Friday's Forgotten Book: Livia Reasoner: The Vampire Affair

I won this book from Livia Reasoner, James Reasoner's wife, some years ago in a blog or a Facebook contest. I got around to reading it only now, but luckily it still seems to be available as an e-book, though I believe these Silhouette books have a short shelf life.

This is the only paranormal Silhouette book Livia has written, but I don't know why this is, since The Vampire Affair is a solid book, fast-paced thriller with enough vampires, romance and erotic love. It's a clearly work of a professional. The main characters are a young and eager female journalist and a mysterious millionaire who turns out to be a vampire hunter and a bit of a vampire himself. This may sound cliched (and indeed many parts of the book are), but Reasoner writes deftly and keeps the story running. The book is quite short, so the cliches don't get in the way. In the end Livia throws some American Indian mystique in the mix, and it works, too!

The Vampire Affair could've also easily started a series, since both major characters could well play leading parts in coming books as well. Here's hoping it will happen!

More Forgotten Books here on Patti Abbott's blog.

Kevin Wignall's Dark Flag finally out

Remember Kevin Wignall's Dark Flag? I had a hand in publishing the book in Finnish translation some years back as Lipun varjo ("The Shadow of the Flag"). The book wasn't actually a success in Finland, even though it's a very good novel, and it vanished quickly. To this day, it hasn't been published in English language, but finally it's available as an e-book from Amazon. I really advise you to pick it up. This isn't one of those sloppily written and edited e-books I was talking about earlier.

(And thanks for comments on that post, I'll reconsider my stance.)

Negative reviews on e-books?

I've been reading some stuff on my Kindle, mainly stuff I've picked free from Amazon, new gritty and noirish crime fiction from both side of Atlantic. I've liked a lot some of the stuff I've acquired, for instance Juaréz Dance by Sam Hawken and Tony Black's bleak novella The Storm Without (of which I didn't do a blog post). I also liked Lawrence Block's short story "Keller on the Spot" quite a bit.

But I've recently dropped two novels by new noir writers I was reading on Kindle. The other one was sloppily written and edited, and the other one had ridiculous characters and the police work depicted in the book wasn't believable. I was going to post a review of the books, but then I got to thinking I wouldn't be doing much of a service to the writers and their publishers (the other one of the two writers has just a book out from a small publisher working actively in the neo-noir business). Then I got to thinking that as a critic that's just what I should be doing: pointing out what these writers and their publishers are not doing very well and keeping readers out of the bad or mediocre stuff, but then I got to thinking again and then I decided not to post.

What do you think? I'm really an outsider in these circles, since I'm essentially a foreigner to all American, British and Scottish writers mining this area, but then again, someone might benefit from my point of view.

The Counselor

Here's the trailer for Ridley Scott and Cormac McCarthy's film The Counselor, coming next October. I'm not really that keen on Scott, but this looks kinda promising.

Pulp writer Earl Peirce Jr.

Doing my first book, Pulpografia (2000), I encountered one or two Finnish translations of short stories by one Earl Peirce Jr. His name may have been written "Pierce" in the Finnish magazines. I didn't find any info on him, except that he wrote for Weird Tales and later on crime pulps, such as Detective Tales. I googled him earlier today (for a purpose I'll reveal later) and found out this post on a genealogy site. Someone has really done good work on Peirce, a really little known writer!

I put up Peirce's tentative bibliography here in my bibliography blog.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: Godzilla (1998)

Roland Emmerich's reworking of the famous Japanese monster wasn't a critical success (I think it wasn't a success even commercially), but my kids just saw it and they liked it. I believe my son (who's soon to be 9 years old) loved it. He also loves the Jap movies of which he's seen five, including the original one. 

There are some moments I also happen to like ("love" might be too strong a word here): Godzilla's leap into Hudson River, the drive into Godzilla's mouth, when Godzilla fools the submarines, the sequence at Madison Square Garden with the Godzilla babies. I also like Jean Reno's hardboiled character. My son says: "The best moment is the ending." He always feels sympathy for the baddies in the film when they fall. 

More Overlooked Movies here. 

Interview with Ed Gorman

Check out this good interview with Ed Gorman at The Rap Sheet.

Steve Brewer: Bank Job

I just finished this hardboiled thriller reminiscent of Elmore Leonard's work the other day. It was the first book I read by Steve Brewer, but I liked it well enough to read more of his books later on.

Bank Job (2005) is one of those books that start rapidly, race along with a good speed and develop into a satisfying climax. Three low-life criminals are on a crime spree doing stupid things. One of them gets hit by a whiskey bottle during an attempt to rob a liquor store. The guys end up in a lonely house with an old couple living in it. The old guy of the house has a secret up his sleeve, and much action and mayhem ensue. There's plenty of violence that really hurts, and there are also some sudden twists and turns.

Brewer creates memorable characters with just few touches, a bit of dialogue, descriptions of how people move, act, keep a book in their hands. It's quite nice that the lead character is someone over 60. The young hoodlums are also depicted very nicely, they are fully human though they are quite worthless and almost evil. The plot moves on with a nice pace and slows down only in the last 20 or 30 pages. Comes highly recommended, even with the very stale front cover.

Edit: Oops! I meant to publish this on Saturday, but I accidentally pushed the Publish button and can't take it out anymore. So it's two book posts on the same day, but I don't really think anyone minds. 

Friday's Forgotten Book: Sébastien Japrisot: The Lady in the Car With Glasses and a Gun

Still suffering from a bad back, I finished lying on a sofa the French writer Sébastien Japrisot's thriller La Dame dans l'auto avec des lunettes et un fusil (1966). I had a beat-up copy I'd found somewhere cheap, and upon noticing I already have a better copy I decided to throw this away - most certainly something I wouldn't normally do.

This is a very good crime novel. I once read somewhere that if you're a male writer, don't try a woman's point of view (unless you're Cornell Woolrich). Japrisot does it and does it very well. Of course some of the stuff in the book depicting a young woman's sexual and social disorientation is dated, but they didn't overrun the reading experience. The book reminded me a bit of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, which I liked to a certain point, but I also got weary of its longevity. Not so with Japrisot's novel, as it clocks at about 250 pages. The book starts in the middle of the woman's noir nightmare of which the characters and the reader can't possibly fathom what's going on. Japrisot likes to toy with the reader's expectations and this is far more exciting and surprising than Gone Girl. Japrisot also writes in a very French style that's both hypnotic and diffuse at the same time. This is a very engaging book and although the prose isn't the most straight-forward one, you can't help but read the book in one sitting.

The book was made into a British movie in 1970 with Samantha Eggar and Oliver Reed. Haven't seen it, though. Seems like there's no decent DVD on it. Here's a good blog post on the film.

More Forgotten Books coming up here.

Edit: I forgot to mention it, but I read the Finnish translation from 1967. The title means "The Woman in the Car". Guess this was clear to anyone. Crime Club (with the nice logo) was a quality paperback series from the large Finnish publishing house Otava back in the late sixties. 

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: The Hooked Bear (1956)

Suffering from a bad back I watched some VHS tapes with old animations in them and spotted this Disney cartoon previously unknown to me. I don't know how this has happened - the explanation is perhaps that I've seen some of the Humphrey the Bear cartoons, but forgotten all about them. Nonetheless, this was a pretty entertaining little film, directed by Jack Hannah.

 More Overlooked Films here.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: Cause for Alarm (1951)

I caught this little film noir on a Finnish television just the other night. It's a slightly enjoyable suspense story starring Loretta Young as the disturbed housewife of a crippled man (Barry Sullivan) who begins to think Young is trying to kill him for his insurance money.

There are some implausibilities in the plot, and Loretta Young's behaviour when she tries to get back the letter his husband sent to the district attorney is pretty much all over the place, but this still fits in with the phenomenon I've dubbed "female noir". I think "domestic suspense" used by Sarah Weinman in her upcoming anthology is actually better for this. The images of Loretta Young under her sociopathic and bitter husband are pretty disturbing.

That said, the ending of the film should've been infinitely stronger. The director was Tay Garnett, the screenplay was by Mel Dinelli, who specialized in film noir. See also the Wikipedia article for the film.

More Overlooked Movies here.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Dean Koontz: Shattered (1973)

I've never read much Dean Koontz and my impression of his later and longer work (see here) has not been very good, but Shattered proved out to be short, gripping and brisk. It's one of Koontz's early books, published initially under his K. W. Dwyer pseudonym (and later on published as Dean Koontz), and still it tells a full-bloodied tale of full-bloodied people.

The premise is not very different from Richard Matheson's and Steven Spielberg's Duel which is two years senior, so Koontz may have had it in mind. Shattered also differs from Matheson's work in that the chase is personal in tone. A dark, mysterious van is behind two drivers, a young boy and the boyfriend of his older sister, who's a father figure to the kid. They don't know who drives the van, but Koontz shows he's a menace in the chapters narrated through the mysterious driver.

The ending is a bit too abrupt and there are some characters of which I didn't know whether they really were necessary. But Shattered is still a
suspenseful book that feels for its doomed characters.

This came out in Finnish in 1994 from Book Studio under the title Varjostaja. See the Finnish cover here.

More Forgotten Books here.

Joseph Rosenberger

When I wrote my first book, Pulpografia (2000), I decided to include some of the better-known men's adventure writers from the seventies and eighties. The genre doesn't do much for me, and Joseph Rosenberger's Richard Camellion books proved out to be the worst of the worst. I can see where the later cult fame rises from, but sometimes I have hard to see beyond those qualities.

Here's a personal letter from Rosenberger, who seems like he wasn't a very nice guy. Some quite interesting takes on politics and race and also some stuff on publishing. If you're into men's adventure genre in general, take a round in the Glorious Trash blog, you might find lots of interest. Here's also an interview with Rosenberger in the same blog.

New book out!

I have a new book out. It's a collection of werewolf stories by Finnish writers (mostly new, but with two old ones thrown in), edited by me. It looks dandy with its 340 pages and a nice cover by Jukka Murtosaari. The title means  "The Dark Side of the Moon", which is the title of Johanna Sinisalo's great story in the book. Here's more info on the book (in Finnish).

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: Multiplicity (1996)

I didn't much like Groundhog Day when I saw it, but I've come to realize the film enjoys a bit of a cult following nowadays. I haven't seen it since, but not long ago I read an interesting essay on Ramis's work, so I decided I should dip into an old VHS cassette I found some years ago from the trash bin containing Ramis's later Multiplicity.

Multiplicity is a bit like Groundhog Day, with its idea of cloning a person to make life easier. Having many Michael Keatons is not far away from Bill Murray living one particular day all over and over again. Both films are amiable, but contain some sharp notes on the middle-class way of life. The basic situation in Multiplicity allows many amusing moments and at times the films is a lot like a classic screwball comedy. All in all Multiplicity is an entertaining film, but I'm not sure whether I'd watch it again. Andie McDowell is not very interesting as the female lead, and the overall result is a bit too sweet to my taste.

A word of warning: if you don't like Michael Keaton, you probably won't like Multiplicity. I'm not one of his fans, but I could stand him in this, even when there were four of him on the screen.

More Overlooked Films at Todd Mason's blog here.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Jack Williamson: Darker Than You Think

I'm writing this before I've finished the book, so I don't know the outcome and how it will play out, but here goes nevertheless.

Jack Williamson's Darker Than You Think (published first in 1940 in Unknown, then in book form in 1948) is a werewolf classic and as such it seems dated now, though it must've been pretty ground-breaking at the time, for all its realism and psychological acuteness. Williamson even strives for a plausible explanation of lycanthropy, but the explanation of course seems dated now.

The title of the book is a lot like many film noirs with its emphasis on dark, and sure enough one could see this as a film noir, especially with the red-haired femme fatale of the book, April Bell. The hero of the book, Will Barbee, is an ordinary sap, hacking newspaper stories and drinking whiskey and waking up to a nightmare of his life.

More Forgotten Books here at Patti Abbott's blog. There's an Elmore Leonard week, but I wasn't able to participate in that.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: The Lord of the Rings by Ralph Bakshi (1978)

I watched Ralph Bakshi's early animated version of Tolkien's saga with my son, who's on a Tolkien binge, having watched Peter Jackson's film twice (or even thrice!). I could see he wasn't thrilled, but he managed through. Maybe he was interested in the differences between the versions.

I'm not sure whether I was, since I found Bakshi's film boring, clumsy and pretentious. I'd seen it before (on big screen), but the film proved to be duller than I remembered. I don't really know what one gets out of it, if one hasn't read Tolkien's book (or seen Jackson's version!), since Bakshi's film is lacking in good, solid narration. I don't know whether anyone seeing the film will care much for the faith of the Ring or the characters.

I promised my son I would try to seek the unofficial Bass-Rankin sequel to Bakshi's film, but Lord help from finding it!

More Overlooked Movies here at Todd Mason's blog.

Richard Matheson RIP

I'll probably be the last blogger to register the death of Richard Matheson, but he was so influential and so good, I can't let it to unnoticed.

I'm just dropping off to do some vacation-time, so here's only a short list of some of his work I've really liked:

Duel: both Spielberg's movie and Matheson's original short story plus his screenplay.
I Am Legend: unbelievably suspenseful, yet tight and relentless, very short (only some 150 pages), but still packs quite a punch, a model for many vampire and zombie novels and films to come.
Someone Is Bleeding: the original novella (later published in book form) reprinted in the great anthology American Pulp, goes to show Matheson was a very good noir crime writer.
short story "Gunsight" (Dime Western, 1951), published in Finnish as "Sokean sheriffin kaupunki" (meaning "The Town of the Blind Marshal"): hypnotic Western story of a blind hero.

Letter from paperback writer Len Levinson

Since I mentioned Len (Leonard) Levinson in a longish post three years ago, this merits reblogging: Len Levinson has sent a letter to the blogger at The Post Modern Pulp blog, and I thought I'd share the link.

John Connolly: Dark Hollow

Dark Hollow was the first book I've ever read by John Connolly, even though I've known about him for quite some time now. I remember Kevin Wignall being very surprised about the fact that Connolly hasn't been translated in Finnish, he's pretty big in the UK.

Though he's an UK author, his books - at least some of them - are set in the US. Dark Hollow stars his private eye anti-hero Charlie "Bird" Parker, who encounters serial killers in the books. Maybe that's why I haven't been very interested in Connolly's work, as serial killers are pretty much a bore to me. (Especially in a series. How could that possibly happen?)

But Dark Hollow was strong enough to warrant more reading from him. The book was too long, though, especially in the beginning where it took over 50 pages to get the story even started and almost 100 pages to get the backstory out of the way. I don't really care for that kind of thing, even though Connolly clearly thinks Charlie Parker's own traumatic story needs to be told and retold. There was some padding also after the story got going (and I'm not sure whether Connolly got all his sideplots going and whether they were necessary, then again I'm not very good at analysing plots), but the story still kept my interest going. And it was epic, like with Ross Macdonald or James Ellroy, with the hidden crimes being committed decades ago and still reflecting their dark nature into the present day. Some of the scenes are very suspenseful, almost out of a horror novel. Connolly can create a monster that feels human. 

I'll intend to read more John Connolly. 

Keith Rawson on Scott Phillips

Keith Rawson's fabulous post on Scott Phillips, the writer of The Ice Harvest and The Adjustment, both great novels.

Antti Tuomainen's The Healer

Not long ago I mentioned Antti Tuomainen and his success in the big world. Here's a very positive review of his dystopian noir thriller, The Healer.

Gillian Flynn: Gone Girl

Lots have already been said about Gillian Flynn's book that's proved to be a bestseller. (Here's Keith Rawson pretty good essay on the book.) It just came out in Finnish and I read it in almost a jiffy. In two days, actually. I've been sick, otherwise I might've read it in one sitting. The plotting is that clever.

Except that the book's too long. Gone Girl - in Finnish translation at least - is over 440 pages. I should say it could've been at least 100 pages shorter and we wouldn't miss a thing. There's too much information we can't use as a reader, too much lingering on details that are not very relevant. This is especially case in the beginning. If I didn't know there was something to expect, I might've dropped the book before the page 100.

Of course one can say that the ending wouldn't be strong enough if the first part weren't so fully detailed. I'm not so sure about that.

But there are enough chilling moments to account for those empty moments when nothing much seems to be happening.

Spring Breakers

Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers is the quintessential neo-noir movie for the 2010's. Why? Because it's a perfect dissection of the society of the spectacle and the futile dreams of the said society we live in. There's no psychological motivation to drive the action, because the psychological motives don't move us anymore. There are only some meaningless ulterior motives, like money, which makes your pussy wet.

And all this is crusted with the abrasive music of Skrillex and the hyper-active editing of YouTube-era party videos.

Four books in a week

As you've may have noticed, I haven't relly been blogging lately (not even in my Finnish-speaking blog, Julkaisemattomia). It's been due to an enormous amount of work I've immersed myself in lately. I've finished four books in a week and I still have the new issue of the Ruudinsavu/Gunsmoke magazine (plus some book reviews) to finish off before I can drop off to spend the Summer holidays with my family. 

What are the four books, you ask. Well, one of them is a double book, but still a pretty mean piece of work, if you ask me. I compiled an anthology of old Finnish hate speech, from the first five decades of the 20th century, focusing on the aftermath of the Finnish Civil War. There will be two books (or one double-sided, I'm not 100 % at the moment), one focusing on the Leftist hate speech and one on the right-wing hate speech. The latter one includes some samples by the Finnish Nazis, and let me tell you it wasn't fun to work with that stuff. Ugly, nasty, paranoid, stupid, even though there seemed to be some attempt to authorize the hate with intellectual reasoning. 

The other two books: a collection of old pulp crime and adventure stories by the famous Finnish writer, later singer-songwriter Reino Helismaa (forthcoming under the title Kolme luurankoa/Three Skeletons; see the cover illustration by Timo Ronkainen above) and the last entry in my own sleaze paperback quartet, called Varissuon varvimestarit (a friend of mine already dubbed this "The Cum-Masters of Crow Moor", Crow Moor being a part of the Turku city). I haven't really finished that, though, I only wrote the first version - I typed the last five or six pages in a feverish state, fingers flying on the keyboard. (Insert smiley here.) I've still got loads of editing to do with the novel. It's some 22,000 words long (in English, it might be something like 30,000 words), so it's not long. The earlier titles: Lausteen himokämppä ("The Lust Cabin of Lauste"), Mynämäen motellin munamällit ("The Spunk Gang of the Mynämäki Highway Motel") and Runkkuloma Rivieralla ("Getting It Off at Riviera"). 

At times I find myself thinking, "how do I manage this?"

The third generation of the Nummelin family on a Tolkien binge

We watched Peter Jackson's The Hobbit when my daughter was last on vacation in Finland with us (she lives with her mother out of Finland most of the time), and my son was so excited about the film, he wanted to watch Jackson's The Lord of the Rings as well. And so we did, just the two of us. (My daughter had already left Finland at that time.)

Boy, was he excited! I'm very happy my son has an eye for grand adventure and thrilling moments of battle. Afterwards he wanted to know everything about elves, old kings, the lineage of everyone mentioned in the film. I told quite many details of the film beforehand so as not to make them too suspenseful. And then he said he wants to hear The Hobbit as a bedtime story, so we started it. Then he said that when the book is done, he wants to move over to The Lord of the Rings. So be it, we said. (And just yesterday when we stopped by a thrift store, I picked up a battered copy of the novel for him to take away when he moves out. If the book holds up to that day.)

I read the European graphic novel version of Tolkien's novel (or rather, Ralph Bakshi's animated film) already when I was 10 or so. My daughter saw Jackson's films when she was 11 or 12 - afterwards she read the book in two or three days. Now my son is on a Tolkien binge when he's soon 9.

I'm just pondering here whether we should watch Bakshi's animated film and its appalling sequels and read the afore-mentioned graphic novel... I'm also thinking whether I should revisit Silmarillion myself - it's been almost 30 years since I last read it!

What Finnish crime writers should be translated?

I ran across a blog post over at Rap Sheet talking about Finnish crime writers who should be translated in English. Linda L. Richards, who wrote the post, mentioned Reijo Mäki who has just received the Vuoden Johtolanka (The Clue of the Year) prize from the Finnish Whodunit Society. Richards writes: "This recent win has likely (hopefully?) already put into motion the forces that will change that [Mäki being unknown in the US - JN]. Still, it seems at least a little inexplicable that we haven’t heard much about Mäki before, because he’s kind of a big deal in his home country. Eight of his nearly 30 novels have been adapted for the screen. Four of the resulting films have opened in Finnish theaters and another four are still to be released."

Mäki is indeed very popular in Finland and his popularity doesn't seem to be fading in the near future. His books are slightly parodic hardboiled private eye books that usually don't do well in the US or UK markets nowadays, and the large sociological and political questions, not to mention questions regarding to gender and minorities, that characterize most of Scandinavian crime fiction are largely missing from his work. The films based on his work have also been popular, but also very much criticized for being sloppy and clichéd. This is not to say someone shouldn't try translating them in English; maybe that would help some other writers break the barrier.

There are some Finnish crime writers, though, who really should be translated in English. Antti Tuomainen is breaking good in seemingly anywhere in Europe and the US, and I can heartily recommend his work: it's good, solid noir. I'm sure many who are into hardboiled crime might like Harri Nykänen's Ariel Kafka novel Nights of Awe out from Bitter Lemon Press (I haven't read it myself). Many seem to like Marko Kilpi's serious police novels, but I didn't like his first one, Jäätyneitä ruusuja ("Frozen Roses"), which I found deeply over-written and pretentious.

Here are some names for you, though. Mind you, I'm not interested in cozies or huge international thrillers. Both have their writers and their fans in Finland, though.

Tapani Bagge writes hardboiled action like no other writer in Finland. His long series of career criminals and sore losers of cold small towns of Finland is very good. Bagge (who's a personal friend of mine) is well-read in hardboiled crime and noir, and he sure knows how to spin the plot. He can also create memorable characters: they are touching, fragile and capable of violence at the same time. Bagge really cares for the people he writes about. Tapani also has a four-part series of historical crime, set in the 1930s and 1940s and the political mischief at that time, but I've only read the first in the series, so can't really comment on that. Tapani's been popular in Germany.

(As some of you might remember, I tried to translate Tapani's first crime novel Puhaltaja into English (with the tentative title The Jack), but it didn't work out so well in the end. Tapani's well-represented by his agent, though, so I don't mind.)

Marja-Liisa Heino is one of the most original Finnish crime writers, whose four books differ greatly from each other. I just finished her latest novel, called Astuit väärään autoon ("You Stepped into a Wrong Car"). It's an absurd Dostoyevskian play of guilt, written in prose that's both diffuse and clear at the same time. Lots of things go by unexplained. The story of a rapist who gets out from the prison and moves in with one of his victims (and makes renovations in the woman's house!) is pretty weird, but also very engaging. There's also some police procedural stuff, but I thought the parts with the rapist were better.

Of the other Finnish private eye writers than Reijo Mäki, Markku Ropponen might be an interesting one, but I'm not sure if his work translates well.

Many readers of this blog are into very dark and tough hardboiled fiction. They might want to try Juha Seppälä's Super Market. It was already published in 1991, but many of its pieces still feel relevant. Some of the more absurd stories set in the Finnish army might not work in English, but some of his violent ultra-short stories about criminals and other lowlife could very well resonate with someone who likes to read ThugLit or Flash Fiction Offensive. Seppälä's first novel, Hyppynaru ("The Skipping Rope", 1986) could also be seen as a non-genre crime novel. He's becoming more experimental these days, though, but his work still retains the darkness of his early work.

Harri V. Hietikko's first novel in years (he wrote a trilogy of supernatural private eye novels for a very small publisher in the 1990s), called Lausukaa Paranoid (the title is a joke that doesn't work in English), is, according to his own words, an update of Sergio Leone with Harley-Davidsons. I haven't read it as yet, but it seems interesting.

There are also some more marginal writers, some of which are more into horror and fantasy. Petri Salin's excellent Jim Thompson-esque short novel Toinen nainen ("The Other Woman", 2009) would work very well as an e-book. (Sadly Petri has made himself non-available for the time being.) Tuomas Saloranta is more a horror writer, but he can spin a mean crime tale any time he wants to. His horror stories, published mainly online and in anthologies, have a very, very dark edgy side to them, though they are also humorous at the same time.

Of the horror writers, I'm sure Juha-Pekka Koskinen and Marko Hautala would find audience translated in English. Koskinen has tried his hands also in crime writing, producing one good novel, called Eilispäivän sankarit ("The Heroes of Yesterday"), and also one book related to the Spanish Civil War and the political anxieties in Finland in the thirties and fourties. (I haven't read that one, though.) Koskinen's horror stories in my anthologies have been uniformly good.

Oh, by the way, here's something I've probably forgotten to post. It's a canon of Finnish noir fiction, posted in one of my Finnish-language blogs. I compiled it with the help of some of my friends, including Tapani and Antti. (I might be a bit biased saying good things about their work, but then again, this is my blog.)

Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: Femme Fatale (2002)

Femme Fatale is one of the latest efforts by Brian De Palma, whose films I've generally liked, with some exceptions. This wasn't one of those exceptions.

Femme Fatale was made in France, possibly because De Palma couldn't raise the money in the USA. There's certain Europeanness in the film, so I'm not sure if it suits the American taste. There's something that reminds me of a Luc Besson or a Jan Kounen in this.

The film is full of technical trickstery and magistery that's characteristic of De Palma: camera drives, odd angles, long shots, shots through different filters, all that. The plot - what I could make of it - was suited to the feverish camera work. Femme fatale of the title is a career criminal, sexy as hell (played by Rebecca Rominj, who looks a bit too much the early 2000's, but I don't mind), who's on the loose from her fellow gangsters. The plot is full of twists one just can't see coming - and the last one is actually pretty absurd, but I think it fits the general mood of the film. There's some thematics on voyeurism that's also characteristic of De Palma, but I'm not sure what De Palma wants to say with the film. People - especially women - are being watched and this watching becomes more mechanistic via surveillance cameras and such, but then what? Women can also take advantage of them being watched, but it's unclear what kind of nature De Palma is saying this vantage point could be. This kind of uncertainty of thematics is also characteristic of De Palma.

More Overlooked Films at Todd Mason's blog here. (For once I managed to do this in time!)

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.)