“The Admiral and the Con Man”
ANNALS OF CRIME about swindler Oscar Hartzell… I came across Oscar Hartzell in “Hustlers and Con Men,” a history of swindles published twenty-five years ago by a crime encyclopedist named Jay Robert Nash… The high summer of the estate swindle was in the first decades of the last century, and its foremost practitioner was the now forgotten Oscar Hartzell, one of history’s most fabulous confidence tricksters…
“Book review: ‘Djibouti’ by Elmore Leonard “
Elmore Leonard’s latest novel, his 44th, takes him beyond America’s shores, way outside the criminal turfs — Detroit, Miami, Hollywood — he more or less owns, deep into unfamiliar territory that looks both tempting and grabbed-from-the-headlines. “Djibouti,” as the title suggests, is set in the Horn of Africa…
Book review: ‘The New Biographical Dictionary of Film’ by David Thomson
Film both mimics our dreams and provokes our fantasies. The idea that an individual’s relationship with it might be a narcotic, a heady mood or attitude, an atmosphere that changes speed and temperature but can never be escaped is central to David Thomson’s “The New Biographical Dictionary of Film,” an ongoing work that first appeared in the mid-1970s.
Lost Highway
It seems almost unfair to berate a brilliant filmmaker who has so obviously been floundering and flailing, but if, like me, you long to see David Lynch return to the weird mastery of Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and those early episodes of Twin Peaks, then his new movie, Lost Highway, will ultimately prove another disappointment – fascinating at first, but messy, confusing, and even infuriating by the end.
“Paperback Writers: James Boswell’s ‘London Journal 1762-1763’; Michael J. Arlen’s ‘Exiles’”
The handwritten pages of James Boswell’s ” London Journal 1762-1763″ languished forgotten in a trunk in Scotland before being brought to light in the middle of the last century and issued under the auspices of Yale University. This event, together with publication of successive hordes of newly discovered Boswell material, at last separated him from Dr. Samuel Johnson,…
“Paperback Writers: Deep into mysteries of Hammett and Hemingway”
Black Mask, the great pulp fiction magazine, was launched by H.L. Mencken in 1920 but really started to come into its own some six or seven years later under the editorship of Joseph T. Shaw, who would in time publish almost the entire pantheon of classic hardboiled American crime writers: Raymond Chandler, Horace McCoy…
THE MOVIE THAT COST THE EARTH
Late October: it´s a balmy evening in Los Angeles and David Lynch, most recent recruit to the top rank of Hollywood movie directors, is trying to calm himself. He´s not having much success. Just off Sunset Boulevard, in the square, undistinguished building which is the West Coast office of the Director´s Guild of America, the first sneak preview of Lynch´s new film is about to begin. For him, it´s a big night…
“Paperback Writers: Vintage early Mantel”
It may seem, thanks to her ManBooker Prize winning novel ‘Wolf Hall’ (just out in paperback, Picador: 608 pp., $16), that the novelist Hilary Mantel needs no more attention; but in fact the large body of her work — and she’s been publishing for more than 25 years — remains largely unknown, and unread, in this country.
Seeds and stems and a hit or two in “Baked”
The first sentence of “Baked,” the new thriller by Mark Haskell Smith, features a four-letter profanity. The second sentence goes: “He walked out of his house and into the white-light white heat of a bullet exploding out of a handgun…” — and the reader rests secure in the certainty that, whatever else it may or may not achieve, this narrative won’t dither.
“Paperback Writers: Henry Miller’s Grecian days”
In 1939, with Europe already sinking into World War II, 46-year-old Henry Miller left Paris, knowing that a cycle of his life had come to an end. As an expatriate in Paris he’d found his voice, and published the novels — “Tropic of Cancer,” “Black Spring” and “Tropic of Capricorn” — which made his name.
Paperback Writers: What made Dylan roar?
The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas died in New York on Nov. 9, 1953, at age 39. Already a celebrity, Thomas was turned into a legend.Did he die as a result of 18 double whiskies drunk neat in the White Horse Tavern? Or was the cause half a grain of morphine (enough to lay out a horse) administered by an incompetent physician?
Paperback Writers: Boston, down and dirty
Forty years ago, in 1970, the young George V. Higgins was working as a federal prosecutor in Boston. By then he’d graduated from Boston College, done a creative writing course at Stanford and worked as a newspaperman before going back to school to study law. He’d written a string of unpublished books and his latest, “The Friends of Eddie Coyle”…
“‘Elegy for April’ by Benjamin Black”
Elegy for April” is the third crime story that the Booker Prize-winning Irish novelist John Banville has published under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. As with the earlier books “Christine Falls” and “The Silver Swan,” the action here takes place in the Dublin of the 1950s and features a brilliant middle-aged pathologist named Quirke…
‘Cemetery Road’ by Gar Anthony Haywood
Gar Anthony Haywood’s new novel, “Cemetery Road,” his first in a decade, opens in the winter of 1979, with three young men — Errol “Handy” White, the story’s narrator, and his trusted homeboys R.J. Burrow and O’Neal Holden (usually known simply as O) — gathering together to burn $140,000 in a steel barbecue drum.
Paperback Writers: Nightmare noir
William Lindsay Gresham’s novel “Nightmare Alley” (NYRB Classics: 288 pp., $16) tells the rise-and-fall story of Stan Carlisle, a hustling carnival wanna-be who transforms himself into the Great Stanton, a big-time stage magician, and then into a fake psychic, running a “spook racket” before reaching too far and engineering his own catastrophe.
Paperback Writers: Sillitoe’s still running
Alan Sillitoe, now in his 80s, grew up in Nottingham, in the English midlands, in the kind of squalor and poverty that, a century earlier, gave Charles Dickens nightmares. Sillitoe’s father was a violent drunk; his mother, on occasion, was forced to prostitute herself. The family, constantly fighting to stay one step ahead of debt and rent collectors…
‘The Possessed’ by Elif Batuman
Elif Batuman teaches at Stanford University, and her first book of essays, “The Possessed,” dances between autobiography, travel-writing and literary criticism with dazzling flair and originality. “While it’s true that, as Tolstoy observed, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and everyone of planet Earth . . . is certainly entitled to the specificity of his or her suffering…
“‘Occupied City: A Novel’ by David Peace”
David Peace raids fact for fiction, churning history and elements of his own life into hypnotic postmodern noir of almost unrivaled fury. His first four novels, which make up the “Red Riding Quartet” (adapted for television in Britain last year and reissued in paperback by Vintage), were a passionate rethinking of a central horror/myth…
“Paperback Writers: Unlucky ‘Eileen’”
Brian Moore was born in Northern Ireland, immigrated to Canada and spent much of his life living here in California, in Malibu. He wrote scripts, short stories and a string of novels, many of which, like “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne,” “Black Robe” and “The Statement,” were turned into films.
“Tuning back in to ‘White Noise’”
Don DeLillo’s “White Noise” (Penguin: 336 pp., $16 paper), newly reissued in a 25th anniversary edition with superb jacket art by Michael Cho, is many different types of novel: a campus novel; the soap opera of a hilariously dysfunctional family; a disaster story; a murder story; a meditation on America’s nervousness around (and obsession with) fear and dying…