DVD Review: She Fell Among Thieves

Acorn Media, 1996. 78 minutes. Full cast at IMDB.

It is 1922 in the Spanish Pyrenees. Vanity Fair is determined to marry off her stepdaughter, Jenny, to the oily Baron Gaston in order to inherit her late husband's fortune. His will stipulated that the inheritance was to pass to the stepmother should Jenny marry before her thirtieth birthday. English gentleman Richard Chandos is fly fishing in the area, discovers the plot, and works to rescue Jenny and put an end to Vanity Fair.

This production has all the elements for a perfect melodrama: an inheritance hinging on a restrictive provision in a will, a gloomy castle, organ music, evil criminal mastermind, brutish henchmen, daring escapes, thrilling chases, fallen clergyman, innocent woman in distress, dramatic reactions, a stalwart servant of the Crown, and an English gentleman who steps up when duty calls.

I didn't know what to expect when I picked up this DVD but several items caught my eye. The case for She Fell Among Thieves says that it is "The BBC drama that launched Mystery! on PBS." It also stars one of my favorite actors, Malcolm McDowell, and was adapted for television by Tom Sharpe, a writer of satire I enjoy. that was enough to get me to purchase it.

This is a wonderfully melodramatic production. Eileen Atkins gives an over-the-top performance as the villainous Vanity Fair. She is an international criminal so frightening that men would rather stand before a firing squad than betray her. With her bone white complexion, red hair, archaic dress, and exaggerated mannerisms, she looks like a cross between Queen Elizabeth I and Cruella De Vil. She also has a talent for curling her red lips disdainfully that I admired.

Malcolm McDowell is excellent as Richard Chantos, the English gentleman. He plays the role with the right amount of earnestness, a man willing to step up, without question, when duty calls.

Michael Jayston is Mansel, the British agent who has been tracking Vanity Fair and recruits Chantos. I thought he looked familiar and suspect I saw him as Valeyard on Doctor Who.

Dunsford Yates wrote eight Chantos thrillers in which Mansel was also a recurring character. Wikipedia has this interesting statement about the Chantos novels,

It is the Chandos novels which are especially referred to by Alan Bennett when he mentions Dornford Yates in Forty Years On (1972): "Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery with Violence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature".

I love that phrase, "Snobbery with Violence."

I give this production high marks. It is clever, fun, and doesn't take itself seriously. The dialog and acting were well suited for the kind of story presented. As for the cast, well, check their filmographies at IMDB. The combined experience of these actors is staggering.

Question:
Has anyone read the Dunsford Yates' Chantos novels? I have a feeling that Sharpe was having a bit of fun with the florid style of books written at that time.

Review: Amberville, Tim Davys

HarperCollins, 2009. ISBN 978-0-06-162512-1, 343 pages. First U.S. edition
First published in Swedish in 2007 by Albert Bonniers Forlag. Translated by Paul Norlen.

Let me say upfront that I enjoyed this book but it is also one of the oddest I've read in a while. It isn't a book that you can read literally. Amberville refers to one of four districts in Mollisan Town which is populated by living stuffed animals that have the bodily functions you attribute to living creatures. There is no attempt to relate the world of Amberville with our world, it just is.

I first thought that Amberville was going to be a crime story that used stuffed animals in place of humans. While it has noir and criminal element it turned out to be something very different.

I admired the way the author was able to establish a logical consistency within an absurd construct. If there was a world of animate stuffed animals this is how it might work. The animals are not born, they are delivered from the factory. The type of animals that the parents represent have no relationship to the type of children they receive thus Eric Bear and his twin Teddy are the children of a dog and a hippo. When animals wear out, their names appear on a Death List, the Chauffeurs pick them up, and they disappear forever. In between they go to school, grow up (mentally, they arrive from the factory the physical size they will always be), eat, sleep, drink too much and get hangovers, marry, and hold jobs.

Eric Bear is given an ultimatum by a former employer, the gangster Nicholas Dove. He is to find The Death List and remove Nicholas' name from it or Eric's wife Emma Rabbit will be torn apart by Dove's gorilla henchmen. Eric assembles the gang from his shady past to help him find the Death List. The gang consists of the violently unpredictable Tom-Tom Crow, Sam Gazelle who is into BDSM, and the untrustworthy Snake Marek. Together they try to find out the secret of the Chauffeurs and through them, they hope, the Death List.

Do not think that stuffed animals = children's book. This is most definitely not a book for children. It is an allegory that uses the Death List to critically examine religious belief and faith and duplicity within organized religion. Related themes include morality, loyalty, and what it means to be family. Viewed as an allegory, the reader can relate Amberville to our world without stumbling over the cast of stuffed animal characters.

I will be interested to see if the author returns to this world.

Notes: The Girl Who Played With Fire, Stieg Larsson

MacLehose Press (Imprint of Quercus), 2009. Translated from Swedish by Reg Keeland. ISBN 9781847245571, 569 pages

I may be the last hard core crime fiction enthusiast to read The Girl Who Played With Fire (THWPWF) so I am not planning a detailed review and analysis. See below for resources. Instead, I will provide a few notes that occurred to me as I read. There may be spoilers ahead, be warned.

• I liked The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, detailed family histories and all, but enjoyed TGWPWF more because it has the police procedural element.


• Speaking of procedures, why didn't the police discover that Bjurman had a cabin? Surely they would have dug into his financials.


• Also liked getting the back-story on Salander. Pretty horrible. I wasn't expecting the biggest revelation about her background.


• What else besides Asperger's affects Salander's behavior?


• I wonder if Larsson read Helen Tursten's Detective Inspector Huss? I was struck by the similarities between the sexist detective Jonny Blom in ...Huss and the rabidly sexist Hans Faste in TGWPWF. Jonny gets slapped by female detective Birgitta Moberg and Hans by female detective Sonja Modig.


• I really want to read the third book, The Girl who Kicked the Hornets' Nest. I want Salander to find peace, be friends with Blomkvist again, and take down the remaining people who did her wrong. Quercus will be getting more money from me this Fall.


• I liked to references to Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking which I got from the library so I can understand about Pippi and Kalli.


• Salander hitting upon the solution to Fermat's Last Theorem while sneaking though the woods was a bit much, still fun though.

Maxine considerately collected links about this book including one to her own review here PETRONA: That girl who played with fire
And there are also these sites that have extensive reviews. If I forgot anyone, let me know.
International Crime Noir: Comments on The Girl Who Played with Fire, by Stieg Larsson
Material Witness: REVIEW: The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson
It's Criminal: The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson

Review: Nuclear Jellyfish, Tim Dorsey

William Morrow, 2009. ISBN 978-0-06-143266-8. 307 pages.

I have been slack lately and find myself with six book to write up if I am to log all the crime fiction I read this year.

If you have read any of the previous ten book in the Serge Storms series then this one won't have any surprises. It is the same formula: Serge and Coleman race around Florida to satisfy Serge's need to visit every site in Florida where anything historical (as defined by Serge) happened - Lynyrd Skynyrd figures in this time; Serge has some new scheme - this time it's Internet travel advice; Serge continues his serial killer ways by dispatching unpleasant people in different and inventive ways; there is some parallel criminal activity going on that somehow involves Serge; Coleman consumes alcohol and drugs in prodigious amounts.

In Nuclear Jellyfish, Serge Storms has turned his attention to the Internet with a renegade travel blog. He wants visitors to experience the real Florida and has useful advice such as how to identify Barracuda hookers (they suddenly appear in hotel parking lots) and the best place to spot John Travolta. There is also a professional robbery crew that will inevitably collide with Serge. As is usual, the story careens along at high speed with reader mostly interested in what outlandish thing Serge will say or do and how will he off the next person who offends his sense of ethics and courtesy.

There are still some laugh-out-loud and "I wonder if that would work" moments but overall I would say that this book is only for die-hard Serge Storms fans.

Review: Mixed Blood, Roger Smith

Henry Holt and company, 2009. ISBN 978-0-8050-8875-5. 304 pages.

Sometimes, what I really want to read is a scorched earth, no prisoners, no quarter, no good guys just degrees of badness, thriller. It's like running Sodium hydroxide through the plumbing, it cleans out the pipes. This is why I was happy that I came across Roger Smith's Mixed Blood.

Jack Burn has a gambling problem. Back in the U.S., a large debt put him in the middle of a robbery that left a cop dead. Jack escapes with a large part of the loot and takes his pregnant wife and young son to Cape Town, South Africa. With a new identity and lots of money, Jack feels pretty safe until a random home invasion by a couple of drug dealing gang-bangers puts him in the sights of Rudi "Gatsby" Barnard, a physically and morally repugnant and corrupt cop. Rudi senses that there is more to Jack than just another American expat. Also drawn into the picture are vengeance seeking ex-con Benny Mongrel and Zulu police investigator Disaster Zondi who wants to settle an old score and at the same time take down a bad cop.

Mixed Blood is a solid thriller with the plot, action, and violence that make this type of thriller enjoyable. But while I thoroughly enjoyed it as a thriller, there is something much more that makes it stand out for me. This is the role South Africa plays in the story. Consider Rudi "Gatsby" Barnard. His nickname comes from the signature South African sandwich, the gatsby, that he favors (see the photo). With his horrible body odor, sumo-sized gut, air bag-sized butt cheeks and a love of "Jesus Christ, gatsbys, and killing people" you might dismiss him as a caricature of the bad cop. But Rudi is a holdover from South Africa under apartheid. Do a Google search with the terms apartheid and apartheid hit squads and you will see that Rudi is based on fact.

Cape Town itself is a character in the story. Gatsby rules the aeolian sand flat known as Cape Flats. It blasted by winds in the summer and many areas flood in the winter. Here are the government-built townships where non-whites were forced to move; the Flats were apartheid's dumping ground. They are a place of terrible poverty, drug abuse, and gang violence. In contrast, Jack Burn and his family live on the wealthy Atlantic side. I recommend a visit to Roger's web site where there is a video narrated by him. There is also a slide show of images of Cape Town and Cape Flats that will give you a good picture of the settings in the book.

I enjoyed Mixed Blood as a straight-up thriller and also for the intense sense of place that Roger was able to weave into the story.

Recommended highly for readers who like thrillers and don't mind a bit of stomach churning violence.