Hard Boiled Detectives

The first detective stories I remember reading are Encyclopedia Brown and a series about boy detectives call The Three Investigators.  Anyone who has read Encyclopedia Brown remembers that it all centered around a nerdy boy who annoyed everyone and found objects misplaced by adults.  The stakes were low and the only really interesting thing about them is the opportunity the reader is afforded to solve the problem based on clues in the stories.  I was never able to do this.
The other series, The Three Investigators, was for a slightly older reader and I devoured it.  I don't remember many of the mysteries the three solved or any other plot points, but I do remember the interaction of the boy detectives and the dangers they would sometimes face.  The stakes were higher in these stories as the mysteries often involved the adults in their lives and in the town they lived.  The boys were never injured, but they faced the possibility of it.  I continued reading mysteries and detective fiction, but these were my first forays into the genre.  I ran through a patch of Sherlock Holmes in my twenties, finding the literary character to be far more interesting than the watered down representations I had seen elsewhere.
My interest in detective fiction peaked when I enrolled in a special topics course called "Crime and Punishment" that focused on crime and detective fiction (not on the Dostoyevsky novel).
This class opened a new world to me in detective fiction.  We started with songs and old accounts from the Newgate Calendar, something like the first true-crime accounts.  This is worth looking into if you are unfamiliar with it.  The thing that stuck with me the most was our section on "hard-boiled" detectives.
These novels were rougher around the edges and were much darker.  The detectives did not always win the day by using their brains, but had to use cunning, deception, and muscle to get their way.  The hard-boiled detective was an even more ambiguous character than Holmes.  These detectives were often private eyes, which freed them from the constraints that law enforcement officials would be bound to.  This meant that they were also often outlaws, or at least operated in a "para-" legal, if not "extra-" legal sense.
These novels paralleled literary naturalism in the sense that they tried to depict a gritty, realistic world.  The detectives were hard because they were forced to be by human nature.

This is all a long introduction to provide context for a recent book I read.  Brett Halliday is one of the mystery authors I most like.  His work, along with John D. MacDonald, Mickey Spillane, Ed McBain, Dashiell Hammett, and others tend to feature a single detective.  The pulpy narratives can be fairly formulaic and the writing is sometimes terrible.  In this novel, Murder is My Business, Halliday's detective Mike Shayne picks up a case from a mother concerned that her son has fallen in with a bad element and may have been killed.  The story features a mayoral race in El Paso, TX, war profiteering, Nazi sympathizers, troubled border crossings, negative stereotypes of Mexicans and immigrants in general, and an overly-circuitous plot to smuggle silver across the border into America.

Back cover artwork for Murder is My Business

The story itself is most interesting for Shayne's actions and attitude.  He attempts to remain aloof from the legal battles that surround him, though he has a personal relationship with many of the involved parties and has a favored outcome.  He enters into the case without a clear motivation besides making money, and even that is uncertain because he is not sure who will ultimately pay him.  Eventually, Shayne will extort money form one of the central figures and mayoral candidate, only to double-cross him immediately and turn him over to the police anyway.
Shayne, like many of the hard-boiled detectives, plays criminals against the police for his own benefit.  Also like many hard-boiled detectives, he has a code of ethics that doesn't necessarily align with the law or with those around him, but is rock solid.  This can be a troubling aspect of these novels because this code can sometimes lead a detective to help someone against their own interests, but it can just as easily lead them to hurting or killing someone, or using illegal means to help the police to arrest someone.  These novels have both a distrust of police for their potential ineptitude and corruption, but also because they are unwilling or unable to go "far enough."  In more than one of these novels, the featured detective will violently coerce confessions from the bad guy to "help" the police make the case against them.  The novels tend not to present any moral ambiguity about this because there is rarely doubt that the detective is wrong.  However, in a real world where hunches are generally wrong and where personal prejudices often masquerade as deduction, this scenario looks more grim and definitely more suspect.
Before this gets too long, I will leave off with some more optimistic notes.  While in that special topics course, we read another author who has become another favorite of mine: Sara Paretsky.  Paretsky adopts many hard-boiled detective tropes but bends their politics a bit by introducing a woman detective.  VI Warshawski is as smart and tough as the other detectives and gets into the same sort of trouble that they do.  Her moral compass tends to read a bit more true and she also tends to be more sympathetic as a character.
I have recently purchased Paretsky's newest novel Shell Game, that I am sure will make an appearance in this blog at some point.

Bad Religion & Lawrence Arms

 Last weekend I went to see Bad Religion play with the Lawrence Arms at the Agora in Cleveland.  This is the first punk show that I have been to in a couple of years, having attended more metal shows recently.
This is also the first time I have seen Bad Religion play in maybe 15 years.  As I may have written about elsewhere (I write a lot of these in advance and bank them for some reason) I have a long history with this band.  To recap quickly: this was one of the very first punk bands that I ever heard and it was definitely the first that hit me really hard.  I won't get too far into that now, but it hit the right combination of speed, aggression, and thoughtful/witty lyrics for me at the right time.  I have seen this band more times than I can remember.
I think the first time I saw them was in 1995 or '96 at the same venue in Cleveland.  I would have gone with my brother and his friends.  This was also one of my first concerts ever.  Back then they used to play at the Agora pretty much every year around Thanksgiving.  I have also seen them play in Columbus at least twice and then at a couple of Warped Tours in the late '90s and early '00s.

The Lawrence Arms opened the show with a pretty good set.  I first discovered this band back in 2006 listening to their album Oh! Calcutta!.  I had this CD in pretty heavy rotation in my car for a lot

of 2006 and 2007.  I dropped off listening to them a bit after that but have always like returning to them.  Surprisingly, I knew a good number of the songs that they played for having only listened much to one album more than 10 years ago.

The 3-piece uses a lot out of call-and-response singing, making the band sound a lot fuller than most bands this size.  The drummer, Neil Hennessy also plays with an aggressive style, similar to Coady Willis of the Murder City Devils and a bunch of other bands.  A few highlights of the set: Chris McCaughan, the guitarist sang but never spoke and never looked at the bass player; Brendan Kelly, the aforementioned bassist drunkenly told the audience that they were going to play a song that only true fans would know because it was so new before launching into "The Devil's Takin' Names," a song from their 2006 album.

Bad Religion put on a great show.  Their sound was good and they played a good mix of early, mid-, and late career material.  Their style has changed some over the years, so it was good to see this mix. They put on a good show full of energy and Greg Graffin using the same corny dance moves and song intros that I remember him using 20 years ago.  I didn't recognize all of their songs, but I didn't really care because they fit into the show well and were still fun to hear.
One thing that I have realized about their music is that even though I started listening to their earlier works (I played Suffer (1988) and Against the Grain (1990) constantly when I was in high school), I have grown to enjoy their work from the early/mid-2000s a bit more.
There were a few albums I never bothered to pick up when founding guitarist Brett Gurewitz left the band for a time in the late 1990s.  But when Process of Belief came out in 2002, I was back on board. Gurewitz had rejoined the band by that time and he bad brought some new sensibilities with him.  The lyrics and much of the delivery was still the same but there was a bit more complexity to the composition of the songs.  This combination held true for their next two studio albums, The Empire Strikes First (2004), and New Maps of Hell (2007).  After that I lost track again so I don't have much to say about that.  Funny things is that I still think of these three albums as BR's "new" work even though some of it is approaching 20 years old.

When the spotlight hit Gurewitz as he ripped into the opening riff of the night, my first thought was how old he looked.  It was uncharitable but it was a first impression.  After listening to him play all night, though, I have to say that he does not seem old.  The music, some of it, still seemed current to me.  I guess I have gotten old, too.  They are just a few years ahead of me.
Highlights of the set: the blistering renditions of songs that I have known for years (including: "Anesthesia," "Supersonic," "Overture/Sinister Rouge," and "I Want to Conquer the World"); scouting out all of the 40-somethings kitted out in their punk rock gear (yeah, I was one of these), some towing along their own kids; watching a very dogged security guard try to keep people out of the area behind the sound booth with a flashlight.

 2 dudes enjoying the show

Foundation, Part 1: An Introduction

I first read Isaac Asimov's classic novel Foundation while in graduate school working on my doctoral dissertation.  I was interested in the way that Asimov uses the encyclopedia as a focal point at the beginning of the novel.  As I have noted elsewhere, this is a point that drops out of the series fairly quickly.  At the time, I read the first couple of novels  before posting interest.  Later on, I read Foundation with my sci-fi group.  I don't remember the conversation about this one but I probably brought up encyclopedism and the Enlightenment a bunch.
Just recently, I decided to take a run at the whole series.  I have accumulated all of the books over the last few months and this is my attempt to read all of them and to write about them here.  I don't expect to enjoy all of the books, but I do hope to find the good in them.  Asimov is a writer who I think is great with ideas and plotting but terrible with character.
I don't have any particular aim in reading these books this time, so we'll see how this goes.
Be on the lookout for subsequent installments in this series.

Some thoughts after learning of Toni Morrison's death

After learning of Toni Morrison's death last week, I have had some time to think about the impact that her writing has had on me personally.  I have not kept up with all of Morrison's latest works but she has been a mainstay throughout my reading and academic life.  Her death was something of a shock because I have taken her presence so much for granted.  She was ever-present in the academic work that I did and I have returned to her work frequently through the years.
Although I have been aware of her work by reputation for much of my adult life, the first of her books that I actually read was Tar Baby in an American Lit class I took in college.  Soon after this I read Beloved and The Bluest Eye in quick succession.  What struck me most about these is how unapologetic Morrison is in her writing.  She writes very frankly about devastating sexual violence and human cruelty, both showing the ways that these impact lives and also the ways that they may be overcome.  These instances of violence were never gratuitous and do not romanticize the worst aspects of humanity.  She presents them as facts in the lives of her characters that must be dealt with in one way or another.  Her characters often carry the weight of their past actions with them, to be haunted psychically or literally by what they have done.
I taught her novel Beloved in a special topics class on American Gothic fiction that I designed years ago.  My students struggled with many of the novels in that class, but particularly with this one, because they were forced to rethink how they talked about books.  They enjoyed the work but were often appalled by the events in them.  They had to rethink how to praise a work when they had been so accustomed to telling me that they "liked" a certain part.  It is hard to "like" some of the reveals in Beloved.  It was instructive for me to watch how they were confronted with their own pre-conceptions about what literary criticism should be in a classroom.  My students were engaged and interested in discovering a new language to express the satisfaction of reading a difficult novel and their admiration for Morrison's narrative.
I think this is something that Morrison wanted.  She made us rethink whose stories could and should be told.  She definitely made us rethink how the stories could be told and what it means to tell our own stories.

Academic Fragments, Part 3

What follows is a review and/or the beginning of something that I wrote about Michael Chabon's Fountain City.  I am not charitable to the book and I do not remember it fondly.  I have always tended to like Chabon's novels but haven't found them to stand up particularly well to re-reading.  I loved The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay the first time I read it, but was less enchanted by it the second time around.  I still liked the book well enough, but it just didn't have the same spark that it did the first time around.  I have not edited this at all:

Fountain City, by Michael Chabon

When I was in graduate school, I happened upon this anomaly by Michael Chabon.  It was part of a boxed set from McSweeney’s that was painted to look like a human head.  I still have the box around somewhere, but I don’t remember the remainder of the contents.  I was in the middle of writing my dissertation on the contemporary encyclopedic novel and had set Fountain City  aside because I thought that there was something in it that I could write about after I had completed my degree.  At the time I was very interested in narratology and I thought that there was something interesting about the form of this little book.

I keep avoiding calling Fountain City a novel because that is not an accurate description, by the author’s own words, even.  For him, it was an abandoned project that he picked up years later.  Although, Chabon did not pick the project up to finish it, but to “wreck” it - the word here being used in the sense of salvaging rather than of destroying.  Chabon supplies this definition (along with the more colloquial one) in a note to his text.  

At the time that I read this, I was very interested in the way that a flesh-and-blood author interacts with his or her own work of fiction.  Within narrative theory, there is an idea that there is a sort of divide between the fictional and the real that extends to the author.  An avatar of the author becomes evident in the text, but this is a re-creation of the author by the reader and is, therefore, a part of the fiction.  This idea seems both romantic and downright homey to me.  On one hand, the author gets to participate in the fiction.  There is a shading off from the reality of the world into the presented reality of the novel.  The reader can attempt to interpret where that difference lies but will never be able to know.  On the other hand, it is a book presented as being fiction.  Of course what is in it is fiction.  Just because an author pops up and says “Hi, it’s me!” doesn’t mean we need to believe it.  This is like believing a liar who tells you to just trust him.

Getting back to the form of the novel, Chabon does what I think a lot of writers want to do.  He takes his incomplete project and “completes” it by adding commentary to what is already there instead of finishing the narrative.  At least this is what the author claims in a preface.  But, as noted above, how do we know where the fiction begins and ends?  Should I trust Chabon that he actually wrote this in the past, or do I think that he just recently wrote this and doesn’t know how to end it or what to do with it?  Then I wonder whether this sense of doubt or incompletion is actually real and think that this whole thing was composed as it is supposed to be: a work of seemingly incomplete prose with commentary by a supposed author.  This wouldn’t be the first time a writer has played this trick, check out Pale Fire or a lot of Philip Roth’s work from the 1980s and 90s if you don’t believe me.

This is a very long preface to my very short take on this book.  I set this book aside for what is now 5 years in the hopes of making some hay out of it regarding the implied author, the edge of fiction, and all that stuff I mentioned a bit ago.  But, when I picked this up last week, I couldn’t get into it.  I read back through the preface and reminded myself about what interested me about it those years ago, but couldn’t pick that thread back up.

I don’t know if the idea, even if it were the authentic story that Chabon had attempted to salvage this abandoned work, was too precious or if I just lost my flair for that brand of literary theory.  Whatever the reason, I quit reading pretty quickly and didn’t even make it through the first explanatory note, which happened to be whether or not the author had dreamt up a line from Hawthorne or it was real: fiction or reality.  See?