Capturing the Thrills

Posted on by
security cameras, street corner

(photo: takomabibelot, creative commons license)

Among the workshops at the Liberty States Fiction Writers’ annual conference last weekend were two directed specifically to writers—and readers—of thrillers, led by highly-rated author Melinda Leigh and featuring Dan Mayland (espionage) and Ben Lieberman (financial thrillers). The first was on “Technical Difficulties”—and the three experts described how the ubiquity of cell phones (especially their GPS capabilities), public and private security cameras, and increasingly sophisticated facial recognition software make it harder and harder for urban bad-guys to evade discovery. (Here’s an example of the many websites and articles focused on defeating facial recognition technology.) While security and cell phone cameras were key to finding the Boston Marathon bombers, they are a black hole for story ideas, if authors want to write an accurate and believable modern-day thriller or crime story.

Similarly, a photo posted on social media may well have embedded geotags that reveal where it was taken—at the crime scene, at the perpetrator’s home, at his/her favorite hangout. This explains, I think, why so many mysteries are set in past decades—even centuries—or in small towns, where such capabilities don’t impose plotting impossibilities for their creators. I’ve had to let a protagonist’s phone battery run out, for example—imperfect, maybe, but we’ve all done it.

Understanding how such technology works, in order to construct a plausible 2015 plot requires research, and, like many authors, I’ve confessed to really loving the research I do for my books. These presenters’ second workshop—“The Thrill of Thrillers”—discussed restraining the impulse to put all that research in the actual book. Technothrillers (of the Tom Clancy/Frederick Forsyth/Michael Crichton variety, to which I am addicted ) are an exception. Too much background research slows readers down, and when they’re skipping over as much as they’re reading, face it, the thrill is gone!

Another advantage of leaving any type of too-detailed information out is, of course, that the reader can imagine a technology (likewise torture) that is more vivid, scary, or powerful (or gruesome) than the author can. You need just enough to jump-start their own creativity.

A side issue: I noticed how Amazon’s author pages for Leigh, Mayland, and Lieberman provide “Customers also bought books by . . .” information, and there is almost 100% gender concordance between the authors’ gender and that of the other authors customers reportedly purchased. Is that true? I like books by men AND women, if they are well done, and most other readers I know are the same. So, do these lists reflect real reader preferences, or just Amazon’s marketing assumption? Signed, Wondering . . . See this related post.

****The Last Island

Posted on by
dolphin

(photo: wikimedia)

By David Hogan – I can’t remember what circuitous path of weblinks took me to David Hogan’s website, but it looked interesting enough that I ordered his book. Unlike a best-seller or a famous author about whose work the reader starts with a set of assumptions, I knew nada about Hogan or his work.

I feel well rewarded for my curiosity. The story’s narrator is a former Boston fire fighter, attempting to escape a past tragedy, who takes up a bartending job on a remote Greek island and moves to a weatherbeaten one-room shack in an even more isolated cove on the island, near another shack inhabited by the elusive Kerryn. It’s some while before he even sees her, and then skimming magically over the water of the cove in the moonlight.

The island’s small population, which makes its living by fishing, is torn by factions. One group is using new nets that ultimately will destroy the fishing industry and give the islanders no choice but to embrace development and tourism, and the other group wants to keep the community’s simpler, traditional life. The secondary characters who take sides in this conflict are portrayed both convincingly and entertainingly.

It turns out Kerryn is an animal rights activist who has befriended a dolphin, whom she calls Yukon, who symbolizes all that will be lost if development proceeds. The dolphin becomes as much a character and a player as many of the people. The conflicts that ensue are intimate and devastating.

Hogan calls The Last Island “a universal tale of escape, love and redemption.” A screenwriter, his writing is smooth and compelling in this appealing novel.

***The Cut

Posted on by
marijuana

(photo: fotobias, Creative Commons license)

By George Pelecanos – Washington, D.C.: the Capitol, White House, Smithsonian, The Mall. Forget it. Pelecanos’s Washington exists outside these tourist-trod centers of power and culture, landing squarely in the territory of drug dealers, D.C. Jail, grease-pit restaurants, and sleazy auto shops. His characters aren’t the power-brokers talking endlessly around tables on the evening news. If they make the news, its ten seconds about a corpse found, a conviction, a police gone bad.

Pelecanos, who received an Emmy nomination for his writing on HBO’s gritty cop show The Wire, writes about a Washington, D.C. as authentically as anyone else out there. In this 2011 crime thriller, investigator Spero Lucas is asked to track down who’s behind a series of thefts of marijuana shipments. Lucas is a likeable protagonist, and the book contained none of the (c’mon, really?) believability-stretching plots of many books in this genre.

It was a fun read, but I gave it only three stars because it doesn’t really do anything new, either. In his drive to be current with the tastes of the young black characters, Pelecanos includes too many recitations of long lists of music groups’ names that I, alas, have never heard of, so can’t relate to. A bit of overkill there. Perhaps the people who know all those groups are part of Pelecanos’s target audience.

Related articles

Shedding Light

Posted on by
night sky, light pollution

(composite satellite photo: woodleywonderworks, creative commons license)

On vacation in Bryce Canyon—one of the few truly dark places left in the United States—a visiting astronomer said that in 25 years, if trends in light pollution don’t abate, no child in the United States will be able to see the Milky Way. Living for forty years in the New York-D.C. corridor, I have seen it only once, in far rural Virginia. In too many places now, the Milky Way and all except the brightest stars are “vanishing in a yellow haze,” says the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA).

Light pollution may sound at first like a problem that isn’t much of a problem, but it has consequences, disrupting the natural patterns of animals (many of which are nocturnal), migrating birds, and humans’ sleep patterns. Not only are sleep disorders a problem for many people, some research suggests these disrupted circadian rhythms raise the risk for chronic diseases: obesity, diabetes, and cancer.

Some years ago, the city of Tucson tackled the problem, when its expansion and night-glare threatened the operation of the night-observation telescope array at the nearby Kitt Peak National Observatory. In Tucson, night lighting must be shielded so that the light is directed down, not allowed to spread in all directions. IDA’s conservation program is attempting to designate dark sites that can preserve the starry night skies for future generations. (Proper lighting also conserves resources, given that 22% of U.S. energy use is for lighting.)

Milky Way, night sky

The Milky Way (photo: Forest Wander, Creative Commons license)

Many businesses—car lots and gas stations are an example—are lit much too brightly at night, in the mistaken assumption that this makes them safer. We referred to the parking lot of a movie theater in Florida where we visited as the “brain surgery parking lot,” it was so brightly lit. Too much light creates glare that actually makes it harder to see. Having lights outfitted with correctly calibrated motion detectors indicate an intruder more easily than lights burning at full power all night. According to light pollution expert Paul Bogard, whose book is The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light, “the best lighting is uniform, low-level lighting.” In other words, light when and where it is needed, not attempts to recreate High Noon.

Related articles

** Boy, Snow, Bird

Posted on by
mirror, image

(painting: “Image” by Lou Hedge)

By Helen Oyeyemi—It’s hard to know what to say about this much-praised novel. It has many elements: two narrators, a passel of symbols drawn from fairy tales (mirrors, rats, evil stepmothers—and mothers), various themes, an epistolary section. Yet, somehow, the book doesn’t cohere into a whole. It’s as if we had all the ingredients, but didn’t end up with the cake.

Many key characters are pretending to be something they are not, so that all the readers assumptions must periodically be reexamined, as Truths emerge. They defend their choices to build a life on lies, and lies—or thoughts about them—are another theme. Boy (who is a girl) is talking about her boyfriend Charlie here: “For my part I was always a little disturbed by him because I’d never heard him tell a lie. That was horrifying to me, like living in a house with every door and window wide open all day long.”

For my part too few of those doors and windows were open in this novel, which kept me from understanding key aspects of the characters’ relationships. While a novel that explains everything is pretty boring, this one tipped the balance too far in the other direction. New York Times reviewer Porochista Khakpour called the novel “gloriously unsettling” and Oyeyemi “a writer of rather enchanting horror stories.” Certainly, horrifying circumstances led the characters to adopt their various pretenses, and while their assumption of false identities may have made a kind of sense in the 1930s and 1940s when they made that choice, what is the continuing relevance to the 21st century reader? Or is there any?

A friend recently remarked that a novel should not be analyzed to death, that the point of it isn’t to dissect, but to enjoy it on a visceral, emotional level. I can think of novels that aren’t fully clear (any of Flannery O’Connor’s writing, for example) that are emotionally powerful. For me, this one never quite connected.

Wild Tales

Posted on by
Erica Rivas, Wild Tales

Érica Rivas in Wild Tales

This 2015 Argentinian film (trailer), directed by Damián Szifron, is a collection of six unconnected short stories, with both comic and catastrophic elements and carrying the tagline “we can all lose control.” The six very different stories describe “how I would extract my revenge if only I had the nerve.”

The excellent ensemble cast keeps the unexpected happening . . . as people go to the surreal brink of absurdity and tragedy—and keep going. They carry out the vengeful urges we all feel in moments of betrayal, in flashes of road rage, facing overwhelming temptation, or confronting mindless bureaucracy.

The first very short tale involves a casual conversation between two airplane passengers, strangers to each other, who happen to discover they both know a would-be musician named G– Pasternak. One is a woman who once broke up with him and the other, a classical music critic who savaged Pasternak’s early work. A passenger sitting in front of them turns around, saying, “Pasternak?” She was his elementary school teacher, and says he certainly had problems. After a few more people who’ve wronged poor Pasternak pipe up, the music critic stands and asks, “Is there anybody on this plane who does not know Pasternak? And who paid for their own ticket?” There is not. I leave the rest to your imagination. And his.

The funniest story involves an explosives expert trying to reason with the local parking authority, and one of the most satisfying has a bride take her revenge on the groom who cheated on her. It’s a wedding no one will ever forget! Said Eric Kohn in indieWIRE, “While adhering to an internal logic that makes each punchline land with a satisfying burst of glee, the movie nevertheless stems from genuine fury aimed a broken world.”

Be sure to catch the opening credits, where the names of key cast and production crew members are shown with photos of wild animals reflecting on their personas. The director, I noted, was a fox.

An Academy Award nominee for best foreign language film last year, this is one of those rare movies where Rotten Tomatoes critics and audiences are in perfect agreement: 93%.

***400 Things Cops Know

Posted on by
police, neighborhood

(photo: en.wikipedia)

By Adam Plantinga – If you write (or read or watch) crime stories, you’ll be fascinated by the detailed insights from a veteran Milwaukee and San Francisco patrolman (now police sergeant). The Wall Street Journal called the book “the new Bible for crime writers.” And, if you  wonder about how crimes are managed in the community, you’ll definitely gain some insights.

Plantinga, who is a Phi Beta Kappa magna cum laude graduate of Marquette University, divided his 400 lessons into 19 chapters on “Things Cops Know About . . .” shots fired, juveniles, booze and drugs, domestic violence, and so on. Each chapter is not only a dive into specifics, but as important, together—with candor and humor—they provide an unfiltered view into the thought processes of the cops called out to deal with some of society’s worst and most intractable problems, deaths in circumstances that most of us never have to contemplate, much less confront, and the possibility of violence at every traffic stop. The endemic cynicism he reports arises from constant exposure to people behaving badly, as well as the internal machinations of many police departments.

In the chapter on shots fired, I was surprised to learn how hard it is to find bullets after they’re fired (unless they’re in somebody), in part because “most handguns have ranges exceeding a mile.” Of course, before a bullet can go that far, it generally hits a tree or a house or something. And most criminals aren’t very good shots, Plantinga says. But, as a responding officer, you can’t count on that.

I saw a movie about a hit-and-run accident over the weekend, and thanks to reading this book, I tried to telepathically help the on-screen investigator: “Look for prints on the rearview mirror!” Thanks, Sergeant Plantinga.

**** 1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina

Posted on by
New Orleans, Katrina

The New Orleans “bathtub ring” (photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

By Chris Rose – This collection of newspaper columns from the New Orleans Times-Picayune in the days and months following Hurricane Katrina is, as the cover says, “a roller-coaster ride of observation, commentary, emotion, tragedy, and even humor”—whose shaky pilings are sunk into the physical, economic, and emotional debris of a devastated city.

Rose reports unflinchingly about the horrors and about the small personal triumphs the city’s residents experienced as they tried, not always successfully, to scrabble back to some kind of normalcy. Collectively, his writings probably better than anything else I’ve read answer the question people asked at the time, “Is New Orleans worth it?” His love of the city—its music, food, culture, and traditions, but mostly its people—soaks every page like floodwater.

The ongoing calamity didn’t stop when the wind and rain ceased, but went on and on in the form of poor government decision-making, ill-conceived emergency and reconstruction plans, rapacious utility companies and developers, loophole-seeking insurance schemes, lost possessions and people. To report on it, Rose got out and about, bicycling through the devastated areas, recording the citizenry’s stories. And some stories they were!

Rose’s close attention to these trials was not without its costs. A little more than two months after the disaster, he began one of his essays by quoting the people who said to him, “Everyone here is mentally ill now.” It took a while for him to recognize it—almost seven months—though his wife, his editor, his friends, and his readers tried to convince him much earlier, but he, too, was breaking under the strain. “I feel as if I have become the New Orleans poster boy for posttraumatic stress, chronicling my descent into madness for everyone to read,” he wrote in late March 2006. A few months later, he wrote about his yearlong battle with depression and what he was, finally, doing about it.

He’d been the city’s cheerleader, encouraging people to be strong and stand tall and celebrate what they still had, and his admission of needing serious help loosed a response from thousands. “It boggles the mind to think of how many among us are holding on by frayed threads, just barely, and trying to hide it as I was for so many months.” Even acknowledging that, he ended an essay about his depression with words of encouragement and purpose: “Find some way to shine a light. Together, maybe we’ll find our way out of this.”

New Orleans, Katrina

House destroyed, chandelier intact (photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

This collection of essays is one of those compilations where the whole is so much more than the sum of the parts. Yes, there’s repetition among them; yes, his messages are often the same. But the reader cannot help but think that if only the people’s situation were improving faster, he wouldn’t have had to hammer his message home so hard and so often. I pictured him in many ways like the John Goodman character in the first season of Treme—outraged and caring and providing his testimony. The difference is that the real Chris Rose stuck it out.

Boyhood

Posted on by
Boyhood, Ethan Hawke

Ellar Coltrane & Ethan Hawke in Boyhood

Probably every American interested in film saw Boyhood (trailer) long before I did last week, but somehow I missed it in theaters and, as Boyhood emphasizes, time passes . . . ! From the beginning, the idea of a film following the same actors over a protracted period was both interesting and risk-laden. What if some calamity or professional conflict overrode the cast’s ability to continue? I wonder whether director Richard Linklater cast his daughter Lorelei in the film as a partial insurance policy against that eventuality? She plays as the main character’s annoying older sister Samantha. Quite nicely, too.

Cast intact, filming proceeded off and on for a dozen years, following Mason Evans, Jr. (played by Ellar Coltrane), from ages six to eighteen, and the continuity of characters across situations, levels of maturity, and the ups and downs of life makes for a compelling narrative concept. All the main parts are well acted, including the kids, the parents (Ethan Hawke and Academy Award-winner Patricia Arquette), and the mother’s problematic husbands. The script grew organically, evolving based on what went before (like life), as well as on experiences in the real lives of the actors.

Ethan Hawke, who plays Mason’s biological father, is a person of local interest, having grown up about a mile from where I live. (A few local junior high girls helped answer his fan mail in the early years.) The stage was set for this feat of filmic time travel in Linklater’s Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight trilogy, in which Hawke also starred, and he calls this latest film “human time-lapse photography.”

While many wonderful things can be said about the slow unfolding of personality that the movie conveys, to me it was about a half-hour too long (at 2 hours, 45 minutes), perhaps because I felt insufficiently engaged with the characters at any age. Having shot footage at all these different ages and stages, it’s as if the filmmakers felt obliged to use more of it than they absolutely had to.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 98%; audience rating: 83%.

Related articles

NSA Chief Speaks in Princeton

Posted on by
Mike Rogers, NSA, military

Adm. Mike Rogers (photo: wikipedia)

Admiral Mike Rogers—Director, National Security Agency, and Commander, U.S. Cyber Command (the military’s centralized operational command for cyberspace operations)—spoke at Princeton University yesterday, part of an ongoing effort to establish greater understanding of the NSA mission and encourage private sector partnerships .

He kept his own remarks short, describing the missions of the two agencies he heads, in order to maximize time for audience questions. A key challenge he noted is assuring that efforts to manage the nation’s cyber-threats and foreign intelligence-gathering are appropriately balanced against “the inherent right to privacy” of the American people. In the late 1960s and early 1970s (the Watergate era), revelations of government spying on U.S. citizens led to two new mechanisms for privacy protection: FISA courts (authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) and congressional oversight. Unfortunately, Rogers said, the public has lost confidence in both those approaches at a time when threats have rapidly escalated.

“Would we even be having this conversation if it weren’t for the whistleblowers?” an audience member asked.

Rogers responded, “I don’t know any whistleblowers. I only know of thieves who stole government information.” He went on to say that he wished he had that information back, because the loss of it has imperiled troops overseas and many other individuals and activities, as well as entailed considerable costs. He tells his staff that, if they see any information or process of gathering it that they consider illegal, immoral, or unethical, they should raise it within the chain of command, and it isn’t up to each individual person to pick and choose which laws to obey.

In deciding how to respond to a cyber-attack, his command uses the same principle of proportionality that the military does in general. The exact means of retaliation is a policy decision, not his alone. In North Korea’s hacking attack against Sony last November, for example, he urged the President to “think more broadly,” beyond just cyber-methods, and the U.S. government response to date includes economic sanctions against Pyongyang.

A questioner asked what happens when information amassed on foreigners includes information about Americans (“incidental” information). Rogers wouldn’t speak to whether the FBI or CIA access such information but said the NSA treats it differently, as to whether and how long it is kept, than it does information on foreigners.

Another controversy raised was the NSA’s practice of bulk data storage. Rogers said that at least some bulk data storage is necessary because the agency does not know now what may be useful down the road. There are limits on how long information is retained, but these are currently “more of an art than a science,” he said. A January report by an expert panel convened by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that, at present, there are no screening methods that are a viable alternative to bulk data collection, although privacy protections can be strengthened.