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Post by pulphack on Oct 19, 2008 9:49:52 GMT
hopefully this film will live up to the book, and also the Omnibus doc of many years back. Meek combined sci-fi sound concepts with gothic tastes and the cheesiest of pop to create something that may not be to everyone's taste, but is totally unique. the book is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of pop and rock in the UK, and despite his paranoia, i think Meek may have been right, at least in part, in feeling squeezed out by the corporate boys.
and what about that amazing recording he made in a graveyard of the cat that 'spoke' to him?! delusion, drugs, or a genuine psychic experience? possibly a bit of all three...
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Post by pulphack on Oct 19, 2008 9:44:56 GMT
well, sunday morning and i won't be able to make it due to a slight recurring back problem which is keeping me in today. sorry to miss you, mr samuels - was looking forward to catching up with you - and a shame i'll miss anyone else who made it. i hope you all find some excellent stuff.
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Post by pulphack on Oct 9, 2008 12:10:53 GMT
yep, a gorgeous cover, and anything with virgil finlay is alright by me. i was watching a documentary about frank frazetta with my mate paul last week, and we started talking about finlay, and how that gorgeous style of b&w illustration is sometimes overlooked these days. the colour artists deserve their praise, but the exquisite world of b&w shouldn't be forgotten.
as to the book, i had it years ago, and to be honest was disappointed. it was weird tales, so why was it ALL sword and sorcery and fantasy? i guess he selected tales that would chime with the times of the reprint, but it wasn't what i'd been hoping for. it's a decent selection, but just not... well, WEIRD enough, really.
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Saki
Oct 9, 2008 12:06:32 GMT
Post by pulphack on Oct 9, 2008 12:06:32 GMT
i would direct the learned gentleman to a post in the A. J. Alan section that refers to saki, and will save me re-typing the relevant sections...
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Post by pulphack on Oct 9, 2008 12:03:57 GMT
ah, a mystery solved. thanks, steve - er, i mean x...
i know exactly what you mean about the sniffy tone that sometimes gets on the tit, and then not... saki is a perfect example. i'm very fond of his stuff, but sometimes the tone - a more uptight oscar wilde, sort of - makes me bristle even though the story-telling is wonderful. i like all of his stuff that i've read; had that wordsworth complete collection at one time, though can't find it now (think it went west on a big clear out two moves ago). the reginald stories and even the alice in westminster sketches still had bite, despite the datedness of the subject. but i do think his 'novel' when willam came (included in moorcock's 'england invaded' anthology of pre-WW1 paranioa tales) is his best work. it's really more a novella in length, and not the kind of thing he's really remembered for, but it reads like a dream. (thinking about that, it may be the stilted tripe that sits alongside it that has that effect! much as i like the book, some it is the edwardian equivalent of plan 9, to half-steal a dem phrase)
this business of the authorial tone is an interesting one. for instance, i could happily read dornford yates for years, even though his snobbishness is appalling and insulting, just because of the that lovely pseudo-georgian turn of phrase. then one day i picked up a book i'd read before, an could no longer take it. HE hadn't changed, so it must have been something in me. but what? which perhaps says a lot about what we, as readers, bring to a book. i mention him here partly because he was distantly related to Saki, and parlayed that into a much closer (and made-up) association that he relied on heavily in his early career. as Doyle was a failing doctor, he was a failing solicitor. yet despite the spruious nature of the association, there are some similarities in style. if saki was couture, then yates was the dorothy perkins knock-off.
similarly, on matters of tone, i often wonder why i love JT Edson's rockabye county and company z books, even though his extremely right wing views (endless frothing at the mouth on anything liberal) and prurience (no swearing or sex, but a lot of dwelling on kinky matters like foxy boxing - which is in Bad Hombre or Run For The Border i think - i'm not looking it up right now as i'd have to find the bloody books! - but anyway it's a very NOTW 'this is disgusting... and now i'll tell you why' sort of dwelling) should have me running a mile.
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Post by pulphack on Oct 8, 2008 13:47:06 GMT
hmm, that description of how his tales were taken down is a little suspect... during my years as a devout henry hall fan (no, i'm serious), i read a lot about broadcasting in the twenties and thirties. and the way i heard it was that mr alan - who was a fairly high ranking civil servant by day - would trun up at the bbc just before he was due to go on, place a carnation in a glass of water on the table where the microphone was set, and then start when the light when on. except that he had his script in a brief case by his side all the time. it was written and rehearsed beforehand specifically to sound as if spoken off the cuff (this making him one of the few writers to realise at that time that the spoken and the read word demanded a different syntax), and the script was there more for a sense of security than anything else.
he had a nice line in whimsy, too - The Cabmen's Shelter, in The Great Book Of Humour is a fine example of this. oddly, my copy has no publisher on the spine, and a couple of leaves are missing at the beginning, depriving me of publisher and date! spooky, eh? a phantom book... anyway, it also has phillip macdonald's brilliant short novel Glitter, which is post-modernism before that term was coined (although i suppose everything in books we call post-modern can be dated back to Sterne's Tristram Shandy anyway, and Glitter was also the same time as cameron mccabe's The Face On The Cutting Room Floor, which was another genre book playing games.
mr macdonald, of course, is no stranger to those who read between-the-wars thrillers, detective or horror stories, and was also a movie scriptwriter at one point in his career. sorry, just showing off there...
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Post by pulphack on Oct 8, 2008 13:33:38 GMT
with you on that, mr marsh. loved yardie when i read it, and mr h's story in the britpulp anthology, but i found the same problems with his later work as i do with - no, don't laugh - robert van gulik, who wrote crime novels set in ancient china. both are totally unknown experiences to me. like any alleyway off the beaten track, you sometimes need a map. cracking writer, though.
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Post by pulphack on Oct 1, 2008 12:30:04 GMT
bit late, dem, but she has my best wishes. you know how familiar i've been with this kind of situation this year, and i'm thinking of you and the bride, too.
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Post by pulphack on Oct 1, 2008 12:27:38 GMT
i think you have a point there, jaq - o'donnel is concerned very much with involving his readers, and as such you get very drawn into his world. i've only read 'i. lucifer' and 'pieces of modesty', but enjoyed them very much. also got the second of the collected strips, and i think his concern with character makes him in some ways a better strip than prose writer.
i do disagree about fleming being an inferior writer per se. technically, he's excellent at that distancing, which may not be to everyone's tatse but allows him to describe scenes without his own POV intruding on what you, the reader, make of the scene; i'm thinking here of bond's torture in 'casino royale' in particular. the fact that you have the distance bond has to lend himself to do his job gives insight, and the nastiness of the torture is all the more horrific for being so flatly described. there's also that great chase scene - with hyperbole, it could have been too much, but fleming's coolness gives it an almost cinematic scope. in this, he shows a huge debt to the pre-war thriller writer dornford yates, whose 'chandos' series saw lots of driving and shooting in the austrian hills, described in a beautiful and fake pseudo-jacobean prose that really shouldn't have worked in a thriller, but did by dint of skill and sheer contrast.
having said that, i'm not massively fond of fleming as i prefer to be more involved with the characters. i do think his books flow better, though.
have you ever read anything by adam diment or desmond skirrow? the latter did three or four spy thillers, i think, and is supposedly a well-known kids author and ex-ad man in disguise. the former may either have been a pseudonym for a writer of crime novels, or a swinging london scenester who hit the hippy trail and never came back after four books about phillip macalpine. again, they're not techincally as good as fleming, but i prefer them as they have a great concern for character and those background touches that you like about o'donnel - which is why i think you'll like 'em if you haven't read them.
as regards the modesty movies - still haven't seen the recent one. i do love the sixties film as it's camp pop-art heaven, and a silly cartoon that makes little sense. however, i saw it before ever reading any of the strips or books, so i can see why someone who was a fan before seeing it might dislike it!
incidentally, although the strip ran in the standard, it wasn't owned by the mail group - it's actually owned by the mirror group, and may be in the portfolio that huwj's hayena studios will revive (they've already got garth up and running. as someone who's tried negotiating rights jungles before now, i'd love to know how come the mirror own it and it was in a mail paper!
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Post by pulphack on Sept 24, 2008 9:10:14 GMT
oh well, at the risk of sounding like john cleese doing that philospher's sketch about tautology, most crime books are thrillers, but not all thrillers are about crime...
crime writing is about the transgression of a law and either the reasons for, or the solving of; sometimes both. there are many approaches to this, some of which use conflict between human emotions and/or action in the form of a chase - both metaphorical or literal - in order to examine human behaviour under extreme conditions (as an aside, this is one of the useful functions of such writing, as it enables the writer to put their character under stresses and so draw out behaviour that a social realist novel may not otherwise be able to encompass). these aforementioned approaches usually take the form of a series of thrilling epsodes in which the writer uses techniques suxch as hyperbole, shortened sentences, and the use of juxtaposition to create tension and suspense.
this is basic thriller technique. however, not all crime novels use this. the golden age (inter-war) of crime was full of country house mystery and what is erroneously called the cosy, and often derided by the advocates of the thrilling crime novel. in my view this is because they fail to understand that although it has the same subject, it's actually a very different TYPE of book. it's actually about the puzzle of the crime, and inviting the reader to piece it together from clues elicited by the protagonist, usually via a series of interviews and flashbacks. to me, the complete mistresses of this were Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh. these novels are about examining a set of circumstances in an enclosed environment (hence the 'country house' appelalation, though it's not always this). the enclosed environment enables the reader to section off the 'world' of the story for easier assimilation - hence the populairty of school stories for kids, from Billy Bunter to Harry Potter. it's also condemned as the cosy because it has no visceral thrills - in fact, horrible murders DO happen, they are just decribed in matter of fact terms, or alluded to, as the purpose of the book is not to thrill, but to engage in a puzzle.
similarly, thrillers have the attributes alluded to a paragraph back, but are not necessarily about crime. what they are about is a threat. the hero and his/her world is under this threat, and the question is will they find a solution or means of escape? many early thrillers were about searches for treasure or missing people, or espionage. look at Buchan's 'The Thirty NIne Steps', which kicks off with a crime, but only as a means to propel Hannay into a series of risks and adventures. the espionage element which forms the purpose of his quest is, in many ways, irrelevant. dornford yates wrote many such thrillers in which the foreign power and secrets were replaced by damsels in distress and treasure hunts, to no appreciable difference.
post WII, and the coming of the cold war, spy thrillers became the mainstream of the genre, and in some ways they still are (Clancy, Ludlum, etc). there's also a strong strain of natural and man-made disaster that has proved popular - Hammond Innes and Desmond Bagley spring to mind for the UK writers, while you could also cite books like 'Jaws' and 'The Posiedon Adventure', which are also strong examples of the way in which the natural conflict is echoed by a personal conflict, to aid reader indentification.
the idea of masked men, superheroes, high-speed action, mysterious villains, etc is something that has bled from pulp to comics to movies and back, and is a example of how crime and thriller can be the same, and also become confused: the same because they utilise the idea of transgression and the breaking of law - both legal and moral - and yet confused because the crime is not the focal point of some stories, but merely a vehicle for the focus, which is all-out action.
or that's what i reckon, anyrate.
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Post by pulphack on Sept 15, 2008 13:31:43 GMT
he's one of those authors who just kept going when sales dipped, solidly producing a book a year, and caught the wave extolled in the Bookseller about eighteen months back, whereby writers of his generation, like Wilbur Smith and Clive Cussler, Ken Follett maybe, have seen a resurgance in their sales as a new generation of readers have caught up with them. The Robert Ludlum franchise is probably the most successful example of this.
is he pulp? in the sense that he delivers tight thrillers for his faithful, yes. but i tend to think of pulp writers as writing for the moment - published usually in paperback only, and with the idea that it has a short shelf-life, is usually contemporary in theme, and then move on...
higgins fits in with a slightly different tradition, springing post-war from the likes of Hammond Innes, Alastair MacLean and Desmond Bagley (pre-war the likes of Eric Ambler and Victor Canning, though to be accurate Innes published a couple of books in '38/39). hardback writers, they and their publishers saw them as having long shelf-life, with a few lesser-sellers to build a reputation until a breakthrough book, with the backlist them picking up sales from the new converts.
this may seem like nitpicking, but the way the publisher and writer saw the career determined whether or not titles would stay in print. so while, say a moffat pre-richard allen or douglas enefer would write a thriller then it would slip out of print as the SUBJECT was the most important, so a Higgins or a Bagley would see a small selling book stay on the list until the 'breakthrough' title either exploded or flopped.
in essence, i guess, true pulp writers were secondary to the subject, in publisher eyes, whereas the hardback thriller writers were seen as the subject in themselves.
or something like that. anyway, apart from The Eagle Has Landed (for which he deserves his place in popular fiction history alone), i've only read a couple, and that some thirty years ago. but recently i was talking to a cousin of mine and the subject came round to books. now he's been a Higgins fan for the best part of forty years, and he reckons any Higgins book you care to mention has three things:-
* a gravedigger
* an irish priest
* a LOT of rain
so i think it's safe to assume that these are the man's trademarks. and here's a subject for a new thread: the trademarks of writers (can i bang on about John Lymington and HEAT again?).
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Post by pulphack on Sept 15, 2008 13:17:32 GMT
there's little doubt that, given his personal problems and style of writing, if Lewis had been American he would be a massive crime cult hero insetad of a footnote remembered for the one book.
which would be no more than he deserved, as Jack's Return Home is a genuine genre breaker - there had been little brit crime like that at the time, only the anti-heros of Robin Cook's early books (before he had a very long break and returned as Derek Raymonde, darker and nastier than ever). without Jack Carter, would there have been a Nick Sharman (Timlin is a personal fave, though his best is Answers From The Grave, a non-Sharman) or even Mike Ripley's Angel?
and without the film, would Guy Ritchie have had a template for his career? incidentally, 'Hitman' (produced by Gene Corman) with Bernie Casey is a scene-for-scene remake, just set as a blaxploitation flick, and bloody good, too. worth catching.
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Post by pulphack on Sept 15, 2008 13:10:44 GMT
as it happens, the fact that the 'monster' is pathetic rather than threatening is what makes it for me. he's just trying to get by, and that bit where the female dies on him is genuinely sad. for similar reasons, the fact that the leads are non-descript gives it a kind of verite (which may also be its graininess), added to by the fact that pleasance and rossington seem to be making up their dialogue as they go along. in some ways, it's a shockingly incompetent film, but that sort of makes it for me.
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Post by pulphack on Sept 15, 2008 13:06:47 GMT
exactly, mr marsh. the phibes films look better with all that art deco beauty and robert fuest's style, but none of the cameos are as good as arthur lowe and robert morley; and joseph cotten in the first phibes is no match for ian hendry as a nemesis for la price. although that phibes DOES have a basil kirchin score...
it's a close call in some ways, but Theatre does edge it overall.
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Post by pulphack on Sept 10, 2008 12:01:48 GMT
oh yeah, and MES was crap at lip synching - was that Turf Moor?
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