Ramblings of the Easily Distracted

Boom! Headshot!

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:35:23 GMT

So, i'm recently been heavily distracted by a new game...

Borderlands lost my savegame. Just lost it. At the end of a 3-hour, 4-player co-op session, i got a message that i couldn't save, and all my progress from the evening on that character was lost. All the levels, loot and missions. Gone.

And to an extent, i don't care.

If there is one thread running through the current generation of games it's hybridisation; the idea that a game should just a one thing seems slightly lost, so we have shooters with levels and rpg progression, RPGs with shooter mechanics, platformers with fighting game mechanics and stealth levels, and all the old boundries seem blurred. And Borderlands, with its levels, and loot drops and dungeons, is an excellent example; it's basically Diablo design with an FPS engine, skinned over with a wild-west cyberrednecks-in-space art style.

And good gosh, does it work. But hang on! you say. Wasn't Hellgate: London a first-person shooter Diablo clone? And wasn't it a train wreck? and didn't you start by mentioning bugs? WTF?

Well there are two major things that make Borderlands work for me. First off, it's a shooter, and a good one. It's not an RPG with shooter mechanics, it's a shooter with RPG mechanics, which means that the focus of the game is good solid firefights that don't get repetitive fast, are biased towards player skill, and are just plain fun. Gearbox, who made it, are a shooter maker from way back so you'd expect that and they deliver. As you level up you do more damage and have more health, but the quest progression i've seen means that the general difficulty ramps up nicely in line with your level anyway, so it sort of evens out.

The second thing is the tone. Rarely for a game powered by the ubiqitous Unreal3 engine, this isn't shiny bald space marines in grey-brown hard-surface environments, it's a brightly coloured, cell-shaded visual romp adds to the fast pace of the gameplay.

It's fun. There are some levels i've now played 4 times with various combinations of my freinds and i'm not bored of them yet. Multiplayer, for all it's a nightmare to get rolling and its aforementioned tendancy to not save your progression, is completely chaotic, pretty well scaled so it still stays challenging, and a bucket of laughs every time i've done it. Even the times we got a kicking.

In fact, the only real problem (bugs aside) it has as a game is that it needs more - more enemy variety, more drop types, more of what it already does well. Its such a likeable game it's hard to stay mad at it, to be honest.

The Great Detectives 19: Charlie "Bird" Parker

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:35:46 GMT

I actually finished over a week ago; however we got ambushed by real life a little. So, late, here it.

I'm starting to wonder, literally speaking, if i'm becomming jaded on gruesome death. Time was, people were murdered, with the Dagger, in the Library, by Miss Scarlett, but once you hit the 90s it seems you can't die in crime fiction unless you've been horribly mutilated by a serial killer with half-a-dozen deep psychoses. None of which involve getting Aunt Agatha's inheritance, or avenging yourself on the man who killed your puppy all those years ago. And worst of all, it hardly seems to faze me anymore.

So, to the curious case of Every Dead Thing, which is sort of two books for the price of one. The first - consisting of the prologue, the first couple of chapters, and then the last third - involves our hero, the improbably named Charlie Parker, investigating the horrible murder of his wife and daughter. The second - the rest of the book - is an investigation into a missing person that then involves a second serial killer. They do interact, and have some follow through, but in many ways the "B" story is there to set up all the characters that will be important in the "A" story, and in many ways feels a little more generic.

But all that said, this is a damn good read. For a start it doesn't suffer from my main gripe about Cornell and Reichs, that they externalise the killer. For this starts, and ends, a personal story, about Parker, and his loss, and that makes a huge difference to the...realism, i guess, of a final detective vs killer showdown that didn't involve anyone ringing anyone else doorbell and attacking in the kitchen. It also makes Every Dead Thing more a true detective story than a thriller, with a large cast, and clues, and the like, appearing in both its stories. But gosh, its gruesome. We have torture, people being skinned alive, bodies found arranged in symbolic, er, arrangements, the whole works.

Beyond that i'm not sure what else to say about it. I've really enjoyed it, and Connolly has been added to my mental "authors to go back to" list, the first for a while, if i'm being honest. I'm not sure it does anything new, but it certainly collates the tricks of the 90s-00s serial killer boom in a slick and interesting final product with a broad and intersting set of characters.

Next up: We reach the end of the list with a book plucked from Bestseller Lists - Steig Laarson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The Great Detectives 18: Tempe Brennan

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 14:26:28 GMT

So, here we are again.

In many ways, Kathy Reich's Deja Dead is aptly named. Here was have a tough female forensics type investigating a complex and gruesomely described murder. She takes the matter into her own hands for personal reasons, a feeling reciprocated by the crazy-stalker killer, so turns his attentions to her. And yes, it ends with the killer turning at the heroines door, so she can bloodily defeat him in the name of all the victims he has taken.

In some ways i feel i just read Body of Evidence twice.

I shouldn't be too surprised, i guess. Way back at the start of the year, it seemed every book in this reading project was stuck in the same groove, so the fact that we've the 90s and found a different, in no less consistent one is at least par for the course. And its the differences that are important here, not the similarities, because overall i found Deja Dead much more engrossing and thrilling.

For a start, Tempe Brennan (not be at all confused with her TV namesake from Bones) is a pretty good character. She's old, she's a bit messed up, she's engaging and interesting in a way that Scarpetta just isn't. Her flaws and foibles make her a far more engaging companion for the length of the book, and that sort of thing makes a bit difference, especially when the plot feels a tad too routine. There's no clumsy love-story elbowed in either, although clear hints that one may develop if you keep reading the series.

The plot...well the plot is less good. Like Cornwell, theres little of the traditional "detectoring" done. The killer is totally externalised, a monster in the shadows that needs to rooted out and caught, rather than one of the "cast" who needs to be unmasked. It looses some depth, i think, insomuch as crazed serial killers quickly become a cliche, and never get any character apart from psychiatric notes amd their motives are of course mad and inhuman. There is no "human" story to tell, really, no spiral of lust or greed or fear, just "The Devil" striking out with no real reason you can hang to. You lose the intrictate puzzles of the older generation of stories, and i think overall thats a shame.

On the other hand, the book plays its hand rather well. There is a disconcerting subtext about male violence against women that parallels through a few subplots rather neatly, and of course ties in nicely to the final confrontation, as much as i dislike for other reasons. A couple of decent twists too, but of course the aforementioned externalising of the killer does limit the writer in that regard.

Overall then, i'm not sure its totally to my taste but i rather enjoyed it.

Next up: a bit of Southern Gothic, with John Connolly's Every Dead Thing

my weekend

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 10:38:55 GMT

i think as a culture, or maybe a species as a whole, that we are programmed to beleive in narrative. That we think that the world works a certain way, because we are taught it, mostly by fiction, sure, but its strong. Ultimately, we believe things must work a certain way, deep down, regardless of the facts of the situation.

When tragedy strikes suddenly, like it did to our family nearly a year ago now, this isn't a problem. In between the shock, and pain, and the grief, the unexpected leaves no dissonance, because the treacherous part of you that beleives in happy endings has no time to stir, and there is only a reality with which you have to deal.

My own brush with drawn out suffering ended well, after a time. A narrative that worked.

And somehow, despite the facts, and worry, and the intellectual knowledge, deep down, in some way, i think i beleived in happy endings. That despite the odds, things have to work out. Because they're supposed to.

Only they don't.

And today i feel empty, and old, and tired and my thoughts are far from here.

The Great Detectives 17: Kay Scarpetta

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 13:43:29 GMT

Right, slight delay caused by my reading of White Jazz and a couple of other loose ends, before comming back to the detectives proper...

So, Body of Evidence. I've held off a few days before posting this, because in some ways its difficult to talk about, seeing as it left me feeling decidely "meh" about it. But i'll struggle through!

So, first impressions were in many ways pretty good. For a start we have a female lead, we're in the US without a country house in sight, and early emphasis on procedure makes a refreshing change from a lot of the still-very-traditonal stuff the genre seems mired in. Of course, Cornwell pretty much created the forensic procedural as a popular form, so it makes sense it's the first exposure to in this reading project.

However, the first problem comes with Scarpetta herself. She is of course, an analytic proffesional, and the books is in first person, so it's written coldly and proffessionally. In fact it's too cold and proffesional; its bland. Even when shes supposed to be scared, or confused, or out of control, the cold, calm narrative describes that she is, keeping out of the heat of the moment, reinforcing the distance between you, the reader, and the events in the book. OK, so i just read a chunk of Ellroy, whose main strength is keeping you right there, but even without that jarring transistion i think Scarpetta is just too damn bland to be a compelling narrator.

Oh! quick shout out to my pet hate in ALL these books: Stop having characters say it's like being in a detective story. It's not big, and it's not clever.

Right, anyhow, back to the story. I guess its a hazard of the procedural that the plot is essentially that of Scooby Doo; a series of clues are followed to exhaustion, theres a bit of running around, and then the fiend is revealed. This may sound harsh, and it's not meant to, but it's the best analogy i can think of. See; in a lot of the early detective fiction you have a crime, and an expanded cast linked to that crime, and they are gradually eliminated, or secrets exposed till the killer is revealed. Part of the joy is getting ahead of the detective. However Cornwall doesn't play that, she uses a different structure, and in the end it's damning sign that they catch the killer by him turning up, unannounced, on Scarpettas doorstep to kill her.

The whole thing plays like a thriller, not a detective story. Its very linear, the identity of the killer meaning that there can be little sense of foreshadowing and many of the red herrings and subplots remain undercooked, or simply not interesting, particularly the somewhat tacked on, and heat-less love angle.

This may all sound rather harsh. In fact, i did crack through it, and it is pacey and accessible. And like i said at the top of the page, it's something new. But it's hard to feel engaged, sadly, and it lets it down badly for me.

Next up, more forensics excitement with Kathy Reichs, and Deja Dead

Thwack! Ka-Pow!

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:48:18 GMT

Sometimes get the wrong impression from a game before you even see any of it. Generally, licensed games are a bit rubbish, and generally, superhero games are too, so you can guess my opinion of licensed superhero games. Furthermore, i first saw publicity for Batman: Arkham Asylum not long after The Dark Knight came out, espousing it's "dark" and "gritty" credentials, and unsurprisingly i thought "hey, that looks like a knock-off" and sort of tuned out.

So I missed that the script was written by Paul Dini, who was one of the masterminds behind Batman The Animated Series. And i missed that Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill were back reprising their roles as Bats and the Joker. And i missed the steady, positive buzz that built around the game, until i was prodded into trying the Demo. And then i went straight out and pre-ordered it.

So how is it?

Well in many ways, B:AA is a game firmly of its generation. For a start it uses the Unreal 3 engine, which means its great at armour textures, but less good at hair, so everyone looks ever so slightly plasticy and over-exposed. Less flipantly, its a hybrid game - part stealth, part action, part platformer, its constituent elements effortlessly thrown together and shaken up at regular intervals. Finally, in what is becomeing the hallmark of games these days, its incredibly cinematic in both it's structure and pacing, slipping between external cutscene, in-game cutscene and playable sections smoothly and without pause. Its rarely annoying, and occasionally utterly wonderful.

The key to the games appeal, for me, is that the sense of being Batman is pretty nailed. You're not bulletproof, or faster or tougher than your opponents, but you are smarter, and more skilled. Combat is largely context-sensitive use of the face-buttons; one for "hit", one for "dodge", one for "counter" and one for "stun", but they key is in the timing, running together flowing combos between multiple attackers in a brutal, bone-crunching style. You can't take many hits but then again, you rarely do. Goons with guns present a different problem, but thankfully the environment is repleat with gargoyles (for hanging from) or ducts (for crawling along) and you can pick off from the dark one-by-one.

The story is pretty solid, if uninspired; Joker has taken over the asylum and you're trapped there, trying to stop him, but the dialogue and voice work is fantastic, as is the interweaving of a number of Batman's villians roster into the storyline. A good few are missing, yet little nods to them appear all over the place, usually in the form of solutions to the games collectable element in the form clues given by The Riddler (who gets increasingly aghast as you find them!). Finally a huge shout out to the fantastic Scarecrow sections, used to both shake up the storyline in places, and delve into Bat's history in an interactive and interesting way.

So yeah, for a game i largely ignored at first i like it quite a lot!

The Great Detectives 16: Jack Vincennes, Ed Exley, Bud White

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:58:13 GMT

So, back on the crime fiction, and back in the US for our last detour to Noir territory...

So this is another "cheat" choice in some ways, seeing as i already own a lot of James Ellroy, and really like him, the creepy dark aestetics, the kinetic prose style, and the twisty, cleverer-than-they-look plotting, but i'd never previously got around to reading what is often regarded as his best book, LA Confidential. Third part of the LA Quartet, i'd read the previous two before being unable to continue due largely to the fact they're so damn grim i can't read more than a couple on the trot. So this seemed like a good time to finish up.

LA Confidential starts with the protagonist of the previous novel, The Big Nowhere, being brutally gunned down in a Motel shootout. This sets the tone nicely.

The book follows a structure i've seen elsewhere with Ellroy, that of three interweaving strands following the perspectives of each of the three main characters as they each follow fairly divergent storylines, revolving around two seemingly unconnected cases that slowly draw together. Ellroy makes little attempt to keep his characters together - White and Exley hate each other, for a start, and Vincennes is wrapped up in his worries, and they all move around each other in an intricate dance that only when you get to the end of the book to you realise how brilliantly plotted it all is.

The characters themselves are also deceptively complex. Ellroy likes his archeypal triumvirate - the Idealist, the Chancer, the Thug, for want of a better synopsis - and here each goes on a long character arc throughout the book that leaves them unrecognisable from their earlier incarnations, each taking on traits of the others whilst remaining very much their own man. Motives outside of these three remain ambigious, other characters revealing different facets depending on who is speaking, and even in the end, when the dice are thrown and the villian(s) revealed and a hell of a lot of people get killed, somethings remain in the realm of speculation.

When i read the other two noir books, particularly Chandler, i remember thinking that they were like "proper" literature disgused as throwaway pulp. LA Confidential is like that, but more so - its even darker than The Maltese Falcon and yet far more engaging, and more polished and calculated than Farewell my Lovely. But boy is it grim. Even the breifest of dips into Ellroy give you a world where nothing can exist without compromise, where nothing can be left pure, and good. Its a view that leaves you at end feeling slightly compromised yourself, having enjoyed a story with no Justice, no riteous avenging of the fallen, just one character left exactly where he wanted to be, having lost everything to acheive it.

Next up: I'm going to finish the LA Quartet is White Jazz and then head onwards towards modern detectoring with Patricia Cornwell's Body of Evidence.

The Great Detectives 15: John Rebus

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:59:51 GMT

So finally we reach a book that feels properly modern..

So, here we are into the recognisably modern age. If Morse brought a noir sensibility into British detectives, then Knots and Crosses brings another american invention, the Serial Killer, into play, alongside the mucky city streets and broken personal lives.

First observation - Knots and Crosses clearly wasn't written as the start of a franchise, something Ian Rankin admits to in his preface. The story is too personal, the detective himself too central to the case, his neurosis themselves a clue. It even toys with the idea that Rebus himself is a suspect, although it never quite holds up in the books' timeline. It feels standalone, and i'm tempted to read more solely to see where he goes a character largely spent at the end of the book.

Its also a little self-concious at times. Theres a few too many heavy references to Jekyll and Hyde, for instance, and characters mulling that they feel like they're in a detective novel was old and weak when Margaret Allingham was doing it in the 20s, thanks.

All that said, Knots and Crosses is a very good book. It's taut, well plotted and making Rebus dead centre of the investigation gives it a power a lot of other detective fiction misses, just because the stakes are so high by the time the two or three sub-plots converge at the end. The final resolutions are nice and dark, with no pat moment of "aha! to the Accusing Parlor!" nor a clean arrest and justice served finish.

Rebus himself, as befits his role in all this, is by far the most messed up detective i've yet seen, and in English terms, the first to be truely separated from the "gentleman detective" line that stretches all the way back to The Moonstone. He's not uncharacteristically brilliant, or strangely cultured, or set apart by his genius; he's a copper, a good one, by and large, but a mostly normal one in many respects. Sure, he's set apart, but like Morse it's a disadvantage, not a strength (and unlike Morse it's for totally negative reasons) and in the end it's central to the plot.

So in the final analysis this is feels very much like another evolutionary step in a genre that seemed to be running pretty much at a standstill. Its a darker step, a more intimately personal step, and i'd be interested to see where, if anywhere, it all ends up.

Next up: i'm way ahead of schedule on this, so i'm taking July off to read Anthony Beevor's D-Day and Carlos Ruis Zafon's The Angels Game....then back to the US for LA Confidential.

The Great Detectives 14: Brother Cadfael

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:01:07 GMT

So, to the real joker in the pack - the only non-contempory detective in the list...

I'm come to the conclusion that in some ways One Corpse Too Many isn't really a detective story. OK, so it opens with a murder concealed within many deaths, and ends with the murderer revealed, but there seems little in the way of investigation and it's all more a loose subplot to the wider plot historical-medieval romp that takes up the rest of the book.

Cadfael himself is pretty much a classic detective though - a wider sensibility than his calling allows, perceptive, thoughtful and given to puzzles. He's interested in logic, and observation, and justice, and like many detectives i've come across keeps his thoughts private until the "right" time for revelations. The murder itself - a man killed and body hidden within the corpses of a (surprisingly ambivalently handled) massacre - is fairly interesting in itself, and plays into the main plot, which involves love, adventure, and missing treasure, but still...i can't help but think it gets lost a little.

For a start, the books features the bloody massacre of 70-odd defenders of Shrewsbury after it is captured by King Stephen, which no-one really seems to bothered about ("He's a King, it's what he does") but gets het up about an extra body no-one actually ordered to be massacred in Cold Blood. And then that gets sort of forgotten again, as everyone gets excited by courtly romance and the missing treasure, and theres a nagging sense that one of the leads is only interested in any sort of investigation/justice as a nice way of getting into one of the other lead's pants.

Although that said, for a book with two romantic sub-plots, a massacre and climax involving Trial by Combat, it all feels strangely light on the "sex and violence" front, in an odd reverse of my expectations about the "Golden Age" books which seemed riddled with the stuff. Theres a lot of courtly woo-ing, of course, but it's not really the same. Oh and i was wryly amused that no-one seems to mind that Cadfael takes his new Novice off to share his rooms at night straight away. Broad-minded Abbey, that.

Thats not to say i didn't enjoy One Corpse Too Many, because actually i did. Quite a lot. Its a broad, jolly romp through medievel England, quick witted and well constructed. The odd qualm aside its full of nicely drawn characters doing fun things, and they all live happily ever after at the end.

Apart from the poor massacred defenders of Shrewsbury of course. But they're extras, so don't count.

Next up: Into the 1980s with Ian Rankin's Knots and Crosses

The Great Detectives 13: Endevour Morse

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:20:58 GMT

Yes, i know his first name is some secret, but it's hardly a plot point...

More than any other name on the list, i have a strong impression of the dramatised Morse. John Thaw, Jaguar, Geordie Sargeant, dreamy spires, a gentle learned pace of story. So actually reading a Morse novel was always going to be difficult in the sense of separating the literary character out.

So, Last Seen Wearing starts as a missing persons case, dredged up from the archives after many years as a new lead is uncovered. The old lead detective is recently deceased, so Morse is reluctantly put on the case, delving into old history and old wounds in search of a schoolgirl who just up and vanished one sunny afternoon. Story wise its pretty solid, although the overall structure is pretty routine - moving between suspects as the information comes out, each secret revealing the next until we finally get a proper murder, and a proper killer.

Whats more notable, and whats finally nice to see, is a sense that this is a new type of British Detective. To whit, it's Noir. Its set in the lower classes, the housing estates. It's full of furtive passions, lost hopes and small lives. Its urban, finally - Dreamy Oxford cast as Marlows' San Francisco, complete with greyscaled, unsatisfactory endings.

Even more interesting is Morse himself. I'm very used to the Gentlemen Detective by now, the man set apart by his brain, alone, and slightly flawed, yet a keen searcher for truth and justice. I wonder if the fact that these are all written by women is a factor, but Morse, the first since the supercillious Father Brown to be written by a man, has many of the characteristics but is portrayed differently; as terribly, terribly, lonely. Morse is set apart, by his skills, by his inclination, but it leaves with nothing save for Beer and Wagner, unable to talk to any woman in the book without in some way sexualising her, a trait that would be appallingly letcherous if it didn't come across as so desperately sad.

His brain betrays him frequently too. Lewis is open about his criticism that Morse thinks too hard, that he discounts the obvious in favour of the complex and it's certainly true that this trips up the investigation as much as propelling it towards a conclusion. There is however a wonderful moment when Lewis' painstaking deduction, and Morse's intuition reach the same detailed (yet wrong) conclusion that nicely balances the partnership and leaves them on a more equal footing than it at first appears.

In the end, Last Seen Wearing feels, finally, like a move away from the more repetitive cycles of the "Golden Age" and their dillente fops in search of criminals in country estates, and towards modern police work in urban britain. And thats nice - because as much as i'd enjoyed some of the time spent with such worthies, it was all getting a bit repetitive...

Next up: we travel back in time to AD 1138, and our only historical Detective, Brother Cadfael, in One Corpse Too Many.

The Great Detectives 12: Adam Dagliesh

Thu, 28 May 2009 13:39:33 GMT

So, we skip forward, out of the Golden Age of Gentleman Detectives into the modern age, and P D James' A Mind to Murder. For some reason i was expecting that the leap towards the current would bring a marked change in tone, as if the 20 year gap would be reflected in the book, and characters. But on the other hand, the "Golden Age" had a lot more sex and violence in than i expected in the first place, so maybe all my predjudices were off.

There is one immediate and obvious difference once you start reading though, and that is it's choice of protagonist. Whereas before we have had Gentlemen working - or playing - at detective, now we have our first proper cop, and the first story approaching what in modern TV parlance is called "the procedural". Dagleish isn't that far that far removed however, being cultured, intelligent and thoughtful - a cop playing at Dilettante, and exibiting many of the characteristics you'd see in say, Peter Whimsey.

The murder is also faintly familiar; a brutal killing in the basement of a posh (yet Nationalised) Psychiatric unit, the doors locked, and everyone a suspect, their small world a mess of secrets and rivalries. However for possibly the first time for British crime fiction this year, the working classes get their hand in, not just the doctors and so on, and there is a more sensitive nuance to a lot of the characters, and a feel for the strains of life in a changing 60s London. As i've come to expect, theres not a lot of depth in any of the suspects, but they are well defined and interesting, and play out their "hour upon the stage" well.

The plot itself also quite clever. In the end, it's a simple case, with the obvious motive. The murderer is actually put in the frame quite early, and as more comes out of events around the hospital, and it becomes murky, moves away from them. Given the pattern of these things it's quite clever, almost a fake clearance, as a cleverer, and in some ways more ruthless character comes to the fore as the main suspect. I certainly didn't catch on.

So in the end P D James feels like evolution, not revolution in the crime genre. It's less artificial, more grounded, more verite, and thats to its credit, but it also feels like it's not really seeking to move too far away from the established tropes of the genre.

Next up: As soon as i get paid and get get to amazon.co.uk, it's time for Morse, in Last Seen Wearing, by Colin Dexter.

...in 3D!

Thu, 21 May 2009 15:44:50 GMT

Now Ewan is old enough to really have his own tastes, rather than ours inflicted upon him, we watch more and more things because he wants to, rather than because we think he'll enjoy them. This has brought us Primeval, Merlin, Power Rangers Mystic Force and Total Drama Island to name but a few, and as you'd expect the quality is very, very variable. But after a which you start to develop a new scale in your, dealing with kids' shows and movies, ranging from the actually quite good down to the "Oh Please let it Stop".

Movies are pretty much the same - these days we see enough adverts on the telly to get an idea if Ewan wants to go see something (Night at the Museum 2, here we come, sadly) but sometimes we still pull Force Majeure and take him to see something anway. Like Coraline.

From the childrens' novella by Neil Gaiman, and the director of Nightmare Before Xmas, its a sumptuous, oozing-quality stop-motion movie that both looks, and plays, like nothing else around in the age of high-speed CG movies. In fact, the trailers that played before it, with the exception of Pixar's Up, may have shown off a lot of processing power but really not a great deal of imagination.

The story, for those who don't know, involves Coraline Jones, whose somewhat scatty and distracted parents have moved into an old house. Left to her own devices she stumbles across a passageway to another world, where her "other" mother and "other" father await; a perfect world, built for her, which is of course not what it seems. The adaptation deviates from the book slightly, mainly with the additional of a new character, but its very true to the spirit of the original, and wonderfully dark as the climax nears.

The character design is awesome, actually, especially Coraline herself. The sets are wonderful, contrasting the fantasy world to the real one, and then the insect-themed truth towards the end. And of course it was all in 3D, my first experience of this new iteration of the format. Pretty impressed i was, too. Mostly it just uses the effect to layer up foreground and background, rather than anything dynamic, but there are a few shots that are more ambitious and work pretty well. You do seem to lose a little bit of image quality, and the glasses are dorky (but less dorky than the old red-and-green ones, and reusable) but on the whole pretty cool.

As an amusing code, on saturday night we were called upstairs to be told that the film was "stupid" and Ewan "never wanted to see it anyway". It now being dark, and raining, and the fact it had stopped him going to sleep, clearly had nothing to do with this opinion...

The Great Detectives 11: Jane Marple

Tue, 19 May 2009 14:08:59 GMT

I cracked through this over the weekend...a really fast read.

It seems that compared to last years "American Classics" theres been a much larger influence of women in this years projects, both in terms of strong female characters but also female authors. The Moving Finger however, is the first book to feature a female detective, in the person of the tireless Jane Marple. In fact the story is pretty much dominated by the fairer sex - both victims are women, most of the characters with any sort of page-time are women, and the nature of the crime, poison pen letters, is widely described as a "female" crime.

In fact, the only male character that makes any sort of impact is the narrator, Jerry Burton. Jerry is a pilot of some description, recovering from a serious injury of some description, resulting from a crash of some description. He's also independantly wealthy by some means (love the vagueness) so when he is prescribed recuperation he rents a country house in a small village with his sister to look after him. Thhe book, much like Christies Murder on the Orient Express, is structurally a mystery for the reader to solve, laid out, slightly artifically, to that end.

In the first act Jerry meets the suspects...ah, villagers, and before you know it, bang! one of them is dead. The second act is the initial investigations, with Jerry not able to resist becoming involved, before the third act arrival of Marple and ta-daaa! denoumont.

Theres a fair amount of solid characterisation at work throughout, although Jerry himself is a tad oblivious at times. Not least his tacked-on love story, which ends in a flash of "gosh, you know i think i love the girl and shall marry her!" although a gag is made of the fact everyone else has realised this before the pair involved. He's mainly a cypher for the readers, an outsider that needs thing explaining to him without being the omnipetant detective, and Marples late appearence means she never comes across as smug and withholding like Poirot does.

As for the story; well it's pretty good. As befits the mystery-story structure little clues are scattered about, red herrings abound, and one huge misdirection adds a fair bit of obfuscation to the proceedings. More importantly it holds together when all is revealed, and cleverly is a lot simpler than it appears to be when you strip away the extra detail and false assumptions.

In conclusion, i suspect that over-exposure to the tropes of Christie adaptations has left me with an unfair impression of her as a writer. I mean, sure they're there, but on the page the structure of it, and the slightly thin characters, make it a puzzle to be solved, and that carries the story through as your brain tries to whirl ahead of the unfolding story. Not sure i'll go back to her in the future, but certainly you can see how her influence becomes dominant and her reputation is built.

Next Up: We leap forward a couple of decades to meet a more modern detective, in P D James' A Mind to Murder

The Great Detectives 10: Phillip Marlowe

Fri, 15 May 2009 13:34:28 GMT

Back to the Great Detectives, and a return to Raymond Chandler, whom i "discovered" last year on the Great American Novel reads. I really enjoyed it, and so Marlowe became a shoe-in for one of this years Detectives. So, without further ado...

I really liked The Big Sleep. I liked it's style, it's characters, and it's feel, but the disjointed, gap-ridden plot sat underneath that, and occasionally, when you thought about it, didn't sit right. So moving onto Chandler's second Phillip Marlowe story, Farewell, My Lovely, you get what is, in many ways, a finished article.

Increasingly i'm seeing Marlowe as the noir hero. Spade, as i've already commented, is harsher, and later noir wallows around in the muck more than Marlowes stories, but the faded, tarnished morality of the man, just trying to do the best in a world where it just gets you hurt, sits just right with me. Its a world which has it's idealists, and it's white hats, but they're cynical and hard-bitten, and black hats who aren't, just ordinary joes trying to make their way in a world that has no room for those that play by the rules.

Farewell, My Lovely tells two separate stories that start to intertwine and finally, it turns out, aren't separate at all. Compared to the ramshackle plotting of The Big Sleep it's slick and well orchestrated, the lose ends that turn up feel deliberate distractions rather than something Chandler just forgot about, and it loops together for a neat ending i didn't see comming, and frankly, kicked myself that i should have.

What makes it different from the predominately English crime literature i've been reading through is a stronger focus on a smaller, well drawn cast. Chandler is great at pencil sketches of his protagonists, but even the minor characters come across well. And the main cast are great - Anne Riordan particularly is a great female lead - centred on Marlowe himself, bruised, beaten but still standing and still, in his own way, a powerful force for justice.

In some ways, Farewell, My Lovely was a banker for this year. I really liked The Big Sleep and was pretty confident i'd like this. And i did. I just need to find an excuse to read the next one, next year...

Next up: Back to Agatha Christie, this time for Jane Marple, in The Moving Finger.

Wed, 13 May 2009 14:53:51 GMT

i really need to get around to a catch-up on our recent DVD views. But i'm not. Instead, i shall nerd-out over this weekends trip to the flicks.

A couple of years ago i bought Z for some anniversary or birthday or something (i forget what) the DVD set of the 1st series of Star Trek. Rewatching it we were stuck by how different it is, in many ways, to the iterations of the franchise that have come after it, and also how influential it has been on the whole TV Sci-Fi genre. It seems that almost every stab at the SF show on the telly has either lifted wholesale from ST or been somehow desperate to prove how much it's "different" from it. It's a credit, i think, to the strengths of the original creation, something that has become so iconic, so embedded into the culture.

So a full blown "reimaging" such as Star Trek was always going to be risky. New versions of those classic characters, new ways of telling those sorts of stories, thats a big challenge. It's easy to look at the summer of sequels, franchise expansions and the like littering the upcomming schedules and think a new Star Trek movie is the same ilk, especially given the lazy, expanded-episode plots of the last couple, but thankfully, it's not.

First things first. The movie opens with possibly it's most savage moment, the destruction of the USS Kelvin and the history-altering death of James T Kirk's father. A lot of the later action and drama is tempered with flashes of humour, from quips to sight-gags, but this opening sequence is brutal and heart-rending and a great setup for the rest of the film. Thereafter we skip forward and introduce a breif history of Kirk and Spock up to Starfleet Academy, followed by the main villian re-appearing (after vanishing for 20 years for some reason) and the main action really getting going.

The plot, truth be told, is a little thin. Nero is a decently acted villian and his motivation is...alright, but the time-travelley nature of it really only serves to allow them reboot the franchise in a gloriously continuity-smashing sort of way. Its a deck-clearer, and feels like it, moving forward at a good pace but there pretty much just to bring the characters together and shake them up a bit.

With that in mind, it's pretty much a total success. A bratty, untempered Kirk works for me; all attitude and arrogance yet briming with potential. Also he's fond of getting into fist fights, which makes a lot of sense, given his propensities in TOS. They've given Spock more to play with in terms of his Human side, emphasising his apartness from Vulcan and gives a nice backstory to how he ends up in Starfleet in the first place. Finally, Karl Urban is uncanny as Leonard McCoy, still the third wheel on the Kirk/Spock bicycle, and a strong presence throughout the movie. The rest of the crew are, largely, the rest of the crew; given their moments to shine but definately on the second tier. A nice addition is Captain Chris Pike, strongly played and well integrated into the plot in a crucial role.

So with a strong cast and decent script (plot notwithstanding) Star Trek fair cracks along. It's effects are gorgeous - the new Enterprise is beautiful, the sounds and sets a great mix of homage and modernity. Theres one shot in particular - the Enterprise rising out of the atmosphere of Titan - that is jaw-dropping, but all the way though it oozes affection for the source material and a great poise in execution. Add onto this far too many little nods to count to the originals and you have the complete package; something that there for the fans, but totally accessable to someone who'd never seen an episode in their lives.

Oh, and using a new version of the TOS theme over the end credits was genius and ensured everyone left with a big grin on their faces. So yeah, i liked Star Trek, i liked it a lot.

Thu, 07 May 2009 13:07:48 GMT

So, whilst on holiday i did get to catch up on a bit of (non-detective) reading...

As is moderately well documented, i have a bit of aversion to the fantasy genre. Mostly this is due to the somewhat repetitive nature of it common tropes - epic myth cycles, elves, destiny, ancient artifacts of power, 20-book series, teenage power-wish-fulfilment, etc. I like some Tolkien as much as the next nerd, but my predjudice is fuelled by the sense the genre as a whole has never really overcome his influence, either in content or in imagery, and i've very rarely read much fantasy that disabuses me of that notion.

I originally read China Mieville's Perdido Street Station largely on the basis that it was recommended on the basis of being un-fantasy fantasy - something clearly set in a fantasy world yet totally removed from many of the normal conventions of the genre. And enjoyed it immensely i did, it's nasty, street-level nihilism, strong characterisation and good pacing, along with a distinctive setting without an elf in sight. I recall being somewhat unsure about the plot, and the slightly for-the-sake-of-it nasty ending which smacked a little too much of "look ma! i'm different. The follow up, The Scar had a better overall story, and some nice insights into a bigger world but felt weighed down with a bunch of thoroughly unlikeably characters which made it hard to feel any involvement in the story.

So, a couple of years after it got published, i got around to reading Iron Council, which basically takes the strengths of both books and chucks out the weaknesses, and wraps it all around a Revolutionary Western. And i loved it.

I'll try and stay comparatively spoiler free, as much as i can, a hope that will be helped by the fact that it's hard to explain the plotting in a relatively short piece of text. There are essentially two core narratives - the first focuses on a bunch of people looking for someone, finding him, and finding what he is searching for: the titular Iron Council itself, a symbol, somewhat murkily defined of defiance of the citys authorities and hope for revolutionaries. The second deals with revolutionaries inside the city of New Crobuzon, following one of the main protagionists on a journey from newsletter printing seditionist to full-blown radical terrorist. These stories don't directly overlap until the end (and their comparative timing is pretty vague, for reasons that become obvious) and then they sort of weave together towards the finale.

The characters themselves are certainly a strong point in the book. Few of them are stunningly "nice" but they're all very human; mixed up idealists, iconoclasts, martyrs, they feel real and engaging and their conflicts with each other are nicely greyscaled right to the final denoument. There is a smack of the other books nihilistic approach to characters, but in many respects the big deaths feel "right" - fitting ends to the character arcs themselves. Its that sense of completeness that i think is one of the big improvements over the other books.

The other strength is the main story concept - the Iron Council itself. Not properly revealed to about half-way through - where the myth and rumours are suddenly brought into releif by a big flashback through the lives of some characters and the formation of the Council - it is not only a cool, this-could-only-really-be-done-in-fantasy idea, but it's also really clear why the city authorities are so scared of it, and why they are so desperate to destroy it. And really it's this concept that carries the book - it's the focal point for the characters, for all the events, and as it all hurtles (literally) to it's finale the building sense of tradgedy gives the book a real pull, and it's final resolution is, i think, near-perfect.

And of course the Iron Council reeks of being about "stuff". It lifts from all over: Once Upon a Time in the West and Les Miserables are the ones that spring instantly to mind, shot through with heavy allegory about socialist revolution, and the impeccable world-building that the earlier books display as an added bonus. It wants to ask questions of its subject matter, to score points on big issues, something thats rare in any genre fiction, it seems, and more so in Fantasy.

So yeah, I don't like Fantasy. But i really, really, liked this.

games wot i played on a weekend

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 15:43:43 GMT

As previously mentioned, we played a lot of new games this weekend. So, in broadly the order i played them, some thoughts...

First up, watery death awaits with Red November. The general idea of this game is that you play the crew of a gobin submarine, that, being built and crewed by Goblins, is in deep trouble. Its leaking. It's on fire. It's running our of air. The Reactor is leaking. Oh and the missiles are looking dodgy and theres this odd thing on the sonar that could just be a Giant Squid...

The core mechanic is a nifty time-shifting thing consisting of a track around the edge of the board. As you do anything - move, repair, etc - you move around this track, which triggers more events to happen. The aim of the game is to get to the end of the time track, when you get rescued, but this can be quite tricky, as fixing things takes time, which causes more things to happen. An amusing core mechanic is that you can be better at something (or braver) when drunk, but getting drunk increases your chances of falling unconcious and burning or drowning to death!

I rather enjoyed Red November - its a lot simpler than it probably sounds, has a nice wacky sense of fun, and you end up charging all over the sub just trying to stay ahead of whatever is going wrong next. we also learnt that trusting your fate to random dice rolls in situations where you can instantly die is foolish.

Next we had Dominion. This was initially described as a game based around the sort of deck-building mechanics in something like Magic: The Gathering, which made me want to flee in terror, screaming, but sadly i'd already had something to drink so that wasn't really an option. Once i played it however, i really rather enjoyed it. and it's not really like Magic at all.

Essentially the idea is that you buy cards from a central pool to add to your own personal draw deck. Each turn you have cards in your hand you can use from your personal deck, which either have special effects or allow you to buy new cards that can then be added to your deck. To win the game, you have to buy victory point cards, but these are useless in gameplay so effectively dilute your deck as you play. There is also a balance of getting special cards and "treasure" cards so your comparitvely small hand each turn contains a decent mix of both.

Dominion had by far the most interestingly novel mechanics of the weekend, and yet once you get past the initial daunting setup is very fast and fluid to play with a lot of options with even the basic card sets we used. The game itself comes with a huge array of cards that you can use in differnet combinations, and keeping track of them all, and packing them in the box is perhaps a sub-game all to itself!

I was less impressed with Tale in the Desert, a game of creating chains of pastel coloured Camels, but this is partly because i didn't really get the rules and partly because i got trounced by my 6-year-old son. So, moving on...

...to the game that got the most play this weekend, Pandemic. My brain tells me that it was really about combating global Zombie outbreaks, but according to the box (pah!) it's about disease control. A fully co-operative game, Pandemic sees you play a team of specialists combating various diseases around the world. To win, you need to cure all four strains, which is done by any one player collecting enough of the relevent location cards and being able to play them a research centre. The trick really is that you need to be together to trade cards at the location they relate to so you end up caught between fire-fighting the relentless outbreaks and trying to get together to get the cures down, all the while the clock is ticking down...

It's really fun, although pretty hard. You can play through it pretty quick but most of the time is spent with the four of you trying to brainstorm the best way forward, and use the individual characters special abilities to make it happen. If you leave an area too long, it can "spark", with outbreaks skipping from one city to the next and in one of the games we got a staggering chain of them that knocked us when we thought we were doing OK. It makes it a little random, but does add to the fear factor as new outbreaks are turned out of the infection deck.

Finally, Small World. This reminded me of a small-scale, fantasy themed History of the World, which is no bad thing, with a larger random, and fun, element. The game "generates" random races from a combination of core races and special powers - for instance "Spirit Ghouls", or "Commando Giants", and then these assault across the land, before falling into the decline at a time of the players choosing, when he picks a new race and does it again. The combinations are what give the game its variety, as your race may score points for certain actions, or certain territories over simply being on the map, so it's not always a straightforward tactical fight on a very crowed map.

Taking territory is automatic, and really there is very little luck involved, other than the creation of races, some of which can be horribly powerful, others laughably weak. of course, to "pass" on a race you have to pay victory points, so over the course of a game picking up a weak race with a bunch of "passed" points on it can be very advantageous. I must confess i think i missed a large number of tricks on my game of this, although i did get better as it went along, and strangely it's quite hard to keep track of who is doing well and who isn't - something i'm not usually fond of but in this case makes the final points tally a nice moment of drama!

...and thats about it...

The Great Detectives 9: Albert Campion

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 14:36:24 GMT

My freind paced the drawing room pensively. "There is a pattern here, Watson. Something familiar, but i cannot place it. Something in the style of the crime, and the strange commonilty of it's participants"...

Before we start, a quick checklist!

Murder! In a refined, country setting! Check
Unlikeable victim with many enemies! Check
Mysterious circumstances! Check
Gentleman Detective Called from London! Check
Working Class calls-a-spade-a-spade Sidekick! Check
Secrets, Lies and Co-incidence Abound! Check

Yes! It's Margaret Allingham breaking absoluetly no new ground whatsoever with The Case of the Late Pig!

Ok, in fairness, the main twist - that the victim was dead and buried five months before their apparent murder is a decent one, and as the plot progresses it's nicely twisty and unravells well. Its another fairly simple case, in the end, messed up by the abundance of motives and questions of identity of the deceased. So it's not too bad, but not strikingly original or, if i'm being honest, that interesting. But after the last book, at least it's not rubbish.

The main show is, as you might expect, the detective himself. Campion is, at face value, another Whimsey knock-off, however this is tempered somewhat by the first-person narrative, which is refreshing, and disarming, and works well for a mystery novel. It's slightly annoying that there is a tendancy to use the "i didn't know it then but this was a fatal mistake" device a few too many times, if only because it's often anti-climactic as the book plays out.

Aside from that, as i've already implied, it's a little by-the-numbers. Even after only a handful of "golden age" novels theres a real sense of cliche going on, i would think after a few more i'll be able to spot the killer from the first few chapters, just from metatextual analysis. Campion isn't bad - i'll reserve that condemnation for Alleyn - he's just alright. But outside of a Marple book, i'm done with this period, which is good, because even after a quick visit i'm kinda bored of it.

Next up: I'm taking a break to read China Mieville's Iron Council, before we're back with more Agatha Christie...

The Great Detectives 8: Roderick Alleyn

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 15:34:18 GMT

Settling into the "Golden Age" now, we have another of the Gentleman Detectives....

Theres another detective that throws a long shadow over The Nursing Home Murder, and it's Peter Whimsey. See, clearly Whimsey was popular, and successful, and someone thought "hey! i can do that!", and so we have Roderick Alleyn, who is also the second son on high nobility, a Great War veteran, and a gentlemen detective assisted by a more traditional sidekick and a few associated hangers on who also get involved in his cases.

The thing is, it's just not as good. Not by a long stretch.

Before we come to the story, lets look at the characters. Alleyn is actually a cop, so thats one up on Whimsey, but whereas Whimseys Scotland Yard sidekick felt more of an equal (even ending up as his brother-in-law), Alleyn's sidekick Fox is a sort of fawning yes-man, with the little aspirational comedy moments (like learning bad French) that made me wince. Whimsey's associate detectives are competant and progress the plot, Alleyn sends his dinner companions in to clown around "undercover" while he does the real work somewhere else. The reason i didn't dislike Whimsey is that despite his toff-ey bestness he was well written, falible and interesting with nice supporting characters, whereas Alleyn is pretty much just plain annoying.

Right, now thats off my chest, what about the story? The setup is interesting for a start - the Home Secretary, in the midst of enacting some draconian anti-Bolshevik legislation whilst boinking an old freinds lady-love comes down with acute Appendicitis. Operating on him is said old freind (the surgeon) and the lady-love (a nurse). He dies, of an overdose adminstered on the table. Whodunnit?

And here we come to the other big gripe with the book. Theres a lot of sound and fury, but very little actual plotting - sure theres a load of red herrings but really it's not the sort of slow uncovering of lies and deception that you expect, just a lot of running them down and sorting them out. Unlike Christie, who practically begged you to solve it from the clues, Marsh prefers a big "it was him!!" reveal followed by two chapters of Alleyn sitting at a dinner table explaining how he worked it all out and what a totally fab chappie he is. And of course it's none of the more interesting suspects and the motive is weak.

Oh, and another thing - making comments all the time about "this isn't like those detective stories you read, you know" from the mouths of characters isn't big or clever. This is book 8 in this is project, still very early in the life of the detective genre and frankly theres' nothing in this book i've not seen done better elsewhere. Pretty much every character is lifted from the Big Book of Cliches, which is more excusable if you've got a large cast, but you don't - and less said about the Bolshevik meeting sub-plot the better - and none of them actually come across as people.

So, the first real dissapointment. Heres to better luck next time.

Next up: yet another gentleman detective from a female writer! This time Margaret Allingham's Campion in The Case of the Late Pig

The Great Detectives 7: Hercule Poirot

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 13:13:42 GMT

And so, we come to Agatha Christie....warning: Spoilers!

My only real experience of Agatha Christie novels is watching the adaptations on the telly. So my opinions, which aren't wonderfully high, are coloured, maybe unfairly, but the seemingly endless parades of country houses and twee detectives and the terribly, terribly, english nature of it all. I'll be honest, i was somewhat dreading getting to Christie, never mind my decision to read two of her books, largely on this basis alone.

So Murder on the Orient Express was a little bit of a revelation.

See, i think i may get this now. The key to it is the structure, something that doesn't come across on the screen. It's the first novel i've got to that directly looks at the reader and says "so, can you work it out?".

As the title suggests, the book is set on the Orient Express, and there is a murder. The train being fortuitously stuck in a Balkan Snowdrift, the suspect must be one of the 13 passengers, and Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, travelling home from some other case, is on the scene! Poirot is slightly featureless, playing his cards close to his chest, asking lots of questions but never commenting on the answers, and the structure of the books - first the build up to the murder, then a series of interrogations of all the witnesses, then the denoument, is slightly artificial.

But heres the thing - what it's doing is laying out the scene to the reader and challenging them to resolve it themselves. By the time you get into the final act you have little assistance from the book about whodunnit, or why, and with Poirots lack of comment its up to the reader to sift the evidence. It's brilliantly engaging, and suddenly you can see why it's a hit, essentially a puzzle book for crime fans.

Only in the final act does Poirot become more active and more traditional crime elements play out - the maze of deceptions and secrets and underlying connections start to emerge in a flood of revelation leading up to the big reveal...

They All Did It!!

It is, by any assessement, a wonderful ending. It's less of a shock today, when convoluted conspiricies are more common in crime fiction, but at the time, and compared to what i've seen earlier, it's clever and fresh, and not, i think to be underestimated.

As to the writing itself, well i'm still not a total convert. The books is certainly engaging, but the characters are paper-thin, and even for the time play a little bit to much on stereotyping (although she's fond of stereotyping the English characters too), and lacks some of the defter workmanship of earlier writers. The pacing is spot on however, and the presentation, as i've said, is the big trick. I'd be interested to see, a few books down the line, what the Marple book is like.

So that is. I should next be reading Enter a Murderer by Ngaio Marsh but it appears to be out of print, or at least amazon couldn't get me a copy. So i've swapped it out for the same authors' The Nursing Home Murder

The Great Detectives 6: Sam Spade

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:31:46 GMT

So, we leave the Green and Pleasant Land behind us and head West, to the Americas!

So hows this for a change of pace? Not only do we step into the seedy streets of Dashiel Hammet's San Francisco, but away from a traditional murder-mystery format to the treachery soaked noir of The Maltese Falcon. I know the story, of course, having seen the film several times, but never got around to reading the source material. Until now.

The plot, told in third person but exclusively following Sam Spade, revolves around a bunch of crooks and the titular bird, a rare statuette reputed to be studded with gems and so forth. It's a classic example of what Alfred Hitchcock would later term a "McGuffin", something largely irrelevent to the story other than being an object everything else revolves around. All the noir characters are here: the gumshoe, the dame, the slimy underling, the corpulent villian - The Maltese Falcon's gift to literature is these archetypes, as familiar as they have become.

Hammet has a nice turn of phrase, if a slightly wearing overreliance on heavy metaphor. Certainly the sense of place is excellent, the tone suitably noir-ish, the plot twists and turns along quite nicely. The main issue i have, in the end, is the characters.

See, i like noir. I'm quite happy to get down in the rainy, dirty streets and soak in the corruption and despair. However, one thing i do tend to need is at least one character you can empathise with, who, no matter how pointles it is, still has a human heart, or some hope not yet beaten from their souls. Chandler's Phillip Marlowe is a case in point - a Knight in Rusted Armour, Marlowe may by cynical and weather beaten but he's ultimately a good guy trying to do hit best. Even that seediest of noir writers, James Ellroy, litters his books with faded idealists and thugs-with-hearts, for all the good it ever seems to do them.

The Maltese Falcon doesn't seem to have that. Everyone is a cold, calculated sort of character, everyone looks out for themselves. There is little sense, with any of the characters, even Spade, that their motivations are anything other than bitter self-interest. I was surprised to find that one of the defining things that make the film work for me - that Bridget and Sam may genuinely love other yet still he has to give her over - is absent. The two of them are too cold, too distant for that, and there is nothing to indicate Spade even bats an eyelid at sending her to the cops.

Spade himself, shorn of Humphrey Bogart (who looks nothing like his description, tho much of the rest of the film's casting is spot on) is actually a bit of a monster. He's appalling to the women in his life, cares little for his murdered partner, and pretty much simply plays the odds at every turn, seeking best advantage. It may not be the intent, and the more sympathetic and layered film portrayal may be accurate, but i found it hard to engage, and it leaves the book without a "centre" that you actually care about.

All that said, i enjoyed the book. it's a good story, well told and the characters, whilst unengaging, go on to be the building blocks of a whole genre.

Next up: Surely everyone knows how this one ends? Agatha Christie's Famous Belgian, Hercule Poirot, in Murder on the Orient Express.

The Great Detectives 5: Lord Peter Wimsey

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 14:54:03 GMT

There are some books that i'd never read, probably unwisely, on the basis of their synopsis. "Minor English Aristocrat investigates crime in Engish Countryside set in the 1920s" is certainly high on the list, but with Dorothy L Sayer's Unnatural Death, thats is what i found myself enjoying, and of course like any good detective case theres more to it that at first meets the eye.

The initial setup is a pretty good one - an old woman dying of cancer dies much earlier than expected and the Doctor treating her is suspicious. However there is no suspicious cause of death (Heart Failure) and no motive; the "victim" was quite open about whom should inherit, and they did. In fact it's only when more bodies start to drop in that the things take a turn for the complex...Actually, in some ways the core mystery of Unnatural Death may have been a damn sight more original in 1927 than it seems today - two of its main twists (one of which is wonderfully literary are both much more commonly used these days, and fairly easy to spot no matter how artfully concealed. That said, it's a good story, well told, and like all good mysterys you seem to stay pretty much in step with the detectives.

The detective(s) themselves are a great step forward, for me, and it was a releif to reach one who felt like a rounded character. All respect to Arthur Conan Doyle, but Holmes is - and is protrayed as - a detecting force of nature. Brown felt too much like a moral cypher for little homilies on sin. Wimsey however, is a proper character, more importantly because he is falible. The falibility displays in two main ways. Firstly he simply makes mistakes, but secondly, and more importantly, he's not the one-man detective force that others seem to be. His main sidekick is a proper Scotland Yard detective, and Wimsey seems to act more through proxies and agents than directly himself. This coterie around him, which is pretty diverse, undercuts the more modern reservations about the second son of a Duke being a central character!

The other thing that is worth mentioning with Unnatural Death, which caught me pretty unnawares, is the Lesbians. Yes, Lesbians. It's not explicitly stated, but the victim inherited her money from a woman she lived with (they both "spurned the company of men") for 30 years, and some of the central relationships in the female members of the cast a "unnatural"; or rather as one of Winsey's agents describes "natural enough when you are a schoolgirl but the sort of thing you really should grow out of by your 20s". Which makes me wonder about Dorothy Sayer's schooldays, but perhaps i digress! It's all handled with a sweetly bemused tolerance thats at the same time very dated and interestingly progressive.

Overall i would chalk this down as a pleasent surprise, a pacey, bright-eyed murder-mystery with more going on under the surface than you might think from reading the back cover. I may well be going back to Wimsey once this is all over...

Next up; it's off to San Francisco in search of the Stuff that Dreams are Made of - Dashiel Hammet's The Maltese Falcon.

telly round-up

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:17:58 GMT

Well, tis Red Nose Today, which at least has the advantage of being a dress-down day at work. huzzah! Anyway, som stuff we've caught on the box recently...

When the BBC started advertising a "flat share comedy" featuring a Vampire, Werewolf and Ghost, i must confess that the idea stank of high-concept, low laughs nonsense where novelty setups are used to try and gloss over the lack of decent scripts. I was certainly right about one thing; the lack of big laughs.

Being Human was in now way a comedy. or even a comedy-drama. the first episode features someone having their throat ripped out, which is not a scenario ripe with comic potential. What it is, is a very British dark supernatural drama that i really rather enjoyed. The setup, is pretty much as the early adverts describe it; a Werewolf and a Vampire set up a flat, along with it's resident Ghost, in an attempt to live a somewhat normal life. A handful of over-reaching arc-plots accompany each episode, and the show gets noticable more sure-footed as it goes through.

And it is very dark, pleasingly so. Some of it is the more standard "Beast Within" stuff, and of course Vampires and Werewolves and Ghosts are ripe with allegory potential. But it's well done, some nice treatment of Vampirism-as-drug-addiction, a lot of agonising about retaining your humanity in the face of being a monster, and a certain amount of being-in-your-twenties-and-having-to-grow-up all get thrown around, and barring the odd mis-step early on mixes very nicely. Tonally it's very reminiscent of Ultraviolet, and it wouldn't have shocked me to see Jack Davenport turn up with a pistol with a camera attached.

It also managed to develop a nice range of supporting cast within it's short run, especialyl it's main villain, who remained nicely nuanced to the end. I'm pleased to read it's been renewed for another series, especially given the loose ends it leaves flapping about!

And speaking of dark, we come to Dexter. Recommended by my sister, of all people, Dexter is narrated by it's eponymous hero, a serial killer who preys on other killers after being "trained" by his adoptive father. Oddly, it's actually a funny show, Dexter himself exerting a deadpan charm over the proceedings.

Like many contempery US dramas, Dexter has a large ensemble cast, sharp scripts and a fairly complex on-going plot arc that climaxes nicely at the end of the series, knowing pretty much when to give away which secrets and then bring everything together nicely. It's clever, and slick, and occasionally very grim, but with enough black humour (and strangely, sympathy of Dex himself) so keep you engaged.

Finally, there's a new Star Wars TV series on screen, The Clone Wars. I could probably do a long post on the state of kids TV these days, which in quality terms is hugely variable, but won't. Suffice it to say that The Clone Wars, whilst unquestionably a kids show, is pretty good.

Bearing no relation to the (better) earlier Clone Wars show, and in fact not sharing a continutity as far as i can tell, Clone Wars is a more standard formulaic kids show with some overlap between episodes, and of course using the "prequal" characters and designs. It's also very much a kid's show, with many of the tropes you'd expect from that. Its not really pushing any boundries, i don't think, and i wouldn't hold it up as the second (third?) comming of the Franchise.

That said, it does have it moments. For every episode with Jar-Jar pratting about there seems to be two or three with giant space battles, or clone-vs-droid blaster shoot-outs. The Jedi are more in line with the films than the earlier cartoons, and theres a great effort made to humanise the clones and their relationship with the Jedi, which works well given what the future holds. Judging it by what it goes out against, it's a superior product, and judging it by the Star Wars cartoons i had as a kid its a work of goddamn genius!

Tall Tales and Blue Bears!

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 15:42:32 GMT

I was slightly bemused, initially, by one of my birthday presents, a book i'd never heard of by an author i'd not come across. The Thirteen and a Half Lives of Captain Bluebear is by German author Walter Mores, and is, apparently the first of a series of books set in the land of Zamonia, which, before it sank beneath the Atlantic, was the home of many fabulous creatures and places.

Bluebear is a wonderfully unabashed shaggy dog story, a series of extraordinarily ludicrous adventures following the "lives" of it's eponymous hero, told by him. Blue Bears apparently have 27 lives, by the way, so this is only the first half of his existance. Anyhow, found adrift at sea in a walnut shell, Bluebear is found and raised by MiniPirates (his first life) before leaving them for an increasingly long series of adventures that take in Mountains, Forests, Deserts, Dimensional Vortexes and Atlantis. To name but a few.

This book really took me by surprise in how much i've loved it. It's wonderful, something i normally wouldn't pick off a shelf but something i'd find irresistable. Theres a solid logic behind the stories, for all the world is barkingly wierd, it's somehow coherent, and like all tall tales it folds back on itself again and again, things recurring throughout the 13 1/2 lives and all climaxing nicely for a big finale.

I could go on, but the discovery of the book is one of it's joys; recounting certain sections would, i think, detract from the experience of reading it. So i'll just say - it's great, go read a copy.

The Great Detectives 4: Father Brown

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:09:55 GMT

It's early days on The Great Detectives but already i can see two broad patterns developing in the sort of detective that i am comming across. Holmes, of course, is one archetype; the cold, methodical, deductive machine who solves crimes by assessing the evidence and coming to the logical conclusion at the end of it. G K Chesterton's Father Brown is the other type, the empathetic detective, the one that puts himself in the place of the killer and looks for human motive to deduce the truth. His first collection of stories is The Innocence of Father Brown, and thats what i read.

I'm actually pretty conflicted about the Father Brown mysteries, even with a good few days to dwell on them. In many ways they're excellent; certainly beautifully written little stories with nice resolutions and a good variety of crimes and criminals, but on the other hand they are shot through with a moral smugness that gets quite galling.

Brown is, as his name suggests (if he has a first name, i didn't come across it), a Catholic Preist, a quiet unassuming sort who hangs around in the background before asking disarming questions which expose the guilty (actually i wonder if Columbo was inspired by him). By early on in Innocence he has acquired a French front man, a redeemed master thief set up as consulting detective, although sometimes it is simply a case of the little preist being in the right place at the right time. Most of the cases are essentially disguised morality tales, in which some inner sin is exposed, and actually this very human focus is a strength of the stories. They're about people, not the fiendish mechanics of crime.

However, the morality of it is, well...twee. And occassionally annoying. Theres a stong undercurrent of predjudice that runs through the books, over and above the more forgivable "oh it's of the times" or "it's just in the character". little potshots are taken at Jews, Hindus, Protestants (theres one story that comes very close to equating Puritanism with Paganism), and of course Athiests, Secularists and New Agers (well, whatever they called New Agers in 1911). They're often just snipey asides by some character or other but othertimes portrayed as an inherent flaw to a murderer or victim, and they never quite get in the way, but linger omnipresently in the wings.

And its a shame that either they're there, or that i can't just ignore them, because much of the rest of it is very cool. Its not a serial work, it's a collection of short stories rather than an ongoing tale, and it's to Chesterton's credit that the settings, crimes and motives are distinct and don't feel repetitive. Theres a lightness of touch to the prose, a sharpness of observation, and aforementioned potshots aside, some nice characterisation. The whole package has a drawing-room mystery feel to it that, despite a Catholic Preist lead with a French sidekick, feels very English.

The conclusion, such as it is, is that Father Brown feels a little like another slab of foundation of the genre slipping into place, the genteel mystery with little violence (save the initial murder) and much talking and quiet investigation. I think that overall i enjoyed it, but feel little inclination to go back to the other volumes.

Next up: The first of the "Four Ladies of Crime", Dorothy L Sayers, with Unnatural Death...