Hammer: One Lonely Night

/ Alex Good / 9 Comments

1951, the beginnings of the Cold War. Or the cold war, as it’s rendered here, as it hadn’t gotten around to being capitalized yet. (An aside: it’s thought that George Orwell was the first to use the term “cold war,” in 1945, and he didn’t capitalize it either.) Mike Hammer is going for a lonely walk that takes him across what I think is the George Washington Bridge, feeling morose after having been reamed out by an angry judge. It seem the Judge, a figure who will continue to haunt Mike throughout the novel, disapproves of Mike’s brutal methods. Standing behind the Judge might we see a shadowy cabal of book reviewers and the literary establishment taking their shots? I think it likely.

I’ve mentioned before how toxic a fellow Mike Hammer is, and how so many of the babes he encounters soon wind up dead. Indeed, this is something he frequently takes himself to task for, and is the excuse he gives in Vengeance is Mine! for not committing himself to Velda. Well, in One Lonely Night this fatal effect is felt immediately as Mike meets a beauty in distress who is being pursued by a gunman who is both a “dirty son-of-a-bitch” and a “fat little slob.” Spillane does like to pile it on when it comes to invective. Mike shoots the gunman and the girl, who is terrified of Mike, jumps off the bridge. So that didn’t take long!

Just to keep with this theme for a bit, there’s another babe that Mike meets who winds up being shot, but she actually gets to live. I think because we want to see her live to recognize the errors of her ways. And that’s all the curveball you’re going to get here.

The plot is chaotic, and more than a little far-fetched. Basically the two people on the bridge connect up with a ring of Commies who are getting together to plot . . . a bunch of dastardly Commie things, no doubt. You will be unsurprised to learn that Mike Hammer, despite having no interest in politics (“I haven’t voted since they dissolved the Whig party”) has an instinctual, homicidal hatred of Commies. And so does Velda. They are the Red Menace. They are a “tumor.” They are “a scurvy bunch of lice.” They are “dirty, filthy Red bastards!” You get the picture. It was the time of the Red Scare, a historical fact even if the Red Menace was a bogeyman of the explicitly “cartoon kind” presented here. Lots of upper-class pansies cosplaying as revolutionaries, like the loser the society beauty gets engaged to. For readers of Dorothy Sayers he sounds a lot like Goyles from Clouds of Witness or Harriet in “The Fascinating Problem of Uncle Meleager’s Will.” (An aside: British mystery stories of the time found socialists and Communists a source of fun. It was in America post-War that they became a threat to the existence of Western civilization.) Anyway, the loser I mentioned in this novel is a “down-and-out artist who made speeches for the Communist Party and was quite willing to become a capitalist by marriage. He was a conscientious objector during the war though he probably could have made 4-F without trouble.” 4-F, in case you’re wondering, is a designation that someone is not qualified for military service due to medical, psychological, or moral reasons. But the main knock against this guy is that he’s not a true believer in Communist ideology, like the Red killers who are Mike’s real nemeses.

Joined to this plot that has Mike as Cold Warrior is another parallel story involving an up-and-coming politician, someone who is ready to take it to the Reds. Unfortunately, said politician is being blackmailed by a psycho twin brother. How these two plotlines intersect is where things get ridiculous, and I won’t try to explain. Suffice it to say that Mike piles up a lot of bodies before he’s through. He even has to break out a Tommy gun for the climactic slaughter. This is when he has gone completely kill-crazy, a Berserker fugue state where we get interior monologues like this: “Kill ‘em left and right . . . Kill, kill, kill, kill!” This is war, after all. “I was a killer and I was looking forward to killing again. I wanted them all, every one of them from bottom to top and especially the one at the top even if I had to go to the Kremlin to do it.”

That’s a tough hill to climb, but . . .

But some day, maybe, some day I’d stand on the steps of the Kremlin with a gun in my fist and I’d yell for them to come out and if they wouldn’t I’d go in and get them and when I had them lined up against the wall I’d start shooting until all I had left was a row of corpses that bled on the cold floors and in whose thick red blood would be the promise of a peace that would stick for more generations than I’d live to see.

A little of this goes a long way, and there’s a lot of it. There’s also a lot of soft, yielding babes throwing themselves into Mike’s arms. Even after Mike has apparently proposed to Velda, giving her a ring. Basically we ping-pong between scenes of sex and violence, so quickly that at times the two start to blur. Mike fantasizes about administering corporal punishment to one babe and gets as far as ripping her clothes off and getting set to enjoy “a naked woman and a leather belt” but she is shot through the window just as he swings the first crack of the belt across her thighs. Those dirty Reds again! It’s like Commie interruptus! Then later Mike will rescue Velda from perverse Red tortures, as she is being whipped while hanging “stark naked” from the rafters. A moment that made its way onto the cover even. Signet knew what they were selling.

If this were all there were to Spillane I don’t think I’d bother with him. You can see why so many critics were disgusted, and why Hammer was so popular. But Spillane could write. While there are sloppy moments when minor characters seem to drop in out of nowhere, there are also places where some care seems to have been exercised. The way the torn green Communist Party membership cards are described as twins, or how the movie Mike goes to see is about a man with a split personality, play into the good vs. evil twin motif. Or the way Velda is described as “a great big, luxurious cat leaning against the desk. A cat with gleaming black hair darker than the night and a hidden body of smooth skin that covered a wealth of rippling, deadly muscles that were poised for the kill. The desk light made her teeth an even row of merciless ivory, ready to rip and tear.” That may be boilerplate, but two pages later, as Mike and Velda are making their way through a foggy alley filled with rats we get this:

Soft furry things would squeal and run across our feet wherever we disturbed the junk lying around. Tiny pairs of eyes would glare at us balefully and retreat when we came closer. A cat moved in the darkness and trapped a pair of eyes that had been paying too much attention to us and the jungle echoed with a mad death cry.

As the scene develops Velda will actually kill a Red in the apartment they’re breaking into. We don’t have to reach far back to make the connection: Velda is the killer big cat in this urban jungle.

The other thing about Spillane that makes him such an easy read is his demotic style. As you’d expect, some of the language has changed in the last 75 years, but a plain piece of writing like this sentence still feels fresh: “It was a little before noon, so I hopped in the heap and tooled it up Broadway and angled over to the hotel where it cost me a buck to park in an unloading zone with a guy to cover for me.” Tooling one’s heap isn’t something we’d say today, but I think we still get a clear picture of what’s happening here. And with the language comes a certain vision of the traffic on the street, a vision without any Toyotas or Teslas in sight.

Even giving credit where it’s due though, I found this a slog of a read. The politics are crude and repetitive, it’s easy to figure out what the twist at the end is going to be, and the emphasis on sex and violence even managed to put me off. One gets the feeling that Spillane was just banging these out at this point, reducing the series to a lowest common denominator of character and plot.

Hammer index

Libraries, old and new

/ Alex Good / 9 Comments

This is the main branch of my hometown’s public library. The building has been there a long time. I remember going there when I was eight years old.

They are currently building a new library just a block away. It’s coming along nicely and looks like it’s going to be really big. On this particular morning the police were driving around a lot because there’d been an accident just a road over. (You can click on the pics to make them bigger.)

Parasyte: Full Color Collection 1

/ Alex Good / 9 Comments

Parasyte Full Color Collection 1

Another popular manga series, this time in a deluxe colored version. Hitoshi Iwaaki’s Parasyte was originally serialized from 1989 to 1994, when it appeared in black-and-white. Having success (over 25 million copies in circulation by 2022), it would later go on to spawn some spin-offs and be made into a TV series and some films.

As you probably know, I’m not the world’s biggest manga fan, and Parasyte shares some of the main faults that characterize the form, at least for me. The two I’d highlight are (1) the lazy artwork, with indecipherable fight scenes, generic figure, and characters who somehow fail to register any emotion at all on their faces even when supposedly experiencing incredible shocks, and (2) the odd blend of violence and gore with leering, juvenile sexual elements.

But even with those strikes against it I enjoyed Parasyte. It’s has a good basic story, with alien spores falling to Earth, where they immediately crawl inside the brains of other, host life forms. One of them tries to get into the brain of highschool student Shinichi Izumi but he stops it and it can only inhabit his right hand. He calls it “Migi” (Japanese for “right”), and they share a consciousness and talk to each other so that Migi is able to explain to Shinichi what is going on. Migi also has special alien powers that allow him to fight with other aliens. This is important as the aliens can sense each other and they’re not happy that Migi and Shinichi form a human-alien hybrid. And these aliens are very dangerous, as they have the ability to split open and unwind in fantastic ways that allows them to tear humans apart and eat them. This leads the newspapers to be full of reports of the “mincemeat murders,” because that’s all that’s left of people once the aliens are done with them.

What I liked about Parasyte is that it avoids the usual manga trap of just repeating the same situations over and over, with the hero taking on progressively more powerful bad guys. The story is more complicated than that, with a number of interesting pieces that introduce some real drama, like Shinichi’s relationship with his parents, a would-be girlfriend, and a sexy teacher who is an alien. There are also allegorical and political messages in play, from the way Shinichi’s battle with Migi’s impulses stands in for anxiety over masturbation to the environmental angle that, in this first volume at least, is only hinted at.

The upshot being that this is a manga that I actually want to continue reading. High praise!

Graphicalex

TCF: A Dark Night in Aurora

/ Alex Good / 9 Comments

A Dark Night in Aurora: Inside James Holmes and the Colorado Mass Shootings
By William H. Reid

The crime:

During a midnight showing of the film The Dark Knight Rises at a cinema in Aurora, Colorado on July 20, 2012 James Holmes went on a shooting rampage, killing twelve people and injuring some seventy others. In 2015 Holmes was convicted on 24 counts of first-degree murder, 140 counts of attempted first-degree murder. He was sentenced to twelve consecutive life sentences without possibility of parole for the murders and an additional 3, 318 years for the lesser included offenses. This was the longest sentence ever handed down in U.S. history at the time.

The book:

I think William H. Reid introduces the story well by pointing out how special a case this was, offering “a rare opportunity to study a mentally ill but very intelligent, highly organized murderer, the extraordinary events that led to his crimes, the shootings, the trial, and its sequelae.”

A Dark Night in Aurora exists because James Holmes survived. He wasn’t killed by the police; he didn’t commit suicide. The elements of the shootings, a web of important precursors, and Holmes himself received extraordinary scrutiny during the three years in which the prosecution and defense prepared for a trial that would last for months.

Reid himself was a part of that extraordinary scrutiny, being appointed by the judge presiding over Holmes’s trial to offer a non-partisan psychiatric assessment of Holmes. To do this he received access to tens of thousands of pages of evidence as well as to Holmes himself, whom he interviewed on several occasions for many hours. Interviews that can now be watched, in full, on YouTube, if you’re interested in that sort of thing. I watched some of them and found it all very dull. But Reid’s point stands: it’s not very often that we have such an amount of material, both first and second hand, to draw on.

I also think Reid winds things up as he should with a discussion of “The Search for Why?” The “why?” of crime is a big part of why we read books like these, and it looms especially large in a case as extreme as this.

Not resolving the why can be very unsettling. We want our world to be orderly, predictable, and safe, not frightening. We don’t want the person next door to be able to turn homicidal all of a sudden, especially without some good reason. We don’t want danger to lurk in theaters or nightclubs or schools or workplaces, but if it occasionally does, we want that danger to be somehow logical, not to be so random that we get nervous every time we sit down in an auditorium and feel the lights dim. More broadly, we want to feel settled, comfortable with some explanation that fits the way we go through life.

This very human need makes it all the more confounding that there’s no obvious answer to the question of why James Holmes blew up in the way he did. While Reid asks the question, and on one level (that of an expert in forensic psychiatry) is well positioned to supply an answer, his ultimate diagnosis of “schizotypal personality” is dry and unrevealing. I also found it to be inadequate as an explanation of what went wrong with Holmes, though that may be asking too much. I think Reid might say that it is, but as a true-crime reader I’ll happily dive in.

Holmes came from a comfortably well-off family and his childhood doesn’t seem to have raised any particular red flags. He was bright and did well at school. Well enough to eventually get accepted into a graduate program studying neuroscience at the University of Colorado. While people who knew him found him a bit odd, the fact is he had friends, including girlfriends, one of whom briefly became a sexual partner. He wasn’t an incel and while he spent time on dating sites seems not to have obsessed over romantic partnerships. His relationship with his girlfriend is described by Reid as “fairly superficial,” and there’s no evidence their break-up caused him any heartache. In none of his writings or interviews did he express a hatred of women.

He had no criminal record or history of violence, and until he began preparation for his “mission” seems not to have had the slightest interest in guns. He spent a couple of months prior to July 20 at firing ranges getting used to the weapons he’d bought, but on the fatal night had to give up shooting people as the result of a simple jam that he couldn’t clear. In other ways he was a caricature of the nerd who overthinks practical points. The explosive booby-traps he rigged in his apartment were ingenious in a Rube Goldberg sort of way, but none of them worked.

He doesn’t seem to have had any desire for fame and notoriety or in leaving a legacy. He had no political agenda and didn’t want his actions characterized as terrorism because “Terrorism isn’t the message. The message is, there is no message.” He received no satisfaction, sexual or otherwise, in killing people. When he was done he just left the cinema and sat quietly in his car until he was arrested. He wasn’t responding to a history of bullying and his attack wasn’t an example of someone “going postal” and shooting up their workplace. He didn’t kill anyone he knew, and chose as his killing zone a location where it would be hard for him to even identify any of his victims. It was dark, he had thrown in a smoke bomb, and he was wearing a gas mask while listening to techno music on headphones so he wouldn’t be able to hear anything from people in the theatre (Reid doesn’t mention it, but apparently the song was “Becoming Insane” by Infected Mushroom). Just as he was leaving he noticed a man sitting in the front row who seemed to be smiling, and this unnerved him. Holmes wouldn’t shoot him because, as he put it, “it would have been really personal to shoot a person who’s smiling at me.” And there was nothing personal about any of this. He had actually considered becoming a serial killer, but one of the reasons he rejected this as a criminal career was because it was “too personal.”

Without any personal motivation one naturally wonders if there was some kind of delusion motivating Holmes, but here too there’s not much to point to. He didn’t hear voices commanding him to kill. Apparently he only had a vague theory of “human capital” that said that every life was somehow worth a point, and that when you killed someone you got their human capital. But Holmes’s explanation of how this worked was shifting, and never made much sense in any reading. The accumulation of human capital didn’t do him any good. He tried to explain to a girlfriend that taking the human capital of others would make his “life more meaningful” but even she couldn’t follow (“i don’t understand the concept of human capital. I don’t see how it is useful.”). That he was expressing the idea to others in the days leading up to his rampage means it probably counts for something, but it still strikes me as a very weak sort of after-the-fact rationalization. Reid even characterizes one of the expert psychiatrists testifying in Holmes’s defence, in what amounts to a professional drive-by, as saying that their “opinion of insanity rested to some extent simply on his [the doctor’s] not being able to think of a rational reason for Holmes to kill the people in the Century 16 theater.”

What we’re left with is a general misanthropy. “Most fools will misinterpret correlation for causation,” Holmes would write in his notebook, “namely relationship and work failure as causes. Both were expediting catalysts [but] not the reason. The causation being my state of mind for the past fifteen years.”

As a bit of self-analysis, that’s not bad, even if it begs the question of what that “state of mind” was. Holmes was depressed and suicidal and his mission gave him a purpose. For whatever reason he’d given up on life. And he just didn’t like people. It’s hard to say he hated people since his own way of putting it was that he only disliked them as some people dislike broccoli. It was not “a fiery, angry, passionate hate.” Which is another explanation that takes away more than it gives. The psychiatrist he was seeing at university only “sensed that he had some level of hatred of mankind, but, she testified, ‘he didn’t state that in so many words.’” It was just a vibe.

Holmes thought life was worthless and meaningless. His life philosophy, shorn of decorative elements and doodles like his self-designed “Ultraception” symbol, was reductive and nihilistic. “I suffer. Other people suffer. We’d all be better off if everybody on earth dies.” “Life came into being,” he would text a friend, “and ever since has been a cancer upon death.” So perhaps in asking the question “Why?” we’re coming at it from the wrong end, assuming that such a horrific crime had some correspondingly big or clear explanation. For Holmes the question may have been “Why not?”

Part of the charges of first-degree murder he was convicted on was that the killings were committed “with extreme indifference.” In legal terms this is defined as knowingly showing an attitude of “universal malice manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life.” That’s not insanity but a part of many people’s mental make-up. Where it comes from I can’t say.

Noted in passing:

Holmes’s defence team offered to plead guilty in return for a sentence of life without parole in order to avoid the death penalty, but this was turned down by the prosecutors. I think they should have taken the deal. The trial process went on for two years and cost millions of dollars and Holmes ended up avoiding the death penalty anyway. And as Reid points out, even if the jury had voted for Holmes’s execution it probably would never have happened and would have taken years if not decades to work its way through appeals. This is not a problem with the system, which should be very cautious in such matters. And I’m not saying Holmes didn’t deserve the death penalty, though the question of whether he was criminally responsible should be considered in conjunction with the fact that he obviously wasn’t well. But the prosecution’s decision seems to have been mostly political rather than practical or smart.

Takeaways:

There may be warning signs, but it’s hard to tell when someone is going to snap, or know what it is that pushes them over the edge. In some cases there may be no explanation at all.

True Crime Files

Sinister War

/ Alex Good / 9 Comments

Sinister War

One for the big-time Marvel fanboys.

Basically we have Spider-Man here taking on nearly every enemy he’s ever had. Or, as he puts it, it’s “a battle royal with every single baddie who’s ever looked at me sideways.” Some of these I had never heard of. Who was this Morlun guy? He seemed important. What’s with the yellow lizard? I had to do a search to find out he’s called the Dragon King. I never did figure out what his super powers were. There are so many villains on parade that sometimes they just have to be introduced as the teams they’re a part of: the Sinister Six, the Savage Six, the Sinister Syndicate, the Superior Foes, etc. They come flying off of splash pages so filled with figures they don’t even register as individuals. But at the end of the day, as with most battle royals, they end of spending most of their time just milling around in the background.

The guy behind all of this is Kindred, and if you don’t know who he is then I don’t have time to fill you in because it’s complicated. Really complicated. Basically he’s a supernatural figure with demonic powers, including the ability to send centipedes into people’s ears and control their minds, sort of like the slugs in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Kindred has assembled this all-star team of supervillains (even raising some of them from the dead) to make Spider-Man pay for his sins. Or something. They all go along with it because they think Kindred has the power to send them to hell. I don’t know if Kindred can actually do this. I also don’t know what sort of hell it is we’re talking about. There’s talk of souls and punishment and the like, but there’s no theological content to any of it. It’s just another part of the multiverse I think.

The four-part series collected here was the culmination of a longer story arc by Nick Spencer. At the end they collect some of the teasers from previous issues that helped set things up (but shouldn’t these have been part of a prologue?), and the story went on from here as well, so it’s really all quite confusing unless you’ve been following along pretty closely. Which I hadn’t.

There was too much going on. Which is too bad because I liked the main story arc, which has Doctor Octopus again cast in the anti-hero mold. He’s the one who takes down Kindred at the end, using science. Spider-Man is mainly just a punching bag throughout, only being spared when the bad guys start fighting each other. (Why Kindred didn’t see that was going to happen when he set things up as a competition to kill Spider-Man, I’m not sure.) I didn’t like Mephisto being involved because that only increased the confusion as to what was actually happening. That confusion also had the effect of watering down all the psychodrama involving the Osborn family, which I didn’t understand anyway.

I think this is a problem with the current era of Marvel comics (and the MCU) generally: an inflation in the roster rolls and an increase in complexity that caters to a readership expected to be up on more and more information regarding backstories and different timelines. So if you’re just coming in here, good luck!

Graphicalex

Wimsey: The Entertaining Episode of the Article in Question

/ Alex Good / 32 Comments

A short and silly story that has Lord Peter foiling a diamond heist. The tip-off comes as a result of his “persistent and undignified inquisitiveness,” a character trait described in the intro. Detectives, even amateurs, are just nosey people.

While in a Paris train station Lord P eavesdrops on a conversation, and this is what leads to his capture of the pair of jewel thieves. What gives them away is a grammatical error that you’d have to know French to pick up on as the conversation isn’t translated. Hint: the title of the story is a pun on “article.” Then, after they’re apprehended, they’ll slip into “a torrent of apache language which nobody, fortunately, had French enough to understand.” This is another reference, so common in Sayers, that contemporary readers might not get. Les Apaches were criminal gangs in Paris in the early twentieth century.

I call the story silly because one would have thought there was a more obvious tell for Lord Peter (and everyone else) to pick up on than the article in question. Jacques Sans-culotte dresses up well, but his ankles give him away.

Wimsey index

What happened to YouTube? Part 4

/ Alex Good / 11 Comments

OK, something is definitely going on here. I’ve previously posted on how long the ads are getting on YouTube, most recently just a couple of days ago in response to having a 28-minute ad dropped into an interview I was watching. Today I had a 31:15 ad in one podcast and then just a bit later on a different podcast getting a 40:37 bomb dropped.

What is the point of this? Nobody is going to watch a 30 or 40-minute ad or infomercial or entirely separate podcast inserted into the podcast they’re watching. Nobody. But given how frequently these things are popping up now it’s clearly part of a conscious decision YouTube is making. Meanwhile, why would somebody even be making these half-hour ads? They must know they just play as aggravating.

I guess somebody is looking at the data and figuring that somehow it works, but I can’t see it. The platform does seem to be transforming into something new though, even if I’m not sure what the endgame is.

Mountain melt VI: The very end of snow mountain

/ Alex Good / 7 Comments

This was definitely the end of the line, as we’ve had a lot of rain mixed with warm weather. It’s all that was left of snow mountain a couple of weeks ago.

For those of you interested in a recap, here are the mountain melt pictures in order.

And here is what it looked like yesterday.

This is a bonus pic, by request, of a different parking lot but with the clean-up crew getting rid of some of the dirt left behind by another snow pile.

That’s a wrap! It was a snow winter but it’s all gone now. The heat is on.