My first sale was 25 years ago!

I've been going through my stacks and boxes of paper (the memory boxes, as we say with Elina) as I'm making a donation to the county archive here in Turku, Finland. I found the first newspaper article I ever sold: it was to the magazine my father was working at, the small Leftist newspaper called Satakunnan Työ (The Satakunta Labour News or something to that effect). I was only 14 at the time and I think I pretty much ripped the piece straight out of a mechanics journal as it was about the new car models being developed at the time in the Soviet Union! There's much to laugh about this, but then again I noticed that this was almost exactly 25 years ago, as the article was published in the mid-December 1986!

Later on I started writing movie reviews for the same newspaper (under the moniker Umberto D.*) and honestly I think that was better suited to me than writing about cars, since I still don't have a driver's license!

* Umberto D. being of course the famous neorealist movie by Vittorio de Sica. My dad thought I should use a pseudonym so that noe one could argue they favour relatives in any way. I must've been the last movie critic in Finland to use a pseudonym! They were pretty much in use in the fifties and in the sixties, but by the eighties they were gone - except for me. This car-related clip was published anonymously. 

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: Dragonslayer

Saw Dragonslayer for the first time in my life last Saturday, after seeing its poster 30 years ago and being mesmerized. Fairly entertaining, fairly well made dragon film set in a world that looks like our Middle Ages, but differs from it in many aspects. All in all, a nice fantasy. The only thing I have actually something to complain about is that I didn't buy Peter MacNicol as a sorcerer's apprentice. The climax is a bit blown out as well. Check it out on Wikipedia and IMDb.

More Overlooked Films at Todd Mason's blog.

Merry Christmas, part two

Okay, now that we got back from Elina's parents and I'm back at my drawing board, I can finally post the Christmas drawing my daughter made and wish everyone Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to everyone!

I was going to post a nice Xmas picture my daughter did, but I just made it vanish! We are away on a Christmas trip and I can't get to the picture at the moment, so you'll just have to wait until tomorrow. Merry Christmas until then!

My weirdest book yet

I'll do a double post on this subject, in English and in Finnish.

This has gotta be my strangest book yet, and I've done some pretty strange books. Finland has a presidential election coming up next year, and we have some candidates from bygone days, some who came to politics already in the 1970's. One of them keeps coming up even though no one - but himself - thinks he has any chance to win the election and become the president of Finland. He's called Paavo Väyrynen - there's something sly about him, has always been, and he's open to parody and irony (some seem to think he knows this all too well, but some are not so sure). A friend of mine had an idea with some friends of his over drinks at a bar that one could make a short story collection with this Väyrynen guy and mix him with the Cthulhu Mythos. I heard about this early in the morning some weeks ago, and asked Turbator's Harri Kumpulainen if he wanted to publish such a book. He said yes. The result: the book went to the printers early this morning. It will come out just before the first round of the election. The book is hilarious, ripe with good parodies of both Lovecraft and Väyrynen. Some of the stories should work even after the election and if there's ever going to be a proper Cthulhu anthology in Finnish, I'm seriously hoping some of the best stories in this book are going to be included. - The cover is illustrated and designed by Ossi Hiekkala, who's one of the best classic illustrators working in Finland at the moment.

And now, in Finnish:

Kyse siis kirjasta nimeltä On Suurten Muinaisten aika, joka valmistui parissa viikossa parin kaverin baari-illan aikana saaman idean perusteella: miten yhdistetään Lovecraftin Cthulhu-jumalat ja Väyrynen? Helposti - näin ainakin pitää päätellä siitä, kuinka nopeasti tarinat tulivat. Lisäksi Turbatorin Harri Kumpulainen innostui ideasta välittömästi, sanoi että tehdään ihmeessä, että päästään edes vähän vittuilemaan.

Osa tarinoista on muokattu suoraan jostain tietystä Lovecraftin novellista niin että henkilöt ja paikat on vaihdettu Väyryseen ja Suomeen sopiviksi, osassa on viitseliäämmin kehiteltyjä juonikuvioita. Oli miten oli, kaikki jutut ovat hauskoja ja nautittavia ja sisältävät sopivassa määrin vittuilua Väyryselle (sekä Kekkoselle ja Jyrki Kataiselle ja Sauli Niinistölle ja muille). Jotkut ovat kyllä jo ehtineet sanoa, että tästä sataa äänet laariin Väyryselle - käyttääkseni kulunutta ja ärsyttävää fraasia. Mutta tuli vaaleissa mikä lopputulos tahansa, niin takaan että jutut naurattavat ja viihdyttävät vielä pitkään! Jos joskus tehdään varsinainen Cthulhu-antologia suomeksi, niin lupaan, että tästä tulee siihen juttuja.

Idean toimivuudesta kertoi sekin, että kuvittaja Ossi Hiekkala teki aivan erinomaisen kannen nopealla aikataululla. Kirjan julkkarit on maanantaina 9.1. Kekkosen patsaalla Töölössä, jonka jälkeen iltabileet ovat Lepakkomies-baarissa. Facebook-sivut sekä kirjalle että julkkareille löytyvät täältä ja täältä. Kirja tulee myyntiin varmasti ainakin Akateemiseen sekä nettikauppaan mm. Zum Teufelin sivuille, joten sitä pystyy ostamaan aivan normaalisti sen ilmestyttyä. Painoksesta tullee pieni ja kirjasta keräilyharvinaisuus, joten siihen kannattaa tarttua nopeasti!

Edit: here's the line-up which I forgot to put down earlier:

Juri Nummelin: esipuhe
Vesa Kataisto: Presidentti Väyrysen puhe Ikaalisten pato- ja matologisen tiedeinstituutin avajaisissa marraskuussa 2019
Harri Erkki: Kalevan uskon paluu
Tuomas Saloranta: Kari Tenho Väyrysen tapaus
Vesa Sisättö: Paavo Väyrysen Ääni
Jussi Katajala: Paavo Väyrynen - elvyttäjä
Timo Surkka: Tulette ällistymään
Niko Aslak Peltonen: Varjo Väyrysen yllä
Juha Roiha: Kasvojen kutsu

The latest and last issue of Isku, my crime zine

Here's the link to the fifteenth issue of Isku, the crime zine I've been publishing from 2004. This is also the last issue of the magazine - just can't find the time and energy to do it anymore. The line-up is impressive: I've got Allan Guthrie, James Reasoner, Keith Rawson, Lawrence Schimel and Michael A. Kechula, with some very good Finnish writers thrown in for good measure: Tapani Bagge (with two vintage stories, the other previously unpublished), Tarja Sipiläinen, Tuomas Saloranta, Henry Aho and one writer who wanted to use a pseudonym to go along with his rather risqué story. There's also the Finnish classic Eino Leino with a story from 1903 that might even now be classified as flash fiction!

There's also a short history of Isku (the title means "punch"), but sorry, in Finnish only. Suffice to say that this has been good training for anthologies! And practicing my own writing, as I've published my own stories in Isku as well. (Only in the printed Iskus, though.)

One more point: every issue of Isku has had a translated story, usually from American writers, but occasionally from some British and Scottish as well. I've been dreaming of doing an anthology of those stories. Some of you guys reading this blog: beware, I'll come asking for rights once again!

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: Dracula vs. Frankenstein

Some films deserve to be overlooked and this is one of those: inept, badly acted, lousily written, full of plot holes, inane special effects... you name it. But you know what? Dracula vs. Frankenstein is - at times - funny as hell, especially near the end when Dracula tries to run from the monster of Frankenstein. You can probably guess that there's no escaping the Frankenstein monster, even though he walks slowly with stiff feet. There's also probably the least charismatic Dracula on the silver screen, a guy called Zandor Vorkov. He provides lots of laughs just trying to look menacing. The best part of the film are Regina Carrol's tits. (Carrol was Al Adamson's wife.)

I said "at times". At times this is just quite, quite boring. But the climax, the last 20 minutes, is a blast.

More Overlooked Movies at Todd Mason's blog, Socialist Jazz. Nothing up at the mo', though.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Thomas H. Cook: The Interrogation

I don't really think Thomas H. Cook is a forgotten writer by any means, but it just so happens I read this and was ready to blog about it on Friday, so here goes.

The Interrogation (published in Finnish as Kuulustelu, which is the literal translation) was my first Cook and I liked it quite a bit to keep reading his works. There was something, though, that bothered me - let's call it "over-written". The characters are also a bit over-developed - Cook makes it too sure that the reader gets the idea: "these people are doomed by their fates and their histories." I could do with less.

But the plot is so strong I'm willing to forgive Cook this. This is so intricately plotted  I was mesmerized by the last 40 or 50 pages, when Cook reveals all the layers - and why he's carrying some characters along even though they don't seem to have a place in the story at first! Something you can't help but admire. And the ending is a serious kick in the guts.

More forgotten books at Patti Abbott's blog.

Sequel to Drive

Keith Rawson reveals James Sallis's sequel to Drive is coming out in April from Poisoned Press.

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: My Friend Ivan Lapshin

This is a Soviet film from 1985. I saw it last night for the third time, and still it remains a bit enigmatic. The film tells about a a Soviet policeman somewhere in the rural area in the mid-thirties, just before Stalin's reign of terror really hit the Soviet people. There are only few mentions of any politics in the film, but the viewer still knows what's going to happen to many of the people seen in the film. The film is narrated through fragments, seen mainly by a 9-year old boy who tells the stories in the present time, being already an old man. This is a slow and at times painstakingly fragmentary movie, in which lots of dialogue don't make much sense. People talk over each other and usually about anything else than what the real issue at the given time is.

There's a long scene in which Ivan Lapshin, the policeman of the title, leads a posse to catch the band of criminals in a seedy building somewhere outside the city. It's a great scene, with long takes with hand-held cameras, done in a hectic rhythm in a dirty landscape. There are sudden outburts of stupid violence, but one act of violence outcomes them all. One of the policemen (well, not actually a policeman, but a friend of Ivan Lapshin, who sometimes helps the police out) is stabbed by the gang-leader in an absurd scene, where there's at first not at all clear what's happening. Then Ivan Lapshin hunts the gang-leader down and shoots him in cold blood. It's a great scene and makes one think that My Friend Ivan Lapshin is a rare Soviet nouveau noir film. The whole scene - the whole film - is permeated with a feeling that everyone gets killed in the end.

One of the commentators in IMDb seems to agree with me: "My Friend Ivan Lapshin is not an easy film to watch. It's dark atmosphere of early Stalin years, one might call it soviet film noir. But in contrast to classical American noirs, Lapshin adds much more realistic tones; shot in black and white with hand cameras it sometimes looks like half-documentary, making it closer to french Nouvelle Vogue." This goes well with the fact that there was a big boom of new noir films in the mid-eighties throughout the world (from Body Heat to Almodovar's films) - I just hadn't happened to think of any Soviet film as a nouveau noir. The meaning of the film is hard to discern from the fragments, but this was banned in the Soviet Union for some years and director German had a hard time to find work.

Aleksei German's few films are, for example, the war film "Check-Up on the Roads" (1971) and the film about Stalin's death and its aftermath, Khrustalyov, My Car! (1998), which, much to my dismay, I haven't seen. I don't know if any of these have been released in English language, but if you can find them, be sure to take a look. Here's a good blog post about the film.

More Overlooked Films at Todd Mason's blog.

Tom Piccirilli: The Cold Spot

I'd heard lots of good things about Tom Piccirilli's The Cold Spot, so I was very happy to receive a copy from a friend of mine. He said he didn't like it so much, but clearly he was wrong, since this is an excellent novel.

There was an outburst of books about getaway drivers some years ago: The Cold Spot was accompanied with James Sallis's Drive and Duane Swierczynski's The Wheelman. I managed to get those books translated and published in Finnish by Arktinen Banaani in the ill-fated paperback series (under the titles Kylmä kyyti and Keikkakuski, respectively). I didn't think at the time The Cold Spot should be translated, because the theme resembled so much those of Sallis's and Swierczynski's books, but now, after reading the book, I have to say this should've also been translated.

Piccirilli (can't help those who find the writer's surname a bit funny: "pikkirilli" means the little finger in Finnish) writes mean and lean prose that's sparse, but very touching and deep-felt at the same time. His grip of the material is very professionally handled, there's nothing too much, but also nothing too little. The story is about a young man, called Chase, who's taken into criminal life by his grandfather to work as his getaway driver. Still a teenager, Chase becomes very good at his job, but there are serious doubts when his grandfather kills one of his gang members, seemingly without a reason. What follows is very touching and intense. The theme of revenge doesn't in the end become the defense of revenge, nor the glorification of violence and vigilantism.

My only gripe with the book is that I didn't buy the fact the main character's deceased father was a professor of literature. And not just that, I also didn't see why it was necessary. There's a scene in which Chase mentions some classic modernist plays, but that also felt a bit unnecessary. Still, recommended highly. The book has evolved into a series: this was followed by The Coldest Mile, and there's still The Cold and the Dead coming.

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: The Sadist

I have a friend, a Finnish movie critic who started his writing career already in the late fifties, going on during all these years (he's now seventy, but he still occasionally contributes). He's an aficionado of old American B movies, and he's told many fascinating stories about films he's seen already when they were new. Surprisingly many films of this kind were brought to Finland in the sixties and seventies - many that are not on DVD even now!

One of these once rare films seems to have been available for some time now: James Landis's The Sadist from 1963. My critic friend once told me that he saw the film when it was banned in Finland (seems like this took place in 1967), but the distributor held a press viewing for those who were interested. The print was probably demolished after that. And my friend said he really liked the uncompromising little thriller, even though the Finnish censors had deemed it immoral. I was of course interested, and I was very pleased when another friend of mine lent me the pretty new DVD of the film. I was pleasantly surprised: the film still seems quite uncompromising, although made on a minuscule budget.

The Sadist is the first film that deals with Charlie Starkweather, who was made famous by Terrence Malick in Badlands. And he's played by Arch Hall, Jr. of all people! Hell, he even looks like Charlie Starkweather! Hall overacts, but manages still - or just because of that - to be scary as can be. He giggles, mumbles, grins - all the way down to hell. His girlfriend says almost nothing during the film - she whispers some lines into Hall's ear, but the rest of the time she just giggles. It's scary! The rest of the bunch - the normal folks - is not so good, but they are manageable.

The Sadist seems an important precursor to films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (and, Todd, I know you don't like the film!). There are only shrieks and screams on the soundtrack for the last ten or fifteen minutes - and the ending is very downbeat, foreshadowing what will happen in Tobe Hooper's film ten years later.

Crude, but effective, shot in black-and-white with verve by young Vilmos Zsigmond, ten years before Deliverance and The Long Goodbye (what a career the man had!), The Sadist is highly recommended if you like your thrillers gritty and dark.

More Tuesday films at Todd Mason's blog.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Carter Brown: The Flagellator

I thought this would be more fun, but at times it felt almost a serious PI novel, which is a pity, since this is not what we expect from a Carter Brown novel, is it? And as a serious PI novel The Flagellator just doesn't work. It's not very well plotted, the solution comes and goes a bit too quickly, and there's just too much talk here and there. And the point where Rick Holman seriously thinks about raping a woman who seems to be resisting his suggestions is just plain awful. (Wouldn't have necessarily to be, but hey, Holman is a clean-cut hero!) It's great, though, that Carter Brown has come up with a name Theo Altman for a well-known art film director! There's not much, if any, flagging in the book.

Great cover, though, as one would expect from Robert McGinnis. Even the post-expressionistic painting on the background is good! The cover was used in Finland in a Nick Carter book, here's a link to the Finnish translation of The Flagellator. Might be the original Australian cover, for all I know. The Finnish title: "The Queen of Sex".

Here's a site on Carter Brown, better than his Wikipedia entry. More Forgotten Books here.

Aino Kallas: The Wolf's Bride

I read this small classic of Finnish literature for the first time last week. It was originally published in 1928 and has been practically the only classic werewolf story written in Finnish language. Many friends of the book don't necessarily see it as horror. I should say it fits the genre bill, but I won't force my view down anyone's throat. The most important aspect of the story is that it's a love story, a story of a forester's wife, called Aalo, who can assume a wolf's shape and is killed in the end by her husband's silver bullet.

In Sudenmorsian/The Wolf's Bride Aino Kallas (the link is in English) uses archaic language of the 17th century and the story takes the form of a ballad, seen by an outsider, who shares his/her theological views on the side. The narrator seems to be well-educated, since he/she (most certainly "he") can talk about werewolves and the studies that's been made on them. Kallas's language and narration make a two-fold statement: while the narration and the use of old language could've been possible only in the modernist era, it also makes sure that The Wolf's Bride isn't easily dated. It still feels fresh and packs quite a punch. It's also a very beautiful story of an unfulfilled love.

The story was translated in English as early as 1930, by Alex Matson, a Finnish literary scholar and world-traveller, but the first (and only) edition from Jonathan Cape seems to be very rare: there's only one copy for measly 550 dollars on Abebooks. You can read the more current translation easily in The Dedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy where the whole story is contained in. Most highly recommended. (Especially since the Dedalus book contains Mika Waltari's great early sword-and-sorcery story "Island of the Setting Sun" from 1926 that could've easily been published in the pages of The Magic Carpet or The Weird Tales.)

The picture above is from a high-literary paperback series called Delfiini (Dolphin) in 1979. I believe the cover illo is by Kosti Antikainen, will correct if turns out I was wrong.

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: Romeo Is Bleeding

Let's make it a short one: a kinky, but too quirkily told and narrated neo-noir in which Lena Olin has never been sexier than when demanding Gary Oldman prepares her a death certificate. More details here.

As I've been having problems with my back, I also watched one other film and tried to watch yet another: Gorky Park (suffered greatly from, well, lots of things, mainly from the stiff direction from Michael Apted and the stiff script by Dennis Potter) and Deadfall by Christopher Coppola. The latter one suffered greatly from being amateurish-looking hogwash. Lasted about 15 minutes.

More films here.

New book out: Marton Taiga's two pulp serials

I'm sure you are all getting tired of this (and I don't even much like blogs that are all about advertising the bloggers' own books!), but here's the cover for my new book. Calling it "my book" might be a bit of a stretch, but here goes nevertheless: it's a collection of two novella-length serials (both somewhat under 30,000 words) by the Finnish pulp fiction great Marton Taiga, put together by me. The book has also my lengthy foreword, and as an appendix the book also contains the forewords Taiga wrote for the readers that started the stories from the middle.

The serials in the book are called "Osiriksen sormus/The Ring of Osiris" (1934) and "Viiden minuutin ikuisuus/The Five-Minute Eternity" (1936). Only the latter has previously been published in book form, in 1945. Both are about time-travel, in "Osiriksen sormus" the lead character is taken to the ancient Egypt.

The cover is by Anssi Rauhala who's done some great covers for Turbator. See for yourself: Sherlock Holmes, Tapani Bagge, Tapani Maskula.

Working my ass off

I did recently a post about books I've had a hand in and that have appeared within this Fall. I mentioned therein some of the books that are still going to be published before Christmas. I seem to have forgotten some, so here goes again:

A collection of early Finnish horror stories (for Faros). This includes some dozen horror stories, mainly from the 19th century, but also some from the early 20th century, from such writers as Aleksis Kivi, Jaakko Juteini, Zacharias Topelius, Larin-Kyösti and Kyösti Wilkuna (he has four stories in this!). This was a fun book to do, even though the process has been long - I talked about this with the publisher already two (or maybe even three) years ago. This will come out as a small paperback under the title Hallusinatsioneja (Hallucinations; the title of a story by Wilkuna).

A book that compiles two long serials by the all-time great Finnish pulp writer, Marton Taiga (real name: Martti Löfberg; the link is in English, so take a look). The both stories are from the thirties and they are about time-travelling and take place in the antique world. One of the stories, Viiden minuutin ikuisuus (The Five-Minute Eternity) was published as a book in 1945, but the other one, "Osiriksen sormus" ("The Ring of Osiris"), has never been published in a book form. This includes also my foreword; comes out from Turbator. This has a cover illo by the great Anssi Rauhala, but I haven't actually seen that one yet.

I also edited a collection of erotic stories, the theme being sadomasochistic sex. (See the picture.) The book's title translates as The Agony and the Ecstacy. I grabbed the idea, when the publisher (Turbator, once again) threw a joke in the air: "If the regular erotica doesn't sell, we have to do a book about sadomasochism!" From this joke I think I developed a pretty good line-up, with some startlingly erotic stories (especially one by Essi Tammimaa, who's a revered novelist in her own right) and even some pretty deep ones, like the historical one by Jukka Laajarinne, who's been gaining fame as a novelist who's not afraid to try something new. There's also a story by one Mikael X. Messi, but you'll have to dig deeper if you want to know who that is. (Insert smiley here.) The striking cover is done by Tendril, who also has a story in this. See this link for more pictures; not safe for work!

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: The Jericho Mile

Michael Mann is probably one of the most overrated directors working nowadays. Mind you, I've liked almost everyone of his films (of those I've seen), but I just can't see him as the visionary he's said to be. There are auteurist touches in his films, sure, but then again the films seem a bit empty to me. If there's a message or some such, I don't think it's very interesting.

So, what's the theme in Mann's first feature-length film, the prison film The Jericho Mile? Do what you want to do? Concentrate on what's best for you? Don't mind others? Be yourself? C'mon! There are interesting minor themes, like the political organizing of the prison inmates or the story of a black inmate who's been blackmailed to smuggle drugs into the prison, but the main story is thematically not so interesting.

It is touching, though, and I even wept a tear near the end. Peter Strauss is a bit autistic guy who just runs. He runs over the prison yard, over and over again, and he's very, very fast. The prison administration wants him to run officially, to run for olympics. There are two climactic running scenes, which are very exciting. Strauss has killed his dad years ago and he's sentenced for life. The film doesn't go much into that, but the scenes about it enforce the man's gotta what a man's gotta do ideology of Mann.

But don't get me wrong: for its low budget and the use of non-actors (many of them being inmates of the Folsom Prison), it's a very well-made and good-looking film. Mann has a very good feel for realism that looks good and goes beyond the mere recording, but won't evolve into a mere style, either.

The Jericho Mile was originally a TV film, but it was released theatrically in Europe and made its way into Finland as well. I saw it last night at the screening of the Finnish Film Archive. There are some scenes that have a different stock feel to them, maybe they are missing from the original TV print and added in only the European 35 mm print, who knows. The VHS and DVD releases seem to be rare, so this was a good occasion to see the film.

More Overlooked Films here.

Margaret Millar back in print!

Hadn't realized Beast in View, one of Margaret Millar's fine crime novels, is back in print from Orion Books!

William Gibson on Chandler and Hammett

This quote from a recent interview was posted to the Rara-Avis e-mail list:

GIBSON
I was never much of a Raymond Chandler fan, either.

INTERVIEWER

Why not?

GIBSON
When science fiction finally got literary naturalism, it got it via the noir detective novel, which is an often decadent offspring of nineteenth-century naturalism. Noir is one of the places that the investigative, analytic, literary impulse went in America. The Goncourt brothers set out to investigate sex and money and power, and many years later, in America, you wind up with Chandler doing something very similar, though highly stylized and with a very different agenda. I always had a feeling that Chandler’s puritanism got in the way, and I was never quite as taken with the language as true Chandler fans seem to be. I distrusted Marlow as a narrator. He wasn’t someone I wanted to meet, and I didn’t find him sympathetic—in large part because Chandler, whom I didn’t trust either, evidently did find him sympathetic.

But I trusted Dashiell Hammett. It felt to me that Hammett was Chandler’s ancestor, even though they were really contemporaries. Chandler civilized it, but Hammett invented it. With Hammett I felt that the author was open to the world in a way Chandler never seems to me to be.

The whole interview here.

Some news from the literary front

October is traditionally the month of book fairs in Finland. The first weekend has the book fair in Turku (where I live) and the last weekend has the Helsinki fair. I of course attended both and am now exhausted after the Helsinki experience. It was fun, though. I made a deal with a publisher about a collection of articles I've been working on and off for some years now, and I heard that there's been some foreign interest in Verenhimo (Blood Lust), the vampire anthology that came out early this year!

At the Turku fair two books saw the light of day that had some of my stuff in it. The first one was Åbsurdistiska berättelser, a small collection of absurdist short stories (which is the title translated) that take place in Turku (Åbo in Swedish, hence the name). The book was published by Turbator, one of my most important publishers, and it came out only in Swedish that's the second official language in Finland and an important minority language in Turku. My story is a bit fairytalish, but with a political bent. The second one was a massive collection of new Finnish experimental poetry called Vastakaanon (Anti-Canon). I have two poems in it that are of the found variety and they have actually something to do with this blog! I have a series of poems made with the same theme, I might do a small pamphlet with them later on.

Will the absurdist short story ever be published in Finnish? Time will tell, but I've been thinking I'll do a collection of absurdist short stories some day. I already have four published and one in the works, so it wouldn't be hard to complete the book. One of these days...

As for some other news: I just completed a small collection of early Finnish horror short stories. It should come out in November from Faros. The architectural guide to Turku that I've been working on for at least a year and a half (or at least it feels like it!) is now almost going to the printers, my colleague is working on the last corrections. I'm not sure whether it makes it before Christmas, which would be a pity. I'm not sure either whether my Actual First Novel ("actual" in the sense of being published by someone else than me) makes it before Christmas, but I'll keep you posted.

And oh, here's a nice review (in Finnish, of course) of the outdoors anthology I edited earlier this year.

What else? You think that's enough? This is again one of those instances where I think I should've been working harder. Oh, there's this, which I mentioned in passing.

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: Série noire

Alain Corneau is one of the most unsung and underrated French directors. He started his career in the early seventies with gritty crime films, like Police Python 357 (1976). Série noire (1979) is based on Jim Thompson's Hell of a Woman and I think it's a seminal film: it's the first in the new wave Jim Thompson film versions. (I think Burt Kennedy's The Killer Inside Me was still old wave. Though I have never seen it.) After Série noire came Coup de torchon in 1981 and then, some years later, The Kill-Off, After Dark, My Sweet and The Grifters, all in 1990.

Corneau's film is a quite slow-moving, but in the end an almost diabolically hysteric story of the downward spiral we so much love about Thompson's work. Patrick Dewaere jumps around like Woody Woodpecker on speed and gets sudden spurts of violence. This is the best part in Corneau's film - he handles arbitrary violence very well, with great verve. Violence is never portrayed as funny, but still the chaotic killings are the funniest parts in the film (especially when Dewaere places the gun in the wrong dead man's hand). The ending is very cruel, as befits a Jim Thompson filmatization.

The French title of course refers to the legendary book series Série noire that had almost all the important American and British hardboiled and noir writers. In English-speaking markets, the film was called... um, actually can't find that tidbit. Maybe it's never been shown in the English-speaking countries. That's impossible!

More overlooked films here.

And now for something completely different: a Swiss kids' comic book

I found this comic book aimed for children of say 5-10 years in a book shop in the small town of Savonlinna last summer. I'd never heard of it, so I bought it without a blink of an eye. When I got back home (okay, I did it already in the car with my phone), I checked from the web what this was all about. Jopi, globally known as Globi, was a creation of Swiss comic artist Robert Lips, for whom there's a Wikipedia article in German and an entry in Lambiek.net in English. There are three other Jopi books published in Finnish and I've never seen any of them (unless as a kid and completely forgotten them). This one, called "Globi Travels All Over the World", was published by the now defunct Weilin + Göös in 1982. There were three others: Eläköön Jopi, lasten ystävä! ("Long Live Globi, the Friend of Children!"), Jopi sirkuksessa ("Globi in Circus") and Jopi maanviljelijänä ("Globi the Farmer"). I showed this to a friend of mine, who's a writer and critic specializing in the comic book history, and he'd never seen any of these.

This is funny stuff, with naïve and heart-warming humour, with a touch of absurd on the side. Jopi reminds me a lot of my all-time favourite, Rasmus Nalle (aka Rasmus Klump, as he's known in his origin country, Denmark). Oh, here's another site about Rasmus in English.

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: The New York Ripper

I saw this classic nasty last night and I must say I was shocked. Some of the killing scenes are very gruesome, almost to the point of being unwatchable.

But then again Lucio Fulci's The New York Ripper (1982) is also a quite well-made thriller or a giallo, as they say in Italy. This one is about a serial killer who's specialized in pretty young women and who talks in a Donald Duck voice, quacking over the phone, yapping to the police. The police are as clueless as can be and get a psychiatric to help profile the killer. Some of the scenes with the cops and the psychiatric are a bit boring, feels almost like there's no real police work being done.

Fulci has a knack for diverting the viewer and also for some great-looking chasing and killing scenes, and he clearly knows what fetishes are all about: some of the scenes before the killings are actually quite erotic and even sexy. Then again, Fulci spoils everything by showing something like a woman's nipple sliced in half. (I think that's the worst scene in the film full of other scenes like it.) Is there some sort of repention going on in here? Fulci feels ashamed for wanting to show beautiful women enjoying sex, jerking off in public, giving fingers to middle-aged men, and then has them slowly and mercilessly butchered? You know, Fulci comes from a deeply Catholic country...

Whatever, this is an interesting and intriguing film, minus the stupid psychoanalytic babble solution in the end. In Finland this was banned from the start, but the print of the film has remained in the archives of the Finnish Film Archive - it was in a beautiful shape.

The original uncut trailer is not safe for work and certainly not for minors:

More Overlooked Films here.

Drive, the film

James Sallis's Drive came out from a small publisher in 2005. It was picked by up for a reprint by a big publisher in 2006. I read it the same year and fell in love. Drive was translated in Finnish, due to my efforts, in 2009 under the title Kylmä kyyti. Already at that time, we knew there were plans of the movie based on the book (with Hugh Jackman starring), but we had to wait until this year to finally get the film.

And what a movie it is! Surely handled, with a very cool, detached style, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, a Danish filmmaker whose Pusher trilogy is one of the great crime classics of the late 20th and early 21st century. This is his first Hollywood movie, and there's a sort of Nordic melancholy to it. The action scenes are great being somewhat elliptic, with something always left out. There are some very good actors in the film, with Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman rising above the others. Ryan Gosling who's replaced Jackman looks very neat in his scorpio jacket, well-fitting skinny jeans and driver's gloves. Visually the film's almost like the eighties blown to heaven, the feeling that's enhanced by the use of very cool eighties' kind of synth pop in the soundtrack. The driving scenes are really stylish, almost totally without a sound. 

Yet I was somewhat disappointed. Sallis's novel is a ballad of great beauty, love and sadness, yet Winding Refn really can't portray these feelings with quite the same verve as he does loneliness and compulsion. The results are too mild, too conventional. It's a serious drawback for the film. 

But I have to give credit to the screenwriter Hossein Amini making a clear narrative out of Sallis's non-chronological novel. I felt, though, the film lacked something when the story was made linear. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it might have something to do with the metafictional quality of Sallis's novel. The film also lacks what might be the most superficial aspect of Sallis's book, the dropping of the names of other writers, like Borges and Cervantes. They actually serve a purpose in the book that's more intellectual than the film (and is not ashamed to show it), but maybe luckily they were dropped out from the film. 

With those fell something else, though. I really love the novel's ending, the words with which it transforms into a ballad, a story of a heroic bandit who managed to right some wrongs and who, after that, rose to mythic heights, but still feels having a loss, missing something he once loved or cared for. Let me quote directly from Sallis himself (mind you, this is a spoiler, so if you haven't read the book or seen the film, beware!):

"Far from the end for Driver, this. In years to come, years before he went down at three a.m. on a clear, cool morning in a Tijuana bar, years before Manny Gilden turned his life into a movie, there'd be other killings, other bodies. 

Bernie Rose was the only one he ever mourned." 

(You know, Sallis is developing a sequel to Drive. Those are the words he can hang on to.) 

So maybe Winding Refn's film is the film Manny Gilden (a scriptwriter in the book, left out from the film) did? Then again, I was also a bit shocked to be reminded that there's a bond between Bernie Rose and Driver, the aspect that the film never mentions. Well, films based on books don't have to have the same things in them, but I thought this particular aspect is one of the things that makes Sallis's book so great.

Animated version of John Carter of Mars

Warner animator Bob Clampett and John Coleman Burroughs, Edgar Rice Burroughs's son, tried to develop a weekly animated series based on ERB's Mars novels. Nothing came of it, except for these short sequences, commented by Clampett himself.

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: The Sicilian

Already see the pattern? Again an interesting, but flawed film. This time it's Michael Cimino's The Sicilian, one of his last big films before a many years' hiatus. This is a very handsome, but pretty confusing film, with a too convoluted storyline about Salvatore Giuliano, a Sicilian rebel who fights the local aristocracy over the lands and steps on the toes of the Mafia.

Gore Vidal supposedly wrote the script for this, but Steve Shagan rewrote it either too heavily or too lightly. There's too much stuff that doesn't make much sense. The theme of an innocent man getting mixed in the web of politics and corruption and getting corrupted himself is always interesting, though. One would like to compare this to the earlier Italian version, Salvatore Giuliano, directed by Leftist Francesco Rosi, but I haven't seen that myself. The biggest drawback in Cimino's film is that it stars Christopher Lambert. The guy is very handsome, but can't act shit. Joss Ackland steals every scene he's in. I'd hoped John Turturro would've been given a better role as Giuliano's brother. Same goes for Terence Stamp, whose prince doesn't have a lot to do, even though I'd like to think Cimino would've liked to deal with him more. The larger social themes don't much show here.

I watched this (this too!) on VHS, but luckily the version I'd found was the director's version that lasts 2:11 or something like that. This supposedly makes more sense than the original version shown in cinema (I'd seen that and even written a review of it, but can't remember much of it). Cimino's original edit is said to have been 150 minutes. Seems like a pattern for Cimino.

More Overlooked Films at Todd Mason's blog.

Scott Phillips: The Adjustment

Scott Phillips's The Ice Harvest has been one of my favourite books for a long time and I saw to it that it was translated in Finnish. Everyone who's read it (not that many people, gotta admit) has liked it. I was thrilled to read Phillips's latest, The Adjustment that's just out from . And it's a great book. It's probably not as catchy as The Ice Harvest, as it's not as plot-driven as the previous book, but it's still just as gripping.

Wayne Ogden, famous from The Ice Harvest's very peculiar prequel-cum-sequel, The Walkaway (a book I liked very much, but it was pretty tough for me to get into, I don't know why), is the very dubious hero of the new novel, an asshole who hates almost everyone and is very lovable for that. You cannot but share his cynic world view, since everyone else in the book is an asshole too, but they are also stupid or boring. Wayne works for a small-town big boss, an alcoholic old man whose only joy in life is fuck young women in a brothel. At the same time Wayne hates his good-looking wife who's pregnant (the fact that Wayne very much hates) and fucks other women. And at the same time he gets hassled by an unknown dude who seems to know something about his past in the war-time Europe when he was a supply surge (I happen to know that "Supply Sarge" was Phillips's original title for the book) pimping and smuggling and selling army stuff.

This is wonderful stuff, you know. Very curtly told, the dialogue is snappy and funny without being overtly so, the downward spiral with occasional bursts of random violence grabs you in a chilling way - all this makes The Adjustment very, very entertaining. Highly recommended.

How can someone write this beautifully?

"He is awake, with no idea what time it maybe, or whether, really, he has slept at all. He sleeps poorly these days. Strange, too, how time's become a blur. At first there's no reason to know the time of day, then days themselves give way, finally years. Till only the change of seasons marks another passage, another decline. To remember, he has to think back to where he lived, what rented room or cheap apartment in Gary, Gretna, Memphis, Seattle."

The first paragraph of James Sallis's A Killer Is Dying, not yet published.

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: Weeds

This is not the TV show, you know, this is the Nick Nolte film from 1987 that has never been released on DVD. Weeds is an interesting, if flawed film (for some reason or another, all my Tuesday picks are interesting, but not very good films) about Nolte who runs an absurdist theater show with his prison mates. Nolte lifts stuff heavily from Jean Genet and almost gets caught.

The major flaw in the film is that you never believe what's happening. The first book Nolte reads is shown to be War & Peace and soon he moves on to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and the afore-mentioned Genet and the next thing he's an intellectual making theater that's straight out of Sartre and others. The inmates also happen to be great singers and musicians and write their own catchy songs. C'mon! The film is said to be based on reality, but there's no guarantee that this makes believable stories. And Weeds, while occasionally touching, just isn't believable.

How come was I able to see this even when it's not on DVD? I bought an old VHS cassette from a thrift store. I've also seen this on VHS, one of the early films by the director, John Hancock.

More Overlooked Films here.

Charles Ardai talks about the lost Cain

Duane Swierczynski talks about the recently found James M. Cain novel with Charles Ardai. Take a look here.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Juri Nummelin: Outoa huminaa, Joe Novak

I was going through bookshelves to put away some books I don't really need and I found my first novel, the self-published Outoa huminaa, Joe Novak ("It's a Weird Buzz, Joe Novak" or some such in English). I read it and, you know what, it's not half bad. Had someone else written the book, I would've really liked it. I read the whole book (it's only some 90 pages though) in one sitting. There were some clumsy sentences in it, but it was more like an ARC that I read, not the finished product, so I may have cleared those parts. Is there more of this kind of stuff available, short, breezy private eye or other crime novels that have an air of absurdity hovering above them? I've been calling this a mix between Carter Brown and David Lynch.

I was going to skip doing more Joe Novaks, but seems like I've enjoyed doing this so much, I'll have to rethink my decision.

More Forgotten Books at Patti Abbott's blog here.

George "Jerry Cotton" Nader's gay porn sci-fi novel

James Reasoner has written about the German pulp series (or Romanhäfte, as the actual term is) in his blog here and here (and here). Just today a friend of mine posted this on Facebook: the 1979 cover for George Nader's science fiction novel Chrome that's about the gay robots of the future! (Or some such, I'm not actually quite sure.) The cover is, shall we say, weirdish - and not very erotic.

And just what does this have to do with Jerry Cotton, you ask. Well, George Nader was the guy who played Jerry Cotton in the German-financed and German-directed movies in the sixties and seventies. I once tried to watch one, but couldn't get very far.

Kjell Westö: Lang (A Finnish crime novel)

Well, not actually a crime novel per se, more like a mainstream novel with a crime in its center. Kjell Westö's (from the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland) Lang (2002) is a tale of a celebrity writer and talk-show host who gets dragged down into a strange ménage à trois with a young woman, who has a 6-year old boy, and the son's father, a young man with a criminal bent. Seems like the woman and her former lover are still engaged in a sadomasochistic relationship that ends up in a tragic killing.

Westö tackles many issues, ranging from the verbal abuse that the talk-show host engages upon his interviewees to the larger social abuse the rich engage upon the poor, and the society of the spectacle.  This is all quite interesting and the book has a pretty good narrative drive, but Westö's style is overwritten. This could've benefited of being 40-50 pages shorter, though the last 50 pages were very good.

I don't know if this is translated in English (or any other language the readers of this blog master), but it might work in other languages, as it's not a typically Finnish novel. The themes are pretty global and the narrative is full of urbanisms.

Edit: my friend Tapani Bagge says this novel has been translated in English, he remembers seeing a review of it in CrimeTime magazine. Anyone? 

Big Sleep Books: Duane Swiercznyski's "Expiration Date" Winner of 2...

Big Sleep Books: Duane Swiercznyski's "Expiration Date" Winner of 2...: Congratulations to Duane Swierczynski for winning the 2011 Best Paperback Original Anthony Award . The Anthony Awards are given at each a...

Lost James M. Cain novel rediscovered

Hard Case Crime is going to publish an unpublished novel by James M. Cain! Take a look here.

Massimo Carlotto: The Goodbye Kiss

I read a review of this books somewhere on-line (can't remember where; I think it must've been Bookgasm, but can't find that one) saying that the protagonist of the book is a much more sleazier scumbag than anyone Jim Thompson ever wrote about. I knew at that instant I gotta have the book.

And it was worth every cent. Massimo Carlotto throws a very lean and mean crime novel, clocking at 144 pages, and you hate all the characters at every step they make, every word they utter. You can't root for these guys, but you just can't turn your eyes away. Carlotto says in an interview that he's not interested in good guys winning, and it clearly shows. It's not easy to say whether the antihero of The Goodbye Kiss wins or loses, though he's still alive in the end, but some confusion is always for good. The violent bits are nasty, but they are over very quickly, with an effective matter-of-fact style. In fact, what makes this so chilling that while Jim Thompson used a non-reliable narrator you just have to believe everything Carlotto's antihero Giorgio Pellegrini says. There's no going back to deception of thinking "maybe he's a looney".

We've been planning a trip to Italy for a week next summer. Reading Carlotto's book I said to Elina: "Seems like anything you do in Italy your money will go to some criminal psychopath." Wonderful stuff! Don't let the sunny feelgood cover fool you.

Nota bene: there's a movie made from The Goodbye Kiss, getting quite mixed reviews from the IMDb crowd. Anyone seen it?

The Finnish Film Archive screenings

I'm just advertising here: the Finnish Film Archive starts its series here in Turku after the summer break. Here's what we have to offer this fall:

Kansallisen audiovisuaalisen arkiston Turun sarja, syksy 2011
Puutarhakatu 1:n auditorio
Näytökset maanantaisin klo 19.00
Liput 5 e / näytös

10.10. Federico Fellini: Vetelehtijät (I vitelloni/Dagdrivarna), Italia/Ranska 1953 • Franco Fabrizi, Franco Interlenghi, Leonora Ruffo, Alberto Sordi • musiikki Nino Rota • suom. tekstit/svenska texter • K15 • 104 min •

17.10. Lucio Fulci: The New York Ripper (Lo squartatore di New York), Italia 1982 • Jack Hedley, Almantha Keller, Paolo Malco • English version • K18 • 90 min

24.10. Alain Corneau: Piru perii omansa (Série noire/Mordlysten), Ranska 1979 • Patrick Dewaere, Myriam Boyer, Bernard Blier • käsikirjoitus Georges Pérec – Jim Thompsonin romaanista Piru perii omansa / A Hell of a Woman • suom. tekstit/svenska texter • K15 • 114 min

31.10. Carl Th. Dreyer: Vihan päivä (Vredens dag), Tanska 1943 • Thorkild Roose, Lisbeth Movin, Sigrid Neiiendam, Preben Lerdorff Rye • käsikirjoitus Mogens Skot-Hansen – Hans-Wiers Jenssenin romaanista ja näytelmästä Anne Pedersdotter • suom. tekstit • S • 95 min

7.11. Michael Mann: Veren maku suussa (The Jericho Mile/Blodsmak i munnen), USA 1979 • Peter Strauss, Richard Lawson, Roger E. Mosley • käsikirjoitus Patrick J. Nolan • suom. tekstit/svenska texter • K15 • 98 min

14.11. Dušan Makavejev: Montenegro eli helmiä ja herjoja (Montenegro, eller Pärlor och svin), Ruotsi/UK 1981 • Susan Anspach, Erland Josephson, Per Oscarsson • English version • suom. tekstit/svenska texter • K15 • 97 min

21.11. Gennadi Kazanski & Vladimir Tshebotarjov: Amfibiomies (Tshelovek-amfibija/Havsdjävulen), Neuvostoliitto 1962 • Vladimir Korenev, Anastasija Vertinskaja, Mihail Kozakov • suom. tekstit/svenska texter • S • 82 min

28.11. Eric Rohmer: Leijonan merkki (Le Signe du lion/I lejonets tecken), Ranska 1959 • Jess Hahn, Van Doude, Michèle Girardon • suom. tekstit/svenska texter • S • 103 min

5.12. Aleksei German: Ystäväni Ivan Lapshin (Moi drug Ivan Lapshin/Min vän Ivan Lapshin), Neuvostoliitto 1984 • Andrei Boltnev, Nina Ruslanova, Andrei Mironov • suom. tekstit/svenska texter • K15 • 99 min

12.12. Al Adamson: Dracula vs. Frankenstein (Verimessu/Blodsmässa), USA 1971 • Carroll J. Naish, Lon Chaney, Zondor Vorkov • suom. tekstit/svenska texter • K15 • 89 min

14.12. Emir Kusturica: Isä on työmatkalla (Otac na sluzbenom putu/Pappa är på affärsresa), Jugoslavia 1985 • Moreno De Bartolli, Miki Manojlovic, Mirjana Karanovic • suom. tekstit/svenska texter • K7 • 136 min

19.12. David Lynch: The Straight Story USA/Ranska/UK 1999 • Richard Farnsworth, Sissy Spacek, Harry Dean Stanton • kuvaus Freddie Francis • musiikki Angelo Badalamenti • suom. tekstit/svenska texter • S • 113 min

David Corbett's Do They Know I'm Running?

I've been reading David Corbett's articulate and interesting posts on the Rara-Avis e-mail list for some time now and many people on the list have recommended his books, so I thought I'd give one a try. Do They Know I'm Running? is a very serious crime novel, almost more like a mainstream novel (he's being compared to Graham Greene in the back copy), and it touches very serious issues with painstaking details and social criticism.

The book is set in Central America and the story involves hijacking a possible Muslim terrorist into the USA. This is being done with the help of some Salvadorans who are anxious to make a better living up north. The global politics and the Mexican drug lords step into the game and the result is ugly.

As I said, the book is serious. It's almost too serious. It's also a bit too long and there are too many characters, I at least lost track. Well, I started this when I was sick... I also had some trouble getting accustomed to Corbett's literary, somewhat spastic style, but there were many moments of greatness and some beautiful prose. Some of the action scenes were very good too. Corbett manages also to show how even the baddest of the people are usually victims and results of the circumstances. Recommended, but not for fans of more pulpish stuff.

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: The Big Brass Ring

The Big Brass Ring has been getting lots of bad reviews in IMDb, and I can easily understand them, since they are right about many things: the story is convoluted, the character development is hazy, the scenes are dark and the actors don't do much.

But that's because the film-makers wanted it that way. At least that's how I saw the movie. It's made from the last script Orson Welles did, with his companion Oja Kodar, and the director is George Hickenlooper, an interesting film-maker in his own right. (Oh, he died last year! I hadn't realized!) The story is about two indie candidates running for guvernor in a Southern state. William Hurt is the good guy of the two, but he seems to have a secret. It's unraveled slowly, through flashbacks that are not in chronological order.

There are real problems in the film (I don't think a convoluted story or dark scenes are real problems), and that's the fact you can't really empathize with these people. They are pretty much too slight, too far away, too distant, and that's something that I don't think the film-makers (nor Welles in his script) wanted to do. It's just a flaw in the film. Some of the actors don't have much to do, like Irene Jacob, whose journalist character is a bit stiff. One of the problems is also that there's a feeling of undecidedness. In the beginning the film feels like it's taking place sometime in the 1960's, before the civil rights movement and all that, but still it takes place in the present time. This is confusing, since the story itself and the central characters could be better suited to the sixties, as some of them are almost straight out of such films as A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or The Chase (Arthur Penn's seminal small town film).

As for Hickenlooper, I've also seen his Persons Unknown, an interesting crime film with Joe Mantegna, Naomi Watts and Kelly Lynch.

The Big Brass Ring is also interesting, but probably meant for Orson Welles completists only. At IMDb there's an interesting comment from the script writer, F.X. Feeney. Welles's script seems to have been published as a book.

More Overlooked Films at Todd Mason's blog.

Hard Case Crime dress - and a beauty in high heels!

Fashion designer Hally McGehean will be premiering her first wearable art collection during New York Fashion Week in a two-part fashion event in the Meatpacking District and SoHo. Among her ten featured designs of the show, McGehean will debut her Hard Case Crime dress. The Hard Case Crime dress is made out of nearly 1,000 miniature reproductions of covers from the award-winning Hard Case Crime line of retro-styled paperback crime novels. The skirt features every cover ever published in the series, including works by writers like Stephen King and Mickey Spillane, while the daring backless top is composed of interleaved copies of the cover of BABY MOLL by John Farris, whose cover was painted for Hard Case Crime by the legendary illustrator Robert McGinnis (whose other work includes the movie posters for “Breakfast At Tiffany’s” and the original Sean Connery James Bond movies in the 1960s). The outfit’s oversized belt features another McGinnis original, his rare horizontal cover painting for LOSERS LIVE LONGER by Russell Atwood.

EVENT DETAILS:
Hally McGehean - Pop Up Pop Art Fashion Event
Monday, September 12, 2011
Part One: The Highline Runway Walk, Gansevoort Plaza, Gansevoort & Washington Sts., 5pm
Part Two: Boutique Showing of Collection, SoHo Loft Gallery, 180 Lafayette St, 6th Fl 7-9pm

Kevin Wignall's vampire trilogy

Huh, Kevin Wignall and vampires? Sounds quite an unlikely combination, you say? The writer of noir masterpieces Who Is Conrad Hirst? and Among the Dead? Well, it's happened: Blood is just out, under Kevin's nom de blume, KJ Wignall, and it's quite excellent, in a way the more recent vampire doorstoppers aren't.

There's a funny anecdote in this: Kevin said to me when he came to Finland that he wrote the trilogy several years ago, but at the time he was told that no one's interested in vampires anymore. But then we all know what happened and Kevin sold the trilogy. And Blood's pretty damn good! It's aimed at teenage readers, but I've read lots less mature horror novels. This is full of magic and action (and even some downright scary moments), and the sadness and melancholy that everyone who's read anything by Kevin is bound to recognize. I was ready to read the next volumes at one sitting...

The book is slightly marred by the fact it's written before the recent vampire boom and hence there's not much surprise in what makes Wignall's protagonist run.

I don't like to give away plot points and direct you straight to KJ Wignall's website here. You'll find all the scoop there. And one, not so minor point: this will be published also in Finnish next year.

Oh, I have a new book out

I just put up a lengthy post about my new book in one of my other blogs. It's my first book for children: a collection of fairytales by Finnish writers not usually known as fairytale writers. Take a look here.

The new issue of Pulp out

My webzine Pulp has a new issue out. Check it out here. It's in Finnish, mind you, but take a look nevertheless. You might find some nice illos or some such.

Tuesday's (or actually Wednesday's) Overlooked Film: The Humpbacked Horse (1975)

As you're probably aware by now, I'm interested in old animated cartoons and animations in general. I've always been interested in them, but I'm now trying to start a new book project: a book on the history of the animated films. There's only one book on the subject in Finnish and it's been sold out for ages now, as it was published in 1978 (IIRC). As for its contents, it's pretty lightweight, though entertaining.

Developing the project in my mind, I've been watching lots of obscure cartoons, some with my kids. Some of the older Japanese anime films have been largely forgettable, but the Russian cartoons seem to be very good, especially the longer ones. Mihail Tshehanevsky's The Wild Swans (1966) from the H. C. Andersen tale was very stylish and beautiful, alwas retaining its almost art deco artfulness. Ivan Ivanov-Vano's The Humpbacked Horse from a Russian poem that I watched more recently was however more in the vein of a traditional fairytale, though very well drawn.

Ivanov-Vano was one of the foremost Soviet animators, starting out with short subjects in the thirties, and filming The Humpbacked Horse already in 1947 (this previous film was shown in Finnish cinema at the time!) and remaking it in 1977. My dad had the later film on VHS and I loaned it. The quality was already pretty poor, but the film, minus the dreadful dubbing (just one person doing all the lines, with the original Russian lines audible in the back!), was very good, exotic and very well drawn (especially the backgrounds). The storyline featured interesting locals, magic and adventure.

Kauto also got a glimpse from the film and much to my surprise stayed with it until the end. And then yesterday he asked if he could see it again! But alas, the VHS had deteriorated, just in two or three days after my first viewing, and you could see practically nothing. I'll have to haunt this down either on DVD or on a better-quality VHS.

Here's some info on the film, and here's Wikipedia on Ivanov-Vano. More Overlooked Films here.

And here's an interesting item, a satire movie by Ivanov-Vano from the story by poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, made already in the 1930's.

New Finnish crime literature: Bagge, Rönkä, Kilpi

I was down with flu for almost two weeks. I'm still a bit ill, but I'm so behind my work I'll have to start doing something. The architecture book I've been writing for about two years (or at least seems like that already!) is seriously late from all the deadlines and I'm hating it big time.

Okay, I wasn't going to talk about that. I was going to mention three new Finnish crime novels I read while I was sick. One of the books was work-related as I wrote a review of it for a newspaper. 

The best of the three was my friend Tapani Bagge's Kasvot katuojassa (Face in the Gutter, out from CrimeTime), a novel of linked short stories and novellas. Fast-moving, touching at best, always on the side of the losers, at times pretty violent and often funny. Very fast read even though I wasn't quite sure why it had to be done as a novel and not as a collection of short stories. The story goes back and forth in time unnecessarily. (The cover for Tapani's book is done by Lasse Rantanen.)

Matti Rönkä's Väärän maan vainaja (Dead in a Wrong Country, Gummerus) is the new entry in Rönkä's series about Viktor Kärppä, the Russian ex-soldier working as a building contractor in Finland and helping out other Russians, dealing even a bit for the Russian mob. Mediumboiled, always on the side of the losers, usually well written, good descriptions and snapshots of the Russian way of life, but still a bit lukewarm. 

Marko Kilpi is one of the most revered crime writers working now in Finland. He was even nominated for the  prestigious Finlandia literature prize. I can't begin to understand why: his first novel Jäätyneitä ruusuja (Frozen Roses, 2007, reprinted now by his new publisher) is a clumsy and over-written piece of pretentious stuff trying to act as high literature. People say Kilpi has improved as a writer, I seriously hope this is the case. 

Tuesday's (or actually Wednesday's) Overlooked Film: Trance (1998)

It's odd how cheap VHS cassettes are now: I found this in a trash bin at our yard, with some other TV-recorded cult items like Plan 9 from Outer Space and weirdish new movies, like Henry Selick's Monkey Bone. The only copies of the three first Star Wars movies (I mean the first actual three: Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, The Return of the Jedi) in our household came from the same batch.

Okay, to the movie: Trance (Muumion kosketus/The Touch of the Mummy in Finnish) is a strange horror film, shot with low budget, but with a decidedly artsy feel all the way through. The film deals with double identities (and it's fitting that Jorge Luis Borges gets mentioned in the thanks credits) and with how history repeats itself through generations. The film is very much like David Lynch's more impenetrable films like Lost Highway in its dream-like logic. There's not much backstory to the events in the film and the viewer is pretty much lost in the mist of the story.

This produces at times a nice, dark feeling, but the film suffers greatly from uninteresting characters, indifferent acting (there's Christopher Walken, but he doesn't have much time on screen) and implausible behaviour of the characters (plus the pretty inept special effects). The story doesn't have much depth to it, even though there's some supposedly deep stuff going on all the time. The film leaves the spectator baffled.

The director of Trance is one Michael Almereyda, whose best-known film seems to be a vampire film called Nadja (1994). Haven't seen that one, so can't comment. There's also Hamlet from 2000 with Ethan Hawke, set in the present day. Trance, called The Eternal on its DVD release, has only been released as direct-to-video in the USA, though it was shown at the Toronto Film Festival. The Finnish VHS release from 1999 veers towards blatant commercialism with a close-up of a (badly-done) mummy and shocking lines about the revenge of an ancient witch (with Walken's name and "Pulp Fiction" big in the cover). This film is commercially doomed from the start and the filmmakers knew it from the word go. It remains a fascinating failure.

More Tuesday's Overlooked Films at Todd Mason's blog here.

Where is this picture taken from?

I've seen it a dozen times, I know it's from a pulp mag from the late thirties, but I can't place it. Black Mask?

Miina Supinen's mini-review of my sleaze novel

Writer friend Miina Supinen had nice things to say about Mynämäen motellin munamällit/The Spunk Gang of the Mynämäki Motel:

Se oli kyllä hyvä, vielä parempi kuin edellinen! Kävi kauheasti sääli kaikkia, varsinkin sitä Supista. Niillä äijillä oli kyllä kauhea tuska munansa kanssa koko ajan, raukoilla. Hyvä kohta oli se jossa se Virtanen on tuskainen ja kauhea stondis ja vitutus ja sitten "Virtanen katsoi mäntyjä. Ainakin Suomen luonto oli kaunis."

In translation:

It was good, all right, even better than the previous one! I felt awfully sorry for everyone, especially the Supinen character. [The book is full of Tuckerizations.] Those dudes sure had awful pain with their dicks, poor ones. It was very good when Virtanen was painful and had a huge boner and then: "Virtanen looked at the pines. At least the Finnish nature was beautiful."

Brian Lindenmuth's list on Top Ten Noirs of the last ten years

Here, check it out. Seems like I'm way behind my reading. Note also that many of these books are from the small presses, so it's no wonder there's not been much talk about these books. But many sure look interesting!

The Treasure of Sierra Madre

It was over 20 years since I'd seen this film and when I was suddenly bed-ridden with flu, I decided to watch it. And what a great film it is!

The Treasure of Sierra Madre, as you know by now, is based on a novel by German-born Leftist novelist B. Traven and written and directed by John Huston. It stars Humphrey Bogart, Tim Holt and Walter "John's dad" Huston, and they work together marvellously. There's not a bad scene in the film. Huston's direction is very cinematic without being overtly so (look how he uses deep focus almost throughout the film, and the set-pieces are very nice, just like they are in The Maltese Falcon, where Huston has a very good eye for a composition), and the pacing is superb.

The greatest thing about the film, though, is its depiction of actual work. Not in many a Hollywood film working men look so dirty, worn out and ragged. The almost anti-Hollywood attitude shows also in how Huston (and Traven) show the men in their raw passion for gold and the pure hatred and paranoia that's spawn from that passion. Bogart especially makes that clear - and his portrayal of Fred C. Dobbs is one of the best I've seen from him, full of insanity and paranoia, all that talking to himself and weaving back and forth.  This is not merely a morality tale: it's a tale of what makes capitalism work, a tale of why gold is so expensive.

The only thing I'm sorry about the film is its casual racism towards Mexicans. They are simple, stupid, naive and superstitious, and if they're not, they're thieves. But then again it'd be pretty hard to avoid those clichés in 1948.

I haven't read Traven's novel in ages, either, but I'm not sure whether I have time for it right now. As I'm in flu, I'm getting seriously behind my deadlines...