As a student I studied Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare, and being named Ali, growing up in the 1960’s / 1970's meant that when it came to cast the school production; my deeply-racist drama teacher cast me in the role of Cassius; as one of my [many] nick names growing up in those days was ‘Clay’. I used to have to fight a lot of wankers & bullies, being the only black kid in the school. Many wankers wanted to fight me due to Mohammed Ali [aka Cassius Marcellus Clay] being in the spotlight a lot; and being a sucessful black man was something new for many people to accept. I am glad I was named Ali; like in the Johnny Cash song 'A Boy Called Sue' - if you know what I mean.
I digress as ever.
The soothsayer’s warning line from Julius Caesar ‘Beware the Ides of March’ seems somewhat apt to me today, as on March 12th - two of my favourite contemporary novels hit the silver screen on the same day in the UK. Fortunately I’ve already seen ‘The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo’ in a press screening last year, so my ticket for Dennis Lehane’s sHuTtEr iSLanD is organized.
I for one do not fear ‘The Ides of March’ – in fact I am rather looking forward to them as both novels like a punch from Ali, float like butterflies, but they linger in the mind like a sting from a bee
This is a coping mechanism often credited as originating from the French school of existential writing from writers such as Voltaire, Camus, Sartre et. al. But many other writers such as J. G. Ballard had the same thoughts. Ballard was quoted as saying –
"The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction."
That’s why I read so voraciously.
So to close the weekend, I thought I’d leave you with an existential joke -
Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist, is sitting in a cafe in Paris. “Can I get you something, Monsieur Sartre?” says the waitress. “Coffee, please,” he says. “Sugar, but no cream.” She leaves him to think, but returns a few moments later. “I’m sorry,” she says. “We have no cream. Should I make your coffee with no milk instead?”
Personally, the best coping mechanism in the grim and absurd reality that confronts us, is the shelter that our family and friends create. I am priviliged to have a wonderful family and some very dear friends - a few pictured above.
I have someone close who is feeling pretty low currently.
No matter how I try and explain that we have to take solace in the ‘little victories’ in our day - to make ourselves happy. Life is totally relative and the way I cope with the ‘downs’ is to realize how I lucky I am, and that we should always use our good memories to make us remember the good times; rather than look at what’s currently ‘wrong’ in our line of sight.
Happiness is not a constant, but a ripple that vibrates along our journey that is our life, a life unique from everyone else.
I adore a couple of lines from Guy Garvey’s Elbow song ‘One Day Like This’ that seems to put this into persepective.
“So throw those curtains wide! One day like this a year would see me right!”
There are many great times in my life that I re-visit in my memory when I feel low, and these moments or ‘days’ I re-explore, to make my world seem right.
This Video of Guy Garvey and Elbow singing with the BBC Concert Orchestra [and the Radio 3 choir of the year Chantage] celebrates how we have to smile when we feel low -
One Day Like This by Guy Garvey of Elbow
Drinking in the morning sun Blinking in the morning sun Shaking off the heavy one Heavy like a loaded gun What made me behave that way? Using words I never say I can only think it must be love Oh, anyway, it's looking like a beautiful day Someone tell me how I feel It's silly wrong but vivid right Oh, kiss me like the final meal Yeah, kiss me like we die tonight Cause holy cow, I love your eyes And only now I see the light Yeah, lying with me half-awake Oh, anyway, it's looking like a beautiful day When my face is chamois-creased If you think I'll wink, I did Laugh politely at repeats Yeah, kiss me when my lips are thin Cause holy cow, I love your eyes And only now I see you like Yeah, lying with me half-awake Stumbling over what to say Well, anyway, it's looking like a beautiful day So throw those curtains wide! One day like this a year would see me right!
Here’s Guy Garvey putting things into perspective so why not take a wider look at your life, and throw those curtains wide and celebrate what’s good, and when you have a good day, store it in your memory for when you might need to retreat from a difficult day.
I use Books, Films & Music to distract my mind from all that is wrong in my ‘line of sight’ – and to be perfectly fair, I could wallow in ‘sadness’ at what’s wrong.
I chose not to.
I look at what’s right and what’s good in my world; but at times, like my friend, it is very hard to smile – but if you don’t – there lies the path of madness.
There are numerous celebrations of the life of Robert B Parker in newsprint and the web. Suffice it to say, he influenced many writers of crime fiction, specifically PI Fiction with his Spenser and Hawk series. I read many of his novels, including Poodle Springs, the Chandler work and have to state that Robert B Parker was a legend to many of us.
I will leave the last post to fellow Boston writer Dennis Lehane - “He cast an enormous shadow over all of us, and that gets obscured because of how ridiculously successful he was, ” said Lehane in a WBUR interview on Tuesday. “He was the king of Boston. We were all kind of princes at best.”
Lehane followed in Parker’s footsteps with his own Boston-based crime fiction, including novels such as “Mystic River.” Lehane says the hero of Parker’s three dozen “Spenser” books, the uniquely tough private investigator, changed the way private eyes were featured in fiction. Parker created a character who was tough and fearless but also sensitive, well-read and devoted to his longtime girlfriend.
“There was private eye fiction before Parker and private eye fiction after Parker,” said Lehane. “And you can literally split it into those sort of epochs. It’s BP and AP.” According to Lehane, Parker also revolutionized the genre by incorporating topical issues and humor.
“He was really, really funny, and that was huge,” said Lehane. “For me and my friends, who were 12, 13, 14, to pass those books around because they were so hard to find. It was all about that Boston sense of humor.”
Lehane says he used to haunt old bookstores to find Parker’s fiction, and met the late author at a book signing when Lehane was 19.
“I still have a vision of him crossing Cambridge St. towards the store,” said Lehane, “and being, ‘that’s Robert. B Parker.’”
Photo Left (c) 2009 Ali Karim 'Better Days' at Bruce Springsteen in London's Hyde Park (Ali Karim, Nick Stone and Stav Sherez)
"Tell me, Will. Did you enjoy it? Your first murder? Of course you did. And why shouldn't it feel good? It does to God. Why only last week in Texas, he dropped a whole church roof on the heads of 34 of his worshippers, just as they were groveling for him. He wouldn't begrudge you one Journalist."
I’m not going to get all Richard Dawkins, despite having a great deal of respect for his work as a fellow scientist. But when a tragedy of the magnitude of the earthquake that struck one of the poorest countries in the World, Haiti; one does have to speculate about our existence and its meaning, if there is any?
I didn’t know anything about Haiti until I read Nick Stone’s blistering debut ‘Mr Clarinet’ several years ago. A friendship developed that lead me to discover more about this land, and what I found was not pleasant, in fact it made me realize how much dignity the people of this land have, considering how they are forced to live.
Nick Stone has taken down all the content on his website, and placed an international appeal to help the people who survived the earthquake, but who now are in dire need of help.
If you are human, and have any feelings I would urge you to do whatever you can HERE. I know money is tough all round, but in Haiti, it is sheer hell and anything, anything, anything you can do to will help.
"Your support will help to ensure that the rights of children in Haiti are not forgotton - including their right to be healthy.UNICEF has been present in Haiti since 1949.
We are working to provide clean water, shelter and medical help to children and families affected.
UNICEF relies entirely on voluntary contributions and receive no funding from the United Nations budget. "
The plot for my debut novel, Mr Clarinet didn’t come to me all at once. I got it in two installments. The first came to me in Haiti in December 1995, where I was visiting my family for the holidays. At the time, I hadn’t seen most of them nor set foot in the country for thirteen years.
I remember the moment lightning struck. It was midday – bright and baking. I was pacing around the courtyard with my late grandfather’s Model 10 Smith & Wesson revolver. I was having a nostalgic moment.
We went back, the gun, the courtyard and me. My first memory – age three - is of playing in the courtyard; my second is of the dog that approached me moments later. It was a stray black German Shepherd. It didn’t snarl or growl or even bark. It didn’t run up to me and pounce. It simply strolled into my life and – my third memory - clamped its jaws around my forearm and pulled me off my feet.
What happened next is a blank, although I’ve long since had the empty spaces filled in for me by people who weren’t there. My grandfather was sitting nearby in the shade, watching over me. This was something he liked to do while he still could. He was dying of cancer and knew he didn’t have long to go.
He shot the dog with the pistol he always kept at his side in case of thieves. Two weeks later he died in his sleep.
My uncle Jean inherited the pistol. He mounted it in a glass case and used to pass it around at dinner parties, whenever the conversation went stale. I found the gun quite by accident, still sitting in its display case, on top of a cupboard in the house I was staying in.
Jean told me the weapon’s history and then took it out of the case and handed it to me. It had a dull grey finish and a wooden grip which had turned almost black with time. It was heavier and sturdier than it looked. The day I took the pistol for a walk in the courtyard – all the while mentally recreating the scene where my grandfather had saved my life - I noticed something about it I hadn’t initially seen, something only the intense sunlight revealed. On one side of the grip, close to the end, three thin straight lines, each about a centimetre long, had been crudely scored into the wood. I guessed what they stood for.
I wondered how my grandfather had felt, being God three times over, for a split second each. I wondered how he’d lived with himself afterwards.
And that was how and when I got the first idea for my novel. Simple, really: I’d create a character who’d killed three people. I’d give him bad dreams and a mounting sense of remorse. I’d make him sorry.
*
Haiti, in case you don’t know, is a Caribbean island, situated roughly between Cuba and Jamaica. It shares a border with the Dominican Republic. You can’t miss it when you fly over it. It’s the colour of rust on rust. Its neighbours are all lush and green, healthy and abundant. Haiti looks like it doesn’t belong there, like it’s floated in from another, sorrier part of the world, a place where it barely rains and nothing ever grows or lasts.
Haiti is apart, unique and alone, as are its people. They’re also exceptionally funny: two hundred plus years of living with almost constant natural and man-made disasters means there’s gallows humour in the DNA.
I returned to live and work there in September 1996. I’d got a marketing job in a now defunct local bank, based in the capital, Port-Au-Prince. I stayed until December 1997.
The place was a disaster zone. Think of some war/famine/drought ravaged African landscape teeming with extreme poverty and disease and you’ll get a picture of what it was like.
You couldn’t – and still can’t - drink the tapwater in Haiti. It’s so filthy you’re urged to keep your mouth shut when you’re having a shower. The electricity supply is temperamental. Powercuts can last for days. Everyone who can afford one has a generator. Everyone else lives by candlelight or in complete darkness. There are precious few streetlights in Haiti. It’s not only the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, it’s also the darkest.
The crime rate rocketed on the island: murders, home invasions, carjackings, rapes, drug trafficking and, very disturbingly, a whole new dark phenomenon - child kidnapping.
Children had always gone missing in Haiti. Most of them had disappeared for good, never to be seen nor heard from again. There were rumours of adoption rackets, black magic ceremonies, child labour and other things I won’t go into here, but kidnapping was a whole new ball game. And for once it wasn’t the poor who were suffering the worst, but the rich. After all, only they could afford to pay the ransoms.
When I heard about this I got the rest of the idea for my book. I’d send my triple murderer to Haiti to look for a missing child. I’d make him a private detective. He’d be haunted by his past - the life he’d lived, the lives he’d taken and the consequences he’d reaped. His name would be Max Mingus, after an old school friend who’d got me reading Kafka, and one of my heroes, the very great Charles Mingus: jazz bassist extraordinaire, band leader, composer, bully, brawler, genius and author of Under the Underdog – the quintessential jazz autobiography, written as lopsided noir.
Meanwhile news comes to us that [Sam] Raimi is planning to kickstart another franchise: “The World of Warcraft” written by novelist Dennis Lehane, whose novels Mystic River and Shutter Island has already being transformed into celluloid screen.
So the change in crew means there will be no sequels to Spiderman 3 but now we are going for a prequel ride, hope the new movie comes up with the same magic and action, though fans will be sad for the departure of the old team who have taken the webslinger franchise to a new height and so is Columbia Pictures President Matt Tolmach as he said: “This is a bittersweet moment for us because while it is hard to imagine Spider-Man in anyone else’s hands, I know that this was a day that was inevitable.”
There are some thriller writers who I admire for their narrative ability, and there are those who not only tell a good story, but also provoke thought and insight into your own life. Their fiction sometimes can provide introspection – and Peter James is one of those writers.
James is also incredibly generous and full of information about the writing process, as well as ‘left-of-field’ trivia, something I enjoy tremendously.
I often bump into him during various events, and each time is a joy. Last December he generously took a smattering of reviewers and journalists for what has now become an annual tradition – The Peter James Lunch!
After the lunch, Peter James kindly signed 3 copies of his latest bestseller - DEAD TOMORROW for a competition at Shots Magazine, so you have a chance to explore the dark side of Brighton with Roy Grace, Peter’s Detective.Click Here to Enter And to learn about the dark world of Peter James thriller series featuring Roy Grace – Click HereThere are no geographical restrictions to the competition
“They took from their surroundings what they needed, and made of it something more.”
- PRIMER [2004]
A few years ago, I watched an extraordinary independent science fiction film called PRIMER written, directed and starring a young man called Shane Caruth. I got word of the film in 2005, when it was the talk of the Sundance Film Festival in 2004, winning the Grand Jury Prize.
When the DVD was released, I grabbed a US NTSC copy, which over the last 4 years, I must have viewed a dozen times, and with each viewing, I get another perspective of what I just viewed, and what it meant. What makes it even more interesting is that it allegedly cost $7,000 to make and Caruth refused to pander to the lowest common denominator – making it a truly complex and thought provoking viewing experience.
With its theme of ‘time travel’ underpinning the framework of two friends and their relationship that disintegrates when they start using their ‘machine’; Primer not only entertains, but also provokes very deep thought about our various reflections of the reality that confront us.
On New Year’s Eve, my son and brother-in-law watched it with me, and it certainly made them think. Of course the instant reaction was – “We need to watch this again” – and they remarked, “You love watching weird things” which made me proud.
I guarantee if you watch the first ten minutes of Primer; listening hard to the creepy and surreal narration that opens the film – you’ll be hooked. The weird thing is that Caruth’s main co-actor is David Sullivan who noticed my twittering about Primer and replied back, which freaked me out a little that night.
"Primer" is a puzzle film that will leave you wondering about paradoxes, loopholes, loose ends, events without explanation, chronologies that don't seem to fit. Abe and Aaron wonder, too, and what seems at first like a perfectly straightforward method for using the machine turns out to be alarmingly complicated; various generations of themselves and their actions prove impossible to keep straight. Carruth handles the problems in an admirably understated way; when one of the characters begins to bleed a little from an ear, what does that mean? Will he be injured in a past he has not yet visited? In that case, is he the double? What happened to the being who arrived at this moment the old-fashioned way, before having traveled back?The movie delights me with its cocky confidence that the audience can keep up.
"Primer" is a film for nerds, geeks, brainiacs, Academic Decathlon winners, programmers, philosophers and the kinds of people who have made it this far into the review. It will surely be hated by those who "go to the movies to be entertained," and embraced and debated by others, who will find it entertains the parts the others do not reach. It is maddening, fascinating and completely successful
Note: Carruth wrote, directed and edited the movie, composed the score, and starred in it. The budget was reportedly around $7,000, but that was enough: The movie never looks cheap, because every shot looks as it must look. In a New York Times interview, Carruth said he filmed largely in his own garage, and at times he was no more sure what he was creating than his characters were. "Primer" won the award for best drama at Sundance 2004.
I was most jealous when Thriller Writer and Wall Street Journal’s Rock Music correspondent Jim Fusilli got to see Led Zeppelin’s reunion concert in London in 2007, in memory of the courtly, influential co-founder and head of Atlantic Records - Ahmet Ertegun –
Filling his father's shoes is asking a lot of Jason Bonham. Not only was John Bonham an inventive and powerful drummer, but his interplay with Mr. Page's guitar lines is as responsible for the band's singularity as its musical wanderlust and Mr. Plant's bluesy, helium-like vocals. That often-intense interaction gave Zeppelin's live shows the possibility of surpassing their recorded music.
Jason Bonham's, and the band's, battle plan Monday was immediately apparent.
They played old Led Zeppelin tunes with incredible raw power, allowing for invention within familiar structures -- and sometimes not-so-familiar ones: The band rarely resisted an opportunity to push the songs, bending arrangements with sheer force and volume. They reworked several numbers -- subtly, to accommodate and exploit Mr. Bonham's gifts -- and played one tune, "For Your Life" (from the album "Presence"), that they'd never performed in concert before. For a band that hasn't been on stage together in almost 20 years -- and almost a decade more than that for a full performance -- Led Zeppelin was as tight as a rock group could be. Its members mixed their brand of rock and metal with an authority that suggested they still might be the best rock band in the world.
To celebrate the release of Royal Mail’s new Rock n’ Roll postage stamps, Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin has been doing the interview rounds. Page is open about the musical aspects of his time with Zeppelin and talk was that he wanted a reformation following the one-off gig in 2007.
The remarkable ‘Kashmir’ live
But when it comes to talk about the darker side of Led Zeppelin, Page is far more coy as reported in The Times -
If Page is ever irked by the speculation concerning this side of the Zep he surely can’t find it surprising. During the 1970s he famously became something of a scholar of the life and work of “wickedest man in the world”, Aleister Crowley, extending to Page owning an occultist book shop and buying the Great Beast’s manor, Boleskine House, on the shores of Loch Ness (he sold it in the early 1990s). Does he still have such an interest in, shall we say, magick? “Well, I’d prefer not to talk about it, really.” It’s hard to tell if the question affronts him, but it feels as though he half-expects it.
Crowley’s credos of self-liberation, not least via sex and drugs, fitted well with Page’s rock-star existence and the level of success the band experienced. Stories of the band’s groupie-tastic, coke-fuelled, booze-binging exploits on tour have captivated the imagination of rock fans ever since. If their excess wasn’t really anything their peers weren’t doing too, then Led Zeppelin’s imperious, untouchable manner, their private jet, the accompanying chaos set them apart, evoking to this day the ultimate rock-stars-on-the-road fantasy. Anecdotes concerning Page being served on a room-service trolley to a room of nubile young women sound like any lusty young man’s dream. But Page has never and won’t substantiate — or deny, it should be said — any of the wild tales.
“The tours took a lot ... well, did it take a lot out of me? I don’t know whether it did. It gave as much to me as it took out,” he says. “It was like being on a permanent adrenalin drip, d’you know what I mean?” Playing live, at least, was “to be right on the edge of the moment”.
Indeed, by 1973, on stage Page was a marvel to behold, whipping himself into rock-star poses as he improvised virtuoso solos with tireless, sweat-pouring intensity, even employing a violin bow drawn over his Gibson Les Paul guitar strings to create eerie, ear-bleeding effects. His costumes became more flamboyant, embroidered with glittery moon and stars, poppies and dragons. Today, they are very much part of rock iconography — I wonder if he still has the famous suits. “Yes I do. Oh, yeah! Carefully stored. The only thing is I’ll never get in ’em again! I think the waist on them is 26in. Absolutely ridiculous!”
What does he make of the rock biographies, such as Stephen Davis’s infamously salacious Hammer of the Gods or, most recently, Wall’s “definitive” tome? “I don’t actually read them, I just hear about them from other people. I did see Wall the other day at one of those award ceremonies and I just told him: ‘I wanted you to know I’m writing a book on Mick Wall . . .’ ”
As we linger on this stuff, though, his sense of humour starts to desert him. The mood darkens as I get on to the subject of the bad energy and harder drugs that crept into the Zeppelin picture in the late 1970s, when Page became near-skeletal in appearance and the Zep juggernaut was shaken by a chain of tragedies, including the death of Plant’s five-year-old son Karac from a viral infection.
Sidestepping any facts, Page offers instead an irritated broadside at biographers perpetuating a lurid fascination with the bad stuff: “Wall’s just writing a book designed to cash in on something he didn’t have anything to do with. He wasn’t a creative force in Led Zep. I’m at something of a disadvantage because I haven’t chosen to read that book, but I hear it’s totally distorted from people who do know about Led Zeppelin.”
But doesn’t he accept that people are interested in the darker side of the Zep legend? “In this day and age there is a sensation that people feed off — towards that aspect of things — with a voracious appetite. It’ll be interesting to see what’s more important at the end of the day — the salacious gossip or the music. I know what I went into it for in the first place. What’s important about Led Zeppelin is the music.”
By now I feel that my questions are starting to goad him — an inquiry into the possible direction the next Zep album might have taken had Bonham not died is met, quick as a flash, with a curt: “I don’t know because we didn’t do it.” He is far more voluble about that 2007 Zeppelin reunion gig, reserving special praise for Jason Bonham, who played in the drum stool vacated by his late father. “It’s great that we did it. I look back on that night with a great amount of fondness, but Jason was the hero. For me that gig was about him.”
I was pleased to see that Royal Mail has picked some other Existential Rock Albums such as Pink Floyd’s Division Bell and Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells among others to sit side-by-side with Led Zeppelin IV. Incidentally many people don’t realize it was thanks to the William Friedkin’s The Exorcist that Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells [which featured on the soundtrack] became a huge seller in the 1970’s and it was one of the first albums released under Richard Branson’s Virgin Label. In fact with [a little help from] The Exorcist; one could speculate that Branson’s business empire had a little help from the darkside too.
The graphic novel is religiously (and gruesomely) faithful to Lehane’s novel and with good reason — it would be hard to tamper with the circuitry of such a meticulously crafted mystery. The visual demands and page-count realities of the new medium required some tough choices, but De Metter has handled them deftly. The plot of the original novel was purposely confounding in certain dark corners and here those shadowy places are ambiguous in a different but still satisfying way. The climatic sequences of the book in its original form possessed a powerful and satisfying click as they fell into place and, under De Metter's watch, the dread and revelation remain intact.
The story, set in 1954, presents a U.S. marshal and widower named Teddy Daniels who, with his new partner, is dispatched to an island with one dominant landmark: Ashecliffe Hospital, a fortress-like mental institution that is missing one of its mass murderers. A hurricane hits and the entire island becomes a wind-lashed prison where the simple case of an escapee deepens into a surreal puzzle. Daniels, who arrived on Shutter Island with his own inner demons, soon wonders what is real and who can be trusted.
Like Darwyn Cooke’s retro-crime masterpiece “The Hunter,” which was the best graphic novel of 2009, “Shutter Island” finds that less is more when it comes to the color palette; crime and punishment, it seems, are best presented in shades of iodine yellow and drowning-victim blue. There are only a few slashes of bright colors in the 128-page “Shutter” graphic novel and they are carefully placed to deepen the dream-time quality of Lehane’s carefully constructed nightmare.
So with the Shutter Island Film coming shortly, and now this graphic novel – I am very excited as sHuTteR iSLaNd is one of my all time favourite novels – period! and it's a period peice to boot.
Richard Matheson is one of my favourite short story writers, with Robert Bloch, Jack Finney, Harlan Ellison, Stephen King and many others. One of Matheson's many classic short story thrillers was Button, Button which was recently reworked by Donnie Darko's Richard Kelly. The film's reception was tepid at best, though I loved it, with the SF twist and retro 1970's feel, though it did give me the creeps.
As another decade passes – I thought I’d share my thoughts about one worrying aspect of reality as we approach the close of 2009.
In my private moments I often think about what the purpose of my existence is. I often consider this maybe the root cause of my excessive reading, my wish to learn about existence and the purpose of reality. I keep a moleskin notebook with me at all times, and when I discover or contemplate an axiom or possible meaning to reality – I scribble it down.
Two years ago I stumbled upon an excellent BBC documentary which in its last 10 minutes offered a very distubing view of reality - view at your own peril as it took several pages of my moleskin notebook to write down, and it is a theory that disturbed me considerably -
Part 5 - Everthing, including you, may not be what it seems.
See all the previous parts of the BBC Documentary on Time and Reality to put the simulation argument into context.
If this intrigued you – check out some worrying thoughts from Professor Nick Bostrom of Oxford University here – there are many technical papers that will provoke thought in what you see around you.
Incidentally Prof Nick Bostrom was involved in the World Science Festival held this summer in New York – and he was on a panel with some of the Battlestar Galactica team discussing Cyborgs on the Horizon
If all this is too heavy for you – why not chill out before the decade ends with one of my favourite John Carpenter movies – They Live, a paranoid look at reality.
The Existential Man wishes all of you a happy new decade – And let’s hope that the wars that rage around the world come to an end, as we wake up to what reality really is; even if we are living in a simulated reality or unreality, and that reality is more complex than our minds can understand.
Ali
NB : I am writing this in Dublin and can not get the HTML links working, so use Google or another browser to search the key words
That’s how long it will take to read and click on the links for my review of the English Subtitled film adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo at The Rap Sheet – Here
Extract here –
I was startled to see the Swedish actor Sven-Bertil Taube playing Vanger. In my youth, one of my favorite Alistair MacLean novels was Puppet on a Chain (1969), which was later turned into a film with Taube playing Interpol agent Paul Sherman. That movie featured a spectacular high-speed boat chase through the famous canals of Amsterdam. It was strange to see Taube on screen again after all these years--and yes, he has aged, but when I looked at him on screen, I could still see the handsome looks he had in such 1970s film thrillers as The Eagle Has Landed and Game for Vultures.
And it takes 8 minutes to watch the greatest boat chase filmed [even better than ‘Live and Let Die’] - from the 1970's film version of PUPPET ON A CHAIN
Have a great existential holiday and buy everyone you know some books - reading is important
I am very depressed today, hearing about the passing of Dan O’ Bannon so The Existentialist Man wishes to celebrate his life with this lament from Dark Star which is strangely apt, so let’s have some music in here Boiler……
Now the years pull us apart,
I'm young and now you're old.
But you're still in my heart
And the memory won't go cold.
I dream of times and spaces
I left far behind
Where we spent our last few days
Benson's on my mind.
Benson Arizona,
blew warm wind through your hair,
My body flies the galaxies, my heart longs to be there.
Benson Arizona,
the same stars in the sky,
The days seemed so much kinder,
When we watched them,
You and I.
‘Benson Arizona’ Music by John Carpenter. Lyrics by Bill Taylor
There's also Total Recall, which managed to expand the Philip K Dick original into a high-action script that even managed to add a little ambiguity (Shusett and O'Bannon were way ahead of everyone in realising the cinematic potential of Dick's stories, picking up the rights to a few at a snip long before Scott's Blade Runner upped the price out of their range).
His directing career unfortunately never really got off the ground, but is still worth considering. As someone who had a hand in more or less every department in Dark Star, he wasn't one to delegate easily. As a result his directorial debut, The Return of the Living Dead, apparently wasn't much fun for anyone involved. The story is enjoyably told in B-movie actor Jewel Shepard's frank autobiography, If I'm So Famous, How Come Nobody's Ever Heard Of Me? – it's well worth tracking down a copy. The finished film, however, is great and was a "zomcom" long before Shaun of the Dead; it also had running zombies long before Zack Snyder "invented" them in his Dawn of the Dead remake. 1992's The Resurrected, the rather nifty HP Lovecraft adaptation, is O'Bannon's only other such credit.
Photo : Dan O' Bannon as Lt Pinback from 'DARK STAR'
Sony Pictures has optioned the English-language screen rights to “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” the first of three titles in the Millennium Series of crime thriller novels by late Swedish journalist-activist Stieg Larsson.
Steve Zaillian is in talks to write the script. Scott Rudin will produce with Ole Sondberg and Soren Staermose of Yellow Bird Films.
The novels focus on journalist-investigator Mikael Blomkvist and a precocious computer hacker named Lisbeth Salander. The duo become embroiled in life-threatening mysteries as they attempt to expose institutions that pull the strings behind the scenes.
The deal hasn’t closed yet; it’s been gestating for six months because of a rights dispute between Larsson’s parents and his longtime partner, Eva Gabrielsson.
Sony’s pursuit began last summer, when Michael Lynton and Amy Pascal sparked to the novel series.
As a Crime-fiction and Thriller reader, I was delighted to read that the late Stieg Larsson's novels have really hit gold in the UK -
Quercus Publishing / MacLehose Press has just had confirmation from Neilson that THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO has overtaken James Patterson by 3,654 copies to take the No. 1 slot in the fiction Paperback bestseller position, with 38,091 copies sold. James Patterson follows at No. 2 with 34,527 copies.
THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE Paperback sits at No. 8 with 18,098 copies and THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS’ NEST Hardcover moves to No. 6 with 13,807
That means that all three Stieg Larsson novels in his Millennium Trilogy appear in the UK Book Charts top ten in the same week.
I have been interested in how The Curzon Group have been fairing, especially as their ‘manifesto’ has gained a little slice of blogo-war with thriller writer Steve Mosby. There seems to have been a truce declared since the recent heated debate, of which one point of contention has been the involvement of Jeffrey Archer as The Curzon Group patron. Whatever one considers vis-Ã -vis the merit of Archer as their patron, he certainly is a controversial character – being an ex-convict, bestselling writer and peer of the realm.
It seems that life often mirrors art, as the continual rollercoaster ride of Jeffrey Archer’s fortunes mirror that of his own characters – for The Times reports today that Archer is back in the money –
JEFFREY ARCHER is being paid a record £18m advance to write a Forsyte Saga-style epic spanning a century in the lives of a fictional family from Bristol. The deal is believed to be the biggest signed by a British author so far and requires the peer to produce five novels over five years. The first book is due to be published in 2011.
Archer said that he will begin work on The Clifton Chronicles shortly. The novels will set out the trials and tribulations of a character called Harry Clifton who rises from humble beginnings to become a wealthy tycoon.
Born to impoverished parents in 1920, Clifton wins a place at grammar school where he becomes involved with an affluent shipping family called the Davenports
The deal with Macmillan will see one book published every May until 2015, by which time Archer will be 75.
Only a handful of American authors, including Michael Crichton, who died earlier this year, Dan Brown, James Patterson and Stephen King, are thought to have received larger advances than Archer.
In Britain he can be challenged only by J K Rowling, whose contract to write the Harry Potter novels for Bloomsbury has been shrouded in secrecy. She received just £2,500 for the first book in the series. Although Rowling received much higher advances for subsequent Harry Potter books, much of her £499m fortune is derived from royalties and the success of the spin-off films.
The largest advances recently have gone to celebrities writing their memoirs. They include Peter Kay (£2m), Julie Walters (£1.5m) and Ant and Dec (£2m between them). But sales of these showbiz books have been falling away.
Since his first book, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, was published in 1976, Archer, a former deputy chairman of the Conservative party who was jailed for perjury, has made about £100m from his literary career.
When I was younger, I enjoyed watching screen actor Richard Todd who always seemed to play the quintessential British Army officer [in movies such as The Longest Day, The Dam Busters, D-Day The Sixth of June and many others]. I enjoyed the stoic image he portrayed and so was saddened to hear of his passing [aged 90]. Originally considered by Ian Fleming as the first choice for the role of James Bond [which he lost out to Sean Connery in a peculiar twist of fate] he worked continually in film, theatre and also in later years - raising awareness about the risks of depression. His later life was tinged with tragedy with the suicides of two of his sons, which sparked him initiating a campaign to warn parents of the dangers of depression in the young. Despite always showing his stiff upper lip in his military roles, Todd was born an Irishman in Dublin 90 years ago.
In his autobiography, Caught in the Act (1986), Todd recalled that, while training as an actor, he appeared in the crowd scenes for two Will Hay movies and as an extra in A Yank at Oxford (1938). But the main focus of his ambition was the stage. After leaving drama school he performed in regional rep and in 1939 joined the newly-founded Dundee Repertory Theatre.
The Second World War temporarily prevented Todd from advancing his career. He volunteered the day after war was declared and was commissioned in the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry in 1941. In 1943 he applied to become a parachutist, and in May of that year was posted to the 7th Parachute Battalion – part of the 6th Airborne Division. For the Normandy landings, he was made the Assistant Adjutant.
In a later article about his D-Day experiences Todd compared the pre-briefing for the landings to "the readthrough and cast list for a new production at the Dundee Rep", and likened himself to an actor who had just been "told the minor role I was to play" after having been "subjected to a four-year rehearsal for the big first night". Yet throughout those years he had kept his profession secret, terrified that he might be put in charge of Ensa: "Not even my closest friends knew I was an actor."
After the war Todd rejoined Dundee Rep before making his West End debut in The Hasty Heart. In 1948 he was invited to London for a screen test and won a film contract with Associated British Pictures.
After making his screen debut in For Them That Trespass (1948) and his triumph in The Hasty Heart, Todd travelled to Hollywood to appear as a bridegroom with a murky past in King Vidor's Lightning Strikes Twice (1950), then starred as Marlene Dietrich's former lover – and a murder suspect – in Hitchcock's Stage Fright (1950).
There followed an orgy of swashbuckling heroics in Disney's The Story of Robin Hood and his Merrie Men (1952), The Sword and the Rose (1953) and Rob Roy, The Highland Rogue (1954), which served only to prove that Todd was no Errol Flynn.
His role as Peter Marshall in A Man Called Peter persuaded Henry Koster to cast Todd in his Virgin Queen (1955) as a roguish Sir Walter Raleigh whose dalliance with lady-in-waiting Joan Collins angers Elizabeth I (Bette Davis), before casting him in D-Day, the Sixth of June the following year.
The Dambusters (1954) marked the beginning of a fruitful collaboration with the director Michael Anderson. He went on to appear in Anderson's Yangtse Incident (1956), as the commander of a crippled frigate breaking a Chinese blockade, and in the Hitchcock-style Chase a Crooked Shadow (1958), he played the mysterious stranger claiming to be the late brother of the heiress Kimberley Prescott (Anne Baxter). He returned as a Wing Commander (this time named Kendall) for their last film together, Operation Crossbow (1965).
Todd worked with a variety of other directors. He was the leader of the escape committee in Don Chaffey's PoW camp movie The Danger Within (1959), and in Leslie Norman's The Long and the Short and the Tall (1961) he played the leader of an Army patrol sent out into the Malaysian jungle. The same year he produced as well as starred in the bedroom farce Why Bother to Knock?
Todd was Ian Fleming's first choice to play James Bond in Dr No (1962), but a scheduling clash gave the role to Sean Connery. Instead he played Inspector Harry Sanders in Lawrence Huntington's Death Drums Along The River (1963), a role he reprised in Coast of Skeletons the following year. In a rather more unlikely casting, he played a counter-culture hippie guru professor in The Love-Ins (1967).
By the late 1960s Todd's star had waned, and his later film parts were mostly forgettable, with the possible exception of Michael Winner's remake of The Big Sleep (1978), in which he played the police commissioner opposite Robert Mitchum's Philip Marlowe.
I've known Mike Ripley for many years now, apart from his very droll and award-winning Fitzroy Maclean Angel series, many people don’t realise that he is also a respected critic of crime fiction, writing for the Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Times and the Birmingham Post among others. He currently writes the "Getting Away With Murder" gossip column at shotsmag.co.uk.
Now we here he has another project as series editor for Top Notch Thrillers with the release of his first four books -
The Terrible Door by George Sims [ISBN 978-1-906288-28-0] Night Of Glass by Philip Purser [978-1-906288-29-7] A Clear Road To Archangel by Geoffrey Rose [978-1-906288-30-3] Snake Water by Alan Williams [978-1-906288-31-0].
When asked about the first batch he selected - “The first four Top Notch Thrillers show the diversity of styles and the sheer bloody inventiveness which is a long standing tradition of great British thriller writing.”
The 'Top Notch' authors
George Sims (1923-1999) was a well-known antiquarian book dealer; a background he used to good effect in several of his thrillers, notably his first, The Terrible Door (1964), and in The Last Best Friend (1967) which Harry Keating chose as one of the “100 Best Crime and Mystery Books”. Sims had the wonderful ability to create a sudden air of menace and a Dickensian flair for describing the seedier parts of London. He was a member of the famous Detection Club.
Philip Purser (b.1925) was the long-standing television critic for the Sunday Telegraph and is an acknowledged expert on TV and films. His thrillers are reminiscent of the early work of Alfred Hitchcock, where un-heroic people are forced to do heroic things. Night of Glass (1968) is not only a cracking thriller but contains many wry observations on the British class system. Philip Purser is married to crime writer and novelist Ann Purser.
Geoffrey Rose (b.1932) was a professional actor for over 40 years before retiring to the south coast of England in 2000. In the early 1970s he wrote three thrillers in his own very distinctive style, which was once compared to that of the early novels of Graham Greene. A Clear Road To Archangel (1973) is a fantastical, almost surreal, chase/manhunt thriller set during the Russian Revolution.
Alan Williams (b.1935) became a best-selling spy novelist with The Beria Papers (1973) and Gentleman Traitor (1975) but his earlier novels were full-blooded adventure thrillers set in exotic locations. Snake Water (1965) is a violent treasure hunt set in South America and introduced the engaging but totally untrustworthy rogue Sammy Ryderbeit who was to reappear in The Tale of the Lazy Dog (1970).
Mike Ripley told me - “I am delighted and honoured to be able to be able to help put these books and these authors in front of a new audience. Each title has a distinctive flavour and atmosphere and together they show the wide range of quality writing in the thriller genre.”
Top Notch Thrillers and all OSTARA titles will be available to order from all booksellers and through internet retailers. Full details can be found on www.ostarapublishing.co.uk and they make excellent festive presents as they are ‘Top Notch’
So who could take on Dan Brown’s position sitting at No 1 in the UK Fiction hardcover book charts? Well others have tried and failed, but I am pleased to announce that it takes Martina Cole’s HARD GIRLS to knock off Brown’s The Lost Symbol as reported by The Bookseller today –
Dan Brown's reign at the summit of the UK bestseller lists is over. The Lost Symbol (Bantam Press) sold 30,113 copies at UK book retailers last week, a sale only strong enough for third overall. The latest edition of fact bible Guinness World Records takes over top spot with a 31,812 seven-day sale, while Martina Cole's latest thriller, Hard Girls (Headline), sold an impressive 30,590 copies in just three days and takes second position. Cole's previous eight novels, beginning with Faceless in 2001, have all scored Original Fiction number ones. Hard Girls makes it nine in a row.
One of the biggest selling crime writers in the UK is Martina Cole, but she hasn’t become the staple of the bestseller charts overnight. Martina came from very humble beginnings and has worked hard all her life raising her son and writing urban thrillers which have attracted a loyal following. Martina Cole is even busier working back on TV with ‘Martina Cole’s Lady Killers’ as well as the ‘Martina Cole’s Girl Gangs’
Last year I enjoyed celebrating Martina’s success at the launch of ‘The Business’ at Dolce in London’s West End and look forward to her new book Hard Girls, which by knocking off Dan Brown shows how popular she’s become.
I’ve known Martina for many years, and if you are intrigued by the photo I took of her with screen legend Herbert Lom at the top of the post - then click here to read how Britain’s biggest crime writer met Inspector Clouseau’s boss - Chief Insp. Charles LaRousse Dreyfus .
If you’ve never read Martina Cole, you’ve got a lot of great reading ahead of you because when it comes to tough urban thrillers with a heart – Martina Cole is The Business.
Dangerous Lady (1992) The Ladykiller (1993) Goodnight Lady (1994) The Jump (1995) The Runaway (1997) Two Women (1999) Broken (2000) Faceless (2001) Maura's Game (2002) The Know (2003) The Graft (2004) The Take (2005) Close (2006) Faces (2007) The Business (2008) Hard Girls (2009)
More information about the tough world of Martina Cole is available from –
As the wind tears off the autumn leaves summoning up the chill of winter; I always find myself reflecting upon some of the novels that have made me stop and think about life during the year. I always enjoy contributing to January Magazine’s best of Crime Fiction lists which I have done for many years now.
The capsule reviews by January Magazine and The Rap Sheet form an excellent resource to help readers select the “best of the best” from the pool of reviewers. Editors and Writers Linda Richards and Jeff Peirce work tirelessly in keeping January Magazine and The Rap Sheet continually updated and brimming with information. I am glad to call them friends, as well as colleagues.
The photo is taken from Bouchercon Baltimore 2008 [Left to Right Ali Karim, Jeff Pierce, Linda Richards and Declan Burke].
Listings of the “best of the best” in the book world are especially crucial today due to the economic situation which is damaging publishing. One should really try to buy books as festive gifts, not only to support writers, editors and publishers and all those people who work in the industry including booksellers, distributors etc – But crucially to get people to read books. Reading is far more important than many people realise.
Here’s some links to January Magazine’s resource, and you’ll find most of the books listed are available in paperback – so go on, make someone’s day – buy them a book, for which Crime Fiction and Thrillers can kick start someone reading again.
Written by series writer Jane Espenson, Battlestar Galactica: The Plan begins before the attack on the 12 colonies and will show events mainly from the perspective of two Cylon agents. The narrative largely follows multiple versions of the Cylon models One (Dean Stockwell) and Six (Tricia Helfer), who have infiltrated the remaining humans, both on the planets, and those who have escaped into space. From there, the events of the television series are shown from a Cylon perspective, and their underlying plan is revealed in a way that will change your outlook on the new Battlestar Galactica series forever. Also starring Michael Trucco, Aaron Douglas, Dean Stockwell, Tricia Helfer, Grace Park, Rick Worthy, Matthew Bennett, Callum Keith Rennie, Michael Hogan and Rekha Sharma and directed by Edward James Olmos, Battlestar Galactica: The Plan blasts off on DVD and Blu-ray on October 27th.
Reviews are appearing all over; such is the popularity of Battlestar Galactica, and because of the frenzied anticipation, the word on the street though positive, is tempered due to the brilliance what came before THE PLAN -
There’s plenty of eye candy in The Plan, too: The space shots, nuke attacks and havoc wreaked on the colonies’ 12 planets are on par with the rest of Galactica’s gritty CGI look. There are also a few bits of gratuitous nudity, both male and female, that will doubtless be cut from this unrated DVD version when the movie airs on Syfy.
What The Plan doesn’t have is much in the way of heavy revelations. It also lacks a strong, standalone narrative. Perhaps most disappointing, the characters who made the series so compelling — Olmos’ steely fleet commander William Adama, Katee Sackhoff’s unpredictable fighter pilot Kara “Starbuck” Thrace, Michael Hogan’s irascible Saul Tigh — barely appear in The Plan. When they do, it’s usually in recycled scenes that will have fans of the series flashing back to the show’s glory days.
Galactica completists will eat up the tiny insights into the Cylon POV: the knowing smiles of skinjobs as mushroom clouds bloom over Caprica, the way Leoben (aka Cylon Number Two, played by Callum Keith Rennie) obsesses over Starbuck.
But there’s not much that would make sense to viewers who haven’t already seen Galactica. It’s hard to imagine, for instance, what a BSG virgin would make of the Beat-poet babble spewing from the mouth of the hybrid in the bathtub aboard the Cylon basestar.
If you haven’t seen all four seasons, explore the complete series and file The Plan for future viewing. If you’re a Battlestar Galactica fanatic, don’t place too much hope in this mediocre coda. Watch it like you would the deleted scenes on a DVD, and don’t let it scrap your memories of one of the most ambitious sci-fi shows of all time.
Fans of "Battlestar Galactica," like fans of most great science fiction (and, let's be honest, lots of mediocre to bad science fiction) tend to be a ravenous bunch — always eager for more from their favorite show.
So even though the series came to a very definitive conclusion back in March, and even though a prequel series called "Caprica" will debut on Syfy early next year, the "BSG" fandom is understandably psyched for today's DVD release of the new movie "Battlestar Galactica: The Plan." But the finished product, which mixes original scenes with archival footage, at times feels as if it meets the bare minimum requirements to qualify as new material.
Because the series finale (which many fans are still not happy with) closed off most avenues for a sequel, and because the series had such a tight story line, there isn't really room to tell a new story about these characters. Instead, writer Jane Espenson and director Edward James Olmos have to content themselves with filling in a lot of blanks — specifically, with showing the events from the series' first few seasons from the point of view of the Cylons instead of the humans.
So instead of Olmos' Admiral Adama as our central character, "The Plan" (which will presumably air on Syfy sometime next year) is built around Dean Stockwell as malevolent Cylon leader John Cavil, who we learned late in the series had engineered the genocide of humanity as an act of rebellion against his human-loving creators. We see Cavil and most of the other Cylon models (Lucy Lawless doesn't appear as D'Anna Biers) preparing for the destruction of all of humankind, then desperately scrambling once they realize they failed to kill everybody.
I truly admire Edward James Olmos for promoting the importance of "humanity" being united, as well as his work with underprivileged youngsters. It was good of the UN in conjunction with the SyFy Channel to welcome Olmos and many of the cast and workers from Battlestar Galactica to ehe United Nations on Humanitarian Issues committee.
So if you haven’t explored Battlestar Galactica – it’s time to behold one of the greatest TV series every filmed – and available on DVD.
Ali Karim - is Assistant Editor at Shots eZine, a contributing editor at January Magazine & The Rap Sheet and writes for Crimespree magazine, Deadly Pleasures and Mystery Readers International and is an associate member of The Crime Writers Association [CWA], International Thriller Writers [ITW] and the Private Eye Writers of America [PWA]. Karim contributed to ‘Dissecting Hannibal Lecter’ ed. Benjamin Szumskyj [McFarland Press] a critical examination of the works of Thomas Harris, as well as The Greenwood Encyclopedia of British Crime Fiction [ed. Barry Forshaw]. Karim has contributed to ITW 100 Thriller Novels due out in 2010.
Karim been three times nominated for a Anthony Award [2007, 2008 & 2009] as well as The Spinetingler Award in 2008 for special contributions to the Crime and Thriller genre.
As a student I studied Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare, and being named Ali, growing up in the 1960’s / 1970's meant that when it came to cast the school production; my deeply-racist drama teacher cast me in the role of Cassius; as one of my [many] nick names growing up in those days was ‘Clay’. I used to have to fight a lot of wankers & bullies, being the only black kid in the school. Many wankers wanted to fight me due to Mohammed Ali [aka Cassius Marcellus Clay] being in the spotlight a lot; and being a sucessful black man was something new for many people to accept. I am glad I was named Ali; like in the Johnny Cash song 'A Boy Called Sue' - if you know what I mean.
There are numerous celebrations of the life of Robert B Parker in newsprint and the web. Suffice it to say, he influenced many writers of crime fiction, specifically PI Fiction with his Spenser and Hawk series. I read many of his novels, including 
As a comic book fan and Thriller reader, I was blown-away by last years 
So who could take on Dan Brown’s position sitting at No 1 in the UK Fiction hardcover book charts? Well others have tried and failed, but I am pleased to announce that it takes Martina Cole’s HARD GIRLS to knock off Brown’s The Lost Symbol as reported by 
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