Tag: detective fiction

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Books

Top Of The Heap: Blue Light Yokohoma

It’s always a good feeling to keep notes and forget about them for a while.

Only after reading Nicolas Obregon’s Blue Light Yokohama, which I thought I had discovered after weeks of lurking on crime fiction blogs, only to be amazed to find an earlier to-read list with the same title.
In that way, what I am seeking is something I already have?
“Tokyo is a million cities. You ever wonder if some of those cities are good and some are bad?”
I love cities, it is something we need to be proud of; somewhere that encourages and allows everyone to be together yet different.
Blue Light Yokohama is a moody Tokyo city novel central to which is a provincial-obsessive detective Iwata.

Kosuke Iwata is fighting against second hand treatment, treacherous team mates,corruption, insane cultists, the Yakuza and more importantly himself to stop the ‘black sun’ serial killer.

I know there are a lot of self-absorbed detectives in crime fiction; maybe this is a recency effect but I have not read anyone as angry as Kosuke Iwata and the pages bleed with his pain and to know that the second Iwata novel has already released puts an expectant smile on my face.
The praiseworthy prose demands multiple note taking. Sample : ” He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home”
Detectives are seekers and a detective novel has more scope to explore philosophy through ruminations that pop-up in the detective’s head and Obregon does this at points that elevate the novel much above a ‘follow-the-threads’ serial killer story, which begins with an unspeakable killing of an entire family.
Dreams & reality intercut in ways that made me feel Iwata’s fever.

Yes, this is that kind of a novel where slipping into the detective is the best option.

Along the way, Iwata is given advice, thrown out of service, double crossed and of course bashed to near death; as I said best way to get this heightened experience is to be Iwata for the length of the novel.

The fact that this is Nicolas Obregon’s first novel itself gives me sleepless nights. A twisted-cracker of a novel, the one that ended a short phase of my reading drought and possibly one of the best I’ve read this year.
Oh yes and people speak to Iwata like ‘ I think you are the type of person who will disappoint yourself before you let life disappoint you’
Very relateable.
Over to the next one.
Categories
Books cinema cinema:tamil genres Movie Notes reviews

Parking Lot Notes: Thupparivaalan

TP3

It begins with the light of a matchstick, an aide in a search or the dispeller of darkness.

That is what essentially a detective story is about; the search for answers and the journey into the unknown.

The detective, our guide or sometimes a co-traveller.

While the opening statement might seem grandiose, this was the first thing that struck (like that match) while watching Mysskin’s Thupparivalan. A detective also fits the mould of the director’s heroes who are seekers.

Fitment is also found in the casting of Vishal (also the producer) as the tall, loner with a bent towards the martial arts as Kaniyan, the detective of the film, but movie making is not just casting.

Thinking through the course of the movie (which the movie allows you to do once you catch it by the flow,which would not be tough if you had been living with a steady supply of detective novels) made me wonder why there was something missing in this homage to the creations of Conan Doyle.

Everything seems to be in place, which by itself is a cause of worry.

While Kaniyan’s room looks like it has been vacated by the BBC and not a living room that would suit the city in which this movie is set, the detective and his trusted sidekick seem to advertising for Indian Terrain in the meanwhile.

I dwell on these extraneous factors only because the characters are flat, whether this is a conscious decision is something best left to the maker.

A character being flat in a film, which more or less depends on the interest created by that lead character, is what I deduct to be the problem.  Especially when your lead is a character that is a shade of the great detective (Sherlock, as we speak is one of the most assumed characters on the screen).

Great ‘Holmes’ of the past have been played by dramatic actors, this would include Jeremy Brett who made the role his own, portrayals since have been either variations of what Brett did or to do what Brett did not do and hence stand out.

The eccentric nature of the Holmes-ian character cries out loud for an expressive actor who can control his/her expressions, which is why I insisted on the word ‘dramatic’; that was the big miss and thus bringing down the levels of excitement.

Sensation and excitement are two keys to the same room in a detective story; Thupparivalan on the other hand is locked in another room filled with Mysskian tick-tock henchmen, beautiful pick pockets and a climax that would reiterate that we already have the best locales for filming. It could be great cinema, but is it engaging?

The Sherlock Holmes homage pool is an ever-deepening one and whether Thupparivalan enriches this pool is something that needs to be seen, but for Tamil Cinema we now have a mainstream detective and I have Arrol Corelli’s teaser music on loop.

 

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Books cinema:english Essay Essential viewing Movie Notes Uncategorized

Out of The Past: Farewell, My Lovely (1975)

 

FML6 copyI have concluded that reading Raymond Chandler at an impressionable age has contributed the most to my further life choices, be it ‘literature’, movies, terse sentences and of course typing in the ‘courier new’ font.

Chandler started writing when the oil industry crashed and he had nothing much left to do, his creation reflects himself; being weary is his core competence.

If I could go back and play the irritating game invented for social engagement, ‘describe your creation in just one word’, Chandler would have said “tired”. If he was kind, he would add, “I’m tired. Enough!” As always breaking the rules.

So when there is a delay in our usual blog posts, it is probably because we are generally tired. Tired of ourselves, tired of the world, tired and yet careful not to add the growing empty mass that is film writing.  Readers must be thankful in that case.

We forgot to add one word to the above: growing boring empty mass that is film writing.

Boring.

 

 “You’re a very good-looking man to be in this kinda business”

Enter Robert Mitchum

Marlowe is supposed to be in his mid-thirties in the works, curiously but not unnatural the best portrayals of the private eye has come from very old ‘has-seen-it-all’ men.

Bogart was in his forties and Robert Mitchum almost touching sixty, it’s that kind of a role. It requires that kind of experience, it is the ‘hamlet’ of all detective roles, no I’m not joking. A sequel to the Big Sleep was called ‘Perchance to Dream’ which is from the famous of all famous soliloquies.

People and war have made our hero tired, and out of this tiredness comes sparkling wisdom.

Why does Marlowe still do it?

FML4

For the much quoted “25 dollars a day plus expenses?”

Nah, Marlowe doesn’t snoop around for money, but he doesn’t evoke moral mightiness too, he certainly doesn’t identify with a cause or putting criminal behind bars. Thankfully he is not insufferable with his ‘genius’ and actually very funny, like a real person.

I guess he just likes looking at people and what they do.

Looking brings us to Robert Mitchum, in many ways the spiritual remnant of Bogart’s distant masculinity, but looking at Mitchum’s eyes we know that this present sadness had once seen sparkle, that alone makes me feel that Mitchum is truer as Marlowe.

Marlowe watches because he knows that deep down all the depravity there is some tenderness, that’s all he looks for in a client, not money, not name, not fame. And he will do anything to look at that tiny true part of yourself.

Evil doesn’t startle him as much as innocence and goodness

People first, plot go to hell

 

For Chandler, the plot was secondary, the characters weren’t, he would never describe anyone unfairly nor would he puncture them for the sake of plot.

An open opponent of this whole locked room plotting business made him see people as people and not as clues or alibi to get going to the next page.

Marlowe is the same wise-ass to the police as he is to the crooks. An ending in a Chandler story is not its logical conclusion or hurrah for its hero, but the acceptance of reality.

The thread of Farewell My Lovely the film is very simple and it follows the book closely, just out of jail thug Moose Malloy wants to get his girl back. Will Marlowe do it or not?

And the hits keep on coming

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Marlowe is always narrating his tale, when we meet him he is just out of a case, naturally tired; Mitchum looks like he just wants to go home but cannot when confronted by his innocent of a thug client.

Within moments Marlowe becomes the centre-piece of a worm caught in a web, and all he does is just give a sideward glance.

Very easy to be dismissed as non-acting, especially in the age that we live in (as in the golden age of non-acting); but I think tiredness is difficult to bring out as an emotion without being dramatic.

Mitchum gets hit on the head, shot at, danced with, seduced by, but all through the film but he plays it like a detective who knows the ending every single time, people will be people.

I don’t really care about the twist in the end

There is a twist in the end, but the film (naturally the novel) is not moving towards it a big reveal way, for fans of detective fiction and crime thrillers this could prove dampening.

Many things happen and so does a twist.

Detection truly could be one of the most boring jobs if not for the humongous amounts of exciting literature written about it.

<pause for reflection>

Maybe all jobs are boring or it is the nature of them to become boring. But somehow Marlowe and hence Mitchum(because of his ability to understand the character) seem to have cracked it.

This detective is a seeker of the intangible, something remote and indescribable as human kindness, that is his spiritual quest, something not even the thighs of a femme fatale or the muzzle of a gun could distract him from.

Hamlet of the detective class, indeed.

That’s an admirable state to be in and this is an admirable movie.

FML2

 

Out of the past is our series on movies that are anything but current,new,fresh etc; we find the idea of film writing just for the sake of a movie release distressing and also it demeans the timelessness of film itself. Mad or what, we won’t be reviewing old films,just writing about them.

 

 

 

Categories
Books fiction

WHERE HAVE ALL THE DETECTIVES GONE?

INVOCATION

If I do not write this now, then someone will write it in the future and they will write it badly

PART ONE

The sun appeared untiring, relentless and omnipresent, the topic of discussion for today and every day and days to come. The heat dried up everything making the men and women forget the feeling of wetness. As lips dried and tongues could no longer help, the people turned to the minds of the poets, but alas; they could find no help there too. The word bank of the poets were empty, their brains too had become dry like cloth sold for cleaning computer screens, their imagination centred on the looming presence of Surya, the sun god.

An enterprising and unimaginative writer had just brought out a series called The Battle against the Sun. Since it was predictable, the comic made a modest profit and found some ardent collectors too.

One of them was Kuresan, he was currently trying to get any word on the monsoon; in his hands were the last two copies of ‘The battle against the Sun”. The penultimate issue was called the Final Recruitment: Battle Cry. These very words were written in ghostly yellow lettering making the reader wonder if ever a war against the sun could be won in reality.

As Kuresan passed a high window, little did he know that final touches on a novel called “Come December, my love, my rain” was being made, the novel would be quite useful in plot development in the future, but we leave it right now.

“Hail Kuresa!” called out one college student from a corner shop where a bunch of them had remained to waste away the remainder of their wasted lives, usually Kuresa used to take offense to these trouble mongers, but being senior to them gave him the look of maturity, if not maturity itself. He passed on without smile or frown.

The corner shop did not have any corners, as in, it was curved and its name by now you would have guessed would have come from the fact that it was in the corner and was run by an non local-ite, apart from stacking locally sourced high on oil highway snacks, the corner shop also sold ‘asli-tea’.

The corner shop also had a thick ledger which was neatly divided into two “College Guys Accounts” and “Jobseekers Accounts”, needless to say and still we would like to say that your name will ultimately gravitate from College Guy Account to Jobseekers Account section without much trouble (unless of your own academic doing or should we say undoing).

Kuresan used to have a Jobseekers Account with dues running up to the higher hundreds, but he then realised that no one will be giving him a job and he will have to make one for himself.

“Novelist” he came and said to owner.

The owner in spite of being a small time trader was also a learned man and he realised that as a novelist Kuresan would never be able to settle his dues in the coming hundred years or so. So he decided to be pragmatic and forced Kuresan to close his account.

This might partly be the reason as to why Kuresan did not stop at the corner shop.

No one can really say what the true reason is, but we cannot rule out some possibilities as well.

As Kuresan reached the Kanchipuram Gazette office, the three storeyed building built in 1832 by Sir Roland Dash, no one knew what the last name of Sir Roland was, but the reason for this however was singular. The commemorative plaque detailing the name and effort of the builders had been chipped exactly at the point where Sir Roland’s family name was etched in stone. This reason for this chipping activity is unknown, mostly miscreants with difficult ideologies.

Since the time of the British the building was called Sir Roland Dash buildings as they knew there had to be a surname and substituted it with Dash. Over the years it was called the Dash and with the help of the tongue of local rickshaw pullers, it is now called just Das.

Uninformed and lazy historians attribute the building to a Bengali steel magnate Das who had interests in Kanchipuram and had since built these office buildings, nothing could be further from the truth. One such historian turned diarist turned newspaper editor sat at the other side of the shining long Burma teak table and he was the guy Kuresan was going to meet.

Like all 52 year olds, A.A.V.Alagesan was irritated and had problems at home, and like every other man holding prominent office; reflected his problems at the workplace. This did not go too well with the workplace as people feared to talk to their employer and innovative ideas, well remained as ideas.

Kuresan, unlike most others you will meet in this story was brave; it is also quite possible that he does not know this. He walked in with an air of privilege and belonging, smiling to all those who passed him, nobody however returned the greeting.

That might be because Kuresan’s uncle was A.A.V.Alagesan and the rightful heir to the constantly reducing in subscription but still functioning local newspaper with a global outlook “the Kanchipuram Gazette”

Before Kuresan drops and breaks his dark rimmed brown tinted Wayfarer modelled imitation power glass later in the story, we need to tell you that he does in fact wear glasses.

Kuresan adjusted the above mentioned glasses and focussed on his uncle whose face was extra worried today, but the magnitude of the worry could be guessed, he looked  like a sparrow that had forgotten to apply anti-ageing cream, to be specific his uncle looked like an out of work Tamil movie villain who had now outgrown heroine father roles.

While looking at all this, Kuresan also looked at a slender figure standing at one dark corner of the ‘three out of four” corner well lit room.

“Ah! Kuresan, it is I who sent for you” said the editor in his dying voice; it was not as if his voice had been that of an army commander or that his voice had given him considerable leverage over other contemporary editors, his voice was always in this near death tone which made people assume that his voice could have been forceful in the past. Nothing could be more wrong.

“We received a letter this morning….and the contents of which are quite, I should use the word shocking!” A.A.V continued, the very mention of the word shocking got Kuresan interested; he had already come to the edge of the seat.

“Seems like a threatening note it could well turn out to be a prank”

“Something like Jack the ripper!” exclaimed Kuresan and giving out reference points to the reader, so that a mental picture could be formed.

“No no, not in this town…here you read it aloud” A.A.V said as he pushed the piece of paper towards Kuresan, and so it began.

“Long have I waited,

Not for work

But for a worthy adversary

In the coming weeks, my hidden acts

Will come to light, while I am in darkness

Where are you, O detectives?”

–         Someone You Need to Find

 

“This doesn’t look so threatening does it?” asked Kuresan, “it’s just a prank, no need to publish this uncle”

“But what if it really is a threat and these hidden acts could be horrible, truly horrible things that we wish would never happen to any man or woman on earth?” This was the voice of the slender figure which had come out and could be seen by all.

“Ah, Kuresa, I forgot to introduce you; this is our new head of the local crime branch Ms. Jayanthi Jayapal IPS, we thought she might want to have a look as well.

As they shook hands, the ever ticking mind of Kuresan realised “But surely you are not THAT Jayanthi Jayapal who wrote ‘Locked Out in Lakshadweep’?”

“Yes, but that was a long time ago, I am a crime novelist turned police detective” she said as she blushed.

Needless to say Kuresa couldn’t control his excitement, he went on to add how the novel had become something of a cult collector’s item in crime fiction and how it could be compared to all the classics of the genre.

“Thanks…but editor sir, you haven’t introduced this gentleman” Officer Jayanthi pointed out.

“This is my nephew…” A.A.V began but couldn’t complete

“I am C.F.Kuresan, detective turned novelist, at your service”

Only A.A.V and Kuresan in the room knew that Kuresan was neither a detective turned novelist and nor was his initials C.F.

A.A.V just sighed and called out for tea.

As they waited for tea, Kuresan made a mental note of two things,

“Unlike most crime novelists turned police officers Jayanthi was actually pretty”

Secondly, “I now have a case, finally”

 

END OF PART ONE.