The Friday Article Roundup
Chow down on the best pop culture writing of the week.
This week, you will fill up on:
Send articles throughout the next week to magpiesmedia [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion and Have a Happy Friday!
In the best St Patrick’s day tradition, John Paul Brammer considers the mix of Irish and Mexican food at a new restaurant:
Our Scotch egg arrived; gooey yellow eyes staring up from a bed of frijoles negros with chives sprinkled on top. I don’t know what the quintessential Scotch egg experience is supposed to be, but this one was delicious: jammy yolk hugged by juicy chorizo, nestled in a crunchy crumb coat with a little kick. This is what I don’t get about the feigned offense over San Patricios’ menu. What cuisine wouldn’t benefit from getting a little Mexican with it? Mexicans are already making the food anyway, which people would know if they’d ever worked in a kitchen.
Natalie Weiner interviews Sunny War about protest music at Don’t Rock The Inbox:
NW: I think you’re underselling your own impact a little bit — people have to feel like they’re in it together in order to do anything that’s actually constructive, right? It’s really hard to do that on your own.
SW: I think it’s impactful for younger people, because the only hope is that, like, everybody now will die and then they’ll be the ones at some point in government or whatever. I guess the hope is more in making everybody more compassionate. Hopefully over time, people are just nicer. But the people who have all the money and run everything, it’s like, until they’re dead…I don’t know.
A.S. Hamrah looks at the 2026 Oscar contenders for n+1, and finds some things to like:
Song Sung Blue is like a 1950s King Vidor movie mixed with an episode of Star Search. It’s an instant classic. Jackman and Hudson, who one has to assume are pretty comfortable in their lives, both throw themselves into this movie like their careers—no, their lives—depended on making it. Hudson’s Wisconsin accent becomes so pronounced she sounds like Edie McClurg. Brought low by the accident that results in her losing half of one of her legs, she takes to addiction in a proactive way, turning getting hooked on painkillers into another showbiz challenge she’ll win. Jackman brings his status as the world’s showman to a new height of dazzle, especially when he falls face-first into a bathroom sink.
David Cantwell sings the praises of singer-songwriter Freedy Johnston at No Fences Review:
You’ll sometimes find critics complaining that Butch Vig’s pristine production on This Perfect World is a poor match for the kind of material Johnston’s writes. But to my ears it feels like a, uh, perfect fit and likely a deliberate one too. The title track is a case in point. The lyric leaks peril: “You ought to lock that door,” “Last time I was here they found her in the lake,” “No matter what I’ve done…” Johnston provides glimpses of a terrifying, violent narrative and only magnifies the menace by keeping the specifics mysterious. Our horror at whatever the narrator has done wrestles to a draw exquisite tune and its twinkling arrangement, and those contrasts exacerbate our dread even as they draw us closer. The world is not perfect at all, but this record is.
At Letterboxd, Mitchell Beaupre interviews Albert Brooks about Modern Romance, his career in comedy and being likeable:
Well, that’s the word I’ve lived with my whole life. To my lovely, naive credit, I never even thought about it until around three films in, because I didn’t care. I didn’t want to be that. It was never my goal. My goal was to present behavior as clearly as I could, and whether people liked it or not really wasn’t my concern. When the studios started testing more and more, you’d have to fight for those kinds of endings. Because, well, if they did get married and it worked out happily, people would give you better [test score] cards. But in the kinds of stories I was telling, I was most concerned with presenting an accurate character. Whether that character could be called likable or not, I just didn’t give a shit.
And for Pitchfork, Mark Richardson revisits Low’s debut record I Could Live In Hope:
Discipline and focus beget efficiency. “Too many words, too many words” goes a knowing line in the opening “Words,” and Hope is an hour-long broadside railing against prolix tendencies. All song titles use a single word—“Cut,” “Down,” “Drag”—and lyrics for most tracks comprise just a few short sentences. Low’s songs aren’t quite narratives; they seem to catch a glimpse of something happening while the rest of the action unfolds outside the frame. You sense the possible histories that brought you to the song’s moment, and all the places it might go after.
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More articles by Dave Shutton
Double Features
Moving in time with One Battle After Another and Caught By The Tides.
Double Features
Considering the comedy in The Phoenician Scheme and The Naked Gun.
The Friday Article Roundup
Going on the record with the best pop culture writing of the week.
The Friday Article Roundup
A cowardly and superstitious lot? No, the best pop culture writing of the week.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season Four, Episode Nine, “Atonement”
A surprisingly dull advancement of the mythology. Minbari are pretty boring; they arguably fit into the scifi cliche of, effectively, Space Elves, and it takes a lot to make that interesting. Vulcans, the original Space Elves (even if, I suspect, accidentally) are interesting because they have ‘logic vs emotion’ and an interesting worldbuilding built around that idea and the fact that they definitively came down on ‘logic’ only makes the existence of the conflict more interesting. I suspect Mass Effect’s asari are riffing heavily on the Minbari in particular in terms of being mystical enlightened beings, but that very quickly ends up secondary to both their particular biology quirks and the details of their society. Minbari themselves come off a lot less interesting than these ideas.
With Delenn in particular, she’s put through another Degree Absolute process just like with Sebastian, but it’s even less interesting here, partly because of the repetition and partly because I just don’t think of her as un-self-aware, a feeling unaffected by the reveal that she did lose her temper once and cause the human/Minbari war. It’s one of those rare twists in this show that feel predictable, at least in retrospect, not four times bigger than the question.
Once again, the best scenes in the episode concern G’Kar and Lennier. Him getting his prosthetic eye is pretty cool; him gleefully realising the potential for a prosthetic eye he can detach is incredibly funny – Andreas Katsulas plays him with the glee of a child ready to play a prank – even if Franklin should have immediately realised where this was going. Meanwhile, Lennier is incredibly funny taking a moment to own Zack Allen for the crime of being slightly annoying and whiny, and I enjoy him pushing through Delenn’s reluctance when going into the Dreaming. He knows that to love someone is to know them, and vice versa.
Strip Law
Unfortunately, didn’t really care for this. It had two and a half things that fatally undermined my enjoyment. The first: their approach to absurdity was to tell you that they’re doing something absurd and then tell you what they did – a comic approach I can’t stand. I’m getting less and less patient with comedy that doesn’t have any subtext or lets me come to a conclusion myself, or that bogs itself down making sure I get the joke. Secondly, it feels like there’s only two characters here – Lincoln and everybody else. It does lighten up on this a bit, but it feels like every character is the same lazy, smug, childish pop culture addict (and I get frustrated enough with that in reality). These characters aren’t made distinct by what they want and they’re barely differentiated by jokes about their backstory. It makes it extra weird and annoying that they kept expecting me to take the character’s relationships seriously just by having the characters act sad suddenly. I do not care about these people.
Things I did like: aside from getting a solid laugh every four or five minutes with an out-of-nowhere joke (first one: Steven clarifying that he’s firing Lincoln in an ad, and another was Sheila and Glem pranking Steven with a sheet of paper that simply says ‘scorpions’ after actually pranking him with scorpions), I did like the accumulation of continuity. My favourite episode was “Trophy Son (Or, The Mother’s Wound)” because all the things that annoy me about the show were tamped down; it engaged with Lincoln’s mother issues in a serio-comic way that felt like it was actually about something (got a laugh out of the Memento tattoo to remind him not to sexualise his mother) and gave each of the characters real motivations rooted in absurdity (Sheila’s broken pussy was a good plot).
I also really like the animation. The opening credits are the single best part of the show and I think the faces are much more expressive than they first look and only get better as the show goes on, sometimes making the jokes funnier. There’s a lot of Rick & Morty in this show, and I think it takes the R&M aesthetic to more expressive places.
Holy shit, the Minbari really are Space Elves, this is why I hate them so much. I like the comparison to Vulcans, they have made an organizational choice to emphasize something at the expense of something else and we can see where that may be lacking in our opinion, the Minbari are just “enlightened” and they suck. There are feints toward a critique of their caste system but there is not enough time spent there for that to mean anything and if the options are more or less time spent with the Minbari, I know what I want in that regard.
Inside No. 9, “The Trolley Problem”
A tense game of psychological cat and mouse, with Pemberton as an unethical, power-tripping, potentially underqualified therapist (the joke about intentionally framing his diploma so it looks like it says Cambridge and not McCambridge was terrific) who exploits his vulnerability and Shearsmith as a would-be bridge-jumper he rescues … or, as the episode goes on, the grieving, furious father of a former patient he’s unknowingly brought into his house. Some good flips in terms of who’s in control here, a great bit of mutual drugging, and a skin-crawling recording of a previous therapy session.
A New Leaf
Rewatched with my friend Scott, who hadn’t seen it before. This has, just as lagniappe, one of the best-ever bits of subversive casting in putting quintessential cinema slob Walter Matthau as an archetypal snob. Elaine May is of course a revelation both behind and in front of the camera–and such a gifted, fearless physical comedian, a gawky, wide-eyed Bambi with a Malaga cooler mustache and her head stuck in the armhole. (Aaaarmhole.)
The armhole bit is exquisite — comedy as torture, WHY CAN’T YOU FIX THIS
Every time she raises the wrong arm, it gets even funnier.
May sewed herself in, without telling Matthau, before they did the scene
That’s amazing! What a legend.
NCAA basketball – At least a bit, though the bloom is off the rose for me. I don’t follow the sport much, and while I totally approve of paying its players and letting them pick their teams, it’s made keeping up with things a lot harder. I watched the first half of what was a dull game only for it to turn to a classic. Alas, I just wasn’t engaged. (The NBA is just so much better, anyway.)
The Practice, “Burnout” A woman who serves as caretaker for her quadriplegic husband is accused of murdering his brother, who she felt should help financially since it was his son who was responsible for the crippling accident. The woman’s defense? She suffers blackouts, cannot remember any of the murder, and might be legally insane. But there is more to things and it turns out her blackouts were caused by her husband and his brother’s wife drugging her. Kind of a standard issue courtroom thriller story, enlivened a bit by Chris Reeve as the husband, and getting to briefly play the villain, which I suspect he missed being able to do. (Reeve also got a story credit.) The second case has a woman who is perhaps to open about being a rape survivor suing the 30 law firms that didn’t hire her. I am not sure anyone would ever volunteer that, but clearly there is a lot of stigma here. But this is really about Jamie confronting her own secret status as a victim of date rape, and Jessica Capshaw is very good depicting it. Also, there’s some stuff with Bobby and his dying marriage that isn’t very interesting. Earl Boen guest stars as his rather unsympathetic therapist.
The Pitt, S2E11 – Big Santos/Langdon blow-up that we’ve all been waiting for arrives! Langdon’s apology is simultaneously very genuine and self-serving, Santos could accept it but is too angry and morally centered to not lash out, and neither of them are totally wrong. (Laughed when Santos almost turns away and then comes back to do said lashing, the girl can’t help it.) Writer John Wells had said the show was trying to show “both sides” with ICE and he was outright lying, these masked pseudo-secret police are filmed like movie monsters or, uh, Nazis. This hour gets a lot of dread and tension out of how they simply hang around, causing patients and workers to flee until Robbie begs them to *get out of the hallway*. (I’ve seen that exact body language in videos where ICE agents get told off so good on that actor.) The violence that later ensues is terrifying. Only inaccuracy as my friend observed is ICE agents wouldn’t bother to bring a detainee into an emergency room.
Part of VHS ’99 – More Monday but first segment is terrific – could see this as the supernatural version of the riot grrl bands of five years earlier versus Blink 182-style dumbass pop punk – second keeps video cameras on to an absurd degree, there’s suspension of disbelief and then there’s “Is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?!” but with horror and camcorders.
Kudos to Wells, who probably will not be able to get away with that again.
MST3K, Zombie Nightmare — voodoo resurrection of a slain baseball himbo to wreak vengeance on his enemies, what could go wrong? Well, the voodoo aspect means the Mads open the episode in full Krippendorf’s Tribe get-up, yikes. And there is a lot of making fun of the voodoo priestess and her accent here but this is Mike and the bots meeting the movie at its level, because she is fucking terrible and it’s not like this is exactly an insightful examination of vodou here, this is a slasher exploitation flick. One that is apparently nasty in places, there are several obvious cutaways from violence that apparently was too much for TV and this is disappointing because we miss Shawn Levy (who has a real knack for playing an obnoxious piece of shit) getting impaled by a baseball bat. So with all this going on, why riff on the movie? Because it is hilarious and stupid and the boys have a lot of fun with what is there, especially the Canadian-ness of it all and Adam West’s appearance late in the game. A very fun time but Dr. Forrester and TV’s Frank are probably canceled now.
Little Caesar — Leo pointing so hard my finger flies off when Edward G. Robinson says “Nyeah.” Which he barely does! But Robinson is magnetic here, arrogant and charismatic and incredibly easy to root for as a gangster, especially when he murks the wiener crime commissioner who’s walking out of a speakeasy offended that alcohol is being served, ha ha ha you loser. Unfortunately the rest of the cast is largely not up to his level and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as Robinson’s buddy in particular sucks ass. The movie spends too much time with him and with others away from Robinson, in particular a scene with a stool pigeon and his mother goes on forever (although the heavily Italian mother promises to make the pigeon a big pot of spaghetti, hilarious). But the ending rights the ship and I never knew how much Breaking Bad lifted from this — a crime lord brought low and sent into first hiding and then impoverished exile, only to vengefully return when he sees his enemies shit talking his game. A machine gun is prominently involved too! Flawed but Robinson is essential, what a dude.
This MST3k episode has some moments that didn’t date well, but has some great jokes: “Is she playing tennis with Kraftwerk?”
The evil racist teens at the beginning see the young priestess and sneer “what is SHE doing here?” which Crow follows with “What are WE doing here?” in a wonderfully nonplussed tone, like he’s invoking an existential crisis for these dopes, I love it.
True/False Film Festival – Another year, another set of great films. This year didn’t have anything that sang above and beyond requiring immediate recommendation, but on the other hand the Ploughwoman and I were pleased with everything we saw. Highlights include Nuisance Bear, which has a refreshingly gray look at the problems surrounding black-and-white bears (Nuanced Bear I quipped quietly to myself in the theater) as well as some stunning photography. Also The Oldest Person in the World about a man’s quest to interview the oldest person in the world even as the title keeps changing hands and his own mortality threatens to get in the way.
“(Nuanced Bear I quipped quietly to myself in the theater)”
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What did we read?
The Republic, Plato
So far, the best thing I’ve read from Plato. The style is clearer than ever and the dramatic structure of conversations is stronger, even when I disagree. Three ideas stand out to me; the first is the allegory of the cave, which is vivid and emotionally resonant across so many situations, and has been baked into society so strongly that I don’t feel able to bring anything new to discussion of it.
The second is the idea that for society to function, someone has to be exploited. Much of Plato’s perspective actually isn’t that far from a modern day small-town busybody; his aim is to work out how to leverage society to achieve the most (achieve the most what?), and he openly says we have to have some people less happy and stable to get more happiness for everyone overall. So much of the book is working out how to control human nature, so that society is best off.
It makes me think of Mary Beard’s observation that what little we know of the Ancient Roman ‘working class’ is that they took identity in being good at one thing, which is largely true of the working class and professional worldview today. “I am better than the elites because, unlike them, I know how to change a tire.” This attitude has been around longer than Plato, and arguably it’s partly why society is where it is now.
The last is Plato wanting to get rid of the poets, on the basis that they present a false and lesser version of reality. This continues the small-town busybody thing; a desire to control people by controlling the narrative they’re exposed to, something reality of the last decade has shown is uncontrollable. One of the upsides of reading history and ancient texts is being able to see humanity really is always going in circles.
8 Bit Theater, Strips 0810-0840, Brian Clevinger
“I’ve talked to people before. They can offer us nothing.”
We jump to King Steve and his Right Hand Man Gary for a while, and there’s an incredible moment that sums up why King Steve is so funny to me: Gary has discovered King Steve lost the entire kingdom to his imaginary friend in a poker game, and in discussing openly how mad he is, Gary pauses, causing King Steve to ask what he’s doing. Gary simply says “I’m carefully considering how to reply to that, sir,” to which King Steve simply replies “Any luck?”. It’s so funny to me because it illustrates that King Steve is, while evil and stupid and insane, also unshakeably cheerful, and it makes his madness so much fucking funnier.
There’s an incredible, very Seinfeldian strip where the characters do nothing but reflect on the terrible food they just ate (“We all ate the food, Fighter, we can all see through time.”).
There’s also a very Always Sunny plotline where, for lack of anything else to do, the Light Warriors attempt to find side quests, and each of them fail to convince people to give them quests; very reminiscent of when the Gang fails at something and Dennis attempts to take over, only to be even worse.
“Now everyone mistakes us for clowns or perverts.”
“To be fair, that’s not so much incorrect as imprecise.”
Absolutely spectacular comic moment when Thief attempts to weasel out of a leg-breaking mobster’s deal by claiming their legs are already broken (“We’re in trouble, he’s not a moron.”).
“We’ve got two wizards, one of whom is stuffed with more apocalypse than three wizards combined, and the other one can duplicate it all.”
“RM, they can hardly count to four, let’s not complicate things further with word problems.”
“In the arena of logic, I fight unarmed.”
What sort of bugs me about people’s reactions to the allegory of the cave is that people think that, if you escape the cave, you’re awesome. But the point is, in the allegory’s second part, that it’s then your job to go back down into the cave, and help others learn how to escape.
The most I ever liked Plato or felt something deeper for him was when a philosophy major described Republic as “a man’s attempt to create a society where his lover wouldn’t be executed by the state.”
It occurs to me that I intended to make a joke at your expense over the whole ‘no poets’ thing, but it slipped my mind.
Moses and the Doctor by Luke Epplin – A good straightforward sports book about Moses Malone and Julius Erving, who achieved fame in the old ABA, found success in the NBA, and led the Philadelphia 76ers to the second (and still most recent) championship. As in his previous book about the 1940s Cleveland baseball team, he combines deatils about the sport and the team, biographical elements, and an appreciation of the larger society around the sport. Fair to say that Dr. J invented a lot of the glitz and glamour of the present day NBA, as well as helping its Black stars be themselves and not worry about white owners or fans. Epplin does very well conveying that, as well as getting to the core of the fairly workaday Malone, who saw playing the game as his job and who avoided the press the way Erving embraced it. A good read for sports fans, though others might find what to like.
An African History of Africa – Exactly what I wanted and needed which is a primer on the history of the continent by a good writer. Zeinab Badawi isn’t going to give you what it’s like in the life of a Congolese citizen 300 years ago – there’s too much to cover – and nevertheless I got a good sense of the empires and resistance movements here and how much white Europeans utterly fucked them over. Badawi’s description of the luxurious train cars de Boers sat in while Africans mined diamonds for him right below is unbelievably morally repulsive.
Flesh by David Szalay – Booker Prize winner last year and a weird, interesting one, the arc of The Jerk with an Eastern-European immigrant and existential outsider, a bit of a brute. I wouldn’t say I loved it but I admired it and the ending has stuck with me.
Funny Because It’s True – A history of our common ancestor, The Onion. Loved reading it, even if it’s not as finely honed as any given offering by its subject (the author wrote for the publication a couple years during its earliest incarnation, putting her in an awkward position of too close to pretend to be an objective outsider but too distant to support the first person used in some sections). Luckily publication held off just long enough to include the most recent sale to (thus far) benevolent wealth so this reads as a hopeful return to form rather than the fall of an unlikely million-dollar punk enterprise. Wish there were more about the AV Club but that’s probably fodder enough for another book. Was going to follow this up with Scott Dikkers’ recent account of events, but he comes across as a credit-stealing sell-out in this book and reviews suggest his book is pretty defensive about his decisions and, worse, not funny.
Murder Born, by Robert Reed
I keep buying Robert Reed novellas because of their intriguing science fictional premises, but until now, none of them had fully clicked with me. This, however, is great: complex, chewy, and unsparing. If you give it the initial absurd bit of setup–a new method of execution that, when used properly, resurrects the executed killer’s past victims–you then get the rigorous exploration of how that works and the various practical, emotional, legal, and ethical complications that ensue. (The horrifying forced bed rest and near-constant sedation certain prisoners are put through after this to preserve them for the “righteous” and life-giving execution is haunting and viscerally described.) It’s all through the lens of one father of a murdered daughter, and his status as a professional photographer enlisted to take pictures of the resurrected while awaiting his own daughter’s convicted killer’s execution. You can sense from the start that it won’t work out in his case, but the exact route the story takes to and through that is terrific.
The Score, by Richard Stark
A crime masterpiece, with an incredibly ambitious heist–rip off an entire town–with a believable complication that comes from someone putting the personal above the professional. We also get the introduction of Grofield, jobbing theater actor and sometimes professional thief who is so delightful and compelling that I fully believe he can pull off a seduction in the middle of a job (it helps, of course, that the character he’s seducing is fully realized in her own right and wants him partly as a way out–her final conversation with Parker is one of my favorite scenes in the book) and it doesn’t make me think he’s an unprofessional asshole. Yeah, Grofield, get some. So: a very good line-up of characters, but the star here is the unbeatable image of a small team of men coming into a mining town under the cover of darkness and just tying it up completely and coming so close to doing it almost without incident. Fantastic, breathtaking stuff, and maybe my favorite of the series so far.
Childgrave, by Ken Greenhall
Elegantly written 1980s horror novel where a photographer (a theme this week, apparently) falls in love with a strange, ethereal harpist with a mysterious background and soon afterwards finds that his young daughter is seeing ghosts (and he can photograph her with them). It’s a very strange book–almost more strange at the start, with its peculiarities of POV, than when it eventually progresses to cannibalistic Lottery/Omelasville–but a very good one, with the narrator progressing step by step into making an unconscionable decision. Some of the people around him are very good at rationalizing all of this under a spiritual veneer about how exposing yourself to the horrors is transformative and purifying (a late-game confession involving a dying woman’s blood pumping into a man’s mouth as they’re trapped together in a car accident not only comes to mind, it won’t leave mind), but the protagonist knows, in his heart of hearts, that his real reason is romantic. This would actually make for an especially effective horror novel for ace people, because so much of it is a man shrugging off a horrific moral weight and a horrific situation for his daughter because of a sexual/romantic obsession with a woman whom even he admits he barely knows.
Excellent, chilly, strange, well-written stuff until the last page and a half or so, which is so out-of-character and out-of-nowhere that I have to assume it was demanded by the publisher. No, I don’t believe this guy is going to make a sudden heroic moral stand. Absolutely not.
How great is that final conversation in The Score? I think a lot of this book is Stark laying down certain structures for the books going forward, beginning with the first straight-up depiction of an unencumbered planned heist front to back in the series. Obviously there have been lots of heists but they’ve all been touched somehow by the events and fallout of The Hunter, even Getaway Face’s straightforward robbery has the complication of Stubbs from the plastic surgeon — this is Parker fully in his natural element and at massive (but not as massive as it gets!) scale. But more importantly, with Grofield and his new lady we get a sense of Parker acting not friendly or kindly (yeesh on the latter) but with the understanding that pragmatism is not necessarily vicious. Sometimes the smart play is the one where everyone lives and Parker’s ability to read people and recognize their attributes is fully fleshed out here. So hilariously, Stark blows everything up in the next book.
Grofield is a great addition to the books. Someone who is a counterweight to Parker but also as competent, and even (despite what Parker might admit) a friend. And also someone who can be fun in stories where fun is not the objective. (How Darwyn Cooke plays with Grofield in the adaptation of The Score is wonderful.) Grofield doesn’t fully work in the four novels that start him – three of them are lightweight political thrillers that foreshadow Westlake’s later output – but as Parker’s main wingman, he is so good.
And I do highly recommend Cooke’s graphic novel of this. We’re not likely to get a faithful adaptation, but Cooke’s visuals might be better than a big budget mess anyway.
Haven’t watched any Parker adaptations yet, it’s just striking to read about how they either get a lot wrong or nothing right, even the ones people like.
Huge second on the Cooke adaptations of course — his visual sense is unparalleled and you’re right about this being better than most movies in that regard but he also is so good with faces, he nails Grofield immediately. And yeah, it’s funny how great Grofield works as a secondary character but not as a lead – he SHOULD work, ‘actor who is also a thief’ is a winning combination, but the James Bond Lite mode Stark uses for him is largely fluff, if easy to read. Lemons Never Lie is head and shoulders above the other Grofields and it’s no surprise it’s the one most like a Parker.
I always wondered why Grofield never came back in the revival of the Parker novels. My best guess is that after he put an alternate reality Grofield in The Hot Rock, that was the end.
MILD PARKER SPOILERS DON’T READ THIS LAUREN
I think it’s because at this point, Grofield owes Parker an enormous debt, outside of previous assistance. It would be unavoidable in their relationship as colleagues going forward, so it was best to just exclude him entirely. This is a bit weird considering how many other original run people pop back up or get mentioned again in the revival, though.
One Of Us Is Lying, by Samuel Holt — Samuel Holt is the main character/narrator, a former Rockford Files-esque TV star who is now out of work but is dragged into a mystery; “Samuel Holt” is also the pseudonym of Donald Westlake, who had many such noms de guerre but here was explicitly trying to hide behind another name to see if his work would be enjoyed if people didn’t know he was the one doing it. A weird setup (not quite the same as King going the Richard Bachman route, as he had written a lot of the Bachmans beforehand; Westlake specifically wrote these new) and one that doesn’t quite work. Holt is a rich guy with a dang butler and homes and girlfriends in LA and NYC, a former cop who gets on with law enforcement and a person who is unsure of what he wants to do with all his resources — in short, the polar opposite of a Dortmunder or a Parker, and in terms of comfort he’s pretty far from the standard Westlake comedic protagonist who is also adrift in life. There is some sharp writing here and a lot of observations about Hollywood, and the story moves along well, but while Holt is fine enough he’s not someone for the reader to grab onto and more importantly he’s not someone the reader wants to grab onto. I might check out the remainder of the short series for completionism’s sake but it’s not a priority now.
Such Men Are Dangerous, by Paul Kavanaugh — Kavanaugh is the main character/narrator, a former Green Beret who now is out of work but dragged into a criminal scheme; “Paul Kavanaugh” is also the pseudonym of Westlake pal Lawrence Block, who had many such noms de guerre but here wanted to get weird with it. The novel opens with Kavanaugh being rejected by the CIA for being too independent and psychotic for work, this knocks Kavanaugh entirely off his axis as a person and he fucks off to an island in the Florida Keys where he lives as a hermit under a 10-point manifesto of isolation (the most important rule: when in doubt, do nothing) until the CIA spook who kicked him to the curb comes by with a plan to heist extremely horrible weapons from the U.S. government. Holt has everything and is upset by lacking motivation, Kavanaugh has nothing and likes it until he’s upset by this guy, a doppelganger of sorts, but gets into the scheming and plotting necessary here. So he is very Parkerish in that aspect but the existential crisis that sets him off and in particular his Sunshine State apathy is extremely reminiscent of Charles Willeford’s Hoke Mosely, whose second novel opens with the Blaise Pascal epigraph “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
This does not seem to be a well-known or well-liked book but I loved it, Block’s command of voice is impeccable here, it’s just that this voice is removed and blase about very unpleasant things. Kavanaugh’s increasing sociopathy brought to mind another classic, James Dickey’s To The White Sea, but he’s in a men’s action potboiler that is well-plotted and executed, with an emphasis on the latter word — people who normally don’t get killed get killed here, with no ceremony. It is a cold hard book that is not like anything else out there, apparently “Kavanaugh” wrote a few more novels and getting them is now a priority.
Gotta pick up a copy of Such Men Are Dangerous now. Block can do that level of detachment in the midst of unpleasantness very, very well.
The Holt books are hard to track down. I found What I Tell You Three Times Is False – that sounds so much like the title of a Quinn Martin detective show episode – some years ago, and can only tell you the mystery was okay but doesn’t play to Westlake’s strengths.
They were recently re-released I believe, the copy I got is clearly a new one (with a fair amount of typos, shoddy reprint work). I need to dig up the Tucker Coes, they seem more in line with Westlake’s strengths.
We All Died At Breakaway Station by Richard Meredith – Dark military SF. Earth is in a galactic war against the Jillies. A ramshackle crew of walking wounded (and some brought back to life) are kept together and living from spare parts. They must protect a hospital ship and get a message from Breakaway Station to Earth at all costs even if it means dying a second time. Meredith was an Army veteran and wrote this in 1969 when it became a counterculture classic. Multiple pov’s from ordinary heroes describe the brutality and psychological consequences of war and the motivations that drive them to the ultimate sacrifice. What drives ordinary men to sacrifice in extraordinary situations is what Meredith tries to answer. “It wasn’t the fear that made you a coward, it was what you did about it.” The multi pov’s deliver some beautiful portraits of individuals dealing with that statement.
Alternate headline: David Cantwell Rehabilitates Freedy Johnston’s Bad Reputation