Here is an excerpt from a short story I'm working on, tentatively entitled "The Rescue."
Noon and the sun's glare burned through me while I walked through the parking lot on my way into Smile's Donuts. Sweat dripped off my head and my t-shirt stuck to my overheated body. I always hated muggy August days like this and I cursed not having the money to get out of town to someplace cooler.
I stumbled as a foot cut in front of me. I crumpled as a knee slammed into my groin and a fist hit my jaw.
I didn't even see the pavement as my vision went supernova with stars and fireworks exploding in my head.
I squeezed my eyes shut and the fireworks just got brighter, so I just lay there face down on the pavement, the kicks and the punches crashing down on me.
This really was it. Nothing to do now.
Sweat poured off me, yet I shivered. Cold numbness spread itself over me like that blanket they threw over Dad after the car had hit him that morning in January years ago when the roads were so icy and nobody could stop...
"What the hell's going on here?"
That old guy who owned the big house out on the lake road was here. I knew his voice. He came around the doughnut shop a lot. But he must've been close to sixty. How the hell could he stand up to creeps like Kevin and his idiot friends?
The cold receded and pinpricks of warmth stuck into my arms and legs. I was coming back. Maybe.
Shouts and screams. Was that a thunderclap? Or a gunshot?
The fireworks went off and the blows and explosions of red spiked agony all over my body stopped.
The cold blanket lifted. Warmth was returning to me. Within minutes, I would be boiling again.
I didn't complain. At least that meant I was still alive.
"What the hell did those guys want with you?" a voice asked.
The old guy was speaking to me.
I couldn't answer. Hands reached under my arms and my feet dragged on the pavement.
He was taking me somewhere.
Blurred shapes spun around. I told myself to focus, try to see what's going on.
My stomach churned. Puke rose up in my throat.
The blurred shapes loomed larger again and I had to close my eyes. My God, my whole body ached now. I just wanted to get out of there.
Then all the pain went away and everything was quiet.
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Charles Willeford's The Burnt Orange Heresy
Hardboiled legend Charles Willeford was a Miami journalist and author whose 1990 novel, Miami Blues, was a big hit and was made into a movie starring Alec Baldwin.
But long before that, Willeford's career as a painter and an art history teacher, brilliantly positioned him to write his 1970 novel, The Burnt Orange Heresy.
James Figueras is a prominent south Florida art critic. He is brilliant at his work. So brilliant, in fact, that he is one of the few people in the US who makes a living exclusively writing art critiques for academic journals, magazines and encyclopedias.
His renown draws the attention of Cassidy, a high rolling millionaire art collector who lets him in on a secret. Cassidy has assisted the reclusive French surrealist artist Jacques Debierue in settling down in Florida. In fact, he's now living only thirty miles away. Cassidy lets James have the reclusive and secretive artist's address on one condition: he must bring back one of the artist's current art works.
James leaps at the offer. He has to. After all, Debierue was one of the most important of the Surrealists, legendary for his No. One installation, a wooden picture frame placed on a cracked plaster wall. Now, the legend was literally in his backyard. He has to meet him.
With his girlfriend Berenice in tow, James meets the surrealist, who turns out to be a harmless, even charming old man who wants nothing more from life than to sip orange juice and to wander off to a nearby drive-in to watch old Bowery Boys movies. He also wants to be left alone. And he wants no one to see his current work. No one. Not even the great James Figueras, whose criticism Debierue admires very much.
His considerable ego and hubris piqued by the rebuff, James hatches a plot to see the artist's current work. When Debierue leaves his house for the drive-in one night, James goes to the house and is able to get into the artist's workshop. He finds...nothing. Many canvases and frames, many painting supplies and implements, but no art work. Nothing. Debierue has not painted anything since his arrival in Florida. Perhaps, James fears, he hasn't painted anything in many years.
At first horrified, James suddenly realizes that he now has a real opportunity to boost his own career, and, almost as an afterthought, Debierue's. He snaps up the artist's gear, sets fire to the studio and then meets up with Berenice and they get away. All the while, James's mind is convulsed by a scheme to unleash on the art world The Burnt Orange Heresy, Debierue's last major art work. James will make the painting and write an article celebrating it. Then, Cassidy and other collectors can move in and fight over it, driving up its already immense value.
One problem though. Berenice uncovers James's scheme and James goes into murderous overdrive.
The Burnt Orange Heresy is a slim novel, but it is jammed with ideas about art and money, art and the perception of reality, art and the criminal impulse. It is also a meticulous depiction of how one man's arrogance and professional pride turn into murderous psychosis. A chilling and profound and original hard boiled read.
But long before that, Willeford's career as a painter and an art history teacher, brilliantly positioned him to write his 1970 novel, The Burnt Orange Heresy.
James Figueras is a prominent south Florida art critic. He is brilliant at his work. So brilliant, in fact, that he is one of the few people in the US who makes a living exclusively writing art critiques for academic journals, magazines and encyclopedias.
His renown draws the attention of Cassidy, a high rolling millionaire art collector who lets him in on a secret. Cassidy has assisted the reclusive French surrealist artist Jacques Debierue in settling down in Florida. In fact, he's now living only thirty miles away. Cassidy lets James have the reclusive and secretive artist's address on one condition: he must bring back one of the artist's current art works.
James leaps at the offer. He has to. After all, Debierue was one of the most important of the Surrealists, legendary for his No. One installation, a wooden picture frame placed on a cracked plaster wall. Now, the legend was literally in his backyard. He has to meet him.
With his girlfriend Berenice in tow, James meets the surrealist, who turns out to be a harmless, even charming old man who wants nothing more from life than to sip orange juice and to wander off to a nearby drive-in to watch old Bowery Boys movies. He also wants to be left alone. And he wants no one to see his current work. No one. Not even the great James Figueras, whose criticism Debierue admires very much.
His considerable ego and hubris piqued by the rebuff, James hatches a plot to see the artist's current work. When Debierue leaves his house for the drive-in one night, James goes to the house and is able to get into the artist's workshop. He finds...nothing. Many canvases and frames, many painting supplies and implements, but no art work. Nothing. Debierue has not painted anything since his arrival in Florida. Perhaps, James fears, he hasn't painted anything in many years.
At first horrified, James suddenly realizes that he now has a real opportunity to boost his own career, and, almost as an afterthought, Debierue's. He snaps up the artist's gear, sets fire to the studio and then meets up with Berenice and they get away. All the while, James's mind is convulsed by a scheme to unleash on the art world The Burnt Orange Heresy, Debierue's last major art work. James will make the painting and write an article celebrating it. Then, Cassidy and other collectors can move in and fight over it, driving up its already immense value.
One problem though. Berenice uncovers James's scheme and James goes into murderous overdrive.
The Burnt Orange Heresy is a slim novel, but it is jammed with ideas about art and money, art and the perception of reality, art and the criminal impulse. It is also a meticulous depiction of how one man's arrogance and professional pride turn into murderous psychosis. A chilling and profound and original hard boiled read.
Brian Gifford's Port Tropique
Brian Gifford is a US novelist best known for his association with cult film maker David Lynch. His fourth novel, Wild at Heart, was memorably, if repulsively, adapted for the screen by Lynch, from a screenplay co-written by him and Lynch. Gifford also co-scripted the 1997 Lynch cult favorite Lost Highway.
In 1980, long before his collaboration with Lynch, Gifford wrote the distinctive noir thriller, Port Tropique.
Through a series of brief snapshot chapters, most of which are flashbacks ranging through the protagonist's memories with relatively few carrying forward the story, such as it is, we learn about the life of Franz Hull, a writer living in the fictional Latin American nation of Port Tropique. He's there, as he tells a journalist visiting the country to cover an impending Communist revolution, to write a biography of Benjamin Franklin. When the journalist asks why he'd be writing about Franklin in Port Tropique, Frans gives a revealing answer:
"Gore Vidal wrote Burr in Rome. Robert Graves wrote I, Claudius in Majorca. Mary Renault wrote The Persian Boy in Cape Town. Sometimes the proper perspective is more easily attained from a distance."
This answer reveals Franz's major problem. He sees life through the funhouse mirror reflection of fiction. All the writers he mentions are historical fiction writers, using real events to weave compelling narratives that may not entirely be "real" or "true." For instance, I Claudius contains a plot where Livia conspires to poison Augustus, her husband and the first Emperor of Rome. No such plot really existed, in fact, little is known of the historical Livia. Yet, Graves invented the conspiracy to make the novel more compelling and to give the Livia character more of a presence in the story. Graves' storytelling was so believable that many believe the poisoning plot actually happened.
This is the curious half-real, half-imagined world that Franz Hull moves, or is it dreams? through, in Port Tropique. A world convincingly evoked with vivid, concrete descriptions of street life, as well as knowing descriptions of the country's political crisis. Although I'm reading a novel, the tone and feel of it remind me of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuczinski's books about revolutions in the developing world in the way that concrete fact is mixed with strong story telling.
All of this is very clever and witty, of course, but what does it have to do with a hardboiled story? Well, in the midst of all of this post modern game playing with narrative, there is a smuggling plot. Every few nights, Franz ventures to the dangerous Port Tropique water front with a suitcase. Various mysterious and disreputable characters pull into the harbor and fill the suitcase with bundles and bundles of money. Soon, he has more than two hundred thousand dollars in the suitcase. With the revolution waiting to explode, should he sit tight and wait for his criminal contacts to claim the money he's been holding for them, or should he simply run away with it?
A hard and all too real choice is to be made. A choice with deadly consequences. A choice that perhaps shouldn't be left with a person so distracted by narratives,a choice that would be better made by someone with a clear headed view of the crisis exploding around him.
Franz makes his choice and the consequences of this constitute the story that Port Tropique has to tell.
An interesting novel, as well as a puzzle. With many red herrings with the slightest hint of the shaggy dog tale thrown in. If nothing else, Port Tropique is one of the most memorable and radical of the hardboiled books.
In 1980, long before his collaboration with Lynch, Gifford wrote the distinctive noir thriller, Port Tropique.
Through a series of brief snapshot chapters, most of which are flashbacks ranging through the protagonist's memories with relatively few carrying forward the story, such as it is, we learn about the life of Franz Hull, a writer living in the fictional Latin American nation of Port Tropique. He's there, as he tells a journalist visiting the country to cover an impending Communist revolution, to write a biography of Benjamin Franklin. When the journalist asks why he'd be writing about Franklin in Port Tropique, Frans gives a revealing answer:
"Gore Vidal wrote Burr in Rome. Robert Graves wrote I, Claudius in Majorca. Mary Renault wrote The Persian Boy in Cape Town. Sometimes the proper perspective is more easily attained from a distance."
This answer reveals Franz's major problem. He sees life through the funhouse mirror reflection of fiction. All the writers he mentions are historical fiction writers, using real events to weave compelling narratives that may not entirely be "real" or "true." For instance, I Claudius contains a plot where Livia conspires to poison Augustus, her husband and the first Emperor of Rome. No such plot really existed, in fact, little is known of the historical Livia. Yet, Graves invented the conspiracy to make the novel more compelling and to give the Livia character more of a presence in the story. Graves' storytelling was so believable that many believe the poisoning plot actually happened.
This is the curious half-real, half-imagined world that Franz Hull moves, or is it dreams? through, in Port Tropique. A world convincingly evoked with vivid, concrete descriptions of street life, as well as knowing descriptions of the country's political crisis. Although I'm reading a novel, the tone and feel of it remind me of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuczinski's books about revolutions in the developing world in the way that concrete fact is mixed with strong story telling.
All of this is very clever and witty, of course, but what does it have to do with a hardboiled story? Well, in the midst of all of this post modern game playing with narrative, there is a smuggling plot. Every few nights, Franz ventures to the dangerous Port Tropique water front with a suitcase. Various mysterious and disreputable characters pull into the harbor and fill the suitcase with bundles and bundles of money. Soon, he has more than two hundred thousand dollars in the suitcase. With the revolution waiting to explode, should he sit tight and wait for his criminal contacts to claim the money he's been holding for them, or should he simply run away with it?
A hard and all too real choice is to be made. A choice with deadly consequences. A choice that perhaps shouldn't be left with a person so distracted by narratives,a choice that would be better made by someone with a clear headed view of the crisis exploding around him.
Franz makes his choice and the consequences of this constitute the story that Port Tropique has to tell.
An interesting novel, as well as a puzzle. With many red herrings with the slightest hint of the shaggy dog tale thrown in. If nothing else, Port Tropique is one of the most memorable and radical of the hardboiled books.
Sunday, December 11, 2011
The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler
A few posts back, I mentioned Raymond Chandler's taste for complex, labyrinthine, and for some people, incoherent plots.
This taste is very much on display in The Little Sister, a novel first published in 1949 and considered by some to be Chandler's finest.
It's a novel starring legendary Chandler gumshoe Phillip Marlowe. At first, the story seems pretty cut and dried. Orfamey Quest, a young lady from Manhattan, Kansas, drops by his dusty and faded hole in the wall office and tells him about the disappearance of her brother Orrin. It seems he has been swallowed up in the big bad maw of Los Angeles. Orfamey is a very prim and proper smalltown girl who at once repels and captivates Marlowe. He teases her and plays games with her, but in the end, he accepts the case.
All Marlowe has to go on is the address given him by Orfamey of the boarding house Orrin was last known to be staying at. When he gets there, he finds the place to be rundown and stuffy and choked with the stink of cigarette smoke and marijuana. He also finds the landlord, a hard and suspicious man, counting rent money. Thinking Marlowe is a robber, he lets him have the run of the place. Marlowe pokes around in Orrin's old room and finds nothing. When he returns to the front room, he finds the landlord has been stabbed with an ice pick.
After this, things get complicated. Very complicated.
Many factors come into play. It seems Orrin had stumbled onto extortion photographs of a rising young Hollywood starlet having lunch with a known gangster who was up on murder charges. The pictures themselves are harmless, just a couple having lunch, but it's the company the starlet is keeping that could cause problems for her. Where did he get the pictures from? Did he stab the landlord, or was it someone else? Who exactly is involved in this conspiracy to extort this young starlet?
Of course, extortion pictures are a well-traveled plot line in hardboiled. In Chandler's own The Big Sleep, extortion pictures of the amorous exploits of a general's daughter and a lending library for pornographic pictures are the hinges of the plot. What makes this novel interesting isn't so much the plot as Chandler's telling of it; Marlowe's persistent, hunch and happenstance unraveling of the conspiracy, the peeling away of false exteriors to reveal an ever widening circle of human duplicity, lust and greed.
And along the way, we are treated to some find noir atmosphere and Chandler's often caustic and pungent observations of human nature as presented through Phillip Marlowe.
Some examples:
I left him to his thoughts, which were probably as small, ugly and frightened as the man himself.
I smelled Los Angeles before I got to it. It smelled stale and old like a living room that's been closed too long. But the colored lights fooled you. The lights were wonderful.
On the terrace of The Dancers, a few early birds were getting ready to drink their lunch.
It's specimens of acerbic writing like this that make Chandler worth reading, regardless of how convoluted or implausible some of his plots may be. The man had a real flair for the telling detail, the apt observation made with sharp, economical and witty language. If nothing else, Chandler should be turned to as a guide of how to knowingly and keenly describe your surroundings.
I highly recommend The Little Sister. If you've never read it, you should maybe read it before The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye. Yes, the plot does get complicated, but there are so many facets of brilliance in this novel that they more than overcome any frustration you may have in trying to figure out who is stabbing whom in the back and why.
This taste is very much on display in The Little Sister, a novel first published in 1949 and considered by some to be Chandler's finest.
It's a novel starring legendary Chandler gumshoe Phillip Marlowe. At first, the story seems pretty cut and dried. Orfamey Quest, a young lady from Manhattan, Kansas, drops by his dusty and faded hole in the wall office and tells him about the disappearance of her brother Orrin. It seems he has been swallowed up in the big bad maw of Los Angeles. Orfamey is a very prim and proper smalltown girl who at once repels and captivates Marlowe. He teases her and plays games with her, but in the end, he accepts the case.
All Marlowe has to go on is the address given him by Orfamey of the boarding house Orrin was last known to be staying at. When he gets there, he finds the place to be rundown and stuffy and choked with the stink of cigarette smoke and marijuana. He also finds the landlord, a hard and suspicious man, counting rent money. Thinking Marlowe is a robber, he lets him have the run of the place. Marlowe pokes around in Orrin's old room and finds nothing. When he returns to the front room, he finds the landlord has been stabbed with an ice pick.
After this, things get complicated. Very complicated.
Many factors come into play. It seems Orrin had stumbled onto extortion photographs of a rising young Hollywood starlet having lunch with a known gangster who was up on murder charges. The pictures themselves are harmless, just a couple having lunch, but it's the company the starlet is keeping that could cause problems for her. Where did he get the pictures from? Did he stab the landlord, or was it someone else? Who exactly is involved in this conspiracy to extort this young starlet?
Of course, extortion pictures are a well-traveled plot line in hardboiled. In Chandler's own The Big Sleep, extortion pictures of the amorous exploits of a general's daughter and a lending library for pornographic pictures are the hinges of the plot. What makes this novel interesting isn't so much the plot as Chandler's telling of it; Marlowe's persistent, hunch and happenstance unraveling of the conspiracy, the peeling away of false exteriors to reveal an ever widening circle of human duplicity, lust and greed.
And along the way, we are treated to some find noir atmosphere and Chandler's often caustic and pungent observations of human nature as presented through Phillip Marlowe.
Some examples:
I left him to his thoughts, which were probably as small, ugly and frightened as the man himself.
I smelled Los Angeles before I got to it. It smelled stale and old like a living room that's been closed too long. But the colored lights fooled you. The lights were wonderful.
On the terrace of The Dancers, a few early birds were getting ready to drink their lunch.
It's specimens of acerbic writing like this that make Chandler worth reading, regardless of how convoluted or implausible some of his plots may be. The man had a real flair for the telling detail, the apt observation made with sharp, economical and witty language. If nothing else, Chandler should be turned to as a guide of how to knowingly and keenly describe your surroundings.
I highly recommend The Little Sister. If you've never read it, you should maybe read it before The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye. Yes, the plot does get complicated, but there are so many facets of brilliance in this novel that they more than overcome any frustration you may have in trying to figure out who is stabbing whom in the back and why.
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