BEAST OF BURDEN by Ray Banks

Usually I leave a book to one side for a while before trying to review it. I like to let my thoughts settle. Hot off reading BEAST OF BURDEN, though, I thought I’d go straight into it without any planning.

Call it a Callum Innes tribute review.

I’m thinking I’ll drop two big clunking cliché’s in the review, but I’ll give you fair warning before I do. After reading the third Inns book, NO MORE HEROES, I wasn’t sure there would be another. Without wanting to spoil things, Banks made some very bold choices at the end of that book, and made it difficult to understand how the character would carry a fourth crime novel.
But that is the silly thinking of an idiot. What Ray and Cal prove here is that, as with Matt Scudder, the time a character gets most interesting is just when you think his story is done.

(Here’s one of those clunking cliché things, duck!)
So, that brings us to the fourth book in the Cal Innes Quartet. There’s a lot of baggage carried over through the series and it set the plot up here for a great ending. There’s death and violence, swearing, and some of the best dialogue of the series.

Every character from the previous books gets an appearance (or at least a mention), and they all get to leave the series in ways that feel natural and unforced.
Innes is typically messed up. Even more so than before, to the point where he seems to have moved past looking for a fight, to now looking to cover up and avoid a beating. It’s hard to think of a central character that’s been on a more complete journey. As usual, there’s a degree of hidden greatness to Cal’s actions. He’s a fuck up who makes the wrong choices, but he’s often doing things for almost the right reasons.
Throughout the series, he’s never been as fast or as clever as he thinks he is. Never one step ahead of anyone. The extra dimension here is that Banks switches back to having two narrators’, each trying to solve a mystery in their own way, so this time you’re never sure who is ahead of who.

This took the novel in a different direction to the previous three. They all had mysteries involved, but they were ones that the reader could figure out just enough ahead of Cal to see where he made the wrong choices. Here Banks throws in more twists and turns, fuelled by the dual investigators, so that the central mystery is not clear until after Cal has chosen to reveal it to us, and even then there are a few twists.
In many ways, Innes gets to control his own fate, fare more than in previous books, and ends the series on the right note. Although I can’t expand on what I mean there without spoiling the whole thing.

The second narrator is a brilliant return for Donkin, the bully-cop from the first book. I may not get my wish, but I would gladly go to war to get a Donkin centric book, such is the way he comes alive here. He was a hell of a lot of fun.
There’s a feeling throughout the book of loss, of time catching up with people and burning them out. (SECOND CLUNKING CLICHÉ ON THE WAY) There’s inevitability to everybody’s stories, a sense of foreboding and fatalism that gives Banks’ latest book a Jim Thompson-esque quality that I really enjoyed.

L.A. CONFIDENTIAL

We re-watched the film recently and I was struck by how much of an influence it’s had on my for the decade that followed.
This was an instance where I unashamedly admit to seeing the film before reading the book. It was also the start of me delving back into crime fiction with a stronger passion than ever before; sure I’d read and enjoyed some of the classics, but I was too young to really soak in what was happening. L.A. Confidential arrived just at the right time. The film pulled back the curtain; the book ripped the curtain off the rail.



I was always going to end up in that place, I can see looking back. At a high school writing project in English, I chose to write a private detective story at thirteen. Some gumpf involving missing Incan gold and a man in a long coat. I was writing the clichés, knowing that they had some resonance with me, but not yet any real meaning. Also, as I’ve written before, the comics I’d been drawn to in the previous decade were the noir-inspired ones, the etchings of David Mazzucheli and even the impressionism of Norm Breyfogle.

As any pulp fan will tell you, most of the things I love ultimately came from the same source. Comic Books, Hardboiled fiction and Film Noir all have the pulps as a grandparent
I’d already been watching black and white crime films while bunking off school, and gone on a massive binge of German Expressionism that probably owed more to Tim Burton than I’d like to admit. But as a writer I was usually writing horror stories, and as a reader it was more often than not fantasy or sci fi. Then 1997 happened, and this film happened. In fact, it wasn’t just this film, as I recall. JACKIE BROWN was in the same year, with all its Elmore Leonard goodness.

Wow, what a year that was.

Things made more sense, there was a worldview that I could really understand and that matched the comics and music I was listening to.
In the blink of an eye I was ditching German films about cabinets for British films about having nil by Ray Winstone’s mouth, I was ditching BLADE RUNNER in favour of the films it was cribbing from, and my bookshelves saw a revolution. RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK has forever stayed at number one in my list, but it has faced stiff competition from CHINATOWN.

How is the film as an adaptation?

It’s both the best example you can find and lousy. It’s gold dust.
The book is epic. So epic it’ll need a separate blog at some point. It has serial killers, a conspiracy involving a thinly disguised Walt Disney, it has drug addicts and alcoholics. It covers, if I recall correctly, about six years. And the ending, oh boy, that ending messed me up good.

The film is lean by comparison. The plot takes place over a few months, almost all of the books sub plots are gone, and the characters are pared down to angry, bristling impressions of the originals. Dozens of characters are missing, back-stories have been changed or ignored, and, with the addition of a motel shoot out and a touch of glory, you could almost say the entire point of the book has been lost. Ellroy himself, when discussing the addition of the high-noon style shoot out, once said “It was madness. But it was inspired madness..” And he should know.

It’s an absolute genius adaptation. It highlights the difference in language between book and film. I often complain about adaptations, and people think I’m being dumb. They tell me that a film has to be different to the book, and yes, it does. But this is the standard that I’m holding them too. You can adapt a book, make changes, and still get it.

The ‘hero’ was a self-serving political animal. The only honest guy in the film was a woman-beating thug, and even the happy ending was about three stages past fucked up.
It was period without ever feeling old. The director or set designer deserve an Oscar just for that. Too many people think that telling a story set in the past means you need to make things look quaint or old, when quite the opposite, you need to make the old setting look contemporary. You need to feel like you’re in the period, when all of the set dressings and clothes would look modern.

The dialogue crackles along, a mix of Ellroy originals and new touches bought in by Brian Helgeland (who previously appeared on this blog when I looked at PAYBACK.)
The film understands the book; it shares its dark beating heart, and gives us a condensed version. The first and final scenes are pretty much identical from book to film, but the route there is changed. And that’s a good thing; Ellroy is not really meant for the masses. And there are nice touches along the way. Jack Vincennes pivotal scene in the film is when he looks himself in the mirror in a bar, and leaves his dirty money on top of an untouched drink.
If you add to that the knowledge that Jack was an alcoholic in the book, the scene gets extra depth. His fate is wildly different in the film, but it makes the same point as the book in a much simpler way.

Ultimately, the film is a much brighter and nicer version of the story. Its ending is much less ambiguous, it’s characters much more likeable. It is the cleaned up Hollywood version. The things we usually hate, the added action, the changed ending, the missing subplots. But, somewhere along the line, everyone making the film understood the book they were adapting and the story they were telling. They just got it. And it was stunning.

Quick notes

Just a few quick notes for you. My official 'writer' website is almost up and running now over at Jaystringer.com
I'll still be plugging away on my noir soapbox, but the .com will be the place to go to for my 'official' persona as i try and get my career to kick up a gear in the next twelve months.

I've mentioned before that i started off another project over the summer, of a pulp inspired serial. The site for that is now also up and running at marahchase.blogspot.com/

I think that serializing on the web is the closest thing we have to the old pulps of the thirties that all of us are so beholden to, and that in fifty years time people will be looking back on all of this as an exciting and revolutionary time. I'm not claiming to have a piece of that action, but there will be action. We're probably looking at two episodes a week, on days not yet decided. To be true matinee style serials, i suppose, saturday morning should be considered.

Coming up on the soapbox soon is my little love letter to a few Springsteen albums that fit on here nicely. I'm working through another Pelecanos, so expect another review. Also, i'm thinking of an epic look at THE WIRE, so if anyine out there is interested in contributed to a collection of essays on the show, drop me a line.

Stone Junction

It’s time to talk about the best book ever written.

Wow, what a loaded statement. Wars have probably been started over less. Okay, lets bring it down to earth.

It’s time to talk about my favourite book.

STONE JUNCTION by Jim Dodge. It’s a book that goes everywhere with me. When people ask me my favourite book, I don’t even have to hesitate. I probably couldn’t draw up a top ten list; ranking books like that is near impossible. But I do know which book would be at the top.



What’s it about? It’s impossible to describe really.

I’ve tried many times to tell people about it, but I always see their eyes glaze over at the halfway point. It’s impossible to categorise. In my days working in a bookshop, I found that this would sell exactly the same whether you put it in the fiction section, the crime section or the fantasy section.

The main narrative centres on Daniel. He starts the book as a child, travelling America with his young mother. She’s the rebellious sort, cast out for punching a nun, and turns to grifting to get money for her young family.
They get picked up by a truck driver who reveals himself to be part of a secret society, a union of outlaws if you will, and from there the book takes flight on just about the strangest, most eclectic and most affirming journey set to paper.
It’s got sex, it’s got crime, it’s got terrorists, it’s got a jewell heist, it’s got gambling and driving, romance and explosives. It’s got alchemy and genuine magic. It’s the most fantastic book ever set in the real world, as if Kerouac dropped a blotter halfway through ON THE ROAD.

It’s not without problems. The journey has been so magical, and so uncontrollable, that the book loses a bit of steam in the final pages. But there was honestly no ending that would have done toe story justice. The prose is crazy and free, taught and Hammett-like one minute, flowery and flowing the next. It works though, which is a feat in itself.

One of the quotes on the back of my current edition, the well-put together cannongate one, says “A book I put my life on hold for. ” and that sums it up well. It’s been the book I turn to in crisis, along with THE PRINCESS BRIDE. The best quote though probably belongs to the BIG ISSUE; “the kind of book that inspires you to smear yourself in pigs blood and stand butt-naked on the church roof howling abuse at the congregation.” Oh yes.

THE WALKING DEAD

My next piece was going to round off a comic book trilogy by taking a look at GOTHAM CENTRAL. It’s a series that was heavily influenced by the first two comics I looked at, and would have shown their legacy.

Best laid plans of Jokers and men…

I haven’t re-read enough of the series yet to really do it justice. In the meantime, I did get addicted to THE WALKING DEAD.
Does it really fit with the themes of this site? Well, I’m sure I could make arguments that proved it did, if I worked at it. But lets not derail the show. I’m not going to limit my writing by making an argument that everything is noir; sometimes I’m just going to go with it.



THE WALKING DEAD is something of a phenomenon. A creator owned ‘indie’ comic. Its possibly the only comic on the market that’s figures are constantly going up. That doesn’t happen, it just doesn’t.

To any fans of horror films, its premise is simple and cliché. Zombies are walking the earth. Nobody knows why. Civilization has fallen. The cities are overrun; the government is nowhere to be seen.

The series, now on issue fifty-something, starts when Rick, an injured cop, wakes from a coma in hospital to find the world has collapsed while he was asleep. Yes, the beginning has been done before, but that’s not the point. If this series uses some well-trodden clichés, it’s using them in a new way. The films have always been limited by their time. Even the most ambitious of films, and Romero got pretty ambitious, could only provide character study for a couple of hours. What THE WALKING DEAD can do, that’s not been done before, is to tae these clichés and run with them. And then keep running. We’ve followed the cast of characters far beyond the point where any film would have left them behind. Some characters last a couple of issues, some last for over forty.

We get to see people try and cope with the madness; we get to see religious people either lose faith or see the apocalypse as proof that the bible was right. We get to see the limits of our own rules, the point as which it becomes acceptable to start killing people who disagree with you. The lengths people will go to defend their families when there is no law around to come and help.

And there are the cliffhangers. Oh god, the cliffhangers.

The first couple of issues are quite tame. They set up the world and introduce you to Rick. Nothing much really happens and the cliff-hangers don’t really have much impact. Once the rest of the cast begin to get introduced, everything goes to hell. Almost every one of the first 49 issues ends in some moments that makes you swear, or gasp, or cry. Serious shit happens, and nobody in the cast is safe.

Issue 49 put tears in my eyes, and that feels rare these days.

So go for it, run out and get the trades to catch up, then start buying the issues. THE WALKING DEAD is proof that comic books as a 22 page monthly art form are not dead. Proof that, if the industry could be bothered fixing distribution, they would still be able to sell comics instead of abandoning them for trade paperbacks.

BATMAN: YEAR ONE

BATMAN: YEAR ONE

After writing of my love for DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN yesterday, it’s important to ‘finish the story.’

Now, for obvious reasons, the two story arcs will never be packaged together. They will never co-exist in that sense. It’s a shame because they truly are companion pieces; Crime driven re-inventions of comic book vigilantes, by the same creative team.
Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli were the creators behind both projects, Millers scripting and Mazzucchelli’s art. They brought the New York of Daredevil and the Gotham of Batman kicking and screaming into the 1980's.

Much gets written about Frank Miller. For two decades it was cliché to worship at his feet, now its becoming cliché to criticise him. Both of these fads come from a grain of truth though; Miller was on a hot streak back then, reinventing and re-energising everything he touched. Since then he has become a parody of himself. Still the best at what he does, but no longer in touch with what it was he did. It’s probably much the same trap that Bob Dylan finds himself in. When you have been so superhumanly good in the past, everything you do will feel trivial.

I never liked Miller’s THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. It’s the holy bible of comic books, and to not like it is to be the guy who says, “The Beatles are overrated,” It’s going to get you outcast. I stand by it though. As a story, it’s sloppy and overblown. It’s full of the same overblown writing that Miller has become lampooned for these days, and too much of it is reactionary. Things happen in this story that are simply a reaction to the preceding fifty years of history, they don’t happen as an extension of the plot or the characters, they happen merely to get a reaction, to make a point.

Sure, a good writer takes his character in new directions. The most realistic approach is that all characters will act out of character during a crisis. But there is a line not to cross, if you push a character to far in the wrong direction, you lose the essence of what made the guy tick in the first place. Batman is not going to use a gun. He’s just not. Think about it.

Anyway, enough of DKR. The payoff is that I absolutely love BATMAN: YEAR ONE. It’s strong, it’s epic without sacrificing character, it just feels…true. If DKR was the Batman of BLADE RUNNER, BYO was the Batman of THE FRNCH CONNECTION. Bruce Wayne returns to Gotham after a decade of travelling the world. He’s been training, a driven missionary, an angry young man. He knows what he wants to do, but not how.

At the same time, Jim Gordon arrives in Gotham. More than anything, this is his story. He’s a man who’s been beaten down; he’s weary deep in his soul. He hates himself, and his wife isn’t crazy about him either. He’s done something wrong in his career. It’s never explained or expanded upon but we learn that he got caught doing something in Chicago. Something that caused his career to be tainted, and his stock to plummet. He gets transferred to Gotham because the corrupt powers that be –and in Gotham that was everyone- assumed that he would be compliant. Hire a corrupt cop to come and look the other way. The trouble is, Gordon has something left in him, some part of himself somewhere, that wants to be able to look in the mirror and not hate what he see’s. He’s going to earn his redemption and be the one honest man, even if it kills him.

If some of this sounds familiar, you’ve been paying attention at the cinema. Much of the inspiration behind Chris Nolan’s Batman series lies in BYO. In fact, on of my few criticisms of the BATMAN BEGINS was that it missed one of Jim Gordon’s defining moments. I wont give away any spoilers but for those who’ve read it, think of the moment he decides to level the field by giving someone a baseball bat.

The art still stands up. Sometimes, you’ll flick through a comic that’s twenty (oh my god) years old, and the art will look dated and silly. Flicking through my hardback edition right now, the art is stunning. His Gotham is what would happen if you took the art of Edward Hopper and made it live rough for a few years, kicked it around a few times and gave it a drinking habit. It’s probably the best thing Mazzucchelli ever achieved, and maybe it’s not a coincidence that he vanished from superhero comics soon after completing it. Sometimes you’ve done everything you need to do, and you have to step back. In fact, almost every character design in here is still the default image in my head.
I’ve followed a number of great Batman artists over the past two –almost three-decades.
Breyfogle.
Nolan.
Bolland.
But when I think of Batman, or of Gordon, It’s as they were in the pages of this story.

But then, these were the stories meant for me, I suppose. There is a Batman out there for just about everyone, a take that will appeal to you whatever your tastes are. But for me, as with BORN AGAIN, this is the work that was meant for me. It’s urban; it’s grounded and realistic. The dialogue is tight, the humour is dry. The characters are flawed. There is cynicism and politics in just the right shades of subtle. And the backdrops look real and lived in.

In short, these two stories, the two bookends on Miller & Mazzucchelli’s finest work, are exactly what I mean when I use the term noir.

If you’re a crime fiction fan looking for a way into reading comics, you’re living in a golden age. There are so many writers and artists out there now who are working to get you product that you’ll like. Brubaker and Phillips to mention just two. But if you want to go back to a different age, to pull out the real gems that helped inspire the great modern writers, you need to pick up BATMAN: YEAR ONE and DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN.

I'll be returning next week to round up my comics spree with a look at GOTHAM CENTRAL, but for now a HOLD STEADY lyric that has been running through my head as i wrote these last two entries;

I was half dead. Then i got born again. I got lost in all the lights but it was ok in the end. And when we hit the twin cities, i didn't know that much about it. I knew mary tyler moore and i knew profane existence. I was keyed up. Keys jangled in the stalls. They counted money in the motels, they mostly sold it in the malls. And the carpet at the thunderbird has a burn for every cowboy that got fenced in.

DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN

I’m thinking DAREDEVIL tonight.

I’ve written before of my life long love of comic books. Growing up at a time before dyslexia was an option, I was struggling to read and write, but I loved stories. School was just no help at all. Comics fused things together for me, a brain that works visually, finding the perfect way in to understanding what was going on.
My love of crime fiction, too, seems to come from the basic and primal prose. Writers who don’t put too many words in a sentence. There’s the great Mats quote, “I hate music, it’s got too many notes”. That about sums up my love/hate relationship with writing.

Batman came first, of course. British reprints of old classic comics. Silver age Batman tales sized up to fit the standard British size. Once family members saw how quickly I took to them, and how quickly this set me racing into being the most ambitious reader in the class, I was given comics quicker than I could read them. I went from someone who couldn’t read or write to someone who was making his own illustrated books and giving them to people.

I was still only about five or six when Frank Miller tore monthly super hero books apart with DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN and BATMAN: YEAR ONE, but they were in my hands. Comics were for kids, so adults never gave any thought to what I was reading. Earth shattering, groundbreaking and dark. Boy, were they dark. The effect on me was so profound that I still have those comics, in the loft at my parents, and I have the collected editions of both stories on my shelf as I type this.
If Batman was first, Daredevil was the real mind trip.

The two heroes of often compared. People say Daredevil is Marvel’s Batman. It’s a bit lazy, really. He’s a moody vigilante who operates in a big city. He likes the dark. They’re both crime-fiction oriented. That’s….about it.
Don’t get me wrong; I love both of them, I’m obsessed with both of them. This write up, especially as I compare the two, will give the impression that I’m degrading Batman. Not so; but to really give Daredevil his due; I’ll have to show how he scores points over the Bat.

They come from different places, and they react with different parts of me. Batman is a classic and righteous hero. As dark as he gets, and as many character flaws as we can point out, he’s a basically incorruptible fiction. THE DARK KNIGT sold that idea brilliantly. The film pointed out that he’s self righteous to a flaw, that he’s angry and insular, that his methods are questionable. But it always comes with the important get out – the man himself is incorruptible.

Also, lets face it, he’s rich. Batman exists because Bruce Wayne’s parents were killed, yes. But Batman is possible because Bruce Wayne is loaded.
Matt Murdock doesn’t have such an advantage. He has every excuse to be a bad guy. A cheat. A bully. He succeeds in spite of who he is, and where he comes from. In the DC universe, Daredevil would be a Batman villain.

His Dad was a corrupt Boxer. His Mother, he was led to believe, died in childbirth. As an adult he learns that she ran away to join the church. He’s blinded in an accident and finds that his senses overcompensate to super-human levels.

He’s a Lawyer who fights crime by night. He’s a Catholic who takes the laws of god and man into his own hands. He’s selfish and selfless, he’s a liar and a cheat, and he’s trying every day of his life to be a hero. Every single selfless act he’s ever done, every single one, has cost him. As a child, he jumped in front of a truck to save an old man, and he lost his sight. That’s the pattern for his life locked in, right there. He is constantly getting knocked down, and constantly finding his way back to his feet for another go.

Recently, Brian Bendis put him through a new level of hell. His identity was outed in the press, ‘Matt Murdock is Daredevil’ screamed the headlines, in a story line that played out over several years. We got some wonderful in-depth character study dressed up as super-hero comic books.

A lawyer who is a vigilante is breaking the law, and will be arrested and disbarred. A catholic who is lying has their own personal demons to deal with. Matt refused to admit he was Daredevil. In front of the world’s media –and more importantly in front of friends who were in on the secret- he lied about his identity. He sued the newspaper for millions of dollars for libel. He continued to attend church. He continued to put on a costume and beat the crap out of criminals. He compromised everything that his profession held dear, and his religion held sacred, in the name of a higher good. All the while, he was the self-righteous guy who felt that it was his decision to make.

But anyway, back to me in the mid eighties. Learning to see the world through comics.

BORN AGAIN is possibly the best achievement of super hero comics. Okay, people will say WATCHMEN, and watchmen is a masterwork. But it also set out to be one. It had things to say about the genre, but had to create whole new characters to do it. There was a degree of separation because it was not taking direct aim at the characters that had inspired it. WATCHMEN has had a long lasting affect on the industry, but there was no long lasting implication for any of the characters, because they didn't exist outside of that one story.

BORN AGAIN, by contrast, was set in the main Marvel universe. It happened in one of its monthly books, with one of its long running characters.It's actions would have log lasting consquences. It's emotional toll would get to play out.

There were no epic conspiracies, no great destruction or grand scale. It was dark and gritty, which were two important cliché watchwords in 80’s comics. But it was more than the cliché. It was grounded and human.

The Kingpin, the man who ran most of New York’s crime empire, found out the true identity of Daredevil. He found out when one of Matt’s friends, an ex lover, sold the secret in order to buy a fix of heroin. Desperate times and desperate measures. When you reach the point that you need something so bad, when your own soul is worth so little, that you will betray the man you love for one more high.

Matt’s life is then taken away a strip at a time. His job. His bank accounts. His house. His friends. His sanity –always a fragile thing to begin with- begins slipping away from him. At his lowest ebb, when he should by any rights be dead, he finds himself collapsed in the arms of a nun, on the steps of a church. In the arms of a woman who seems strangely familiar to him, he begins to heal and find strength; he begins to piece things back together. One of the best elements to any heroic story is the comeback. Not only for Matt, but for Karen, the woman who betrayed him, as they somehow find each other again and begin to rebuild.

The ending takes the character into a new place, which is often so rare in episodic comic books. He doesn’t get his whole life back, the money, the house. So much of what was taken away stays taken. Because that’s real life. But Matt learns who he is, and how much he can take, and seems happier in the final panel than at any other time in his life.

You have to go a long way to find a story this good in any format. It just so happens it was put into my hands as a kids story when I was too young to know what was about to hit me.