Starsky & Hutch

I put my friend pHinn's street cred into a serious doubt when he announced he liked to watch the Starsky & Hutch reruns on Finnish television. I said I might be more interested in the novelizations. This was a joke at first, but it occurred me to check - I had a suspicion nagging somewhere in the back of my mind that it shouldn't've been a joke.

And, yes, there were eight Starsky & Hutch novelizations. Here's the list; all of the following were written as by Max Franklin who was really Richard Deming about whom I've had nice things to say in Pulpografia.

Starsky & Hutch 1: [no title]
Starsky & Hutch # 2: Kill Huggy Bear
Starsky & Hutch #3: Death Ride
Starsky & Hutch # 4: Bounty Hunter
Starsky & Hutch # 5: Terror on the Docks
Starsky & Hutch #6: The Psychic (from a script by Michael Mann!)
Starsky & Hutch #7: The Setup
Starsky & Hutch #8: Murder on Playboy Island

All of these were published by Ballantine in 1976-1978. The last one is credited with being the scarcest one. The seller in Abebooks asks 95$ for it! (There are cheaper ones, too, if you want to grab it.)

There seems to be no novelization of the recent Owen Wilson movie.

Vaalit, Satu Silvo, William S. Burroughs

(In Finnish again, sorry! This is about the Finnish presidential election. I'll write next about the Starsky & Hutch novelizations and the appearance of Mycroft Holmes in the forth-coming anthology of Fenno-Ugrian science fiction...)

Vaimo toi vaalikonjakin sunnuntai-iltana kun istuin tässä koneella ja bloggasin. (Tai tein töitä, en ole ihan varma enää. Muistelen, että oli tarkoitus työskennellä.) Olin häipynyt television äärestä, kun Ylen ennuste tuli. Meillä siis ilahduttiin Halosen voitosta - mikä ei varmaankaan ole yllätys kenellekään niistä neljästä jotka tätä seuraavat. Mutta meillä ei oltu iloisia Halosen ällöttävästä Suomi-henkisestä kampanjasta. Jos olisimme nuorempia ja kyynisempiä, olisimme hyvinkin voineet jättää tämän perusteella äänestämättä Halosta! (Mietin ensimmäisellä kierroksella Hautalan äänestämistä, minkä olisin jälkikäteen arvioituna voinut hyvinkin tehdä.)

Ja näinhän monet tekivätkin. Joku nuori jyväskyläläinen tutkija kirjoitti Hesarin yliössä hiukan hämmentävän, mutta oivaltavan analyysin ihmisten äänestystaktiikoista. Hän totesi monien ystäviensä olleen Halosen takana, mutta äänestäneen kuitenkin muuta ehdokasta, jotta saataisiin hyvää draamaa. Tutkija sanoi vielä, että monet ajattelivat asiaa niin että olisi hienoa, jos itsestäänselvä ehdokas (eli Halonen) saisi näpeilleen - tosi-tv:n tyyliin!

Aikoinaan yksi kaveri boikotoi Pepsodentia, koska näillä oli niin typerät mainokset (ja itse boikotoin Dressmannia samasta syystä), mutta onko se validi asenne presidentinvaaleissa? Tietysti tämä kertoo myös siitä, että ihmisten mielestä mikään ei muutu, vaikka olisikin Niinistö pressana (mikä voi tietysti olla totta, mistä sen nyt saamme tietää), mikä taas kertonee siitä, että puolueiden välillä on liian vähän eroja eikä kukaan tiedä, mitä nämä todella ajattelevat. Mikä taas näkyi siinä, että ihmiset kertoivat katugallupeissa äänestyspäätöstensä perusteista paljonpuhuvia juttuja: "Se oli luonteva esiintyjä."

Muutoin vaalit jättivät jälkeensä muutamia loistavia fraaseja, joita kyllä tulen toistelemaan tästä lähin aina kun tilaisuus tulee. Yksi suosikeistani oli Sarasvuo, jonka mukaan Niinistö oli henkinen tienavaaja, joka aloitti henkisen uudelleenrakennuksen ajan (tai jotain sinnepäin). Myös naisten kommentit Halosesta hämmensivät. Miten nainen voi vihata toista naista niin paljon? Joku tangolaulaja heitti, ettei hän halua sanoa Haloselle mitään! Satu Silvo: "Olen sen verran feministi että tarvitsen vahvan miehen rinnalleni." (Tämä jatkui jotenkin niin, että pitää olla torni tornin rinnalla ja että Niinistössä on tornia. Onkohan Silvo kokeillut?)* Joku katugallupissa tavoitettu sanoi, että Niinistö on ensimmäinen miespoliitikko, jossa on munaa.

Yksi pieni vaalianekdootti: kun kävimme toisella kierroksella äänestämässä, vaaliavustaja, nuori tyttö, luki William S. Burroughsin Nistiä!

* Aikoinaan kun olin Turun Ylioppilaslehdessä töissä, mietimme yhtä härskien työtoverien kanssa, mitä Sauli sanoo Tanja Karpelalle sängyssä. En kehtaa toista sitä tässä.

Suurus? (In Finnish)

Julkisen sanan neuvoston puheenjohtaja Kalevi Kivistö antoi lausunnon toimittajien ilmaismatkoista ja muista. Hän totesi, että kyllä toimittajat voivat osallistua sidosryhmiensä tarjoamille päivällisille tai suuruksille. Mille ihmeen suuruksille? Eipä ole tälle toimittajaperheelle tullut häävisti kutsuja sidosryhmien tarjoamille suuruksille. Onko tämä jopa peräti jokin salaliitto, kun meitä on estetty pääsemästä suuruksille? Nyt sietäisi kyllä ropista kutsuja...

Wish me luck

(How many times have I asked you to do this?)

I'm printing the novels I'm sending to the crime novel contest. It's weird to let go of these and not know what happens to them. I'm not so sure about the other, but it looks good. Still I keep making last-minute corrections and thinking about whether a particular scene should be done in some other way. Wait a minute, is that line bad there, should be there more vibe in that? Just let go, man, I keep telling myself. (I have to: the deadline is tomorrow.)

I haven't yet learnt just how one is able to decide what's good and what's not - if it's my own writing. (It seems to be easier in the non-fiction business, in which I've been much longer than writing and really trying to publish fiction.) Here's hoping.

By the way: I wrote the first draft of the other novel when I was still living with Ottilia's mother. I remember that I did some 30 or 40 pages at the same time when Ottilia was being born. We lived near the hospital and I ran back and forth to grab something to eat and everytime I sneaked to the computer and wrote page after page in a feverish rush. Ottilia's birth took 25 hours, if I remember correctly, and I think I got the story going pretty fast. It's been lying in the computer ever since. I dug it out and have been polishing it and rewriting bits. It looks good, dammit!

I had a laptop with me when Elina gave birth to Kauto. While waiting, I arranged the manuscript that will someday be the sequel to my original Pulpografia and wrote some bits of poetry (one of them got actually published later on).

Japanese Spiderman

Check out this. It's, emm, hilarious? I don't know what the heck is happening in there, but it's worth a look!

Carl Barks

I've promised elsewhere that I'd write something about the legendary Disney and duck artist, Carl Barks. I've always considered him to be one of the best five comic artists ever in the whole world.

I was reading a book that has been made only for the Finnish audience (if I understood correctly) that commemmorates Barks's 100th birthday - it's a book with Barks's own favourite Duck stories. It's a telling book: an artist doesn't always know what's best for him. I mean, the stories are great, but they are not the best stuff Barks made. Missing are almost completely the Chekhovian short stories about the everyday life of Donald Duck and his nephews, Scrooge McDuck and especially Gladstone Gander. In these stories Barks was at his grimmest and comes close to the noir atmosphere: people (or the ducks, actually) are haunted by their past deeds and they don't really know who they are and their identities shift in every possible occasion.

I don't know why this was, but Barks's best stories - at least to me - were made in the early fifties. Maybe it was the Korean war paranoia (about which Woody Haut talks about in his delightful Pulp Culture) that made the anger and bitterness rise to fore in Barks's stuff in the early fifties. David Cochran should've used Barks's stories as an example in his book, America Noir.

The stories that came after this are naïve at best. In the book we have the story "Micro-Ducks from Outer Space" from 1966. It's a fast-moving adventure, but the premise is downright stupid: it's announced in the morning that the sceptics' club gives away billion dollars to anyone who presents a real UFO and immediately everyone's crazy about it, shouting at skies and pleading the aliens to come down. The same goes for the stories in which Donald Duck manages in every profession he tries - the scheme gets boring after a few stories.

This said, I cannot but admire Barks's knack for building up atmosphere, mood and even straight horror. I need only name "The Old Castle's Secret", which, if it were a movie, would be in the pantheon. Economic storytelling at its best. Barks's best secret - namely, how to draw psychologically plausible facial and bodily expressions - is here already at top form, even though this is one of his earliest and the second one with Scrooge McDuck.

(I was rather disappointed to read from a interview in the web (I can't find it anymore, sorry!) that Barks was against the US taking part in the WWII. Lucky they got Roosevelt in the lead.)

Newish pulp site

Covers and indices to old pulp mags:

http://home.earthlink.net/~cdepulps/acqGallery.html#about

Quickly on Darkly Dreaming Dexter

Finished Jeff Lindsay's much-praised serial killer parody Darkly Dreaming Dexter last night. I wasn't wildly excited. I wasn't excited at all. I spent two days without reading a page, which isn't a very good result for a thriller.

It seems impossible to write a serial killer parody without reverting in the end to the old clichés about the killer genius who manages to escape everytime and who has all the childhood traumas that manifest themselves in the sexual lust that leads to killing. Lindsay does nothing to crash this supposition and while the book was mildly entertaining at times, it did nothing for me.

(Once again I remind you of Buñuel's film in which the hero dreams of killing several people, but someone kills them or they die accidentally before he gets on with the killing.)

Have to come up with a good subject line here

Short updates on domestic life and work:

It seems that Kauto is finally, at one year and (almost) five months, beginning to sleep his nights. No more waking in the middle of the night. Sigh! It's weird, though, that waking up at seven or seven thirty seems more difficult to me now than, say, two months ago. Maybe the fatigue is at last coming through. Or then again it might be that it's still dark outside when you wake up.

***

We got a lengthy e-mail response from an editor who works at the publishing house that rejected our YA novel last week. It seems they would still be interested, but only if we develop things further. It's just odd that another published said exactly the opposite thing and asked us to turn down the homosexuality thing. This one wants more of it. (It's odd also that if they really show interest in the manuscript, why reject it with only a short notice and not call us and say that maybe we should work together on this and we have some ideas etc. I don't get publishers.)

Elina is at work with the ms as I write.

***

Shot the first insert for the TV show yesterday. I had to cut my speech down severely to make it to match the one-minute request I had. It took some 1:20, though. That is no problem, I was told later. Don't really know how it went, since there was only the photographer. They hadn't sent me a director. And they won't in the future, which is weird. It's as if they wouldn't want it to the best thing possible.

I wore a black Stetson-manufactured fedora from the fifties in the shooting (it was shot outside). I asked Elina whether it looks silly or snobbish, but she said it looks just fine.

***

Finished polishing up the two manuscripts I'm sending to a crime novel contest. Wish me luck! I find it even at this point extremely hard to tell whether my stuff is actually any good or not.

***

There's a presidential election next Sunday coming up. I've been wondering why people put so much emphasis on TV debates and such. Don't they have goddamn political views on which they can vote? Don't they know on whose side they are on? Don't they know on whose side the candidates are? It's not shopping, people, it's a serious business!

Someone quoted recently Bertrand Russell as saying: a man without a political view is like a man without pants. (Or something to that effect.)

***

Too much television shows at the moment. Mondays: Desperate Housewives. Tuesdays: Shield and Deadwood. Wednesdays: Deadwood comes out so late that we'll have to watch the previous night's show from the tape. Thursdays: Lost (starting today). Fridays: Battlestar Galactica (missed the first one last week). Saturdays: umm.. actually nothing. Sundays: The Wire (to my mind the best show at the moment, but I always seem to forget it - it comes out at 23:50, which is just plain stupid). I just hope Lost and Galactica are crap and won't have to watch them. Housewives is very entertaining (and not just for Eva Longoria), but it drags.

***

Spent a lovely night yesterday reading Dupuy-Berberian's Jean graphic novels and short stories. Simply wonderful! I could easily identify with Jean who is a young literary novelist (with one novel to his credit) and who lives in Paris and associates with his friends and mates. In one of the short stories he reads a negative comment on his novel. I knew exactly how he felt! In the end of the last of four I read Jean is getting to be a self-adopted dad to a little boy called Eugene. I find the situation deeply moving and touching. The boy is spoiled and difficult to hang out with, he doesn't really know where his mother is and his real step-father is a shallow sociopath (even though he's Jean's best friend).

***

Enough of this. There's a lunch soon.

Old cassette covers

I dug recently a bunch of C-cassettes from the trash bin. I gave the recordable ones to a friend of mine who runs a record label that publishes some obscure stuff in cassettes and kept the others. These are the crop of the bunch.

The first one is a collection of children's songs. Would you give that guy to your kids? Scary! You know, John Wayne Gacy also acted as a clown in children's parties...

The Best Music

Parhaat musat I/The Best Music I is a compilation of artists from Pori, if I understand correctly. The compilation was produced by an ad company in Pori and the cover photograph was taken by Visa Mäkinen, fhe Z film genius. This predates his film career: the cassette is from 1978 and his first film came in 1979.

The woman in the photo is, I believe, Virpi Miettinen, who was Miss Finland in 1965 and later became a religious celebrity.

Jussi Hakulinen

Jussi Hakulinen came from the same town as I did: Pori, from the West Coast of Finland, with appr. 77,000 population. He had a popular glam-schlager band called Yö/Night, but he quit the band for reasons I don't know. Maybe because of his bad hair?

A saxist friend of mine played later in Hakulinen's band and I seem to remember that they made a record that was never or very poorly released. This was in the early nineties. I don't really know what Hakulinen is up to now. (The album on the left was called The Pink Hotel.)

But, really, that hair... Elina bought recently a new issue of InStyle and in there someone says that the seventies was a fashion wreck. What about the eighties, then?

John Wayne in Finnish paperback covers

I found an old letter I'd written to an American acquaintance of mine. It's full of oddball references to the pulp publishing in Finland, Sweden and Germany, and I thought it would repay to post it here. All the personal stuff removed, of course. It's mainly about some Finnish Western paperbacks and pulps with John Wayne in the cover which I sent to the friend of mine. I'm sorry that I can't post any covers - I'm not sure if I kept any duplicates.

Dear X,

finally these John Wayne covers reach you. Sorry for the delay.

I fear I haven't been able to find as many Wayne books as I'd like have to. There are more – in the Summer I even held one in my hand, but then I put it away in order to check the other books and eventually the book disappeared. These four Wayne books include two Colt books or rather leaflets. The Colt was a very popular series stemming from the early sixties to the eighties. The authors in these books – Shad Denver and Emerson Dodge – were very frequent in the series, but I know nothing about them. I hope you recognize them and could offer some information. [NB: The authors are Australian paperbackers. - jn] The Texas series with Wayne and Kirk Douglas in the cover is a German one. As you can see, the copyright is given to Martin Kelter Verlag in Hamburg. I haven't paid any attention to the series, so I don't know how long it continued, but I do know that there is another Texas book with a John Wayne cover. I hope to find it.

There's still a Swedish McQ – hård hämnare, which means "tough avenger". (The letter å is pronounced like 'oh'.) This is a novelization of a seventies film. As you can see, there's an ad for some paperback porn novel in the back of the book. I just wonder who wrote the book in question. It's about John Stake, a special agent, a mixture of Matt Helm and Dr. Kinsey, as it says in the ad.

I include also two photocopies of John Wayne in the cover of a Finnish pulp magazine called Jännityslukemisto – Seikkailukertomuksia (Suspense Library – Adventure Stories). This one ran from 1959 to 1963 and was a fusion of two earlier magazines the names of which you probably guess. They stem from the thirties. I'd send you the magazines, but that's impossible since I read these in the university library. The other cover with Wayne shooting point blank includes, if I remember right, a story by the science fiction writer Nelson Bond. [This is a false memory, as I've seen the magazine again. It was some other, more obscure pulp writer. - jn] I believe it's "The Outlaws of Dust Canyon" mentioned in the cover.

I'll throw in some extra: three Clint Eastwood covers and a Swedish Larry Kent with Humphrey Bogart, copied straight from High Sierra. You can probably trade these if you're not interested in them yourself. The Swedish Larry Kent is interesting: it's originally an Australian book, but it claims to have been translated from "American"! Two of the Eastwoods are from the Colt series, the third one is from Lännensarja, meaning Western Library, which was very popular too from the early fifties to the eighties. It ran longer than Colt, but I don't have the years at the moment. In Lännensarja there were printed many classic authors, such as Ernest Haycox, Clarence E. Mulford and William Colt MacDonald.

The most interesting thing about the Eastwoods is the John Huston picture in the back of Brett McKinley's No Man's Deputy. The blurb says: "The gun spat once.. twice.. death had once again made a visit and the law of vengeance had been fulfilled – but the old man didn't lose his smile.." It's an advertisement for yet another Western digest, Colorado.

If you're interested in more John Wayne covers, let me know. I'm sure I can dig something up. And if you're interested in Finnish western covers of American actors in general, let me know. Searching these I found several Kirk Douglases, at least one Tony Curtis-Dean Martin (!) and one Lee J. Cobb.

I didn't get any votes from you, you cocksuckers!

At least I think I didn't. Someone didn't. How could it not be me? (I've had a novel rejected this week, so it's pretty obvious it was me.)

See for yourself: Paul Guyot's blog contest for crime stories. My story (with my name on it!) is here. Congratulations for the winners! (Some of the stories could well be published in Isku.)

I wrote the story when I was 13. That may well explain the fact that there's not much plot. I just patched it up a bit before sending it. (On the left you can see the notebook I scribbled the story with a pencil!)

Finnish Macdonalds

Here are two Finnish Ross Macdonalds. The sexy cover is for The Zebra-Striped Hearse (1962), which has always been my favourite Macdonald. The other one is for The Wycherly Woman (1961), which could be just as good, but I think I've read it only once.

(Just to remind you that there's a growing base of Finnish book covers here. The texts are in Finnish, though.)

Touching snuff mystery

Finished Terrill Lankford's Shooters earlier today. A gripping noir thriller, taut and tight, and also touching. Lankford's "hero", fashion photographer Nick Gardner, is not a sympathetic character and Lankford emulates his voice in the narration quite well. The mystery surrounds the death of a porn actress, whom Gardner fucked in a cocaine rush. The killing appears to be filmed...

Lankford gives a very authentic-looking picture of the Hollywood porn industry - and it's a lot better than you'd imagine! Gardner says in one point that the porn hustlers are more honest than most of the Hollywood people. He goes on to say that if there are snuff or kiddie porn films, the porn industry is the first one to report it, because it really hurts the sales.

My only quibble is that at some points the explanations seem a bit rushed and are passed by quite fast.

Sad news on my fiction

I just found out, accidentally, that the story I sent to a SF/fantasy contest didn't make it. It didn't even get an honourable mention.

(I promise I'll write about something else than myself in the next post.)

Author! Author!

Some news and updates on my fiction writing:

The YA novel Elina and I have written came back from a big publisher. Scheisse! We talked about this and settled that Elina will rewrite it. I admit that she knows the genre way much better than me. I may've written too hardboiled stuff for the little girls. (Just to remind you: it's about a 14-year old girl whose dad turns out to be gay.)

Elina read my P.I. novel and liked it a lot. She's not connoisseur of the genre, but would've easily got bored if it were utter rubbish or just some hackneyd action. It's not. It's closer to someone like Jason Starr or Terrill Lankford, about whom I wrote just couple days back. At the last pages, I was also reminded of Gaspar Noé's disturbing little film Seul contre tous/I Stand Alone, even though Noé's hero could easily beat the shit out of mine. Elina noticed some mistakes in the plot, have to make corrections.

This is going off to a mystery novel competition, and so is my other crime novel, with another P.I. in the lead - this time it's Joe Novak who's been seen in three stories in Isku. I'm talking about The Dostoyevsky Reel that takes place in the late fifties' Hollywood, amongst its schlock scum. It's not nearly as grim as the other novel (which has no title, by the way), it's more along the lines of traditional hardboiled private eye novel. I noticed some mistakes while rereading it.

I could still do something to my third novel, which has a tentative title Blood Orgy of the Void God, and send it too to the contest, but it's not a mystery novel in any sense. More like a religious horror thriller. I've been dabbling with some ideas regarding the novel and may yet return to it.

I've also written some paragraphs to my story about Joe Novak in an empty hotel room, touching things, thinking about his past career as a private eye.

I realized one thing earlier today: I've never concentrated on writing fiction this much. Maybe this is what it takes: concentration. It's just too bad I have non-fiction commitments to make and some ideas I should be taking forward to publishers. (The damn TV thing got my schedule out of order! Must refocuse. (And I must get back to work.))

And, please, check out the Ink Slinger Bog Armored Car/Kids Clothing Story contest up at screenwriter Paul Guyot's blog. You may find something familiar there. (Use your vote! I need the T-shirt!)

Vum Vum

Some 20 years ago I wrote my own hypothetical music reviews and invented a new genre of African garage rock. I don't know why, but for some reason it sounded good to me, even though I find it now only implausible.

But, well, um, not actually. I've been listening to a collection of Angolese music from the sixties and seventies and one of the songs could actually be one of the lighter pieces in the Nuggets compilation: Vum Vum's Muzangola. It's said in the sleeve notes that the singer Vum Vum praises the authentic African music, but I find there's more feel of American soul and sixties' pop in the song.

You can find an excerpt of the song here.

Me? Weird habits? Get the f...

My friend Tosikko challenged me into this meme about five idiosyncratic or weird habits. I enjoyed Tosikko's confessions very much, but I'm not so sure whether I can live up to her expectations. Well, let me see...

1. I can't sleep in the same room with a ticking clock. I have to remove the batteries or take the clock out of the room (and if I can, put it somewhere behind closed doors). I've done this even in a hotel: I sneaked in the middle of the night into the hall and took the batteries out of a ticking clock and tried to hide them. My mother-in-law once said: "You must be pretty difficult to live with." Elina got angry when she heard this.

2. I'm the only living person I've ever heard of who eats sour bamboo shoots. (Others have died.) They smell like a sewer that hasn't been drained for months. If I eat them at home, I'll have to shut the can to keep the smell out of other peoples' noses.

3. Collecting various stuff: I start a new collection six or seven times a year. I've been collecting old handkerchiefs (and, please, don't ask if they are clean or used when I purchase them), old bikes, old photographs of bikes, postcards with architectural items, old porn paperbacks, old T-shirts and ties, preferably from the sixties and seventies, vintage plasticware, stupid children's books (I'll have to write about these later on and post scans), old bookmarks and publishers' and book shops' catalogues, etc. Usually I forget about all of these in a few months' time, but sadly the collections remain. (Except for the old bikes: a friend of mine has them. We managed to purchase some 30 old bicycles before burning out.) I also like to think that I have collections of shirts and jackets. I have to justify them somehow. Lately it seems that I have collections of shoes and men's underwear, too.

4. Even though I've been known to put large amounts of money into books and clothes (and also luxury food), I just can't pay same prices for music. Even a CD that costs 10 euros is too much for me, but I wouldn't hesitate to put the same money into a good T-shirt. Same goes for DVD's. They are way too expensive for me. (But if I find a crappy old VHS with a same movie or some obscure hidden gem for 1,5 euros, I'm game.)

5. I can't stand seeing food thrown away. I finish other peoples' food more likely than throw it away. I've been trying to learn away from this and I didn't nag at Elina the other day when I saw the spaghetti I'd been trying to salvage in the garbage.

(I can easily top Tosikko's reading of narratological theory books in a train. I once tried to finish Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom in a train. I had some 30 pages to go and I thought I could manage it, even though the book is notoriously hard to read. (I don't remember anything about it, except for this anecdote.) Then I met a friend who was headed towards the same place as I was. She was especially talkative and even though I sat the whole trip with Faulkner on my lap, she wouldn't let me read. Then just 15 minutes before the train arrived to Turku or whatever place it was, I had to take a shit and I took the book with me to the toilet! I seem to remember it was winter-time, so it was pretty chilling to sit in there and read Absalom, Absalom...)