Veronica Mars

Earlier this week, I reviewed the Veronica Mars television show, noting that it petered out rather than resolving plot points.  The Veronica Mars movie from earlier this year has some of the same problem. We rejoin our characters at the time of their tenth high school reunion. Veronica, having graduated from law school is getting ready to embark on a career as a New York lawyer, far away from Neptune, California and its problems and dramas. But Veronica is dragged back into being a private detective because former bad-boy boyfriend Logan Echolls has been arrested for murder. This is a new plot, a new mystery to solve, and a satisfying soluton to the murder. At the end of the movie, Veronica decides to move back to Neptune, not to take up law there (rather than in New York), but to return to being a PI.  Even worse, the sense we're left with at the end is that we're not having a standalone story, but rather a way to set up for a movie franchise or another TV series.  

Veronica Mars

When our daughter mentioned the Kickstarter-funded movie Veronica Mars the other day, I sighed and said we'd add it to our Netflix list, even though I'd avoided the sixty-some episodes of the Veronica Mars television show, which she'd devoured when they were originally broadcast. Allie quickly waved me off the movie: the TV show is apparently a hard and fast prerequisite to fully understand the character interaction. So we hunkered down to start watching this series about a spunky blonde girl and I discovered it's actually pretty good. Picture Sam Spade being channeled by a seventeen-year-old high school girl in a California coastal town split firmly between the very, very rich Haves and the working-class Have Nots. Our heroine is also the daughter of the town's former sheriff, who was run out of office for failing to solve a high-profile murder. Solving that murder becomes the McGuffin for season one, since both Veronica and her father, now a private investigator, are convinced the guy who confessed didn't do it. The second season begins with the school bus returning kids from a field trip driving off a cliff on the Pacific Coast Highway into the sea. What actually happened and why? I was completely sucked in. 

        Having solved the second season bus-crash mystery with a death-defying finale on the roof of the luxury hotel in town, we leapt into the third season with Veronica heading to college, and a series of events that are complete mish-mashes.  I believe the showrunners were attempting to throw everything and the kitchen sink into the mix in a setup for the fourth season.  While the individual episodes are interesting, the whole falls flat.  To make matters worse, the show wasn’t picked up for a fourth season, so the show doesn't end so much as cliff, and we were left dangling. (Yes, some of this is resolved in the movie, which I'll review next, but it's still frustrating.)

I was hired when television was desperate enough to scrape the top of the barrel.

     --- Gore Vidal

The Inside Ring / The Second Perimeter

The Inside Ring is the first of a series of thrillers by Michael Lawson, recommended by the Seattle Mystery Bookshop. An attempted assassination of the President is tied up too neatly and the Homeland Security secretary has some suspicions about what actually happened. Our main point-of-view character is Joe DeMarco, the “fixer” for the Speaker of the House, who --- like Robert B Parker's Spenser --- runs around asking questions, stirring up the waters, trying to find answers. However, unlike Parker, the writing is vivid, rather than snarky. The chapters are each reasonably self-contained, many of them written almost like stand-alone flash fiction. The third quarter of the book is predictable and gory, but overall, it's a very, very serviceable thriller.

        In the second of the series, The Second Perimeter, Joe and his friend Emma investigate some shady consulting contracts at a Washington state naval base. (This allows Lawson to give his own Congressman, Norm Dicks, formerly of Washington's 6th, a cameo.) It turns out that the shady contract is, in fact, a cover for an espionage ring, run by a Chinese agent who has past dealings with Emma. After Emma is kidnapped and the action bloodily moves across the border to British Columbia, things get more and more complicated. Our various plot threads are resolved in a shootout at a yacht basin on the Potomac River. I had great fun this time, not only with Dicks's cameo, but aligning various fictional politicians with their real-life counterparts. Again, not great literature, but a perfectly servicable thriller.

Gambit

For Thanksgiving weekend amusement, I suggest Gambit, a lovely 2012 caper movie, with Colin Firth playing the art curator for a rapacious, annoying, ill-mannered Rupert Murdoch billionaire played by Alan Rickman, and Cameron Diaz as the Texas rodeo queen who is supposed to in possession of a long-missing Monet from his Haystacks series. Diaz's Monet is a forgery, perpetrated by Firth's accomplice, and Rickman already owns one of the series, for which he outbid his Japanese business rival at auction. Much hilarity ensues as Rickman tries to put the moves on Diaz, and Firth ends up on the ledge of the Savoy Hotel without his trousers. Eventually, the painting is delivered and Rickman brings in a second expert, who authenticates the fake. Then things get complicated. It's not deep and it's not a great plot, but it's amusing nonetheless, with good performances all around.

Buzz

Following from Anders de la Motte's Game, we have the second book in the trilogy, Buzz, in which our ne'er-do-well slacker, having taken revenge on the organizers of the Game and after a long foreign holiday, finds himself in a Dubai prison on murder charges after a night of drug-infused partying. Meanwhile, his sister, the bodyguard, finds herself brought up on charges for waving off the arrival of a Swedish diplomat to a meeting in an African country. The slacker takes a real job, under an assumed name, infiltrates a company he thinks may be involved in the Game, takes up with an attractive woman, becomes a party to some insider trading. His sister fights the charges, argues with her boyfriend, carries on a clandestine affair, meets a long-lost uncle, finds a plot to invade the royal palace on New Years Eve. Like Game, quite the page-turner, with a lot of local color from Stockholm, a city which I wish I knew better.

Back Channel

Back Channel is a new thriller by Yale law professor Stephen L Carter set during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It posits that the agent of back channel communications between Kennedy and Khruschev was actually a nineteen-year-old Cornell co-ed, whose cover was having an affair with JFK. It's very well-constructed, with an extensive note at the end detailing the ways in which he adjusted the timeline to suit his story and dramatize events. Nonetheless, Carter slips through a couple of anachronisms --- he has our point-of-view character use a Princess phone three years before they were available, and have a Kodak Instamatic camera two years early. He also assumes ubiquitous direct-dial long distance calling, which wasn't available in the New York area until 1964. Most grating of all, our heroine is African-American: even though Cornell was co-ed since it's founding, and also integrated early-on, a black teenager being able to navigate Washington circles without extra comment at the beginnings of the civil rights struggles --- six months before the letter from the Birmingham jail and a year before the March on Washington --- strikes me as unlikely. I solved that major suspension of disbelief by merely ignoring Margo's race for much of the book.

    That all said, it is a very well-told story, with a lovely convoluted plot. As hawks on both sides beat their drums for war and saner heads try to prevail, we get to watch the President and his brother and his national security advisor try to keep the lid on the boiling pot. Carter has clearly drawn some from An Unfinished Life, Robert Dallek's biography of Kennedy, and from the White House tape recordings in the JFK library. We watch JFK's efforts to steer the middle ground elegantly, with steel resolve, against the cajoling of McNamara and LeMay; we watch Bobby playing the devil's advocate to see the sense of the room; and we see a fictionalized McGeorge Bundy both advising and plotting.

The Dying Light

Based on a favorable review in The Economist I dug up The Dying Light, a 2009 thriller by British writer Henry Porter. Consider what happens when the British government starts gathering an unbounded set of information on everyone in the country on the grounds of protecting us all from terrorists. But that the data collection grows to the point where it's used to persecute everyone who shows any sign of protesting or being against the party in power. And that the head of the security services is forced out because he objects to the massive violation of civil liberties. Faked deaths, rigged coroner's inquests, loose organizations of protesters, small towns in England and Wales, people who care about rights and privacy. A call-to-action on our side of the Atlantic as well as to the British. Nicely done, and worth the read.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

How to describe The Grand Budapest Hotel? It is not a murder mystery, though there is a murder. It is not a drama, though there are moments of suspense. It is not a comedy, though much of it is grandly absurd. It is not a caper movie, though there is a theft, a hidden message, and a complicated getaway. It is not a period piece, though it takes place in a grand hotel between the world wars. It is not a comedy of manners, though there is quite a bit of interplay between the very rich and the staff. However, we can say that the story is intricate and amusing as we follow M Gustave, concierge of the eponymous hotel, on his outragous adventures with his lobby boy-in-training. The acting is exquisite, with a huge, varied, talented cast, excellent performances by Ralph Fiennes and F Murray Abraham, and stunning supporting work by Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, and Jeff Goldblum. It made for a lovely evening.

A Man, a Woman and a Bank

Because I like caper movies, Netflix's recommendation engine suggested A Man, a Woman and a Bank, which is a canonical 1970s boy meets girl movie, complete with goopy soundtrack, and running time of 100 minutes for easy sale to television. Boy meets girl, boy robs bank, boy loses girl, boy loses money, boy gets girl back. Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams appear as the first two characters named in the title. Unfortunately, the bank, which is under construction for most of the movie, does a better job of acting.

Kahawa

Since I just posted a review of Donald E Westlake's Dancing Aztecs, it's worth also taking note of Kahawa.  He considered the pair of them to be his best work, and I'd have to agree. On the surface, this is a familiar Westlake caper: some guys steal a 33-car-long train of coffee in Uganda, and spirit the coffee out of the country during the era of Idi Amin. But it's not his usual light-hearted caper, since it graphically takes place amidst the backdrop of Amin's reign of terror. It is tightly plotted, with setbacks, double-crosses, mixed motivations from the principals, piracy and hijacking, romance, sex, and quite a bit of violence.  But, it's tightly plotted, and tells the fictional tale of what was, apparently, an actual robbery.

Dancing Aztecs

In all the years I've been mentioning it, I realize that I've never written a proper review of Donald Westlake's masterpiece, Dancing Aztecs. My opinion about it has varied, but I've always believed it's the pinnacle of Westlake's comic caper writing, surpassing even his Dortmunder books, because it stands in its own little universe. The story is that a shipment of duplicates of a pre-Columbian artifact from South America includes the smuggled solid gold original, and our large cast of characters spend the book trying to locate and cash-in on the find. It features well-drawn, amusing characters with quirks and foibles, and a fluid set of alliances among them. Entertainingly, it includes the lowest-speed car chase on record. It's a wonderful rendition of the lost treasure story told in a 1920s Russian novel (which was filmed as The Twelve Chairs by Mel Brooks). I've complained from time-to-time that Dancing Aztecs suffers from being stuck in the decade in which it was written, the 1970s, with a number of prejudices and dated ideas that come from that. However, that is a problem only in the way that Gatsby being stuck in the roaring twenties is a problem: it doesn't change the overall quality of the narrative and the timeless nature of the conflict.

The Intern's Handbook

Nobody ever notices the intern. That means if you're an assassin, you can sneak into the law firm as an intern, and kill one of the partners. And your guide for doing it would be Shane Kuhn's recently-published lovely black comedy, The Intern's Handbook, which is just wonderful. It's told from the point of view of "John" one of the operatives at HR, Incorporated, who place hitmen/interns at various companies. He's on his last assignment at a mob-connected law firm. This volume is the notes he is assembling for the operatives who come after him, giving them hints about his hard-won knowledge through multiple murders. It's also the story of meeting and falling for an FBI agent named Alice, who's investigating the law firm with the intention of sending someone to jail rather than the morgue. The whole thing is a black comedy of the first order, and a lot of fun.

Inception

Normally, I avoid anything starring Leonardo DiCaprio like the plague, but encouraged by Liz's studio mate Karen, we recently watched Christopher Nolan's Inception, which won both Hugo and Nebula. And it deserved them. It builds a complete, complex, self-contained world in which DiCaprio's character is in the business of stealing industrial secrets by sneaking into people's dreams. Even though DiCaprio's name is above the title, it's an ensemble cast, including Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Ken Watanabe, and Marion Cotillard, and they succeed in carrying the movie. The dream within a dream within a dream within a dream is a stunning plot device. Cotillard's character appearing in DiCaprio's mind and in the shared dreams even though she's dead is a lovely on-going threat. This movie also succeeds in showing Nolan's scriptwriting and directing chops, which he hasn't done in the commercial Batman fluff he's been doing, or the crappy Superman reboot he wrote last summer. It has a brilliant, haunting closing shot.

Into The Night

We recently rewatched Into the Night, a lovely little 1985 movie about emeralds purloined from a Persian pasha and smuggled into the United States by a woman who has to escape from the Iranian thugs who are trying to steal them. She literally falls onto the hood of the car belonging to an insomniac aerospace engineer. The woman is played by Michelle Pfeiffer, and the engineer is played by Jeff Goldblum, both of them frighteningly young. There is much chasing around Los Angeles in the night (with just enough geographic errors to amuse me), there are cameo appearances by everyone imaginable, many of them directors of other movies. Carl Perkins and David Bowie have a lovely knife fight, though Bowie's scenes have a cheerfully understated menace. Director John Landis plays one of a flock of Iranian thugs, who provide comic relief.  Director Amy Heckerling plays a diner waitress at the landmark Ship's on Westwood Blvd. Dan Ackroyd turns in a funny performance as Goldblum's carpool buddy.  Richard Farnsworth does a nice job as Pfeiffer's sugar daddy with Vera Miles as his snarling wife. If you have not had a chance, find and watch this little-known thriller.

Ready Player One

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is a wonderful cyberpunk story, covering the search for an epic Easter egg hidden in cyberspace. The inventor of cyberspace as we know it has died, leaving no heirs, but has left clues strewn throughout the bits and bytes of his creation to find his inheritance. The path is littered with movies, video games, books, comics, and other references to the 1980s, when the inventor grew up. (About the only missing reference is to Tetris.) In itself, this is reason to read the book: Liz and I amused ourselves by being able to say things like "Jordan from Real Genius" and "Inigo Montoya" to each other as we caught the references ahead of their explanation.

Our narrator and hero is on a quest to find the egg. He meets interesting characters on the way, including the (cyber) girl of his dreams. Of course, there are bad guys from the evil corporation who want to take over cyberspace for their own ends; they're on the hunt, too. Our hero almost keeps ahead of them, and outsmarts them until the point where they kill him. Then it gets truly epic.

We listened to the audiobook version of this in the car on our various peregrinations last summer and fall. By Thanksgiving weekend, we were sufficiently sucked in that we listened from chapter 33 to the end in the living room. Part of that delight was the performance of Wil Wheaton --- yes, Wesley Crusher --- who just does a stunningly wonderful job as the reader. Not only is he a good voice actor, but he clearly was enjoying the material, and was particularly well-suited to read it.

Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

My friend Lisa highly recommended Robin Sloan's Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore and I can now do the same. It's a book in that odd space between mainstream novel and science fiction. There's a clear quest, secrets to be decoded, heroes and villians, patrons and sinners, danger and love, secret cults and the internet. Our point of view character is a clerk in a bookstore that Is More Than It Seems. His roommate is a guy at Industrial Light and Magic who builds physical props not digital ones, and he begins dating a young woman who does data visualization at Google. He and his crew work to solve a puzzle left by Aldus Manutius, the brilliant Venetian printer and typesetter. Sloan recreates Aldus's type designer Francesco Griffo as the German Griffo Gerittszoon, with a very different backstory. There are nice puzzles for the reader, too: the secret society membership numbers appear in odd places so you can track folks through them. Aldus's printer's mark appears in an interesting context. And there's a boutique hotel in New York catering to computer nerds where the bar has a drink called the Blue Screen of Death. (I'm sure I missed some other little fillips.) It's a wonderful book, and I completely devoured it.

Dick Francis's Bloodline

I've been a voracious reader of Dick Francis's thrillers -- all of which take place with a background of horse racing -- since I discovered them in the 1980s. After Francis's wife (his unacknowledged co-writer) died, his son Felix left his job teaching physics at a British prep school and started writing with his dad. Now that Francis senior has died, Felix has continued the franchise his parents started with Dick Francis's Bloodline, and continues it badly. Like Silks, the novel which they wrote jointly, this ends with the hero killing the antagonist. It also proceeds through the gratuitous murder of an attractive woman who appeared for six chapters only to be knocked off, the annoying "I recognized the murderer, but won't tell you who it is right now" ploy, and two instances of "how could they have been so stupid" for the sole purpose of advancing a stalled plot. That's it. I'm done. Francis pere put together good thrillers, which violated rules of plotting to good purpose. I don't know how good a physics teacher Francis fils was, but as a writer, he seems to be re-inventing particle physics --- he's just smashing things together to see what flies out.

Where the Truth Lies (film vs book)

I tripped over Atom Egoyan’s film Where the Truth Lies via a Netflix recommendation.  I was massively disappointed.  The film stars Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth as a 1950s comedy-singing duo, who break up under mysterious circumstances after a dead girl is discovered in the hotel suite they are about to check into.  The point of view character is a young journalist who idolized them when she was a small child, and is writing a biography of one of them in the 1970s.  It wants to be a film noir mystery, but can’t quite get its act together to do so.  Fortunately, the credits note that the source material is a novel by Rupert Holmes (who you know for “The Pina Colada Song” and the plays Drood and Accomplice), and the novel is everything the movie should have been.  It's a send-up of Tom Wolfe-style “new journalism” and provides the full story of our intrepid girl journalist chasing down the reasons for the team’s break up, their sexual predilections, the quirks of their entourages, and surrounding oddness.  It is a fully formed story, rather than the cartoon Egoyan attempted to get past the censors at the MPAA.  We have a real whodunit plot with murder, blackmail, suicide, mistaken identity, and several interesting switchbacks in the path.  This is the story I would have expected from Holmes, who, in Accomplice, was a subtle and sneaky storyteller.

The Last Policeman & Countdown City

If you knew the world was going to end, how diligent would you be in continuing with your daily routines and responsibilities? Thus is the plot of Ben Winters's The Last Policeman. Our point of view character, Henry Palace, has just made detective in Concord, New Hampshire, when it is discovered that an asteroid is going to clobber Earth in nine months. And yet, he insists on finding who murdered the man he finds hanging by his belt in the restroom of the local McDonald's. As society collapses around him, he continues with his daily routines, attempts to corral his errant sister, starts a relationship with a woman he meets while investigating the murder, and tries not to take his fellow detectives' black humor too seriously. A wonderful character study, and a wonderful excuse to ask "what would I do if I was there?"

The immediate sequel to The Last Policeman, as society begins to break down, is Countdown City, in which Palace, now forcibly retired from the police force as local police departments are federalized, takes on a missing persons case. The husband of his childhood babysitter has gone missing, and he agrees to find him. He uncovers several plots larger than he expected and sees his sister off on her own last-ditch attempt to save the world. In the end, he is rescued from a tight corner by an old colleague from the Concord Police.

Through both books, the question kept coming up, "what would I do in those circumstances?" I'd like to believe that I'd carry on, as Henry does, doing what I could, continuing to discharge my responsibilities, even as those responsibilities changed with the world around me. To do otherwise would violate my sense of who I am, of what I'm about.

And now, World of Trouble, the third book in the series is due next week, on 7/15.  I'm very much looking forward to it.