Kauto can read

My son Kauto has just learnt to read! He read at least two quotes from a cartoon all by himself - and he'd never seen the cartoons before. We are totally amazed with Elina - we knew this was coming, but still it strikes us by surprise.

And before you ask: Kauto is five. Okay, five and a half.

Tapani Bagge's The Jack finally finished!

Some of you may remember that I've been translating Tapani Bagge's first crime novel, Puhaltaja (2002), into English for the past few years. Now the first version is finally complete. I might even say "finally fucking complete", since I've been at this at least for the last five years. The book was supposed to come out as "The Jack" from JT Lindroos's Point Blank Press, but Point Blank Press is no more. I'm sure we'll come up with something.

In the meantime, here and here are two stories by Tapani for your reading pleasure.

Once I manage to get some editing done, I'll post some excerpts of Tapani's novel.

Another blog post on another blog

A slightly pulpish item on another blog of mine here. In Finnish, that is.

The latest issue of my fanzine, Isku

Here's the cover by Timo Ronkainen for the latest issue of my print crime fiction zine, Isku. The cover illo goes for my story, "Joe Novak and the Case of the Science Fiction Writer", and it's purported to be a Vega Books paperback with that title. I'm pretty sure that Vega never published science fiction, but it serves a sort of poetic justice in the story. (If they did, I'd be interested to hear.)

Here are the contents (in Finnish):

Harri Erkki: Kellari (alun perin Vappu-Vippu -lehdessä vuodelta 1980 [!])
Gerald Page: Murhaaja (Planetary Stories -nettilehdestä parin vuoden takaa, veteraanin perinteinen aikamatkustustarina, jossa yllätysloppu)
Eino Liekki: Professori Tähtiniemen hermoklinikka (salaperäisen salanimen tarina Seikkailujen Maailmasta vuodelta 1940)
Kieran Shea: Koko lähtee lomalle (Plots With Guns -nettilehdestä parin vuoden takaa, Shea uusi novellisti; suom. Johanna Vainikainen-Uusitalo)
Juri Nummelin: Joe Novak ja scifi-kirjailijan tapaus (ei varsinaisesti scifi-tarina)

The Killer trailer

Dave Zeltserman's Killer (out now) is simply one of the best crime novels I've read. Not in a long time, not in ages, not this year, but ever. And here's the trailer for it. Check it out.

The history of French animation

I was at the Tampere Short Film Festival last weekend, the festival I've attended to for the last 20 years, with some (one or two) one-year pauses. This year I was particularly interested in the three-show series consisting of old French animated films, ranging from Émile Reynaud's cartoons from the 1870's to films made just after WWII. There were many films I hadn't previously seen, even though some of the films were familiar to me.

The earliest examples were pretty crude, as you can imagine, but there's also a sense of invention and real magic, especially in the two films by Émile Cohl, his first, Phantasmagorie, from 1908, and a later one, called Les Locataires d´à côté from 1909. The latter one is a good example of early Surrealism that still flourished in commercial cinema during that time.

The second screening of the series was the best. There were the best-known examples of French art animation, like Berthold Bartosch's Expressionistic L'Idée (1932) and Alexandre Alexeïeff's Night on a Bald Mountain (1933). The most striking example - and one I had never seen - was La Joie de vivre (1937) by two British artists, Anthony Gross and Hector Hoppin. It's timeless, could've been made in the sixties or seventies - or even now, with some alterations. It's made in a free-flowing, fluent and fast style, with only outline drawings. I can find only one link with an extract from the film, and the quality is poor, but it's here nevertheless.

The third screening consisted of films made in the fourties, during the war and just after it. The most interesting of these was Jean Painlevé's clay animation, Bluebeard. It was a wild experience, utterly unrealistic, in weird colours, with crude and grotesque humour reminiscent of Rabelais and his Gargantua and Pantagruel, with heads being chopped and all. Painlevé has seen a renaissance in later years, with a DVD collection of his short films having been released; he was a Surrealist, but also a scientist, who used his fellow Surrealists' ideas in his scientific films, the best-known of which is probably Le Vampire from 1945, a horror documentary about a blood-sucking bat.

Also Paul Grimault's two films in the screening were very good, reminding one of the best American cartoons of the era, with only more artistic ideas thrown in - for example L'épouvantail/The Scarecrow from 1943 in which the devoid landscape is an echo from Surrealist paintings.

One of the most interesting and most boring films in the screening was André-Édouard Marty's Callisto from 1943. The ancient tale of Greek antiquity was told in art deco style, with a very slow pace, in artistically high standard, but also with boring rigidity. It was said that Marty made this in order to show how the French should be making animations in the new Europe (we have to remember that the Nazis were on the winning side in 1942 and 1943 when this was made). I made a quick association to Finland and thought that this is how Finnish animators could've worked had there been any animation industry in the country in the 1940's. (I had especially sculpturer Wäinö Aaltonen in mind - he never made any cartoons, that's for sure, but I think the Founding Fathers of Finland might've called for him, if there had been a need.)

Émile Cohl's Fantasmagorie:



Grimault's L'épouvantail:

Larry Cohen's Perfect Strangers/Blind Alley

I bought an old VHS cassette of a film that seems not to have been released on DVD: Larry Cohen's Perfect Strangers AKA Blind Alley, Umpikuja in Finnish. It's from 1984 and shot on very low budget, with only a small cast. I thought this was a very interesting film, even though not very good on all accounts. I read somewhere that this was shot already in 1981, but released only three years later.

Perfect Strangers is a mob thriller of a hit man who commits murder on a back alley and is witnessed by a seemingly mute three-year old kid, Matthew. The hit man is forced to make contact with the kid's mother and eventually kill the kid. The hit man, a charming sociopath, makes the woman fall in love with him in order to get to Matthew. Seems like the guy falls in love, too. We never actually find out.

There's much of interest here. There are some pretty good suspense scenes, especially the one with the kid playing around in the hit man's apartment with the mob bosses threatening the hit man. The local scenery is good. The three-year old kid seems totally plausible - I thought it was a small wonder Cohen gets so good a performance out of him! There are some interesting connections to the cult classic Liquid Sky: the female lead, Anne Carlisle, had a double role in that, and there's also a weird private eye played by Otto Von Wernherr who also featured in Liquid Sky.

What's more interesting is the film's connection to the women's lib movement: Anne Carlisle's character is a single mother who takes part in the feminist demonstrations. We also see some pretty convincing scenes of the feminists' meetings and the support they provide for Carlisle's character. This is connected with Carlisle's ex-husband who's violent and aggressive, even at one point snatching the three-year old Matthew. Cohen doesn't take sides, but this is a far cry from any Hollywood movie depicting feminists and their cause. An easy way out in the film would've been the ex-husband turning good and fighting the hit man. Cohen doesn't take the easy way, which is always for good.

However, there are some negative things to be said about Perfect Strangers. The actors are not very good, and some of the characters are not very well written - especially the lieutenant assigned to the case of the back alley murder. The hit man's and Anne Carlisle's relationship seems a bit implausible or at least far-fetched. You'd think a woman like Carlisle wouldn't fall in love with a guy like the hit man. He's played by Brad Rijn who's actually pretty good-looking, but is also totally in a different league than Carlisle.

But all in all, a very interesting little movie, which should be available on DVD. (A small note: the Finnish VHS publication has the same image on the cover as the one I found on the web, displayed above.)

Christa Faust's Money Shot out in Finnish

Christa Faust's Money Shot is out in Finnish, as Koston enkeli. Here's the cover by Jukka Murtosaari; more details in the next posting - which is in Finnish.

The Finnish title means "the avenging angel". Koston enkeli was also the Finnish title of Abel Ferrara's Ms. 45. I hope someone likes the connection.

PS. It was also the designated Finnish title of Meir Zarchi's Day of the Woman AKA I Spit On Your Grave, but that one was banned in Finland. Craig R. Baxley also has a movie called The Avenging Angel, and oh, the third Die Hard film was called Koston enkeli in Finnish.

Christa Faustin Koston enkeli ulkona!

Amerikkalaisen hardboiledin kovin naisnimi, Christa Faust, on saanut ensimmäisen suomennoksensa, kun hänen sensaatiomainen romaaninsa Koston enkeli (Money Shot, 2007) on juuri ilmestynyt Arktisen Banaanin julkaisemana.

Koston enkeli kertoo Angel Daresta, keski-ikää lähestyvästä pornoalan ammattilaisesta, joka joutuu keskelle väkivaltaista huijauksien peliä. Kirja alkaa, kun Angel havahtuu lähes kuoliaaksi hakattuna paskaisen auton takaluukusta Los Angelesin syrjäisellä parkkipaikalla. Kirja yhdistää B-filmimäistä toimintaa pornoelokuvan suoruuteen, mutta ei ole mikään Bitch Slap -tyyppinen itsetietoinen pastissi, vaan rehellinen kertomus haavoittuvan naisen matkasta kostoon. Faust kulkee pornoteollisuuden maailmassa kuin kotonaan - hän onkin entinen domina.

Tässä amerikkalaisen kirjailijan ja bloggaajan James Reasonerin arvio Koston enkelistä.

Koston enkelin kannen on tehnyt veteraani ja pitkän linjan pulp-harrastaja Jukka Murtosaari.

Kirjaa myytävänä kaikkialla missä kirjoja myydään, mutta valitettavasti on mahdollista, että joihinkin kauppoihin sitä joutuu tilaamaan. Paras paikka tilata lienee jokin verkkokauppa, kuten Booky. Hinta vain 8,90!

Italian disco at its very best

I dare you to watch this. Just how can that.. that.. that thing stay on her, even when she's shaking that.. that.. that thing of hers?

A bit more about the Harlequin vintage collection

I noticed that someone had posted this link to my earlier post on Harlequin's collection of vintage crime. This follows closely, with quotes, what Harlequin had done to the books they reprinted.

Three reasons I love noir

1. Noir tells about ordinary people you can sympathize with.

2. Noir is uncompromising about why people do the things they do.

3. Noir offers a surprise in the end.

Dave Zeltserman's Killer is about all of these. It's about an old man who gets out of prison after ratting out about his boss, a mob boss who hired him to do 28 killings during some 30 years. We follow him trying to get his life together. He's not going to do another gig, he's not going to do a reform, he just tries to stay alive for some time and possibly meet his children. We see him almost fall in love. We feel for the guy.

We also see glimpses of his past life. He's a ruthless bastard, but he's also reasoning that killing was just his work and that he really loved his family. I love the way how Zeltserman lets the killer's paranoia sink in. It's also worthy to point out how the scenes in the past are told in the present tense and the scenes in the recent are told in the past tense - it's not just a gimmick, it's very important thematically.

And the surprise ending... I was trembling after reading the final pages. It's a surprise not only plot-wise, but Zeltserman also turns the theme of his novel totally upside down.

I'm ready to rank Dave Zeltserman alongside Jason Starr as my favourite new noir author.

Here's Ed Gorman on the book, and here's another blog on the book.

The Finnish translation of Don Tracy's Criss-Cross

I reviewed Don Tracy's Criss-Cross recently and mentioned not having been able to check if the Finnish translation from the fifties is an abridged one. I had finally an opportunity to check and I can tell you it's not abridged. The translation is somewhat toned down and, for example, all the ethnic slurs, like "wop" and "dago", have been taken out and replaced with "guy" and similar neutral epithets. Some of Tracy's short, clipped sentences have been connected to make longer sentences.

But all in all, it seems an above average translation, which is unusual for the Finnish paperback publishers of the fifties. More often than not, they used to cut huge chunks of the original books, sometimes censoring, but also to make the books shorter and cheaper to print.

The Finnish translation came from Nide that operated from Hämeenlinna, and the publishing year is 1957. The Finnish title means "She-Wolf", which is not bad, but I'm not sure if it really depicts Tracy's novel. If someone knows from what book the cover illo is, please let me know. (It could be from the reprint of Criss-Cross, called The Cheat.)

Thundercrack!

With the same people I saw the stupendous Hard Ticket to Hawaii I recently watched another cult classic, Thundercrack! It's - umm, what can I say? - stupendous. It's a hilarious spoof of old silent film melodramas and the liberated porn of the seventies. It's shot in black & white and the action takes place in a house that looks like it's haunted, but the people inside the house seem to be only interested in getting each other to bed. Some problems arise from a love-sick gorilla seeking someone to hold hands with. And a locked door behind which there's a man with huge testicles... (The DVD we watched seemed to slightly cut from these scenes, so I can't really say what was behind this subplot.)

Thundercrack! is surely not for everyone, as there's lots and lots of rough sex of many kinds (this must be the only film in the annals of cinema in which a gorilla jerks off another man), and it surely is not necessarily for those who take their films seriously, as it is not very well made or acted. There are occasional moments of genius at work, bits here and there in dialogue (which is absurdly hilarious at times) and in cinematography and editing. At times Thundercrack! looks like a Soviet silent film, something made by Lev Kuleshov or Vsevolod Pudovkin. I'm not sure if this is intentional.

Thundercrack! was directed by one Curt McDowell and written by George Kuchar, better known as one of the Kuchar brothers, the famous underground movie makers of the sixties. This was Kuchar's attempt at mainstream cinema - looks like he couldn't have made a proper mainstream film even if he had tried very, very hard. (Kuchar also plays one of the leads.)

Thundercrack! is pretty hard to describe. It is a bit too long (well, not only a bit - it's almost 30 minutes too long) and it's best to see with some beer and good friends with whom you can laugh your ass off. Yet it's worth tracking down - if you're into this kind of thing, that is.

It's interesting to note, though, that while Thundercrack! is strictly an underground movie, it's totally free of any political content. I wrote recently about John Carpenter's They Live, a so-so horror-cum-action movie from the late eighties. It is much more political than Thundercrack!, and for some reason or another I find this, well, interesting. Is it often that there's more politics in the marginals of popular culture than there is in subversive underground culture?

One extra point: I'm sure David Lynch picked something up from this movie, especially the way Isabella Rossellini looks like in Wild at Heart. The woman living in the haunted-looking house looks exactly like her - and even the way she acts, mumbling to herself, throwing up over her wig that falls down the toilet, could be from a Lynch movie.

Marton Taiga's SF stories

Posted a little bibliographic piece on a Finnish pulp writer, Marton Taiga, and his science fiction stories on another blog of mine here.

My daughter

I haven't been blogging much - that's mainly because my daughter (now 10 years old, 11 later this year) is spending her Winter holiday in Finland and has been mainly staying with us for this week. She's going to her mother in a couple of hours and they are leaving back abroad early tomorrow morning. These are always difficult moments. My daughter is shy and doesn't really seem interested in getting melodramatic, so it's just normal life before we part again - she's playing with Kauto, I'm sitting at the computer, Elina is tidying up places, we're talking casually about lunch. And then it's all over again for five weeks.

John Carpenter's They Live

Okay, back to normal after The Great Jimi Ellroy Experience. Haven't really felt like working (even though I've done some editing*) and I've been watching movies. On an old VHS tape I watched John Carpenter's They Live. I've never really felt easy with Carpenter - he's at the same time skillful and pedestrian. His direction is sometimes good, but his scripts are blah. They Live is more interesting, though, than many of his films.

I was wondering why a writer in a video guide (from 1993, I use this frequently while I'm on sofa watching telly, but can't tell who's behind the book) says that the two thirds of the film are "harebrained fun", while the same two thirds are also very serious and almost subversive! How many films have you seen from the late eighties in which the US police attacks a slum village populated with homeless and unemployed people? And how many in which there's a large conspiracy to get people to obey and just consume happily? I just gotta give Carpenter credit for being so bold in his satire. He also has some nice male-bonding touches that are reminiscent of classic Western films.

But then everything changes. The film becomes a mediocre action-fest, with lots of shotguns and not much tension. The satire is almost lost. But then again, the idea of the yuppies of the late eighties as aliens... there's something in there.

The actors are not very good, especially wrestler Roddy Piper in the lead hasn't got much of a charisma. (And he has a very stupid hair.) And his character does so many mind-boggling things it's a wonder he stays alive.

* I did the final edits for my translation of Duane Swierczynski's The Blonde. It will be out in June as Vaaleaverikkö. I also edited a Finnish crime novel manuscript that will be published next Fall. More on that later.

A Google translation

Okay, here's a Google translation of my Ellroy interview if you want to take a look. It's pretty bad and awkward and there are some Finnish words in there, but take a look anyway. I've never done this before and don't know how long the link will work.

Ellroy and me: The Final Countdown

Some things you need to know about James Ellroy:

1. he doesn't like journalists or interviewers
2. he likes women more than men
3. he doesn't like fans
4. he wants to control the interviewing process (I believe he controls those made by women reporters by flirting)

Okay, I know I'm not necessarily the world's best interviewer, even when I conduct them in Finnish, but you'd think the interviewee would want to take some of the responsibility. Apparently not, when we talk about James Ellroy. Just before me he talked with a young female reporter who asked what Ellroy's first impression of Finland was and such pretty light-fare stuff. Ellroy seemed relaxed and talked with his feet up on the coffee table. Okay, I can handle this, I told myself - being of course very, very nervous about the whole thing.

But when I walked up to Ellroy and told him I'm a fan and have been reading his novels for over 15 years, I noticed instantly he stiffened up and went into a defensive mood. What gives here? You don't want to hear someone likes your novels? That shouldn't be my problem, should it? I can understand there are fans who are pains in the ass, but I wouldn't call myself that.

We started off pretty well, though, with me speaking in rather clumsy English - I don't know why this sometimes happens, but it just did. Then I made a mistake in my questions: I asked Ellroy about Haiti. "Haiti?! What have I got to say about Haiti?!" Well, I tried to reason, you write about Haiti in Blood's a Rover, CIA and the mob are taking it over... "Wait, wait, it's not Haiti, it's the Dominican Republic, they are two different things." Oops! I had got fixated on Haiti for some reason and honestly thought it's Haiti they are invading with casinos and all and hadn't bothered to check my copy of Blood's a Rover. My bad, totally. Apparently after that I was nobody in Ellroy's books: total moron who hasn't even read the books. I said I was sorry about my mistake, but it was all downhill from there.

Especially when I wanted to talk about politics. I think Ellroy's books are hugely political - they are mostly about how politics and the negative feelings (anger, jealousy, lust, aggression) intertwine in national and global level -, but clearly he doesn't want to talk about that. I know he's said that he doesn't want to write about later times, i.e. Nixon, Carter, the Bushes, Reagan etc., but I still wanted to ask about that, especially the Reagan era. "Don't you think there would be many fascinating characters, like Oliver North..." At this point, Ellroy gets mad, waves a finger at me and yells: "Don't! Stop right there! Reagan is one of my heroes. I'm sure history will prove him right. He defeated Communism." This, of course, made its way into my article and has, perhaps deservedly, become somewhat of a cult item, alongside with Ellroy's rant that he hates Communism, since he doesn't want to pay more taxes. "Look at Sweden! They pay fucking huge taxes and they are still all drunks." I seriously don't know what Ellroy meant with this.

But as I said, I got a great article about this. I had to write it on spot, in two hours and send it along right away, the article of 5000 characters. I knew instantly that I had to write it from the viewpoint of the author getting angry at the interviewer. It worked miraculously well. This is one of the best pieces I'll ever write, period. Someone said to me that it was better than the interview published in Helsingin Sanomat, the largest newspaper in Finland. Don't know about that, but at least it was different from any other interview Ellroy made during his three-day visit in Finland.

Any new info from Ellroy himself? Well, he'll have a new book out next Fall: The Hilliker Curse is about the women in his life. And he'll be writing another quartet set longer back in time. He'll abandon the stylistic excess (he didn't want to elaborate). He's not going to write the Warren Harding novel.

I'll post the interview here. Use Google to try to make sense out of it. Hope it works. And here's, with a Google translation, a short news item about how Ellroy got mad at a Swedish reporter, mainly for similar reasons.

Ellroy and me

How did it go? HOW DID IT GO? Oh boy, how it went. Ellroy pretty much went to his defensive mood and started attacking me and I got too clumsy and made some stupid mistakes and it didn't really go very well. He got sore, very sore, and got mad at me at one point. (Not sure, of course, whether he was just fucking with me.)

But: I got a great story. James Ellroy pissed off in Finland? You can't have better stuff than that!

More details later! But not the recording of the interview! I'll destroy it the first minute I can.