F.R. Jameson's Blog, page 4
June 19, 2019
Ghost Stories (2017)
As a horror movie fan there’s a lot to really like in this portmanteau movie. Clearly made by people who appreciate the genre and who – like me – prefer creepy scares to gore, each of the three tales is really well-crafted and disturbing. (Mrs Jameson won’t mind me saying that she watched large parts of it from behind a pillow.) The problem I had with it though is the framing device and the twist that comes from within that framing device, which I didn’t buy and just left me scratching my head with questions. So, despite the fact I enjoyed the parts, I was ultimately underwhelmed by the whole.
Andy Nyman is a professor who debunks psychics and the supernatural. If you think James Randi, just without any charm or magic. Accepting a challenge to examine three cases which seemingly can’t be explained, he hears Paul Whitehouse’s tale of spooky goings on in an old mental asylum; Alex Lawther’s disturbing encounter in the woods (probably the best of the three); and Martin Freeman’s distressing tale of his wife’s pregnancy. The smug professor thinks he has a good handle on the all – but does he really?
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This is an incredibly male film. Indeed, I can’t think of a woman who has more than a couple of lines and that feels distinctly to its detriment. The stories are good, but the male and pale thing needs some variety. Yes, it makes a certain kind of sense as the conclusion heaves into view, but as I say – and I don’t want to give much away – I find the conclusion more perplexing than disturbing. In the end this is a good, well-made horror movie, but one which – frustratingly – could have been so much better.
My debut novel, THE WANNABES – which has been out of print for a little while – is now available for free. A supernatural thriller of beautiful actresses and deadly ambition in London town, it’s well worth your time. You can get your copy here!
June 17, 2019
Legion by Iain Rob Wright
The second of Iain Rob Wright’s apocalyptic series feels like a sideways accompaniment to the inaugural novel, THE GATES. Having followed the travails of various characters in the first book, we now pick up with a set of different characters who encountered them along the way. As such it’s a bit like the ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD of British end of the world horror – with previous side characters and incidental players getting their time in the spotlight. Although, to be far, there is a lot less absurdist comedy.
In the first
book, one of the characters is rescued by a gang of youths after all hell literally
breaks out on Oxford Street. Here we follow those youths. While a ship captain
has an altercation with another boat as he heads out onto the Atlantic, and
here we follow that other boat.
There is a
danger, I suppose, that this could all seem like the same story told twice, but
fortunately characters do start returning from THE GATES and there is forward
momentum in the narrative. Wright is a genuinely compulsive writer, who throws
in a good sense of adventure with the demonic horror.
There may be some circling back before we charge on, but the whole here sets things up nicely for the next book…
My debut novel, THE WANNABES – which has been out of print for a little while – is now available for free. A supernatural thriller of beautiful actresses and deadly ambition in London town, it’s well worth your time. You can get your copy here!
June 12, 2019
Saint Death by John Milton
The advantage of having
a protagonist who wanders is you can drop him into all kinds of different
stories. So, whereas the first John Milton tale saw him in an adventure in East
London reminiscent of THE WIRE, here he’s up against Mexican cartels in a tale
that is like a missing season of NARCOS. Obviously, I can’t imagine John Milton
crashing the rarefied world of MAD MEN (although maybe there is a bizarre short
story in that), but I look forward to when he gets involved with THE SOPRANOS.
Six months have elapsed
since the first book and Milton has left the UK, spending his time incognito wandering
South America. Now hired as a cook in a Mexican cantina, it isn’t long before
fate and happenstance intervene and he finds himself battling with local
gangsters. Also in the mix are a crusading journalist, a cop with integrity and
a bounty hunter from across the border. While back in London, Milton’s old
department is still on the hunt, but has it been compromised?
This is a tight thriller which makes the most of its location (made even more impressive by Dawson cheerfully confessing in the Afterward that he’s never been there) and our cultural understanding of the drugs world. Milton is forever a hand-grenade ready to go off and it’s hard to think of a location where such an explosion wouldn’t be fascinating.
My debut novel, THE WANNABES – which has been out of print for a little while – is now available for free. A supernatural thriller of beautiful actresses and deadly ambition in London town, it’s well worth your time. You can get your copy here!
June 10, 2019
The Dancer at the Gai Moulin by Georges Simenon
Thank God Simenon has his style.
Thank all that’s holy that, as he matured as
an author, he had a way of conjuring small town nightclubs and backstreets and
dancers with dubious morals, to create a small seedy world that feels so
gloriously alive and real.
As really, if he had to rely on plot alone, I can’t imagine his reputation would stand up to much scrutiny. Here we have a Detective Inspector behaving in a way no police officer would ever behave and keep his job. You think you’ve seen rogue cops on American TV shows? Well, this is a whole other level. I’m not going to give much away, but ask yourself at the end – would any serious policeman do what Maigret does?
Still though, I liked this book because of
the world he creates and most particularly the character of the title
character, Adele. She isn’t in it the narrative all that much, to be fair, but
Simenon still draws her so incredibly well. A flirtatious, yet sad figure who
has found herself in this seedy world – where either she is exploiting her
beauty or its been exploited for her – and she makes the best of it that she
can. She is a much more substantial figure than the boys she encounters, much
more interesting and enigmatic than all the other characters on the page
frankly. She is someone who cries out for a larger part, to be the star of this
book named after her rather than a bit player.
I enjoyed THE DANCER AT THE GAI-MOULIN – it’s a lot of fun (some of it bonkers, thanks to our detective) – but if I had a wish, it’s that we could have spent less time with Maigret and his antics, and more with this entrancing woman.
My debut novel, THE WANNABES – which has been out of print for a little while – is now available for free. A supernatural thriller of beautiful actresses and deadly ambition in London town, it’s well worth your time. You can get your copy here!
June 7, 2019
Good Omens (2019)
I don’t think the critics have been sniffy about GOOD OMENS,
more that they’ve shrugged their shoulders and given it a collective ‘meh’. The
ones I’ve read seemed to quite enjoy it, but it’s not going to be on any of
their year’s end best lists. I don’t know if it will end up on my year’s end
best list either, but I do know that I binged it over the last week and loved
it.
An adaptation of the Gaiman/Pratchett novel, which seems funnier and more touching than the book ever was. The script probably isn’t quite as clever as the book, but still has a degree or two; the direction is truly magnificent; and the performances are excellent across the board.
I’ll pick three out though.
David Tennant has great fun playing his Doctor as a debauched
rock-star; Michael Sheen has the harder job of making goodness and prissiness seem
charismatic and succeeds brilliantly; while Jon Hamm is clearly loving essaying
a Don Draper as Don Draper would have, in his best moments, seen himself – the king
of absolutely fucking everything.
Having said all that, I’m not sure that the door left slightly ajar for the sequel is one which needs to be stepped through. I fear a second run-around may become a re-tread. For now, we have six wonderful, miraculous episodes of television and we should just be happy with that.
My debut novel, THE WANNABES – which has been out of print for a little while – is now available for free. A supernatural thriller of beautiful actresses and deadly ambition in London town, it’s well worth your time. You can get your copy here!
Good Omens (2019
I don’t think the critics have been sniffy about GOOD OMENS,
more that they’ve shrugged their shoulders and given it a collective ‘meh’. The
ones I’ve read seemed to quite enjoy it, but it’s not going to be on any of
their year’s end best lists. I don’t know if it will end up on my year’s end
best list either, but I do know that I binged it over the last week and loved
it.
An adaptation of the Gaiman/Pratchett novel, which seems funnier and more touching than the book ever was. The script probably isn’t quite as clever as the book, but still has a degree or two; the direction is truly magnificent; and the performances are excellent across the board.
I’ll pick three out though.
David Tennant has great fun playing his Doctor as a debauched
rock-star; Michael Sheen has the harder job of making goodness and prissiness seem
charismatic and succeeds brilliantly; while Jon Hamm is clearly loving essaying
a Don Draper as Don Draper would have, in his best moments, seen himself – the king
of absolutely fucking everything.
Having said all that, I’m not sure that the door left slightly ajar for the sequel is one which needs to be stepped through. I fear a second run-around may become a re-tread. For now, we have six wonderful, miraculous episodes of television and we should just be happy with that.
My debut novel, THE WANNABES – which has been out of print for a little while – is now available for free. A supernatural thriller of beautiful actresses and deadly ambition in London town, it’s well worth your time. You can get your copy here!
June 5, 2019
A Kim Jong-Il Production by Paul Fischer
You probably read about this in the newspapers. An ultra-strange story of how famed South Korean actress, Choi-Eun-hee and her husband, the film director Shin Sang-ok, were kidnapped by Kim Jong-Il and the North Korean regime, held for eight years and forced to make movies. It’s a tale of international espionage, skulduggery, defections, escape attempts and naked propaganda. This is a story of bizarre intrigue which is much more Fleming than le Carré, although I think even Ian Fleming would have thought some of the plot twists a bit out there.
Paul Fischer relates it in a charming, breezy style, which works well at this intersection of the bright lights of show-business and an ultra-hard secret service of a dictator. But the style doesn’t trivialise the content, indeed it makes those passages where we delve into life in North Korea have an even harsher slap – for example, the hardships and drudgery the average North Korean; or the fact that North Korea’s largest prison camp is bigger than the city of Los Angeles (and the various tortures which take place within). This is a story told for entertainment and Fischer makes it as entertaining as possible, but he pointedly refuses to ignore the grim realities.
Kim Jong-Il himself comes across as something of a paradox – yes, he is your standard overgrown spoilt child, and the point is made late in the book that in his egotistical, capricious, short-tempered, demanding way, he was just like the other film producers Choi-Eun-hee and Shin Sang-ok knew – but he also struck me as a man who lived inside a bubble of his own creating. The hermit kingdom he and his father ran kept the outside world away from its populous to preserve the mystique that they were living in the greatest country on Earth. North Koreans were for a long time unaware of the luxuries which existed as a matter of course elsewhere, but Kim Jong-Il was a man who actually consumed mass-media from that outside world and knew that wasn’t the case, yet he seemed to believe in the bubble anyway.
It’s A fascinating book. Utterly recommended. It makes me want to go out and track down some of the films of Shin Sang-ok, and the performances of Choi-Eun-hee, just to see what all the fuss was about.
My debut novel, THE WANNABES – which has been out of print for a little while – is now available for free. A supernatural thriller of beautiful actresses and deadly ambition in London town, it’s well worth your time. You can get your copy here!
June 3, 2019
An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris
The Dreyfus case – with its blend of corruption in high places, and high tension as the plot was unravelled. – is, let’s be fair, the perfect meat for a writer expert in historical literary thrillers to sink his teeth into. And here’s Robert Harris to prove that point.
In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, an officer in the French military was arrested, tried and imprisoned on the remote Devil’s Island for spying for the Germans. In numerous different ways both the investigation and the trial were shams, with Dreyfus convicted through the use of secret evidence that his defence was never allowed to see. However, the guilty verdict was hailed as a triumph throughout the whole of France, with the country – still traumatised from war against Germany in 1870 – uniting in their hatred of the Jewish Dreyfus. Shortly afterwards, Georges Picquart, who’d played a small role in Dreyfus’s arrest, was appointed Spymaster for France. It wasn’t long before he came across worrying information that Dreyfus wasn’t actually the spy, and that dishonour instead belonged to a Major Ferdinand Esterhazy. Except when he took this information to his superiors he was told to bury it, and it swiftly became clear that the powerful would rather keep a guilty verdict against Dreyfus and uphold the good name of the French republic, than pursue a case against Esterhazy which would inevitably overturn it. As Picquart continued to hunt down the truth, he found himself in danger of being framed and rail-roaded in much the same way Dreyfus was.
It’s actually a fantastic decision for Harris to make Picquart the first person narrator. He’s the perfect choice, a man whose certainties are shattered while his moral centre holds firm. It ensures that the book is always at the heart of the action; that even when the character is sent into exile in Tunisia, the action has a way of catching up on him. And yet if I have a criticism, the book remains a curiously dispassionate one. Even when Picquart does something passionate – like storm out of a trial, or have an affair with a married woman – there’s a coldness to the prose, one that has an odd distancing effect. Maybe there are just so many passionate screeds out there about the Dreyfus case that Harris felt the need to go another way, or maybe the real Picquart was known as a bit of a cold halibut. It doesn’t make for a bad book by any means, but it does make for a book one can like, but maybe struggle to truly warm to.
It’s often said of Nixon that the real thing that brought him down wasn’t Watergate, it was the cover-up. (Although, let’s be fair, Tricky Dick’s hands were undeniably dirty by that point, but he did exacerbate matters by attempting to draw the veil.) That’s the trouble with cover ups, there may be one original lie/crime/mistake, but the cover-up requires hundreds of untruths and fabrications. Suddenly the crime itself is almost incidental, what becomes the real focus is the big wobbly tower of lies built on ridiculously shaky foundations. That’s what this book is about. It’s us looking through Picquart’s eyes as the tower is built up, and then watching this honourable man’s attempts to smash it down, all whilst following the rules of his beloved army. AN OFFICER AND A SPY is a fascinating, sometimes shocking (even at this great distance) and incredibly tense read.
My debut novel, THE WANNABES – which has been out of print for a little while – is now available for free. A supernatural thriller of beautiful actresses and deadly ambition in London town, it’s well worth your time. You can get your copy here!
May 29, 2019
Quarry by Max Allan Collins
By the time we get to the 1970’s, there’s been a real change in the character of tough guy American fiction. In the immediate post-Second World War period there was still a curious, old school morality to the genre. Yes, there may have been murders, beatings, rape and general mayhem, but there was still a pretty clear binary sense of who was good and who was bad. Mike Hammer may do all types of things to get at his prey, but he is still a good guy and the bad guy (or bad gal, it’s nearly always a woman) is an insane, degenerate killer – or worse, a communist. A Jim Thompson hero may be somewhat morally fluid and do some dreadful things, but he will generally meet his comeuppance. These may be hard and brutal worlds, but they are hard and brutal worlds with certain fixed rules.
Maybe it was Vietnam which changed all that. Maybe it was the release of THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY. Maybe it was Richard Stark’s creation of Parker. Maybe it was Lee Marvin playing his version of Parker in POINT BLANK. Whatever it was, by the time we get to the 1970’s that moral ambiguity is entrenched. No longer do we have the killers in one corner, and the bad guys in the other trying to stop them. Instead, whose corner is whose is now distinctly blurred. The killers might just be our good guys now; the ruthless criminals might be the ones we root for. After all they may call him ‘Good’ in the title of the spaghetti western, but the evidence of his goodness isn’t particularly present on the screen. The world has moved on, the old orders have been shattered.
And that brings us to QUARRY, which is 1970’s tough guy fiction deluxe – hard-boiled for so long it must have needed a pressure-cooker. The hitman good-guy who (much like Lee Marvin in a different tough guy thriller, THE KILLER) is trying to solve who was behind the murder he himself has just committed. The hitman as the hero is not the only sign the world has changed though. Quarry initially has a gay working partner, one who is treated as a serious criminal and not like a camp caricature (although that doesn’t stop the book having something of a homophobic streak). A former Playboy bunny is now a respectable and resourceful businesswoman, rather than shamed or a disposable piece of fluff; whilst such is the nature of pornography on our society that Quarry observes it – both gay and straight – in a local cab stand. It’s no longer a dreadful sin one of General Sherwood’s daughters would be blackmailed over. Or maybe she still would. It’s the one constant from the older model: that the rich are super ruthless and super unpleasant and will do basically anything to survive. The world may change, moral certainties may change, but those with inherited wealth will always be bastards.
It’s possible here to strip away the tough guy stuff and find a deeply capitalist and classist book here. This is a story about the little guy, the self-made man who has carved a niche out in the world doing the jobs that no one wants to do. He has a manager but is really his own boss, earning enough to get by and have a nice quiet life. And his problems really only begin when he encounters those who were born with a silver-spoon in their mouths, who have never had to work and have no respect for it the way he does. And it’s up to this self-made man to rub these blue bloods noses in it just a little, even as his world is torn apart.
QUARRY is a cracking example of 1970’s noir, full of cross and double-cross, and where the men are ruthless bastards, the women are voluptuous stunners with smart mouths, and the treacherous scum deserve everything that comes to them.
My debut novel, THE WANNABES – which has been out of print for a little while – is now available for free. A supernatural thriller of beautiful actresses and deadly ambition in London town, it’s well worth your time. You can get your copy here!
May 27, 2019
Pietr the Latvian by Georges Simenon
There’s a distinct lack of
glamour to this first Maigret mystery. In itself that’s interesting as this is
a story centred on an international conman and an American investor in one of
the finest hotels in Paris. Surely that should give a triumphant yell of
glamour. In the hands of a Leslie Charteris or an Agatha Christie, the glamour
would have been buffed shiny and played up above all else. But in this novel,
everything is filtered through the doughty presence of Inspector Maigret – a
man who has no time for shinier things in life. This is a policeman who has
seen too many bad guys, who knows he is paid poorly and who is well aware that
the successful conclusion to any criminal case means a mass of paperwork for
him. In short, he’s an individual with no time for glamour and as such the book
takes all these shiny elements and boils them down to a story of crooks and
cops and very little in-between.
However, that filter also
manages to diffuse other elements normally crucial to a crime mystery: for
example, excitement.
In PIETR THE LATVIAN, a chase scene is told solely from the point of view of what Maigret has to do to achieve his objectives and how he goes about it, rather than the perils and danger involved in achieving those objectives. It does rather kill the tension. But then this is the stolid Inspector Maigret, and Maigret doesn’t get excited. He has a job to do after all.
So, there are flaws here (and that’s without the fact that Simenon at this point doesn’t really have the knack of creating memorable characters; beyond Maigret, and perhaps the title character, the rest are just cyphers) and yet there’s something quite compulsive about PIETR THE LATVIAN. In its determination it almost becomes engaging despite itself. An engrossing police procedural, which is straight and no fuss, and sets out to do things on its own terms and – you know what – largely succeeds.
My debut novel, THE WANNABES – which has been out of print for a little while – is now available for free. A supernatural thriller of beautiful actresses and deadly ambition in London town, it’s well worth your time. You can get your copy here!
