COUNTERPART. “The Crossing.” Starz, 60 minutes. 10 December 2017 (season 1, episode 1). J. K. Simmons (in a dual role), and a large ensemble cast, both primary and recurring. Created by and screenplay: Justin Marks. Director: Morten Tyldum,
Shown on the premium channel Starz for two 10-episode seasons, the premise is both simple and complicated. The short description is that a parallel world to our has been secretly tapped into, and while much is the same in the two Earths, the paths for each have been rapidly diverging. The long version takes up the entirety of this, the entire pilot episode, without much of a direction of where the story is going to go from there.
I’ve listed only J. K. Simmons as the star of the series, as the roles of everyone else revolve only around him. On our side he’s a downbeaten schlub for the company he works for, without no hope for promotion and not much idea what the company he works for actually does (which is tom monitor the point at which the two wolds meet). On the other side he’s the aggressive agent who’s been sent to our side to pave the way for – what exactly, the details will come later.
As an actor, J. K. Simmos is a revelation. Just by body language alone, you know immediately which Howard Silk he is. It is an utter delight just to see him in action. I’m not a big fan of parallel worlds story lines such as this (I stopped watching Fringe when the emphasis changed from relationships between the characters on our side to uninteresting events happening on the other), but at the moment I’m OK with watching the next in this series, just to see where it’s going from here.
NOTE: This review from the past was first posted on this blog on January 28, 2014. I’ve been prompted to reprint it because (would you believe it) this past week I started reading the hardcover edition of it, and I was a quarter of the way through (and enjoying it) when it said to myself, by golly, I think I’ve read this before. And lo and behold, I had. Here is the review again, complete with previous comments.
The detective in The Kissed Corpse, and the earlier Mum’s the Word for Murder, is Jerry Burke, recently brought in to oversee the El Paso, Texas, police department.
These are the only two books that Burke and Asa Baker (as narrator) appear in. Asa Baker the writer, is in reality Davis Dresser, of course, who is, as you all know (I’m sure), far better known as Brett Halliday, creator of PI Michael Shayne. The latter first appeared in Dividend on Death in 1939, the same year as this book, and either Shayne became instantly popular or else Halliday/Dresser found more possibilities in writing about a Miami-based PI than he did about an El Paso police detective.
The style of writing in this last adventure of Jerry Burke, then, has the strong aroma of the pulps, at least in the beginning, but as the story goes on, and as some of the wilder activity dies down, it begins to resemble more and more the formal detective story A small houseful of suspects, that is to say, with the detective(s) trying to uncover the clue that will finally revela the killer’s identity.
Dead are the two participants in a scheme to gain expropriation fees for Americans after Mexico has taken over their oil lands — one a soldier of fortune violently opposed to the idea, the other the rich American behind the plot. Complicating matters is the tough female reporter that “Baker” finds himself falling in love with, but who may actually be the killer. (It is her lipstick that is found on the first body, as well as a strange symbol of a double-barred cross.)
If I found Jerry Burke and Asa Baker rather bland, it’s no surprise, since I’ve generally found Mike Shayne to be in the same category. The plot and the several twists are interesting, however, and any pulp detective fan who can find this book should read it. I think Laura Yates had possibilities, too, and it’s too bad we’ll never hear about what kind of excitement she got into next. (That she simply settled down and married Asa Baker is a possibility, but it’s one I refuse to dwell upon.)
— Reprinted from Mystery*File 37, no date given, slightly revised.
Editorial Comment: Mike Nevins reviewed Mum’s the Word for Murder in one of his columns for this blog not too long ago. Check it out here.
Two very different takes on the story, each memorable in its own way.
Both deal with an isolated frontier community imprisoned by snow and mud, a tough rancher willing to kill for more land, and a band of outlaws just barely under the control of a hardened chief, who take over the town. But from there on, the book and the film go different ways.
In Wells’ novel, the Rancher Blaise Starrett (The name seems a deliberate reference to Shane, released two years earlier.) has a foreman, Dan Murdock, who refuses to follow his boss’s murderous program and gets fired for his scruples. From that point on, Dan becomes the book’s central character. There are minor digressions to limn the thoughts and actions of townsfolk and desperadoes, but mostly we follow his efforts to a) unseat the outlaws; b) keep his neighbors and those he loves from gettin’ they fool heads blowed off; c) thwart Starrett’s lethal scheme; and d) get in out of the damn weather, which veers from mudslide to blizzard as only Wyoming weather can.
Murdock
doesn’t always succeed at this, which lends a real sense of uncertainty to the
outcome, as we follow his progress through fights & frustrations to a
dan-dan-dandy final shootout between the citizens and a last, lethal gunman who
bids fair to kill them all. Wells has a gift for detailing fast action and
dangerous personalities with equal flair, and the result is a book that kept me
up reading past my bedtime. Which is why I became a Grown-up.
In the film however, Dan Murdock(played by Nehemiah Persoff) gets blind drunk early on and pretty much drops out of the action as Starrett (Robert Ryan at his toughest) decides to gun down the inconvenient nesters in a “fair†fight, only to have his plans smattered (“smattered?â€I like that. I think I’ll keep it.) his plans smattered by the dirtiest-looking bunch of renegades to hit the screen till The Wild Bunch.
These baddies seem on the edge of smattering up the whole town, but they’re held in tenuous check by Burl Ives, who clings to the fantasy that they are a disciplined bunch and he their leader — and Burl Ives is about the only actor possessed of a screen presence imposing enough to carry it off. He actually projects a sense of power over the likes of Jack Lambert, Lance Fuller and Paul Wexler (more on him later) while they convey a sense of incipient chaos you can feel coming through the screen.
Oh – did I mention Ive’s character is dying of a bullet wound? And if he goes, his owlhoots look all set on rape, murder, and wholesale destruction — for starters.
It’s all
very tense, but I have to say it also gets awfully confining after a while,
with so much happening indoors. Even when they get outside, the landscape is
flat and uninteresting, and I found myself growing restless until…
Well I’ll just say the last part of Day of the Outlaw is spectacular and literally chilling, with Robert Ryan and the outlaws struggling through a blizzard to an eerie, silent, haunting climax.
Wexler’s star never rose high nor shined brightly in Hollywood, but I recall him fondly as the sinister butler in The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters and Henry Daniell’s lip-sewn gofer in The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake. Here he plays a mixed-race desperado whose fixed stare threatens to steal the show from all the better actors.
Films are
too often judged and condemned based on their faithfulness to the book, but I
found this one just as enjoyable in its own way. And when I say that about a
film from a book I couldn’t put down, well… Try them both.
MARY MONICA PULVER – Original Sin. Peter Brichter #4. Walker, hardcover, 1991. Diamond, paperback, 1993.
This is a mystery novel that fellow blogger TomCat recently reviewed on his blog. Not only was what he had to say about it rather positive, but (and this almost never happens, and I mean never) I found a my copy of it the very next day in a box of books I just happened to be going through.
It’s also a book included in Brian Skupin’s recent update of Bob Adey’s classic reference book of of Impossible Crimes (and if you’re interested in Locked Room mysteries and the like, this is a book you absolutely need to have, posthaste).
And even more than that, Original Sin has all kinds of ingredients in it to intrigue anyone who loves old-fashioned puzzle-type detective stories: (1) it takes place at Christmas, in (2) an old manor house with (3) a detailed drawing of all three floors. More than that, the group gathered there together are (4) snowed in, and at the crucial moment, (5) the lights go out.
Luckily the story does not take place in the 1920s or 30s, since the house does have a backup generator that can take care of most of the house. Dead is an elderly second cousin of Kori Brichter, wife of police sergeant Peter Brichter, whose fourth recorded case this is. It seems that while remodeling the house the two of them have just bought, she has also been doing some genealogical research into her family tree.
But as she is talking to her cousin in private, she leaves the room momentarily, and that’s when the aforementioned lights go out. When she returns, the woman is dead, struck in the head by some large (6) blunt instrument. Problem is, there is no blunt instrument in the room, and tracing the whereabouts of everyone in the house, no one could have been in the room but the dead woman.
The big plus in this tale is how well worked out the woman’s death is. I would have liked more specific attention to have paid to the mystery, however. Perhaps the author believed that if too much emphasis were placed on it, it might have been unraveled too quickly, but I think the secret was sound enough to withstand a little more scrutiny by those involved in the story.
Not so good, from my point of view, is that all of the suspects, save maybe one, seems to have been friends, relatives, and acquaintances for a long time, and Original Sin was just another group adventure for them. When the circle of would-be killers is narrowed down so much thusly, it not only makes the first time reader of one of their stories feel a little left out (me),but it makes the observant one (not me) think a lot more about not whodunit, necessarily, but howdunit a whole lot more.
A quibble, perhaps. Original Sin remains a solidly constructed Impossible Crime story, a definite throwback to the days were puzzle stories were de rigeur.
CAGE OF EVIL. United Artists, 1960. Ronald Foster, Pat Blair, Harp McGuire, John Maxwell, Preston Hanson, Helen Kleeb, plus uncredited: Eve Brent, Henry Darrow, Ted Knight. Director: Edward L. Cahn.
Mostly a play-it-by-the-numbers crime film, with a largely lackluster cast, cheap sets, and no more than workmanlike camera work and direction – all of the ingredients of a mediocre movie, in other words. And yet, in spite of all the odds against it, the movie did manage to keep me watching the whole way through, and these days of abandoning movies quickly on my part, that has to mean something.
Part of it may have to do with the fact that no matter how much star power the cast may have been lacking, they were all pros at the business they were in, which was telling a story both clearly and cleanly. In perhaps his only leading role in a film, Ronald Foster plays a police detective who keeps getting passed over for promotion, mostly for being very bad at the PR end of things. (He starts slugging possible witnesses when they don’t speak up right away.)
So it comes as no surprise when he’s assigned to get close to the girl friend (the rather statuesque Patricia Blair) of the hood who’s suspected of pulling off a jewel robbery, we already know one major route the story is going to take. Nor are we wrong.
Nor, of course, do things go well for the two of them, in true noir fashion. Even though you know what’s coming. what’s still a certain amount of fun is seeing it happen, and just how.
Just got the word from Mark that everything but two images has made the transition over. I think there’s been an upgrade to WordPress in the meantime, as this editing page is different, but I can handle that. Otherwise all of the links, embedded videos and so on are here at the new location safe and sound. Three cheers to Mark and his colleague at school Nate!
To a new hosting system, that is. If all goes well, everything on this blog will show up on the new site just as it is right now with (fingers crossed) nothing lost.
I don’t know whether the blog will be visible while the transition is taking place, or if everything will disappear for a while until we’re back again. I suspect the latter, so if that happens, please don’t panic. I’m not sure how long it will take, but everything should reappear as soon as the transfer’s done.
GARY DISHER – Peace. Paul Hirschhausen #2. Text Publishing, paperback, 2019. Setting: Contemporary Australia.
First Sentence: This close to Christmas, the mid-north sun had some heft to it, house bricks, roofing iron, asphalt and the red-dirt plains giving back all the heat of all the days.
It has been a year since Constable Paul Hirschhausen was branded a whistleblower and transferred to a rural territory covering hundreds of square kilometers. Except for his lover Wendy, and her daughter Katie, he still doesn’t feel welcome in Tiverton. However, between Brenda Flann driving into the front of the local bar, a stolen ute containing stolen metal, a ranch tragedy, a woman clearly hiding from someone, and a discovery which brings in way too many outside cops, and results in Hirsch forming an unexpected alliance.
Disher has a real skill for descriptions– “He liked to walk every morning, the dawn a time to cherish with only the birds busy, the air quite still and everything sharply etched. …by 9 a.m. the mid-north would be lying limp and stunned beneath a molten sun and the overnight reports of villainy, idiocy and shitty luck would have landed on his desk.”
Even his style reflects the location as the story begins more as a series of vignettes rather than one straight-line mystery. These are interesting and give a real sense of the types of things with which Hirsch has to deal, but one finds oneself waiting. It’s interesting because it’s so real.
Never fear, when the pieces start coming together, one realizes things aren’t as tranquil as seemed and the level of involvement turns to high. “Peace inside. That’s all a cop wants at Christmas, he thought. Not a heavenly peace, just a general absence of mayhem.”
Hirsch is such a well-done character. Although assigned to this one-man territory, he has the instincts of a city cop— “…the house felt unoccupied rather than touched by junkie-offspring violence, so he left it at that. It was a sense all cops developed, knowing when a situation behind closed doors was right or wrong.” –but the compassion of a community policeman. There is a nice balance between his former colleagues who dislike or dismiss him and those who know and respect his capabilities. This establishes a basis for future relationship development.
The story has its share of dark elements, suspense, and unexpected twists, all of which are perfectly executed. Peace is the second book in this series, with Bitter Wash Road (2013) having been the first. One need not have read that book to enjoy this one, but Disher is such a good writer, why not?
Peace is a thoroughly engrossing story shattering one’s perceptions of a peaceful small town and of knowing whom one can trust. It builds slowly with a number of seemingly unrelated incidents, only to have the pieces coalesce to a well-done ending.
THE GOOD WIFE “Pilot.” 22 September 2009. Julianna Margulies, Chris Noth, Christine Baranski, Archie Panjabi, Matt Czuchry. Guest Cast: Katie Walder. Created and written by Robert King) & Michelle King. Director: Charles McDougall.
I remember when the series started and I thought it sounded interesting — but not interesting enough for it to last more than the usual three months or so that new shows are almost always gone by. Why invest any time in it, when it will history by Christmas?
It was on for seven years.
You were probably way ahead of me. You also probably know the premise of the show. Just in case not, however, it begins with a scene seen all too often in this country. A man, a former State’s Attorney in Illinois, has been forced to resign because of corruption and a sex scandal. His wife, Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) is forced to stand on the stage next to hm as he apologizes but promises to keep fighting the charges.
Six months later, Alicia, forced to go out and work for a living, is the new lady hiree at a prestigious law firm. Her first case is a pro bono one: a young woman is accused of shooting and killing her ex-husband in a parking garage. She claims that it was done by someone in a drive-by pickup truck, but neither the security guard nor a surveillance camera saw or shows such a truck anywhere in the vicinity.
An impossible crime, in a way, except that the ex-wife was there, and the police have no interest in pursuing their investigation any further.
Truthfully I liked the mystery more than I did the background story, and apparently (from looking at the plot lines on Wikipedia) the background story goes on and on through the whole run, almost soap opera style, except that it was done with a lot more production values and style.
Which is not to put down soap operas. The people who work on them do yeoman work, under tough conditions, lower budgets and awfully tight time constraints.
As for The Good Wife, I’m enough intrigued that I’ll watch another episode or so, but I can’t imagine, now that I’m so far behind, that I’ll ever find the time to go the whole seven yards. How far I go, I think will depend on whether the next few episodes have completed stories or not, as well as the ongoing drama.
QUICKSAND. Overseas FilmGroup, 2003. Michael Keaton , Michael Caine, Judith Godreche, Rade Serbedzija. Director; John Mackenzie.
Even though I’m a big Michael Caine fan, I’d not heard of this movie until I spotted it on Amazon Prime Video this past weekend. That’s what having only a direct-to-video release will do to a movie, no matter who’s in it.
Not that Michael Caine has much of a role in it, but even so, it’s quite an enjoyable one, mixing the world of high finance with, what else, money laundering, this time through a film company that’s supposedly making a movie in the south of France. Michael Caine plays an on-the-skids movie star who’s there only as figure head to keep legitimate money coming in.
Michael Keaton plays the hard-nosed by-the-book head accountant back in the States when flags come up, suggesting something has gone wrong. Ad indeed it has. Once on the ground and investigating, he’s finds himself the victim of a frame-up, that of killing the head of the Nice police force.
Assisting him is the company’s CFO, played by Judith Godreche, whom I’ve never seen in a movie before, but who reminded me of a young French Julia Roberts. If I can I’ll see if I can’t watch her some of the other moviees she’s made.
Michael Keaton does OK in his role of our hero on the run, and if pressed, I’d say better than OK. His character seems to have resources you would not think a nerdish business-orieted kind of guy would have, given that he started the movie being portrayed as exactly that. Sometimes, though, characters are forced to grow in ability and what they can do when they have to, right before our eyes, and we the viewers fall for the gambit every time.
It is difficult to make such a movie as this and not make it fun to watch, and that is precisely what happens here. They don’t make a lot of movies like this any more, or if and when they do, how does one ever find out about them?
