Adventures in the Mouse House

9 & 10 Bone Song and Black Blood by John Meaney

I became aware of these books back at my very first BristolCon. John Meaney was on a panel and talked about books he'd written that are noir crime thrillers set in a world where everything is powered by emanations from the bones of the dead in massive reactors.

Hello, that's ticked all my boxes.

While the mysteries and the detective parts were good, overall I found them a bit disappointing.

He throws too much into this world to make it "alien" for the length of the books, that don't really seem to have any function other than to prove how alien and dangerous this world is. Some aspects of it work better than others. At one point there is a throwaway comment about being made to pay a blood price. In a society that is made up of megacities and impersonal bureaucracy, I don't think that would work. (Admittedly, you probably have to specialise academically in societies that have a blood price to come up with that particular niggle).

The pacing is odd - there are parts I couldn't put down interspersed with parts where I wanted to give up, and the characters do things that simply don't make sense at times.

There's one nice touch where the detective goes into his local secondhand book shop and buys a fantasy novel that is clearly based on our world.

I so wanted to love these books, but they fell pretty flat for me.

39.The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy
I finished this just before we went away. Many thanks to badnewswade for the recommendation. I had a blast with this.

For those that don't know, this is LA Noir set in the 40s and 50s but written in the late 80s. For the most part it brings 40s LA alive in the same way as Chandler does, though once you know, there's some things that stick out. For example, Ellroy uses "fuck" a lot more often than Chandler, and the sex is more explicit. Or so it seemed to me. There's also a lot about how quickly LA was changing in the post-war years (a key plot twist involves the removing of the "LAND" from the end of the "HOLLYWOOD" sign), which I don't know if anyone was picking up on at the time.

I think I need to go watch the film again. And get hold of the rest of the LA Quartet, and then watch the film of LA Confidential again.

40. The Murder Room by PD James
Another long flight, another PD James mystery. See my review of The Lighthouse. I think everything I said there applies.

Which isn't to say I don't love this stuff.

41. The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
Interesting counter-factual in which Roosevelt is defeated by Charles Lindbergh (the aviation hero and Nazi sympathiser) in the 1940 election, from the point of view of a small Jewish boy living in New Jersey.

Never having read any Roth before, I wasn't sure what to expect. Mostly I just found it an interesting and reasonably well-written counter-factual history exercise, but there was a part at the end that made me cry. Books don't make me cry. Ever.

While I did enjoy this, I'm not in any great hurry to read the rest of his stuff, which doesn't really appeal.

42. Predator's Gold by Philip Reeve
Sequel to Mortal Engines, a recent Bibliogoths selection which was universally loved. Most excellent airplane reading, because it's easy but exceptionally good. The action never stops. Once again, really high body count for a Young People's book, yet still not as dark as Philip Pullman.

This week the DVD rental company decided the theme was lovingly re-created period pieces that are a bit slow-moving.

Hollywoodland is wonderful in that it is extremely evocative of 50s LA. It's a post-noir number, with many elements of a good hard-boiled PI story, but the 50s don't have the same feeling as the 30s and 40s. LA is growing exponentially - the PI, Simo, keeps ending up at new-build tract housing on the edge of the desert. Television is the Next Big Thing and the old studio system is breaking down.

One strand of the story is the (apparent) suicide of George Reeves, star of the original Superman TV series, played by an almost unrecognisable Ben Affleck. Reeves didn't want to play Superman in the first place and thought it was ridiculous. It's stressed throughout how only children watch it.

For all that adults scoff at Superman and act all superior because they don't watch it, it's adults who ruin Reeves' career. He has to be cut from From Here to Eternity because in a test screening the audience (adults) fell about pointing and laughing "it's superman!". It would probably have been unimaginable to them that today's big TV stars use their hiatus to make movies. Thankfully today's audience is sophisticated enough to separate actors from characters in their minds and careers don't have to end because the actor is too well known as one character. And they say society is dumbing down!

/rant over

Wonderful period/location stuff and points about the state of the entertainment industry in the late 50s aside, the film isn't all that good. It's not bad either, but Chinatown or The Big Sleep it's not.

The Good Shepherd
Technically this is the better film, but I'm glad I didn't see this in the cinema. It's far too long! It spans the period 1939 to 1961. Matt Damon gets different glasses to show that time is passing because, hey, it's not like men's fashions changed much in that period, especially for uptight blue-blood WASP types. I do hope the take-home messages (espionage fucks up your family life, is full or moral grey areas and you can't trust anybody) weren't supposed to come as news to anyone.

It's somewhat better than I've made it sound, and the sheer joylessness of Damon's character has to be seen to be believed.