Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: Knife in the Darkness

The 72-minute episode of the TV series Cimarron Strip, released on VHS (in Finland as Kaupunki kauhun kourissa / The City in the Hands of Horror or some such nonsense; see photo) has some assets, some downsides.

The assets:
- the cleverish script by Harlan Ellison
- Bernard Herrmann's music, made especially for this episode, not Herrmann's best by a long shot, but still Herrmann
- Stuart Whitman in the lead, very young Tom Skerritt in a small but significant role

The downsides:
- the dire direction by Charles Rondeau
- too little violence or suspense

The biggest problem is that you pretty much guess what's going on after you've seen 10 or 15 minutes of it. In 1968 this must've been something.

Here's Marty McKee in a more detailed blog post about the same flick. More Overlooked Films here.

Don Easton's Jack Taggart books

Based on recommendations on Bookgasm (and some personally from one of Bookgasm's contributors, Bruce Grossman) I ordered a couple books by Don Easton. He's a Canadian writer, a former Mountie working undercover in drug-related cases. The books sounded interesting in all their violence.

But I was sorely disappointed. I've managed to get on page 67 on Loose Ends and I find the language and the narration stilted. The dialogue, not to mention the inner monologue, is stilted. The characters, including Taggart himself, are not far from being clichéd.

Sorry, I'll have to drop these and move on to something else. Anyone want two Don Easton books? The other one is Loose Ends, the other one is - well, something else. (It's in a stack on the floor, I can't see it at the moment.)

The Noir Dorian Gray

Remember when I was pondering about whether Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray might merit as a noir novel? I repeat: it's about an individual transcending the boundaries and suffering from the consequences. Okay, seems like I'm not the only one. I stumbled on some sketches by a Finnish artist called Jarmo Mäkilä and his exhibition based on The Picture of Dorian Gray. He has envisioned Wilde's characters as heavies from a gangster movie.

Bought some books

It's a rare occasion when I can take some four or five hours to take a good look at the used bookstores around here in Turku, but whenever I can, it can be this good.

(The book on bottom is a Finnish anthology of sword and sorcery stories by writers like Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague de Camp. It's called The Witches' Empire.)

Tuesday's Overlooked Films: Finnish Westerns, part two

Okay, to the second part in our on-going escapade on Finnish Western films. In the first part I concentrated on the Wild North movies by Aarne Tarkas (and mentioned some others in passing), in the second part there are two films (if there will be part three, it will be about some TV commercials and some odd pieces here and there) by comedian Spede Pasanen, one of the most commercially successful film-makers in Finland from the 1960's to the 1980's.

I'll have to admit I'm not a fan of Pasanen's humour. Seems like he hasn't got any sense of timing and his jokes and gags go on and on and on... Sometimes he managed to strike a chord, though, and some of his films have a cult following I can understand.

And one of these films is the latter of his western films, Hirttämättömät / The Unhanged from 1971. It's shot almost entirely in a sand pit somewhere in Southern Finland and the almost only set-piece in the film is a wagon (and almost throughout the film it has no horse). The film is about Speedy Gonzales (see more on him later), the famous killer (played by Spede Pasanen himself) and Lonely Rider and his buddy, Tonto, played by Vesa-Matti Loiri and Simo Salminen, respectively. All three are wanted men. Speedy Gonzales lets Lonely Rider and Tonto capture him and take him to another town to collect the reward, but he has a cunning plan: he knows there's not enough water for the three of them, and pretty soon the film is about trying to find water in the sand pit.

The film is absurd, but not absurdist. Some of the scenes must've been improvised on the set, given what kind of mad shit Vesa-Matti Loiri lets out of his mouth all the time. At times The Unhanged is quite boring and scenes just go on and on, but at times it's also very funny. And at times because of the film's minimalism it also reminds one of Monte Hellman's westerns, like The Shooting. The parody element is evident in the opening and closing song, sung by Vesa-Matti Loiri. (Sadly I could find only the trailer, which is very funny, but missing the music. Do check out this hilarious battle scene between Lonely Rider and Tonto and some Indians.)


The Unhanged was unofficially a sequel to an earlier western film called Speedy Gonzales - noin 7 veljeksen poika / Speedy Gonzales - the Son of the About 7 Brothers from 1970. This was a more traditional western film, in the vein of the then popular Spaghetti westerns. Spede Pasanen plays Speedy Gonzales (apparently the same guy as in the later film), who comes into a town to search the killer of his brother. There are some nice ideas in the film and the opening credits are very good, with the Morricone-like music by Jaakko Salo (see here), but all too quickly it turns into a sequence of not very good gags. The shoot-out in the end is quite good, though, and actually very nicely photographed. Too bad I didn't think the film was as fun as some others seem to think.

There's one memorable scene in the film. Between fights Spede Pasanen starts to tell a story and it turns into an absurd song which is accompanied by a story-within-a-story. It's done in a nice Spaghetti style.


One point still: Spede Pasanen, as all the men of his ilk, picked beautiful women to act in his films. There's lots to look at in both The Unhanged and Speedy Gonzales. And clearly Spede Pasanen picked some of his ideas for Speedy Gonzales from Roger Vadim's Les Pétroleuses with Brigitte Bardot and Claudia Cardinale, especially the outfits worn by his female lead actors.

Here's still one video, with a Western-style song by a Finnish singer called Frederik edited with scenes from Speedy Gonzales. (More Overlooked Movies here.)

Tuesday's Overlooked Films: Finnish Westerns, part one

The publicity photo of High and Mighty, 1944

The Festival of Finnish Cinema was held in Turku, Finland last weekend. I'm part of the group organizing the festival and it was my idea to show this year Finnish westerns films. You might ask: "what in the name of God are Finnish westerns?" But in fact westerns are an European invention. The first westerns were written and/or directed by Europeans, and there are lots of westerns that have been made elsewhere than in the USA. Italy of course is the best known of these countries that have produced lots of their own westerns, but he have also Germany, Soviet Union, France, the Great Britain, India, Japan... and Finland.

There are six feature films made in Finland that can be called westerns - five, if you're more strict about the genre definition. There are some more if you look at TV movies, short indie movies and TV commercials and such. There are also some films that utilize the same motifs and types of plots as many western movies - many of these are situated in Lapland or the Ostrobothnia area in the Western coast of Finland with its violent "häjy" culture. These films are truly about the edge between the civilization and the frontier, as the more actual Finnish westerns are not - they are merely about playing with the conventions of the genre and trying to cash in on with the more international fads.

The first real Finnish western film is a borderline case, as it's set in Mexico and resembles more the Zorro stories and films. Herra ja ylhäisyys ("High and Mighty" might be a good translation; see photo above) was made in 1944 and at the time it was the most expensive film made in Finland. The film was based on Simo Penttilä's series of books of lieutenant general T. J. A. Heikkilä, Finnish soldier working for the Mexican government. The books deal more with Heikkilä's amorous adventures, and the film follows suit. I haven't actually seen this (at least so I can remember something about it) and it wasn't shown at the festival because of the technical limitations (it's available only on nitrate film), so I can't really comment.

Director and screenwriter Aarne Tarkas, a somewhat legendary figure in his own right, made the next Finnish westerns. The Villi Pohjola AKA Wild North trilogy doesn't represent the true western thematic, as the films don't take place in the American Wild West. Instead they're set in a Never-never-land that shares some of the characteristics as the actual westerns: people ride horses, shoot six-guns, wear stetson hats, dig gold, but then they also have machine guns (Stens, to be exact), drive jeeps and wear wrist watches. And then there's the startling fact that the American Indians are replaced with the Sami people! It makes the films pretty funny - unintentionally of course - at times, but it also goes to show that the Indians in real westerns are a fictional construction.

Tamara Lund in The Gold of the Wild North

I didn't have a chance to see the first Wild North movie (simply called The Wild North, 1955) at the festival, but it's pretty easily available on DVD and elsewhere. The other two films are more difficult to come by. The second film, The Gold of the Wild North (1963), is according to some the best of the three films. It's fast-moving, though there's also the usual sloppiness of director Tarkas with too long scenes and a very bad climax at the end (it's actually quite incomprehensible - the words fail me). The film tells about the three Vorna brothers who are digging for gold somewhere in the utopic North of the films. The plot is pretty thin and meaningless in the end, as this is a mere spectacle of the beautiful Finnish scenery, fist fights and horseback riding. The film has also the charm of the very sexy young Tamara Lund - she plays a foxy lady who's also good with guns.

(Here's Tapio Rautavaara (of the London Olympics fame) singing one of the songs in the first Wild North movie.)

The third Wild North movie, called The Secret Valley of the Wild North (another one from 1963), is the rarest of the bunch as it's been last shown in TV in the early 1980's and it's not available on DVD (nor it was available on VHS either). It's also the wildest one, as it boasts a science-fictional theme of the lost civilization. The Vorna brothers run into a gang of bad guys who are searching for the secret valley they have a map of, but the Sami Indians with their medicine man fight back hard. There is some hilarious action and also some unintentionally funny stuff about the Sami Indians, and the film is fast-moving enough not to be boring, but there are also some scenes that must've looked pretty embarrassing even in the early sixties, such as the two of the Vorna brothers trying to pick up some Sami girls who are out doing Midsummer magic tricks.

The Vorna brothers in The Gold of the Wild North

The Wild North films have largely been seen as parodies of the western genre (and I thought so earlier, too), but having seen the two films I can't concur. It's obvious Aarne Tarkas was pretty enthusiastic about his efforts to bring western thematics and iconography into Finland without having to resort to doing a fake version of Wild West. There's of course humour - some of its largely unintentional, as I've pointed out -, but that's not the same thing. The stuff about the Sami people substituting Indians was a critical mistake, but now it seems only funny. (I don't know how the Sami feel about it themselves.)

One thing about the Wild North films still: the Finnish horses look too big, too muscular compared to the horses in the American or Italian westerns. They don't look right. Some of the guns also look dead wrong (not to mention the Stens), but I can live with that.

Coming up in the 2nd part: the western films of Spede Pasanen (and possibly a cable channel oddity called The Gold Train to Fort Montana).

Here's a stylish song with some parodic overtones, sung by Rose-Marie Precht, from The Gold of the Wild North. (More Overlooked Movies here.)

Sam Hawken: Juaréz Dance

It's been a long time since I read a book I really wanted to devour. There have been some I've liked, but they haven't been books I didn't want to leave alone. I didn't want to leave Sam Hawken's Juaréz Dance alone. I wanted to get back to it as soon as I possibly could. And for some reason or another, it was possible this last weekend.

The protagonist of Juaréz Dance is an American hired assassin working for a Mexican drug lord. The guy, named Cooper, is a very skilled in what he does, but everything seems to go a bit wrong when the drug lord asks Cooper to bodyguard him. Cooper's still effective, but there's something nagging him all the time.

Hawken writes mean, minimalist, behaviorist prose that doesn't much give away what the people - mainly it's about Cooper all the time - think or feel. I really love this kind of writing. There are wonderful passages of time just passing, of a boredom that comes from waiting by a pool in an empty backyard of a luxurious villa. I could see this being directed by Jim Jarmusch, and I kept comparing it to one of the best books I've read, Kevin Wignall's Who Is Conrad Hirst? 

The last pages of the book are not as good as the previous 240 ones (this is something Hawken says bothered his agent, so the book wound up being self-published), but I'm not really complaining. If I were still picking up books to be translated in Finnish, I'd pick this up.

Purchase the book here. I mean, seriously, do it. This guy means business. (Sorry, the book seems to be available only as an e-book. I didn't mind.)

Hawken has also two other novels, Tequila Sunset and Dead Women of Juaréz. I mean to read them as well.

Sarah Weinman's anthology of vintage female noir

I noticed in Facebook that Sarah Weinman has an anthology of vintage female noir coming out. I snatched the photo from Megan Abbott's feed, and here's a teaser on the book. I couldn't find any more info on the book at the moment, though.

Stanley Morgan: The Courier

In my on-going exploration of British crime and adventure paperbacks, I dipped into The Courier by Stanley Morgan. I left it pretty soon when I noticed it wasn't crime-related, but I thought I'd say something about it.

Stanley Morgan seems to have a bit of a cult following these days, since he has a fan-based website - and it's quite good, too. There's something about him and his books that feels like targeted towards the recent laddie and GQ culture with its tailored, expensive suits, sports cars and pretty dames. Though I'm fond of pretty dames and well-tailored suits myself, I find the culture surrounding them pretty dated and even abrasive. The hero of The Courier is one Russ Tobin, the hero of Morgan's long series of books, free-wheeling bit-actor whose sexual escapades the book follows. There's an add for other books in the series in which Russ Tobin is called "romeo-rapist". Nice touch, eh?

I started to read this, since Morgan has one thriller translated in Finnish, Octopus Hill. Anyone read that?

One thing that comes to mind: the difference between the British and American sex paperback is that there are more crimes and more angst-filled feel of punishment in the American sleaze. And free-minded as I'm about all things related to sex, I find the American way more fascinating.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: Kyor-ogly (1960)

Kyor-ogly is a Soviet adventure film from 1960. It was the first Cinemascope film in colour made in the state of Azerbaijan, and it tells about the national hero, Ker-ogly, who battled the evil tyrant who blinded his father. I saw the film on 35 mm last night in the Finnish Film Archive screening, with some 30 other viewers.

The film is stunning to look at, but there's clumsiness as comes to the story-telling. At times I didn't know what was happening and who the people on the screen were. Some characters came out of nowhere and dropped out of sight pretty quickly. I thought at first the copy I saw was a shortened one aimed at international markets, but I couldn't find any evidence on that. Maybe they thought everyone knows the story of Ker-ogly by heart!

The film is a lot of fun, some of its intentional, but most of its unintentional. There are some nice action scenes and some of the sets are spectacular. Even the matte paintings are pretty well made. Some of the funny scenes include the last battle during which Ker-ogly starts to sing this ballad to encourage his soldiers! If only Peter Jackson had Gandalf do something like this! (Actually I got to thinking about The Lord of the Rings quite many times during Kyor-ogly, I just wonder if Jackson saw this...)

Kyor-ogly has no English title, but in Finland it was shown as Maagillinen miekka, literally The Magical Sword. There's no magic in the film, however. In German the film was called "The Bloody Sword". There's not much of that in the film either, as the film shies away from showing lots of violence.

Here's the whole film without any subtitles:



More Overlooked Movies here.

Weasels Ripped My Flesh contest

You still have some time to take part in the Weasels Ripped My Flesh contest. Take a look here, you might win a copy of the book!

Friday's Forgotten Book: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Forgotten book? Surely not. I must be an exception to have read this book only now, when I'm 40. I guess my teachers were suspicious of such radical stuff. And for some reason or another, I've been a bit wary of classics all my life.

What surprised me reading Oscar Wilde's book was that it's essentially a noir book. It's a crime-related novel about an individual crossing his boundaries and suffering from the consequences.

What bugged me a bit was that there's a bit too much talk and not enough action. Of course Oscar Wilde could throw a very funny line anytime he wanted to - I mean, the book is full of them! -, but it's probably just me being too American-related in my reading habits. And I'm actually a bit ashamed to have written the sentences above.

More Forgotten Books here.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: Une grosse tête

Une grosse tête from 1961 is a funny little French film written by Francois Truffaut and directed by his pal, Claude de Givray. The film stars Eddie Constantine. It's a forgotten gem, though not a great film in any meaning of the phrase, but entertaining, witty and inventive all the way.

The film is a parody of many Hollywood genres alongside with French genre films, especially those with Constantine in the lead: the Lemmy Caution, Nick Carter and OSS 117 films. There are some funny scenes in which Constantine fights some other guys and they are acted out like the outrageous scenes in those films. The film begins like a weird western film in which a stranger - Eddie Constantine in his glider! - comes to rescue an old man from some baddies who want to buy the old man's house and build a skyscraper instead. But then suddenly something completely different ensues! I'm pretty sure this is one of the very few feature films to have karting races at the center of things. The film changes tones in an instant and it also features some Nouvelle Vague type of loose editing and shooting. The ending made in a grand style of The Giant or some such epic is priceless.

The film also boasts two very beautiful female actors, Alexandra Stewart and (I believe, as not all the actors are credited in IMDb) Genevièvé Galéa (the mother of Emmanuelle Béart, no less!).

I'd recommend this to all friends of French New Wave and some others too, since it's so light and not to be taken seriously, but seems like it's very hard to find. I just saw the 35 mm print held in the Finnish Film Archive. The film seems to have been shown in American TV as A Fat Head and in England as A Swelled Head. In Finland it was called Kovat kurvit ("Hard Curves" or some such).

More Overlooked Films here.

Here's a French rock band featured in the film playing a song called "Rock des Karts":

Friday's Forgotten Book: Weasels Ripped My Flesh!

This isn't actually a forgotten book by any means, but some of the stories and their writers are forgotten, if anyone knew them in the first place.

I reviewed some of the stories earlier here, but now that I've finally gotten hold of an actual, physical copy, I can't but say: "Vow! This does look cool!" The book is hefty, and ripe with old illustrations and covers and ads from the sleazy men's adventures mags from the fifties, sixties and seventies. And there's lots of information about the authors, which is at times more important and more interesting than the actual stories.

I've had my hands full of other projects (for example, I just e-mailed my werewolf anthology to the publisher just five minutes ago), so I haven't had time to dip into the book again. But I mean to.

More Forgotten Books here.

K J Wignall: Death

Death is the third and last installation in Kevin "K J" Wignall's Mercian trilogy, set of vampire books aimed at YA audience. I liked all three of them and I think I can safely say that I'd rather see kids reading these than, say, the Twilight books. I reviewed the two earlier books here and here.

As has happened before, I was a bit lost in the beginning of Death, since I'm not very good with plots and I keep forgetting all kinds of stuff that take place in books and in films - the same here with Blood and Alchemy. But the themes and the atmosphere are more important in any book, not to mention the style, and Wignall has both in abundance. The mystic and sinister character of Lorcain Labraid is given a satisfactory background in chapters that are forceful and well-built. The Mercian trilogy doesn't suffer from genre clichés.

I'll have to read the whole trilogy back to back at some point to really appreciate all the things in it, especially the ending of Death. I'm a bit sad to hear that this probably won't be out in Finnish after all, but here's still hoping.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movie, or actually a loads of them

Theodore Rex: doncha just love 'em?

We held another movie festival at the cabin loaded with all kinds of weird stuff just last weekend. Here are the films we watched:

Race with the Devil, 1975 **½ (Warren Oates and Peter Fonda on the run from the hick satanists, not bad, but not memorable, except for the ending)
Gymkata, 1985 * or ***** (really stupid martial arts film that never slows down and is actually pretty good entertainment if you're drunk and with lots of friends around)
Beast in Space AKA La bestia nello spazio, 1980 * or ***** (absolutely inane and absurdly cheap space flick made with the same plot as Walerian Borowczyk's artsy horror film The Beast and the same lead actor, Finnish-born Sirpa Lane)
Wake in Fright, 1971 **** (Australian film thought being lost, but found in the early 2000's, very noirish stuff about a guy who gets stuck in the middle of nowhere with lots of Aussie drunks fooling around and shooting kangaroos just for the fun of it, Ted Kotcheff's strong direction)
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, 2010 **½ (mildly funny I Walk the Line parody with some good music, but almost 30 minutes too long)

Die Wand: human and nature

Die Wand, 2012 **** (or even ****½) (I'd seen this earlier, but wanted to show it to my friends: grim, ecological and possibly post-apocalyptic anti-thriller, with lots of gorgeous mountain scenery, made in Austria of all places, based on Marlen Haushofer's novel from the sixties)
The Foetus, 1997 **½ (Finnish lost film from the nineties which I've managed to salvage on VHS, uneasy mix of extreme gore, extreme perversions and highly experimental editing and storytelling, irritating at best, but almost always interesting, luckily only 40 minutes long)
The Last Circus AKA Balada triste de trompeta, 2010 *** (inventive, wild and unpredictable, but not very interesting thematically, the first film by Alex de la Inglesia I've liked)
Copkiller AKA L'assassino dei poliziotti, 1983 ***½ (see my earlier review here)
Vampire's Kiss, 1988 * or ***** (awful but funny "Nicolas Cage goes ape-shit crazy" vampire film from the yuppie era)
Theodore Rex, 1995 * (so awful I wanted to eat my brains, luckily it was very late and I was very drunk)
El ángel exterminador, 1962 ***** (one of Buñuel's masterpieces, very eerie drama of upper-class jerks who are suddenly not able to leave the room of a house they're in)
The Mechanic, 1972 **½ (Bronson actioneer trying to be deep, better when there's only action on the screen)

More Overlooked Films here. (And here's the lowdown on the last year's Cabin Film Festival.)

Friday's Forgotten Book: My Bonny Lies Under the Sea

Ray Alan was the pseudonym of one Joseph Lawrence Valls-Russell (born probably in 1922, died in 2007) of whom not much is known. Seems like he was a career soldier at one point, but the only thing that's most assuredly known about him is that he wrote two spy thrillers under the Ray Alan by-line. The earlier book came out in 1963 under the title My Bonny Lies Under the Sea, the latter, The Beirut Pipeline, came out in 1980. I don't know what he did between those books.

Ray Alan is the also the name of the hero of My Bonny Lies Under the Sea. He's a British journalist who's asked to come to Lebanon by a friend to investigate some fishy affairs. Of course there are murders, chases, mysterious tough guys, beautiful ladies etc. The book is pretty talkative and repetitive and also a bit too complicated as I lost myself in all the schemes, but there are also some better scenes throughout. At times the book resembles a hardboiled private eye novel, but it's still firmly a spy novel. The big stakes are about the Cold War stuff, uranium and other minerals used in nuclear weapons. Seems like "Ray Alan" knew quite a lot about the Middle East, which makes me wonder if he served there during the WWII or worked there as a diplomat. If someone knows something about Valls-Russell, I'd like to hear more.

Sorry, couldn't find the original cover, so you'll have to do with the Finnish cover. It uses a Bertil Hegland cover that, for all I know, might be the original Swedish cover for Ray Alan's book.

More Forgotten Books here.

Mädchen in Uniform (1931)

I managed to see this German cult film about a girl dormitory recently and I thought it was worth blogging, even though it's not Tuesday and the Overlooked Films meme. The film is a rare example of an all-female cast.

The beautiful film by Leontine Sagan is a look at teenage girls' love life that develops in a dormitory governed by a tough mistress. There's also a young teacher who cares for the girls and at times lets them get near her - and one of the girls, a new one called Manuela, falls in love with her, with tragic results.

The film is both frank and tender, at times with striking visuals and sensual erotics, and it must've caused quite a buzz at the time. I think the film was also ahead of its time as for the girls' appearance. Many of them look like they could be from any decade, not just the Germany of the early thirties. Especially Hertha Thiele as Manuela is very stylish in her chignon (she's very pretty, too). It's tempting to read the film as a critic of dictatorship (under which Germany was soon to fall), but it also might be projecting later incidents into the past.

Mädchen in Uniform is a very interesting and beautiful film, not to be overlooked by anyone seriously interested in the history of cinema. It's possible the film has no official English title, IMDb gives these two: Girls in Uniform and Maidens in Uniform.

The Ideal Hellbient Party

I noticed while checking out some other older posts that this had been lingering in the cyberspace for years. I don't really know what it was originally for, but it's a set of songs I'd play if I was DJ'ing somewhere. (And of course when I decided to clean it up a bit and publish it, it went straight to top of my posts, though it must've been originally written in the early 2000s. Hell, what the heck!)

The Ideal Hellbient Party Soundtrack Compiled by (the one time) DJ Andropov AKA Juri Nummelin, Pori/Tampere/Turku

(Not in order.)
The Crack House: My Revolution
The Demars: Lada
Lalo Schifrin & Alan Douglas: Amityville Frenzy
Stetsasonic: Talkin' All That Jazz (Dominoes Version)
Sly & Robbie: Make 'Em Move
DJ Hell: My Definition of House Music
Suicide: Ghost Rider
Ron Trent: Altered States
US3: Cantaloop
Grandmaster Flash & Melle Mel: White Lines
Eric Peters: Mechanical Movement / Industrial Activity
Isaac Hayes: Run Fay Run
The Dave Howard Singers: Rock On
Aphex Twin: Z Twig
Syd Dale: Stanley Steamer 1 & 2
The Meters: I Need More Time
Laibach: Panorama
Jean-Jacques Perrey: E.V.A.
Eric B. & Rakim: I Know You Got Soul (The Double Trouble Remix) '
Kool Mo Dee: Go See the Doctor
Spoonie Gee: All Shook Up
Alan Hawkshaw: The Roving Reporter
Dyke and the Blazers: It's Your Thing
Plastikman: Spastik
The Pop Group: Forces of Oppression
Wiseblood: Motor Slug
Prince Charles and the City Beat Band: Bush Beat
Green Velvet: Flash
Ministry: Jesus Built My Hotrod
Trouble Funk: Don't Touch That Stereo
The Dead Milkmen: You'll Dance To Anything
The Rochester-Veasley Band: Beat Bop / Tokyo Strut
The Naked City: Batman
The Monkees: Writing Wrongs

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: Minnesota Clay

Minnesota Clay was Sergio Corbucci's second western and the first one released under his Italian name - the earlier one, Massacre at Grand Canyon (1964), was released as Stanley Corbett. Minnesota Clay was actually the first Italian western to be released under the Italian director's real name - even Sergio Leone claimed his true authorship later.

Minnesota Clay has some of the same characteristics as Corbucci's later, cynical Django, but it's not on the same level and it's also a bit clumsy and at times even boring, especially in the first half. The last shootout in which Cameron Mitchell is virtually blind, but still manages to kill six baddies, is however very good. Beware of the copy with the happy ending!

Sorry, managed to do this only on Wednesday! More Overlooked Films here.

Rural Noir: A Visual Essay

Brian Lindenmuth, the fiction editor of Spinetingler Mag, has put up another great Pinterest board, this time on rural noir. Take a look here.

And here's Lindenmuth's earlier visual essay on modern noir.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Adam Diment: The Dolly Dolly Spy

Adam Diment's The Dolly Dolly Spy (translated in Finnish with a misleading title Nukkevakooja) was an enormously popular spy novel published in 1968 that's largely forgotten these days. It does seem to have some sort of a cult following, though, which I can understand, but not easily relate to.

I did enjoy the book mildly. The book has lost some of its shock value - I mean, we have seen quite a lot of free sex and the use of mild drugs since 1968, there's not much to it anymore. But it's still entertaining, even though in the case The Dolly Dolly Spy there's also lots of old-fashioned sexism to it. A blogger wrote that Adam Diment's Philip McAlpine makes Ian Fleming's James Bond books feel like they were written by Andrea Dworkin!

The main problem for me in The Dolly Dolly Spy was that the book was too episodic. There's not much coherence to it. I'm the first to admit this was probably something Diment was aiming at, but it doesn't work very well (though it does work in some books). The first part of the book is pretty good, and so is the end, but the middle part drags - and none of them have much to do with each other! It does, however, add to the overall parodic quality of the book. The parody goes well with Philip McAlpine's character, since he couldn't be less interested in the Cold War affairs and he gets rather pissed off by the fact that his employers want him to help an old Nazi officer escape.

Adam Diment's story has been interesting, read for more here and here.

More Forgotten Books here.

Interview with Megan Abbott

I'm doing a piece on great American crime writer Megan Abbott for the magazine of the Finnish Whodunit Society. Here's an interview I made with Megan via e-mail. It starts without any introduction, so you better check Megan's website. She's a wonderful writer. I do hope someone in Finland picks her up (no pun intended). 

You've written five novels that could all be labeled as noir. What draws you to noir?

With the exception of Queenpin, I don’t really think about ”noir” or even genre when I set out to write a book. What draws me to a story idea is a character under pressure. What will he or she do, in the face of circumstances out of their control? Or faced with a desires they cannot restrain? Or to keep a secret they fear escaping? Those situations always fascinate me. I guess human nature, its lightness, darkness and murkiness will always be my draw.

How do you define noir? How do your novels fit your own description?

I don’t think I’ve ever found a definition that works for more than one person. It’s so subjective. I’m happy to have anyone consider any of my novels ”noir,” or not, but those are terms that feel constricting when I’m actually writing. If I thought like that, I think the process would feel artificial, formulaic—”this is what should happen next”—rather than organic, springing from the characters.

Did you start writing at early age?

No, but I was a booklover my whole life, from a family of booklovers. I think the writing eventually became the natural outgrowth of that, of wanting to write myself into the world of the books I loved.

Your crime novels are at times without crime, there are only few murders in them. Especially THE END OF EVERYTHING was interesting in this aspect. Are you moving away from being a crime novelist? Will there someday be a mainstream novel from you? Or is this definition something you're not interested in?

I think if there’s a throughline in my books it’s that a crime occurs (a character under pressure seems to lead to crime) and the story beats are driven by that crime. Crime fiction is about as ”mainstream” as one can get in the U.S., if you’re talking about popularity/readership, but I’ve never thought of my career  in those terms. I guess I just write the story that comes next. Usually the seed for the next one lies in the prior one.

Your doctoral thesis was about men in original film noirs, but your novels are almost exclusively about women. Why do you find men interesting, but don't write about them? (Or does this question belong to the category "male writers are never asked this question"?)

I admit, I’ve never heard a male writer asked that question! To me, I write about men in all my books and I can’t imagine otherwise! Foremost in The Song Is You and The End of Everything and in my next novel, but I consider them just as central to the story as the women.  Gender and power and desire interest me very much.

Your first crime novels were set in the past, mainly in the era of the original film noirs. The books never felt they were only pastiche, how did you manage this?

I’m glad I did! I guess it’s two things. Pastiche means you risk writing character ”types” rather than characters so I’ve  always tried very hard to make all my characters feel authentic. Second, growing up with a love for midcentury America, research is key for me. When I’m doing research, I’m really looking for the odd piece…the piece of slang you’ve never heard. The phrase you never see anymore. I’m more fixated on the idiosyncratic.I want to build out the worlds in which my books take place so they feel both authentic and unfamiliar. I want the reader to feel they have slipped into the past and can feel, taste, smell it.

What's especially interesting to you about the fifties' and sixties' Hollywood and its seedy underlife? And why?

I grew up on movies from the 30s-50s, so they were my fairy tales. And I think we always return to our foundational fairy tales. They are the stories that form us, in some way. I never tire of reading about that world. 

THE SONG IS YOU deals with similar matters as Ellroy's THE BLACK DAHLIA and is also based on a true story. How did you approach the story?

Several years ago, I saw a reference to Jean Spangler as one of Hollywood’s unsolved missing person cases and there was just so much there: An aspiring actress, gone missing. Rumors of gangster boyfriends and dates with movie stars. Then, one day, just vanished. I tracked down one of her movies: The Miracle of the Bells. She’s on screen for just a few seconds. She’s witnessing the “miracle” of the title and she has this terrified look on her face. I couldn’t get it out of my head. Utterly haunting. I began to imagine her life. And that made me think about how a missing person becomes this empty vessel for everyone else to fill with their own desires, fears, anger, guilt. The characters in the noel turn her into this blank slate on which all they can etch anything, everything. And precisely what they etch tells us so much about them, their disappointments and dreams, the way they view love, romance, death, themselves.

One point I noticed in QUEENPIN is that you don't use the usual trademarks of a historical novel, the music, the books, the trademarks etc. of the era. You described the whole era only through the language and style. How did you manage this and was it deliberate on your account?

It was deliberate. I wanted that book to take place not in any real world but the world of the B-movies I loved, particularly the crime films of 1950s and early 60s, films like The Killing and Kiss Me Deadly, when it’s less romantic, when it’s harder, tougher, leaner. And because they were B movies, the sets were spare, everything was spare. For me, it was all about human drives.

Even though DARE ME is set in the present day, it still seems as it's set in the past, i.e. in the teenager years of these girls? Is this something you've set out to do and not only my imagination? [This was my bad, I meant THE END OF EVERYTHING, not DARE ME, which obviously is set in the present day.]

Mmm. No, it ’s meant to be set in the present day. It’s a world of Facebook, texting, YouTube—very much the world of now. Though I think the particular experience the novel recounts is over for Addy, so perhaps that’s why it feels that way to you?

You seem to find youth fascinating - the time between being innocent and the time being experienced and knowing. What draws you to youth?

I think it's the bigness of it. It’s all sex and terror and longing and chaos. Everything feels urgent and frightening and thrilling. The stakes feel unbearably high and everything feels precarious—it’s a time of heightened everything. And a time when you can't control yourself, stop yourself.

And, while I. don’t think that’s solely an experience of youth, the passage from innocence to experience is an abiding fascination for me. And I think we go through it again and again. It’s what makes us human, the desire to believe in something, someone, again and again. Our hearts may close temporarily, or thicken with scars, but ultimately we open them again.

And what about the fascination that young girls feel toward dangerous situations and dangerous men, someone might say it's something female writers don't normally touch upon?  

I think that comes with the crime fiction terrain. You could argue all crime fiction is about our attraction to danger, its lure, including the dangers in our own desires. It’s primal and goes across genders. All desire is dangerous in some way. You make yourself vulnerable.

How did you end up writing a novel about cheerleaders? How did you do the research? Have you ever done any cheerleading yourself?

No, I was never a cheerleader, but in my last book, The End of Everything, one of the characters was a high school field hockey star. I started watching girls play and was struck by their ferocity on the field. Their aggression but also the wild abandon they brought to it. That led me to cheerleading, which is the most dangerous sport for girls in the U.S.. Watching squads compete, I was fascinated by the girls’ willingness not only push themselves but to take tremendous, terrifying risks. I started thinking about it as this terrain to explore friendship, rivalries, power, ambition. Adolescent girls feel things so powerfully and when the stakes are raised, as they are in this kind of sport, the possibilities for trouble are pretty immense.

I recall reading on Facebook that you were negotiating a movie deal on DARE ME. What's the status on that?

It’s been optioned by Fox, with me ”attached” to write the screenplay. Pretty exciting—fngers crossed!

What are you working on now?

I’m tackling the screenplay for Dare Me. It’s a weird process, like taking a chainsaw to your home and building something from the ground-up. And also at work on my next novel. It’s called The Fever and it’s about a s about a family reckoning with a mysterious outbreak in small town.

Who are you reading at the moment?

A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert "Believe It or Not!" Ripley by Neal Thompson.

Who are the writers that have influenced you most?

A pretty wide range—a lot of voices in my head at any given moment. From Chandler and Cain and Ellroy to Fitzgerald, Plath, Joyce Carol Oates. In more recent years, Daniel Woodrell would probably be tops for me.

It would be nice to have you visit Finland and get your books published in here, have you had any requests from here?

I don’t know, but I hope to be one day—I’d love to visit!

Another female Hard Case writer!

See more here.

Review of Weasels Ripped My Flesh

Or actually a review of half of it. I wrote a review of this collection of stories from vintage men's magazines for a Finnish cultural magazine and I asked the published if I could see a PDF of the book in advance, since I wouldn't have had time to buy the book via web and wait for the copy to arrive. And I haven't had time since to read the rest of the book, but I definitely will when I've got some extra money to order the print book.

Okay, to the book. I posted the table of contents earlier, now I read the first half of the book and some extra stories. My reaction to the stories was somewhat mixed: the concept of the stories is often better than the execution. (Well, who didn't know that already..?) The idea of half-crazed Nazis torturing gorgeous and half-naked women in the castles of Germany is always good fun, but as far as the stories go, I'm not sure whether I'd care to read lots of them. One here and there is passable, but dozens of these...?

There are some good writers and good stories in the bunch, make no mistake about that. Robert Silverberg's crazy "Trapped by Mau Mau" (Exotic Adventures 1959) is a very good hardboiled adventure story, even though it's racist as hell. Robert F. Dorr's "Bayonet Killer of Heartbreak Ridge" (Man's Magazine 1964) is very well told, a snappy true-war story set in the Korean War. Harlan Ellison's "Death Climb" (True Men Stories 1957) is just a crime story, there's nothing about it to claim it's a true story, but it's pretty good - noir set on a mountain!

There were some disappointments: Lawrence Block's "She Doesn't Want You" (Real Men 1958), which is a rather bland account of prostitutes who are really lesbians. This wouldn't do as journalism anymore, even though I'm willing to admit that today's journalism at times resembles the vintage men's magazines very much. They might only do it better today. Same goes for Walter Wager's "Please God, Help Me Break Out" (Male 1958), which just tells what happened to a famous soldier (forgot the name already, sorry!) during the WWII. Jim McDonald's (real identity unknown) story has a great title: "Grisly Rites of Hitler's Monster Flesh Stripper" (Man's Story 1965), but it's actually a quite bland "re"-telling of odd incidents. You would think a writer would want to pepper these stories with some narrative hooks, but that clearly wasn't the case. And it has not enough sadism! By 2013, the teasing element has somewhat worn out. (Someone might say of course that's sad, but that's the way it goes.)

There were also stories by Bruce Jay Friedman (oddly humorous piece about a tiger in a zoo trying to eat another tiger in another cage) and Walter Kaylin (weird story about an exotic dancer acting as a tribal chief in the darkest Africa) that were of interest. The book is also spiced up by interviews with Wager and Mario Puzo, but unfortunately no story by Puzo. Wager's interview is more interesting (albeit too short!) than his story.

There are more books coming out from New Texture and I'm all for it, though I was a bit critical on this. I'll be reading the rest of the book one of these days and I'll also blog about it. Meanwhile you can take a look here.

Inglourious Basterds

I was finally able to see Quentin Tarantino's war film Inglourious Basterds last night. I watched it from my small TV set, so it wasn't quite the experience it might've been. 

The film got some bad reviews here in Finland and I wasn't very eager to see it, since I'd hated Kill Bill 1 so much and was mildly bored with by Kill Bill 2 and Death Proof. But now that I liked Django Unchained a great deal, I thought I should see this. It's better than Kill Bill and Death Proof, but I didn't enjoy it as much as the Django film. I'm probably in minority here as far as Tarantino fans are concerned. 

Inglourious Basterds could've been ripped out of the headlines of vintage men's adventure mags: LUSTY FRAULEIN HELPED US DESTROY NAZI MOVIE THEATER! THEY ESCAPED THE NAZI DEATH CAMP WITH HUNDREDS OF KRAUT SCALPS! It's all done with great visual verve and great dialogue - Tarantino can really write a scene. They are sometimes a bit too long, but they are never boring. I should probably try to watch Kill Bill and Death Proof again... 

Tarantino's influences come from violent and even trashy European war movies and such. They are usually (or, shall we say, at times) incoherent and not very well made. Tarantino seems to maintain the incoherence, but makes everything else better than his predecessors. There's not much continuity or character development in Inglourious Basterds. There are only dozen to fifteen individual scenes in the whole film, into which mix Tarantino throws some comic-like flashbacks or ironic info dumps. The hell with continuity, says Tarantino. He goes for spectacle, not plot or story or any of that serious stuff. This is probably something some critics will never get and it will irritate them for years to come. 

And this is also the reason why I liked Django Unchained more than this: it's more a drama, more a story, it's no mere spectacle. But I did enjoy Inglourious Basterds in all its glorious silliness. 

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: Quand la ville s'éveille (1975)

I  bought this French crime film on an old VHS cassette from a thrift store for 10 or 20 cents. I knew nothing about it, but I thought it might be worth to take a look at. It turned out it was both yes and no: the film is quite stilted, but it's still a French crime film from the seventies! And with this I mean the fact that the French probably make - or at least used to make - the best crime movies after the Americans and Hollywood.

Writer-director Pierre Grasset (who also stars) worked on some of Jean-Pierre Melville's films and it shows. This too goes for the Melville-type fatalism and existentialism, as it's about old career criminals who are retired, but gather together to make the last job and then really retire. Of course it all goes terribly wrong, but they do it anyway, without flinching an eye.

What's wrong about the movie is the reason why the job goes so wrong. They could've avoided it so easily. After the crucial scene it's only implausible. Still, there are some cool moments in which old guys dressed up in long trench coats shoot each other at desolate fields and subway stations. This could've been my stuff.

What also bugs me is that they use almost only one piece on the soundtrack - I got pretty tired of the accordion song, even though it turned out be by Astor Piazzolla. Disconcerting was also the fact the movie, of course originally in French, was dubbed in English - luckily it was pretty well made.

 
One thing still: the film seems to have quite a many titles. The original French title is above, but there's some confusion as to what the English and Finnish titles are. Both IMDb and the Finnish VHS database claim this was called When the City Awakes, but as you can see from the photo (sorry about the quality!) in the opening titles it's called Hot Day Afternoon (which doesn't really fit). The Finnish title in the VHS cover (see the photo above) is Lehtileike, which means "A Newspaper Clip" (doesn't make much sense), but as you can see, in the titles it's Keikkojen keikka, which means "The Hardest Job" or maybe "The Last Job", if you know what I'm getting at. I don't know where they got the last title, since the film wasn't shown here in theaters. Maybe there's an earlier VHS publication of which no one is aware of.

More Overlooked Movies at Todd Mason's blog.

Cormac McCarthy: Blood Meridian

Cormac McCarthy's classic western novel from 1985 has only now been translated in Finnish and I finished the translation a week back. I've already written two pieces on the book (one is available here, though it's in Finnish, understandably), so I won't have much to say about it here.

One could say that this is the antiwestern to kill all antiwesterns. Blood Meridian buries a lot of the clichés associated with the western genre under the hellish amount of dead and mutilated bodies and does it with style that's both baroque and extremely hardboiled at the same time. I really don't know how McCarthy does it. Some of the battle scenes are truly stomach-wrenching in a way that not many books are.

All this said, I must confess I'm not hundred percent sure what McCarthy wants to say with his book. Is he really saying that war and violence are inherent in all men - in all nature, even? Is the mysterious judge a spokesperson for his own values (this is quite possibly the case with the sheriff in No Country for Old Men) or is McCarthy trying to say something important, possibly something contrary to the judge's opinions? Is he just playing with the reader? You can never tell what the judge is trying to say with his long monologues.

This confusion makes for some fascinating reading, all right, but at times I wasn't exactly sure what to think of McCarthy.

Included is the photo of the Finnish edition, with the cover by Mika Tuominen. The Finnish title means "To the Edge of Blood" or something along those lines.

Django Unchained and The Paperboy

Sorry, I've been quite busy lately trying to work out some new books. Here's a quick post of two films I saw recently and thought might be of interest to the readers of Pulpetti.

Django Unchained: the first Tarantino I really liked since Jackie Brown. I hated Kill Bill 1, liked the second part slightly better and was pretty bored with Death Proof. (I haven't seen Unglourious Basterds yet, but I'll try to watch it soon.) In Django Unchained Tarantino's grandeur that veers toward bad taste is in good balance with the drama and there are some very good moments throughout, not to mention some very good actors. I liked this a lot.

The Paperboy: gritty neo-noir film about some low-life trash and some idealistic newspapermen in the deep South in 1969, based on a novel by Pete Dexter. I liked this, too, but there seems to be something missing from the film and I can't quite put my finger on it. Nicole Kidman and John Cusack are brilliant in this, they walk on the edge of overacting all the time.

Milestone post!

I didn't realize my post on the men's adventure mags book Weasels Ripped My Flesh was my 1900th post. Will have to celebrate! Only one hundred to go! What should I do in my 2000nd post? This was my 1000th post. Seems like it takes five years to do thousand posts!

Weasels Ripped My Flesh out soon!

The long-awaited collection of vintage stories from the Golden Age of men's adventure magazines called Weasels Ripped My Flesh is out soon! I received the table of contents in PDF form last week and I can tell the book looks dandy! The editor of the book, Bob Deis (who maintains the great Men's Pulp Mags blog), has done good work with his colleagues, Josh Friedman and Wyatt Doyle (who's also the mastermind behind the New Texture publishing house that's putting this out).

Here are the table of contents, posted with Bob's and Wyatt's permission. It's too bad they didn't get a permission to reprint any of Mario Puzo's men's magazine stories, but there's an interview with him about him hacking away for the mags. I believe the last piece in the ToC is an essay on men's mag (and the writer, Bruce Friedman, is I believe the father of Josh Alan Friedman). 

I think this looks cool.

Mike Kamens: Weasels Ripped My Flesh [MAN’S LIFE, September 1956]
Gilbert Nash: "Beat" Girls: Worshippers of Zen and Sin? [UNTAMED, February 1959]
Walter Kaylin: Bar Room Girl Who Touched Off a Tribal War [MALE, June 1966]
Lawrence Block (as Sheldon Lord): She Doesn’t Want You [REAL MEN, June 1958]
Harlan Ellison: Death Climb [TRUE MEN STORIES, February 1957]
Robert F. Dorr: Bayonet Killer of Heartbreak Ridge [MAN’S MAGAZINE, October 1964]
Bruce Jay Friedman: Eat Her... Bones and All [MALE, December 1954]
Robert Silverberg (as Norman Reynolds): Trapped by Mau Mau Terror [EXOTIC ADVENTURES, 1959]
Josh Alan Friedman: Walter Wager Interview
Walter Wager: Please God, Help Me Break Out [MALE, November 1958]
Vic Pate: Chewed to Bits by Giant Turtles [MAN’S LIFE, May 1957]
Jim McDonald: Grisly Rites of Hitler’s Monster Flesh Stripper [MAN’S STORY, March 1965]
George Majari: Calypso: Is It Pornography in Hi-Fi? [GUSTO, October 1957]
Robert Silverberg (as David Challon): 50 Days as an Amazon Love Slave [SIR!, November 1959]
Josh Alan Friedman: Mario Puzo Interview
Walter Kaylin: The Stewardess ‘Call Girl Slave’ Ring [FOR MEN ONLY, December 1971]
Jane Dolinger: Girl Crusoe [ESCAPE TO ADVENTURE, March 1959]
Ken Krippene: I Married a Jungle Savage [SIR!, November 1959]
Dr. Robert H.: I Went Insane for Science [MAN’S MAGAZINE, August 1956]
Robert F. Dorr: "Ghost Bear" That Terrorized a Town [MALE, February 1975]
Lawrence Block (as Sheldon Lord): Just Window Shopping [MAN’S MAGAZINE, December 1962]
E. C. Schurmacher: I Was a Slave of the Savage Blonde [HUNTING ADVENTURES, 1956]
Joanne Beardon: I Went to a Lesbian Party [ALL MAN, May 1964]
Carl Evans: Monkey Madness [MALE, August 1953]
Bruce Jay Friedman: Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: Tough Guys Don't Dance

I just watched Tough Guys Don't Dance from a VHS cassette I found free in a thrift store. I'd seen it when it was new and I remember even writing a review of sorts about it, but I really don't recall anything I said. I have a vague feeling I liked the film, but other than some reflections on scenes here and there I didn't remember anything about it. I'm not even sure if I've read Mailer's novel, but again I have a nagging feeling in the back of my head saying I read it at the time.

If I liked the film the first time, I certainly liked it less this time. The film drags heavily at points and is too dialogue-ridden and some of the actors are pretty bad. The film is not very focused and gets confusing at times. There are some very bad moments (the famous "Oh man! Oh God!" scene, for example). This all said, there's something in Tough Guys Don't Dance that makes me want to proclaim it one of the precursors of the modern neo-noir films. The same delirious feeling permeating Mailer's film is also found in films like Romeo Is Bleeding (the Peter Medak one, not the later one) or Coens' The Big Lebowski. Scenes are disjointed, the characters are campily overacting, everyone is using cocaine and talking nonsense, womens' heads are cut off mercilessly, everyone's overusing sex to get to their goals. Maybe Mailer was truly ahead of his time?

One thing I remember thinking about Mailer's film is that it reminded me of David Lynch's Blue Velvet (very important early neo-noir film, that). There's a secret in the woods and there's also Isabella Rossellini (Lynch uses her much better, there's not much to do for her in Mailer's film). There's also Angelo Badalamenti's score, but that's about it. I sure didn't get the same feeling watching the movie now.

Mailer's film has one asset not enough films have: Lawrence Tierney. He's simply great in this and he has great lines ("I just deep-sixed two heads"), though he's pretty thin thematically - but that's Norman Mailer's fault. 

More Overlooked Movies at Todd Mason's blog.

Dean R. Koontz: Watchers

I think this is the first book I've read by Dean R. Koontz. I wanted to have something long to read during Christmas, but this proved to be too long! I had to drop some other books from my holiday reading list because of it, ones like Scott O'Dell's The King's Fifth (1966). Since the holidays are now over, I'll have to start reading work-related books again.

I did finish Watchers (Ääniä yössä in Finnish, meaning Voices in the Night), since the premise was interesting and the book was quite suspenseful at times, but the sentimental moments between the two main characters got at time too soft for me. I would've cut some 100 pages out of it, and I don't think the book would've suffered.

Watchers came out in 1987 and seems like Koontz's books have only gotten longer. What's with it? I understand the comfort of a long book, but c'mon, I want to read some other books too! I got to think more about this when we went to see The Hobbit with my daughter. As you well know, it's almost three hours long and it's going to be in three-part serial, nine hours in all! Who's behind all this? Tolkien might be himself one to blame with his 1,000-page books (well, The Hobbit is only 300 pages), but then again he wanted The Lord of the Rings to be published in one piece, not as a trilogy. After his publisher's decision though, everything has had to be published in three pieces, hence also The Hobbit trilogy.

Is it Stephen King then? I seem to remember he was one of the foremost bestseller writers to go for 400 or 500 pages - and accordingly Koontz followed him. (But then again, some of the fifties' bestsellers were quite long, i.e. The Thin Red Line. Or talk about Gone With the Wind!)

Or is it television? I got to thinking they could've done a TV series from The Hobbit. It could've easily been even longer, just like The Wire or The Sopranos. Are they trying to compete with these ever-continuing TV series that have long story arcs? Many of the sophisticated viewers go now for TV and series like the two mentioned above or The Game of Thrones and others and shy away from the hustle and bustle of movies like X-men or Transformers? The longer, the more serious? Is it really so?

Sorry, this got out of hand. I didn't say much about Watchers, and suffice to say that I liked The Hobbit moderately. I did think it was a bit too long, but then again I wasn't bored. Some of Peter Jackson's more serious moments are pretty clichéd, though. I'm not sure whether I'll be reading more of Koontz's longer books, but I'll be waiting the other parts in The Hobbit serial.

No, wait a second: I've read one of Koontz's early crime novels as by Brian Coffey. That one (The Wall of Masks) was brisk and short. I also liked it more than Watchers.

Featured is the Finnish cover, with typography by Marjaana Virta. I like it better than the actual picture in the cover, which is American in origin.

My new Tumblr blog

I was cleaning up an old computer and deleting most of the pictures stored therein, but I got to pity all the cover scans and other stuff I've been saving, so I decided to up a new blog. It's also called Pulpetti, but it's at Tumblr, so I could use the same moniker. Here it is.

Michael Connelly: Echo Park

I've been having a vacation and reading all sorts of books and graphic novels (I really liked Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, which I'd never read), but it seems I'm running out of time to read all the books I meant to. I'm blaming Dean Koontz, whose Watchers I've been reading. It's a pretty good horror thriller, but it's too long! (I'll get back to the book shortly, once I've finished it.)

But Michael Connelly's Echo Park (2006; Sokkelokuja in Finnish) I finished with ease. Connelly is real comfort reading to me, and I don't mind saying that, since he's also always got some edge in his books. Connelly handles his dark materials (sic) easily but with verve, and his writing is smooth and simple without being simplistic. He's not a great stylist like Chandler or a great innovator like Ellroy, but he does very well what he does. His plots are also intricate and they involve some deep stuff without being heavy-handed or didactic.

Echo Park isn't one of the best Connellys (the plot is a bit too straightforward), but I still liked the heck out of it. I'm not so fond of Connelly's Terry McCaleb or Mickey Haller books, but Harry Bosch is a favourite. I remember when I interviewed Connelly and he said he's always imagined Donald Sutherland as the film version of Bosch. This may seem weird, but not long ago I watched Claude Chabrol's rarely-seen Ed McBain film Blood Relatives with Donald Sutherland. He's very good and convincing as McBain's Steve Carella, who's a blueprint for all the film cops. I can see him as Bosch, no problem.

By the way, it was nice to see both Duane Swierczynski and Sarah Weinman being Tuckerized in Echo Park.