Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Thief – Maurice LeBlanc

Arsene Lupin!  Gentleman Thief!  Hyperbole!  Ridiculous plot contrivances!  Exclamation points!  But fun!  Fun!  FUN!

A good holiday read, especially if your holiday is in France.

Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer

A couple of weeks ago, ABC2’s Sunday Best aired Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer.  It’s second documentary by British filmmaker Nick Broomfield on Aileen Wuornos, often billed as America’s first female serial killer and subject of the 2002 hollywood movie Monster.

Broomfield formed something of a friendship with Wuornos, and this unique relationship provided him with access to her right up until the day before her execution in 2002.  His interviews with her are at once captivating, disturbing and saddening.  Wuornos is compelling from the moment she comes on screen.

There is her physical presence – a battered face, swept back blond hair and piercing, wild eyes.  Her large frame is hidden in prison orange, but it is hard to imagine a more formidable, frightening woman.  She is frank, prone to outbursts of rage and clearly delusional, becoming more and more convinced over the course of her incarceration that the police allowed her to kill as part of a conspiracy to make money off her story.  But her trust in the filmmaker also provides glimpses of a woman who, despite being hardened by a tragic life, is hungry for friendship.

Confessions of a Yakuza – Junichi Saga

Describe it

A well-written biography of an old-school Yakuza, providing an unvarnished account of the underworld and the underclass in early 20th century Japan.

What I loved

A lot of history focuses on leaders or the elite, whose names are committed to the ages by circumstance, ability or privilege.   Confessions of a Yakuza provides a window into the lives of the other half: the poor, the outcasts and the criminals, who inhabit a world where the importance of guts and luck are less veiled, and where it is harder to hold illusions about human nature.

It is the biography of Ichiji Eiji, as told to a country doctor, Junichi Saga.  Eiji is not an overly complicated character: he is tough, amoral and self-serving.  He upholds a sense of yakuza honour, but mostly out of self-interest.  At the age he recounts his tale, he is unconflicted about his past and given to only occasional reflection.  He also has a weakness for woman, which, throughout his storied career, causes him to lop off a few fingers in penance, as per the yakuza code.

Farewell, My Lovely – Raymond Chandler

Near the end of Farewell, My Lovely, a beautiful woman gazes up at Chandler’s legendary shamus, Phillip Marlowe, and says:

“’You’re so marvellous… So brave, so determined, and you work for so little money.  Everybody bats you over the head and chokes you and smacks your jaw and fills you with morphine, but you just keep right on hitting between tackle and end until they’re all worn out.  What makes you so wonderful?’”

It’s a question that you could ask not only about the prototypical hard-boiled detective, but about the author himself.  What is it that elevates both the character and the writer into a league of their own?

Faceless Killers – Henning Mankell

Faceless Killers stands out from other crime thrillers by avoiding gimmickry.  Its detective character doesn’t have the quirky genius of Sherlock Holmes, the try-hard edginess of Lisbeth Salander, or the hard-boiled wit of Philip Marlowe.  Instead, Mankell’s protagonist, Kurt Wallander, who goes on to star in eleven more stories, is an everyman, an experienced but unexceptional cop.

At the opening of the novel, his wife has left him, he is estranged from his daughter, and his father is going senile.  His borderline alcoholism and diet of hamburgers and pizza have left him with seven unwanted kilos that he repeatedly resolves to shed, only to fail due to the stress of his job.  Apart form his abilities to go without sleep for long stretches and take a few more knocks than the average person, there’s nothing extraordinary about him.

The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler

Review by Gabriel

There’s a famous story that, during filming for the 1946 film adaptation of The Big Sleep, the director and screen writers couldn’t figure out if one of the characters in the novel had committed suicide or been murdered, so they contacted the novel’s author, Raymond Chandler, to seek clarification.  It was only at this point – seven years after the novel had been published – that Chandler realised that he didn’t know the answer.  The plot was so convoluted that even its author had trouble keeping up with it.

But The Big Sleep railroads over any faults with sheer style, thanks to its ultra-cool protagonist, colourful characters, sense of place and humour.  A warning though – because everyone has things that they can’t forgive – it’s also one of the more misogynistic books you’ll read.

From Hell – Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell

Review by Gabriel

To comic book fans, Alan Moore is a superstar.  People who don’t follow the medium may be familiar with his works that have been made into movies, such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, V for Vendetta, The Watchmen, as well as the graphic novel that is the subject of this review, From Hell.  However, even those who saw these movies may be unfamiliar with Moore’s name, as he completely disassociated himself from all of the film adaptions due to their questionable quality or divergence from the source material.

His reputation is well deserved.  He is master of blending sympathetic characters and humour with high concept science fiction and philosophy.  From Hell is one of his greatest achievements, in which he navigates the cliché minefield of the Jack the Ripper mystery to create something original and mesmerising.  He does this by exploring what the Ripper murders, and people’s continued fascination with them, reveal about the society and culture in which they occurred.

Moore’s work can be relied on to challenge readers, and From Hell raises questions about the depiction of violence and its perpetrators.  His partner in crime (all puns intended, especially the bad ones) is Dave Gibbons Eddie Campbell, whose sketchy, murky style perfectly capture the grime of London’s East End at the end of the 19^th Century.

A Study in Scarlet – Arthur Conan Doyle

review by Gabriel

A Study in Scarlet is the premier Sherlock Holmes adventure, and therefore a pretty influential text in the detective fiction genre.  It’s a hell of a lot of fun and could be held up as an example on how to write sentences, create a sense of place and establish important characters.  However, I assume that Conan Doyle was still perfecting his craft when he wrote it, because there are some poor structural choices that really dampen the excitement of the book.  There are also some thundering clichés, especially surrounding one character that becomes a sinkhole for bad writing.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo – Stieg Larsson

Review by Gabriel

I don’t usually read thrillers.  No matter how hard authors try to create some quirky new riff on the genre, they still end up being formulaic and cliché.  I gave The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo a go, because I’d heard so much buzz about it, and was going away for work for a month and didn’t want to use my brain too much.  It turned out to be a page-turner with some interesting inversions on the tropes, but which won’t make a lasting impression because of the conventions of the genre, and its writing style.