False Detectives, True Discourses, and Excessive Exegeses

I got caught up in the hype, got curious, and found a way to watch True Detective. It's my kind of thing: a dark crime story/police procedural/serial killer whatzit. Also, apparently the writer of the show, Nic Pizzolatto, is aware of some writers I like, and even one I know, Laird Barron. (Hi Laird! You rock!) What struck me right from the beginning was the marvelous music, selected and produced by the great T-Bone Burnett, and the cinematography by Adam Arkapaw, who shot one of my favorite movies of recent decades, Snowtown, and also the very good film Animal Kingdom and the marvelous Jane Campion TV show Top of the Lake. Something about Arkapaw's sensitivity to color, light, and framing is pure mainlined heroin to my aesthetic pleasure centers. If I found out he'd shot a Ron Howard movie, I'd even watch that.

So many other people have discussed the show that there are now, I'm sure, nearly as many words written about it as there are words in Wikipedia. My own opinion of the show is of no consequence, though for the curious, here's what I said about it on Jeff VanderMeer's Facebook page, where some discussion was going on: "I liked the music, cinematography, most of the acting and directing, but thought the writing was all over the place from pretty good to godawful. And episodes 7 and 8 were like the Goodyear blimp deflating mid-air and landing in a bayou of drivel. (The stars, the stars! Use the Force, Rust! The Yellow King is YOUR FATHER!!! Oh, wait...)"

Much more interesting to me is the discourse around the show. Why did this show inspire such a fanatical response? Why did we feel compelled to respond? Zeitgeist, genre, etc. probably all play into it, but a fuller answer would require some time and research, particularly about how the show was marketed and where and how it first caught on. 

I'm enough of a pointy-headed academic to hope one day for a whole book about the construction of True Detective's appeal, something that doesn't neglect the material aspects: budgets, advertising, Twitter. I'd also like to see analyses of fan responses to mystery/crime shows — for instance, a comparison of fan speculations between seasons 2 and 3 of Sherlock and fan speculations about the mysteries of True Detective before the finale. The choice in season 3 of Sherlock to offer a relatively acceptable but not definitive answer to the mystery of how Sherlock lived was, I thought, quite smart, because even though the creators probably had (unlike Conan Doyle) an idea of an answer when they wrote Sherlock's "death", they realized by the time it came to write season 3 that no answer they could provide would be satisfying after two years of fan speculations.  

True Detective took a different approach, partly because they didn't realize viewers would react the way they did, or that the show would be subject to so much ratiocination, and so they gave a rather ridiculous and clichéd end to the mystery, one that made not a whole lot of sense and tied up only the most obvious of loose ends. Pizzolatto's interest was more in the characters than the plot, or perhaps not even the characters so much as the mood and the projection of an idea of complexity rather than any actual complexity. 

The Affect Effect: Notes on Sherlock and Hannibal

Last night, viewers in the US got to see what viewers in other parts of the world have already seen: the first episode of the third season of the phenomenally successful BBC show Sherlock. I've already seen it — twice, in fact — because I enjoyed previous seasons of the show enough to work around the BBC website's geographical limitations and watch the episode when it first aired, and then I saw it again at a local cinema's preview showing, where my friend Ann McClellan gave a presentation on Conan Doyle and Sherlock. I've also seen the other two episodes of the season, watching episode 2 twice and episode 3 once.

Recently, I watched the 13-episode first season of NBC's Hannibal, based on Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter character, and I've been thinking about certain overlaps and significant contrasts between the two shows in their approach to their material. The comparison first occurred to me after I re-watched the first episode of Sherlock in preparation for the new season and heard, again, Sherlock refer to himself as a "high-functioning sociopath" — immediately, I thought, "No you're not. But Mads Mikkelsen in Hannibal is..."* That then got me thinking about connections between the two shows.

A Few Words for Wallander

Some time in the winter, I fired up the Netflix machine and watched the first few episodes of Wallander with Kenneth Branagh. It was occasionally interesting, but I found Branagh's lugubrious, blubbery, hangdog acting insufferable. It's rare that I like Branagh in anything, so I decided to try out the other Wallander that was available for streaming: the 2009/10 Swedish series starring Krister Henriksson.

This week, I finally let myself watch the last two episodes available. I haven't loved a TV show this much in ages, and the final episode of series two is heartwrenching, though the last scenes are sweet and touching. I was moved halfway through the episode to send a frantic text to a friend (who, though she hasn't watched the show, has been amused by my growing obsession): "They killed Wallander's dog! The heartless Swedes!" I was, it turned out, jumping to conclusions and slandering an entire nation. But I have never been moved to send a text to anybody while in the midst of watching a TV show before.

Black Star Nairobi by Mukoma wa Ngugi

Last year, I wrote about Mukoma wa Ngugi's Nairobi Heat, seeing it as an interesting, if flawed, first novel. Now Melville House has released Mukoma's second novel, a sequel to the first: Black Star Nairobi, a political thriller that begins as a detective story and ends up taking us from Kenya to Mexico to the U.S. and then back to Kenya at the time of the election crisis of 2007/08.

The writing in Black Star Nairobi is more assured than in Nairobi Heat, and the plot and structure are more ambitious. The ambition is also the novel's curse, because the text is not up to the task of portraying and dramatizing the richness of its worlds and ideas — it's a book that needs to be twice its length or half its plot.

Nairobi Heat by Mukoma wa Ngugi

I read Mukoma wa Ngugi's Nairobi Heat (part of Melville House's International Crime series) a few weeks ago, but haven't had the time to write much about it, so what I say here is likely to be more general than it would have been before. Though I think the novel has some significant flaws, those flaws are mitigated, for me at least, by a number of real strengths, and in the weeks since finishing it, moments from the novel have scratched through my thoughts and memory. For that reason, I think it's a book well worth reading.

First, to get unpleasantness out of the way, here's what I see as the novel's flaws: Events often feel like they exist for the sake of the plot's convenience and not for any reason organic to the narrative; some moments that should evoke an emotional connection from readers are not set up in a dramatic way that would allow such emotion to come to the surface and are instead sped through (a particular fault in the romantic relationship that propels some of the major events of the second half of the book); some of the characters are little more than hardboiled detective novel clichés in their general outline, if not their particulars.

However, I would not write about a small press publication of a writer's first novel if I didn't think its virtues were greater than its flaws, and it is the virtues I think worth spending time with here.

Borges y Boucher, Yo

In my latest Sandman Meditations column, I tackled the prologue of Season of Mists, and ended up spending a lot of time talking about Jorge Luis Borges and his first appearance in English: "The Garden of Forking Paths" in the August 1948 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine:

The EQMM “Garden of Forking Paths” appeared in a translation by Anthony Boucher, which means that Boucher was not only a well-respected writer of mysteries and science fiction, not only an important and influential reviewer of mystery fiction, not only the man whose name is honored by the annual World Mystery Convention (Bouchercon) and its awards (the Anthonies), not only the man who co-founded The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, not only an important mentor to many writers, including Philip K. Dick — he was also the man who first brought Borges’s work to the United States. Later translations would become the standard ones (as far as I know, Boucher’s has rarely been reprinted), but Boucher was first.

For those who are curious, below the cut I've posted scans of the first three pages, which includes the introduction by, I assume, editor Frederic Dannay (one half of Ellery Queen), although it could be by another member of the magazine's staff. Interestingly, according to Jeffrey Alan Marks's Anthony Boucher: A Biobibliography, Dannay rejected Boucher's translation of "Death and the Compass", which was later published by New Mexico Quarterly.

Money Shot by Christa Faust

I confess: I like the idea of noir novels more than I tend to like noir novels themselves. (Noir movies I often enjoy watching, but there are few I've found very memorable, for whatever reason.) In fact, I don't much like mystery novels of any sort, though I've read a lot of them in a desperate attempt to like them more. I've tried at least one novel by all the classic mystery writers I know of, and the only such writer I've managed to read more than one book by with any pleasure is Patricia Highsmith. I've tried contemporary mysteries by a bunch of different writers, but hardly any of them have remained in my memory. I don't know all the reasons for my inability to really embrace mystery and crime novels -- strange, I think, given my interest in the psychology and sociology of violence -- but I think most of it comes from my general indifference to plot. I like books that have some sort of narrative, certainly, but I don't generally care for books where plot is the primary element.

And yet I loved Christa Faust's recent novel Money Shot.

I'd been intrigued by the Hard Case Crime series for a while. Their retro covers appealed to the part of me that revels in the pulp era, and everything I'd read about the series indicated that it was thoughtfully edited. I decided to start with Money Shot because I was curious to see how the first female writer in the Hard Case series would handle a story about the porn industry.

Because I am not a good reader for the mystery/crime genre, I can't tell you whether this is a good mystery/crime novel. What I can say is that it overcame my prejudice against plot-heavy books by being somewhat more about its main character than its plot. The basic plot, in fact, seemed fairly standard and predictable to me, but this seemed more like a virtue than a flaw, because if the plot had been too clever or complex, the novel's strengths might have been less prominent. Its strengths are the development of the main character, Angel Dare (a retired porn actress), and the presentation of what everyday life in the world of porn is like. I have no idea how accurate Faust's presentation of porn life is, but that doesn't matter -- what matters is that it was portrayed with so many well-chosen details that it was convincing and vivid. All the accuracy in the world is useless if a writer doesn't know how to select and present details to create verisimilitude. Most good fiction writing, regardless of genre, requires some worldbuilding skills, because even if the story is set in a real place, fiction is just a representation of a conception of that real place, and the best "realistic" fiction has as much care for rendering an imagined place in the reader's mind as does the best science fiction set on alien worlds.

The basic story of Money Shot is almost Existentialist -- Angel Dare's life is quickly destroyed for reasons she doesn't understand. The story is not Existentialist, though, but rather conservative in that the forces destroying Angel's life turn out to be identifiable; there are reasons her life is destroyed and there are people who committed various actions that come together in a web of cause and effect to cause the destruction. Everyone has a motive and once all the complications get explained we can understand why the various characters behave in the ways they do. Generally, I hate such stuff, because it seems reductive, dull, and untrue to my own experience of life. But I found Angel Dare's character and situation interesting enough that I mostly ignored the justifications for the actions, and so the narrative became, in my mind, a more complex and ambiguous one than its surface presented.

It helps that Christa Faust has a good sense of prose rhythm and pacing. She doesn't write "transparent prose" (the thin gruel offered by the anti-art workhouse), but she also doesn't indulge in the strained metaphors and clunky sentences that so many writers seem to think necessary for a novel to truly be noir. Angel's personality comes through the narrative voice Faust creates for her, and though it occasionally offers too many clichés for my taste, on the whole this voice is precise and engaging:

I normally hated that Men-Are-From-Mars, testosterone-driven impulse boys get where they want to solve all my problems by troubleshooting me like buggy software and offering up a simple concrete solution to stop my tears. But if Malloy had done something more intuitive and nurturing like hugging me or telling me everything was going to be all right, I would have disintegrated into a useless puddle. His simple answer to the problem of the big shoes gave me something to hold on to. Payless. Right. Good idea. It allowed me to pretend that the lack of shoes that fit really was the reason I was crying.

This is not a paragraph that will blow anyone away as Great Writing, but it is clear and efficient, and with that clear efficiency it conveys a few things in a short space -- it presents the complexity of Angel's feelings about men and masculinity, it conveys her emotional state at a vulnerable moment, and it shows us a little something about Malloy, one of the other important characters in the book. It's specific and it has the feel of originality, of something necessary to this character at this place in this time, without drawing us out of the story and situation by calling lots of attention to itself (which is a perfectly good technique in the right sort of book).

The ending of Money Shot is somewhat tame in comparison to the fatalism leading up to it, but I found it -- again, against all odds -- satisfying and even somewhat moving. The second half of the book is brutal, but it is a logical brutality, not a random one, and the conclusion brings the brutality to a close without offering any easy answers or simple morality, because what remains behind it all is the destruction unleashed on Angel's life, and no matter what happened to her in all the possibility ways Faust could have ended the book, that destruction would never be able to be assimilated into a simple conclusion. Revenge may be had, the law can do its thing, and loose ends can be tied up ... but the dead are still dead, and lost illusions and shattered dreams don't recover well. The great revelation at the end of the book is that we realize to what extent the whole tale has been a meditation on the implications of the first sentence:

Coming back from the dead isn't as easy as they make it seem in the movies.