matt scudder – nostalgic nyc noir

 My dad was a huge fan of the prolific author Lawrence Block. Block is best known for two series of books, one following ex NYC cop Matthew Scudder and his battles with alcohol and guilt, as well as a light-hearted series about the charming burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr, who always seems to find himself on a job in a fabulous residence that also happens to contain a dead body. Most of the Scudder novels are included with my Audible subscription, so I have been enjoying revisiting a few that I read years ago and discovering some new (to me) ones. But mostly I have enjoyed time-traveling with Scudder to New York City in the 1970s and 1980s, a time before the internet and 24-hour cable news and so many other scourges of our times.

Matthew Scudder has a tragic backstory and spends a good deal of his time in coffee shops, ginmills, and walking the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, as he tries to “do favors” for friends. After he quit the force he started drinking – and also functioning as a quasi private eye. Even under an alcohol haze he can put his considerable talents to helping track down assorted murderers and ne’er-do-wells. Block loves to underline the day-to-day repetitiveness of city life as Matt drops numerous dimes in payphones, hops into cabs or rides subways and mass transit trains all over the boroughs of New York to solve a case – all while hitting his favorite watering holes several times a day to drink his favorite concoction – coffee with a shot of bourbon – it helps him keep his drunk on while also keeping him awake.

When the Sacred Ginmill Closes (1986) by Lawrence Block

What is most interesting about Scudder is his unapologetic manner – he doesn’t pretend or aspire to be a hero. He is dogged, determined, and sometimes enacts his own sense of justice. He is the first to talk of his many flaws. Most of the talk, the dialogue in these books, is first-rate. Block has a way with words, but especially with conversation between characters. This hits its apex in When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, a story the now sober Scudder tells while looking back on his hard-drinking days with his even harder-drinking buddies.

The best audio versions of these books are by readers who really seem to capture the character of Matthew Scudder, as well as being able to act out the other characters convincingly. Strangely, the weakest reader so far has been the author himself, who voices perhaps his best-known Scudder novel, Eight Million Ways to Die. It is a pivotal book in the series, as it chronicles Scudder hitting his lowest point with the booze and taking his first tentative steps towards quitting it and joining Alcoholics Anonymous. Block’s reading of the novel at the beginning is rote – but his delivery does seem to come alive as Matt sobers up. This may have been intentional, but frankly the other books are far more enjoyable for listeners, books where the voice actors can act, not just read.

That minor quibble aside, I am really enjoying my recent foray into nostalgic NYC noir. I’ve listened to the first seven books in the series. There are seventeen novels and numerous short stories featuring this classic detective (even if Matt wouldn’t call himself one). Favorite narrators in the series so far are Alan Sklar and Mark Hammer. There are numerous non-PC attitudes expressed by many characters, as to be expected of NYC low-lifes circa ’70s-’80s, but some readers/listeners might find the racial, homophobic and ethnic slurs offensive. Matt Scudder never projects such views, but runs across or spends time with characters who do.

The Sins of the Fathers (1976) – narrated by Alan Sklar

In the Midst of Death (1976) – narrated by Alan Sklar

Time to Murder and Create (1977) – narrated by Alan Sklar

A Stab in the Dark (1981) – narrated by William Roberts

Eight Million Ways to Die (1982) – narrated by Lawrence Block

When the Sacred Ginmill Closes (1986) – narrated by Mark Hammer

Out on the Cutting Edge (1989) – narrated by Dan Butler

First published on Cannonball Read

favorite movie #77 - halloween edition: the bone collector

Favorite movies that have had an impact on me - #77 - The Bone Collector (1999) - This movie is billed more as a crime thriller, but for me The Bone Collector is pure horror. It's got lots wrong with it — an ultimately unsatisfying bad guy and some gratuitous deaths that weren't even in the original book by Jeffrey Deaver — but what sells this film for me and why I have watched it a few times is:

1. The undeniably hot hot hot chemistry between Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie 
2. The Ye Olde New York City crimes and locations based on turn of the century detective novels and magazines (the movie is more of a book-related puzzle to be solved than an action movie) 
3. The great supporting cast, including Queen Latifah, Luis Guzmán, Bobby Cannavale, Ed O'Neill, etc. 

Angelina and Denzel are so great together — they really need to consider teaming up again.

Hey, I guess it's technically a holiday film, too.

lawrence block's pulp fiction: borderline

Lawrence Block is one of the country's best-known and successful mystery and crime novelists (8 Million Ways to Die, When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart). He has created memorable characters like the hard-boiled detective Matthew Scudder and the charming burglar-turned-bookseller (and crime solver) Bernie Rhodenbarr. But many of his most ardent admirers may not know that Block started his writing career in the pulp field, frequently using pseudonyms to churn out stories mixing crime and sex. Hard Case Crime has been reissuing these lost dimestore novels, now under Block's name, and the latest, Borderline, is a doozy. Originally published in 1962 (but according to the book's copyright may have been written as early as 1958) as Border Lust by Don Holliday, Borderline centers around four people who all converge on the U.S./Mexico border, with tragic results.

Author Lawrence Block

...

Borderline and its accompanying short stories are a time capsule of what publisher's thought would excite the American male in the late '50s, early '60s. The girls are all very busty and aiming to please, and the men are hardly PC in their behavior. It must have been quite risqué at the time to include gay characters, both male and female. Pornography is so readily available these days that it is hard to imagine the role books like Borderline played in many lives, brown paper wrapping and all. But it does show what a training ground pulp fiction played for such a good and prolific writer as Lawrence Block.

You can read my complete review on Cinema Sentries

the central park five

Article first published as Book Review: The Central Park Five: The Untold Story Behind One of New York City's Most Infamous Crimes by Sarah Burns on Blogcritics.

Author Sarah Burns takes readers through the infamous 1989 Central Park Jogger case in The Central Park Five: The Untold Story Behind One of New York City's Most Infamous Crimes. Five young men, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise, Yusef Salaam, and Antron McCray, who came to be known as the Central Park Five, were all convicted of the rape of Trisha Meili. Over a decade later, the actual rapist, Matias Reyes, confessed, and the young men's convictions were overturned, but the case is still surrounded by controversy.

Burns's main agenda is to underline the racism that contributed to the arrest and conviction of the youths. She digresses into multiple historical accounts of lynchings; of innocent black men who were tortured and hanged after being accused of raping a white woman. They are sobering stories, but don't completely parallel what was believed at the time to be a gang rape of a young woman. Burns makes a good case for the police forcing confessions and not looking for an alternate suspect, but considering the multiple related crimes perpetrated by the kids that evening, and the severity of Meili's injuries, their tunnel vision, while unjust, is understandable. "The detectives who interrogated them believed that they were guilty from the start, and the legal – if questionable – tactics used by those detectives to extract the confessions, along with other subterfuges that probably crossed the line, caused a series of reactions in all the young men, and sometimes their families, which eventually led to coerced confessions."

But not just the police were bent on painting the boys as guilty before they had even been tried, "... Media coverage also employed blatantly racist language and imagery. Animal references abound. When referring to the suspects, the words Wolfpack and Wilding were used hundreds of times and came to be emblems of the case, a shorthand that nearly everyone used and that still elicits memories of the Central Park Jogger's rape in many minds."

Burns objects to the terminology, but her description of the night's events confirms that the group of teens, although not rapists, were a roving group who set out to do some damage. They attacked a man they called "the bum," a pair of tandem bicyclists, and several male joggers during the course of the evening.

I lived in New York at the time of this case. I don't remember it as being as depressed and crime-ridden as Burns reports — New York has always been a city where crime happens and people, especially women, are afraid to walk through a dark park at night. But what happened to the Central Park Jogger, the violence of the attack, and the belief that it was part of a larger series of crimes, struck fear in New Yorkers, especially women. There were, as Burns writes, countless sensationalized reports on the television news and in newspapers about "wildings" and "wolfpacks." She relates all the finger-pointing that went on in the media to keep the story alive and to continue to cast blame on the boys and anything else reporters could think of — it's the teens' fault, their parents', the state of the city, society as a whole.

The trials were a circus, with so many suspects being tried at the same time, and by less than competent lawyers. No DNA or semen samples could be connected to any of the teens in the park that night, or the ones on trial for rape. The media, including the New York Times and Daily News reported as much. A column in Newsday reported, "we are waiting to see if there is any believable evidence that will connect these kids to the crime. So far, we haven't heard any." But the weak case that the prosecution put forward didn't seem to matter.

The detectives lied. The teens lied. Meili had no memory of the attack. But it was still enough for the jury to find them guilty and for the judge to sentence them as adults. Five other teens involved in the park attacks that night all pled to lesser charges. Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise, Yusef Salaam, and Antron McCray were convicted. Because they were juveniles (apart from Korey, who was 16 when he was arrested), their terms were limited to 5-10 years. In a rare show of compassion, hard-as-nails Judge Galligan only imposed a 5-15 year sentence on Korey for assault.

Burns describes the crime spree that the real rapist, Matias Reyes, also known as the Eastside Slasher, went on prior to the attack in Central Park. He attacked and raped several women, usually in their own homes, after following them, or making some excuse to enter their apartment. He raped and killed one young pregnant woman while her three young children were locked in a nearby bedroom. He was eventually caught and covicted and sentenced to 33 years to life in prison.

Amazingly, years later Korey and Reyes found themselves more than once at the same prison facility, and in late 2001, after talking with Korey and feeling guilty, "Reyes confessed to a prison employee that someone else at the prison was serving time for a famous crime that he had in fact committed."
Although the reader knows in general how the story will come out, Burns still tells a compelling, suspenseful story.

Although the Central Park Five have all been declared innocent, the case, in some ways, is far from over. The NYPD, nervous about how the overturned convictions reflected on how they ran their original investigations, came up with their own report discounting the new findings and Reyes's confession. There is a civil case against the city, police, and prosecutors still pending. Burns has collaborated with her father, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, on a theatrical film based on her book. Hopefully this book and the film will help to finally bring to light the innocence of the Central Park Five and what happened on that night in New York all those years ago.

for women's history month ...

Article first published as Marking Women's History Month: We Still Need Strength on Blogcritics.

March is National Women's History Month, with the theme for 2011, "Our History is Our Strength."It is good to remind people of the strength and achievements of women in history, but two stories circulating on the internet lately that have become inextricably linked in my mind also point out that we may have come a long way, baby, but we still have so far to go in how women are perceived and treated. Loretta Lynn's lyrics in her album and song "We've Come a Long Way, Baby" from 1978 may state, "Up to now I've been an object made for pleasin' you — Times have changed and I'm demanding satisfaction too," but it's clear that message hasn't been heard by all.

A viral email, supposedly written by a member of the Kappa Sigma fraternity at USC expounds the notion that women are still viewed primarily as objects — maybe even less, as isolated body parts. It's a frat boy handbook, a guide for guys who want to score with chicks. The anonymous (for the moment) author constructs a detailed manifesto, designed to be distributed to his fraternity brothers, with instructions to have sex and report back to him for a "gullet report." Women are not individuals or even human beings in his view, "Note: I will refer to females as 'targets.' They aren't actual people like us men. Consequently, giving them a certain name or distinction is pointless," but solely referred to as an orifice — in his vernacular — gullets and pies. "I want raw data on who fucks and who doesn't. In conclusion the gullet report will strengthen brotherhood and help pin-point sorostitiutes more inclined to put-out."

College is still the bastion where sexual experimentation and personal growth go hand in hand with course learning. Classic frat films like Animal House and Revenge of the Nerds humorously depict the desire of frat boys to successfully hook up with chicks. But those movies aren't mean-spirited or belittling. This email, for all of its "no feeling on earth can compare to a warm piece of pie" bullshit, is an extremely calculated demeaning of women. It goes so far beyond the centerfold/porn mentality — an image of a woman as an object to get off on — that it's almost hard to believe it's real. Almost. But I think it is very real.

This email is not just a cultural blip, a trifle. As noted by commenter TeacherDee on Jezebel, " ... "Do you have any idea how many of these guys become managers, directors, politicians, CEOs and on and on and on? ... These guys do not wait till they're at a party or whatever to objectify women, they are doing it all the time. ... Men like this, in leadership positions that cause them to consider women (maternity leave, reproductive rights, domestic violence etc), do not see women as equal human beings and do not make decisions that are good for women."

Equals?

Considering the atrocious actions of another fraternity of sorts recently in Texas, it's abundantly clear that for many young men today, women aren't real people, but objects.  A young girl, aged 11, was brutally raped by at least 18 boys and men in Cleveland, Texas this past November. As if that story isn't horrific enough on its own, there are some disturbing issues raised by how the crime has been reported in the New York Times. 

At the moment the girl involved in the incident is in foster care in a different town in a different school, as both the authorities and her family fear retribution from the community and families of her attackers. Retribution for a child, a sixth grader, and her family after she had been raped, multiple times, by boys and men, schoolmates and local adults. An attack like this is a stain on any community, but is hardly new. Rape has been used throughout history, women's history, for both sexual and political humiliation. Communities, both real and virtual, need to not rally around the attackers and excuse their behavior as pack mentality by highlighting such quotes as the Times did, "How could their young men have been drawn into such an act?" Oh, the poor young men, duped and lured.

Poynter.org called out the Times for its shoddy reporting and implied viewpoint, and the Times has since issued a pale admission that maybe it didn't get the story completely right the first time. But maybe Times reporter James C. McKinley Jr.'s "angle" goes to a deeper truth that no one wants to acknowledge. As  commenter Amy suggested, if the 11-year old had been a boy, both the Times and the community would have reacted and framed this story much differently. The Times hardly mentioned the victim or her attackers. Although some of the men were definitely adults, none were identified in even the vaguest way. The Houston Chronicle wrote a much more balanced and descriptive account, "So far, 17 suspects have been charged, ranging in age from a middle-schooler to a 27-year-old. Seven are high school students, including two members of Cleveland's state-ranked basketball team. Another is the 21-year-old son of a school board member." Why so coy, New York Times?

Horrible also is that so many people, the in-denial neighbors, friends and relatives of the Texas gang-bangers, and the USC students who are sharing the "gullet report" email or dismissing it as merely a prank, are somehow promoting and abetting this treatment of women by refusing to call it out for what it is — unacceptable, shameful, horrifying. Are they that de-sensitized to this way of thinking of women? In regards to the USC email, have young women trained themselves to look the other way from an undercurrent of misogyny in order to get their rocks off? There is nothing in the USC email to indicate that the author even comprehends in the slightest way that a woman might be out cruising for sex and treating him as an object. He is either stupid or only interested in a scenario where he is the one putting a notch on his bedpost. But he isn't satisfied to be on a personal sexual journey. He has to drag all his fraternity brothers into his philosophy, to his level, "My hope is that ALL of our brothers will follow this creed with pride and distinction"

So similar in attitude to the creeps in Texas who weren't satisfied with their initial humiliation of the 11-year-old they were sexually abusing, but during an "intermission" started calling all of their friends to join in. According to the Houston Chronicle, "Not long afterward, the group fled through a back window when they heard a relative of one of the teens arriving at the blue house. The 11-year-old left behind her bra and panties as the group moved to the nearby abandoned trailer, where the assaults continued. As the men had sex with the girl, others used their cell phones to take photographs and video, police said." Not only was the young girl repeatedly physically assaulted, but the abuse continued as the event was shared and re-shared. That sort of rape is beyond misogynistic. It's strangely guy-centered sex. It's not heterosexual or even homosexual. It's just fucked up beyond belief.

Women's History Month is usually celebrated by remembering the achievements of women. But maybe we should be using Women's History Month as a signal to remember that as far as women's rights may have come, our society still has a long, long, way to go. Blaming the victim still seems to be par for the course, as the Times, a newspaper that is supposed to be held up as one of the best in the nation, had nary a description of the girl or her family or even much information about the attackers, but included observations and quotes from Cleveland, TX residents like, “Where was her mother? What was her mother thinking?” McKinley Jr. went so far as to report, "Residents in the neighborhood ... said she dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s. She would hang out with teenage boys at a playground." Why was that the focus, the highlight?