David/Day Keene: The Queens of Death?

I bought this old Finnish paperback (published in 1947) with three short stories in it several months ago, mainly because it has a Zorro story in it. If I'm right, this is the only real Zorro story by Johnston McCulley published in Finnish. It's probably one of the later Zorro stories that were published in pulp magazines, such as West. I believe these stories have never been reprinted.

I didn't read the Zorro story in the book, but I read the two preceding stories. The first one that also gives the book its title is written by "David Keene". The title reads as "The Queens of Death". Now, there's no David Keene who has written any kind of crime novels or stories that I can find. I can't find any trace of a story called "The Queens of Death". Of course it's possible that this story was published in a pulp magazine no one has ever indexed, but somehow I don't think that's right. I got to thinking it might be possible this is really by Day Keene. The Finnish publisher may have thought that "Day" is not a right name for an author and changed him to "David". These things happen. And Day Keene happens to have a pulp story called "Three Queens of the Mayhem", published in Detective Tales in February 1946, so it's entirely possible that this story found its way to Finland and got published as part of a three-story anthology.

There are three old women in David Keene's story. They are old ladies living together. They were once famous singers called The Beverly Sisters, but getting caught in a murder case ruined their career. Now one of the sisters asks private eye called Tom Doyle to try to find a girl one of the sisters was forced to give away to an orphanage. The story is fun, mildly parodist in tone and plot. It's written strictly in the zany school of hardboiled writing, reminiscent of Robert Bellem, Richard S. Prather and others. So, is it "Three Queens of Mayhem"? Anyone? Or is it some other story by Day Keene? Or is there a David Keene?

There's also another short story to stir up interest. It's called "Kadonnut sävel", which means "The Lost Tune" or some such. The hero of the story is troubleshooter of some sort called Hannibal Smith. He's a former sports coach, but now makes his living selling used stuff, giving loans and doing services to people. Hannibal Smith is a fat man, but he's also resourceful and intelligent and quick with his mouth. Now, there's a Hannibal Smith story called "Down Among the Dead Men" published in Dime Detective in 1945, written by C. William Harrison, who's best known for his paperback westerns. (I've read one, it was pretty good.) I'm pretty sure this story is by the same C. William Harrison. Can anyone confirm? The story is funny as Hannibal Smith is asked to take a photo of a cow somewhere in the fields. He does exactly that, but fast he realizes he maybe shouldn't have, since he's being suspected of a murder...

The great Finnish cover is by Poika Vesanto. Probably - I can't find his signature in the cover.

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: Moscow – Cassiopea (1974)

This is a Soviet science fiction film in which six teenagers - three boys, three girls - are sent in a spaceship to Cassiopea to investigate who's sending out radio code. The film is a first of the two, the sequel is called Teens in the Universe! In Finland, the sequel's been called "The Robots of Cassiopea".

This is a fun movie. It's goofy for sure, but it's also very sincere and not badly made at all. There are actually some very nice scenes in space, and the futuristic design of the spaceship itself is pretty good. There are also some surrealistic or hallucinogenic scenes in which the teens use the virtual reality provided by the spaceship to entertain themselves during the long trip. The film is also played as a comedy and a love movie between some of the kids.

I'm not sure if this is available in the English-speaking countries, but you can watch it in YouTube with Russian titles:


There's also this, using footage from the sequel (which I have yet to see):


More Overlooked Films here. At least pretty soon, I hope.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Frank Struan: Murder's So Unpleasant (1954)

In my on-going, but sporadic study of British paperback crime fiction, I read, almost in a jiffy, a short booklet by Frank Struan, called Murder's So Unpleasant. The Finnish title translates literally as Murhat ovat epämiellyttäviä. It was published here in a cheapo paperback series called Max Strong.

Frank Struan's real name was Graham Fisher, and all I know about him is that he was born in 1920. I don't know if he's still alive; probably not. He used the Frank Struan pseudonym in a series of stories that were published in the legendary British magazine called Tid-Bits in the early fifties. I've never seen these, but I believe one story filled out an entire magazine. If I'm mistaken, do correct me. Fisher wrote some thrillers still in the seventies, but that's all on him.

Murder's So Unpleasant is a mock-American hardboiled crime novel with a private eye hero called Johnny July. If he's a series character, he should be included in the Thrilling Detective listing. I don't know that yet, but I'll check it out. In this outing, Johnny July is hired to guard a wealthy business man, but he dies - in a closed room! - before July gets a chance to make out just from whom the man's supposed to be guarded from. There are two beautiful women involved in the case, the young bride of the deceased and her sister who seems to be after the man's inheritance. Or some such. I wasn't actually paying much attention and it's been already days since I read the booklet.

And this is what this book was really about. It's an one-hour entertainment, nothing more. There are notable gaps in the plot and Johnny July isn't a very interesting character, but I didn't really mind as the stuff went on with some speed. There are many references to Chandler. The city of the story is Bay City, Chandler's fictional city, and Johnny July is mugged and taken to a mental institute to be held there just like Marlowe in Farewell My Lovely.

I'm not sure how easily one could obtain stuff like this. The Finnish translation is easily found and cheap, though. The Finnish edition's cover art is by Spanish Portada Noiquet.

More Forgotten Books here.

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (1962)

I saw earlier today a 35 mm print of Czech animation wizard Karel Zeman's Baron Prásil, also known with the title of the subject line. In Finnish, it's been called Parooni Münchhausenin uskomattomat seikkailut. I don't know what's with the Baron Prásil thing, but that's not very important here.

I wrote earlier (three years ago!) about Zeman's other film (see here) and said that his films resemble the silent cinema. It's like we're seeing everything for the first time. It's a cinema of marvels and rare beauty. It's also the cinema of laughter and joy. And it fits Zeman made his film about Münchhausen whose adventures have brought us laughter and joy for many decades.

Zeman's technique - the mixing of live actors with animated backgrounds - works very well here. Everything is very exotic and strange and beautiful. This is also cinema of optimism, even though there's a healthy strand of satire as well.

Zeman's film is also an important precursor to steampunk, mixing modern heroes and inventions with steamboats, air balloons, flying horses and such. It's no wonder Terry Gilliam was impressed by the film.

This is a trailer someone made to commemmorate Zeman's film. More Overlooked Films here.

Ridley Scott & Cormac McCarthy: The Counselor

Damn, I wanted to like this film so much! I'm not a fan of Ridley Scott's work, but I know he can do some good stuff, but given that this was scripted by Cormac McCarthy and the genre is trashy hardboiled crime I was more than thrilled when I walked in the movie theater.

Damn, it sucked.

The Counselor has lots of good moments and some nice action scenes, but there are also lots of problems. First, the plot. Mind you, I'm a fan of ellipsis. I can love the way how not everything is explained or is explained a lot later after the incident has already taken place. McCarthy as the sole writer of the film - what, no script doctors here? should've been! - uses the ellipsis clumsily and makes the film seem more awkward than it really is.

Second, the dialogue. McCarthy's dialogue works very well on paper. It works well on big screen, if it's been rewritten by real screenwriters. Take a look at No Country for Old Men or The Road. The Counselor tries to tread the same ground, but gets stuck in long monologues that have no meaning plot-wise or stupid repeating of small phrases like "What?" or "Huh?" Some of the scenes are better in this sense, however, for example the first meeting of Brad Pitt and Michael Fassbender.

Third, McCarthy writes women like shit. The character of Penélope Cruz is totally meaningless. She's an empty pawn with nothing to do. Cameron Diaz is somewhat better, but she's also over-written to the extent she becomes, like Cruz, a pawn. She has no life of her own, even though that purports to be the film's focus. The men of the film are more convincing.

Fourth, how can someone like McCarthy be so demure? He writes convincingly about killing, slaying, maiming, torturing and exploiting other people, but talking about sex and giving us good sex scenes between two people - or even people talking about sex - seems to be overwhelming for him. Probably he shouldn't try it anymore and stick with killing.

If you want to have some crime fiction about Mexican drug trafficking, try Don Winslow's Savages and The Power of the Dog. Or Sam Hawken's quiet and hypnotic Juaréz Dance.

Don Winslow: The Power of the Dog

I just finished this huge novel by Don Winslow, who's one of the foremost new hardboiled crime writers in the USA. I've liked what he's done, especially Savages (and I even liked the film, which most people seemed to hate), but there's something about him I can't quite grasp. He leaves me a bit cold. 

Winslow belongs firmly to the James Ellroy school of crime writing - at least when it comes to The Power of the Dog -, but he's different from Ellroy in two aspects: first, he writes about true stuff, things that have happened and are happening; second, he's not maniacal about his writing. His characters are not wacky psychos, like with Ellroy, and his language and narration are not clipped nightmares of White Jazz or The Cold Six Thousand. Winslow writes very curtly, with very short sentences, but his sentences are not feverish. They seem more like he's writing a story treatment for a film or a TV series. The same immediacy - we see only action, not the motives behind them, we are never offered glimpses of inside people's minds - is prevalent also in Winslow's other books, especially Savages, in which the narration at times transforms into fragments of a screenplay. 

So, when Winslow writes about the tragedy of war against drugs and the drug cartels of Mexico and Columbia that are in control in those countries, mostly with back-up from CIA and DEA, we know it's real stuff. He's that convincing. He shows in The Power of the Dog that the war against drugs should be stopped immediately, but he doesn't say that out loud. It's up to us to realize that ourselves. It helps Winslow's characters are not loonies. 

But maybe it's the reason the book left me colder than I really expected. Still, it's a great read, with many explosive action scenes and some very suspenseful chase scenes. It would work great as a TV series by HBO. 

The book came just out in Finnish from Like under the title Kuolleiden päivät/The Day of the Dead. 

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: Attack of the Robots (1966)

Jess Franco was a Spanish director who has probably made more feature-length films than any other director. His filmography has about 200 films. Many of them are erotic horror, some of them are more mundane action and sex flicks. His reputation has never been too high and I've gathered many of his films indeed are of poor quality, but some of them have redeeming qualities about them, such as hallucinatory sequences and imaginative camera work.

I just managed to see two of his films, which I believe were the first for me. I saw both on 35 mm on big screen. The first one of the two was much better than the latter one, and I'm pretty sure it has something to do with the screenwriter. Cartes sur table AKA Attack of the Robots (1966) was written by Jean-Claude Carrière, one of the best-known and most revered French screenwriters of the last 40 years. He's written lots of stuff for directors like Buñuel, Godard, Peter Brook, Philip Kaufman... and Jess Franco.

Cartes sur table is an enjoyable spy romp with many parodical touches. The film is full of silliness and it's almost always in the right tone, so it's not overdone or unintentional. There are some light touches of sadomasochism and fetishism, which both show in Carrière's and Franco's later films. Cartes sur table is also a reminiscent of Godard's Alphaville which was done a year earlier, so it's possible Carrière and Franco wanted to parody the better-known film. Both star Eddie Constantine as a hardboiled hero (though he seems silly and clumsy in Franco's film), both have Paul Misraki's music, and both have a huge central computer that speaks incoherently in the end.

Cartes sur table is one of those cheap spy flicks the French made in abundance in the sixties (remember the Lemmy Cautions and Nick Carters Constantine starred in?), but it's also a lightweight New Wave film in its self-reflectiveness which is never too loud. Comes recommended by me - if you can catch it, as it seems like there's no decent DVD publication.

And then I saw Franco's later Count Dracula with a stellar cast of Christopher Lee, Herbert Lom and Klaus Kinski, but this was only boring. Nothing else. Sorry. Nothing to see here.

Franco died earlier this year, having directed his last film in 2012. Its main character is called Al Pereira, just like Constantine in Cartes sur table.

More Overlooked Films here at Todd Mason's blog (after a hiatus).

More info on the Brian McDermott mystery

I was in contact with the archive of the Otava publishing house, who put out the book that left me astounded some days back: Brian McDermott's The Battles, called Tuntematon tilaa näytännön in Finnish. Here's the original post on the subject.

So, the Otava publishing house still has the contract made with Brian McDermott. Unfortunately the contract didn't tell if McDermott's book was already published in book form in English, but the contract retained the possibility that the Finnish publisher could also use it as a serial in a film magazine. And a friend of mine happened to have the said magazines at hand, and - ta-taa! - Brian McDermott's story was indeed published as a serial in a magazine called Elokuva-aitta (Film Storehouse or some such in translation) in 1966-1967. This leaves the question: was McDermott's story published as a serial also in English? I don't seem to be able to find any trace on this possibility, though, but it's still a viable explanation.

However, there's also a possibility that McDermott wrote the story exclusively for the Finnish audience. It was said in the magazine that McDermott was a popular figure in Finnish television due to the BBC language program called Walter and Connie in which he performed. It was also said that the characters in the novel resemble the Walter and Connie of the show, so it's possible McDermott based his characters on them. (I still haven't had the chance to read the book, so can't comment on that.)

Q&A with Sarah Weinman on domestic suspense

I've been reading Sarah Weinman's anthology Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives that focuses on domestic suspense short stories and novellettes written by female authors from the 1940s to the 1970s. It's a very good book, not a bad story in sight, and the subject of the book is very interesting. It's also something I've written about earlier myself, both in Finnish and in English here at Pulpetti. I've called the genre "female noir", but I'm not sure if it's really fitting. These writers are almost always not hardboiled or cynical, nor do the stories take place in alienated big cities, yet there's hard-edged grittiness to the stories that might merit the use of word "noir".

I interviewed Sarah Weinman via e-mail for the Finnish Whodunit Society's magazine, and I got also her permission to use her answers in the blog as well. See also her website (the link above), it has great additional info.

How did this book come to be? 
Troubled Daughters emerged from an essay I wrote for the literary magazine Tin House. I’d been approached by an editor there to write something for their themed “The Mysterious” issue, and I’d long contemplated why it seemed that a fair number of female crime writers working around or after World War II through the mid-1970s weren’t really part of the larger critical conversation. They weren’t hard boiled per se, but they weren’t out-and-out cozy, either. Hammett and Chandler and Cain, yes; but why not Marie Belloc Lowndes and Elisabeth Sanxay Holding and Vera Caspary? Why Ross Macdonald but not his wife, Margaret Millar, who published books before he did and garnered critical and commercial acclaim first? I knew after writing the essay that I wasn't done with the subject, and when I had lunch with an editor at Penguin on an unrelated matter and started going on, rather enthusiastically, about this widespread neglect, he said, “sounds like there’s an anthology in this. Why don’t you send me a proposal?” It took a while to organize, but eventually I did, and Penguin bought the anthology. Publishing being what it is, it took a less than two years from acquisition to release date.

How would you describe "domestic suspense"? 
Here's what I say on my website: "To my mind, it’s a genre of books published between World War II and the height of the Cold War, written by women primarily about the concerns and fears of women of the day. These novels and stories operate on the ground level, peer into marriages whose hairline fractures will crack wide open, turn ordinary household chores into potential for terror, and transform fears about motherhood into horrifying reality. They deal with class and race, sexism and economic disparity, but they have little need to show off that breadth. Instead, they turn our most deep-seated worries into narrative gold, delving into the dark side of human behavior that threatens to come out with the dinner dishes, the laundry, or taking care of a child. They are about ordinary, everyday life, and that’s what makes these novels of domestic suspense so frightening. The nerves they hit are really fault lines."

Is it a women's genre or are there any male writers who would fit the description? 
Two of the most successful practitioners of contemporary domestic suspense are Harlan Coben and Linwood Barclay. Their books absolutely fit the description. I'm harder pressed to think of male writers from the 1940-1970s whose work falls into domestic suspense territory aside from Ira Levin, though going back earlier than that, Francis Iles' MALICE AFORETHOUGHT (1931) or C.S. Forester's THE PURSUED could be categorized as domestic suspense.

What writers and which books are the forerunners of domestic suspense?
Everyone included in my anthology! (And many not included.) If you mean earlier -- Marie Belloc Lowndes, especially her 1914 novel THE LODGER.

Don't Bother to Knock

Can you name some examples also in cinema?
I'm not a cinema-phile, so my expertise is really limited to books. But I think it's safe to say that if it was adapted from a domestic suspense novel, then the film, too, would be categorized that way (i.e. Charlotte Armstrong's 1951 novel MISCHIEF adapted into DON'T BOTHER TO KNOCK, Marilyn Monroe's first big role.)

Who are the most memorable practitioners of this genre now?
Contemporary domestic suspense is thriving, to my mind. Gillian Flynn for sure; also Laura Lippman (standalones), Megan Abbott, Alafair Burke (standalone), A.S.A Harrison's THE SILENT WIFE, Hallie Ephron, Koethi Zan's THE NEVER LIST, Kimberly McCreight's RECONSTRUCTING AMELIA...and many more I'm forgetting at the moment. 

What are the fears and wishes of women the stories in the book reveal? What historical changes in the women's life does this book represent? 
Untold changes! The first stories were from the end of World War II, when women were conscripted to work while their husbands, sons, brothers, fathers were fighting overseas. Then the men came back -- those who survived -- and women were expected to revert to domestic roles, which caused a lot of cultural chafing. Then came second-wave feminism, Betty Freidan and Gloria Steinem (and Helen Gurley Brown, too) and financial and social equality was possible, not a pipe dream. It's no wonder domestic suspense tales fell out of fashion in the 1970s; but in a way, it's equally understandable why they would be popular now, with so much anxiety, culturally and economically, at the moment.

Is domestic suspense a feminist genre? 
I think so, even if many of the writers may not have seen themselves that way! But the very idea that, in fiction, women trapped in bad marriages or crippling cultural norms had some agency to fight back and assert themselves is a distinctly feminist thing.

What are some of your favourite stories in the book?
My answer changes almost every day, but I've been pleased to see readers respond well to Joyce Harrington's "The Purple Shroud" and Barbara Callahan's "Lavender Lady". [And they are very good stories! - JN]

The book is dominated by American writers, but there's one British writer, Celia Fremlin. Is this kind of story something typically American?
No, that was an accident. Fremlin's THE HOURS BEFORE DAWN is a prototypical domestic suspense novel in my mind that it was critical she be included. But I can think of so many other British writers -- Celia Dale, Joan Fleming, Ruth Rendell in her early years -- who could be included in a hypothetical sequel.

Why are these writers so forgotten today?
My theory is that because they had no influential champion as did their male counterparts. These women aren't canonized in the Library of America. They aren't taught in schools at the undergraduate or graduate level. If TROUBLED DAUGHTERS redresses that balance in even a small way, I've done my job. Who would you pick up to be reprinted in a larger scale? All of them, probably...? Dorothy B. Hughes was already beginning to get new notice thanks to the recent reissue, by NYRB Classics, of her final novel, THE EXPENDABLE MAN, and much of the remainder of her backlist was just reissued in ebook format by Open Road Media (they also reissued many books by Charlotte Armstrong, and I believe one or two others from my anthology are in the works.) Shirley Jackson is in midst-revival, too, with a major biography due out in 2016. I'd love to see more attention lavished upon Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Joyce Harrington, and Nedra Tyre, as they wrote excellent novels. But really, everybody in TROUBLED DAUGHTERS should be celebrated with reprints!

Will there be a sequel?*
I'd love for there to be one, but only if a great many readers buy TROUBLED DAUGHTERS and spread the word!

* I couldn't help but include my own list in my e-mail: "I can think of at least some writers not in this book, like Doris Miles Disney, Kate Wilhelm ("Murderer’s Apprentice", Double-Action Detective and Mystery Stories, May 1959), Shelley Smith, Ursula Curtiss, Dolores Hitchens, Dorothy Dunn, Margaret St. Clair, Leigh Brackett..." Though Hitchens and Brackett come off more as hardboiled crime writers. 

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: The Intruder (1962)

Roger Corman is best known for his schlock, but there's a hidden gem in his repertoire: the 1962 film called The Intruder, also released as I Hate Your Guts and Shame. It stars young William Shatner as an All American young man who also happens to be a racist and a fascist. And you just cannot not love a film that stars young William Shatner as an All American young man who also happens to be a racist and a fascist.

The film, shot somewhere in the Deep South, is a hard-hitting drama based on Charles Beaumont's novel of the same name, but it veers away from cheap exploitation and also from the patronizing racial attitudes so prevalent in films like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? There are no heroes in the film, as there are no easy explanations or solutions. In the end, it's clear everyone's still going to go on being racist, even though Shatner's All American young man is dragged to shame.

I haven't read Beaumont's novel, as it seems pretty hard to come by, but it would be interesting to compare the two, as it feels like Corman had toned down the novel. Beaumont himself scripted the film, but there are some moments that don't ring true to me, such as the seduction of a lonely woman and the violent abuse of a young black kid in the end. They would've felt more right if Shatner had raped the woman and if the mob had tried to lynch the kid.

But all in all, The Intruder comes highly recommended from me. If you're a fan of no-bullshit drama that pulls no punches, doesn't deliver phony speeches between action and still makes a relevant point about our world, check out The Intruder. (Especially when you know you get a chance to see young William F. Nolan as one of the racist hicks.)

Here's a longer post by a Finnish writer on the film. It's also in English.

More Overlooked Films, umm, somewhere, certainly not at Todd Mason's blog. I must admit I've fallen off the radar here.

Another bibliographic mystery: Brian McDermott

Now off to another mystery surrounding a book published in Finnish, supposedly translated from English, but seemingly not in English.

Brian McDermott's Tuntematon tilaa näytännön ("The Unknown Man Orders a Play" or some such, pretty awkward name, if you ask me) came out in a big publisher's paperback series called Crime Club in 1968. The original name is supposed to "The Battles". Now, there's not a book called "The Battles" written by Brian McDermott. Actually there's not a book called "The Battles" by any writer, at least prior to 1968. One Brian McDermott did publish a crime novel called Who Killed Robin Cock?, but that was in 1981. And that's his only crime novel, possibly only novel.

What gives here? There are some American paperbacks published in Finland that were never published in the US: two private eye series by Grover Brinkman and I. G. Edmonds, a crime novel by Bruce Cassiday, possibly four or five air war novels by Robert Sidney Bowen. I think Edmonds also has a war novel in Finnish that didn't come out in the US. It is entirely possible that Brian McDermott, whoever he was, didn't manage to sell this book to British (or US) publishers, but managed to land it in Finland. (The book wasn't published in Sweden. I didn't check Norway's or Denmark's national libraries' catalogues, but I'll do that at some point.)

So, who was this Brian McDermott? I haven't as yet read the book, but given the title it's possible or actually likely that he was the actor Brian McDermott who died in 2003, writing on his own experiences.

Can anyone help me with this? Who was McDermott's agent, if he had any? Did someone reading this blog know McDermott? Is someone reading this blog related to McDermott? (One thought comes to mind: could Who Killed Robin Cock? be the same novel that circulated through many publishers, landed only in Finland in 1968, but was finally published in 1981 in the UK?)

The Lando series as by Tex Kirby?

One of the Finnish Landos:
"Don't Show Mercy, Lando"

There are fourteen books published in Finnish paperback series as by "Tex Kirby". The books are westerns and they feature one Brad Lando as the hero. Now, there seems to be at least two Lando books published by British cheapo publisher John Spencer (in their Badger paperback imprint), called Lone Gun Renegade (see photo below) and Arizona Manhunt (both 1971). But I can't seem to be able to find any info on the other Brad Lando books. In the Finnish editions they are clearly announced to be translated from English as they have such original titles as "Wildcat Breed" and "Trial by Gunsmoke". For some reason or another, Lone Gun Renegade isn't one of the Finnish Landos.

But there's nothing on them in any place I can think of. Pat Hawk's pseudonym catalogue credits John S. Glasby having written two Lando titles, but there simply are no other Tex Kirbys or Landos in Abebooks for sale - I even went through all the "original" titles in the Finnish Tex Kirby books and checked whether Abebooks had them.

These could of course be anything: something penned by German writers with hoax English titles; something written by English writer or writers, but left unpublished in the UK and published only in Scandinavia (or even only in Finland); something penned by someone else entirely, but published for some reason in Finnish under different name or title. Similar things have happened in the past.

Edit: I edited this, since there were some errors in my posting. Pat Hawk's pseudonyms catalogue does indeed list Lone Gun Renegade and Arizona Manhunt as written by John S. Glasby, but other than that, there's nothing.

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: Shock Corridor (1963)

Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor must've been quite a shock for the audience of its day: the in-your-face attitude of this hardboiled anti-thriller is baffling even to viewers of 2013. I just saw this recently for the second time (both times on big screen) and was again mesmerized, even more this time than the previous.

Shock Corridor is a sordid tale of a newspaperman who wants to get Pulitzer and thinks about doing it by being planted into a loony bin. He talks his girlfriend and his editor-in-chief into the plot and rehearses going crazy with a shrink, but the second he's in he notices he might be going insane himself. Or wait, he doesn't notice it, his girlfriend does, but can't do nothing about it.

The film is somewhere between downright trashy sleaze and avantgarde (as, as it feels sometimes, only the best art is) as Fuller doesn't shy away from using the most ridiculous stuff of the day's pulpy fiction, like the nympho patients of the female ward and the zombie-like lunatics manning the corridors of the asylum. The zany acting (especially of Peter Breck in the lead), the fierce rhythm of the editing, the harsh photography of Stanley Cortez and the dream sequences in colour, leftovers from Fuller's unfinished documentary projects all make this into a dynamite of a film. Here's Jonathan Rosenbaum on the subject.

I'm not sure whether there will be a compilation post of Overlooked Films. Could it be somewhere else than Todd Mason's blog?

Oh, my new novel just came out

You think I'm productive? Not all the books that were supposed to come out this Fall didn't work out as planned, but I'm still putting out some seven books. One of these was the Lovecraft novel I mentioned earlier, another one is a sword and sorcery novel that came out roughly the same time Haamu/Ghost came out.

Sword and sorcery novel? Yeah, Viimeinen bjarmialainen/The Last Bjarmian (Bjarmia is a mythical place in the north-east region of Finland) is something I've always wanted to do and now here it is. This story came out first in five installments in the Seikkailukertomuksia/Adventure Stories mag I edited and published some years back. I wrote my serial set in ancient Finland almost from a scratch and later on I realized the story resembles westerns a lot: a lone swordsman comes into a small town, finds the town people corrupt, but still has to fight some bad guys that threaten the town from outside. But these bad guys are weird gigantic white monsters, not your basic Injuns or robbers. And they have a mysterious leader, living in a cave no one has ever seen... It's a bit like Hammett's Red Harvest coupled with Lovecraft.

The serial went through quite many edits before it hit the print, and I still think there remained lots to be done. The main problem was that the battle scenes resemble each other too much, but last week I figured out how it could've been avoided - two weeks after the book had come out. I guess this happens a lot.

There's also my foreword telling how the story got into print. (I posted the foreword here - in Finnish, of course.) The cover illo is another one by Aapo Kukko, who's really good at these things. He said he wanted to draw my hero, a guy called Pesäri, with Alain Delon in his mind. And I think he got it exactly right.

Writing these things - this and my collection of Joe Novak private eye stories and the one novel about Joe Novak - is more like a hobby to me, though it takes a considerable amount of time. Writing this kind of stuff is practicing my craft, practicing how to narrate a story, construct the dialogue, keep the story moving. In the gone days of pulp and paperback publishing you could do this for money, now you have to self-publish or rely on your friends' micropublishing outfits, like in this case. Tuomas Saloranta does a good work with his Kuoriaiskirjat, and I've already agreed on doing another book - a small anthology - for him. Here's hoping someone finds reading Viimeinen bjarmialainen as much fun as I had writing the story!

Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: Shivers AKA They Came From Within

I'm not a huge fan of David Cronenberg, but I've liked some of his films. One of these is his early horror film - I think his first real feature film - called Shivers. It also goes by the name of They Came From Within, which is fitting for a film that depicts weird creatures that take control of a human body and transform people into sex monsters.

The film is crude and full of inconsistencies, but it's still very effective. It's also very silly at times, but I think Cronenberg knows this and plays the film up as a black comedy. There's slapstick, there's some intentionally stupid dialogue and the scientific explanation behind all this is pure hokey, but don't let that fool you. Cronenberg's dark and disturbing vision is right behind every frame.

Trivia: the film was produced by Ivan Reitman and the special make-up effects were done by Joe Blasco!

More Overlooked Movies here. (Oh, I guess no one was compiling the links for this week!)

Sarah Weinman's Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives

I've had this on my laptop for some time now, but I only now delved into Sarah Weinman's new anthology Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives that has been out for a month so. As you probably know, this anthology covers the ground I've mined here in this blog from time to time: noir written by women and about women, not noir written about hardboiled and cynical men, but noir written about good, ordinary women who have babies and their work and what not. Most of the stories in the book come from the period between the 1940s and the 1970s, but there are some exceptions.

I've only read Sarah Weinman's foreword and the author introductions, but the book seems like a very solid piece of research, and the short story choices feel balanced. I think I can safely say this comes highly recommended from me. Check also Sarah Weinman's great website for the book, it has lots of additional information on the authors and their work. For my other pieces on female noir - or domestic suspense, if you will -, navigate via keywords.

Peter Chester: Murder Forestalled

As many of you may remember, I've been doing a book on British paperback crime writers for years now – actually for over ten years... I now decided as I'm kind of between jobs that I'll finish the book no matter what and publish it myself before the next summer.

I don't have the time to read all the books I don't find necessary to read. I've already read six or seven books by Dennis Phillips (1924–2006) who wrote under many aliases. His Peter Chambers (sic) books are light-fare private eye novels and his Philip Daniels books are mediocre thrillers. I noticed I hadn't read Murder Forestalled (1960) that came under his Peter Chester by-line. I found a small description of the book's plot at Amazon and decided to help future historians by blogging it. These kind of descriptions are hard to come by on forgotten British crime fiction. The Thrilling Detective site has an entry for Mark Preston who was "Peter Chambers's" private eye hero, but not for Johnny Preston who featured in "Peter Chester's" books.

I don't seem to be able to find the original cover, so here's the Finnish paperback cover (which is by Robert McGinnis and from altogether different book).

So, here you go: "Barbara Porter came into private eye Johnny Preston's office because she was in trouble. She was being blackmailed and some crook was demanding a thousand dollars from her...money she just didn't have. She wanted Preston to get rid of the blackmailer...but when she told him the crook's name was Jack Mahoney, he knew someone had already attempted the job. As Mahoney lay dying in hospital another mobster came in and finshed him off. And with the blackmailer well and truly dead, Preston found himself right back on the case again."

And oh, by the way, don't mix this Peter Chester with the convicted murderer. Nice to see some traffic here, though!

Harry Hobson and the Hank Janson series

I just posted the bibliography of Harry Hobson's outings in the British Hank Janson series on my bibliography blog here. Anyone know anything about Hobson? Nothing much seems to be available.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: Alphaville (1965)

Woody Haut once wrote that both poetry and pulp fiction start from scratch. One film that is right in the middle between poetry and pulp fiction is Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville. In the film the hero kills the evil central computer by reading it Paul Éluard's poetry.

The film stars Eddie Constantine as Lemmy Caution, the hero of cheap French crime flicks, originating from Peter Cheyney's once-popular novels. Alphaville is a mix of parody, pastiche, deconstruction and homage to the cheap genre, timed to the rhythm of the Lemmy Caution's gun, Paul Misraki's pounding but jazzy music, hysterical car drives through the suburbs of Paris. The film is at times pure poetry in motion: the image changes into negative all of sudden, people stagger strangely in the corridors of the central computer building, the lights flicker, the screen is filled with neon-light words.

Seems like Todd Mason isn't doing his usual Tuesday round-up, but I'll post this anyway and add a link to his blog here.

My forthcoming novel about Lovecraft

Monday sees my new book coming out. It's a very short novel or a novella in which horror writer H. P. Lovecraft is the main character. The book, simply called Haamu ("Ghost"), with the subtitle Kertomus Hollywoodista ("A Tale of Hollywood"), is a case of alternate history: in the book, Lovecraft didn't die from cancer in 1937. After he's been miraculously cured, he decides he's had too much of horror stories in his life, sells his house and library and moves on to Hollywood where he desperately tries to break as a screenwriter. He's living in a beat-up hotel and writes pulp stories but in different genres than before (crime, romance, even mainstream stuff) and tries to keep up his letter writing, mainly with Clark Ashton Smith.

The book is fragmentary and shows us glimpses of Lovecraft trying to write and earn his living. There are also some scenes on a desolate block where Lovecraft finds a dead mole. There are also some real-life Hollywood characters, mainly other writers from B-studios, but also director Edgar G. Ulmer whom Lovecraft meets at a party. There's also Earl Peirce Jr., who's also trying to work in Hollywood and comes up with an idea he tries to sell to Lovecraft. Some of the scenes in the book are more surreal and some of them may seem like Lovecraft is hallucinating, and he's not at all times the most reliable narrator. There's no horror in the book, though, and it has no supernatural elements. It's not a genre novel.

What's the idea behind the book? The vision of Lovecraft working in Hollywood has been with me for years. I think someone suggested it almost ten years ago at the Fictionmags e-mail group where I once was an active member (still am, but not a very active one). At the time, the writer (I can't remember who it was) suggested Lovecraft might've worked in Hollywood already in the early twenties, but I decided to make this an alternate history, set in 1941. (One book that had some influence on how the novel turned out was Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays, her novel on Hollywood that I read prior to starting work on Haamu.)

But there's still something I can't really explain in the book - in my own book! Doesn't art exist to make you wondrous? I'm sure many Lovecraft aficionados will tell me that my Lovecraft isn't the real Lovecraft, and I'm sure they're right. There are of course things that I decided should be according to how he was in real life, but then I also decided I don't have to act as if this was the real Lovecraft - after all, he's gone through a sickness that was supposed to kill him. His writing style has changed drastically, but that came also because I didn't want to emulate or parody Lovecraft's unique style - there are comments on this in the text. There are also subtle hints he's not really alive, as if this were a dream, but I won't give anything away.

The cover for Haamu is by Aapo Kukko, a young graphic artist. He's a very capable guy. Coming out from Turbator, Haamu has a very small print run, so be sure to grab it! Any foreign agents reading this? (Insert smiley here.)