A Final Problem

I'm reading Neil Gaiman's new collection of short stories, Trigger Warnings, right now. One of the stories in that book is a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, in which the retired Holmes keeps bees, travels to Asia in pursuit of a particular bee, obsesses over his last case, and deals with his impending mortality. There's a cottage industry in Holmes stories set during his retirement. It's a vast area of terra incognita in the Holmes canon, and writers have been rushing to map it out ever since the detective bowed out in "His Last Bow." Elements of such stories are often very similar. This can create a sense of deja vu if you read enough of them. I had a little bit of that while I was watching Mr. Holmes (2015, directed by Bill Condon), in which Holmes retires to keep bees, travels to Asia, obsesses over his last case, and ruminates over his impending mortality. It is otherwise very different from the Gaiman story I read this week. Based on the novel, A Small Trick of the Mind by Mitch Cullin, Mr. Holmes presents a more vulnerable Holmes, one whose mental faculties are failing as he nears the end of his life and one who lives with regrets over events he can no longer remember. Holmes can sometimes come across as inhuman--Sherlock's portrayal of the detective as a "high functioning sociopath," for one example--something that this film sets out to deconstruct. The Holmes one finds here is very human indeed.

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So Long, Dutch

I had planned to write about something else today, but the death of Elmore Leonard has put me in a funk. Leonard has been a fixture on my bookshelf for decades now and I was beginning to think he'd outlive me. Leonard is the last of the great mid-century pulp writers to shuffle off this mortal coil. He follows other populist writers like John D. McDonald, Ed McBain, Ross MacDonald, and Donald Westlake in to the great hereafter. His legacy is arguably broader and more durable. The movies have assured that. Unlike his contemporaries, Leonard was as much a cinematic artist as he was a literary one. Dozens of movies are based on Leonard, some of which he wrote directly for the screen himself. Lately, I've been watching Justified, a series based on one of Leonard's short stories, and it's almost a perfect amalgam of his career: equal parts western and wry hardboiled crime story. A friend of mine thinks that Leonard's westerns are where his real legacy lies, and I don't know that he's wrong. The western movies based on Leonard are pretty hefty, including 3:10 to Yuma, Hombre, Joe Kidd, Valdez is Coming, and The Tall T. I don't know that my friend is right, either, because nobody makes westerns anymore. But crime stories? Those seem evergreen.

My favorite movie based on one of Leonard's novels is probably Stephen Soderbergh's Out of Sight, but it's hard to choose, given that there's also Jackie Brown, Get Shorty, Mr. Majestyk, and the aformentioned westerns. My favorite of Leonard's novels is probably Maximum Bob, because it's the funniest of them, not because it's the best (I liked the ill-fated TV series, too, probably in spite of my better judgement). But this is all splitting hairs.

So this morning, I grabbed The Law at Randado from my shelf and I'll start rereading it on my lunch hour. And if I drank, I'd raise a glass to Leonard after work, and I'll probably watch an episode of Justified. So long, Dutch.

Life Among the Nerds, and Short and Sweet

I spent five days in Chicago at the World Science Fiction Convention this past weekend. I'm not much of a con-goer, even though I've had an interest in science fiction, fantasy, and horror all my life. I get bored at cons. I don't drink, so the room parties don't appeal to me, really, and while I like talking shop with writers and artists, I find that I can do that with less awkwardness on the internet these days. From all this, you might assume that I had a bad time, but I didn't. I had the opportunity to meet some people in meatspace with whom I've had long internet correspondences, and meeting people in meatspace is a rare pleasure. You get more of a person's overall presence when you share air and space and elevators with them.

There was also the vendor's area, a cavernous hall at this convention located somewhere beneath the convention center (a significant portion of Chicago appears to be underground, by the way, and I half expected to run into the mutants from Beneath the Planet of the Apes at any time). Various booksellers tormented me with collectible books. I've never seen so many $300 and up books in one place in my life. I'm poor right now, but if I had money to spend, I would have spent it. Probably for the best.

I had a good time, too, at the ceremony where the Hugo Awards were presented. I was a Hugo voter this year, and I was pleased to see that my own tastes aren't totally out of step with the rest of the world. Of the four main literary awards, I picked three of the winners, with my second place pick in the novella category taking the fourth. I was especially happy with the diversity of the winners. Genre fiction has well and truly broken the rule of straight cis white dudes. At the risk of indulging in identity politics, the fact that there's a trans woman with a literary Hugo award right now makes me squee a little inside. The fact that this level of diversity was acknowledged in the opening remarks by the event's emcee, writer John Scalzi, was flabbergasting in itself. I'm much more predisposed to loving science fiction fans this week than I was last.

Anyway...

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In a Literary Vein

So, I'm listening to Annie Proulx's That Old Ace in the Hole on audiobook right now. Ostensibly, it's about a location scout for a pig-farming combine searching out land for pig farms in Oklahoma; kind of a Local Hero narrative, I guess. I'm three discs in, and so far there has been a lot of lovely descriptions of the Oklahoma Panhandle area, some vividly imagined characters, and nary a narrative hook to be found. I'm getting impatient. I can't shake the feeling that Proulx is wasting my time. This stuff might be fine for short fiction, but I don't think you can sustain a novel on it. After three discs of this, I put it aside. If this is what passes for literary fiction right now, I think I'm going to head back to genre fiction for a while. I also need to apologize to Ang Lee for grousing about the way the movie version of Brokeback Mountain kind of dawdled along. Clearly, the source material is at fault.

By contrast, I also have Stephen King's Under the Dome on audiobook right now, too, and after the first three discs of That Old Ace in the Hole, it was a comfortable book to sink back into. (I read the hardback of Under the Dome last year shortly after New Years.) Whatever else Kings failings as a writer might be, hooking the reader is not one of them. The narrative sets its barbs in the reader within the first five minutes (roughly the first half of the first chapter) and yanks her along for the ride. The size of Under the Dome is daunting, but it's surprisingly stripped down. Anything that doesn't further the narrative is thrown over the side. Eventually, the thing develops the forward motion of a freight train. It doesn't let up. The book itself is one of those obvious allegories with which King sometimes indulges himself, this time taking up the notion of a closed ecology after a small Maine town is mysteriously walled off from the rest of the world by an invisible, impenetrable dome. King's dim view of humanity comes to the fore in this, in true Lord of the Flies fashion, and he brings this nastiness to grotesque life. It's almost like reading Seventies-era King, which is high praise from me.

Have I mentioned my book habit before? I've probably been remiss, because I have a book habit that makes my movie habit pale in comparison. I listen to a lot of audiobooks, too. In terms of dead trees, I've been carrying around Artemisia, Anna Banti's fictionalized biography of Artemisia Gentileschi, for the last week. The book is framed as a dialectic between the author and the life of the great artist, one of the very first women in the arts whose name we actually know (in part because she was a genius). This is pretty fanciful, given that very little is known of Artemisia, including the date of her death. We do know that she was raped by one of her art tutors and that she endured a very public trial. For myself, I'm pretty sure that the experience informs paintings like Judith Beheading Holofernes, an image she painted more than once:

Banti doesn't emphasize this, really, though it hangs like a pall over the whole narrative. It's a fascinating depiction, in any event.

My bedside book right now is Ramsey Campbell's Cold Print, a collection of the author's early Lovecraft-inspired stories. Some of the early stories like "The Church on High Street," the story the teenage Campbell first sent to August Derleth, aren't very good, but reading the stories in sequence is a revelation, because it demonstrates the process by which Campbell learned to write. Campbell provides a tour guide to the stories with a comprehensive introduction. The later stories are superb, especially "The Voice of the Beach," which Campbell rightly calls his most Lovecraftian in spite of an almost complete absence of the paraphernalia of Lovecraftiana. Well worth seeking out.