The Carter Cartel

I oughta have my head examined.

Through no design on my part, I wound up reading two of the toughest, grimmest, most violent novels of the year in tandem. It was like running a bloody gauntlet between Taxi Driver and The Wild Bunch over two weeks of late nights in my reading chair. Toward the end, my nerves were so splintered, I added some light theology to plane them away.

One of these novels was written and set years ago. The other was written and set in the present. One was violent.  The other, mega-violent. They were Get Carter, by Ted Lewis, and The Cartel, by Don Winslow. (The oblique rhyme of the titles is also noted.)

Get Carter was my annual trip back in time (or “Cloudland Revisited” as S.J. Perelman might call it.). I first read Ted Lewis' Brit-noir as a Popular Library paperback tie-in to the Michael Caine-Mike Hodges classic crime film of 1970 (available on video; it also occasionally peers darkly from the vaults of Turner Classics). Originally titled Jack’s Return Home, it seemed daring to this male high schooler in content and style, a violent tale spun in the first-person by a vile, reprehensible character.

 

Get Carter is a Jacobean revenge story—but not a tragedy—of a small-time London gangster, Jack Carter, on a trip home to Yorkshire to bury his late brother, Frank, and dig up the mucky truth surrounding his mysterious death. To complicate the matter, Jack and Frank, who was a square-living bloke, have been bitterly estranged for years. As with Sam Spade and his partner Miles Archer, Carter and his brother had little use for each other. But it doesn’t matter what you think of your brother: When he’s killed, you gotta  do something about it.

Forty years on, Get Carter still hits hard, an tightly muscled bulldog that bites with prose as gimlet-eyed as Hammett's.  This time around, I noticed how vividly Lewis paints its particular corner, the late 1960s underworld of industrial England, a coal-smoked world where cosier mysteries dare not tread. The swinging ‘60s swing far out of sight; a place that stands apart from its era, a world trapped in the seedy amber of postwar England.

Both the novel, and the film it inspired, were shocking then. They still are. They came out during a time when criminality was glorified in popular culture as rebellious, romantic, even noble (Butch Cassidy, The Godfather and the like).  Get Carter, both novel and film, will have none of that. Crime doesn’t pay, period. While there is plenty of pathos, not a speck of glamour gleams anywhere, especially in its depiction of how women fare in the underworld. (Not good. At all.)

Gentler readers will not want to enter. But for the rest, Get Carter remains a first-rate icon of modern crime fiction.

Now to the violent novel . . . .

Get Carter draws much of its its power from a combination of real-life backgrounds and well-contrived plotting. The Cartel by Don Winslow, is ripped and torn right from the headlines. Based closely on the Mexican Drug War that raged during the first decade of 2000s, just across our southern border, this is a righteously angry novel that takes aim at this “War on Drugs” with both hammer and blunderbuss.

And a war it truly is. Norte Americanos may talk a good war game, but the Mexican people are actually living it. Tens of thousands have died in what, in any other nation, would be called a civil war. The violence, depravity, and horror from this war crash from The Cartel’s six-hundred plus pages in towering waves of carnage.

The main hero is Art Keller, an ex-DEA agent who, in George Smiley fashion, returns from bee-keeping retirement to track down his arch-nemesis Adan Becerra, the most powerful drug lord in Mexico. Becerra, in turn, has put a high price on Keller’s head.

Early on, the story takes a turn into de Sadean fairyland as Magda Beltran, imprisoned for smuggling, falls under the spell of fellow prisoner—and real prison boss--Becerra, who runs the co-ed penitentiary with the same fatal aplomb Dracula uses to run his castle. His powers border on the supernatural.

This cat and mouse also involves numerous rival cartels battling to control the drug pipelines to the United States. In that it's as complex as a Le Carré novel. But beyond the intrigue, the violence and cruelty boil over into vicious, pointless insanity. Murder becomes a drug, an addiction that claims boys as young as nine. The situation becomes so desperate, Keller and his tiny band of untouchables go far outside the law to put a dent in it (a development that will make strict civil libertarians uncomfortable.)

In the end, dents are all that are made. The carnage has subsided for now but the Cartel remains in business. The war goes on. So long as Norte Americanos fail to come up with any useful ways for controlling demand, there’s simply too much money to be made off human weakness. Not only by the cartels, but also the politicians, businesses, the military, and law enforcement. Everyone, it seems, works for the Cartel.

There are other heroes besides Keller. He crosses paths with Mexican journalists struggling to expose and condemn the war, at enormous personal risk. (The novel’s dedication lists over sixty journalists who have been murdered while covering the war.).  Keller also finds himself involved with the activists striving to help the civilians caught in the insane crossfire. The novel is a genuinely angry, and deserved, memorial to them.

The Cartel is a hard read, a novel I admire more than like. It's a soapbox novel, howling with rage at the top of its lungs.  The violence, while relentless, is described with hard-boiled restraint. Still even hardboiled veterans may find it a numbing experience.

I also found it a little thin and hollow, maybe because it’s too much ripped from the headlines. During the course of its bloody pages, I researched some of the events it’s based on (including an excellent Frontline documentary). The factual accounts seemed to have more depth and urgency to them. (A list of sources used by Winslow appears at the end.)

“History,” a friend of mine once insisted, “is better than fiction.” The Cartel may be an example how even well-meant fiction can wind up a carbon copy of the events it rightfully strives to memorialize.

Copyright 2015 by Thomas Burchfield

Thomas Burchfield’s latest (yet to be published) novel is Butchertown, a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up. He is also the author of the contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark, winner of the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers and The Uglies (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, those three are available at Amazon in various editions. You can also find his work at Barnes and Noble,  Powell's Books, and Scribed. He also “friends” on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, reads at Goodreads and drinks at various bars around the East Bay. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Essie Davis: Chameleon, Shapeshifter

Two completely different characters; one astounding actor

For the last few years, I’ve known Essie Davis only as the star of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. Based on a series of novels by Kerry Greenwood, the Australian-produced show is broadcast here in the US on a variety of PBS stations. (For cord cutters, it’s also available through Acorn Media.)

I think the title is a bit cutesy and the plots are, unsurprisingly, often routine. But Miss Fisher is great to look at, sumptuously draped and furnished in 1920s dress and décor. It takes place mostly in the upper strata of Melbourne society, where “g’day mate” is rarely heard. No one plays Aussie Rules Football or cracks open a Foster’s. It’s typical of a well-woven British mystery. Once in a while, I think I might be wandering Midsomer County with Tom Barnaby.

But I know better, primarily because of Ms. Davis as the titular Miss Fisher: Sherlock Holmes as a wealthy flapper, fashion plate, and free-living feminist (or, more accurately for that era, suffragette). Like Mr. Holmes, Miss Fisher is less a character, more an ingenious cobbling of attributes, both representative of her time and highly appealing to ours. Next to her, Mae West looks a dowdy aunt; her detective’s eye make the Melbourne police look blind. And, finally, she’s a dead shot with her gold-plated revolver.

Miss Fisher is not a deep role (even with the traumatic past now mandatory for detective heroes). As any actor who’s played either Holmes orJames Bond can tell you, these parts can be frustrating and boring. They also need to be cast just right.

Miss Fisher gets it right with Essie Davis, a tall angular beauty with a perfect black bob, cheekbones you could ski down and huge panther eyes. She plays Phryne with an elegant strut, always dressed and wound up for adventure.

The show also provides her a well-matched suitor, a rough-barked police inspector played by Nathan Page. Their tense, romantic rapport puts me in mind of Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis in Moonlighting, the rom-com mystery series from the 1980s.

My main point here is that Essie Davis is a terrific actress. As in great actress. For witness, I offer not her commendable work as Miss Fisher, but her extraordinary performance in one of the most highly praised films of 2014, The Babadook.

The Babadook is an intense and excellently made horror fable. Here, Ms. Davis plays the polar opposite of Miss Fisher--Amelia Vanek, a widow haunted by the gruesome death of her beloved husband in a traffic accident seven years before—the very night their son, Samuel, was born.

Since then, Amelia has become a ragged derelict sinking in a black sea, surrounded by endless fog. She’s all shaking bones as she stumbles around inside the blue-gray walls of her house, which are disturbingly blank and empty, like an imprisoning sky.

Her relationship with her son is dangerously needy. Together they ride towering waves of love, neglect and abuse. Samuel (well played by Noah Wiseman) is a weird kid, a terribly lonely boy, loud and impulsive, feared and disliked by both friends and family. Together, mother and son become entwined in their moldy isolation as they turn against each other.

One night, for bedtime reading, Samuel brings Amelia a book she doesn’t recall seeing on his shelf: The Babadook, a pop-up featuring a black-clad demon who peeks, waves and rises from its tomb-like pages to the murmured cadence of a creepy nursery rhyme.

This demon, who smells grief like a vampire smells blood, is soon released from its bound pages to slither in their lives, to strike again and again.

The Babadook is beautifully crafted, a disturbing claustrophobic fable about undying grief. Writer-director Jennifer Kent has created a beautifully crafted horror show of atmosphere and style with hardly a drop of onscreen blood. It stands with my favorite horror shows of the 2000s, alongside Session 9, the American version of The Ring and the original The Returned.

Essie Davis ties it all together with her blistering performance as Amelia. Like Julie Harris as Eleanor in 1963’s The Haunting, Davis brings a fragile deer-like quality to Amelia, a woman who wears her nerves on the outside, where they’re plucked upon by the raging ghost of grief.

Loneliness and vulnerability are two of horror’s best and most reliable themes. Amelia is a classic player. Davis plunges to the center of her skull and surfaces with its harrowing contents. She is simply riveting.

It takes guts and talent to portray someone like Amelia with such unbridled feeling. Essie Davis, a major-award winner for other performances, has plenty of both. That she makes Amelia completely unrecognizable from her work as light-footed Phryne Fisher is about the highest compliment I can think of. The way she's going, she could be as big a star as her fellow Tasmanian, Errol Flynn. You can call me a fan.

Copyright 2015 by Thomas Burchfield

(Edited 11/2/15; the actor Nathan Page was accidentally transcribed as "Nathan Hunt.")

Thomas Burchfield’s latest (yet to be published) novel is Butchertown, a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up. He is also the author of the contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark, winner of the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers and The Uglies (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, those three are available at Amazon in various editions. You can also find his work at Barnes and Noble,  Powell's Books, and Scribed. He also “friends” on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, reads at Goodreads and drinks at various bars around the East Bay. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

"Appleby's Answer" by Michael Innes

I first learned of Golden Age British mystery writer Michael Innes back in the 1990s, from San Francisco Chronicle columnist and Innes fan, Jon Carroll. Carroll’s enthusiasm for an Innes novel called The Journeying Boy coaxed me to open its paper door.

I got a good kick out of The Journeying Boy, a vim and vigorous chase adventure that roamed through England’s green at a colorful and witty jog before roaring into a ripping action climax involving a plane dive-bombing a boatful of nasty villains.

Some years later, I opened up another Innes mystery and now visit his books annually. He was the fecund author of over 50 mystery novels, plus short stories and numerous mainstream novels written under his real name, John Innes McIntosh (J.I.M.) Stewart.

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, Innes was educated at Oxford. His books are flavored with brave and rather unfashionable erudition, a genre now called the “donnish detective.” They are impish, arch and witty, sometimes to a fault. (Innes also authored biographies and academic studies of such literary thunderbolts as James Joyce and Thomas Hardy. He also seems to have known J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.)

His literary legacy carries on circuitously through Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse novels and the subsequent TV series, all of which are set in Oxford. His prose is stylish, unfolding in long, winding sentences clustered with winking asides. Reading him can take a little patience. But while literary allusions abound, you keep smiling, tittering, chuckling, occasionally guffawing.

Like all super-prolific authors, Innes’s output is checkered: some books are successful (Journeying Boy; A Private View, about the very public theft of a Vermeer painting; Hare Standing Up, about nuclear war); some not (The Bloody Wood, Man from the Sea).

Happily, Appleby’s Answer, (Dodd Mead, 1973) counts as one of his funnier, more entertaining novels.

We board the story on a London-bound train. Miss Priscilla Pringle, a spinsterish and moderately successful “cosy” writer, is on her way to a meeting of the Crooks’ Colloquium (based on the legendary Detection Club, of which Innes was a member). It should be a relaxing, forgettable trip, but for the strange man who shares her compartment, one who turn out to be a most unlikely fan.

Colonel Bulkington is a Colonel Blimp type, a retired soldier of questionable means and evasive manner. He treats Miss Pringle’s mysteries as though they were intended to be instruction manuals. They debate the tenuous relationship between crime fiction and crime fact. As he takes his leave, the colonel suggests the two of them collaborate on a murder mystery.

This strangers-on-a-train episode sparks a strange fever in Miss Pringle. Bulkington may be a trifle mad, but, she thinks, she may be able to turn his lunacy toward her own profit and finally write that elusive breakthrough bestseller. And so she starts her own descent into the swamp of folly.

Miss Pringle tracks the colonel down to the West Country village of Long Canings (“named after an interesting rural pursuit”; the novel steams with such clever double entendres.) She finds him living in a derelict mansion, tutoring a pair of delinquents, and waging a secret war on a wealthy neighbor.

Of course, Miss Pringle finds herself rapidly losing control of the situation as Bulkington ensnares her in his nefarious plot against the vulgarians next door. Clever as she thinks she is, Miss Pringle’s no match for the colonel.

Luckily, retired Scotland Yard man John Appleby, Innes’s constant detective hero, happens on the scene, accompanied by his Watson, his equally able and witty wife, Judith. Appleby sets things aright, snatching Miss Pringle from Bulkington’s evil clutches in a cliff-hanging—and awkwardly contrived—climax concerning a grouchy goat and a deep well.

I wouldn’t call Appleby’s Answer top drawer, but it’s a fun read much of the way. It casts a puckish eye on English country manners and mores. Innes relies more on witty dialogue and plot than descriptive prose. For example, we never get an idea what Appleby looks like—Tall? Short? Thin? Fat? David Niven or John Nettles? “Draw your own Appleby” seems to be the rule here. There’s also some painful and unlikely slapstick involving a horse and an automobile.

Appleby’s Answer shouldn’t be the first Michael Innes novel you read. (Start with The Journeying Boy.)  It may be an “old” book, but the past has its way of enhancing the now. It can even put the new, the shiny, and the shallow to shame.

Copyright 2015 by Thomas Burchfield

Thomas Burchfield’s latest (yet to be published) novel is Butchertown, a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up. He is also the author of the contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark, winner of the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers and The Uglies (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, those three are available at Amazon in various editions. You can also find his work at Barnes and Noble,  Powell's Books, and Scribed. He also “friends” on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, reads at Goodreads and drinks at various bars around the East Bay. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.