F.R. Jameson's Blog, page 33

Die A Little by Megan Abbott

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It’s a hell of a debut for Megan Abbott: a female led mystery in 1940’s Hollywood with a distinctly unreliable narrator.

There’s murder, a femme-fatale and a too trusting dope of a man. But it feels like Abbott is referencing women’s films of the 1940s, as much as she is standard noir. As if she spent many an hour watching and re-watching Joan Crawford as MILDRED PIERCE, just so she could get the perfect balance between vulnerability and steel.

The plot finds a policeman, Bill, meeting cute with a girl, Alice, who works for a Hollywood studio, and the two falling madly in love. But his sister, Lora – a teacher – who he has always been incredibly (almost weirdly) close to, is both fascinated by this new addition to her family, and wary of her. Alice reveals herself to also have a teaching qualification and the two sister-in-laws end up working together, car-pooling, becoming fast friends. Alice even sets up Lora on dates. But Lora can’t lose her suspicions, and as cracks start appearing in Alice’s carefully constructed façade, Lora starts investigating.

Looking at Abbott’s bibliography, it seems an incredible eight years since Abbott last gave us one of her noir LA thrillers. And while I’ve enjoyed the books she’s given us since, it’s still a shame, as classic-era Hollywood mysteries is a genre I adore beyond reason. DIE A LITTLE is really strong on the psychology of its two female leads, but what really struck me this (my second) time of reading was how much detail she grasps of the era. Sights, smells, brand names, fashions, fads – they’re all here and utterly convincing. If it emerged that Megan Abbott had a Tardis and was frequently visiting the 1940s for research, I wouldn’t give even a slight gasp of surprise.

It’s a great debut, but of the four books she wrote with the classic noir feel, this is probably the weakest. Undoubtedly, it’s well written and has a number of great lines. But as much as I liked it, this is one of those irritating stories which relies on the major characters not sharing things you think they’d share – or asking questions you’d think they really ought to ask.

However, it’s impossible to read this and not been haunted afterwards by the thought of Lora staring at Alice, frightened and fascinated at the same time. Wanting to be her sister-in-law even as she wants her out of her life.

Horror Express (1972)

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Or MUMMY ON THE TRANS-SIBERIAN EXPRESS.

The last couple of times I’ve seen Christopher Lee, he’s been playing Dracula – so it’s thrilling to actually watch him engaged and interested in a role. In terms of sheer charisma, in terms of simple presence, it makes a huge difference to have him invested, not just showing up to glower and collect his pay-cheque.

Cushing too, is possibly as relaxed as I’ve ever seen him. I wouldn’t go as far as to say he was caddish, but there is a certain roguish charm to his portrayal.

The two of them made something like twenty films together, and you can see that natural chemistry in how they work. What makes HORROR EXPRESS a particular treat is that for most of the running length they’re on the same side.

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The set-up is intriguing, with Lee bring a prehistoric mummy on board a train heading west from China and said mummy coming alive and committing murders.

What’s more, it’s an interesting idea that’s not just allowed to rest on its laurels – with the plot moving from horror to science-fiction, as our team of heroes realise that it is in fact a creature from outer space. Okay, if you actually step back and try to examine the scientific trail they follow, then it’s quite, quite mad. But I do appreciate they made the effort of trying to develop it and once there, tried to explain it all.

There’s some really good stuff at the start, with the opening scenes crammed full of tension.

But for a story set on a train (which SPOILER ALERT: does end with a train wreck) this goes off the rails remarkably quickly.

Firstly, as much as I like Christopher Lee in this, his character arc makes no sense. He’s the one who actually brings the mummy on, ignores all warnings and refuses to let anyone else examine it. But when the killings start, he suddenly gets to play hero and everyone lets him. Surely there should be a lot more wariness and suspicion of him.

Secondly, Telly Savalas features heavily on the poster, but doesn’t arrive in the action until late in what’s effectively a grand cameo. But the effect of this is like the reel of a whole other movie being inserted into the order. He’s American and working with the Russian police for some reason, and is allowed this big grandstanding performance – which disappointingly leaves Lee and Cushing just hanging around staring at him – but pretty much leads nowhere. It’s a character this film doesn’t need and a performance this film doesn’t need.

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Finally, I did like Alice Reinhardt as Miss Jones, Cushing’s older assistant/peer – but even for a horror movie of the period, the female characters are there to be winsomely attractive and nothing else. While the murders when they come are more than a bit rote and nowhere near as interesting or as scary as the filmmakers believe.

So, all in all, it’s a bit of a mess, which is a shame as I really like both Lee and Cushing in it. Actually, it would be remiss of Alberto de Mendoza as the mad Priest, played with more than a few shades of Rasputin. They each deserve a better film around them.

How would you write about Donald Trump in a horror story? (part 10)

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If, after his presidency is over (so I’m hoping sooner rather than later) I do write a horror novel that features President Donald Trump in some way, then he can’t actually be the monster.

I know that seems a weird thing to say. After all, he does seem like an absolute demon of a person. Easily, in the top five worst people in the world. Why wouldn’t he then be a monster in fiction as well?

But that’s the thing. There are going to be so many books in the coming years about how dreadful he was, about all the damage he did (though hopefully he won’t be able to get most of it through congress), about what a shockingly terrible president he was.

So, if I’m going to write mine, it has to be different.

My idea is that some great existential threat, maybe something from cosmic horror – maybe Cthulhu himself – attacks the Earth and it’s Donald Trump who in the end somehow saves everyone.

Donald Trump saves humanity.

I know, it’s a weird and far out there concept.

Yet to make it work. I need to see some kind of personality trait in him that makes him look like a normal human being. You know, like he’d give a shit about someone who isn’t a close family member.

So far, I haven’t seen anything. Absolutely nothing. It’s scary how devoid of basic compassion he seems to be.

Right now, it looks like he’d be hand to tentacle with Cthulhu and they’d be carving up the world together, and that won’t work as a narrative at all.

In my story Donald Trump has to have a long dark night of the soul and save everyone (possibly – actually, make that probably – while dying himself). Though to make this work he’s going to have to demonstrate he possesses some kind of soul.

 

It’s been a while since I’ve done this, but here are my previous thoughts:

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Me, Writing, in 2017

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Why do I write?

That’s a question I’ve been asked more than once. It is after all a big reach to suggest that I’ll ever make a large amount of cash from it, so given all the time and effort it takes – why bother?

The answer is, simply, because I absolutely love doing it.

And that’s all really that you can ask for: that what you’re devoting your time to actually gives you pleasure and makes you feel good.

I’m working so hard at the moment, trying to get to a distant point where I sell enough books I can just focus full time on writing. My dream is to spend all day, every day focusing on my family and my writing – the things most important to me. But even with that ambition, I couldn’t do all this – the writing in the morning before work, writing at lunchtime and writing in the evening – if I wasn’t actually getting intense satisfaction from it. Every moment I spend writing – even if that day’s work turns out to be one of stinking crap; where I can’t find the words I need – is a day I have enjoyed.

It’s my passion, my drug, my calling.

Maybe I’ll never be able to sell enough books to leave work, or maybe this will be a twenty-year project with lots of frustrations along the way, but as long as I am still loving it then I will keep going with it. Scribbling in my notepads, pounding my word-processor, juggling a dozen short stories, novellas and novels at any one time.

The reason I write is that giving realisation to those stories and ideas that spin around my head just makes me so happy. The process itself is one I tremendously enjoy. And that’s without even getting to that moment of ultimate, supreme glee when I actually finish something and think: “Yep! I’m proud of that!”

Doctor Who Reviews (Extra) – Plague City by Jonathan Morris

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It’s an incredible tight-rope trick to try to write a frothy DOCTOR WHO story set in plague-besieged Edinburgh.

After all, the actual details of plague are so horrendous, something straight out of Cronenbergian body horror, and these are books written for kids.

There’s a lot of death and suffering that’s unavoidable here, and to be fair, Morris does his best not to flinch from it.

But there are limits.

The reality is so horrible that it’s impossible for DOCTOR WHO to truly engage with this part of history. As such it becomes a novel where The Doctor and Bill and Nardole kind of skate around on the surface. This is not going to be a story where everyone lives. But its is a book where, by necessity, The Doctor dances around at the periphery, and it all feels a bit incidental.

At the start of his association with DOCTOR WHO, Jonathan Morris wrote the excellent FESTIVAL OF DEATH. There’s nothing so timey-wimey or self-consciously clever in PLAGUE CITY. There’s not much to show his taste for Douglas Adams sci-fi absurdity. Apart, that is, from one moment where The Doctor emerges from the fog performing – both playing and apparently singing – HOW SOON IS NOW? by The Smiths and LOVE WILL TEAR US APART AGAIN by Joy Division.

Now, the guitar was over-used in Series 9, and had fortunately been dialed back by Series 10. But this was such a bizarre and over the top idea that it actually made me genuinely laugh out loud. The result being a chapter in a book, which as a whole I fear won’t be particularly memorable, that I might never forget.

Arrival (2016)

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Thinking about ARRIVAL in the days since I saw it, I’m trying to remember the last time I watched a sci-fi movie which started out smart and just kept getting smarter.

Most sci-fi films start off with a good idea, a hook they use to reel the audience in with. But most of them are then content to just play around with that one hook and that one idea, talking it to its limit. ARRIVAL though builds on it, throws new things into the mix, even indulges with a bit of sleight of hand with the audience to reveal a film that is intriguing, smart and affecting in equal measure.

When I’m reviewing old Hammer movies, I’m quite laissez faire about spoilers. They’re at least forty-plus years old so it doesn’t matter. Here though, because there are lots of people out there – like myself and Mrs Jameson – who don’t get to the cinema frequently, and ARRIVAL is only just available on DVD, I’m doing my best to be careful.

(Of course, one of the elements I most enjoy in reviewing those old Hammer movies – as much as I love them – is pointing out the glaring plot-holes. Needless to say there is nothing so egregious here.)

The plot is one of my absolute favourite subsets of sci-fi movies, the benevolent aliens visiting Earth plot. (CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND is, and will always remain, one of my Top Ten films). Amy Adams is superb as the linguist sent in to try and communicate with them, while Jeremy Remner as her scientist counterpart is as good as I’ve ever seen him (Forrest Whittaker and Michael Stuhlbarg are both good without being stretched).

What really sets the film apart though is the direction. I’ve also seen Denis Villeneuve’s previous efforts, PRISONERS and SICARIO, and undoubtedly he likes a greyness of palate. It gives his films a crisp and professional look, and that choice really makes sense for both this and SICARIO, as they are about experts doing their jobs. The stories may be tense and/or fantastical, but they are about professionals in their place of work. Yet what really sets this movie in particular apart is how emotionally involved the film makes the audience. It’s a slow burner perhaps – watching other people work in a methodical way isn’t the most immediately gripping – but as it intrigues and piques curiosity, the film brings us in so that we’re invested with both mind and soul.

Genuinely, this isn’t hyperbole in any way, ARRIVAL is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long while.

The Devil in the White City by Eric Larson

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After East-End Jack, the only other Victorian serial killer people could name would probably be H.H. Holmes. The curious American doctor who built a crazy house in Chicago with gas chambers, hidden rooms and a furnace too big and too powerful for domestic use. So it’s somewhat bizarre that even though Holmes was caught and tried and executed, there’s something quite unknowable about him. We know who he was, but the why, even the how a lot of the time, remains an utter mystery.

At the time the fact that such a man existed wasn’t bloody grist to the mill of Sunday Magazine Supplements. There was not only a feeling that the gory details should be kept away from the general public, but a move even to limit the scope of the enquiry. We have no idea how many people he killed. His case was never fully examined in a court of law, as if his evil – if exposed –  would turn out to be contagious.

[image error]These days the media would have more than a feeding frenzy, it would be – I don’t know – a devouring delirium. No detail, regardless of how small, would be ignored. All, from the brand of toothpaste he used outwards, would be given a sinister spin. There’s evidence here that there was a certain amount of that appetite already there, but from a 21st century perspective one can’t help but be amazed at how restrained the 19th century versions of us actually were.

We’ve obviously performed a high-speed 180 since the late Victorian era, to the extent that true-crime fiction of today generally and justifiably gets a bad press, because a lot of it is just there to be salacious and to titillate man’s desire for darkness. It’s the outer edge of the tabloidisation of society.

THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY is the upper end of the scale though, a world away from those tawdry paperbacks with bloody knives on the cover. It’s smart, beautiful gripping, page turning with a fine sense of history.

I did wonder, as I started reading, whether the decision to alternate Holmes’s story with the contemporaneous design and construction of the World’s Fair in Chicago would prove to be a wise one. After all, surely a serial killer is going to be far more fascinating than a bunch of architects sat in smoky rooms arguing. But Holmes is such a cypher in his own story that he really does take the idea of the banality of evil to a whole other level. We hear about his charm and mesmeric effect, but – boy! – he seems boring. As such Larson has to do the heavy lifting in the other side of the narrative, and really does take the architects’ story and make it really grip. So much so that I was actually rooting for plucky Chicago to find a statement piece that would live up to the previous fair’s Eiffel Tower.

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Spoiler alert: They did and it was called The Ferris Wheel.

The fact that this book could make me care about the ins and outs, ups and downs of a construction project a hundred plus years back and thousands of miles away – so that it almost seems more interesting than a deadly, notorious serial killer – just shows that this book is practically a work of genius.

Not tawdry, not sensationalist, instead narrative history at its definite best.

 

Me, Writing, in 2017

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Thunderstorms at three AM are a good place to think about plotting.

At the moment I have the typed draft of my new novel on the go, that’s the project taking up most of my creative energies. But I also have my Welsh short story, which I am currently working on the first proper draft of; as well as tidying up a shorter collection of stories which will be published in September.

Into this whirl of bloody ideas, horrible deaths and eerily scrawled words on parchment, I’m planning to introduce another short story/novella that I want out in time for Christmas.

Christmas still seems a long time away for most people, but if I want to write this story, rewrite it, rewrite it again, edit it myself, have it properly edited, go through all those edits and have it proofed, then Christmas doesn’t seem far away at all.

Particularly when, at the start of the week, I still didn’t have a clear idea what the plot was.

This was really starting to worry me. All being well and I finish this draft of the Welsh story next week, then I would be looking to start on this next story the following week. Not having a fully worked out plot then really becomes a big, chunky problem.

I know what the story is about in the sense I know what I want to say with it. I know who the characters are, but the getting from A to B to my big-already-visualised-in-my-feverish-mind finale, was still incredibly vague.

So thank the Lord for the two large thunderstorms this week. Mrs Jameson barely woke up, Baby Jameson (thankfully) didn’t wake up at all, but I lay there working through ideas and notions in my mind and started to string together something that looks interesting.

Notepad in my hand first thing I started to scribble it down and – you know what? – it still looked damned good!

I only got the first two thirds down, so there’s a way to go yet, but I know where I’m going now and cannot wait to get started!

Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970)

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Given that I haven’t really watched any of the Hammer Dracula movies since I was a little kid, I’d forgotten that a lot of them don’t give the title character much to do. Most of them, to be fair, make better use of the character than DRACULA – PRINCE OF DARKNESS does, but still – despite what the title might suggest – he isn’t normally the major player. Mostly he’s a tall man with a cape who just shows up to glower

The challenge then becomes for the screenwriter (in this case old Hammer reliable, Anthony Hinds) to create a plot around The Count that is scary and riveting itself, which Dracula – because his name is in the title, so it’d be silly not to – can then be inserted into fairly seamlessly.

TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA is one of the better examples of exactly that trick.

The plot actually centres on three middle-aged hypocrites. Supposedly righteous men who present a face of puritanical vigour to the world, while actually spending the last Sunday of each month debasing themselves in what looks to be a particularly well-upholstered brothel. Their quest for dark thrills leads them to dissolute young Earl, Ralph Bates, who persuades them to buy the desiccated remains of Dracula’s blood and then a dark ritual takes place which revives The Count. Except in their fear at the revival, our protagonists kill Bates and run off into the night. At the death of his servant, Dracula swears revenge.

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If you take a step back there are couple of obvious flaws in this:

Firstly, is Dracula really such a caring person this time round he seriously gives a damn about this servant he’s never actually met?
Secondly, okay, Roy Kinnear witnessed Dracula’s death last time around, but he’d surely have to be the world’s most rapacious capitalist to just put his desiccated remains on the open market? His obvious discomfort at the transaction doesn’t sit well with the fact that he not only sourced the product, but brought it back and advertised it.

(If I’m nit-picking, I should also confess that I have no idea what’s going on at the end).

However, if you sit back and don’t think about it too hard, then there’s a lot to enjoy here.

It looks great, with both design and direction creating a great contrast between a repressive world order and the more louche underbelly society, like the brothel and – well – Dracula.

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Linda Hayden as the corrupted daughter of one of the men is great, already showing a great capacity to switch from innocent to bloodthirsty, which would serve her so well in the following year’s THE BLOOD FROM SATAN’S CLAW. To be fair, pretty much all the cast gives it their best, with Geoffrey Keen – later a particularly genial M in the Bond films – is fantastically harsh as a stern patriarch. And if Christopher Lee looks like he’s only there under sufferance, well – how often is that not the case? Dracula may be his more famous role, but he scarcely ever looks like he enjoys it.

Finally though a tribute to Peter Sallis who died recently. I remember seeing this as a child and it being discombobulating to see TV’s Norman Clegg cavorting with semi-clad women.

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For those who grew up with him as plasticine’s Wallace it must be equally jarring. But even though the cultural dissonance is there, he is still really good here as a man who’s been led along by his friends and now feels his conscience creeping up on him. I will always prefer him in the flat-cap, but I’m sure he’d be happy to be remembered for something else too.

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FREE TODAY!!!

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My first novel, THE WANNABES, is available to download FREE on Amazon Kindle today.

You can read the lovely introduction I wrote for its republication here.

Or you can just download it straight away and get on with reading it through these links:

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