My first collection of poems: Bodice Ripper Apart

This book has been long time in coming. I started saving spam e-mail some four or five years ago, in order to gather enough of them to make a book, with the aim to archive some of the spambot literature, which can be seen as a form of Dadaist or concrete poetry.

And here it finally is: Bodice Ripper Apart: A Book of Spam Poems is out from ntamo, who's specialized in modernist, postmodernist, weirdish, concrete and language and non-language poetry. ntamo works via Lulu.com, so the book is available throughout the whole globe. Follow the links. The book is accompanied by an afterword from Jussi Parikka, a friend of mine, who works as a lecturer in Anglia Ruskin University and who has shared my enthusiasm for spam for some time now.

The book is totally in English, save for some parts that are more like in Spammish, whatever language that is.

James Sallis's Kylmä kyyti (aka Drive) out in Finnish!

James Sallis's Kylmä kyyti (Drive) is the latest book in the paperback series I edit for the Finnish publisher, Arktinen Banaani. The book is just fresh from the printers and I'm not sure if it's available in bookshops as yet, but it will be soon. The book tells about a Hollywood stunt driver who's engaged into criminal activity on the side. He's fallen into a trap and the book follows both his past and his future almost at the same time, in vivid non-chronological narration. The Finnish title means literally "Cold Ride".

I asked some questions from James Sallis, who's been writing from the late sixties on and has been getting more widely-known, perhaps mainly due to the fact that Drive is just an excellent novel, one that combines hard-hitting violence and ballad-like beauty. I'll translate the interview in Finnish later on.

The excellent cover is again by Ossi Hiekkala, who's done the cover art for the earlier Banaani paperbacks as well.

Drive is a very lean book - the Finnish edition is only 208 pages, with a loose layout. Why did you want to write such a short book?

My intention from the first was to write a contemporary equivalent of the old original paperback novels that came from Fawcett Gold Medal and such: short, hard-hitting, muscular, with great momentum.

Have you always been interested in the world of stunt car drivers? What interests you in them?

Actually, I knew very little about the subject. Drive began with the character, with Driver; to write him, and to know him, I had to learn about driving. Some of it is from books, and some of it is from a friend who test drives cars for a living.

Drive is also a very beautiful book. In the end, just in the last lines, it transforms into a ballad. Was this something you set out to do?

Thank you. I had no idea, and in fact was concerned all along with how I’d be able to bring the book to a suitable end. The end came to me in a rush – the character had to take on a greater presence, become mythlike. Those final lines dropped into my head as I was out for one of many walks, and I hurried home to get them down.

Drive has a very difficult narrative technique, speeding back and forth in time. Were you influenced by Quentin Tarantino or was this something you've been doing for a long time?

From the first. If you look at a Lew Griffin novels, you may find one chapter detailing what happened today, the next chapter skipping ahead three days, the chapter after that returning to “tomorrow.” The most blatant example of this would be the conclusion of the second Turner novel, Cripple Creek, where I skip ahead to the aftermath and then, in the final chapter, return to what occasioned the aftermath. Let me emphasize, though, that this is by no means trickery; these are solutions I’ve found to my desire to tell the story as fully as possible. In our minds, we do not live in straight lines.

What were some of your other influences? Walter Hill's film The Driver, perhaps? You also name some European, more artful writers, like Celan. What's behind that? It's not usual for a crime writer to drop names like that.

Incredible as it seems, I didn’t know the Walter Hill film until after Drive was written; I’ve still not seen it. As for European writers, I’ve a long, long engagement with them, beginning when I lived in London in the late Sixties – and especially with French writers. I did, for instance, the sole English-language translation of Raymond Queneau’s novel Saint Glinglin. I’ve translated poetry by Cendrars, Yves Bonnefoy, Neruda, Jacques Dupin, Pasternak, and many others. I am also profoundly influenced by science fiction, which is what I first wrote professionally; most of my oldest friends are science fiction writers.

You are better known for your longer and more complex novels, for example those featuring PI Lew Griffin. Will you be writing more in the vein of Drive?

Drive was meant (like Death Will Have Your Eyes before it) primarily as homage, and as a gift to myself. None of us had any suspicion that it would prove so popular. The novel I’m finishing up now began as – I thought – another muscular, fast-moving novel, but it promptly changed course. And at this point I’m just kind of following it along, seeing where it wants to go.

There are rumours of a movie based on Drive, with Hugh Jackman in the lead. Do you know anything about what state is that in?

The option has just been renewed. They have what I’m told is quite an outstanding script. We’ll see. The six Lew Griffin novels, by the way, are also in development.

Thank you for your time, Jim!

Reino Helismaan länkkäreistä

(This is about the small collection of the western stories of a Finnish writer I recently compiled and which is now out.)

Kuten lupasin, kirjoitan muutamia sanoja Reino Helismaan länkkäreistä, joita on ilmestynyt äskettäin nimellä Henkipattojen kylä. Kyse on siis Helismaan vuosina 1938-1940 kirjoittamista novelleista, jotka ilmestyivät pääsääntöisesti hänen serkkunsa Olavi Kanervan isän August Kanervan julkaisemassa Isku-lehdessä - Helismaahan oli lehden päätoimittaja yhdessä Olavin kanssa. Tunnetuin Iskuun sisältyneistä jutuistahan on ollut Ami Hauhion kuvittama sarjakuva Maan mies Marsissa, jonka uusintajulkaisu, alkuperäisistä lehdistä kuvattuna, on ollut puuhan alla jo vuosia eri tahoilla.

Helismaan novellit ovat yksinkertaisia - niistä suurin osa on varmaan kirjoitettu niin että Helismaa on istunut alas, ehkä katsonut kuvitusta, joka Kanervan kirjapainolla on ollut käytettävissään, ja alkanut kirjoittaa. Juttu on muotoutunut tarinan edetessä. Varsinkin kirjan nimitarina, "Henkipattojen kylä", on selvästi tällainen. Novellit ovat myös todellista peruslänkkäriä: pyssyt paukkuvat, urhoolliset kaverit pelastavat neitosia, viski virtaa. Intiaaneja jutuissa ei ole, ilmeisesti sen takia että 1930-luvun lännenelokuvissakaan ei pahemmin inkkareita ollut. Veikkaisin, että juuri elokuvat ovat olleet Helismaan suurin innoittaja - mutta varmasti myös Zane Grey, Mayne Reid ja vastaavat. Monimuotoisimmillaan Helismaa on parissa kullankaivuujutussa, joissa on Jack London -maista kyynisyyttä. Jutuissa on myös dekkarivirityksiä, ja vieläpä ihan kohtuullisia.

Yhdessä vuonna 2001 ilmestyneen ...ja Reikärauta-Brown -kirjan kanssa Henkipattojen kylä todistaa, että Helismaa oli hyvä kirjoittaja ja hänellä olisi hyvinkin voinut olla pitkä ura viihdekirjoittajana. Sodan jälkeen hän kuitenkin suuntautui musiikkiin ja elokuviin, vaikka hän kirjoitti muutaman novellin vielä Seikkailujen Maailmaan sekä kaksi romaanina julkaistua tekstiä, Tyttö kuin atomipommi ja Lentomatka seikkailuun, joista lukemista kestää vain ensin mainittu. Sekin on selkeästi kevyempi kuin rajut ja väkivaltaiset toimintapalat, joita Helismaa ennen sotaa teki. Lisäksi Henkipattojen kylä kertoo omalta osaltaan suomalaisen lännenkirjallisuuden sekä viihdekirjallisuuden historiasta, joita ei ole missään vaiheessa kunnolla tutkittu.

Henkipattojen kylä sisältää seuraavat tekstit:

Juri Nummelin: Lukijalle
Tulivirta (Isku 11/1941)
Buck ei pelkää! (Isku 13/1940)
Mikä unohtui? (Yllätyslukemisto 9/1938)
Kuka nauroi viimeksi? (Isku 1/1940)
Kaksi vanhaa taikinanjuurta (Isku 15-16/1940)
Ristiässä (Isku 7/1940)
Lumen ja jään poliisi (Isku 14-15/1940)
Henkipattojen kylä (Isku 12-18/1941)

Tässä kirjan varsinainen esipuhe toisessa blogissa. Kirja maksaa viisi euroa + postit (todennäköisesti 1,10 e) ja parhaiten sen tilaa laittamalla sähköpostia (juri.nummelin@pp.inet.fi). Voi myös käyttää kommenttilootaa. Koetamme saada kirjaa myyntiin myös kirjamessuille jollekin osastolle, lisäksi se tullee ainakin Akateemisen myyntiin.

Great western illo for the weekend

I emptied my cell phone and found this, a photo of a mid-to-late sixties Finnish western digest mag, called Lännensarja (The Western Series). The text is German in origin (forgot the writer and the title), but the illustration is clearly American. I don't recognize the artist - anyone? The picture is full of intense waiting and impending doom, even though it's "only" a picture of a man smoking his cigarette.

The - pretty inept - Finnish title means "The Left-Handed Man Disappears".

Friday's Forgotten Book: Leonard Gribble's Striptease Macabre

Leonard Gribble was a British writer of police procedurals and detective novels, with some westerns on the side. He's pretty much forgotten now, but I believe he enjoyed some success during his lifetime as his output was pretty big. This seems to be as much as there is out there in the web about him. There is an entry for him in the second edition of Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers, but I'm not sure if it's in the later editions.

I tried to read the Finnish translation of Gribble's Striptease Murder, from 1967 (published originally by Jenkins), but with not much success. The book seemed at first interesting and it did give a nice picture of a British criminal life in the late fifties, adopting lots of slang expressions ("wide boy" especially), also with a good description of police work, but I couldn't get into the plot that involved smuggling and deceiving the police with the help of a slightly perverted nobleman. It may have been due to the Finnish translation, of course, but for some reason I believe this is wooden also in English.

Pictured is the cover of the Finnish paperback translation from 1968.

As for westerns, by the way, Gribble did them in three spans: first, under Landon Grant, in the thirties, then again in the early fifties, and then, as Lee Denver, in the late seventies and early eighties. His westerns as by Landon Grant were published in Finnish in a digest paperback series the name of which escapes me. I probably remember it the minute I shut the computer.

Victor Gischler's Vampire A-Go-Go

Victor Gischler's new novel, Vampire A-Go-Go, has been available for some days now. I had a chance to read it just last weekend - even when I was on my sick bed, I enjoyed the heck out of it. With some reservations, but let me get back to them in a sec.

Many of you know by now that Vampire A-Go-Go is genre hybrid, mixing vampires, werewolves, zombies, ancient alchemy, a group of Jesuits guarding ancient secrets with handgranades and shotguns... There's not much missing here - maybe a dinosaur or two, but I can live without. On top of everything the book seems to be a parody of Dan Brown and his ilk, but also an example of how one can assemble a book that has the same elements with the lesser amount of pages. Gischler is indeed an economic storyteller, giving hints of what kind of people his characters are through how they speak and how they act. At times Vampire A-Go-Go reminded me of early Lawrence Block.

So, this is a very fast and enjoyable read, but I had a slight problem reading the book, actually almost all the time. Apart from the violence - which is pretty tough from time to time - I had a feeling that this could be a juvenile or a YA novel. Some of the characters are university students and there's a love angle, which may have attributed to my feeling, but there's also something else. I can't really put my finger on it. I can say that I didn't have that feeling when Gischler was narrating the life story of John Dee's fellow alchemist, Edward Kelley. Even though Gischler's dialogue in these parts is delightfully anachronistic (I really can't picture an early 17th century gentleman saying: "You okay, Dee?"), there's really a feeling of an old, bitter man talking. And during these times I enjoyed Vampire A-Go-Go most.

New Kid On The Block: The Outfit

JT Lindroos's publisher, the home of Dave Zeltserman's Fast Lane and many Willeford reprints, PointBlank is officially no more. He has now put up a new crime fiction publisher called The Outfit - fitting name, that. Find them here - seems like there's not much content as yet.

It seems also that Sean Wallace has broken up with Wildside Press (which was also the home for PointBlank), as he has moved his fantasy publisher, Prime Books, under The Outfit. This warrants for questions from JT Lindroos - if someone else beats me to it, I certainly won't mind, but since I've had business with JT, I might send him a few and post the results here.

Here's James Reasoner's review of The Outfit's first book.

New book out: Reino Helismaa's western short stories

This book is finally out. Will be posting more about it later.

The Spam Book

Promoting a collection of articles my friend had a hand in:

Announcing a new book on the dark side of network culture:

THE SPAM BOOK
On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomalies From the Dark Side of Digital Culture
edited by Jussi Parikka and Tony D. Sampson
With Foreword by Sadie Plant
Hampton Press, 2009

For those of us increasingly reliant on email networks in our everyday social interactions, spam can be a pain; it can annoy; it can deceive; it can overload. Yet spam can also entertain and perplex us. This book is an aberration into the dark side of network culture. Instead of regurgitating stories of technological progress or over celebrating creative social media on the Internet, it filters contemporary culture through its anomalies. The book features theorists writing on spam, porn, censorship, and viruses. The evil side of media theory is exposed to theoretical interventions and innovative case studies that touch base with new media and Internet studies and the sociology of new network culture, as well as post-representational cultural analysis.

“Parikka and Sampson present the latest insights from the humanities into software
studies. This compendium is for all you digital Freudians. Electronic deviances
no longer originate in Californian cyber fringes but are hardwired into planetary normalcy.
Bugs breed inside our mobile devices. The virtual mainstream turns out to
be rotten. The Spam book is for anyone interested in new media theory.”
—Geert Lovink, Dutch/Australian media theorist

“What if all those things we most hate about the Internet—the spam, the viruses,
the phishing sites, the flame wars, the latency and lag and interruptions of service,
and the glitches that crash our computers—what if all these are not bugs, but features?
What if they constitute, in fact, the way the system functions? The Spam
Book explores this disquieting possibility.”
—Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State University

Contents:
Foreword, Sadie Plant.
On Anomalous Objects of Digital Culture: An Introduction, Jussi Parikka and Tony D. Sampson.
CONTAGIONS
Mutant and Viral: Artificial Evolution and Software Ecology, John Johnston.
How Networks Become Viral: Three
Questions Concerning Universal Contagion, Tony D. Sampson.
Extensive Abstraction in Digital Architecture, Luciana Parisi.
Unpredictable Legacies: Viral Games in the Networked World, Roberta Buiani.
BAD OBJECTS.
Archives of Software—Malicious Codes and the Aesthesis of Media Accidents, Jussi Parikka.
Contagious Noise: From Digital Glitches to Audio Viruses, Steve Goodman.
Toward an Evil Media Studies, Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey.
PORNOGRAPHY.
Irregular Fantasies, Anomalous Uses: Pornography Spam as Boundary Work, Susanna Paasonen.
Make Porn, Not War: How to Wear the Network’s Underpants, Katrien
Jacobs.
Can Desire Go On Without a Body?: Pornographic Exchange as Orbital Anomaly, Dougal Phillips.
CENSORED.
Robots.txt: The Politics of Search Engine Exclusion, Greg Elmer.
The Internet Treats Censorship as a Malfunction and Routes Around It?: A New Media
Approach to the Study of State Internet Censorship, Richard Rogers.
CODA
On Narcolepsy, Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker.

Orders from Hampton Press:
http://tiny.cc/3qniv

as well as bookstores and online sellers.

Gabriel Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear

Now, this is what Dan Brown's books should be like! Swift and fast, full of action and exotic locales, not too full of overtly long pseudohistorical dialogue.

Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear is written by Charles Ardai, who's also the mastermind behind the Hard Case Crime and has penned three titles for the series. I really loved Songs of Innocence (if "love" is the right word for such a bleak book) and thought that Fifty-To-One was very good, if a bit overlong, so it's no surprise his new book is a great read. This has everything one can ask for in an adventure novel, down to a sword-fight - in a dark cave! Here's hoping we get zeppelins in later Hunts...

A good example of Ardai's skills is that when a certain beast walks into view and starts talking, it's believable and not just laughable, like it easily could be. There's just one thing that bothers me: if one recites Homer's lost epics, shouldn't he do it in ancient Greek and would normal contemporary Greeks understand what he's saying?

I was slightly disappointed in the first Gabriel Hunt outing, but I'm exhilarated to find out that the series is becoming something to watch. The book is accompanied by an extra short story by Ardai, but I haven't read that one, as yet.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Päivö Suomela's Mustan ketun kirot

Okay, this is really a forgotten book, since it's Finnish - and I don't think anyone's read that even in here for at least 20 years. It just so happens I read it last night and thought it might be of interest to someone reading this blog - there must be some Finnish readers among the bunch.

Päivö Suomela's Mustan ketun kirot was published in 1955, by Karisto, in their pretty low-down juvenile series called Poikien kirjoja (Books for Boys). The books in the series are not very collectible, even though I know there are people who are looking to fill the series. The book's title means translated "The Curse of the Black Fox". There's no supernatural element, though, which is a shame - and I was actually looking for one, since I've been planning a book of Finnish sword & sorcery stories and when I saw this at a bookseller in the Turku market square, I thought this might have something I want.

No such luck. The book is set in the 15th century, but you don't know it from anything other than that there's a mention of the time in the short foreword. The characters have names that purport to sound like ancient Finnish or Kalevala-ish (Sipi, Osmo, Haveri), but the book could still take place even in the early 20th century. There's not much action and it seems at places that the author forgot where he was taking his story. It's relatively entertaining, though.

The book could also be a western. It's about a boy and an old man who live somewhere in the Finnish frontier. They are robbed of their furs - which contains a fur of a black fox. The young boy sets out to track down the thieves and runs into another young boy called Marjo. (There's a hint of homosexual attraction, until it's revealed in the end that Marjo is actually and safely a girl!) The same events could take place in Wild West in the 1880's.

Päivö Suomela was a son of the Finnish sports writer and educator Klaus Suomela and the juvenile writer Launo Suomela was his brother. I believe both worked as teachers. Päivö Suomela did also the cover illustration for his book. I think it's pretty nice. Päivö Suomela wrote a dozen or so other juvenile novels in the fifties and sixties.

Another blog post on another blog

Hell, I seem to be more active in my other blogs than this one... Here goes nevertheless: another post on Finnish war-time magazines here.

Allan Guthrie's Savage Night

Allan Guthrie's Savage Night (2008) is not an easy feat. It's not entertainment, even though it's wildly funny, in a way you just can't anticipate.

I'm sure there are people who find it unethical to laugh at people who hack off other people's limbs and heads, but that's only choice Guthrie's characters have given the circumstances they live in. Guthrie moves the tragedy of a Jacobean plays (i.e. John Webster's The White Devil from 1612) to the underbelly of Scottish lower-to-middle-class and their everyday struggle. This is no social realism, though, more like hyper-realism. Guthrie's characters are always convincing, that must be said.

The prose it's so sparse and hard I had first trouble getting into Guthrie's writing and its rhythm. Guthrie doesn't make it easy for the reader to get into the flow, even though the events described make you turn the pages feverishly. There's almost an experimental quality to Guthrie's writing (and I want to remind I compared Guthrie to Vladimir Nabokov when I was reading Hard Man).

Citta Violent/The Violent City

I watched last night an Italian film called Citta Violenta aka The Violent City. It's one of the better Italian crime films from the sixties and seventies, with Charles Bronson and Telly Savalas in the lead. The director is Sergio Sollima, who has been gaining cult status in recent years, also due to his spaghetti westerns (which I haven't seen, I'm sorry to say).

By no means Citta Violent is a perfect film. Some of the dialogue is corny, some of the actions are not very well motivated, some of the actors are poor (especially Bronson's wife, Jill Ireland), and I'm not really sure if I like Bronson. I think this would've been better for someone like Lee Marvin or Barry Nelson. Having said this, I must confess the film has a great style, lots of scenes without dialogue or even music. The climax - shooting in the scenery elevator - is a tour de force. The story line, lifted up from Out of the Past, is a complex one and is truly noir, with everyone dying in the end. Someone said when this came up in Facebook that the film is very Parker-like.

Ennio Morricone's music is great, chilling, with curious guitar sounds. Check it out:

Pulpish illustration from a Swedish mag

Bought this earlier today from the Turku market square, where there's a bookseller. It's a Swedish hobby mag from 1944. The illustrator is called Björn Karlström and I know nothing about him. The illo is great, though. The German plane is presumably Messerschmitt Me-210, which I know only because there's an article on the same plane in the inside pages.

Panu Räty on Finnish pulp literature

Quote from the City weekly in 1991. Sorry 'bout being in Finnish.

Can't really begin to count the errors on this small item... Let's start (and I'll do this in Finnish):

1. Tapani Backe on oikeasti tietenkin Bagge.

2. Tapani kirjoitti FinnWestejä, niin kuin muutkin sarjan tekijät, ne eivät olleet käännöstekstejä alkuunkaan.

3. Joni Skiftesvik oli Kolmiokirjan kustannuspäällikkö, ei -toimittaja.

4. Hän ei "pusertanut hyllytolkulla aitoa paperikansikamaa", vaan ainoastaan yhden FinnWestin, yhden jatkokertomuksen FinnWestiin ja kolme lyhyttä täytenovellia Kostaja-nimiseen länkkärilehteen. Nämä kaikki on julkaistu sittemmin kirjassa Työtä arkkunikkarille.

Skiftesvikin tilalle Räty olisi löytänyt paljon oikeampiakin ehdokkaita, kuten vaikkapa Kaarlo Isotalon, joka realististen romaaniensa ohessa tekaisi jatkuvasti lyhyitä viihdenovelleja Viikonlopun ja Perjantain kaltaisiin lehtiin.

Harlequin's vintage collection

Someone pointed out earlier today at the Rara-Avis e-mail list (which is focused on hardboiled and noir crime writing) that Harlequin is bringing back into print some old crime novels. Here's a link. There are two titles by James Hadley Chase - I think those were reprints already back in the day. The other three novels are pretty obscure. The Dale Bogard one, Pardon My Body (gotta love these titles!), was first published by Harlequin in 1951 - so it was one of their early original crime paperbacks, before they started concentrating on romance. "Dale Bogard" was a pseudonym for a British paperback hack Douglas Enefer, who wrote lots of other stuff, too, like some Cannon TV tie-ins in the seventies.

I can't find any info on Perry Lindsay's No Nice Girl, but Alan Handley's Kiss Your Elbow (Kiss Your Elbow?) was originally published by McKay in 1948. The reprint came from Pyramid in 1950, under the pretty different-sounding title Terror in Times Square, but there must've been a Harlequin one.

The fact that Harlequin is doing these under the original illustrated covers must have something to with Hard Case Crime. You see, they created a fashion! (Or, actually, recreated.)

Okay, I couldn't leave this unchecked: Perry Lindsay was the same writer as Peggy Gaddis, who started out back in the 1920's and continued penning cheap romance and sleaze way into the sixties. No Nice Girl was a Phoenix Press title in 1946 and the Harlequin reprint came in 1949. This information comes from Abebooks and is highly suspectible, but I'd like to hear otherwise.

Reading doesn't pay: Gregg Hurwitz: The Program

As I mentioned, I've been silent here for some days now, mainly because I've been both working frantically and trying to spend some time with my kids. Ottilia - who, you may remember, is currently living outside of Finland - is spending her summer holidays here and since her school starts later than is usual in Finland, we've been keeping Kauto away from daycare. The result: how the hell am I supposed to work frantically?!

Anyway, it seems the zombie anthology I mentioned while back is finished and making its way into the printers next week. Another one bites the dust - or something to that effect.

What I meant to say was that reading doesn't pay. I bought The Program by Gregg Hurwitz, an American crime writer, a while back from a thrift store only because it was cheap (80 cents, it says - and it's a hardcover, no DJ though) and because I vaguely remembered hearing Hurwitz's name somewhere. Then I noticed he has a story in Jennifer Jordan's acclaimed anthology Uncage Me, and as I was looking for something to read, I decided to dip into The Program.

Not a wise move. You know, I've been busy. I should be reading more, I should be writing more, I should, I should, I should... The book seemed interesting, a bit hardboiled, a bit like a private eye novel. The premise was intriguing: a rich Hollywood producer asks a retired police officer to get back his adult stepdaughter from a mind cult, run by a charismatic mystery man. Okay, I said, this is original, even though, I think, Lew Archer had a similar case. I lingered on, when the action didn't begin. There were many interesting scenes, especially those that take place in the meetings of the cult.

But finally, after reading this for over a week, I had to confess: I don't care. The problems of the lead character and his wife seemed overworked (and they were continuation to a book I haven't read, presumably an earlier one in the same series). There wasn't enough action or suspense. There were scenes in which I was thinking: how can this happen, these guys, an undercover cop and a cult member who's being under surveillance, just get away and walk into a meeting with psychologies to help the girl? I think I stopped reading The Program something like 50 pages before the end, because it never seemed very believable, even though Hurwitz had been clearly doing his homework about how mind cults work.

This reminded me of 3:10 to Yuma, the new version from the Elmore Leonard story. The film was at times well made and it had some good action scenes (but too much posturing), but the most interesting thing about it was that it was about how mind cults work. Look at the scene in which Russell Crowe talks with his men about a member who got shot. It's exactly like the cult leader talks in Hurwitz's book. Crowe is a charismatic sociopath, who also gets to work inside Christian Bale's head. And here lies the problem within the film: it never resolves the questions it poses. Crowe is a scary psycho, yet he becomes like a father to Bale (and his older son). I don't understand what the writers were thinking. That becoming a father figure to a simple man who's had his share of tragedy (leg gone in Civil War) is something that can cure a sociopath? C'mon!

I digress. Suffice to say that I got finally to Allan Guthrie's Savage Night and we don't have the same problems there.

A piece on Finnish fictionmag

I posted a piece on a Finnish war-time fictionmag on one of my other blogs here. Sorry to have been so silent, trying to get the work routine back and getting some stuff out of my hands.

Bloodstone

I've been watching some films lately, which is surprisingly rare for me nowadays - the work (which involves a lot of reading and I don't even read as much as I'd like to or I'm supposed to), the kids, other hobbies, spending time with Elina, everything else seems to go first. But as the summer vacation's end was getting near, I found some time to sit on a sofa and put on a film. I even watched Raiders of the Lost Ark once again - I'm not a big admirer of the film (there's just too much silliness going on all the time) and since I didn't see it as a kid, it's no nostalgia trip for me, but still it's pretty entertaining. (And the VHS copy I snatched for 20 cents turned out to be the first video release of the film world-wide. Is this valuable?)

Raiders of the Lost Ark is a good bridge to what I'm really going to blog about: the half-Indian, half-American film called Bloodstone (1988). It's directed by Dwight Little, who's done lots of TV work and the sequel to Free Willy (which I liked more than the original, but I might be alone in my opinion; but hey, better than Free Willy - that can't be much asked, can it?), from a script by Greek Nico Mastorakis, who is said to be (or probably says it himself in the Wikipedia article) a controversial figure, involved in lots of things. Many of the actors are Indian and there's a feel of a Bollywood adventure/musical/comedy in many of the set pieces and scenes in the film. Basically, the film is just an Indiana Jones rip-off, but due to its Indian connections it's interesting.

But alas, it's only that. The story is pretty ordinary - there's this bloodstone, a marvellous jewel with which a beloved princess went to grave hundreds of years ago, there's this American couple spending time in India, there's this conniving thief who's been lucky enough to steal the bloodstone, there's this ruthless European collector who also wants the diamond etc. - and the European actors are all pretty lame, especially the romantic couple (and the woman isn't even good-looking! what were they thinking?). The Indian actors, some of which are famous in their homeland (especially Rajnikanth, who plays a swindling cab driver), are better, but with the story at hand there's not much to do. There might be potential for a good story about betrayals and criss-crosses, but the story neves gets enough speed. Maybe the budgetary limits prevented this taking on the adventure route the video cover hints at. There are some hints to classics, such as Jack Kehler's character, thief Paul Lorre, but they are a bit too obvious.

Still I found this at least a bit entertaining, so if you come across a copy and feel like watching a cheesy adventure flick, go for it - especially if you're a Bollywood enthusiast.