And what Crank and Beat the Reaper have in common?

The usual apology: I've been busy, haven't been able to post anything here. I've seen lots of interesting movies lately and been wanting to write about them, but for now this will have to suffice.

Crank, starring Jason Statham, seems to be a minor cult favourite already, even though it came out in 2006. The movie is no-holds-barred crime flick, with Statham running around for 1:30 hours, drugged almost all the time, trying to find out - well, what? I kind of lost track. The movie is just too over over-the-top, with every scene being full of cinematic, editing, cutting and photographying gimmicks.

I admit there's sort of inventiveness involved, but even for me it was too much. I could've taken most of it, if there had been more sense or depth to the plot. There's a possible tragedy in the movie, but I wasn't touched. In contrast I found myself moved when I saw the last 30 minutes of Luc Besson's Leon the other night. I'm no fan of Besson, far from it, but I've always liked this film. The scene with Jean Reno forcing Natalie Portman to leave is a tear-jerker. Yet the film is overtly violent - over-the-top in its day. Will I cry in 2025 when I see Crank again? I mean, the ages change and what seems to be over-the-top might someday become the norm, but with Crank - nah, no way.

So what's this gotta do with Josh Bazell's hyped crime novel, Beat the Reaper, that was recently translated in Finnish (under the title Niittaa noutaja)? The same sort of over-inventiveness, almost being over-the-top only for the sake of being over-the-top. The plot isn't much, and I thought the backstory with all its Auschwitz connections was very lightweight and felt forced. When I reached the climax I said: "C'mon, that's plain stupid!" But okay, I gotta give Bazell that I hadn't seen that one in any other book.

Same goes for Crank. After we'd watched it, Elina said: "Never seen anything like this." Neither had I, and I'm not sure if this is the way things have to go.

Nevertheless, I was happy Beat the Reaper being translated, since in its own way it's part of the noir renaissance, the neo-noir movement.

More on e-books

I've been posting some posts about e-books and their affect on publishing - here's one more link, to Peter Rozovsky's ponderings about cuts in author royalties. (He provides a link, so there's more to read there.)

Bud Webster's Past Masters

Here's a site, maintained by Phil Stephensen-Payne, linking to all of Bud Webster's science fiction-related Past Masters columns he's written for the Helix magazine (which is, I think, now defunct). You'll get essays on H. Beam Piper, Leigh Brackett etc. (The site is still preliminary, I believe, but looks pretty okay to me.)

Fred Zackel and Dave Zeltserman on e-books

There's been a lot of discussion over Kindle and e-books over at the Rara-Avis e-mail list (the list is about noir and hardboiled literature) and I thought that at least two of the posts would be worth to post here. (The Rara-Avis posts are archived here, though, but not many know that.)

The first is writer Frederick Zackel (Cocaine and Blue Eyes) and the second is writer Dave Zeltserman (Fast Lane, Small Crimes, Pariah, etc.). Dave's post was a reply to Fred's, which kicks off from the recent Bouchercon crime fiction festival. The discussion went on from here, but you'll have to find about that from the Rara-Avis archives. And oh, don't forget to check what Ed Gorman said about the issue here.

Can we start a discussion about Kindle, something deeper than "it's the Beast 666" or "I think the future will be Kindle-licious."

Bouchercon was fun. Went to panels, got free books and bought other books. Got some of them autographed, even.

But what stood out was Kindle. This guy from Amazon had a panel about the Kindle. The room was standing room only ... with writers and not readers or zealous fanatics. The session also went over its hour time limit, got kicked out, and then moved out into the hallway, where it stayed informally for almost another thirty minutes.

I liked what I heard. Kindle seems like the most feasible (most plausible) place for most older books and manuscripts down the line.

A friend of mine has a kindle and uses it on airplanes and for reading in bed at night. He swears by it. Buys ten books at a time.

About an hour or so after Amazon's panel ended, I bumped into the Amazon guy in the hotel lobby. He said -- and this is what got me the strongest - that Kindle would link manuscripts with whatever is listed at Amazon.

Before I met this Amazon guy, I meet some disgruntled, disgusted, frustrated, pissed-off writers at Bouchercon. As soon as their rights revert back to them, these guys were switching their manuscripts to Kindle.

All these manuscripts can get cobbled together as a sort of virtual backlist through Kindle. Maybe one of them ms. can help sell the others.

Kindle was the talk in the hotel bar after hours. Which surprised us.

I met one writer at Bouchercon whose agent is trying to get all thirty (yes, 30!) of his books onto Kindle. Most are out of print, he said, and his publisher won't offer them. He wasn't worried about the book collectors. Collectors will always buy and trade his old hardcover stuff. But his new readers -- until now (maybe) -- will never get a shot at reading them.

One writer said, "Nobody autographs a Kindle." But she had four out-of-print books she was worried about. Whatever's out of print is no longer out of print. And because it's electronic, it has no effect on the collectors who want a hard copy no matter what. And people who read it electronically can also get linked to everything else in your series ... and, if they wish, order hard copies to keep forever.

We also met a writer whose agent shopped a manuscript but couldn't find it a home. The agent told the writer, give it to Kindle, the writer sold 7000 copies, and Simon & Schuster bought it for a future hardcover. I spoke with the guy; he was in shock.

Mister 7000, we started calling him; we saw him everywhere. Oh, I know that story is the old "once upon a time it happened ..." and it only happened once. It's not about that.

I liked what the guy from Amazon told me about Kindle. You upload the manuscripts, then there's more fiddling around, whatever, and you get to set the price for the piece. Prices are kept low so you get those who devour books.

And here's Dave Zeltserman:

E-readers (Kindles, Nooks, Sony, iPhones, what have you) seem to be the future. When this future arrives, who knows? Personally I think it will take eReaders coming down in cost ($50 or less) for that to happen --maybe they'll be like cell phones where the e-book stores sells the readers cheap to lock you into buying e-books from them. As a reader, I don't want to move from paper to spending more time staring at a screen, as a writer, I'm very concerned with the effect this will have on bookstores, especially the independents.

For newer writers, it's the independents who support us -- they're the ones discovering us, recommending us and handselling us. It happened with Michael Connelly, as well as many other authors, and they're the ones now selling Small Crimes and Pariah. My fear is as more and more indies get knocked out of business and books are bought for e-readers, it will make it nearly impossible for newer writers to be discovered and read except by a very small niche of readers.

I suspect over time as 100s of thousands of out of print and self-published books are dumped onto the kindle store and other e-book stores that these stores will more and more resemble Walmart, where only a handful of the biggest bestsellers are given prominent display space and all other books buried deep in the web-site. I also suspect as the volume of books grow on these stores, the chances of any book being bought at high enough volumes to attract a real publisher is going to be close to 0.

So to summarize, I think this trend will be disastrous for most writers (although probably a boon for the biggest names), unless all you're aspiring to is to sell a few hundred copies of your book.

But this is clearly the future. I'm just hoping it takes a while to get here.

Winterbottom directs Thompson's Killer Inside Me!

Check out the promo trailer here.

On Stieg Larsson and Swedish crime fiction

I'm not very interested in the current trend of Scandinavian crime writers, as almost everyone else seems to be. Admittedly I haven't read any of, for example, Stieg Larsson's books, but they just seem too damn long to my tastes. I can take Ellroy, but his stakes are a bit higher than Larsson seemingly has - and I'd like to point out that the American private eye writers, like Stephen Greenleaf and Jonathan Valin, dabbled the same issues with a considerably lesser amount of pages in the late seventies and the eighties.

So, I was pretty pleased to note that Swedish science fiction critic John-Henri Holmberg said this on the Fictionmags e-mail list some days ago:

Two days ago the final vote was taken to finalize the shortlist for the Swedish annual best crime novel and best first crime novel awards. As a member of the selection panel, I've read -- as far as necessary -- over a hundred original Swedish crime novels published this year. It's not been an experience I'm keen to repeat. Why is it that because Stieg Larsson has by now sold 22 million copies of his three books (now contracted for in 41 countries), seemingly every publisher in the country will publish seemingly even the worst manuscripts to be found in their submissions as long as they're crime? In my experience, it is sadly true that the vast majority of readers is blind to stylistic abilities. But I've never found it true, as it seems current publishers believe, that readers are also blind to the absence of any storytelling ability.

Vintage Harlequins

Here's a link to an article about Harlequin's vintage collection of their old crime titles. I wrote about them earlier here. And here's James Reasoner writing about the books, which prompted me to provide the link - and here's James still at it, providing some great vintage Harlequin covers.

I promised to dig up little something about one M. Scott Michel who wrote some private eye novels for Harlequin in the late fourties and early fifties, but that'll have to wait.

Review of the zombie book

Here's a review of my zombie anthology from the Portti magazine. It's pretty positive, for which I'm proud and happy. The main point: "Finland's never had her share of good trashy literature, so this is a step to the right direction!"

Alain Robbe-Grillet: Trans-Europ-Express

I just got back from the Finnish Film Archive's screening of Alain Robbe-Grillet's Trans-Europ-Express (1966), a parody of French spy flicks of the sixties that's both hilarious and theoretical at the same time.

I'm not a big fan of French New Wave films. I suppose I should be, since I'm a young film buff living in Europe, but I've felt for some years now that many of the inventions of the French films of the sixties have become obsolete and not very effective today, even though there might be a dose of Verfrämmedungseffekt, to quote Bertolt Brecht on this. (I hope I spelled that right!) Same goes for Trans-Europ-Express: the metanarrative is clumsily made, the main narrative drags on for quite a while, the direction should've been more dynamic considering the film's theoretical contents. Now the viewer is only distracted, not entertained at the same time. There were some great moments - especially in the erotic scenes, which were pretty much ahead of their time in their kinkiness - which makes me think Robbe-Grillet made those clumsy and awkward moments in purpose. But the question still remains: why?

But don't take my word for it. Here's Senses of Cinema on the film, praising it very highly.

Here's also a very weird scene in which Jean-Louis Trintignant, the pervert smuggler of the film, is being interrogated.



The film, in all its clumsiness, made me think I should take my copy of Robbe-Grillet's Labyrintissa/In the Labyrinthe and read it.

Cthulhu for children

Here's a very cute animation, Lil' Cthulhu. Suitable for even four years old! (I didn't try this on my kids, though - no Finnish subtitles.)

You just gotta love him! (Or "her"? Or "it"?)

The cover for my war book

Here's the cover for my newest book, Tankki palaa! It's a collection of Finnish war-time stories about, well, war, namely the Second World War (which means in this case the Winter War and the Continuance War, Finland's two wars against the Soviet Union). The book collects together 22 (if I counted right) short stories and vignettes that were originally published in magazines or other periodicals. Almost all of the stories might be called propaganda, but some of them are also straight adventure (and some very good at that). One of the stories is a piece of left-wing critique against the war and the story in question isn't very well done, but interesting nevertheless. I would've liked to have more of that stuff in the book, but I couldn't find the estates for some authors. Here's the table of contents for the book; on the same blog, there's lots of other stuff concerning the book and war-time short stories.

The cover design is by me (oh man, I did the layouts for the whole book!) and the cover illustration is by Poika Vesanto, the artist extraordinaire. The picture is from 1943. (I posted Vesanto's western book covers here and here a while back.)

The book should be available through any bookstore in Finland, but not necessarily in any bookstore. So far the book doesn't seem to be available in the net bookstores, but it will.

A telling anecdote: I got my author's copies from the publisher earlier today (it's a local publisher, so I don't have to take a train to get to them) and walked home and forgot to tell Elina, my wife, about the books! A new book seems to be too common a commodity around here.

James Ellroy: Blood's a Rover

As often happens nowadays, I'm busy, so I won't be writing long about James Ellroy's Blood's a Rover (out in Finnish as Levoton veri / The Reckless Blood, or something to that effect). It's a book, though, that could've - should've - deserved a lot lengthier review than I'm able at the moment. Suffice to say that I wrote a long piece on it for the Turun Sanomat newspaper.

On Facebook, I gave the book four stars out of five. Four, because the book rises to a very high level during the last 100-150 pages. Not five, because the book's first 200 pages pretty much failed to grap my attention. The mystery - or the mysteries, as there are many - isn't powerful enough and is pretty far away from such masterpieces of suspense as The Big Nowhere or L.A. Confidential. But four, because in those last pages Ellroy really makes the mystery shine - as they all twine together and we at last get to hear what it was all about Ellroy manages to create a mystery that bears a comparison to the statue of The Maltese Falcon.

One point more: Ellroy has been accused of being a racist, a sexist, a male chauvinist, a right-wing extremist. I know he's said all those things aloud (and he was part of a Neo-Nazi movement in his youth, but then again I just heard that one of Finland's most revered young novelists was, too, in his youth), but I think Blood's a Rover makes clear that Ellroy is on the side of the defeated. His heroes can be bad and sleazy, but they are also tragic and larger than life. More tragic are those who they stomp on, and in this book Ellroy makes the history of American Communism fascinating and tragic. It's clear that when one of the lead characters decides he's been tortured too much and makes a headturn turning against his former employers and friends, it's a picture of Ellroy himself.

What I didn't say here, Stuart Neville says much better in his review here.

Comic anthology NOIR

Quickly before Ellroy: Dark Horse's new crime story anthology, called simply Noir, which looks very interesting. Here's a story from the book, Jeff Lemire's "The Old Silo".

Swedish cover for Jay Williams's novelization

Okay, this is getting pretty ephemeral - and I haven't read the book in question -, but I want to get this out of the way before I move onto more important things, such as Ellroy's Blood's a Rover, which I just finished reading.

This is the Swedish cover for the novelization of King Vidor's spectacle Solomon and Sheba (1959). The writer is Jay Williams and the Swedish publisher is B. Wahlströms; the year is 1960. I can't remember anymore where I picked the book up, but it must've been cheap or, perhaps, free. Due to the language, I'm throwing the book away after this, since I have neither use nor space for it.

I'm sure that amongst the pulpsters Jay Williams is best remembered for the Danny Dunn books (some of which were translated in Finnish in the early seventies), but he seems to have written quite a lot some other books.

The Swedish cover is nice and pulpy, but the original American cover is pretty bland. I don't know who the Swedish artist is, as there's no name given in the book.

(By the way, be sure to check the Wikipedia article on the co-author of the Danny Dunns, Raymond Abrashkin. I didn't know he was the writer for Little Fugitive, the rare American cinéma vérité film from the fifties. Jay Williams seems to have a small part in it! Weird history of pulpish writing!)

Crying my eyes out: Chaplin's The Kid

You know the scene in The Kid where they come to take Jackie Coogan away from Chaplin? With Coogan throwing his arms out and yelling: "Papa! Papa!" (I'm not sure, but that's what I read from his lips.)

It's a scene that makes me cry every time I even think about it. And now I just saw the film again, for the first time in years (in its entirety, I've seen bits of it every now and then and I've showed it to students when I've done some lecturing on the history of cinema). I was crying almost all the time, especially since I knew what was coming. And thinking that Jackie Coogan is just as old in the pic as our son, Kauto, is now made me weep even more.

But when I got back from the film archive screening, Elina showed me this photo she'd taken of Kauto earlier tonight, I couldn't but laugh.

Review of Jarkko Sipilä's Against the Wall

Someone called Toby commented on my months old post on Finnish writer Jarkko Sipilä's Helsinki Homicide: Against the Wall, the English translation of his cop novel. Here's his review he wrote some time ago - it's not entirely positive, but still merits a look, as he's clearly knowledgeable and mentions having read one of David Peace's crime novels. (I haven't read Sipilä's book myself, so I can't really comment.)

The Finnish Ice Harvest

Here's the Finnish cover for Scott Phillips's The Ice Harvest, done, again, by the great Ossi Hiekkala.

Hard Ticket to Hawaii

You know the type of film that turns out just great when you watch it with a bunch of folks and everyone's little drunk - even though the film is actually just a piece of crap, with which you wouldn't bother if you were sober and alone.

This happened last Saturday night with Andy Sidaris's Hard Ticket to Hawaii (1987), which might best be described as "a cheesy 80's action movie". It has lots of girls with guns - and the girls are usually Playboy models. There are lots of explosions, evil drug lords, sexy and stupid eighties' clothing, nudity, motorcycles - what's not to like? The film also has Ronn "Ridge Forrester" Moss in the lead (even though he's not seen all that much) and a venomous snake. It's shot around Hawaii, so there's lots of nice scenery.

But then again... The venomous snake is a boa that's been bitten by cancer-infested rats - what the fuck? And it's not seen at all for some 20-30 minutes until it comes attacking through the toilet, exploding the toilet on the way, bursting in a cloud of smoke. Just what were these people thinking? The songs on the soundtrack are appallingly bad, especially the title track. There are weird illogical moments throughout the movie. In one scene, Ronn Moss and the other drug cops are planning an attack at the smugglers' house where one of the cops is held hostage, but then, suddenly, Ronn Moss and one of the ladies go to another room to have sex (and that sex is weird - strictly unexplainable).

At times, Hard Ticket to Hawaii is just as bad as Plan 9 from Outer Space. It's daytime, then it's suddenly night and in just two or three minutes it's daytime again, all through the same scene. This happens especially in the end climax (with the snake coming through the toilet), where you have no idea where Ronn Moss is coming from and where he's been all this time - he's probably been riding his motorbike for eight hours.

But hey, what am I complaining about? Everyone was enjoying the hell out of themselves and some of the scenes will stick to my mind forever.

Take this one, for instance:



Great, huh?

Here's the trailer for the film:



There are other clips from the film at YouTube, go check them out! The scene with the snake exploding from the toilet is also there...

Mike Shayne back in print

From Hard Case Crime.

New on-line fictionmag

Lightspeed magazine.

Review of Conrad Hirst

Ossi Hiekkala, the great illustrator of Arktinen Banaani's paperback series, found this very positive blog review of Kevin Wignall's Kuka on Conrad Hirst? The writer, blogger Kari Naskinen, compares, quite rightly, the book to Graham Greene's thrillers and says that Wignall's book could've well been published in the high-literary and prestigious Keltainen kirjasto series, which is quite a compliment. (Even though, with the exception of Brighton Rock, none of Greene's entertainments came out in that series.) He also compares Conrad Hirst to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which is pretty apt.

The writer ends his review: "The best book I've read in years."

He mentions that this was so good he rushed out to buy the other books in the paperback series: Duane Swierczynski's Keikkakuski aka The Wheelman and Allan Guthrie's Viimeinen suudelma aka Kiss Her Goodbye. He says about Keikkakuski thus: "Top-notch, represents the American hardboiled tradition at its best."

Two Leonards

I read recently two books by father and son, Elmore and Peter Leonard. Elmore is a self-deserved classic and Peter is a new-comer, albeit he's over 50. Both are simply great.

Elmore's best-known western novel, Valdez Is Coming, was just translated for the first time in Finnish (partly due to my suggestion to the publisher). In fact, it was Leonard's first western translated in Finnish (apart from a short story in Seikkailujen Maailma in the 1950s), which is surprising. Then again, Leonard had only two crime novel translations in the paperback series of the seventies and sixties (both, Mr Majestyk and 52 Pick-Up, are very good and come highly recommended), so there might've been some issues with his agent. Leonard's had a bit of bad luck with Finnish publishers even later on, with publishers changing almost from book to book and the publishers treating him with bad translations and not very good covers and bad marketing. Some of his earlier masterpieces are still left untranslated, so it's even more fabulous that Valdez Is Coming is now available in Finnish (the Finnish publisher is Bookkari, by the way).

The book is famous also for having been filmed, by Edwin Sherrin in the early seventies, with Burt Lancaster. The film is remarkable for keeping Leonard's ending intact - in the 2000's it would've been changed into a lengthy gunfight. This ending is more in par with Leonard's terse prose and the worldview of his characters: do, don't just tell you're doing. It's something deeper than the old advice "show, don't tell". Leonard's style and narration are always about what needs to be done, what's necessary to do. Thus the emotions of his characters come clear, even though there's not much talk about them per se.

Valdez Is Coming must be one of the best western novels ever.

A minor bibliographical point: the Finnish edition has the original publishing year as 1970. That was however the year when the book was published in the USA, by Fawcett. The book had come out from the British lending library publisher Robert Hale a year before that, as a hardcover (which seems to be very rare), so the actual first publishing year is 1969.

Elmore's son, Peter, has written two novels so far (actually three, the third one just hasn't been published as yet). The Turku-based literary publisher Sammakko picked Leonard's books up, for which I'm very glad, and his first, Quiver from 2008, was just published in Finnish under the title Ihmismetsällä ("Man Hunting"). Peter Leonard came to Finland to promote the book (I got to change only a few words with him, but he seemed like a very nice guy). The book is excellent. It's more in a thriller vein than Elmore's books, but it's still strictly hardboiled. Peter has learned a lot from his father: the pace, narration, style all bear the marks of Elmore. The best thing about the book is that Peter Leonard can make his characters full-rounded by using only small things, bits of dialogue, short reminiscences of their pasts. Just like his father does.

I'm really looking forward to reading more Peter Leonard from Sammakko. I think Leonard's second novel, Trust Me, is coming pretty soon, but don't quote me on it.

What I'm even more glad about is the fact that some other publishers have also noted the new rise of hardboiled and noir writing. Count in also Josh Bazell's Beat the Reaper which came out from Siltala just one or two weeks ago as Niittaa noutaja. A crime reader like me couldn't be happier.

My war book

I'm not sure how much I've been talking here about my project about Finnish war-time stories about, well, the war. The focus is on stories that were published in various magazines during the Second World War (meaning the Winter War and the Continuance War). The book has been pretty difficult to compile and I've done lots of work to find and contact heirs of the writers - there's only one living writer in the bunch!

But now the book's coming to be, finally. I've managed to assemble 21 short stories for it, ranging from outright war propaganda with dubious political agenda to straight pulp action and Leftist critique of the war. Almost all of the writers are well-known Finnish authors, but there's at least one amateur in the bunch, and also some pretty forgotten writers and hacks. I've also written a lengthy foreword for the book.

I posted some stuff about the book on one of my other blogs. Here's the table of contents, with bibliographic info on original appearances, and here and here are two stories that a friend of mine typed, but that weren't included in the book in the end. I'm posting the foreword in some point, but I'll let you know. On the same blog there are several other pieces relating to the war book - check them out.

Oh? When will it be available? I hope already in the beginning of November - the book will be published in POD, so the printing process shouldn't take much time. I'm sad to say we won't make it to the Helsinki Book Fair that was the original plan. The title of the book, by the way, is Tankki palaa! / The Tank Is Burning!, after the title of the short story by Tenho Palsa, who, accidentally, is the only amateur writer in the book, a tank sergeant who won numerous writing contests for the war-time magazines, but never published a book.

Dan Brown, per Damien Broderick

Texan-Australian science fiction writer Damien Broderick wrote this funny piece on Dan Brown on the Fictionmags e-mail list and I asked his permission to use it also here in Pulpetti.

I decided to read ANGELS AND DEMONS. The Dan Brown method is truly amazing. It seems at first to be quite incredibly amateurish and bad. That can't be all that's in play. It alarms me to think that he probably researched 100s of best sellers and factored down to the kind of sentence structure most people like because it is nothing but a string of concrete labels that convey expertise and wealth or terror, and dialogue right out of those pulps that were enormously popular among the barely literate. It would be excruciating to try to write for hundreds of pages in this sort of vulgarized voice. Well, for a few million bucks--if guaranteed--maybe it'd be worth the pain and disgust.

Brown assumes that the reader is a know-nothing simpleton, but here is his stroke of genius: instead of infodumping baldly, he has his man explain to a genius wheelchair bound Stephen Hawking figure who Galileo is and what his crime was, who the Illuminati were, who the fucking Masons were. You can see why people in the middle of the Bell Curve would warm to this.

Some of Brown's absurd success is no doubt accident of timing, and the big buck PR push on a selected candidate, but not all. It's possible to identify the elements--strange ancient mysteries, dark conspiracies of church or state, and the usual blockbuster "expertise" of a grotesquely itemizing kind ("He slipped into his Slashnburn 450-GT hybrid manufactured in Uppchuck Sweden, of which only five had ever been handcrafted for the Kings of Siam, careful of the crease in his Fortum&Freemason grey twill pantaloons handstitched by the leading Gnome of Zurich, Herr Frogleg Sauerkraut"), etc.

While e-mailing about this, Damien asked me to add this:

There was another great bit 70 or so pages on, where a genius explains antimatter:
"Everything has an opposite. Protons have electrons. Up quarks have down quarks." Protons have antiprotons, you moron! I screamed at the book. Up quarks have anti-up quarks! But the book didn't hear me, or didn't care...

Floyd Smith's Action Girls

Remember? Well, it wasn't that long ago. Last Summer I wrote a Forgotten Book entry about an obscure sex paperback called Action Girls, by one Floyd Smith. I couldn't find any bibliographic info for the book.

Just now I got a comment from a used-book seller, called Rags & Bones Antiquarian Books:

I am a bookseller and I do have a paperback copy in English of Action Girls by Floyd Smith. It was published by Midwood Publications, New York 1977.

To which I replied:

It must've been a reprint in 1977, since it was published in Finnish as early as 1974. It could've been a trunk novel that sold in English only in 1977, but somehow I don't think that was the case here.

It's possible we never know. It's also possible that no one really cares. I'd like to know, though. Maybe it's another Harry Whittington looming... maybe not.

Round-Up: Megan Abbott, Ken Bruen, The Hurt Locker

Okay, seems like I'm not very much into blogging these days. Been busy, will be busy, will hopefully take a break, a day or two.. one of these days. Been editing the book with Finnish war-time stories, and it's proven to be a bit of a pain in the ass. Will hopefully get it out of my hands next week.

Some mini-reviews of books I've read recently and one film:

Megan Abbott: Die a Little, her first novel from some years back. I was mesmerized by the voice and the first 50-60 pages, but then the plot got a bit too ordinary, but I'm not complaining with her skills as a narrator and writer. A bit reminiscent of Elizabeth Sanxay Holding - which is a compliment of a highest kind.

Ken Bruen: London Boulevard. I got this out-of-print book as a text file from Ken Bruen's agent and I read it from print-outs. I'm not sure how much the simulation of Sunset Boulevard really holds, but Bruen's voice, very staccato, very terse, more Hemingway than Hemingway himself, is enough to maintain interest.

Now, a question: what do these books have in common?

And just at a cinema club screening I saw Kathryn Bigelow's ultra-realistic Iraq film, The Hurt Locker. This is not your typical war film and there's very little of action, even though some of the scenes are very suspenseful, but the main point is the utter frustration of these young guys who are dropped in middle of the desert nowhere to fight the war they don't understand against the people they don't understand. It's frustrating to see, though, that the film isn't going to make it to cinemas here in Finland. The copy I saw had Italian subtitles and I really had trouble understanding what the guys were saying, since they mostly mumble and shout, so I'd really like to see this with Finnish subtitles.

Zombie book out

Readers of this blog may remember that I had a zombie anthology coming. It's now out and soon available from the bookstores, and also straight from the publisher at rakennussanomat@pelipeitto.fi. On the left is the striking cover from Mika Myyry, and here, on another blog of mine, is my foreword to the book. The book's title means "The Land of the Thousand Zombies" - Finland has traditionally been called "the land of the thousand lakes".

The book is full of hilarious and horrific zombie stuff, with a certain melancholy Finnish bent. It was interesting to notice when the stories began to arrive for the book that even when writing about zombies the Finns do stories about the Finnish Civil War of 1918, the Second World War, depression, loneliness, domestic violence, etc., the traditional themes in Finnish literature. Some of the stories have lots of delicious political satire, which is rare in Finland nowadays, so this book should be a good treat for anyone looking for serious literature.

The Outfit, JT Lindroos's new publishing house

Over a week ago I said I'd noticed that JT Lindroos, the man behind PointBlank, had come up with a new publishing venture, The Outfit. I sent JT some questions and received just now some answers, which I'll duly post below.

PointBlank became known as a very original publisher of crime fiction - it had Dave Zeltserman, James Reasoner, Pearce Hansen... Why was it cancelled?

PointBlank isn't dead yet. There may be life yet in the old dog. PB was too ambitious for its own good, and as much help I rec'd from Sean Wallace, John Betancourt and Al Guthrie, too much of it was on my shoulders and I couldn't hack it while working a regular job on the side. We all are wiser from the experience, and narrowing its focus will help in getting results. PointBlank will remain under the wings of Wildside Press. Many PB books will remain in print, some are looking for a new home.

What kind of books will The Outfit be publishing?

The Outfit will focus on hardboiled entertainment. We don't have plans on doing domestic or U.S. reprints like Point Blank or Hard Case, but we will bring in English language fiction from across the world that has not yet been released for the US market. That may well include new novels by American and British authors. A little later down the line it may include translated novels from other countries.

For recommendations, all I can say is that give our first two books a shot. Leigh Redhead's PEEPSHOW is a fun, sharp and a little exotic hardboiled entertainment by an author who should be huge. Frank McAuliffe's SHOOT THE PRESIDENT, ARE YOU MAD? is a book written by an Edgar winning author right before JFK was assassinated. With a title like that, it's not difficult to understand why it wasn't published at the time.

The Outfit will share the same roof with another publisher, Prime Books. What can you tell us about that?

Prime Books is Sean Wallace's baby. He publishes high quality fantasy and horror titles. If you have any interest in said genres, Prime Books is very much worth a look. I worked with Sean on getting Leena Krohn's TAINARON published through Prime, but despite it receiving nods for the World Fantasy Award, getting spectacular reviews, and being one of the most beautiful books I've ever worked on... it pretty much died on the shelves. Which is a damned shame because it was a wonderful book by a wonderful author, and we put a lot of effort into it and I don't think anybody made a penny off it. It was still worth it.

Here's also the official press release.

September 21, 2009
For Immediate Release

Here's the score. The Outfit has the handle on tough guys and even tougher girls. Even the book business needs its own plunder squad.

Formed by Prime Books head-honcho, award-winning editor Sean Wallace, and the Point Blank Press co-founder J.T. Lindroos, The Outfit has their plans, artillery and blueprints ready for the big takeover.

Their breakout title is the award-winning Australian hardboiled debut PEEPSHOW by the criminally under-appreciated Leigh Redhead. The Weekend Australian called it the 'best new [crime] novel of the year'. The follow-up featuring our smart and sexy stripper slash private investigator Simone Kirsch, CHERRY PIE, is scheduled for 2010. Redhead -- yes, really -- has not worked as a private investigator, but she has been a cook on a prawn trawler from Cairns to Cape York, stripped at the Crazy Horse and Club X Bar in Melbourne, written five novels, and currently teaches English in Vietnam.

"I couldn't believe this series had not been picked up for US publication," says Lindroos. "It's entertaining, smart and tough, and Leigh obviously knows what she's writing about. There's a lot of outstanding downunder crime fiction that just isn't getting the exposure it deserves, and we're planning give it some."

The Outfit will chase the inaugural title with a long-lost novel by Edgar Award winning author Frank McAuliffe. SHOOT THE PRESIDENT, ARE YOU MAD? is the final book to be published in McAuliffe's series featuring the rapscallion Augustus Mandrell. The reason for the long delay in getting the book published? McAuliffe submitted the manuscript to his publisher just prior to death of JFK, and the book was cancelled. The Outfit is about to correct that mistake.

"We'll handle four to six titles a year, making sure all the books are smart and entertaining. Don't expect a 500-page tome. We like short and sharp. Like an icepick. Every book we publish will be a really good read."

PEEPSHOW is available now.

My first collection of poems: Bodice Ripper Apart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you for your time, Jim!

Reino Helismaan länkkäreistä

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

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

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

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

Henkipattojen kylä sisältää seuraavat tekstit:

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

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

Great western illo for the weekend

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Victor Gischler's Vampire A-Go-Go

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

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

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

New Kid On The Block: The Outfit

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

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

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

New book out: Reino Helismaa's western short stories

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

The Spam Book

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

as well as bookstores and online sellers.

Gabriel Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another blog post on another blog

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

Allan Guthrie's Savage Night

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

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

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

Citta Violent/The Violent City

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

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

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

Pulpish illustration from a Swedish mag

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

Panu Räty on Finnish pulp literature

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

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

1. Tapani Backe on oikeasti tietenkin Bagge.

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

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

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

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

Harlequin's vintage collection

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

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

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

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

Reading doesn't pay: Gregg Hurwitz: The Program

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A piece on Finnish fictionmag

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

Bloodstone

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

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

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

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

Jason Starr's Panic Attack, part 2

Will try to say something about this. I've been working almost all day (save for dropping at a thrift store earlier today) and I'm getting a bit tired, but, hey, I promised!

Jason Starr, as you probably know, is one of my favourite authors. He is one of the few American writers, crime or mainstream, dealing with depression, codependence problems, unemployment and male anxiety. He writes about sociopaths and psychopaths and makes them very much alive and not some near-mythical creatures à la Hannibal Lecter. Starr's also a true noir author who doesn't have to retort to pastiche, bringing up old hardboiled clichés (he also doesn't have to use gory violence to make his point). His books Fake I.D. and Nothing Personal are, for me, the ultimate noir experience.

His new novel, which is just out, Panic Attack is a very strong foray into a insecure world of a psychiatrist who doesn't realize his life is a mess: his wife doesn't love him, his daughter hates him. And now his house is being broken into, in middle of the night. What does he do? A peaceful man with many problems, some he doesn't know about, shoots the perpetrator. Not once, but ten times. A public hunt begins: can we live in peace with this kind of vigilantes running loose? The psychiatrist's life is torn apart.

And that's only the beginning. Enter Johnny, handsome, skilful, young, a conman. He's the ultimate sociopath in any literature. And you don't know he's dangerous when he's near you. He was the best friend of the man who got shot and he wants revenge.

Panic Attack is a very frightening novel with many truly chilling scenes and I liked it just as much as any Jason Starr book. There's just one problem. The book is too long. I don't really know why this is, but Starr's books have gotten longer in the past few years. I was a bit worried about it when I read his earlier novel, The Follower (which also was very chilling), but now I have to say it out loud: if Starr's books get any longer, they are on the verge of become "telling, not showing". In Panic Attack, Starr goes elaborately through people's emotions, when a simple passage or a piece of dialogue might suffice. Sometimes it takes away some of the enjoyment of the irony he uses depicting his characters and revealing something new about them.

But even that being said, I remind you once again that Panic Attack is a very good novel. Do check out also Fake I.D. that was out recently from Hard Case Crime.

Comixology on The Hunter

Interim here's a link to Comixology's post about the new graphic novel adaptation of Richard Stark's The Hunter.

Am trying to come up with something tomorrow

Haven't had much chance to blog this week, but I'll be posting something tomorrow, either about Jason Starr's Panic Attack or some films I've been watching: Bloodstone and 3:10 to Yuma (the remake). The latter was surprisingly interesting, but not always in the good way.