The Departed

I watched The Departed last night at the behest of The Sole Heir. I remember how impressed I was coming out of the theater the first time I saw it. I've seen it three or four time since, and, frankly, it's not holding up all that well. It's still good, and I'm sure I'll watch it again. It's just that the holes are more evident every time I watch, and the things that made it special have to work a little harder to hold it together each time.

Most of what holds it together is the acting. I know a lot of people like to rip this movie because of the accents; they don't bother me so much. I lived in the Boston area for four years, and there are Boston accents and Boston accents. None of them bothered me enough to take me out of the movie. The performances in general more than made up for any accental flaws. (Yes, I made that word up.)

DiCaprio and Damon are great, playing the opposite sides of the coin. Nicholson's risky in places, but no bones are made about the fact that Frank Costello is crazy, and getting worse. The character depicted by Nicholson is definitely batshit crazy. Martin Sheen has the most troublesome accent, but the humanity he brings to Captain Queenan more than makes up for it. No one has more obvious fun acting than Alec Baldwin. Mark Wahlberg's character is awkwardly written, but he carries it off naturally. Ray Winstone was born to play in crime flicks (if you haven't seen Sexy Beast, do so), and Vera Farmiga was a revelation.

Scorsese's direction is the equivalent of an actor choosing to be a movie star instead of an actor. Everything is there, and it's dazzling in parts, but it lacks the "go to hell" character of Goodfellas and Taxi Driver. He may have entered the phase of directing Raymond Chandler warned about for writers, where one has all the techniques and nothing new to say. The overall effect is still commanding, especially on first viewing on the big screen. The seams become a little more obvious with subsequent evaluations.

Now we come to the weaknesses, and they are several. To wit (spoilers abound, so beware):

- The premise. Given the research done on these elite cops and the depth of knowledge Queenan and Dignan have on Bill Costigan, how can they not know Colin Sullivan and Frank Costello go way back. It's not like they made it a big secret; Costello did a drive-by at the Academy graduation ceremony.

- Cittizens Citizen's Trust. The misspelled envelope is the key to Costigan's uncovering Sullivan as the mole, but there's no need for it. Everyone in Costello's crew writes their vitals on pieces of paper that are places in the envelope to be delivered to Sullivan. Why does Fitz alone wtite his bank information on the outside? There's nothing there that identifies whose bank that is. The whole thing is done solely so Costigan can find it on Sullivan's desk later.

- Sullivan erasing Costigan's record. There's no way a staff sergeant is going to be able to erase such a well-protected, permanent record from this sensitive a database. I'm a senior administrator for a training tracking system of much lower sensitivity, and I couldn't do it. There's no way Sullivan can.

- The rat scurrying along the railing on a seventh floor balcony. Please.

There are some great scenes, Scorses's a master at them. Costigan ordering cranberry juice in the bar the night he meets Mr. French is a favorite. Still, for me, The Departed has shifted from a brilliant movie to a flawed connection of excellent scenes, the whole less than the sum of its parts. Well worth watching, but not Scorsese's best work.

(Due credit should be given to John McFetridge's rant during the 2008 Bouchercon. He got me thinking about some things I hadn't before, and, as is so often the case when he and I initially disagree, he was right. Bastard.)

Why Movies Suck

Here's a tidbit from the Trivia page of IMDB's entry for the movie Get Shorty:

MGM didn't want to extensively use Elmore Leonard-inspired dialogue in the film, and pushed Barry Sonnenfeld and Scott Frank to make many passages more generic than the book's, but once John Travolta signed on to the film he successfully pressured the studio to leave Frank's original draft (which had a lot of colorful dialogue) intact for filming.

Yeah, let's smooth the edges off of Elmore Leonard's dialog. There's a good idea.

The End

The Work-In-Progress is no longer in progress; I finished it over the weekend. I never append THE END to the bottom of a story until I'm officially through with it; now I have.

This project droned on forever, was almost dropped a couple of times. Should it ever see the light of day, Declan Burke and Charlie Stella will each bear responsibility, as they were instrumental in bucking me up to carry on, each in their own way. Note I said they will "bear responsibility," not "are due credit." Let's see how the book is received first.

So now the writing is over--pending editorial suggestions by anyone who might be interested in it--and it's time to start looking for an agent and/or publisher.

Oh, joy.

Summer Reading

My summer hiatus has extended into all realms of writing, including passing along recommendations. Not that what appears in this blog will make or break a book, but making even one person aware of a good book is worth the time, since the publishers sure as hell aren't going to do it.

 

So, with that in mind, here are my recommendations for May, June, and July.

 

The Queen of Patpong, Timothy Hallinan. I will be greatly surprised if I read a better book this year. Hallinan's Poke Rafferty series started well with A Nail Through the Heart, and has continued to improve with each installment. In The Queen of Patpong, Hallinan explores the back story of Poke's wife, Rose, from a girl in a Thai village through her work in the sex trade, in the context of a chance meeting with a man she thought she'd been rid of. Hallinan's pacing is dead on, which is no mean feat, considering he breaks away from the story he's telling to give you a novella-length look at Rose's life. If you're already familiar with Hallinan's work, you're not going to want to miss this one. If you haven't read him yet, why the hell not?

Gutshot Straight, Lou Berney. I picked this up at the Bouchercon book bazaar last year, because I figured any book titled Gutshot Straight had to be entertaining. I was right again. Berney runs you through twist after twist, never quite doing what's expected but never straining your credulity too much. The tone is just right, the characters are expertly drawn and complement each other well, and Berney keeps his tongue planted only deep enough in his cheek to maintain the proper mood.

Tonight I Said Goodbye, Michael Koryta. Koryta's original Lincoln Perry story deserves its accolades. To me, Koryta's Perry stories ring truer than his standalones, and this one is no exception. A good introduction to his regular cast of characters, and a story that turns around just enough. The ending is a twist out of the blue until you think about it for a second, which is just as it should be. Thor, the Russian mobster (who also appears in A Welcome Grave) is perfect.

Cop in the Hood, Peter Moskos. True story of a sociology student who spent twenty months as a Baltimore cop. Not just following them around; Moskos went through the academy and donned the uniform. Insights in a context you can't get anywhere else, an entertaining read, to boot. The last section of the book is a history of prohibition in America—both liquor and drugs—and how the unintended consequences of each may be worse than the problem the policy is supposed to solve. Should be mandatory for anyone who wants to have an intelligent discussion of the pros and cons of current drug policy.

Mating Season, Jon Loomis. A worthy successor to Loomis's first Frank Coffin book, High Season. Not as much of a revelation—you're already aware of the "colorful" nature of the Provincetown setting—but still a fun read. Loomis blends humor and violence as appropriately as anyone.

TKO, Tom Schreck. The second book in Schreck's Duffy Dombrowski series. Another good mixture of humor and murder, though with a considerably higher body count than Mating Season. Duffy is a multi-faceted character who's too involved in what goes on around him to truly be a slacker, though just barely. He's smart, and, most important, has a good heart that holds things together and keeps you rooting for him. Schreck may be the best at getting an animal to help solve mysteries, using Al the basset hound to things a dog could actually do, like track people.

After Further Review

I started writing book reviews for New Mystery Reader in 2005, and will forever be grateful to Stephanie Padilla for the opportunity and encouragement she provided. At least half of the authors I read now became known to me through books I was asked to review, including many of my favorites. (John Connolly, Timothy Hallinan, and Declan Hughes jump to mind; there are several others.)

I've been on hiatus for a few months, and I think it's going to continue. The fact is, a lot of books that get published have many of the same strengths and weaknesses, and it got harder all the time to say the same things in different, and (hopefully) entertaining ways. I also found I was more quickly losing interest in books I didn't care for, which made going through to the end more of a chore than it should be.

Those things pushed me to take a break; what's keeping me from going back are the writers. I've been lucky enough to become friendly with fairly broad range of writers, from reading each others' blogs and trading comments on web sites such as Crimespace. Some I became friendly with after I reviewed their books and followed up with an interview. This was all well and good and fun, until a thought came to me one day:

What do I do when I get one of their books for review and I don't think much of it?

It's bound to happen. No offense to any of my writer friends, but I've read books by Elmore Leonard and said, "meh." The easy answer is, you tell the truth in an honest and straightforward manner, and they'll understand. They're writers. They know how it works. I've read uncomplimentary comments about my writing and not felt differently about the commenter. It's not a criticism of them as a person, it's the writing we have a difference about.

Still, I'm not going to do it, for the best reason I can think of: I don't want to.

It's not like I'm Jonathan Yardley or Michiko Kakutani. I'm not making a living at it, and people aren't subscribing to feeds with breathless anticipation of my next literary pronouncement. I owe readers an honest evaluation, and I'd be reluctant to give it to them if it meant I had to disparage a friend's work. So I won't. I'll read for the entertainment, and to learn a little, and I'll do my monthly "Good Reads" posts with single paragraph comments of books I liked. If I don't like a book, no one needs to know I read it.

The less seriously I take this whole writing business, the more I like it.

Ain't Technology Wonderful?

There's a new scam operating online that can actually be fun. "I Write Like" asks you to paste a sample of your writing into a text box, where its magical algorithm will "analyze" what you pasted and tell you who you write like. They'll even send you an electronic "certificate" you can post to your blog, bragging about which writer you most resemble. (This leads me to believe everyone who submits a sample is far more likely to resemble a literary great than some schmuck who sold fifteen copies of a coming-of-age soft porn book twenty years ago.)

I thought it would be fun to paste in the first couple of pages on my current project and see who I wrote like. This scene between two men in a strip club plotting the death of their wives was proclaimed to read like Mark Twain. This surprised me a little, as I've read all of Twain's books, and many of the shorter pieces, and I don't remember him using "fuck" at all, though I worked it in there six times.

Maybe this algorithm is more subtle and profound than I expected, or am myself. Next I pasted the last few paragraphs from Raymond Chandler's "The Simple Art of Murder," including the famous, "down these mean streets" section. I wanted to see if the computer thought it resembled Chandler.

Nope. Mario Puzo.

I liked The Godfather, and wholeheartedly agree with the description given to it by a critic whose name escapes me. ("The best bad book ever written.") I just don't see a lot of resemblance between Puzo's writing and Chandler's, aside from dealing with crime and using English.

I decided to go best two of three, and pasted in an excerpt from a data feed the system I work on gets nightly. It's nothing more than names, addresses, dates, and some column separators, and looks something like this:

TWX_2899|Simpson||Bart|111 15th Street, SW|Arlington, VA||20319||||(703) 555-9978|CONT|TWX_CONTRACTORS|N|06/22/2010|06/23/2010|e7213fbf43edbe4e8da2e6afe3f49a65

The computer was reminded of the work of David Foster Wallace. I would have said HAL9000, but maybe that's why I'm not more successful.

Back in the Saddle Again

I started the final draft of the work-in-progress Sunday night. I probably mind these polishing drafts less than anything else about writing; I have a routine that works for me, and I just plod through the entire book. Each day I read a chapter or two, edit on the screen what I read the previous day, and line edit a hard copy while I read it aloud. (The three steps are performed in reverse order from what is described here; it seemed to read easier this way.)

How do I feel about coming back to a writing routine after two months off? Meh. I don't mind the work, but I don't like the time it sucks out of my evenings. The plan is to finish this off by Labor Day, then decide if I want to start another project to fill the winter months. (I have a few story ideas I like percolating, so there shouldn't b a delay there, should I feel like continuing.)

The book itself is okay. I'm pretty happy with the quality of the writing and not changing a lot, mostly tightening and re-ordering words and sentences. I hope this doesn't come across like I'm an arrogant prick, but I really don't think it's the quality of my writing that has held me back. (I freely admit to being an arrogant prick; I just don't want to sound lime one.) The fault is not with the publishing industry, it's mine alone. The issue isn't so much with the quality of the writing, but with the something else of the writing. Story selection, maybe. Possibly my voice. As I've noted before, I try to write books I'd like to read; maybe my tastes aren't popular enough. Whatever. Let's finish this puppy up and get on with trying to sell it.

It would be remiss of me not to take a moment to thank those who have been encouraging, sympathetic, and generally made me feel as though they had my back. Of course, My Beloved Spouse heads the list, but Declan Burke and Charlie Stella have stood out with their support and patience with my whining. Thanks to them, and to all of you who have posted comments here, or sent emails. You are much appreciated.