F.R. Jameson's Blog, page 14
August 1, 2018
Hands of the Ripper (1971)
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Here hammer takes serial killing, psychological trauma dressed up as demonic possession, a fear of sex and a whiff of lesbianism and turns it into something that almost appears classy.
Well, perhaps that might be exaggerating the effect slightly. But it’s certainly taking the salacious and tawdry and giving it that little sheen of class,
Watching it, it occurred to me that I could actually have been tuned in to some BBC period drama at 9pm on Sunday night. Okay, maybe THE HANDS OF THE RIPPER might have been a bit extreme in 1971, but now certainly. In fact, now it might even be a little tame.
The acting is good, the script is entertaining enough to almost disguise the fact that character motivation makes no sense, while the direction is smart enough to know that this kind of period adaptation – or faux period adaptation – doesn’t need any cheap and gory tricks.
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The daughter of Jack the Ripper is all grown up and is a beautiful, young woman. But whenever the possibility of sex raises its head, she lashes out and kills the person nearest her. Even though it stretches credibility more than once, aristocrat and would be psychiatrist, Eric Porter, finds out her secret but decides not to turn her in. He instead keeps her nearby for observation. A decision that will have predictably fatal consequences.
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No one goes to Hammer for the realism. It’s a studio that dealt in over the top mindless fun, and this most definitely falls into that category. But its one you can almost take home and show mother over a cup of tea and some Malteasers.
A collection of my shorter horror fiction is available here. Get your copy of SOMETHING WENT WRONG & OTHER STRANGE TALES free now!
July 30, 2018
Black Dahlia, Red Rose by Pia Eatwell
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This is the second Black Dahlia book I’ve read. The first one being the one most people with a passing interest in this case would have come across: James Ellroy’s superb fictional version. Obviously, like all great Ellroy, that’s an over the top and over-ripe version of the story. But reading this true-crime version, it’s amazing how many truths and hints of truths Ellroy slipped into his narrative. If BLACK DAHLIA, RED ROSE is to be believed, the reality also seemed to have an abundance of corrupt cops, a conspiracy in high places, and powerful people doing all they could to stop the truth getting out.
Okay, this may be only the second book I read, but not long ago I listened to the Hollywood & Crime podcast series on the Black Dahlia and it’s still fresh in my mind. But it’s amazing how much the telling of the tale, the direction its steered in, can change the whole story. The podcast concentrated on the spate of murders of women with dark hair that happened in LA at much the same time. Positing that that the Dahlia killer may have been more prolific than thought. That’s alluded to here, but the book instead goes down another alleyway. Trying to solve the case and pinning the whole thing on a man who, in the Hollywood & Crime version, is dismissed as a red herring.
The theory suggested here is an interesting one, and Eatwell does a thorough job of building it all up. But still, I think it maybe stretches credibility too far. It brought to mind Daniel Farson’s comments in the preface to his Jack the Ripper book. That he believed, in some afterlife, all Ripperologists would be brought together and have the true identity of Jack the Ripper revealed them. And each and every one of them would stare blankly as the name struck no bell with them at all.
BLACK DAHLIA, RED ROSE is worth a read for anyone interested in the case. It had a great sense of time and place and really manages to evoke the LA of the 1940s. But most importantly, it takes a complex and difficult case – with a vast array of characters – and tells it in a way that’s feels clear and almost straightforward.
I write fiction heavily influenced by noir tales. The first two books in my ‘Silver Screen Noir’ series, DIANA CHRISTMAS and EDEN ST. MICHEL are available now!
July 25, 2018
Eden St. Michel – extract
My new novel, EDEN ST. MICHEL is out now and available at £1.99/$1.99 for the next week. Here, to whet your appetite, is a brief extract.
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From audio recordings made by Eden St. Michel, probably about 1970
“Exotic! That’s the dreadful word I was constantly labelled with. Exotic! As if I were a flamingo or a unicorn, something strange or impossible that shouldn’t really exist in their normal and tedious world.
“Yes, my looks were partly responsible. My ‘aloof beauty’, which the more unimaginative film critics – so all of them – went on and on about. ‘Glacial’, they said, ‘intimidating’, someone confessed. The phrase ‘icily alluring’ actually went out in one studio press release.
“Then one silly bastard labelled me ‘exotic’ and did it close enough to the start of my career that I wasn’t quite pinned down, and because they didn’t have an original thought in their heads, every other halfwit followed on. It was my upturned nose, apparently, my high cheekbones, the fact that my hair is so blonde it’s nearly white. Or grey if in the hands of the wrong cinematographer.
“I think my favourite guess as to the provenance of my ‘exotic’ looks was the scribe in ‘The Daily Mail’ who thought my ancestors might be from Mongolia. I mean, Jesus! Hadn’t this man ever seen anyone Mongolian? Couldn’t he have looked up a picture of a Mongolian in a book? Asked someone what a Mongolian looked like?
“There was also, of course, the fact that I grew up partly overseas, as if that alone gave me an exoticism which no English girl who’d spent zero to twenty-one going no further than the Isle of Wight could match. But really, my dad moved with his job from the suburbs of Epsom to the suburbs of Copenhagen when I was twelve, so just after the war, and we moved back again when I was fifteen.
“When I was out there I went to an English school, so I didn’t even get to learn any fun, interesting swear words.
“Besides, Copenhagen really, really isn’t exotic.
“The people of Copenhagen do not see themselves as exotic in any way. In fact, they’d no doubt look at Epsom as quite exotic.
“While, of course, I’ve learnt from experience that the people of Epsom definitely look at Copenhagen as exotic. As if it’s the road to Timbuktu or some such thing.
“Meanwhile, I’m caught in the middle. An English girl, but with looks that surely must come from some other magical place, and my white – almost grey – hair. For no good reason, I’m exotic, and it’s all so incredibly boring.
“It’s strange, as even though my grandparents were the most English of English people, it’s this foreign quality which is seen as having somehow cursed me. That my Scandinavian beauty – Scandinavian obviously makes more sense than Mongolian, maybe the idiot got the wrong word – was the cause of my fall. As if such glacial, pristine beauty could only ever be a mask for a passionate, unruly nature, which led to a passionate and unruly life, which led to my disgrace and damnation.
“There are some out there who think that what happened to me was entirely down to my looks.
“As if my great fatal flaw was my exoticness.”
Available now at £1.99/$1.99. Get your copy now!
July 23, 2018
Raymond Chandler: A Biography by Tom Hiney
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Reading this biography, I found myself coming to like Raymond Chandler more than I thought I would.
Through various articles I’d read, I had come to the impression that Chandler the man was cantankerous, rude and nothing like Philip Marlowe. (The very public recollections of Billy Wilder probably helped form that opinion, as the two did really fall into a hate/hate relationship with each other.) But the man I found in these pages seemed a kind and intelligent soul, devoted to his wife, who nonetheless struggled with terrible alcoholism. An addiction he couldn’t quite bring himself to admit. What’s more there was a lot of Marlowe to him, there was the nobility, the jaundice eye and even the loneliness. Chandler may have been a married man and not a perpetual bachelor, but he was still someone who cut himself off from the outside world, even as he craved it.
This is a fine nuts and bolts biography which takes us through his life on both sides of the Atlantic, and the creation of his books and his legacy. It made me want to curl up and read The BIG SLEEP to THE LONG GOODBYE all over again. No, more than that! The write up that Hiney gives it actually makes me want to read PLAYBACK again.
The wonderful Megan Abbott penned an article the other week about Chandler’s problems with women in his novels. Reading with a Twenty-First Century eye, there may be issues relating to both gender and race, but – even if that’s the case – I’d never be able to divorce myself from loving these books. His writing is brutal poetry and is still wedded to my soul after three dozen rereads.
My new thriller, EDEN ST. MICHEL is out now and available at £1.99/$1.99 this week! Get your copy now!
July 18, 2018
What ‘Eden St. Michel’ means for me
EDEN ST MICHEL is published today. You can get your copy here for the currently remarkably reasonable price of £1.99/$1.99.
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In EDEN ST. MICHEL, I’ve written my first love story.
That might seem a surprising claim. A quick glance at the cover will give away that there’s a dead body on it. So, from that point of view, it’s very much on point with ‘Screen Siren Noir’ thus far. But a love story it is. And what makes that doubly curious is that I in no way set out to write a romance – even one tinged with darkness and murder.
When I started writing this, at the end of last year – fresh from the thrill of how well DIANA CHRISTMAS had turned out, and with words flowing freely through my veins again – I had in mind a somewhat different story. It was going to be more stereotypically film-noir, with cross and double-cross and no one knowing whether to believe the person next to them or shoot them dead.
But then I got to know my protagonists, Eden and Joe.
As they became fully-formed on the page – as I started to see them together – I realised that my plot, as I’d envisaged it, wasn’t going to work. They were both too grounded as characters to be manipulated by plot machinations into the deadly duo I’d imagined. What’s more, together they were wonderful. I felt the affection between them, the way they genuinely cared for each other. And I knew that my original story wouldn’t pass muster.
I needed a man and woman who could betray each other, who WOULD betray each other. Instead, what came to me, was a pair who would do no such a thing.
As such I had a choice, I could change them in some way or change the plot.
But they were too good to change!
And so, I changed the plot. I rewrote my plan entirely and, to slice a long story short, I ended up writing a love story.
It’s a long way from any sweet romance you can think of, but a love story it ultimately is. It’s my first and I’m incredibly proud of it.
The book is finally published today and I cannot wait – at last – for people to read it and discover Joe and Eden, and to learn of the terrible things that occurred when they fell in love.
Get your copy of EDEN ST. MICHEL now!
July 16, 2018
The Outsider by Stephen King
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I’m finding this an oddly tough review to write. There were parts of THE OUTSIDER that I really, really enjoyed, and there were parts so unengaging I skim-read them.
And I hate it when I skim-read!
But what made that lack of attention on my part so particularly annoying, was that the book started out so well.
There’s been a brutal murder of a young boy and the police know who did it. A local football coach, a seemingly upstanding member of the community, has been seen by numerous witnesses. Furthermore, his fingerprints and DNA are both at the crime scene. It’s an open and shut case. Except that when they actually (and very publicly) arrest the man, he has a solid airtight alibi that places him a hundred miles away at the time of the crime.
So, the set up is excellent, and King does spend the first hundred and a fifty pages moving all the parts into place with an expertise few could match. Those hundred and fifty pages are tense and gripping and undeniably nail-biting.
The problem comes with the rest.
Now a straight thriller writer would spend the remainder of the book showing how the trick of a man being in two places at once (or someone framing him so it looked like he’d done the crime) was done.
With a less gory crime, it could even be an episode of COLOMBO.
But this is Stephen King, so obviously there’s going to be a supernatural element. That’s his M.O. and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Except, when the various characters come together to hunt The Outsider of the title, it feels like the most perfunctory monster hunt of the Twenty-First Century. Information falls into their laps in a way that’s lazy and contrived, and – even with most of the characters saying that they don’t believe in the supernatural (to the point where they bored this constant reader) – they still move without complaint from A to B to C tracking down the evil entity, all with few bumps in the road.
Do I wish that King hadn’t embraced the supernatural and tried to write a really gory episode of COLOMBO instead?
No, not at all. What I instead wish is that, rather than try to wed a plodding police procedural to a horror story, and ending up with a tale which just plods, that he’d written a braver and weirder novel.
A hundred and fifty pages in, there’s a big dramatic moment where the book turns on its head. However, that for me was where the narrative lost most of its interest. As THE OUTSIDER went on, King should have thrown in a few more of those moments – shaken the narrative up, made it unpredictable – so that instead of a slog, we had a book that intrigued and surprised rather than dully grinding to an obvious finish.
My new novel, EDEN ST. MICHEL is out this week! You can buy your copy here!
July 11, 2018
Who is Eden St. Michel?
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My new novel, EDEN ST. MICHEL is published next week and is available for pre-order now at the low price of £1.99/$1.99 (but it won’t stay at that price for long!) Below is a taster of where our heroine is at the start of the book…
When I think of Eden St. Michel in the weeks leading up to where we meet her in Chapter One, I think of a stunning woman lost in ennui. I picture her staring out of her lounge window at an empty Green Park in the heart of London, a Gitanes in hand, taking long and bored puffs as she roused herself to somehow try and enjoy life.
Undeniably she was a beautiful woman. Tall, slim and athletically built, with blonde hair that was almost white, high cheekbones and wide blue eyes which – for all their allure – rarely shone with welcome. She did spend part of her childhood in Denmark, and maybe that contributed more to her personality than she credited. The world weariness of the Scandinavians was a pose she’d most definitely adopted.
Of course, she told herself frequently that she was being silly. That she was a film star, that she had more money than she could ever have imagined, that she was spoiled in receiving so much from life. But even though she enjoyed the parties, and smiled so gaily at industry events, she still couldn’t help the hatred in her soul that she felt for the whole superficial, facile world which surrounded her.
Although, what was the alternative to her life? What was the alternative to making films and going out and being seen and photographed and commented on? (Whatever she wore led to bitchy remarks in The London Chronicle these days). She could just stay in and be like a sad old spinster, but as much as she didn’t enjoy her life, there was no fun in that.
So, she went out and tried to have fun. And one night she went slumming it in an off-the-hanger dress to ‘The Cinema Club’ in Soho. This was the night, though, which changed her life. It was there that she met Joe Jones, the man who turned out to be the love of her life.
But it was there that the trouble all started.
EDEN ST. MICHEL is out next week. You can get you r copy at the bargain low-price of £1.99/$1.99 here!
July 9, 2018
The Hunter by Richard Stark
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Imagine you’re Donald Westlake in 1961/1962. You’re a struggling writer, churning our four or five novels a year under a variety of names and across a number of genres. Then one day you finish a book named THE HUNTER under the pseudonym Richard Stark. A book about a ruthless, super thief named Parker who finds himself up against a criminal outfit known as The Outfit. Do you instantly know that this is the one? That this is the character, and this is the book even, which would give you a lasting legacy? Could you possibly realise that this short, brutal novel would have numerous sequels, that there’d be Hollywood adaptations, countless imitations, and that when twenty-five years later you get chance to write a prestigious Oscar-bait movie, the English director would actually ask whether they could credit it to Richard Stark rather than Donald Westlake?
Was there any way he could possibly have conceived of such a thing?
To put it into further context: in the same year THE HUNTER came out, Westlake also published novels (under a variety of pseudonyms) called 361; THE SIN DRIFTER; STRANGE AFFAIR; and SIN HELLCAT. Surely then, there wasn’t any way to know? Surely there was no way to realise that this book was a moment of grand triumph?
Well, given that he apparently killed off Parker in his first draft and had to be talked into leaving him alive by his editor, clearly he didn’t realise. But when he looked back at his life and his career, this was undoubtedly the turning point, not just one book amongst many but a key book for him and for American crime fiction itself.
Without a doubt it’s a triumph. It’s over fifty years old and it still feels modern, it still has a vibrancy. You can see exactly why it had such an effect and why people were crying out for sequels. It’s tense, smart, darkly funny and terrifically entertaining. What I really noticed on this re-read was how grounded it is, how real it all feels. There’s no way I can check, of course, but this seems like a novel that has a great sense of living geography. The prose is never less than beautifully economical and yet even though they’re quick pencil sketches, the streets he visits and the places he goes seem to have a verisimilitude. It reads like a travel guide to the less salubrious parts of New York. So that, if you wanted to in 1962, you could have walked the very same streets, gone to the same cab-stands and hidden in the same scrublands as Parker.
In Parker himself we may have the ultimate anti-hero: one who follows his own rules, who always takes his own path. It isn’t just that he’s a thief and a law-breaker – there’s barely a character we meet here who isn’t on the wrong side of the law – it’s the uncompromising efficiency with which he operates. It means that in a world of criminals, Parker is always the hardest, nastiest bastard who walks into a room.
Often the opening books of series are strange in hindsight, as the central character we’ve got to know so well isn’t quite there yet. However, Westlake/Stark seems to have a handle on Parker almost immediately – the professional, ruthless bastard who does what he has to do without compromise. Except not quite. Whereas in later books it’s all about the robbery at hand and Parker’s attempts to save it or save his neck or both, here it’s personal – it’s about vengeance. It’s almost as if Westlake created this character and instantly saw what he’d have to do this man to take him out of his comfort zone, to push the envelope of the character. Then, rather than wait until later to shuffle things up a little, he made that adventure the opening salvo. This book therefore, much like Parker himself, isn’t one to play by any arbitrary rules.
A truly impressive, breathlessly exciting, tersely but beautifully written, five star novel.
My own thriller, EDEN ST. MICHEL is out next week. You can pre-order your copy here!
July 7, 2018
July 4, 2018
It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis
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Reading IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE in the time of Trump is a hugely depressing experience. So much of his rise is here in a book written in the 1930s. There’s the nationalism, the populism, the demonization of ‘the other’. There’s the making enemies out of anyone who has the temerity to disagree with him. What makes it all doubly depressing is that in writing this in 1936, Lewis simply transposed the rise of Hitler onto America and went from there to create a piece of satirical fiction. Unfortunately, it now feels like horrible reality.
If there’s a saving grace of some kind, it’s that Trump and the people around him seem to lack the intelligence and organisation skills to truly turn the country into a full-on fascist dictatorship. (There’s a reason that John Oliver refers to the Meuller investigation as “Stupid Watergate”.) All of these people seem, to one degree or another, worryingly incompetent. Having said that, if you’re a six year old child who finds yourself in a cage in Texas and you haven’t seen your parents in weeks, then being told that the people behind your unimaginable suffering don’t have the wit or wisdom to truly destroy democracy in America is small comfort indeed.
As an actual book, it’s intriguing without ever being gripping. Focusing on one family in Vermont, the book gives us an outside view of the rise to power of the new leader. In a way that’s a great idea as it gives us an on the ground experience of what society goes through. But, even as terrible things happen, it remains a curiously low-stakes read. It’s a dreadful warning, but one which probably frightens the intellect more than the heart.
Although maybe I’m being unfair on it. As even if they are less bright than their fictional counterparts, the fact is that the reality is much more scary and horrible than any fiction can possibly be.
My new thriller, EDEN ST. MICHEL is out in two weeks. You can order your copy at the bargain price of £1.99/$1.99 here!
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