GOING AFTER CACCIATIO is about a squad of American soldiers in Vietnam, tasked with hunting down a deserter named Cacciato, who leaves a note saying he's ditching the war and walking to Pairs. As they follow the elusive, enigmatic deserter deeper and deeper into the jungle, soldier Paul Berlin reflects on Cacciato, the various members of his platoon living and dead, his life back home, and the chances of Cacciato reaching his goal, 8,600 miles away. Eventually Berlin's imagination runs away with him, and the hard-boiled narrative of grunt life dissolves into a full-on "phantasy," in which the squad travels through the cities of the Far and Middle East to Europe, always hunting Cacciato and always missing him, until at last they arrive in Paris for the final --? -- showdown. Meanwhile, Paul Berlin, through an imaginary female companion he has conjured from his own mind, argues with himself about duty and possibility and ugly necessity as they relate to war. He reflects upon war itself and the way it manifests differently within each soldier who fights it. Through the real and imagined people Berlin encounters or remembers, we get such gems as this:

"It is easy, of course, to fear happiness. There is often complacency in the acceptance of misery. We fear parting from our familiar roles. We fear the consequences of such a parting. We fear happiness because we fear failure. But we must overcome these fears. We must be brave. It is one thing to speculate about what might be. It is quite another to act in behalf of our dreams, to treat them as objectives that are achievable and worth achieving. It is one thing to run from unhappiness; it is another to take action to realize those qualities of dignity and well-being that are the true standards of the human spirit.”

One of the central themes of CACCIATO -- it has many, perhaps too many for its own comprehensibility and flow, but so does every work of overflowing genius -- is whether the possibility of a thing is determined by mathematical odds and logic and so forth, or merely by will-power and daring. Paul Berlin seems to be a metaphor, an allegory if you will, for the ordinary decent American boy/human being who is nonetheless confined, cramped, even incarcerated within limitations imposed by society and by himself. By tribal mores and the expectations of his neighbors and relations. He asks himself, and is frequently asked: “What happened, and what might have happened?” And in a real sense the entire book is a wobbly balance between those two things -- reality and imagination.

CACCIATO is definitely one of the more imaginative novels I've read in many a year: off the top of my head only Ernst Jünger's interweave of the everyday and the fantasic in novels like THE GLASS BEES or ON THE MARBLE CLIFFS come to mind as standing with this ordinary, decent soldier's fever-dream. O'Brien, a Nam vet who penned several classic memoirs and novels about his service there, is attempting here to ask huge questions about the way morality and even sanity work in a war context. And he understands that it is different for everyone and contains a great deal of what seem to be paradoxes or contradictions. A soldier can hate the war and still revile the judgments civilians make about the war. He can believe in the war and not glorify it or have a sense of passion about it. He can hate both being in a war and being a soldier and yet embrace both because of his sense of duty. He can understand and empathize with Cacciato's decision to desert while despising him for being a deserter.

O'Brien does not romanticize his soldiers, nor does he allow them to be tainted by any judgment. He presents them as ordinary men who have worked out their own way of dealing with an impossible situation and are somewhat beyond armchair analysis. Most hate the war and are barely in the army in a meaningful sense, even plotting murder when they deem it necessary, but they have a strong if eccentric sense of duty and even of honor, all of which comes out in context. There is one chapter describing Berlin's march into his first battle -- not the battle, the long mountain climb into it -- which is a masterpiece of character study and of description, not unmixed with irony, and passages like that make CACCIATO unforgettable. O'Brien is not some guy who served in a war 50 years ago and made a career and a life kicking coins and candy out of that Piñata. He clearly took away life lessons and observations which changed him deeply and affected profoundly his way of looking at the world. Not just war -- the world, existence, life.

The issue I had with the novel, and it is a large one, is that the fantasy elements, except for some in the early-middle and the last few chapters, become somewhat tedious and over-wrought as they go on. I realize some of this was probably by design, but that didn't make it more engaging to read. I was much more interested in Berlin's reminiscences of, for example, Sydney Martin, the earnest, fearless, rigid-minded, ultimately doomed lieutenant who was deemed too dedicated for everyone's good own good by his men, than I was by Berlin's increasingly fantastic daydreams. I had to penalize my rating fairly heavily for this.

So, in the end I found this book a bit of a slog at times despite its daring and its brilliance, and yet I have very little doubt I'm going to read it again, which I can't say of many books I've given five stars. Make of that what you will, and consider this as you do:

“You have taken many risks. You have been brave beyond your wildest expectations. And now it is time for a final act of courage. I urge you: March proudly into your own dream.”

BOOK REVIEW: ERNEST HEMINGWAY'S "THE DANGEROUS SUMMER"

Then he raised his hand as he faced the bull and commanded him to go down with the death that he had placed inside him.

Having previously read Hemingway's rambling, overflowing, unforgettable book on bullfighting, DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON, I was uncertain as to whether I wanted to bother with THE DANGEROUS SUMMER, whose very existence violated Hemingway's own rule about never chewing the same cabbage twice. It was, after all, another non-fiction book about bullfighting, and one produced near the of Hemingway's life, when he was struggling with depression, delusion, and, I suspect, a feeling that he was a has-been living in the shadow of his own legend. There is actually an incident in the book in which Hemingway is told this in so many words by a young writer he encounters in a bar. Indeed, the book's fulsome but very interesting introduction, by James Mitchner, makes a curious point of...well, pointing out that this book should probably not have been written, pointing out that Papa's conclusions about both the bullfighters profiled in the book ultimately being proved completely wrong. Not since various Ernst Jünger book introductions have I been told more thoroughly warned about what I was about to read.

Despite all of this, I found THE DANGEROUS SUMMER one of the most readable things the old master ever put to paper. For my money, which does not amount to very much, I have always found Hemingway at his absolute best not in his novels, but when writing short stories, or reportage, or non-fiction work, where his cut-to-the-bone style and absence of dialog produce the most vivid imagery and flowing pace. Such is the case here.

Hemingway loved anything that he felt reeked of manliness, and the more blood and death were involved in the manliness, the better. Hence his love, one might say lust or obsession with, bullfighting, which pits men against bulls in a contest that always ends either in death (for the bull) or blood (for the bullfighter). THE DANGEROUS SUMMER chronicles the real-life competetition between Luis Miguel Dominguín, the former undisputed great of bullfighting come out of retirement to reclaim his crown, and his brother-in-law, Antonio Ordóñez, the classic young lion determined to put the old one back in his pasture, which took place in 1959. Though friends with both men, Hemingway made no secret of his favoritism towards Ordóñez, and the book is written from a perspective of an admiring hanger-on who accompanied the hotshot across the length of Spain and elsewhere during this epic conflict.

Hemingway was an "aficianado" of the bullfight, which to him was a tragic and beautiful dance with death, and he had a way of describing these contests which brilliantly balanced his very high technical knowledge of the spectacle with his gift of describing physical action. I know absolutely nothing about bullfighting beyond what Hemingway himself has told me, but he somehow makes this horribly macabre activity poetic and artful with his descriptions while more or less fully acknowledging its cruelty. And he does this, for the most part, without repeating much of anything he said in DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON, in which he tried to explain why he found bullfighting so glorious without whitewashing its essential, visceral savagery or offering a defense of the spectacle.

I read this book in three days, for its very much written in the style of a thriller, and while there are a few faults, a few discreet displays of a man possibly trapped within the rigid confines of his own highly distinctive and unique style of prose, trapped beneath the weight of his own reputation, and in a different sense, trapped beneath what were rather faulty conclusions about both bullfighters which were arrived at due to his rather shameless favoritism of one man over the other, none of this made any real difference to me in terms of enjoyment. Hemingway is a fascinating read as much for his willingness to explore the forbidden, the taboo, the deepest darks of the human condition without any fear or shame or apology, while seldom if ever coming across as a mere provacateur, as he is for the beauty of his prose, his jabbing wit, or his bon vivant love of all things connected to life. He was partictularly artiful in finding deeper meaning in simple actions, especially ritualistic actions, such as the hunt, sailing, boxing, fishing, and war. There is an almost Buddhist quality to his ability to hold onto a moment and pluck its meaning without damaging or diminishing it. (I say "almost" because his love of violence is hardly a Buddhist quality.)

In short, I thought this was one hell of a book, something that did not aim at any lofty goal but concentrated its entire might and passion upon a single objective and achieved that objective handily. There are distinct parallels between Hemingway and his depiction (accurate or no) of Dominguín as a great man past his best, yet so stubbornly determined to reclaim his former glory that he does in fact periodically and briefly reclaim it with advantages; a parallel Hemingway may or may not have been aware of since it only heightens his tragedy; in the end though it doesn't matter. Death is for the afternoon and this summer, with Papa, will always be dangerous.

THE MANY WORLD(S) OF DUNE

Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic. -- Frank Herbert, DUNE

A few months ago I posted a semi-coherent rant about the dialog in Dennis Villeneuve's cinematic adaptation of DUNE. I was angry that one of the most cerebral sci-fi stories of all time had been pruned down to suit the text-message vocabulary of the Modern Audience -- so angry I forgot to mention that I didn't dislike the film. It didn't wow me as a whole, but there were definitely "wow" moments and the whole thing held a great deal of promise. Having seen the second installment, I am relieved to report that Villeneuve not only made a much better movie the second time around, there was significant improvement to the intellectual depth of the dialog.

This experience led me to think about the many worlds of DUNE. The original novel, a masterpiece published in 1966, sold 20 million copies, spawned a slew of sequels. Following author Frank Herbert's death in 1986, his heirs allowed the publication of numerous "in universe" prequels and sequels as well, operating from heaps of handwritten notes Herbert left behind. There have been several television miniseries devoted to the series, and it also spawned two massive cinematic adaptations, the first by David Lynch in 1984, the second by Villeneuve in 2021 in 2024, respectively.

Now, I should pause here to say that I am an old-school nerd. I was weaned on STAR WARS, STAR TREK and the original BATTLESTAR GALACTICA. My older brother introduced me to DUNE by way of the novel, and I had only just completed it when the Lynch adaptation hit the theaters. Because this is so, because I am a fan of Herbert's worlds since back in the day, I thought it might be fun to start exploring the entirety of his universe here on Goodreads -- that is to say, both Herbert's novels and the films and series that sprang from them.

A review of DUNE the novel is daunting, so I'm going to ease into this attack with an easier target, the Lynch movie of 1984, which is singular in that it is the only one of the on-screen versions to be made while Herbert was still alive. And on that note, here we go....

[...serious music]

In 1984, my dad took me to see DUNE at a big theater in Washington, D.C. As we sat down, an usher passed out one-page "glossaries of terms" for the film's terminology. Though only twelve years old, I was already a veteran moviegoer (we probably saw 50 movies a year as a family when I was growing up, not including matinee rewatches) and remembered thinking, "Uh-oh...since when does a film need a glossary?" I'd never seen anything like that before. I never saw anything like that since. But that's David Lynch's take on DUNE. It's unique. (And the "Extended Edition," which incorporates significantly more footage and was made against Lynch's wishes, is even moreso.)

DUNE was an almost incredibly deep science-fiction work by Frank Herbert which developed a rabid cult following and finally became the best-selling sci-fi novel of all time. Eccentric director Lynch was tapped to helm what its producers hoped would be another "Star Wars" - style mega-hit. He tackled the intimidating task of cramming an enormous and intricate universe into a single movie by making the most lavish, operatic film you've ever seen. It's bad opera, but it's SO lavish, and so curiously sincere, that it too has developed a rabid cult following. I don't know if I belong to the cult, but I respect those who do. The book DUNE sucked you in with the complexity of its creative surround; this movie does the same, but on a largely visual rather than an intellectual level. If I can use a different metaphor, it's like that scene in "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" when our famished heroes sit down to the royal banquet and get served fried insects, live snakes, and monkey heads. The food is weird and disgusting, but it's served on silver platters and white linen, and all the cutlery is gold.

DUNE is set in the distant, distant future, when humanity spans the entire galaxy and is theoretically ruled by the corrupt and devious Padishah Emperor, Shaddam IV, and his terrifying legions of Sarduakar. Balancing the emperor's might are the Great Houses, the hereditary rulers of each individual planet in the imperium, each with its own smaller, less formiddable army. The most valuable substance in the universe is the spice melange, a substance which extends life and gives prescient powers to those who take it in large quantities, but also allows spaceships to "fold space" and travel instantaneously anywhere in the galaxy ("traveling without moving.") This substance is found on only one planet, Arrakis, known as Dune because its a giant desert. Dune is an awful place -- harsh and arid, populated by mysterious and savage warrior nomads, and full of gigantic monsters known as sandworms, which are virtually indestructible and will hunt down and devour anyone moving incautiously over the desert. At the story's opening, the emperor schemes to destroy a particular house of which he has become jealous, House Atriedes, by throwing his weight behind the Atreides' worst enemy, House Harkonnen.

House Atreides is ruled by the virtuous Duke Leto, his witch-concubine the Lady Jessica, and their teenage son Paul. Although Paul does not know it, he is the end-product of a breeding program 90 generations old, designed by the witch sisterhood, the Bene Gesserit, to produce a superhuman being. In the mean time, the Atreides have developed a new battle technique called "the weriding way" which uses sound as a weapon, but the technique is in its infancy when the Emperor orders the Atreides to take over spice-mining from the Harkonnens on Dune. The Atreides know it's a trap, but have no choice but to obey; in any case the Duke hopes to win over the local populace, the fierce desert warriors known as Fremen, to his cause. He suspects -- correctly -- that the Fremen are the key to holding Dune. Not long after the Atreides arrive, however, they are betrayed from within and largely wiped out in a sneak attack conducted by the Harkonnens and Sarduakar. Only Paul and his mother Jessica survive, and flee into the deep desert. They soon join the Fremen, who are awed by the fighting abilities Paul and his witch-mother possess, and accept them into their tribe. Paul, whose nascent powers are growing due to his proximity to so much spice, becomes a religious figure among the Fremen, a warrior-prophet, and, after mastering the secret of "desert power," begins the long bloody process of trying to wrest Dune from Harkonnen control. This guerilla war prompts the exasperated Emperor to openly side with the Harkonnens, and he arrives at the film's climax with his entire army, ready for the showdown. Because, after all, he who controls the spice controls the universe!

If this seems a bit involved for a recap, just imagine everything I left out! DUNE, as a novel, was layered with all sorts of ideas, concepts, and unfamiliar terms. Mentats, guild navigators, Bene Gesserit witches, Sarduakar, sword-masters, sandworms, thumpers, body shields, Suk doctors, Great Houses, the Landsraad, CHOAM, the spice, etc., etc. What's more, much of the book is written via internal monologue, which is a very tricky thing to translate to film. David Lynch manfully attempted to drag as many of these concepts into the movie as possible, including many sequences in which we can hear the characters' thoughts, and probably did too good of a job; he overloaded the 127 minutes of the theatrical version to the point where it could barely move...hence the "glossary" I got as a twelve year-old. What's more, it's fairly evident that a great deal more time was spent on the costume and production design than on the script, which is horribly clunky and often falls out of the actors' mouths like wet wooden blocks. Though the movie is positively jam-packed with talent (Kyle Maclachlan, Juergen Prochnow, Jose Ferrer, Sean Young, Patrick Stewart, Dean Stockwell, Sting, Kenneth McMillan, Virginia Madsen, Freddie Jones, Brad Dourif, Max von Sydow, etc., etc.) one gets the sense some of the cast just didn't know what the hell they were doing or how to approach doing it. (Some scenes are terribly over-acted, almost to the point of parody.) The final theatrical product is a bold, brassy mess of a movie, visually often stunning, intellectually charismatic, but executed in such an eccentric, awkward style that it's just bizarre...too weird for most people to enjoy.

After DUNE bombed -- if it wasn't a bomb, it was certainly a disappointment critically and commercially -- many people voiced the opinion that a longer version with less choppy editing and a more fleshed-out story would have worked wonders. So a massive 176 minute "extended edition," incorporating many deleted sequences as well as a completely different opening with much more exposition and backstory, was put together and released on television. I watched this when it came out, and was very intrigued by the added sequences, some of which -- like the dining-room scene where Gurney Halleck plays his balliset, or where Feyd-Rautha stuffs the Atreides insignia into Dr. Yeuh's mouth, or the fight scene between Jamis and Paul -- would have helped the story flow more smoothly together had they been shown in the theater. Unfortunately, others, like some of the scenes where Paul is taught Fremen mysteries, are so badly written as to be actually embarrassing. Everett McGill was saddled with nearly all the film's worst lines, and one gets a sense that Lynch was aware of this, for he made sure to employ McGill (and Machlachan) in TWIN PEAKS. A few sequences, like the throne-room confrontation at the opening of the movie, both gain and lose by the changes: some of the takes used in the Extended Edition are worse than in the Theatrical, but they reveal more information. One thing that particularly annoyed me was that even though this version is 39 minutes longer, it has several cuts -- the Baron's infamous "heart plug" assault on one hapless Harkonnen minion is cut out, as is the sequence where he spits on Lady Jessica's face. So amidst all the addition there are some subtle subtractions meant to make the film more palatable to a TV audience.

It is well known that David Lynch wanted nothing to do with the Extended Addition and had his name taken off it, hence the "Alan Smithee" at the beginning. And truth be told, it's not an easy film to watch at one sitting. It's slow and heavy and sometimes quite incomprehensible, and while you can be visually seduced by the uniforms, gadgets, sets and props, it takes a better man than me to sit through some of it with a straight face (or open eyes). Having said that, if you watched the Theatrical version of DUNE and felt frustrated by what seemed to be missing, or are a hardcore fan of the film period, you pretty much have to own this version. It contains enough extra material to more than pay for itself and as I've said, some of the added stuff is well worth watching. This is one bad opera that will have you coming back for more....

[music fades]

Such was the Lynchian version of DUNE. It departed mainly from the book in that the Atreides have actually developed a new form of battle technology, the weirding module, rather than simply trained their army very well; but otherwise it is as faithful an adaptation as one could possibly want. Indeed, it is too faithful: the complexity of the universe Herbert created lends itself to miniseries or even episodic "limited series" television far more than it does to cinema. This is why Villeneuve broke DUNE into two feature-length movies -- and even then, scooped out a great deal of material lest it overload the script. Villeneuve's approach was more logical and more effective, but it robbed DUNE of some of what made it so special in the first place, and I tip my hat to Lynch for his manly attempt at fleshing out so daunting a novel...especially for audiences who probably thought they were going to see a slightly more stylistic take on STAR WARS.

Such was Lynch. The next time we return to this sandblown planet, I am to have a go at Villeneueve's version, and then to the book series. Until then, keep the spice flowing.

MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "THE EQUALIZER"

Don't do something you won't live to regret. -- Robert McCall

As a writer, there is nothing more interesting to me than when somebody comes up with a new way to do an old thing. To tell a well-worn story in a manner that feels fresh and interesting. To come at a familiar place from an angle nobody tried before. THE EQUALIZER (1985 - 1989) was such a television series. It took one of the oldest tropes in the game, that of the "vigilante with a heart of gold," and turned it sideways -- with panache. For that reason we shall shake the dust of our own neighborhoods and take a little night walk through the cold, lamp-lit windblown streets of New York city...via Memory Lane.

I bought the entire series of THE EQUALIZER on a nostalgic whim. I hadn't seen an episode in decades and had quite forgotten whether the show was actually good or whether I was simply remembering it that way. And indeed, my initial feeling after watching a few episodes was regret. Viewing THE EQUALIZER is rather like putting an ice cube in your mouth. The initial reaction is discomfort, and a realization that no, you can't eat these things like candy. You have to spend time letting them warm up before you can enjoy the experience. And just as you wouldn't eat a tray of ice cubes, you probably won't binge-watch this show. To that extent it's like THE X-FILES: meant to be consumed slowly and thoroughly over a long period of time.

The conceit of THE EQUALIZER is this. Robert McCall (the majestic Edward Woodward) spent decades in the spy game before retiring to New York City. Although considered a legend in the business – his former boss calls him “the most dangerous man I have ever met” – the dapper, cultured McCall has little to show for his life's work. He's bitterly divorced, semi-estranged from his son Scott (William Zabka), and troubled by the terrible moral compromises he's had to make. To wash this foul taste from the palate of his conscience, McCall decides he is going to work pro bono as a kind of high-end vigilante. Advertising in the paper as a man who can help the helpless and fight for the little guy, he meets a variety of people in desperate need and uses all of his skills to see that justice is done on their behalf. But what differentiates THE EQUALIZER from what you'd assume would be its premise is that McCall is not a violent man by nature. In fact, he looks harmless and rather cuddly: short, silver-haired, slightly pudgy, sporting a cultured English accent and a fondness for good whisky, classical music and tasteful art. He can use a gun, and does whenever it's necessary, but his general approach is psychological. The ordinary episode goes like this:

A person is being stalked, terrorized, extorted, threatened, etc. by a much more powerful and dangerous person, or group.

They go to the cops, who either can't or won't help. Enter the Equalizer.

McCall circles his opponent for a while, learning his past and weaknesses, then confronts him and demands he/she/they back off.

Instead, they only up their harassment and menacing of the victim.

While forming his plan, McCall usually notices problems within the victim's own personal relationships, family, etc. and tries to fix them, often using “tough love” arguments. In doing this he often examples his own failed marriage and fatherhood, or the guilt he feels over his time with The Company.

Using his contacts from The Company, most notably the dead-eyed and dangerous ex-Navy SEAL Mickey Kostmeyer (Keith Szarabajka), McCall develops a case history and psychological profile of his enemy, and uses it to wage psy-war ops on the poor shmoe until they crack. He rarely slays his victims, instead leaving them broken and compromised, or in the hands of the police.

He repairs to his townhouse for a drink, some Bach, and a book on South American art.

Obviously not all the shows followed this formula. A number are dedicated to McCall's troubled relationship with his former employers, most notably his boss, best friend, and occasional nemesis Control (Robert Lansing). Control is an excellent character, charming and brilliant, yet morally ambiguous and fork-tongued, and whenever he shows up, you know there are international intrigues afoot that will drag Robert back into the spy-world. Other episodes feature McCall's generally disastrous personal life, or the appearance of some wanted (or unwanted) person from his own dark past. One very memorable story, for example, revolves around Randall Payne, the man who murdered his father. Another forces McCall to confront his own deeply-held belief that he is going to hell when he dies.

THE EQUALIZER is an unusual show in more ways than its choice of lead actor (a pudgy, gray-haired, dapper Englishman rather than a young, rip-muscled American stud), or the fact that his methods are more cerebral than violent in nature. It is an intelligent, thoughtful, oddly civilized series that explores the nature of evil from the viewpoint man who is not evil, but understands evil uncomfortably well, because of all the damage he has done, and thirsts for a redemption which may not be possible...because, after all, to fight evil, McCall must frequently blackmail, extort, terrorize and even sometimes kill his opponents. The notorious episode “Nightscape” (Season 2) pits McCall against a trio of vicious rapists who prowl the subways. The episode is handled from the angle of the damage that rape does to the victims and their loved ones, but also in the sense that McCall is trying to prevent the husband from becoming a vigilante. This creates a tension in the episode which resolves in an act of brutal, cold-blooded, but thoroughly satisfying multiple murder, and sets THE EQUALIZER apart from almost any other show on television during its era. While not an action show pe se, when it did depict violence, it was often brutally done. “China Rain” (Season 1) or “Prisoners of Conscience” (Season 4) shocked me as a kid (as did “Nightscape”) because this was no A-TEAM fairy tale where bullets don't kill anyone, a beating is shrugged off in the next scene, and even torture leaves no more consequence to the victim than a barked shin. No, sir. The people who die on THIS show stay dead, and the people who live are sometimes scarred for life or visibly haunted. It's pretty dark at times, but in that sense hardly unrealistic. In short, THE EQUALIZER, while often violent, did not glorify violence or pretend it came free of consequences. It emphatically rejected the Tarantino-esque thesis that bloody vengeance is something which must be sought for its own sake and viewed as a thing-in-itself, its own alpha and omega. On the contrary: it made a point, a repeated point at that, in explaining that blood does not wash off so easily.

Aside from this, and the iconic score by Stewart Copeland of The Police, there are three factors which make THE EQUALIZER really stand out. One is the show's relationship to New York City during the 80s. Beautifully shot, the cinematography depicts both the beauty and the decay of the Big Apple, shying away from neither. Virtually the whole of T.E. was filmed on location, almost nothing in the studio. It gives us a picture of mid-80s NYC which is almost impossible to find anywhere else, a sort of time-capsule from my own boyhood. The other is the absolutely staggering number of up-and-coming actors who appeared as guest stars or recurring roles who later became famous actors in their own right. A very short random sampling would include Michael Wincott, Laura San Giacomo, Alberta Watson, John Goodman, Stanley Tucci, Kevin Spacey, Lawrence Fishburne, James Remar, Michael Rooker, Richard Jordan, Saul Rubinek, William Atherton, Vincent D'Nofrio, J.T. Walsh, Tony Shaloub, Michael Moriarty, Ving Rhames, Vitamin C, Patricia Richardson, Steve Buscemi, Jennifer Gray, Dan Hedaya, Jenny Agutter, Christian Slater, Will Patton, Keith David, Brad Dourif and John Heard. You will also recognize all of McCall's ably-played company sidekicks.

The last factor? Cinematography and lighting. The star of THE EQUALIZER is Woodward, but his co-star is New York City itself. The word "lush" can be used to describe the visual painting that is a lot of the camera work: especial use is made of both light and (not surprisingly) shadow. As I said before, there's no attempt to glamorize the wormy Big Apple, but the camera shows us both worms and fruit in a way that's easy to admire and impossible to forget.

THE EQUALIZER is, of course, not perfect television, even for the times. It can be horribly sappy and cheesy (“Reign of Terror” from Season 1, for example, is just awful) and at other times overly stylized or just plain preposterous. The methods McCall uses to psychologically destroy or just exact tricked confessions out of criminals are sometimes so involved as to defy all belief, and there are other episodes where one just wonders why the crooks don't go after McCall more aggressively since he rather than their victims are the source of their real problems. In the 87 – 88 season, Woodward's heart attack limited his role on the show for a time, and the producers tapped Robert Mitchum to sub for him for a few episodes: this was a good decision, but instead of using Szarabajka as his side-kick, they brought in Richard Jordan to play Harley Gage for ten episodes. Jordan is a fine actor but was miscast as a tough guy, and seemed to know it, and to resent it: these episodes don't work all that well, and when Jordan disappears without explanation, my sense as a viewer was, “What the hell was that all about?"

THE EQUALIZER had just wrapped its fourth season when it was abruptly canceled, one season short of what was then considered the minimum length for syndication. It turns out the cancelation had nothing to do with ratings, it was simply an act of spite by the network. To quote Quora:

The ratings for THE EQUALIZER had never been great, but it attracted the right demographic and performed well enough in its timeslot for CBS to renew the series for a fifth season. However, this all went sideways when the negotiations between CBS and Universal Television over the renewal of MURDER SHE WROTE turned hostile. Angela Lansbury’s five-year contract had expired, and the 63 year-old actress wasn’t at all sure that she wanted to continue with the punishing workload of carrying a weekly TV series. CBS very much wanted to keep its highly-rated whodunit on the air. To make that happen, the network was forced to make concessions to Universal that it really did not want to make. Having to capitulate to Universal to keep Jessica Fletcher busy solving mysteries on Sunday nights did not go down well with the network execs, so—to prove they were still big, tough guys—CBS decided to punish the studio by reneging on the already announced renewal of THE EQUALIZER. So, in the end, it wasn’t poor ratings or health concerns that ended THE EQUALIZER, it was Hollywood petulance and backstabbing.

As you all know, I saw -- from the ground level, where the economic impact is really felt -- a lot of this behavior myself when I was working in Tinseltown: and that brings us to the part where I say, "So where does this leave us? What is the legacy of THE EQUALIZER? What can we learn from it? Does it stand the test of time?"

Let's address the first point first for a change. I mentioned up top that THE EQUALIZER was in my estimation a new take on an old scene. I stand by that. The "vigilante movie" semi-craze of the 70s and 80s usually depicted men who had been violently wronged wreaking bloody personal vengeance. This show approached the problem of "is there no justice?" in a different way. The wronged men (and women) of T.E. did not practice vengeance, they enlisted it, in the form of the dapper little McCall. And McCall, unlike, say, Chuck Bronson's Paul Kersey, did not exterminate the evildoers with a typhoon of hot lead. He hit them in their psychological pressure points, like some epigram-spouting, white-haired kung-fu master, taking pleasure not in their pain, but the in the destruction of their power to inflict further evil. If he had to kill, McCall's look of angry disgust told the story. In one episode, when a beautifully conceived, carefully-laid trap ends with an unexpected fatality, he rages at the triggerman: "Nobody was supposed to die!" McCall's ultimate motive was not destruction but reclamation: of his own soul, the peace of mind of his clients, and justice itself. Whether McCall used the sword or his mind, however, is less important than the fact that such a figure -- a redresser of wrongs -- figures prominently in the mythical architecture of Western society. From Robin Hood to Paul Kersey, from Dirty Harry to Batman, we have always needed what Orwell called "an everyman to give the wicked rich man a sock on the jaw." He added, however, that such escapist mythology was rooted in "the need to vicariously get one over on the people who are getting over on you in real life." And this is where our question about legacy groweth deep.

I'm tempted to say THE EQUALIZER's legacy lies in the fact it's undergone two full-dress reboots in the last decade, one cinematic, one episodic; but I'm uninterested in these flabby modern takes on the unmatchable original. Its real legacy is a two-sided coin: the first that it proved that it is possible for a thoughtful, well-acted, usually very well-written series to exist in a genre of storytelling marked by tough guy dialog, spent shell casings and gallons of stage blood. The second is that there is no bottom to the spite of The Suits, the network and studio executives who always come to mind when I hear Don Henley sing the lyric: "These days a man makes you something, but you never see his face; and there is no hiding place." The real wire-pullers of our collective destiny, be they political or industrial or medical-pharmaceutical or anything else, are, as C.S. Lewis noted, "admin." They have scrubbed fingernails and wear ties and carry briefcases and sit in air-conditioned boardrooms, and they decide our destinies from a distance and in total anonymity. And contrary to what you might think, their motive is not money but domination -- the exercise of ultimate power, the more abitrary and spiteful, the better. And their power really is ultimate: a hundred criminals came at Robert McCall and failed. They made him disappear with the stroke of a pen.

I don't want to end this stroll through Memory Lane on a down note, because however grim it might have been, and however much its fate may have gone against the grain of its message,the series was ultimately about hope, about the triumph of the little man over the big man, the individual against the system. So let me say that for all of its flaws, THE EQUALIZER was a damn good show. Maybe a bit too ponderous, a bit too rigidly formulaic and uneven in execution to be truly great, but enormously enjoyable both as a dark lover letter to New York and as a celebration of what a great actor – Edward Woodward – could do with a thoughtful, well-written part that was willing to take risks both with its storylines and its characters. Like NYC itself, it's both ugly and beautiful, tough and curiously sincere. So, if you've got a probem..if the odds are against you...give the gentleman a call. Because hell, if all men were created equal, we wouldn't need The Equalizer.

THE SATURDAY EVENING POST: NOT QUITE AS I PLEASE

I haven't done a "Saturday Evening Post" in a good long while. To be frank, my schedule hasn't permitted me to put out two blogs a week in longer than I can remember. Such is the life of an independent author: you juggle the writing and the revising and the podcasts and unpaid speaking gigs and all the other things you want to do with all the rest of the things you have to do...like hold down a job. I know, I know: me and the rest of the world. Still, it does seem sometimes as if I'm rather like Frank Cotton at the end of Hellraiser...getting pulled into many directions at once. With hooks. On this Memorial Day weekend, however, I actually do have time to relax a little and enjoy life. I will put out a short Thank You to the fallen who allowed this through their sacrifices on Monday, but in the mean time I'll say a few words about reading and writing.

Firstly, and I know this is becoming a bit repetitious so it will be the last time I do this in 2024, I want to announce that my second CAGE LIFE novel, Knuckle Down is a Readers' Favorite Five Stars. Here is the review:

Author Miles Watson has a real talent for suspense, crafting a pulse-pounding journey into the gritty underworld of New York City, where danger lurks around every corner and redemption comes at a steep price. The vivid and visceral descriptions of this world pull no punches, and the realism of the action sequences is gut-wrenchingly compelling, to the point where readers will truly believe that every fight could be Mickey’s last. As our well-penned, complex hero grapples with his past and fights to protect those he loves, readers become fully immersed in the adrenaline-fueled action and suspenseful twists. I was also really impressed with the wider ensemble cast around Mickey, who were just as well developed with their own unique dialogue touches and attitudes that have been credibly shaped by their dark and difficult way of life. Overall, Knuckle Down is a gripping tale of redemption, revenge, and the power of love that fans of realistic and action-packed fiction are certain to enjoy from cover to cover.

Not too shabby. I have always had an especial fondness for this novel, which I hated like poison when I was writing it but now consider one of my better efforts. If you read these blogs regularly, you probably know that the third installment in this series is on its way: I plan a release before the end of the year.

More in the writing vein: at the end of this month I'll be attending In Your Write Mind, a three-day seminar-slash-writing conference in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, a few miles outside of Pittsburgh. Theoretically I am presenting one or more teaching modules there: "Writing Violence," "Writing Dialog" and "Building Better Worlds." Whether I actually teach anything is still up in the air, however, as I've seen the presentation schedule and as of now I am not on it. Whether I present or not, however, I will be doing a book signing there and meeting up with my editor, Michael Dell of One Nine Books, whose podcast, the LCS Hockey Radio Show, I just guested on again last night, and my mentor Pat Picciarelli, author of Hollywood Godfather, The Sixth Family, and Mala Femina, among others. Writing being a solitary profession by nature, it does a writer's heart some good to be around his own kind every now and again. (When I was working in Hollywood, I was constantly surrounded by people who, regardless of how they felt about me or I about them, understood the struggles inherent to the business generally.)

In regards to reading, I recently discovered this: The term, tsundoku (tsoon-doh-ko), means “the practice of buying a lot of books and keeping them in a pile because you intend to read them but have not done so yet; also used to refer to the pile itself” (Cambridge University Press, n.d.). The term is a play on words and originated in the late 19th century of Japan. Welp, that's me. A short list of the books now threatening to collapse both my nightstand and one of the shelves of my bookcase, which I want to read but haven't gotten to yet, are:

P.G. Wodehouse "The Inimitable Jeeves"
Evelyn Waugh "Brideshead Revisited"
W. Somerset Maughm "On A Chinese Screen"
John B. Gordon "Reminiscences of the Civil War"
Ernest Hemingway "The Dangerous Summer," "True at First Light," and "Selected Letters 1917 – 1961"
Mike Tyson "Undisputed"
David Grann "The Wager"
Derek Robinson "The Eldorado Network"
Rainn Wilson "Soul Boom"
John D. Billings "Hardtack and Coffee"
James Holland "Big Week"
Errol Flynn "Showdown"
Johnathan Bastable "Voices from Stalingrad"

Before I can get to any of this, however, I have to finish Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato a strange and surreal novel which is alternatively brilliant and bizarre. There are chapters in this book that take me so completely into Vietnam that I feel as if I'm there, and there are chapters in which I feel I've walked into someone else's mescaline-induced Hunter Thompson fever-dream. Which I suppose is the point. It's certainly an interesting read, but it's not a smooth read. In any event, 5 will get you 10 that I buy at least one more book before I finish the one I'm reading now, or crack any of the two dozen or more I've got waiting for me.

I mentioned podcasts. I am a regular guest on LCS Hockey, and have never, not once, discussed hockey. I have not even been asked about hockey. Among the things I have discussed there are writing, boxing, the UFC, Hollywood, TV shows, horror movies, and very bad movies generally. I am also a periodic guest on Comic Book Syndicate's "Flea Market Fantasy," which discusses Bronze Age comic books, and I have made one appearance each on The Hollywood Godfather Podcast (it was the highest-rated cast of the season, actually) and Burke Allen's Big Time Talker Podcast. Being an indie author, I have to take every possible opportunity to promote myself, but let's face it, if you put a microphone in front of my face and tell me to talk about basket weaving or sea sponge migrations, I'll do it.

And that about wraps me up on this lazy Saturday. I'm going to go hiking now despite the thunderstorm warning, and work out some of the plot problems I'm encountering while writing my third SINNER'S CROSS novel, South of Hell. A writer is, after all, a writer all the time -- even when he doesn't wish to be. As fates go, I'll take it.

AS I PLEASE XXIV: THINGS WE LEARNED FROM BENITO EDITION

I am currently reading Duce!, a breathless, beautifully-written biography of Benito Mussolini, written by Robert Collier in 1971. I have been curious about Mussolini more and more in recent years, especially since Putin's invasion of Ukraine, because it is in Mussolini rather than Hitler or Stalin that I see a historical figure analagous to Russia's present-day dictator. Reading the book has my mind going in a parallel direction: parallel in the sense that Mussolini's rise -- and his catastrophic fall -- were both the results of the human inability to heed historical warnings, both individually and on a mass scale. I believe as a Generation Xer I am among the last group of Americans to have been formally taught Civics, the subject being hateful to both the Left and the Right for the same reason: the fundamental lessons of Civics are to teach students the "slippery slope" theory as it applies to human freedoms, and more broadly, how to think critically in the face of one's own prejudices and predelictions. Both skills are critical to the survival of democracy, and therefore, neither idea is popular among the would-be autocrats who have hijacked our political system at both eneds. Reading about Mussolini, however, led me to a whole series of observations about history and current events which I will now set before you.

* There is widespread belief that authoritarian governments are more efficient than democracies because they do not engage in tedious wrangling over policy, but make decisive decisions and then act upon them. People admire dictators as much for their supposed ability to "get things done" as for their cruelty or ambition. (Mussolini was admired for his literal and figurative ability to "make the trains run on time.") Authoritarian worship, then, is often born not in a vicarious lust for power but rather out of sheer impatience for the fumbling and stumbling way of democracy. History has shown us, however, that authoritarian systems rapidly become so corrupt that they find it almost impossible to do anything effectively. Corruption stems largely from the fact that a free press is by far the most effective tool in exposing corruption in both business and government, and of course a free press is the first thing to go under a dictatorship. In the vacuum, corruption flourishes, leading in turn to the very inefficiency that investing a man or a small group with ultimate power was supposed to eliminate.

* Perhaps not coincidentally, the Italian director and provocoteur Passolini explored the "anarchy of power" in his unwatchably disgusting movie Salò, or 120 Days of Sodom; Salò happened to be the capital of Mussolini's short-lived Italian Social Republic, the Nazi puppet state in northern Italy the last two years of the war. The film deals with corruption, not in the monetary but rather in the moral sense, and it is fair to say that Mussolini's empire, whether headquartered in Rome or Salò, was morally corrupt almost from the start if not before its actual inception. The tactics Mussolini used to gain power, which included murder of political opposition, tainted the legitimacy of his rule, and his actual policies were divergent enough from their socialist origins to alienate much of the populace he governed. His penchant for warmongering did the rest. Napoleon once remarked that the moral is to the physical in war as three is to one, and it remains a fact, however uncomfortable to dictators, that people do not like to fight, and most especially do not like to die, for morally bankrupt causes. A dictator must convince his people that his cause is just, or at least that there is some identifiable merit in it, and after about 1937 Mussolini seems to have been unable to do this. The Italian people fight well when they believe in their cause, but when they do not, to paraphrase Suvorov, they stick their bayonets in the ground and go home. Several million Italian soldiers did this in World War Two and it is very difficult to fault them for it.

* Militarism is the worship of the military for its own sake, rather for any benefit it produces society, and its central tenant is that bombs solve political problems. This is at the core of all fascist movements: a veneration of all things military and a belief that violence is always the answer. In fact, history manifestly shows that bombs actually tend to create more problems than they solve, and that those who view politics as merely a continuation of war are generally doomed to failure. The genius of a man like Franco was that he knew how to play the role of a fascist dictator without losing his good sense: his understanding of the limits of Spanish military power kept him out of WW2 and allowed him to rule for generations and die in bed. Mussolini probably knew Italian limits at the start; he was actually quite an able politician, and after taking power, was trying to moderate and rule by coalition; he was forced into autocracy by extremists in his own party. Once he accepted this autocracy, however, he fell headlong into it and all the false logic that came with it, and his petty jealousy of Hitler led him to try and imitate his former pupil by playing Caesar to Hitler's Charlemagne. The result was total destruction of the Italian Empire, the extermination of fascism in Italy, and the death of Mussolini himself.

* Realpolitik, the practice of conducting foreign policy without regard to morality but only benefit, is a darling of right wing political thought; but is self-defeating for the same reason that selfishness is ironically self-defeating: it produces the thing it seeks to avoid. It may be expedient, for example, to ignore a friend's cries for help so as to avoid risk or inconvenience to oneself, but the bill for such selfishness will eventually come due -- often with interest. There is an intangible moral factor in politics of all kinds, and those eager to dismiss morality as a basis for behavior usually do so under the guise that they are "realists." This is the same mentality that justifies what we call brutal honesty, which more than half the time is simply an excuse for sadism under the guise of directness. Realpolitik is ultimately an attempt to dress up and justify amoral decision-makiny. Mussolini threw many a laurel and cosmetic over his imperial ambitions, but these dressings failed to conceal the stench of his amorality, his lack of scruple. For a dictator to remain popular, he must find a way to justify his dictatorship to the individual. Mussolini's brand of realism failed, except to the extent it thoroughly produced its own destruction.

* One of the results of tyranny and dictatorship is the movement toward group fantasy, a stylized denial of reality, among the ruling clique. For a good many years Mussolini seems to have had a reasonably firm grasp on both Italian and world politics -- he initially courted members of the internal opposition he felt were useful for his government, and correctly deduced the League of Nations would not stop his military ambitions in Africa. As Europe came closer to war, Mussolini -- not Churchill -- was actually at the forefront of the peace movement, being the first to stand up to Hitler, and later, even after his ill-fated alliance with same, a vocal proponent of talks and negotiations between the powers rather than violence. Hitler's success in the field, however, jealousy-blinded Mussolini to the inadequacy of his own military, goading him into the world war; much later, after defeats had stripped him of most of his empire and all of his prestige, he spent more and more of his time retreating into the petty squalor of internal fascist party politics, arguing with his disgruntled, fractious fascist prelates over this or that doctrine, this or that platform, this or that method of recovering the party's soul, when in fact it was obvious to anyone with sense that fascism was doomed -- actually dead and rotting, though admittedly still clinging to the levers of power like a corpse in mid-rigor. This collapse into denial is a marked feature of all tyrannies looking into the abyss, but it does not take an existential crisis to produce psychosis: success can also produce it. The point is that dictators like Mussolini inevitably become isolated from reality, either due to the scheming machinations of servile and ambitious underlings, or because they lose the ability to distinguish between power and omnipotence.

* Collier makes a fascinating observation about Mussolini, to wit, that like many revolutionaries, even those who went on to commit bestial atrocities on a massive scale, Mussolini's initial objectives as a political figure were at least partially understandable. A child of abject poverty, he knew poverty intimately and detested a system which ignored its cruelties and indignities; he opposed imperial adventures abroad when the great mass of the people at home were hungry and hopeless; and he wanted to effect changes which would grant the ordinary Italian dignity and a share in his own destiny as well as sufficient bread and vino to live, as opposed to merely subsist. He did not begin his journey fighting for the church, the aristocracy, the wealthy, or big business; quite the contrary, he openly hated these instutitions and classes and longed to see them in the dirt. And yet one of his girlfriends made the observation that "to her it seemed that his hatred of oppression not from love of the people but from his own sense of indignity and frustration, his passion to assert his ego." In this he shared much with men like Stalin and Hitler, whose sense of grievance, and whose desire for vengeance against the world, outweighed any benign motives they might have once succored for their people early in their politico-revolutionary life. This serves as a keen reminder that "even the devil can quote scripture to his purpose;" that just because a man has or seems to have the right enemies, the right goals, it is his motives and his means by which ye shall know them.

So much for old Benito, who has long since been consigned to the ash-heap of history. The fact that his memory resides there is not the important issue, but rather the fact that he needed to be sent there in the first place. For Mussolini, like Stalin and Hitler alongside him and like so many subsequent dictators and would-be dictators since, could have been avoided. His methodology was from almost the start a red flag fluttering and snapping in the breeze, plain for any to see and remark upon; and his fate could have been foretold by anyone with sufficient understanding of the inherent weaknesses of dictatorship. It remains for us to remember the lessons taught to us by his rise and fall, and by the existence of all the others who would follow in his footsteps and utilize his same means.

MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "FATHER DOWLING MYSTERIES"

I am fairly certain that I was not aware of the existence of "Father Dowling Mysteries" during its brief (1989 - 1991) run on the air. I freely confess as well that I would not have watched the show even had I known it did in fact exist. The "cozy mystery" was nothing I was remotely interested in as a young man who wanted to see shootouts, fist-fights, car chases and bikini babes in most of my entertainment. As I have ambled into middle age, however, I feel an increasing need to find periodic escape in what is sometimes referred to as "wholesome entertainment," i.e. TV shows and movies which are not replete with cursing, gore, and moral ambiguity. It is not that I have lost my taste or tolerance for these things per se, merely that television and film were meant first and foremost as a form of escape, and the present world is vulgar and amoral enough as it is.

Not having memories of "Father Dowling Mysteries" from its original run, this entry of Memory Lane probably deserves as asterisk; but one of the joys of running your own blog is that you can do whatever the hell you want, and in any case this entry will be largely free of the tedious nostalgia I invariably feel compelled to comment upon, since my viewing of the series came thirty-plus years after it was on the air. There is in any case a reason I am visiting this particular address on the Lane today, one which will become apparent as we explore its candle-lighted interior.

To begin with, "Father Dowling Mysteries" is the sort of TV series which is not made much, if at all, in this horribly cynical age. It is a cozy mystery show with an old-fashioned set of values and strong moral center, "suitable for the whole family," as advertisers used to say when I was a kid. It is just the sort of thing that is fun to watch if you want to be unchallenged, unthreatened, occasionally amused, and modestly engaged. In a sense it's like having tea with your eccentric grandmother. And if that doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement, you must understand that there is a real place for entertainment of that type, and that place should be respected.

"FDM" was very loosely adapted from the popular mystery series of the same name by Ralph McInerney, and supposedly influenced -- if you believe Wikipedia -- by G.K. Chesterton's "Father Brown" novels as well. I is the story of Father Francis Dowling (Tom Bosley) and Sister Stephanie (Tracy Nelson), of rough-and-tumble St. Michael's Parish in Chicago. The rotund and cuddly Dowling is a devoted if somewhat embattled priest, none too popular with his bishop, in part because he loves playing amateur detective. The fiesty Stephanie ("Steve" to her friends) is a former reprobate who still knows the streets and is as comfortable with a lockpick (or lipstick) as a rosary, and acts as Dowling's legman and Girl Friday. Together they make a habit of aggravating the local cops by butting their noses into murder mysteries, usually for the purpose of trying to prevent the dull-witted Chicago PD from arresting the wrong man. In this task they are supported by Marie Murkin (Mary Wickes), the irascible parish cook/housekeeper who pretends not to like Dowling, and the bumbling, self-centered and comically ambitious Father Philip Prestwick (James Stephens), who is usually more of a hinderance than a help. These four actually make a family unit of sorts: Dowling is dad, Marie is mom, Steve is the daughter and Prestwick the unwanted relation nobody is willing to throw out into the street.

The show usually follows a formula taken partially from the "Perry Mason" catalog, and "Murder, She Wrote" playbook, which is no surprise, as Bosley left that show to head up this one. It goes like so: A murder is committed, an innocent person is on the hook for it, and our heroes must not only prove the accused didn't do it, but find out who did. This usually involves some derring-do and undercover work, and often culminates with Frank talking the bad guy into a confession while the cops lurk just around the corner waiting to spring. Because it's set in Chicago, there are many Mob stories and plots that center around corrupt officials, crooked cops, etc., but the basic atmosphere of the show is "cozy mystery" and so with a few notable exceptions, the murders and rough stuff are handled in a pretty tame fashion, and a woman in a bikini or a tight cocktail dress is as sexy as things will ever get. Also, although Dowling is a priest and Steve a nun, religion here is often a backdrop and not foreground material: if the series has a theme, it is that faith is great, but good works are what save the day and the soul.

From an objective standpoint, DOWLING has a lot wrong with it, even grading on a curve. The storytelling is generally full of cliches and tropes, and while some of the stories are inventive and a few very cleverly plotted, most of the twists are easy to spot from far away. The dialog varies enormously, from sharply witty and clever to the usual TV dreck of that era, in which the script seems to be pasted together from scraps of the Great Book of Television Cliches. The show is set in Chicago, but actually filmed in Denver (as was "Perry Mason" when it returned), and it certainly looks nothing at all like Chicago, to the point that they may as well just have set it in Denver and been done with it. What's more, like Tracy Nelson herself, the guest actors are usually New Yorkers with heavy New York or Jersey accents, which makes further nonsense of the setting. As for Tom Bosley, he is extremely believable as a priest, but not so much as an amateur sleuth/deductive genius. Unlike Angela Lansbury's Jessica Fletcher, Dowling's deductive faculties never really ring true. He comes off as merely nosy rather than possessing any genius at detection. There were also times the show also struggled with its identity: three or four episodes are purely supernatural in character. Now, as a general rule, you can do that all the time or none of the time, and if you want to work the middle, you'd better have a very deft touch (like "Magnum, P.I."). I'm not sure Dowling talking to the devil constitutes a light touch.

What makes DOWLING rise above its flaws is its wholesome attitude. In this day and age, every protagonist is either an outright criminal or so tortured, troubled and morally ambiguous it's hard to tell the difference between protagonist and antagonist. There's a place for Noir-type storytelling, but it should not RE-place conventional protagonists and yes, even heroes. Dowling represents the radical idea that there are good and selfless people out there who want to do mostly good and selfless things...period. Steve represents the idea that people can overcome their past without pretending it never happened...period. Marie is caring and kind beneath her crusty exterior, the “stepmom with the heart of gold,” and even Prestwick, who is venal, shallow, clueless, selfishly ambitious, and generally annoying, is curiously likeable, because his failings contains no malice. There's something comforting about all of this, a sort of emotional atmosphere which I found myself strongly responding to. What's more, while the show is necessarily steeped in Catholic iconography and ritual, it's not preachy: Bosley himself was Jewish in real life, and I think the main message is not religious per se, but moral: good must fight evil, and must not expect a reward for doing so. You fight not for riches or glory but because it's the right thing to do...period.

During its short life, "Dowling" produced 43 episodes and one TV movie, appeared on two different networks, and managed to employ just about every working character actor in Hollywood, as well as many young actors who went on to considerable fame or success in later life, including Anthony La Paglia, Tony Todd, Colm Meany, and Michelle Forbes. It made no lasting pop-cultural marks and certainly never threatened "Murder, She Wrote" in either ratings or popularity, which I'm fairly certain was the intention of its producers. When it disappeared, it did so quietly, and I'm fairly certain that while it is fondly remembered by its small audience -- look at the loving tributes on Amazon reviews -- there won't be any "Father Dowling" conventions or reboots any time soon. So why talk about it at all? The answer to this is digressive and complicated but worth the trip, which I'll make as short as possible, impatient as we all are of destination.

I've already touched on the place which "wholesome entertainment" has, or ought to have, in our lives. It should exist, at the very least, as an option; an alternative to the dark, gritty, morally ambiguous taletelling which abounds everywhere. It provides distraction and relief from the real world, which is necessarily often gray and ugly and replete with unhappy endings. But there is also the greater purpose that this sort of thing serves, the service it provides which we often do not appreciate enough in the noisy, speed-crazed age in which we live. It is what George Orwell referred to in "Coming Up For Air" as the "book-pipe-fire" atmosphere, which the cozy mystery (among other fictive genres) so easily summons. When one chains the door, switches off the phone, builds the fire, boils the tea (fortified, perhaps, with some Irish whiskey), and sits down in one's favorite chair, what is it that they seek when they pick up the book or the remote control? Is it the world on the other side of that locked door, from which they have just returned, or is it something else -- something different?

When we look at the history of television and film, we see that "adult" themes began to make themselves more and more readily felt in the years immediately following World War Two, when returning soldiers demanded that their entertainment correspond more accurately to the darker, more cynical world that war and military service had exposed them to. This movement towards gritty storytelling, toward the protagonist as opposed to the hero, toward the unhappy rather than the happy ending, reached its apotheosis in the 1970s, when ugliness and brutality became the norm in film and increasingly common on television. The good and the bad guys were generally indistinguishable in outlook and method; only the causes they served tended to differ. This was probably a necessary thing, and certainly it was inevitable, but it also left audiences with fewer and fewer places to go where the deeper purpose of entertainment was to be found: escape. It is one thing to insist that a film or a TV series reflect, as accurately as possible, the world we live in; it is another to destroy the distinction between the world we live in and the fantasy world we are trying to reach through these self-same mediums. After all, we already live in the real world: why the hell should we turn on a TV and get more of the same? The very purpose of these mediums is to divert us from reality, to bend the rules of existence so we can produce different behaviors and different outcomes than those we can expect in our everyday lives.

The very concept of a "cozy mystery" is somewhat fantastic, in that it reduces one of the ugliest acts inaginable, murder, into something suitable for comfortable, fireside entertainment. Indeed, the mystery genre itself presupposes something which does not obtain in real life, i.e. that the mystery is always solved, the murderer always caught or at least identified. When you fire up "Father Dowling Mysteries" you may not know much, but you know Dowling will get his man -- or woman, regardless of the odds arrayed against him. But this is also precisely why we watch such things. The insistence on realism which pervades all forms of entertainment today creates by its very existence a dissonance within our minds and hearts, because TV and film were meant as funhouse mirrors, not windows. And this is where the strength of "Dowling" and its ilk rests: this is why, despite is numerous flaws and failings, it is just as appealing, or perhaps more appealing, in 2024 as it was in 1989. It is not giving us the truth; it is presenting us with a stylized rejection of reality in which, whatever tragedies and dangers are borne by our heroes, the truth will always out and the murderer always end up in the dock. And this is why, when it's cold outside in more ways than just the temperature, it doesn't hurt to chuck the cell phone, put the kettle on, hoist up your feet, and escape to St. Michael's Parish for an hour or two. After all, the real world will still be there when you return.

DARK TRADE

On June 14, 2023, I sat down and began the formal process of writing the third novel in my CAGE LIFE series, tentatively titled Dark Trade. I completed this draft on January 7, 2024; the manuscript scaled in at a surprisingly trim 82,953 words, and by and large I'm pleased with it. If that seems like damnation by virtue of faint praise, I would draw your attention to the following writerly facts:

1. First drafts are like college students: while they are no longer children, and their future shape is most definitely suggested by their present form, they haven't quite finished growing, they haven't truly filled out, their complexions leave something to be desired, and there is still a good deal of time and experience which separates them from real maturity.

2. I generally dislike the CAGE LIFE books as I am writing them, only to fall in love with them later, when the emotional smoke clears. This applied especially to Knuckle Down, the second book in the series, which I now regard as far superior to its predecessor. I cannot tell you how much I hated this novel when I was writing it, or how mercenary and cold-blooded a project it seemed to be. Now, eight years after its release, I could genuinely read it for pleasure. So that's kind of encouraging.

As it happens, the CAGE LIFE books actually occupy two places within my heart. The first installment, Cage Life, was my very first novel, and the product of an agonizing, decade-long process to take an incoherent, 300,000 word collection of short stories without a plot, and slash, weld, beat and hammer them into a single, fast-paced, tightly woven novel that scales it at around 100K or less. Releasing it also won me several accolades, including Zealot Script Magazine's "Book of the Year" award for 2016, and the Best Indie Book Award for 2018. The awards were the first time I had been recognized for my writing since high school, and meant a great deal to me: I am therefore rather sentimental where anything CL is involved. These are the books that started what I pompously refer to as "my writing career."

At the same time, however, I recognize that unlike my other two series -- SINNER'S CROSS and THE CHRONICLES OF MAGNUS -- and even my novellas, CAGE LIFE is meant simply as entertainment. While I like to think there are deeper, more substantive, and even "literary" themes in the novels, the fact remains they fall squarely in that category known as "commercial art." I want you to turn the pages and enjoy what you read, and if you happen carry away some profound observations about life between punches and flying bullets, great; if not, well, if the novels just help you pass the time enjoyably on your flight to Miami or Montreal, I'll settle for that and then some.

If you happen to be unfamiliar with the CAGE LIFE series, the novels are about an up-and-coming New York City based MMA fighter named Michael (Mick) Watts whose run-in with the Mafia forever alters the trajectory of his life. Forced into servitude as low-end mob muscle, he must extricate himself from "the Life" while trying to keep his romantic relationship, career, and skin intact. This he does with varying degrees of success, and failure, encountering along the way a colorful panpoply of hoodlums, femme fatales, high-powered fixers and crooked businessmen. Where CAGE LIFE diverges from something like, say, Robert Parker's SPENCER novels or Mickey Spillaine's MIKE HAMMER series is both the versatility of the plots and the fact that each novel is a step toward a definite destination. What I mean by the former is that some of the novels are mysteries while others are straight suspense. What I mean by the latter is that Mick is a work in progress, a character who ages and grows with each book: rather than returning to the status quo at the end of a novel, he accumulates both wisdom and maturity, as well as scars and sorrows, as he fights in his literal and figurative cages. Each novel is a step toward his completition as a human being, and when I feel he is complete, that will be the end of the series. He will either die -- a very distinct possibility -- or he will reach a point where he has no more lessons to learn, no more battles to fight. Exactly how many books that will take, I don't know, but for some reason the number in my head is seven.

Now, if you are familiar with CL, you know that it's been almost eight years since Knuckle Down hit the shelves, so you could be forgiven doubting that I'll ever cross this finish line. In point of fact, writing #3 took so long merely because I couldn't think of a good story. I have a horror of repeating myself, and everything I came up with tasted like warmed-up soup. At last, in 2023, I came upon an idea that felt really fresh, resolved a lot of loose ends from the first two books, introduced some new characters, and still managed to end on a cliffhanger. Without giving away the store, I'll say that Dark Trade finds our hero at the lowest point of his life, yet called upon to give more than he ever has to rescue his best friend from the clutches of his worst enemy. In a previous blog, I discussed how a reviewer noted that "all of Watson's worlds are cruel," and I suppose CAGE LIFE, with its Catholic-tinged themes of sin, suffering and redemption, is evidence of this; but CL is also about loyalty and friendship, about the price of love and the willingness to pay it. Dark Trade is a further exploration of a good fighter's journey to find the good man within himself. I don't mind telling you that Mick's journey is a metaphorical or perhaps allegorical representation of my own life: not that I've been a professional fighter or worked for the Mafia, mind you, merely that his struggles, and his arc, reflect, in a grossly dramaticized way, my own trevails, heartbreak for heartbreak, black eye for black eye. Joss Whedon built Buffy around the simple idea of "high school as hell" in the literal sense, and I'm doing the same here, the difference being that the "cage" in which Mick fights is a representation of life itself and not merely a sport. There are women in these novels -- Anne Claybourne, Kristen Claybourne, Tina Soriani and Alana McCandles -- but the books themselves are a masculine lens, as well it might be. The stark fact is that we live in an age where manhood and masculinity are under a sustained attack, and I think there is something to be said for works of the old school which explore the XY side of things without mythologizing or fetishizing the darker aspects of -- how shall I say this? -- wielding a penis. So in spite of what I just said above, about these books being mere entertainment, well, I've always believed what you take away from something depends to some extent what you put into it. Either way you come at it, however, Dark Trade will soon be here for your applause, ridicule or indifference. Expect it roughly around Halloween, but at any rate before we wave bye-bye to 2024.

OLD TIME RADIO: DIARY OF AN OBSESSION

Some time ago I wrote an article in these pages called "Private Radio," which briefly described my lifelong love-affair with programs from the Golden Age of Radio. Since I dislike heating up yesterday's soup, I shan't bore you with a recount of how I came to discover OTR when I was a very young boy, courtesy of my father; but I would like to discuss why I love it, and examine, if briefly and inadequately, my favorite programs from the era. I would also like to touch, briefly, on the similarities between OTR and reading, a subject nobody ever seems to talk about.

The Golden Age of Radio lasted roughly from the late 1920s, when radios started to become household items, to the early 1950s, when television began to push radio steadily toward its present-day, marginalized status -- something you may happen to listen to while driving. During that period, along with news broadcasts and music, there were innumerable scripted shows: comedies, soap operas, plays, children's programs, Westerns, variety shows, detective stories, superhero stories, horror stories, etc., etc. As today, a great deal of what was produced in that period was utter crap: some of it was enjoyablecrap, but crap it was, even by the standards of the day. However, and also as today, there was a great deal of truly quality programming, which, when viewed through today's lens, is not only entertaining in its own right, but provides us with a fascinating time-capsule of times gone by.

I suppose I have at least 1,000 episodes of various shows in my personal MP3 library, with access to 60,000 more via the Old Time Radio Researcher's Library. What keeps drawing me back to this dusty, half-forgotten medium? The answers are surprisingly simple. First and foremost, a good old radio program, or even a good-bad old radio program, requires the listener to use their imagination even as they listen. In this it is unlike almost all other forms of entertainment save reading. Television and film, for example, are reactive mediums; when we are fully immersed in them, we cease to think at all: only our emotions are engaged. But radio programs ignite the imagination, because all we get is dialog and background noise; it is up to the reader to describe the characters and the scenery. Anyone whose imagination is sufficiently honed by reading can take to OTR provided they find the right program.

Second, OTR writers had numerous restrictions upon them: censorship is not too strong a word. And because this was so, because their characters couldn't swear, sex was almost completely avoided except by use of James Bond-like double entendres and sly insinuations (and even these had to be checked and double-checked by Standards & Practices and were only grudgingly allowed), because hot-button topics had to be avoided, these writers were forced to rise to great heights to deliver quality entertainment. Granted, many of them failed to do this; but those that did produced great stories and often, absolutely priceless dialog of the sort you rarely see nowadays, in this horribly glib, imitative, shallow-minded era. Lastly, because OTR was very much a product of its day, it is as good a means as any to study the past -- attitudes, mores, prejudices, prevailing wisdom.

My favorite shows are as follows. This list is not exclusive, nor is it in precise order of affection, but it ought to give you a good picture of both what I most enjoy (to date) and the diversity of programming which was available:

1. THE SHADOW. This popular series ran from 1937 to 1954, and gave birth to several classic lines, such as "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?" Straddling the line between detective and superhero, The Shadow was about a wealthy amateur detective named Lamont Cranston who learns the secret of invisibility while traveling in "the Orient" and uses this power to fight crime back here in good old America. The Shadow ran so long the main character was played by no less than five men, of whom the first was a 22 year-old Orson Welles. The Shadow/Cranston was accompanied by his doting assistant, confident, and chaste romantic interest, Margo Lane, who was forever getting kidnapped, terrorized and nearly killed by a whole slew of psychopathic killers, enemy spies, mad scientists, bloodthirsty gangsters and the occasional flat-out monster. At its best, The Shadow was imaginative, atmospheric, periodically witty and consistently brutal, underscoring in blood its mantra that "crime does not pay." Indeed, The Shadow was often incredibly violent: I remember people being shot, hanged, stabbed, electrocuted, burned with acid, run over by cars, thrown off airplanes, ripped apart by wolves, strangled, drained of blood, devoured by crocodiles, drowned (after being whipped!), gassed, and thrown into volcanoes. The violence, however, was always used to underscore the futility of crime. The show's moral compass feels terribly outdated nowadays, but it is not ambiguous. That's kind of refreshing.

2. THE LINEUP. This gritty police procedural ran for only three years, from 1950 - 1953, but what a three years those were. Starring Bill Johnstone, one of the five men who also played The Shadow, it follows a detective squad in a "great American city" (a nameless hybrid of New York, Los Angeles, and many others) as they pursue murderers, thieves, drug dealers, racketeers, bank robbers, mad bombers, fraudsters and assorted other hoodlums. What always strikes me about The Lineup is a) the quality and realism of the dialog, which is written a very naturalistic style, with interruptions, stumbles, casual conversation, etc., while simultaneously being as punchy as the hardboiled gab you'd get in a Film Noir movie, and b) the surprisingly unglamorous way much of the investigative procedure is handled. Yes, there are fights and shoot-outs and even car chases, but mostly the cops are depicted actually running down leads, consulting notes, arguing with each other, pathologists and forensic experts, getting heartburn from bad diner food, sweating in uncomfortable summertime stake outs, talking sports, planning vacations, you name it. They even occasionally rough up suspects a little and deny them right to counsel, which isn't pretty, but is very realistic, especially for the period. The Lineup's humor is skewering, its drama very heavy: the show depicts grief in very stark and realistic terms, and almost revels in its depictions of the effects of crime on ordinary people, whether it is violent or financial. I've spent almost ten years in law enforcement and I'd put this up near the top of police/forensic procedural shows I have ever encountered.

3. ESCAPE. "Tired of the everyday grind? Ever dream of a life of romantic adventure? Want to get away from it all? We offer you... Escape! Escape! Designed to free you from the four walls of today for a half-hour of high adventure!" Though most people would categorize Escape as the less-successful kid brother of the much more famous show, Suspense (see below), I truly believe Escape is the better of the two. As the name implies, Escape (1947 - 1954) was a flexible format adventure-suspense show in which the protagonist was invariably placed in a life-threatening bind and had to, well, escape it. Because the premise was so open-sided, stories could be hard-boiled, adventurous, supernatural, horror-themed...anything went, and many great short stories and novels were adapted into plays, by authors as diverse as Jack London, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ray Badbury. To give some examples: "Three Skeleton Key" (starring Vincent Price) was about a remote lighthouse overrun by carniverous rats. "Lenningen vs. The Ants" was about a South American plantation owner defending his land against a massive army ant invasion. "Earth Abides" was a two-part post-apocalyptic epic, "John Jock Todd" about a dockworker struggling to cope with a tyrannically cruel overseer, "The Scarlet Plague" about a world-ending disease, and "Evening Primrose" was a deeply disturbing tale about mannequins which come alive after the store closes. Many of these stories were brilliantly written, most were brilliantly acted, and a few ("Blood Bath" for example) were so over the top in their depictions of South American, South Pacific or African adventures gone wrong, that they rose to the level of art.

4 & 5. MERCURY THEATER ON THE AIR/THE CAMPBELL PLAYHOUSE Orson Welles' Mercury Theater on Broadway rocketed him to fame and fortune while still in his early-mid 20s; ever the avant-garde, he delved deeply into the medium of radio as well. His theater troupe, which included such luminaries as Ray Collins (later famous for his role as Tragg on "Perry Mason") and Agnes Moorehead (four Academy Award nominations), is best remembered for producing the adapation of H.G. Wells "War of the Worlds" which wrought havoc in 1938, but also made masterful adaptations of "Dracula," "A Tale of Two Cities, " "Julius Caesar" and "The Count of Monte Cristo." It later became The Campbell Playhouse, and added "Les Misérables," "The Magnificent Ambersons," "Beau Geste," "The Citadel," "The Glass Key" and others to its laurels. Wells' was the sort of performer whose voice can hypnotize, seduce, infuriate, or beat the listener into submission depending upon his whims, and by bullying his excellent cast along with him, he produced hour-long dramas which are worthy companions to the great works of literature than spawned them.

6. FRONTIER GENTLEMAN. Westerns were a very popular genre on radio, but Frontier Gentleman was cut from a different strip of cowhide. Running for only a single season in 1958, it nevertheless produced no less than 41 episodes starring John Dehner as J.B. Kendall, a former British cavalry officer now working as a newspaper correspondent for a London Times, on assignment in the American West in the post Civil War era. Wikipedia describes it aptly as "grittier, more realistic, and clearly intended for an older audience. Adult westerns [like this] were less the descendants of their juvenile predecessors than they were cousins of western feature films such as Shane (1953) and High Noon (1952)." Kendall, though first and foremost a newspaperman, was not shy about using his fists or his guns if absolutely necessary, but what he really wanted was good copy, and boy did he get it, encountering a wide range of scoundrels, gunslingers, corrupt sheriffs, embittered Indians, struggling homesteaders, and cynical salloon-keepers (including some of the female persuasion). This show was not afraid of thoughtful silences that seemed to summon up the emptiness of the West, nor of delving into some of the more morally complex aspects of what went into taming it. Kendall is occasionally appalled by the cruelty and greed he encounters, and while some stories are comic and others uplifting, there are a few hewn with tragedy and loss. When Kendall departs for England in the forty-first and final show, one gets the sense he will greatly miss it, but also that it has marked him forever in ways he does not entirely like. This was one Western meant for the grown-ups.

7. SUSPENSE. One of the longest-running programs in radio history (1940 - 1962), Suspense broadcast nearly 1,000 episodes and was called "radio's outstanding theater of thrills." Stories were introduced by "The Man in Black" and usually featured protagonists who were thrust suddenly and unexpectedly into life-threatening situations from which they had to escape, though they were by no means always totally sympathetic people or successful in their efforts. Lives turned on mistaken identities, old wrongs, impulsive crimes, simple misunderstandings or, in some cases, minor mistakes such as forgetting a wallet or taking the wrong suitcase. Many of these people were of purely ordinary or unremarkable character, adding to the tension by making them relatable. The show also adapted famous stories like "Donovan's Brain," "Sorry, Wrong Number," "The Most Dangerous Game," "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and "In a Lonely Place," showing that the rigid formula actually possessed a certain flexibility. Some of these stories are shocking and unforgettable: "Flesh Peddler" (starring DeForest Kelley) is a good example of how suspense and horror can dance smoothly together, and one can clearly see the influence of such storytelling on Rod Serling and his "Twilight Zone." Nearly all of this show's episodes survive and are well worth listening to, they provide superb accompaniment, especially on night drives.

8. SHERLOCK HOLMES. (1939 - 1950) Until Jeremy Brett came along in 1985 to make the role always and forever his own, Basil Rathbone was Sherlock Holmes in the minds of millions, including yours truly. He starred in many Holmes movies, some good and some bad, but also recorded a large number of radio dramas playing the immortal detective. Together with his redoubtable co-star Nigel Bruce, who played Watson, he took the listener through adaptations of Conan-Doyle's tales, but also on stories inspired by random throwaway lines from the original Holmes stories ("Holmes solved the mystery by discovering the depth the parsley sunk into the butter on a hot day"), and many completely original scripts. Rathbone, a debonair veteran of WW1 in real life, played Holmes with a certain wry wit rather than as an ice-blooded sleuthound, fundamentally a little more human than Conan-Doyle envisioned him, but without betraying Conan-Doyle's vision of Holmes as a man apart, requiring only Watson as friend, confidant, foil and legman. I actually prefer the radio dramas to the movies, which were partially contemporized to the 40s and often little more than "Holmes vs. Nazi spies:" these are more true to the source material.

9. THE WHISTLER. I...am the Whistler, and I know many things, for I walk by night. I know many strange tales, many secrets hidden in the hearts of men and women who have stepped into the shadows. Yes... I know the nameless terrors of which they dare not speak! From 1942 - 1955, this mysterious and sneering narrator chronicled the clever crimes and nefarious schemes of men and women, often brilliant in character, which nonetheless came to shipwreck, usually because of some small mistake or ironic happenstance. Like "Columbo," the show was not about who did it but why they did, how they did it, and how they very nearly got away with it, if not for that pesky little devil of a detail. Although the formula can get a little tiresome, the stories are almost always very well written and cleverly plotted, and justice -- if only in a cruelly ironic fashion -- is generally served.

10. INNER SANCTUM MYSTERIES. From 1941 to 1952, this series scared the hell out of kids like my mom, who weren't supposed to be listening to it, just like I wasn't supposed to be watching "Friday the 13th" movies when I was supposed to be studying geometry. The narrator, identified only as "Raymond," was a sort of Crypt Keeper type who spewed bad puns and tacky gallows humor over equally terrible organ music before introducing each episode: the episodes themselves were not funny at all, and walked a bloody line between horror and suspense, crime and supernatural, featuring such plots as "a hearse-driver is hired by a murderess to dispose of her husband's body, and it doesn't go well" or "a woman home alone [or broken down on the roadside] is terrorized by an escaped criminal." Some of the stories had supernatural themes, while others were on the sci-fi end of the spectrum (an immortality formula that goes wrong) but all stuck to the basic premise of "scare the audience at any cost and spare no one" -- in one episode, Raymond himself was the victim (!). While happy endings were not by any means unheard-of, even these characters had to suffer through all sorts of terror and tension to earn their lives back.

This is not by any means all-inclusive; I could a tale unfold about Light's Outr, NBC University Theater, The Green Hornet, or the lengthy and highly imaginative adaptation of Dr. Jekyyl & Mr. Hyde, but this remains a good sampling of some of the better shows. It is certain that my passion for OTR heats and cools at regular intervals; there are years when I listen only occasionally to an episode here or there while hiking or driving, and there are others when I burn through half a dozen or more a day for weeks or months on end. Hell, when I was temping in Los Angeles, I used to burn through the better portion of what you could load on an iPod in a single shift. The point is simply that Old Time Radio is a resource that is always there for me, always ready to provide me with entertainment, and always capable of instructing me, the storyteller, with better ways to tell the story. In the age of the podcast, the YouTube video and the free download, it is certainly worth your time to explore this older but no less, and in some cases, far more enthralling medium.