Road trip

/ Alex Good / 10 Comments

Last week I went on a road trip. It was pretty grim. First a quick drive down the 401, which is plastered with monster warehouses, mass housing, industry, and powerlines all the way to Toronto. I’ve always found this one of the grimmest stretches of highway on earth, but I imagine it’s much the same outside every major city.

Things got foggy after Toronto. Luckily traffic wasn’t bad.

After a night’s stopover just outside Ottawa, I took the train back home, leaving from the aptly named Fallowfield station.

As you can see, I wasn’t blessed by a lot of sun on this trip. But the grey skies fit my mood. I’ve learned my lesson and will aspire to never leave home again.

TCF: Empty Promises

/ Alex Good / 22 Comments

Empty Promises and Other True Cases
By Ann Rule

The crimes:

“Empty Promises”: Jami Hagel married Steve Sherer in 1987 but things didn’t go well. Sherer turned out to be a nasty drunk and a violent control freak. Jami disappeared in 1990 and ten years later Sherer was convicted of her murder, though her body was never found. Later, while in prison, Sherer tried to hire someone to kill his in-laws.

“Bitter Lake”: a brutish man beats his ex-girlfriend and her 3-year-old son to death.

“Young Love”: when a young fellow’s girlfriend breaks up with him and heads off to university he continues to stalk her and eventually blows himself up in her dormitory.

“Love and Insurance”: a gay librarian meets up with a man who promptly gets him to take out a life insurance policy.

“The Gentler Sex”: two stories both dealing with women who enlist partners in plots to kill their husbands. The second woman doesn’t realize she’s trying to hire an undercover cop to do the hit.

“The Conjugal Visit”: a convicted kidnapper and killer escapes from a motel while enjoying a conjugal visit . . . with his niece. Such visits were new at the time and the system clearly had a few bugs.

“Killers on the Road”: a pair of bad guys rob a bank and go on a murder and kidnapping road trip.

“A Dangerous Mind”: a woman lets her brother stay with her in Seattle, forgiving of the fact that he is a violent psychopath. He kills her daughter.

“To Kill and Kill Again”: 18-year-old Gary Grant kills and rapes a couple of young women and then a couple of even younger boys.

“The Stockholm Syndrome”: a young couple meet up with a killer while out camping. He kills the husband and gets the wife to go along with a cover story until she breaks free from his sinister influence. This was also the final story in the Rule collection Without Pity.

The book:

“Empty Promises” runs just over 200 pages and the nine other stories 30-40 pages each. This made sense as there wasn’t as much to them. Ann Rule does her usual proficient job with the material, but it’s very familiar ground, especially for her millions of devoted readers.

But then let’s face it, most murders are pretty routine. As Poirot explains to Hastings in Peril at End House, there are really only a couple of motives for murder, excluding “homicidal mania” and “killing done on the spur of the moment.” The two motives are (1) gain (that is, greed), and (2) crime passionnel: hate, “love that has turned to hate,” or jealousy. Or, as Rule lays it out when describing female killers (and the point she starts out by making is equally applicable to men):

There are really only two reasons why the vast majority of women kill: for love – very broadly defined to include passion, revenge on a faithless lover, jealousy, or a desire to clear away obstacles to an affair – or for money. The promise of riches tends to bring out the wickedness in some women. Whether it be for love or money, women plan murder with far more care than do men. They seem to be able to delay gratification longer than their male counterparts. One might say that, even in homicide, women enjoy more foreplay than men.

I don’t know if this is strictly true, but the point about “love or money” – Poirot’s “gain” or crime passionnel – is spot on. Most murders are committed by people who know their victims, and take place in domestic settings. And so the same situations repeat again and again, and we see the same red flags being ignored by those at risk.

The early stories here are of the relationship variety, with the last few being examples of “homicidal mania.” And the relationship angle is always pretty much the same. Rule even gives a road map in her Foreword:

we can see long before relationships escalated to a point where murder was committed, there were lies. There are people, both men and women, who pretend to be someone they are not. They make commitments, agreements, assurances, pledges, and vows – promises – to get what they want. When they abuse the trust of those who believe them, those empty promises often lead to violent death.

This is a bit of a shoehorning to get the book’s title into the mix, but the basic point about escalation stands. Before things get to murder there are usually lots of red flags. In previous reviews I’ve done for the True Crime Files I’ve flagged some of these. For example, my takeaway from All That is Wicked was that

If your whole family is against you marrying someone, best give the matter further consideration. If they become even more insistent that you leave your spouse when the marriage goes south, you should admit you made a mistake and get out before things get any worse. Because they will.

Definitely advice Jami Hagel might have taken in the title story here. Though as I also said in my notes on She Wanted It All, there’s no talking to someone who has convinced him or herself that they’re in love. And this is a point I know I’ll be making again.

Another red flag has to do with partners suddenly taking out large life insurance policies on you. I mean, you’d think that one was pretty obvious but it seems not to have made much of an impact on the unfortunate librarian in “Love and Insurance.” Indeed, life insurance policies play a major role in several of the stories here. Not saying that life insurance is a bad thing, but these policies definitely lead to what’s known in the industry as a moral risk. Rule underlines the takeaway here: “Perhaps all marital insurance policies should read ‘And to my beloved wife, the proceeds of my life insurance . . . with the express exemption that this policy is null and void if she kills me.’”

Other lessons to be learned from relationships that go south in such a dramatic fashion? Well, “open” marriages are probably a bad idea. And if you are planning or in the midst of a divorce it’s best to make a clean break. Don’t go back to the house or agree to a private meeting with your ex (or soon-to-be ex). This is what led to the murder of Charla Mack as recounted in John Glatt’s Love Her to Death. Again, Jami Hagel received due warning about this. Her mother didn’t want her seeing Steve again but she arranged a meeting where he immediately stole her purse. Then she went back to her house after her lover pleaded with her not to. In the story “Bitter Lake” the victim is also warned about meeting up with her brutish ex-boyfriend “but she believed she could handle him.” There’s definitely a lesson to be learned here. If it’s over, it’s over. Don’t just move on, run away and don’t look back.

So if the sort of information you can glean from these cases isn’t new, it is at least useful. That’s one of the benefits of reading enough true crime that it comes to seem generic: the key points and takeaways get drummed into your head. And the early cases here are quite generic, for all their tragedy. Even the book’s cover is a throwaway effort. I originally thought that big red maple leaf meant there was going to be some Canadian content, but there’s none of that. Then there’s a picture of a computer mouse and cord, but most of the stories are quite old, set in the 1970s. And even in the newer ones PCs don’t play any part. So no maple leaves and no computers. That’s a really misleading cover. A wedding ring does play a role in “Empty Promises” and another ring has a particularly nasty part to play in “Bitter Lake,” but that’s it for relevance.

Noted in passing:

“Experts on domestic violence have a rule of thumb; it takes seven beatings before a woman or a man will find the strength and the courage to leave.” I’d never heard of this before. It struck me as high. I would have thought a “three strikes and you’re out of there” rule would have been more the norm. I’m also familiar with the saying that if a spouse or partner hits you once, they’re going to do it again. So once should be enough. I don’t know if it’s always a matter of having strength or courage to leave though. I think a lot of people fool themselves into thinking things are going to get better, and they’ve already got so much invested in a relationship they don’t want to just write it off as a sunk cost in a failed joint enterprise. Of course they should, but that’s another matter.

Takeaways:

You’re most likely to be killed by someone you know, and indeed someone you’re living with. Staying single has its upside.

True Crime Files

Aliens: The Original Years

/ Alex Good / 7 Comments

Aliens: The Original Years

I loved this collection of what originally ran as three Alien-themed miniseries, with an additional prologue and double-barreled coda added to the mix. But before I get to praising it I should give some of the backstory.

First off, despite being a Dark Horse comic this is part of the Marvel Epic Collection line-up because Marvel bought the comic book rights to the Alien franchise in 2020. So I guess they own all this stuff now.

Second, the comics themselves have been “remastered” in various ways over the history of their publication. So if you pay attention to these things you’ll note that the credit for colorist on the first series is given as “Dark Horse Digital.” That’s because the first series originally appeared in black-and-white and was later colorized. Also, the series launched in the wake of James Cameron’s 1986 movie Aliens and follows up with the further adventures of Newt and Hicks (Ripley took a bit longer to appear because of legal issues). As the film franchise went on, however, we found out that Newt and Hicks died at the beginning of Alien3, so in reissues of the comics they went back and changed the names of Newt and Hicks to Billie and Wilks. But for the trade edition they changed them back again, which is how they appear here. Then the final series, Earth War, was renamed Female War and then changed back again to Earth War. Got that straight?

The major change from the original publication is the colorization of the first series (most of the other changes being reversions back to the initial version). I think they did a fair job with the colour, but if you’re a purist you might wonder if it doesn’t take something away from Mark A. Nelson’s underground art, since black-and-white isn’t just an art form that is without colour. It’s its own thing. As with movie colorizations, there’s an artificial feel to these pages and I think something of the original atmosphere is lost. But it didn’t bother me that much.

There are different artists with very different styles in each of the series, but the writer – Mark Verheiden – is constant and there is a strong through narrative. And it’s the story here that I really grooved to, with the arc that takes us from the Xenomorph home planet to Earth having lots of little curves and details along the way. For example there’s one twist that plays off the reveal of who is a cyborg among the ship’s crew that I thought was brilliant. It surprised me and still made perfect sense. Then there’s the cynical video reporter from INS who has been sent out by her boss Kolchak (get it?) to cover the opening of a pyramid with Xenomorph guardians. Going along with the tomb-raiding team is the only known survivor of an alien chest-burster, which is such a cool idea I can’t understand why no screenwriter thought of it. I also loved the idea of how the aliens, who are basically just killing machines or space sharks, have all this meaning projected onto them by humanity. Of course the military-industrial complex is looking to make a weapons program out of them but they’re also worshipped as gods by a bunch of cultists that had me thinking of the plot of Cullen Bunn’s The Empty Man (if only because I’d been reading that title recently).

None of this has much to do with the mythology of the film franchise. And it’s way better than the mystical mumbo-jumbo Ridley Scott gave us with Prometheus. Verheiden was basically off doing his own thing while continuing on from Cameron’s movie and I thought he did a terrific job. Even the “mistakes” turn out to be a lot of fun. Verheiden thought the “Space Jockey” figure from Alien wasn’t wearing a mask but was actually a kind of giant humanoid with an elephant head. And so that’s another alien race that puts in a disturbing appearance here.

I could go on. This was a joy. It’s the Alien franchise that should have been. Just leave the scary monsters as scary monsters and concentrate on the human story. There’s a leitmotif throughout the series that has it that the aliens are basically only props and that humanity is more than capable of destroying itself. That’s the sort of thoughtfulness and liberty toward source material that you don’t get in a lot of comics, and like I say, it’s not even a major theme. It’s just a point that comes up several times in passing.

Though it really diverges from the official Alien canon I think fans of the movies may be the most appreciative audience for this book. As I’ve said, it holds on to the original two movies (the two best, by a long shot) and then goes in a totally original direction that I thought was superior to where the movies ended up. Sure it’s still bubble-gum stuff at heart, but it’s a really nice package that presents a thrilling alternate Alien reality that’s like some giant franchise Easter egg. Or maybe one of those leathery eggs with creatures inside them.

Graphicalex

Taking flight

/ Alex Good / 20 Comments

Some people, even people living here, don’t know that the major metropolis I call home does in fact have an airfield. I’m not sure if it counts as an airport. Probably not. Though there are hangars.  And of course planes and runways.  And a café.  (You can click on the pic to make it bigger.)

Looking backward

/ Alex Good / 21 Comments

Over at Good Reports I’ve added a review of Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties. I found this a real nostalgia trip, leading me into all sorts of reflections on what the meaning of that decade might have been.

I’m sure everyone who lived through the nineties will have a different idea or impression of them. If you try to stand far enough back though I think the big changes had to do with the coming of the Internet (social media came later). That would literally change everything, and I think most people understood that, at least somewhat, at the time. I still find it a point of wonder that I’m a member of the last generation to have grown up without the Internet or computers in the home. And overall I consider that a blessing.

In fact, I’m hard pressed to think of things that have gotten better since the nineties. We’re more aware of environmental issues, but nothing significant has been done to address any of them. Politics has become angrier, stupider, and far more polarized. The economy has become more dysfunctional. Culturally the nineties were not a golden age, but they stand up well against what we’ve seen in the twenty-first century.

Sure, this is an old guy grumbling. But I don’t have any complaints about young people, who I like pretty well. I think people my age, and even more the dreaded Boomers, have to answer for most of what’s gone wrong. And I don’t think ignorance is any defence. We knew what we were doing.

Wallpaper: The glory years

/ Alex Good / 14 Comments

This weekend I visited an open house in my neighbourhood that had just been listed. The owner, a 102-year-old man, had moved into a retirement home. I guess it was time, as they say. From the looks of things inside, I don’t think any work had been done on the place since the early 1970s. The layout of the house was fabulous, but the wallpaper not so much. Submitted for your approval.

On our way down to the basement we have this lovely brickwork. But it’s not brick! It is, in fact wallpaper that looks like brick. Does this count as trompe l’oeil? If you run your hand over it, it even has a rough, pebbly texture.

You can really enjoy your trip to the washroom with this fun and friendly wallpaper. Who would want to leave?

This is the wallpaper in the upstairs washroom. Some people might think it’s a bit too much, but it matches nicely with what we get in the large sitting room just outside . . .

Can any words to justice to this? And it covers all four walls of a very large room. I felt I’d stepped onto the set of an Argento film.