Michael Connelly and Life Change

Posted on by

Michael Connelly, Mickey Haller, Lincoln LawyerA big fan of Michael Connelly—and his fictional crew, Harry Bosch and “Lincoln Lawyer” Mickey Haller—I was eager to study his selection of “ Books that Changed My Life” on Audible.com. Connelly is one of more than 50 authors from whom Audible has gathered this information—everyone from Philippa Gregory to James Patterson to another of my favorites, Alan Furst. The authors were asked to name the smallish number of books, generally two to four, that fit the life-changing rubric.

Connelly’s picks are Neely Tucker’s first novel, The Ways of the Dead, because of the way that, despite the fast-moving Washington D.C.-based story, Tucker “always takes the time for wry observation of the humanity of the streets.” Washington Post review here. He also singled out Alafair Burke’s All Day and a Night (New York Journal of Books review here). For both of these choices, one of Connelly’s main criteria was how well the authors conveyed a sense of their cities, for example, saying Tucker “knows the turf inside and out.” Much like Bosch and Haller know Los Angeles, I’d say.

His third selection is Michael Koryta’s Those Who Wish Me Dead (NPR review here)—“full of surprises,” Connelly says. The funny thing about these three choices is that they were all published last June. Either Connelly has an attention span similar to mine, or June was a epochal month for him. At least, he seems to have a different definition of “life-changing” than Audible’s mavens intended.

As it happens, Koryta is another author asked for life-changers, and his picks are Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (“rhythm and word choice”), King’s The Shining (“a clinic in suspense”), and Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, with its “peerless prose,” which in the audio version is narrated by Brad Pitt. The three novels are All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing (my *****review), and Cities of the Plains.

As a postscript, I note the perennial difficulty of finding a review of the one book written by a woman, an issue that helped launch a great organization, Sisters in Crime.

HBO Steps in It

Posted on by
Jonah from Tonga

Jonah from Tonga cast (photo: bbc.co)

HBO this month is demonstrating that political correctness has not yet smothered bad judgment. Instead, it’s showing why those acute sensitivities developed in the first place, by airing the unbelievably tone-deaf Australian Broadcasting Corporation program, Jonah from Tonga. Created by Australian actor Chris Lilley, the program is styled as a comedic mockumentary about a group of trouble-prone Tongan teens. Lilley—39 and white—plays 14-year-old schoolboy Jonah, by wearing a wig and “brownface.”

“All such attempts at making travesties of who we really are, perpetuate long-held and faulty assumptions of our values, self-worth, beliefs, culture and our tangible contributions to American life, Australian life, and Tongan life,” said the National Tongan American Society. According to organizers of a petition asking HBO to pull the show from its schedule, “All of the teenage ‘Tongan’ boys in the show are low achievers, gang members or in jail. Much of the ‘comedy’ is derived from Jonah’s acts of violence, sexual aggression, ignorance and profanity.”

The Japanese American Citizens League (representing another group of Americans affected by racist prejudices) weighed in, noting that satire can be “a powerful weapon for revealing and skewering the irrationality and absurdity of the racist ideas,” but pointing out that “the juvenile and crude characterizations in ‘Jonah from Tonga’ only reveal Lilley’s deep ignorance and disrespect for the Tongan people.”

In describing the show, HBO says “Jonah tries to leave his naughty ways behind and be a ‘good boy,’ but with Jonah, things never quite go as planned.” Let’s hope this fate applies to the series, as well. While it aired earlier this year in Australia and on BBC Three in the UK, it was a ratings “disaster” for these networks. The Australian producers’ defense, reported here, is weak.

Huh? In 2014? Who is HBO trying to entertain with this crude racism? You can sign the petition here. I did.

Winter in Wartime

Posted on by
snow, Holland, bicycles

(photo: pixabay)

This award-winning 2008 Dutch film (trailer) sees the desperate, waning days of the Nazi occupation from the perspective of a 13-year-old boy. He despises his cautious father, the mayor of the village, for being friendly with the Germans and idealizes his uncle Ben, a member of the Resistance. When the boy finds a downed RAF pilot in hiding, he has to discover how much courage lies within himself, and the movie is a “complex exploration of the theme of heroism,” said Washington Post critic Michael O’Sullivan.

As directed by Martin Koolhoven, the movie is tension-filled, with the lead performance by Martijn Lakemeier a convincing portrayal of the mixed bravado and uncertainty of adolescence. It’s so beautifully photographed, with a thin icing of snow over everything throughout, I had to stop and think whether it was black and white or color (the latter). Based on a novel by Jan Terlouw. Nominated for an Academy Award. Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 73%; audiences 78%.

Faraway Places

Posted on by
York, England, Cityscape, roofs

(photo: author)

No doubt about it, setting a mystery in a faraway locale adds a touch of romance. Fans of the Venice-based detective stories of Donna Leon, Edinburgh’s Inspector Rebus series by Ian Rankin, or Tarquin Hall’s Delhi-based private eye stories, see their cities as practically another character. But these authors live or have lived in the places they write about. Can authors pull that off from afar? A panel of American mystery writers at last weekend’s Deadly Ink conference discussed where, why—and most important, how—they do it. This is of intense interest to me, because my mystery series character, Eugenia Clarke, is a travel writer, and stories about her take place where she’s on assignment—Alaska, Morocco, Rome.

For the most part, Annamaria Alfieri (writing about South America and colonial East Africa), Albert Tucher (beginning a series about Hawai`i—a great excuse for a tax-deductible research trip, he said), and Cathi Stoler (Tuscany and that foreign country, Las Vegas) have spent time in the places they write about, supplementing their own experiences with research. They talked about how the challenge is far greater than pasting on a few superficial references. Street names, landmarks.

When they’re really cooking, their research—on the ground, through interviews, background reading, online—will lead to a plot and characters uniquely of that place. They’ll end up with a story that could not have happened in Columbus, Ohio. Readers recognize that legitimate sense of place. For example, an estimated 500 English-language books—mostly mystery or suspense—are set in Italy, and this website rates them as to whether they really capture “the essence” or merely use Italy as a lure.

On the Murder is Everywhere blog, which features a group of far-flug writers, Alfieri recently quoted from John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, in which he describes the fundamental reason writers write: “We wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is.” Setting a story in a far-off place puts the writer’s head—every bit as much as the reader’s—in a place where that can happen.

Age of Innocence

Posted on by
Michelle Pfeiffer, Daniel Day-Lewis, Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton, Martin Scorsese

Michelle Pfeiffer, Daniel Day-Lewis in The Age of Innocence (photo: 2.bp.blogspot.com)

The Age of Innocence must be really over, as it’s a little hard to sit through. Watched the 1993 movie of Edith Wharton’s classic (read it free here) over the weekend (Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Winona Ryder, directed by Martin Scorsese (trailer). Miriam Margolyes’s portrayal of the grandmother with her—was it five?—ever-present fluffy lapdogs was terrific. Credits were beautiful, sets and costumes the same. Some family discussion here about whether I’d seen this movie before, and I thought not. Remembered nothing until the final scene.

Not much happens on the surface in this story of repressed passion (though I’d nominate Henry James’s The Golden Bowl—at 632 pages—for the all-time “not much happens” award), and it could happen a lot quicker. You know where the story’s going from your first glimpse of Countess Olenska (Pfeiffer) at the opera—Faust, by the way, the very definition of temptation. Wharton’s book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1921, an emblem of how tastes change.

Nevertheless, the photography, sets, and people are so beautiful, they’re fun to watch . . . for a while. Perhaps Scorsese wanted to do something totally different than Taxi Driver and Goodfellas, and didn’t quite know where to stop the pendulum. Still, at the time, he said it was the “most violent” film he’d ever made. Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating, 80 percent.

History, Mystery, or Miss-story?

Posted on by
4th of July, early America, John Lewis Krimmel, Philadelphia

John Lewis Krimmel, Fourth of July in Centre Square, Philadelphia, 1819 (photo: wikimedia.org)

A panel of six mystery writers explored the elasticity of history at the Deadly Ink 2014 conference this weekend. They were, in chronological order by their topics:

One of the most interesting questions these panelists were asked is how comfortable they are changing facts to suit the fictional purposes of their story, and the division of opinion was striking. Belsky’s point of view seemed to be “It’s fiction—do what you want,” whereas others, including Alfieri and Inglee, especially, believed that if you incorporate real historical individuals, you have to be true to their attitudes and actions.

Belsky pointed out that we may never know the whole story or maybe even the true story of past events—and Irving pointed out that applies to current events as well—freeing the author to fill in the blanks. (My own opinion on this is there’s a big difference between not knowing a fact and making one up.)

When an author must change a fact, a date, or other detail, they can use author’s notes to describe what and why. With that manes, Scott Turow acknowledges some of the liberties he took in several pivotal event in the WWII novel Ordinary Heroes: “There was no ammunition dump at LaSaline Royale, which is actually situated a few miles from the site I describe . . . Heisenberg (Werner Heisenberg, physicist) did run from Hechingen, but not because anyone had attempted to blow up the secret location of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute on Haigerlocherstrasse. FDR’s death was announced near midnight overseas, not in the afternoon of April 12, 1945.” This last detail seems to be one that could have been fictionally accommodated. It was an event, like the Kennedy assassination, that every American alive at the time remembers vividly.

Alfieri created a character drawn from life down to his toenails and gave him his own name, much as real people appear in the novels of E.L. Doctorow, but when her mystery plot required this character to commit a violent act for which there is no evidence, she renamed him. She was able to build the character in the first place because of the strength of her research, and several panelists endorsed immersive research for fiction, which must appeal to many writers’ innate inwardness.

When an author knows enough about a period—how people thought, what they thought about, what they ate, how they made a living, what they feared—new story elements arise organically from that substrate. They fit the story, the story isn’t made to fit them. Such an approach makes for an infinitely richer reader experience, even if most of that research never appears explicitly in the book. The writer moves forward with confidence.

Another reason to get the details right is that readers will be sure to ding them if they don’t. Errors can destroy a book’s credibility and readers’—and reviewers’—interest in it. To avoid mistakes, Kelly and Rubin said they work with historians. Rubin, especially, because he is published by LSU Press, has to meet scholarship standards.

A final difficulty for historical writers is language. The conversations among characters have to read as if they are of the period, yet a precise rendition of old-fashioned language—by writing “forsoothly”—may be unreadable. David Mitchell, discussing the language he used in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (I loved this book!), described writing dialog for characters who were native speakers of Japanese, who were Dutch and speaking Japanese, Dutch and speaking Dutch, English upper-class sea captains, English lower-class seamen, and so on. Plus, the book begins in 1799, with two hundred-plus years of language evolution in between. Mitchell developed a language he called “bygone-ish,” which had the ring of the old and the clarity of the current, with variants for each nationality and class.

Mitchell’s approach points out an important issue that applies not just for words and phrases. Even if an event actually did happen or a word actually was in use at the time a story is set, writers of historical mysteries may avoid it anyway, because it will sound too modern, out of place. In this way, truth is more powerful than fact. And if this seems like another way of saying, “it’s fiction—do what you want,” it isn’t.

Related articles

The Honourable Woman

Posted on by
Maggie Gyllenhall, Middle East, The Honourable Woman

Maggie Gyllenhall in “The Honourable Woman” (photo: bbc.co.uk)

Saw the first of eight episode of this new BBC production—“both mystery and spy thriller” says Willa Paskin in Slate (clip)—on the Sundance Channel last night (Thursdays, 10 pm). Reviews have been smokin, and certainly the first hour:fifteen was exceptionally strong, laying down a lot of tantalizing clues about what’s to come, with the backdrop “the incredible complexity, raw emotion, and intractability of the Israel-Palestine conflict,” Paskin says.

Maggie Gyllenhaal plays the head of a U.K.-based arms company and has recently been made a baroness, so is Lady Nessa Stein. She and her brother were orphaned young when their father, a major seller of arms to Israel, was assassinated in front of them. Now she runs the company, and her brother the company’s foundation. They are determined use their money for good, so are in the midst of a project to bring communications technology—cables for phone and internet access—to the Palestinians, including, she says at one point, “to the schools and hospitals we have built.”

The episode begins and ends with violence, including an early quick-cut of an event Viewer thinks might have been another violent act. In the middle, various people are trying to figure that one out, including Stephen Rea, as an over-the-hill MI6 agent assigned temporarily to the Middle East desk, as punishment it seems (I missed some muttered dialog, but I can read the script here). He and Gyllenhaal independently elude their handlers for frank conversation with what I suspect is a short list of people they can trust.

Lots of clues, lots of intrigue. Very promising. Says Paskin, “The Honorable Woman is in many ways, most of them cerebral, an extremely impressive piece of work” that “oversimplifies very little.” Cerebral? Reason enough to watch.

Converted_file_4913e22dDo you think the publicists tried–perhaps unconsciously–to replicate National Geographic’s most famous photo in that picture of Maggie Gyllenhaal above? There’s something odd about the eyes there.

 

 

***The Cobweb

Posted on by
spider, cobweb

(photo: pixabay.com)

By Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George (narrated by Marc Vietor)–As a huge Neal Stephenson fan, I was delighted to see this political thriller—co-written with J. Frederick George—in a special Audible 2-for-1 sale. Unfortunately, it lacked the very aspects of Stephenson’s other works that I enjoy most—complexity, humor (ok, there was a bit), challenging ideas, although there was some effective skewering of government bureaucracy.

J. Frederick George is the pen name of historian George Jewsbury, a Russia specialist—whose special expertise is little-used in this tale about the first Gulf War—who is also Stephenson’s uncle. This book was originally published under another pen name for the two of them, Stephen Bury. That’s not quite the most complicated aspect of the plot.

The story takes place in Iowa and Washington, D.C., and the title refers to how people in the nation’s intelligence agencies can protect themselves by keeping anyone who might disturb their world so smothered in procedure and paperwork and investigative committees that they lose their ability to actually accomplish anything. Ample evidence since the book’s publication (1996, reissued in 2005) demonstrates how the different pieces of the nation’s security apparatus have worked at cross-purposes and always to their own presumed advantage and protection. Amazon reviewers familiar with Stephenson’s other work gave it lower ratings (“Neal Stephenson lite,” one said), but overall, four stars.

Related articles

I Know Where Your Cat Lives

Posted on by
cats

(photo: author)

Owen Mundy, artist and teacher at Florida State University, has used the metadata attached to photos posted on the internet to track where a million of the world’s cats live, and he’s put their home lairs on an interactive world map. According to Mundy, the web has some 15 million images tagged with the word “cat,” with more uploaded every minute.

If this strange project were only about cats, Mundy’s experiment wouldn’t have received the media attention he’s been getting. Rather, the point of his experiment is to show how easily the locational coordinates embedded in these publicly shared photos can be extracted and linked to (pretty) precise locations.

When you look at the map, you see the streets and rooftops of houses and apartment buildings and back yards that are homes to these charming felines and their amusing antics, but anyone else—say, megacorporations who want to sell you something and scrape every scrap of information about you—are more interested in the cat owners. You watch the cat. They watch you holding the cat. You see the cat playing. They see the inside of your living room. Well, not my living room, Grant and Sherman’s picture isn’t on the map, but 22 other Princeton cats are. I’m going to take a look.

What first appears as an amusing meditation on the prevalence of fur turns into a biting commentary on privacy.

Thanks, Autocorrect!

Posted on by

Though at times we pound our tiny screens screaming that autocorrect must have sprung full-grown from the forehead of Satan, this devil’s spawn actually has a long history, and Gideon Lewis-Kraus recounted it recently in Wired. The mistakes are shared, sometimes hilarious, and may eventually bring back proofreading, but maybe not.

According to Lewis-Kraus, “the real marvel of our mobile text-correction systems is how astoundingly good they are.” He believes they’ve enabled us to text so much, we of the “podgy fingers” and dimmest memories of sixth grade spelling tests. Our tiny keypads are possible “only when we have some serious software to tidy up after us.” Then, in a scary revelation, Lewis-Kraus admits he typed the whole first draft of his book (doesn’t say which) on a phone.

princess

(photo: c2.staticflickr.com)

Then man behind autocorrect is Microsoft’s Dean Hachamovitch. He began his Microsoft career in the early 1990’s on the Word team and wanted to make typing “sleek and invisible.” His crew began with enabling fixes for common typing errors, which is why every time I abbreviate electronic health record EHR, Word “fixes” it for me. (And, yes, I’ve tried to add EHR it to my personal dictionary.) And there were consequences. Hachamovitch spoke to his daughter’s third-grade class and showed the youngsters how to make auto-fixes, and afterward received parental emails saying things like, “Thanks, but whenever I try to type my daughter’s name it automatically transforms into ‘the pretty princess.’”

Autocorrect’s developers went with primary spellings (judgment, not judgement—take that, Brits!), declined to give suggestions for correct spelling of vulgarities (ignore them), released their baby, and soon laid bare its eccentricities. Linguist now use the word cupertino as a term of art for autocorrection with incorrect words, after older spellcheckers repeatedly replaced “cooperation” with the name of Apple’s home town. Regrettably, my own last name (“Weisfeld”) more than once went out on the bottom of letters with its automatic replacement “Weaseled.”

Don’t abandon hope. Improvements still coming. Meanwhile, here’s the Damn You Autocorrect Hall of Fame.

 

Related articles