Gordon Lightfoot: The Music of the Song

You can blame him, you can thank him, but Johnny Cash is the one who led me to being a Gordon Lightfoot fan.

As a boy in upstate New York’s Hudson River Valley, in the 1960s, I spent countless hours listening to Cash’s music from an older brother’s record collection.

Come 1972, I’d been living in the middle of Wisconsin for six years, with much of my childhood sent to the attic, when I bought my first Gordon Lightfoot album, Don Quixote. (Johnny must have been lurking somewhere.) Then I started telling people about Lightfoot and made a sad discovery: I seemed to be the only one in town, in the entire state, and, as I came to believe, the world, who found Lightfoot’s music absorbing and enchanting.

As it was with Ennio Morricone, with Lightfoot, I was a bit ahead of the curve.

It may have been his name that caused resistance—“Lightfoot” easily translates to “Lightweight” to boozy barroom wags. It sounds like something cooked up by Henry Willson, the Hollywood agent who coined “Tab Hunter,”  “Rock Hudson,” “Troy Donahue” and other 1950s beefcake monikers.

Worse, he was a Canadian who wrote “silly love songs.” His bold baritone voice could soar like a hawk or bounce along on high mountain streams of melody, but it may have sounded too much like the crooners despised by my generation as a tribal duty—Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis Jr among others.

To those people, Lightfoot seemed as square as the 101 Strings. He couldn’t be taken seriously. And neither could his fans. “Burchfield knows shit about music,” they whispered. “Keep him away from the turntable before he plays the Tijuana Brass.”

But that was fifty years ago. Gordon is still kicking about and now there’s a major biography: Lightfoot by Canadian journalist Nicholas Jennings demonstrates that not only were the naysayers around me wrong, but so was I.

Lightfoot is workmanlike journalism, at times becoming a buzz of travel and tour dates. Lightfoot’s life follows the familiar track of other showbiz bios: years of hard—really hard—work, then fame, then problems with wives, other women, temper, addiction (in his case, the demon rum), followed by recovery, eclipse, then in his “Sundown” years, a revival as the world softens its scowl and even the grouches embrace him.

Most of this is interesting in a variety of ways. Lightfoot provides his own written accounts throughout and he writes very well.  However, the book seems more for serious Lightfoot fans than general readers. What I found most interesting is how, even though he remains loyal to his Canadian roots, Lightfoot has traveled the world and hobnobbed with a remarkable range of people. 

My outsider’s sense turns out to be false, as Jennings reveals the extent of the admiration and acclaim Lightfoot’s music received from his peers, ranging from Paul Simon through Harry Belafonte (who recorded four Lightfoot songs), onto Streisand and Elvis, Robbie Robertson, Neil Young, Paul Weller (of the punk band The Jam) and, finally, Nobel-winner Bob Dylan, who’s said,  "I can't think of any Gordon Lightfoot song I don't like. Every time I hear a song of his, it's like I wish it would last forever."

Yeah, they laughed at me . . . but the guy on the right . . . .

Jennings also makes a good case for Lightfoot being a better lyricist than I even thought. I still smile at his witty turns of phrase in his very early songs, such as “Rich Man’s Spiritual,” “I’ll Be Alright,” and “(That’s What You Get) For Lovin’ Me.” Lightfoot now disdains the latter for its vile misogyny, but this cad’s absurd ode to his bad self remains a wickedly funny song, one you sing with a bad-guy sneer and a “BWA-HA-HA!” In these songs, Lightfoot shows a sharp eye for human hypocrisy and self-delusion.

Gordon and Johnny

As he moved along, though, the wit seems roll out as other themes rolled in (though it still peeks through in the classic “Sundown” line “Sometimes I think it’s a sin/ when I feel like I’m winnin’/ when I’m losin’ agin.”) 

He wrote numerous protest and topical songs. Of these, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” “Circle of Steel” and “The Canadian Railroad Trilogy” (the unofficial Canadian national anthem) still sound gorgeous, as does “Too Late for Prayin’”, a tune now more relevant than ever. There are great sailing songs (“Christian Island”), road songs (“Somewhere U.S.A”), and of course, love tunes. (“Beautiful” now seems to be a standard at weddings all over.)

Lightfoot’s best lyrics deal with the torments and tangles of romance and marriage—(“cheatin’ songs” they call ‘em.) There is, of course, “If You Could Read My Mind,” the anguished cry of dying passion spun like a tragic fairy tale, a song torn from Lightfoot’s failing first marriage. By Jennings’ account, Frank Sinatra may have found it too much—he walked away from the podium in mid-phrase as Lightfoot looked on in the recording studio.

“Sundown” of course, is a classic in erotic paranoia. Digging down deep into Lightfoot’s large catalog, there glitter many other gems of romantic despair and domestic travail: “The Circle is Small”; “Talking in Your Sleep”; “My Pony Won’t Go”; “Can’t Depend on Love” and, especially, “Cold on the Shoulder” a growling bluesy folk piece about a guy accusing his girl of cheating while his own muttering suggests he’s no pillar of virtue either. All these songs—and others—are a delight to the ears.

Still, I believe song lyrics exist to serve the music, and therefore, they often fail to stand on their own as pure poetry does. It’s always about the music: the melody, the chords, the bass, the rhythm, how it’s all brought together, the feelings more than the thoughts. Any songwriter can stand for and against all the right stuff, but if their music isn’t all there, a career in electoral politics is a better way to move the world.

Jennings’s book lets Lightfoot’s musical side slide, maybe because the subject is hard to tackle without sounding like a pedant. I’m uncomfortable writing about music but stick with me while I give it a shot.

Because Gordon Lightfoot wrote beautiful songs, wrote them by the carload.

With Lightfoot songs, the music is all there. At a time when musicians seemed to be running out of melodies, Lightfoot poured them out in a near-endless stream of buoyant, catchy tunes that leap along like a fast river, before bouncing and soaring to the mountaintops. He’s a hell of a crafty fisherman when it comes to hooking the ear. You can hum his songs all day long and not reach the end. For my low tenor voice—untrained and unskilled--his songs are accessible and great fun to sing. A couple of times I’ve been caught humming his back catalog and asked, “That’s a Lightfoot song, isn’t it?”

(I once sang a pleasing rendition of “Rainy Day People” to an appreciative crowd, but since then have found next to nothing in other karaoke catalogs. Lightfoot is protective of his work, so you never hear it in commercials, either.)

These melodies ride along on Lightfoot’s golden baritone, rich, masculine without overloading on testosterone. He could sing the contents of a sock drawer so it sounds like “Masters of War.” (One fair criticism is that his voice may be a little too good, the burnish painting over the anguish underlying many of his songs.) 

Past those two well-known points, Gordon Lightfoot had another advantage over many of his contemporaries—he went to music school.

Lightfoot started as a choir boy, singing Franz Schubert, among other classical songwriters. In the late 1950s, he spent two semesters at Westlake College of Music in Los Angeles (a famous jazz school, now closed) then returned to his hometown of Orillia, outside Toronto, with a firm understanding of composition, arranging and sight-reading. He got a lot out of his two semesters.

Two classical musicians perform Lightfoot, creating beauty.

Temperamentally conservative, Lightfoot was no avant-gardist, remaining a fierce craftsman rooted in folk and country traditions, as inspired by Bob Gibson, and, most especially, Dylan. His songs are rigorously structured but somehow leap the fences of country-folk into the wider savannah of popular music. As he moved along, the music behind his songs grew more complex and sophisticated. (He once aptly called himself a “cosmopolitan hick.”)

Recently, I watched YouTube films and videos of his early live concerts (of which there are only a few).  I noted how his lead guitarists (Red Shea and, later, Terry Clements), sets the capo far down the neck of the guitar, sprinkling high notes through the songs like raindrops. Meanwhile, from down below, the bass players (John Stockfish; and later, Rick Haynes, still with Lightfoot after fifty years), rumble easily along occasionally leaping up into the song like a trout before diving back down below.

Meanwhile, striding up the middle, pulling it all together, comes Gordon Lightfoot’s wonderful baritone accompanied by his own authoritative picking style, making songs that sound like honeyed sunlight.

You can hear this in Lightfoot!, his first album (with Bill Lee, Spike Lee’s father, playing bass), and his last for the United Artists label, Back Here on Earth, For the two albums in between, he took a spare approach with The Way I Feel (which Dylan claims as an influence on John Wesley Harding)and Did She Mention My Name? (my least favorite, in part because of an echo effect that works against his voice. The album sounds distant and thin, as though recorded in a large empty gym). 

In 1969, he signed with Frank Sinatra’s Reprise label and producer Lenny Waronker. The style grew richer, more luxurious, through three albums until 1972, when he released one of my favorites, Old Dan’s Records.

At first hearing, Old Dan’s Records sounds like covers of Hank Williams, George Jones, Johnny Cash, Tammy Wynette, plus a nod to Joan Baez. Except they’re all Lightfoot originals and they’re all terrific toe-tappers and hummers.

On this album, Lightfoot and Waronker layered in more musicians than ever before, weaving an intricate and rich warm bed of guitars and other instruments. It’s like Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound,” but without the muddy sound.

The album closes with one of Lightfoot’s best road songs, “Hi-way Songs.” His next album struts out of the gate with another swell traveling tune, a folk-rock waltz called “Somewhere USA.” The album is Sundown, a classic of the 1970s that still glows with expressive melodies, musicianship, and a rich sound like a honey-colored dusk. 

While I like Old Dan’s Records more, this one is an absolute high point, reaching number one on the Billboard charts. (Side note: Sundown is the first time I ever heard a pop singer actually sang “shit”—twice, no less. For weeks after, I ran all over campus crying “Gordon Lightfoot said ‘shit!’” but no one cared.)

His subsequent albums became a little more electric and pared down. He never had a number one again but in 1976, he had a real surprise hit with “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” a nearly seven-minute story song about the infamous Great Lakes tragedy. Recorded in one take, it feels a bit long, but thanks to Terry Clements’ spearing electric guitar and Pee Wee Charles’s sweeping steel guitar it evokes real terror and bitter tragedy. It may be one of most unusual top-ten hits ever.

By 1980, Lightfoot’s songs were still good to great and his dedication to music remained undimmed, but, as it does, the marketplace had moved on. Still, he had one more terrific album in him. That would be Shadows(1981) a gorgeous concoction that brings back that “wall of guitars” sound with one good song following on another. I’d pick the title tune as my favorite love song of all time, as, apparently, does Bob Dylan).

With nothing left to prove, Lightfoot has retired from songwriting and—it really hurts to say this—age has dimmed his voice, but he’s still with us, performing for a fan base that seems as intense as ever.

Fifty years on, the snickers have faded while I still say Gordon Lightfoot is a great popular songwriter. He’s as much a part of a tradition starting with Tin Pan Alley, running through Cole Porter and onto the Brill Building and Lennon-McCartney. There may not be a whole lot of deep-dish thinking, but so what? When you’re humming in the shower, or looking for a balm for your sorrowing soul in bad times, what really matters but the music of a song? It may not cure the world’s pain, but it can cast a light against despair.

Thomas Burchfield’s Butchertown,a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up  novel is now out! His contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Arkwon the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book Festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers, The Uglies, Now Speaks the Devil andDracula: Endless Night (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, all are available at Amazon,Barnes and Noble, Powell's Books, and other retailers. His reviews have appeared in Bright Lights Film Journaland The Strand and he recently published a two-part look at the life and career of the great film villain (and spaghetti western star) Lee Van Cleef in Filmfax. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Living Room Bijou: The Black Panther

I don’t care much for comic-book, superhero movies—they’re loud, clangorous, insensible and, despite their color and thunder and all that crazy CG, boring. 

I had more fun when I was a real little kid, sending my American toy soldiers up against my Nazi toy soldiers, mowing the Nasties down by the hundreds of dozens. 

Those little plastic men had actual weight and substance, unlike those weightless CG figures, who exist so far beyond the lead-shoes of gravity that they’re less than ghosts. Movies are already shadow plays for our collective minds. Too much CG, and you have shadow of a shadow show.

Batman, Spiderman, Superman, whatever the costume, the stakes are pretty low in superhero movies. Have you noticed? Superheroes never die, ever(making them God-like, a question for another day). Unlike, say the best supernatural horror films, there’s no break, or tension, between life and death, or reality and unreality, in a comic book movie. With death banished, unreality seeps into every bone, and, like a totalitarian society, despite all the bright flash and color, the life within flattens out.

Strict ironists say that there’s not supposedto be anything at stake in superhero movies: We’re supposed to chew on them like bubblegum, mindless and easy, good for a laugh. 

They used to be right.  A few of you may have chortled through those old Republic chapter serials of the 1930s-1940s (way before our time). They were cheapies, made for little kids and, at their most entertaining, filled with bad acting, laughable dialogue, goofy villains, breakneck pacing and terrific—and often eye-popping and daring—stunt work. (The Phantom Empire, from 1935 and starring Gene Autry, remains one of the most outlandish things ever embedded in celluloid).

These serials sure beat playing Superman in your backyard with a towel around your neck, but not by much. They only showed at the local Rialto once a week, Saturday afternoon, at about 20 minutes per chapter and, by God, that was long enough. A little went, and still goes, a long way. Try binging on them and the charm dies.

But that was then. These days, wits and ironists are not running the show. (Have children changed? I honestly don’t know.) Today’s comic book movies seem constructed to straddle the world between childhood and adulthood. Both realms seem to suffer in the end.

But their volatile population of fans and the films themselves beg to differ—thereissomething at stake in these movies, something deep and profound, like you might encounter in Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Ingmar Bergman. 

Since at least The Dark Knight—and even before—film after film in this genre has draped its shoulders with the cape of ambition, marching out to thunderous acclaim as “A film for our era”; “a profound examination of society’s destiny” and, most insipidly, “the movie we need now.”

(As if Donald Trump and his gang would pack their bags for Moscow once they saw Deadpool, in the same way MASHended the Vietnam War. You may recall that famous anecdote of Richard Nixon standing up after a screening of the latter film and declaring “By God, I shall end this war!”)

There is, I will admit though, some social utility to a movie like Black Panther. At last, black comic book nerds the world over get to see black heroes in a genre that’s always been overwhelmingly white.

But past that, what? What about the rest of us, we who are outside the cult, us non-nerds of color and not—who may well be the majority of movie watchers.Black Panthermay not be the worst of its type, nor is it the best. Even the most lefty leftist may only be able to damn it with faint praise. (Yes, I know millions of innocent people love Black Panther. . . but if it—and the others—wasn’t so self-important, I might like it better).

Black Panther takes us to the mythical African Kingdom of Wakanda, where several tribes are fighting over the miracle metal “Vibranium,” (related to those other miracle metals “Unobtainium” “Whatzattium” and, the most precious mineral of all, “MacGuffium”). Among its powers is its ability to turn the King into the masked superhero Black Panther when mixed together with a rare plant.

This most benevolent dictatorship briefly brings to mind the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan—hermetic, yet reasonably prosperous. In this film, the country is a gold and emerald secret Utopia disguised as a struggling developing nation. It’s a good look, I guess. (As Marvel Studios already rule this particular Earthly universe, it’s hard to see how anyone is fooled, though).

All is not well, of course. After old king T’Chaka dies, T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman, Marshall) accedes to the throne, only to find some unfinished business in his predecessor’s past. While a young man, T’Chaka was a Wakandan government undercover investigator who was forced to kill his brother N’Jobu, who, though next in line for the throne, was a criminal secretly smuggling Vibranium out of Wakanda in collaboration with the nefarious Ulysses Klaue (a growly grungy Andy Serkis). 

To thicken the soup, N’Jobu left behind a young son, N’Dajaka who grows up to be the vengeful “Killmonger” (Michael B. Jordan, Fruitvale Station). N’Dajaka returns to Wakanda to claim the Wakandan throne, saying he only wants to open up the kingdom to the world and share the miracle of Vibranium; but, really, he’s just another bloody-minded authoritarian gangster, the likes of which we seem unable to rid ourselves.

Of course, Killmonger kills T’Challa and takes over Wakanda. And, of course, T’Challa is resurrected to save the day, along with family, friends, a CG rhinoceros and finally, a white American CIA agent (Martin Freeman, Sherlock!).

(Did I spoil it all for you? Think before you answer!)

I can’t completely badmouth this movie. Wakanda looks great, bathed in sunlit gold and deep jungle green. If you didn’t know any better, you’d web-search “Wakanda tourism”. The music by Ludwig Göransson is excellent, incorporating African themes from Senegal, giving it more atmosphere and power than these scores usually do.

As for the actors, villains Michael B. Jordan and Andy Serkis are the most memorable. At first Jordan seems to be a little too nice and callow to play Killmonger. He eventually grows into the part to where I felt that surge of gleeful hatred I always feel toward good heavies. Serkis adds grit with a crusty villain out of Scorsese and Peckinpah. 

But, like those Republic serials of old, a little of this goes a long way. To this action-movie fan, the only scene with real excitement is an analog shootout in a South Korean junkyard. Otherwise, it’s the usual CG cartoon fights, with occasional flashes of actual stunt people. 

It’s all so serious, there’s no sense of play. It failed to persuade me to suspend my disbelief, to accept its absurdities. It sinks into that frantic dullness that infects many of these films. The longer it went on, the deeper my sighs grew. After it was over, I wanted to wash it down with a chapter of The Phantom Empire.

Thomas Burchfield’s Butchertown,a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up novel is now out! His contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Arkwon the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book Festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers, The Uglies, Now Speaks the Deviland Dracula: Endless Night(e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, all are available at Amazon,Barnes and Noble, Powell's Books, and other retailers. His reviews have appeared in Bright Lights Film Journaland The Strand and he recently published a two-part look at the life and career of the great film villain (and spaghetti western star) Lee Van Cleef in Filmfax. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

The Living Room Bijou: The Cloverfield Paradox

The Cloverfield Paradox (2018) is the third entry for J.J. Abrams’ Cloverfieldfranchise (the first of which, out of the found-footage horror genre, I enjoyed; I missed the second). It’s an okay sci-fi/horror piece, that, while purporting to be based on real science, is too fanciful and goofy to take with anything more than a grain of meteor dust.

Once again, we’re in Earth’s dystopian future (now de regueur in the genre; Lord help us, if hope and optimism ever become fashionable again). Human civilization has maxxed out its energy supplies (somehow, even wind, solar and water are not workable either . . . okay, we’re still here). Doom’s a-knockin’ at our door.

Meanwhile, circling about the planet, is the good spaceship Cloverfield Station. Humanned by an international crew, it’s attempting to boot up the Shepherd particle accelerator to somehow provide Earth with an eternal supply of energy.

Of course, this is a fiction and that means this is not a good idea. (Otherwise, we’d more likely have a documentary, or an earlier episode of Star Trek). Once the plot engine launches into hyper-drive, the film is invaded by a typical cosmic motley of Alien,Space, and other, supposedly more science-based, movies. Ex Machina it is not.

Things go to hell in a hyper-space pod, as Things and Stuff from Another Universe crash and pop into this one, turning existence upside down, backward, and inside out, like a flashy but poorly knit sock, wooly with loose threads. Trapped in a mirror image Universe, the crew must find a way back to this one. There’s also the usual background character B.S. meant to encourage swelling hearts and damp hankies . . . .

While the rest of us shake our heads, we can enjoy the elaborate gleaming production and performances by an able cast, including Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Black Mirror), Daniel Brühl (The Alienist), David Oyelowo (Selma), John Ortiz (Luck), and, most entertainingly, Chris O’Dowd (Epix’s Get Shorty). O’Dowd gets most of the laughs as he gets separated from his arm, which later returns with its own agenda. Several cast members meet their ends in suitably grotesque fashion.

Not surprisingly, shit goes really helter-skelter at the end, as the movie undercuts its mediocre drama with a joke ending out of an old Robert Bloch/Twilight Zonestory. 

And, this being a Cloverfield movie, you’ll be waiting for it before the opening credits even role.

Thomas Burchfield’s Butchertown,a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up  novel is now available! His contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark won the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book Festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers, The Uglies, Now Speaks the Devil and Dracula: Endless Night (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, all are available at Amazon,Barnes and Noble, Powell's Books, and other retailers. His reviews have appeared in Bright Lights Film Journaland The Strand and he recently published a two-part look at the life and career of the great film villain (and spaghetti western star) Lee Van Cleef in Filmfax. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Birth of the Hard-Boiled

If you were a noir fan who found The Big Book of the Continental Op by Dashiell Hammett (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) under your 2017 holiday tree, consider yourself blessed.  If not, you owe it to yourself to buy it now, because this collection, lovingly assembled and edited by Julie Rivett (Hammett’s granddaughter) and Richard Layman (the leading Hammett scholar) is a treat from cover to cover as it opens a window onto a world and style of detective fiction now mostly gone.

All the Op stories first appeared in the legendary pulp magazine The Black Mask,starting with “Arson Plus” in the October 1923 issue and ending with “Death and Company” in November 1930, the year of The Maltese Falcon.

Now, for the first time, all twenty-eight tales featuring Hammett’s pioneering creation have been joined in one volume. The bulk of them were collected in three earlier editions, one of them edited by Hammett’s companion, playwright Lillian Hellman. Others remained scattered in far-flung corners, in addition to a couple of uncompleted stories and early versions of Hammett’s first two novels that have not seen print since their first magazine publication in the late 1920s. They too, have been all wrapped up in one bulky but worthwhile package. At 700 double-column pages, it’s one hot brick of a book.

Before the Op, there was no one in detective fiction quite like him. Literary detectives were creatures of the upper class or from officialdom and were mostly of British origin. The Op, a descendant of dime-novel frontier sheriffs and gunfighters, was American to his cold marrow. By the 1920s, the American frontier was long gone, and World War I had brought a bloody end to old ways. Rural populations were on the cusp of becoming a minority as giant cities sprung up from coast to coast. Prohibition kicked in, in part, as a reaction against these changes. These dry laws, however, ignited a fantastic era of corruption and lawlessness. Genre fiction readers needed a new hero for this violent and tempestuous time.

The Op was among the first and by far the best of the new breed. He rose from the ranks of the unwashed to take a place in a relatively new American institution—the corporation as fronted by the Continental Detective Agency. Like the Pinkertons, Hammett’s former employers on whom it’s based, the agency represents the wealthy and the powerful, extracting them from their own unique troubles.

The Op is smart, but no genius like Sherlock Holmes, smoking his pipe, shooting cocaine while slumped in his armchair. He does his thinking on his feet, in the moment. He’s a dogged fellow who takes a stoutly cynical anti-romantic stance toward the world and his work. Homely as an old suitcase, he’s like a mechanic, fearlessly getting his hands dirty—the kind who’ll steal the crutches off a crippled newsboy to get the job done. Hammett seems to have built him from brick, concrete and steel, adding only enough human qualities to help him function as a detective, an oblique symbol of his times and, finally, as the gnarly root of every tough-guy hero since then.

Because professional detectives prefer to remain safe in anonymity, we never learn the Op’s real name in these first-person fables. He seems to have no private life save for sleeping, eating, smoking and the occasional poker game. He falls in love once—or, more precisely, becomes obsessed—but it passes like a bad flu. He’s as single-minded as a hunting dog.

Today’s high-strung readers will feel tweaked by his callous pragmatism and disdain for most human feelings. (His closest modern equal can be found in the Donald Westlake/Richard Stark novels, following the terrifying hard-boiled adventures of a cold-eyed professional thief.) He’s in it for the work and the money it brings the company. His social attitudes occasionally slip into racism and his black humor still shocks. (“I haven’t laughed so hard since the hogs ate my kid brother!” he cackles near the end of Red Harvest, the first Hammett masterpiece novel.)

While Hammett’s leftist politics are the stuff of legend, he wrote the Op stories while he was still in his twenties, his attitudes still unformed. The Op is a creature of the establishment, freely cooperating (as real detectives do) with the police—who are often portrayed as being as able as he is, though sometimes also corrupt.

Whatever the political undercurrents, these are first and foremost true noir pulp tales: raw, energetic, ungainly. These stories dazzle and delight, burst with invention and energy, gleam with nuggets of color and fun. Many of them are novellas, long, elaborate action-packed tales, full of shoot-outs, stabbings and even homicide by typewriter. Even when they careen toward the implausible, they compel attention with vivid prose, breakneck pacing and Hammett’s fierce eye for surface detail and the local color of 1920s San Francisco. 

The collection divides the Op stories into three sections, mirroring the three Black Mask editors for whom Hammett wrote: George W. Sutton, Philip C. Cody and Joseph Shaw. Each editor made his own demands of the magazine’s star author. Hammett, an invalid recovering from tuberculosis, poor and with a family to support, chafed under their demands, but he was in no position to rebel.

Nevertheless, he made the most of the fences surrounding him. His background as a Pinkerton detective provided enormous amounts of exact detail, painting a realistic patina over his fantastic plots. Hammett is sometimes called a “realistic” writer, which I think is a profound mistake: His stories and plots are too incredible, as baroque and strung with wild coincidence as any 19^th-century melodrama. 

Take “The Gutting of Couffignal”: It opens with the Op reading M.P. Shiels’ fantasy The Lord of the Seawhile standing midnight guard duty over a pile of expensive wedding gifts.After summing up the plot, he admits, “it sounds dizzy here, but in the book it was as real as a dime.” It’s clearly a tip off that we should take Hammett’s work here in a similar vein as we’re spun off into an equally dizzy romp about a Russian criminal gang overrunning an entire island. And it reads as real as a dime.

The Op stories are really works of fantasy and deserve to be seen as such. (Sergio Leone’s movies, indirectly inspired by Hammett’s work, play a similar game, laying gritty details over equally dubious scenarios.) This is not criticism but praise. The Op stories work a pulpy magic, seducing readers into a baroque world of skullduggery and revenge, where the unreal becomes real.

Hammett was a self-educated writer, broadly read and it shows. His style, especially in his early stories, is awkward, sometimes heavy with slang (all of which is defined in footnotes). Nevertheless, he writes with such energy, flamboyance and humor, with such a deft eye for detail, objections dissolve like mist.

Not every story hits its target. The early ones show a young writer finding his feet before hitting his stride in the middle years under Cody and Shaw. From this period came most of the best Op stories, including four which, when read together, constitute two separate novellas: “The House on Turk Street” and “The Girl with the Silver Eyes”; and “The Big Knockover” and “$106,000 Blood Money.”

 “This King Business,” a late novella, sweeps the Op away to the fictional Middle European nation of Muravia for a wild satire of out of both John Buchan and Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King.” It crackles with arch and witty commentary on politics but drags toward the end.

As an encore, the volume includes Hammett’s first two novels, Red Harvestand The Dain Curse, as they first appeared in The Black Maskbefore their hardcover publication by Alfred Knopf, where they underwent significant red-penciling.  The Dain Curse seems to be an even bigger jumble than it was in its final version. The Black Mask Red Harvest is also significantly different, yet in some ways better, as it clips along to a more cogent ending. For Hammett fans, they are fascinating documents.

Then came Sam Spade in The Maltese Falconin 1930. Hammett left the Continental Op behind, the string played out. Both his style and themes would crystallize in the great works to come. Nonetheless, some readers may feel a sad twinge when The Big Book of the Continental Opreaches the end. I know I did.

Thomas Burchfield’s Butchertown,a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up  novel is now out. His contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Arkwon the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book Festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers, The Uglies, Now Speaks the Deviland Dracula: Endless Night(e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, all are available at Amazon,Barnes and Noble, Powell's Books, and other retailers. His reviews have appeared in Bright Lights Film Journaland The Strand and he recently published a two-part look at the life and career of the great film villain (and spaghetti western star) Lee Van Cleef in Filmfax. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Sea Captains, Good and Bad

War has always been with us, but just over a hundred years ago, the most savage and epic era of human conflict began. Human beings, especially males, have always been distinctly ornery. But with the 20^th Century we “improved” our technology. Alongside that human populations soared, while competition for limited space and resources grew fierce.  

So now we’ve had a century’s worth of tragedy, terror and trouble to show for our cleverness and fecundity. Though war may seem in comparative abeyance now, we still live by the skin of our teeth.

World War I, the first of the great conflicts, was called “the war to end all wars” after it was formally concluded in 1919. That was a fine hope, but, of course, it turned out to be bullshit. It was only the first chapter of a longer war, from which have grown enormous libraries of books and commentary. Why the “Great” War even started remains a ghastly mystery full of worthy educated theories embracing a multitude of factors, but few clear conclusions.

Especially for those who are pacifists, there’s little honor to be found in any of this. Even so, amidst all the misery, you occasionally find glimmers of the old-style myths of heroism and decency. The stories that came forth do not erase the horror, but they provide a little solace, a little hope that even our enemies can be angels.

Some of these events took place on the battlefields of Europe and Western Asia. But mostly, they seem to have taken place on the high seas.

The naval literature of World War I is not vast compared to other theatres. But for the attacks by U-boats on Allied shipping and their response, only one major battle took place, between the British Royal Navy and the German Imperial Fleet at Jutland, which, to the amazement of many, ended in a draw. (The fate of the Imperial German Fleet at war’s end makes for another stunning tale.)

Though they took place on a much smaller scale, the exploits of the German merchant raiders pack just as much drama. These ships, some of them drastically refitted commercial freighter and passenger vessels, roamed the sea from the Atlantic to the Pacific. They had no practical effect on the war’s outcome, but nevertheless they aroused great terror as they captured and sank hundreds of vessels, while providing at least some inspiration for a people who had little else to inspire them.

The best account of these actions I’ve read is The Wolf by Richard Guilliat and Peter Hohen (Free Press, 2010). 

The S.S. Wolf, armed with a several cannons (and a seaplane!), set sail from Kiel, Germany, on November 1916 on a 16,000-mile, 16-month voyage. 

Its mission was to lay mines in dozens of Allied ports, mostly British, from the Atlantic through the Indian Ocean to the Pacific. These mines sank thirteen ships, whileThe Wolf herself directly captured and sank fourteen others. It snuck back through the British blockade in February 1918, with almost 250 prisoners in her holds. All this without losing a single life on both sides.

As in all stories of this genre, the crucial element in The Wolf’s success is its captain, Karl Nerger. He was a genuine oddity, a sailor from a long-lost world, where war was seen as a noble pursuit for upper-class gentleman. With his courtly well-bred manner, Nerger both inspired his men and acted as a most gracious captor to his prisoners during the long, hard months at sea. He swore he wouldn’t take a life during his mission and stuck to his promise. Even the women prisoners, of which there were at least two, made it through safe and unharmed.

Even so, Guilliatt and Hohnen’s swift and irresistible account makes no attempt to soften this harrowing story. The Wolf was a slow boat, a coaler that couldn’t get past 10 knots at best. As the endless days at sea passed under harsh sun, miserable heat and violent storms, and the number of prisoners in the hold increased, conditions naturally deteriorated. There were a few gestures at mutiny by the crew, while conditions grew foul in the prisoner holds below decks.

The prisoners were a diverse lot, ranging from the Cameron family, San Franciscans who were plucked from their luckless schooner The Beluga. There were also British, Australians, New Zealanders (including Maori), South Pacific Asians and finally, a crew of Japanese sailors. Cultural and racial tensions ran bitter and high, yet they all made it out alive to tell their incredible tale, one worth reading for fans of true-life adventure. It’s a great story to read, though you wouldn’t want to experience it.

Blaine Pardoe’s The Cruise of the Sea Eagle (The Lyons Press, 2005) is not as successful as a book (mostly due to slack editing toward the end). Even so, its story is even more colorful, incredible and thrilling. Where the SMS Wolf was a modern, if slow, single-masted coal-powered ship, The Seeadler was a three-masted sailing ship, right out of the nineteenth century and Errol Flynn by way of Raphael Sabatini—the last thing you’d consider sending out against mighty British Navy dreadnoughts.

But, considered further, Seeadler’s very antique innocuousness turned out to be its strength, like the tiny mouse that makes off with the cheese while the cats hunt the big rats. To the modern British battleships, it was just the Hero, a cute antique freighter under a Norwegian flag. Why, there was even a woman on board, the captain’s wife!

But, of course, hidden away, lay the flag of the German Imperial Navy, not to mention a pair of cannons. As for the captain’s spouse, “Josefeena” was played well-enough by crewman Hugo Schmidt, in drag ("Well, hello sailor!"). Another wild trick was played in the captain’s dining room, built on hydraulics that it could be lowered down to entrap unsuspecting captains who though they were just sitting down to dinner with a fellow captain, not a German buccaneer.

The Seeadler targeted similar British freighter schooners and windjammers, still in wide use in the early 20^th century, so it never bit off more than it could chew. With these modest goals, the Germans captured and sank twelve freighters in the Atlantic before rounding Cape Horn into the South Pacific. It sank three more ships before running aground on the Pacific island of Mopelia eighteen months later.

As with The Wolf, the man at the helm was key to the Seeadler’s success. Captain Felix von Luckner cut an even more dashing figure than Karl Nerger. Of noble birth and wide experience, he was a true “gentleman pirate,” handsome, charismatic, sociable. (In a different world, Christopher Lee would make a perfect von Luckner in the movie version.)

Von Luckner wasn’t the brains of the outfit (which honor belongs to his lieutenant, Alfred Kling), but he was the glue that held the crew together. Like the best commanders, he thought fast on his feet, and brought purpose and direction to the long, hard voyage.

Like Karl Nerger, he swore an oath not to kill a soul during his raids, but, tragically, failed to keep his promise. When one of the raider’s targets, The Horngarth, elected to fight back, von Luckner gave orders to return fire. Richard Douglas Page, a young British radio operator, died. Though Von Luckner undoubtedly regretted the loss, he also elected to brush it out of his own romanticized accounts of his life.

Even without an airbrush, von Luckner led an incredible life from first to last. Though a loyal German, he openly despised the Nazis who kept him under house arrest for most of World War II. At war’s end, he managed to single-handedly stave off the destruction of his hometown of Halle by American troops and rescued a Jewish refugee while trying to manage his own escape as Germany collapsed around him.

There are competent sea captains and there are incompetent ones. What happens when a ship is helmed by an incompetent is the drama behind S.S. San Pedro by James Gould Cozzens (Berkeley Books), a trim, but vivid seafaring novel from 1931. Cozzens was a noted 20^th-century author known mostly for By Love Possessed (which was adapted into a Lana Turner movie.)

Now mostly forgotten, some of his work seems allegorical. (Castaway, his 1934 novel about a man trapped forever inside a Macy’s-type department store, was once eyed for adaptation by director Sam Peckinpah.)

While inspired by Joseph Conrad, the novel belongs in the Ship-of-Fools genre, but years before Katherine Anne Porter’s epic. The titular ship is a large passenger freighter, bound from Hoboken, New Jersey, to Argentina. Passengers and crew are a motley cross-section of humanity with class and racial divisions drawn hard, bright and cruel. Not long after leaving port, the San Pedro encounters a violent storm, and thanks to sloppy cargo-loading and a sick and listless captain, founders toward a briny doom.

Despite strong writing, S.S. San Pedro seems a curious antique now. The narrative strongly suggests Cozzens to be a bigot. It’s a pessimistic reactionary work that reads like an allegory of doom. For all the ships that do safely reach port, there are many that don’t. To James Gould Cozzens, we are all passengers and crew on the S.S. San Pedro. As one old sea saying goes, keep one hand for the ship and the other for yourself.




Thomas Burchfield’s Butchertown, a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up  novel is available now! His contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark won the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book Festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers, The Uglies, Now Speaks the Devil and Dracula: Endless Night (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, all are available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble,  Powell's Books, and other retailers. His reviews have appeared in Bright Lights Film Journal and The Strand and he recently published a two-part look at the life and career of the great film villain (and spaghetti western star) Lee Van Cleef in Filmfax. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.