Lethem Binge

a repost from last year and, I guess, part of my ongoing influences series...
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If you're like me (and for your own sake I hope to God you're not) when you find a new author that you like you simply have to read everything by them that you can get your hands on, bingeing horribly on their words for weeks at a time until you just can't read anymore. I suppose Tolkien was the first author I consumed like that, devouring The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and even the largely unreadable Silmarillion in the Christmas holidays of 1979. A few years later I read the entire Raymond Chandler oeuvre in one week and when I discovered Cormac McCarthy a few years after that it was a wonderful sensation knowing that I was probably the only person in my high school that had heard of him. I had to hunt high and low to find copies of his books in Northern Ireland, but hunt I did and had Cormac McCarthy polished off in a fortnight. My Dostoyevsky binge in my first year of law school took me an entire term and my eccentric Melville completist phase took over a year (you try reading Clarel some time (or better yet don't)). As you get older you're unlikely to run into authors you haven't read before but when you do and you get one you like it can be just as fun. I wolfed through the David Mitchell collection in a week a couple of years back. Earlier this year I went on a mad dash through Michel Houllebecq (the hilarious Platform is the one to read there) and over the last month I've been reading the collected works of Jonathan Lethem. Like all the best novelists Lethem is very hit and miss. (Mediocre writers don't experiment and thus don't have epic failures or epic successes.) His early science fiction novels are ok as far as they go but his early mystery novel Motherless Brooklyn is unique, strange, funny and all together brilliant. It's the story of a detective with Tourettes trying to discover who knifed his boss and left him in a Dumpster in Brooklyn, but it's the characters and the style that really sing here not so much the plot. After Motherless Brooklyn Chronic City is a bit of a disappointment: a washed up child star and a pothead Rolling Stone essayist dick around the Upper East Side of Manhattan while the child star's astronaut fiance is stuck on the International Space Station. Lethem's true genius comes to the fore the narrower his focus gets and this is the case with his masterwork The Fortress of Solitude which is about life on one block in Brooklyn in the late 60's and 70's. It's clearly heavily autobiographical and although the blurb says that its the story of the friendship between two boys, one white and another black, it's actually about much more than that. It's a kind of history of the gentrification of Brooklyn and along the way we get tales about the music, fashions, street culture, stick ball games, comic books, graffiti styles, food, folk wisdom and life in general during the 70's. I loved Fortress of Solitude, it's such a rich, dense book, every page brimming with good stuff. It reminded me so much of my life on Coronation Road in Victoria Estate, Carrickfergus during the 70's - a street that was also full of kids playing arcane games with colourful eccentric characters by the score. Dean Street in Brooklyn is a mix of rich and poor, working class, middle class, artists, dreamers, blue collar city employees, with the added dimension of complex race politics. Lethem was lucky to have grown up in such a rich and fascinating environment for a writer and he's done justice to his source material.
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Too many novels these days don't have a good line in the whole book, Fortress has good lines in virtually every paragraph. Lethem doesn't push the prose, he just is patient enough to distill the sentences into economical nuggets of universal truth. There are a few negatives of course: the book is long and does outstay its welcome a little when we jump from the crazy energy of 70's Dean Street to the narrator's college years; I also wasn't completely convinced by the magical realism which I can't talk about at all without giving away major spoilers. But these are minor quibbles - the ending is terrific and like I say the first two thirds of the book is utterly brilliant. 
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This has been a great reading year for me and I'm happy to say that in the last few months I've read two modern American masterpieces, Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding and Jonathan Lethem's wonderful Fortress of Solitude.

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Another Sirens Review

Still don't have your copy of I Hear The Sirens In The Street, yet? Well, that's ok, it's certainly not for everyone (one lady recently dissed me on Good Reads complaining that I put too much thought into my prose style) but it is for some people and this is what Winsor Dobbin in last Sunday's Melbourne Age thinks: 

CRIME FICTION

I Hear the Sirens in the Street 

Adrian McKinty 

Serpent's Tail

Winsor Dobbin

The Melbourne Age, 26 May 2013

Northern Ireland. 1982. An uncomfortable place to be a policeman, let alone a Catholic one. Sean Duffy, articulate, urbane and stubborn as they come, is a detective in Protestant Carrickfergus at the height of the decades-long sectarian war that ripped Ulster apart: ''A shooting in Crossmaglen, a suspicious van in Cookstown, an incendiary attack in Lurgan - nothing that serious.''

As for settings, it doesn't get much bleaker: ''Army helicopters flew over the lough, sirens wailed in County Down, a distant thump-thump was the sound of mortars or explosions. The city was under a shroud of chimney smoke and the cinematographer, as always, was shooting in 8mm black and white. This was Belfast in the 14th year of the low-level civil war euphemistically known as The Troubles."

It's hard to be enthusiastic about your job when your first task each morning is to check your car for a mercury tilt bomb. Forget one morning and …

When the torso of American veteran and war hero Bill O'Rourke is found in a suitcase in an abandoned factory, it looks as if the IRA might have been up to its old tricks, but then it turns out the victim has been poisoned by a mixture containing the root of a rare plant.

Duffy's investigation leads him to a desperate aristocrat, a foxy widow and an American billionaire chancer (a real one, in this case) and us on a musical journey from Saint-Saens to Blondie.

You have to drink in descriptions such as: ''Belfast was not beautiful. It had been built on mudflats and without rock foundations nothing soared. Its architecture had been Victorian red brick utilitarian and sixties brutalism before both of those tropes had crashed headlong into the Troubles. A thousand car bombs later and what was left was surrounded by concrete walls, barbed wire and a steel security fence to keep the bombers out. ''

This is probably the best police thriller I've read over the past 12 months - lyrical, poetic and mean. ''I tried to think of a curse but Irish articulacy had clearly diminished since the days of Wilde and Yeats, Synge and Shaw. Three 'shites' and a ciggie, that was the best we could come up with in these diminished times,'' Duffy muses.

This book is atmospheric, beautifully paced and precisely constructed; one that is genuinely hard to put down.

Fans of Billingham, Rankin and Lehane and their ilk will not want to miss out on McKinty, who is now basing himself in Melbourne - where he will doubtless become a valuable addition to the brotherhood of wordsmiths in Australia.

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President Obama's Guide To Belfast

President Obama is coming to Belfast next month. They'll probably drag him to the usual tourist spots, but if I were him I'd try and see some more interesting sides of the city instead. These are the top 10 places I'd go to: 

1. The Crown Bar: yes it is a bit of a tourist trap, but it's still worth visiting. A pub owned and run by the National Trust, lit by gas lamps and with its original Victorian fittings. A visit here really is like stepping back in time. My name is carved under the table in one of the snugs.
2. The Titanic Museum: My dad and sister used to work at Harland and Wolff shipyard and I wish the company were still making ships rather than memorialising their least successful vessel ever...I was opposed to the whole concept of this place but a lot of people seem to like it so why not check it out. 
3. The Game of Thrones set: Since you're already at the Harland and Wolff shipyard why not visit the Game of Thrones set in the old Paint Hall. Castle Black, bits of forest, The Wall...it's all here.
4. Carrickfergus Castle: 12th century Norman Castle only 10 minutes from the centre of Belfast. This place has got quite a history having been attacked by the French, the Scots, the Irish, the Americans and even the Nazis. The castle is built on the rock where King Fergus Mor Mac Erc's ship ran aground in the seventh century which, naturally, gave Carrickfergus its name. The castle is only a few hundred yards from where I grew up but don't let that put you off. And if you're hungry while you're in Carrick do check out my sister's pub The Joymount Arms, a literal stone's throw away from the front gate, where they do a fabulous Irish Stew and the best pulled pint of Guinness in the town. 
5. Milltown Cemetery Belfast: Although a little macabre it's very interesting to walk around the gravestones of the Republican Plot.
6. Belfast City Hall: actually the city hall isn't that exciting but it's a well proportioned building in Baroque Revival style made with clean Portland stone. Stir up some controversy on your visit by asking why there are no flags flying...
7. Queens University: the alma mater of Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson and their circle and the place where Philip Larkin lived and worked. A nice oasis of calm in the middle of the city.
8. No Alibis Bookshop: best bookshop in Ireland if you ask me. Easy to find on Botanic Avenue. Mention my name to the bald guy and you'll guy a 10% discount. Either that or you'll be unceremoniously booted out. 
9. HMS Caroline: the only surviving warship from the Battle of Jutland in 1916 which, remarkably, is still floating on an obscure pier in Belfast. Well worth a visit. 
10. Cyprus Avenue: about a 10 minute walk from the centre of Belfast, just off the Upper Newtownards Road, visit the street that helped inspire two of Van Morrison's most famous songs: Cyprus Avenue and Madame George.
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One thing that may be hard to resist is to take a Black Taxi Tour of the major paramilitary murals and scenes of violent incidents during the Troubles, but resist it you should; many tourists do this on their trip to Belfast but personally I find the whole idea a little bit vulgar.  

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Adrian McKinty, Parker Bilal and Paul French at the Adelaide Writers Festival

I'm blogging this (below) to coincide with the US release this week of I Hear The Sirens In The Street...And since I'm - rather embarrassingly - talking about me, I'd also like to point you in the direction of some reviews: Dana King reviewed Sirens in the New Mystery Reader, here. The lovely Connie Wilson reviewed and profiled me over at Yahoo Voices. Peter Dragovich (the Nerd of Noir) reviewed Sirens in Spinetingler Magazine, here. Finally I'm pretty excited that Steven Dougherty wrote a very sweet profile of me in The Wall Street Journal, here. It's all too easy for reviewers to cover the mainstream releases from the big publishing houses so I really appreciate the fact that Dana, Connie, Peter and Steven looked beyond the big publicity campaigns to seek out a peripheral voice like mine. Slainte.

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Harvey Pekar

(a repost from July 12, 2010, the day Harvey Pekar died and, I guess, part of my little series on influences that began with JG Ballard last week (I'm surprisingly worked up in this little obit, I'm not quite sure why...))

If its even a little bit true that our elite institutions like the BBC, The New York Times, Hollywood, The New Yorker etc. are dominated by middle and upper middle class white males perhaps it explains why we often get so many patronising and phony images of blue collar people in the arts and why artists like Harvey Pekar were so bitter. The establishment in England is largely run by men who went to private school; I expect (although I'm only guessing) that the East Coast establishment in the United States is also largely a closed club of elitist faux liberals who are, in fact, reactionary defenders of their hegemony. Pekar was an angry scourge of corporate America and elites of all shades and with the old boys network against him (famously he was banned from Letterman for badmouthing GE) it's a minor miracle that his epic vision of ordinariness became so well known. His multi volume comic book American Splendor was a paean to everyday life as an office drudge in that most hardluck of American cities, Cleveland. Pekar had no car chases or superheroes in his comic. He was the superhero himself, a superhero who got up in the morning, went to work through the cold, dealt with bureaucracy and tedium, his aches and pains, his petty humiliations and suffering...you know, life. Anomie, weltzschmerz, angst - these were Pekar's muses. But he tempered the misery with a rare intelligence, irony and humour. His parents spoke Yiddish at home and Pekar wrote firmly in the Mittel Europa Jewish tradition of Kafka and Sholem Aleichem, IB Singer and Bruno Schulz. 
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Like Jim Thompson and Charles Bukowski, Pekar was a poet of the mundane, an artist of the regular. He lived a blue collar life amongst blue collar people. I remember years ago watching that ghastly, false Clint Eastwood film Million Dollar Baby and being amazed by the conniving, cheap, unpleasant working class caricatures. That's how they really see us, I thought to myself. Harvey Pekar was the man we sent back into the lists to tell truth to power and speak for us. He was our knight errant in K Mart jeans and Payless Shoes. Pekar spoke for the losers, the failures, the grifters, the bums, the working poor, the unworking poor. He saw beauty where others saw only despair, he saw abominations where the powers that be saw slum clearance schemes and new developments. He loved old jazz and old records and old books. He liked talking to old people in coffee shops to hear what they had to say. He hated standing behind old ladies in lines at the supermarket. A lot of this made it into his comic books.

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When future generations want to know what life was like in the late twentieth century I don't think they'll bother with the Hollywood movies or the Pulitzer Prize winners or the hipsters writing clever stories in the New Yorker, no, I think they'll probably just read American Splendor instead.

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The Israeli Flags In Belfast

I've been reading Tony's Blair's memoir A Journey which isn't as masochistic an exercise as it sounds. It's an interesting book for Blair's take on his own life and it's helping me understand some of the British policies towards Ireland in the 1990's. Tony Blair seems to have been more interested in Ireland than any British Prime Minister since Gladstone: his maternal grandparents were from the County Donegal and he used to spend his summers in that very odd town, Rossnowlagh. The chapter in his memoir on the Irish Peace Process is full of interesting stuff including this little story:

On one visit to Northern Ireland I saw a remarkable demonstration of how the culture of opposition is enforced. Sinn Fein had invited the Palestinians to town. As I landed to stay overnight, I saw the Palestinian flag displayed along the Republican roads of Belfast to welcome their guests. Next day I drove through the town to leave and I saw arrayed along the Unionist enclaves the white and blue flags of Israel. How they got them and how they put them up overnight I'll never know but the moment those Palestinian flags went up Unionist solidarity with Israel was total.

The Israeli flags were always there of course; Blair just hadn't noticed them. There are a couple on the A2 as you drive into my home town of Carrickfergus and there also used to be several flying in Victoria Estate in Carrick (but I didn't see any when I was back home in January). I'm not sure that the reason for the Israeli flags is quite as oppositional as Blair says either. There's always been a feeling of solidarity between the Unionists of Northern Ireland and the Israelis. Perhaps it's something to do with the Bible which every good Presbyterian reads before bed time and the Biblical idea that just as the Jews have found their Promised Land in Canaan, so the wandering tribe of Ulster Scots has found its promised land in the north of Ireland. Blair is also mistaken about the link between the PLO and the IRA which has been longstanding (I remember the big "PLO-ETA-IRA One Struggle" mural on the Falls Road in the 1970's) and something of an embarrassment for American right wing IRA apologists such as Congressman Peter King (R, Long Island) and left wing IRA apologists such as the Kennedys.

The deeper link between Israel and Ireland of course is Albion Perfide: the successive British governments beginning with Lloyd-George's cabinet who made promises to the Jews and Arabs and to the Irish Protestants and Catholics that were mutually incompatible. The sight of competing Israeli and Palestinian flags in far flung Belfast is an odd but ultimately unsurprising commentary on the ironies and dualities of history in the aftermath of the British Empire. The fact that Tony Blair understood none of this, even in retrospect, isn't that surprising either: Like Bill Clinton, Tony Blair was always the brightest boy in the class, but he was never as observant or as perspicacious as he thought he was.

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JG Ballard

This is the first in what I hope will be a fun little series about writers and artists that I'm obsessed by. If I don't give up after this effort I'll do pieces on the writers Harvey Pekar, Philip K Dick, Michel Houellebecq & Iain Sinclair, comedians Stewart Lee & Louis CK and the directors Werner Herzog, Errol Morris, Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch.

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According to historian Eric Hobsbawm the twentieth century really began with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in his car in Sarajevo on June 28th 1914. It was a century dominated by assassinations, cars, aeroplanes, wars, mass production and American pop culture. For me the novelist who perhaps best captured the obsessions and imagery of the twentieth century was the Shanghai-born English novelist J G Ballard. Pigeon holed early as a science fiction writer, for a long time Ballard was not noticed by critics. He had his champions, of course, such as Martin Amis, but in general his books seldom broke through into the popular consciousness until the publication of Empire of the Sun in 1984.

Ballard’s early apocalyptic novels from the 1960's such as The Drowned World and The Crystal World cut against the mainstream science fiction of the time with their concern for the effects of disaster on protagonists’ psychological states. In 1973 Ballard’s most remarkable period as a novelist began with the publication of Crash, a book famously rejected by one London publisher’s reader with the phrase “This author is beyond psychiatric help - DO NOT PUBLISH.” Crash is the story of Vaughan, a television psychologist who is fixated by the sexual power of the car crash and who wishes to die in an auto-erotic accident with Elizabeth Taylor’s limousine. A damning indictment of, and also a love letter to, American celebrity culture, Crash reads as fresh, subversive and lively today as it did forty years ago. It prefigures the deaths of Princess Diana and Grace Kelly and recapitulates the deaths of Franz Ferdinand, JFK and screen siren Jayne Mansfield who was decapitated in the 1967 crash of her Buick Electra 225.

Ballard’s follow up to Crash was a retelling of the Robinson Crusoe story, Concrete Island, about a man who crashes his car and is trapped in it at the junction of many motorway flyovers and sliproads, living desperately on his concrete island and finally dying unseen by the thousands of commuters passing by on their way to work. High Rise (1975) is a funny, perverse and oddly believable novel about the collapse of civilisation’s norms within an apartment building. Satires on the English sense of decorum seldom get this ribald or excoriating.

For me, though, the climax of this period in Ballard’s evolution is the willfully strange, surrealistic novel The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) about a man who hijacks a small plane and crashes it into the Thames in the sleepy suburb of Shepparton. It’s never clear whether the pilot died in the crash or not but certainly some kind of apotheosis takes place and throughout the novel London is transformed into a seething, primordial, tropical city (similar in many ways to the London of The Drowned World) rich with sexual and avian imagery. The Anglo-Saxon world has generally been uncomfortable with the erotic and surreal in serious fiction but Dream Company is a book which treats both these tropes with the gravity they deserve and it may be Ballard’s finest work.

Empire of the Sun (1984) is a novelistic retelling of the young Jim Ballard’s imprisonment in a Japanese internment camp from 1942 - 1945. Although the story is told in conventional matter-of-fact prose the book throbs with Ballard’s usual obsessions: war, repressed sexual desire, cruelty, ruined cities, America, cars, flight. As a novel of people in extremis it is a psychological masterpiece as well as being probably the last great novel to come out of the direct experience of World War Two.

In the 1990's and early 2000's Ballard wrote more volumes of memoir and interesting novels about the growth of advertisement speak, business parks, motorways, urbanisation and the spread of pop culture into all walks of life. In 2009 Ballard died of prostate cancer and the British obituaries were respectful but somewhat restrained in their praise. Ballard had been hard to categorise and he was never completely embraced by the British establishment even after his success in Hollywood. It’s a shame because many of Ballard’s contemporaries have dated rather badly and their books read like peculiar period pieces, but Ballard has hardly dated at all. Like Philip K Dick his voice is that of the clear sighted Cassandra warning us of the perils and strange joys ahead. Ballard agreed with the poet Horace who famously said that “they change their skies but not their souls, those who run across the sea,” which is true even when the seas are black with pollution and the sky is a radioactive hell.

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15 Things I'd Like To Ban From Contemporary Crime Fiction

Crime fiction has gotten very dull lately hasn't it? I should know because I get inundated with galleys and review copies and most of them are beyond tedious, without a spark of wit or a well turned phrase in any of them. And the cliches, Jesus the cliches. And the violence. Especially violence towards women and children...It's almost impossible to read some of this stuff and it makes me wonder how and why these authors ended up writing it. Were they pressured by editors or a feeling that this is what the market demands? I wonder if they ever get embarrassed. I know I get ashamed when I find myself falling into cliche or hacky situations or when the dialogue sounds tinny and false. I'm guilty, I'll admit it, but I can't be the only one, can I? 
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Things don't have to be this bad. Do you know who Dogme 95 are? They were a group of Danish film makers who decided that movies had gotten too bullshitty and that it might be fun to work within a set of rules that they made up for themselves: no artificial light, no extraneous music, no extensive rehearsals etc. The Dogme 95 films are very interesting: not always successful of course but original, expressive and when they fail they fail in intriguing ways. I don't think you can really do an equivalent of that in crime fiction but here's a little list of 15 things I'd like to see banned (or maybe just a moratorium of 10 years or so) from contemporary crime and mystery fiction that would force authors to think and try just that little bit harder...So, lets get rid of: 

1. Clever serial killers
2. Stupid serial killers
3. Child Murderers
4. Serial Rapists
5. Everything from Scandinavia
6. Torture Porn
7. Working class stereotypes 
8. Architects
9. Gallery owners
10. Books with recipes
11. Detectives baffled by basic scientific facts/mathematics 
12. Detectives who solve crimes with magic or fairy dust (Lizbeth Sallander, the BBC's Sherlock etc.)
13. Detectives who solve crimes with cats
14. Cops who haven't heard of Ernest Hemingway or other basic elements of contemporary culture (this is an extension of #7 above).
15. Super villains. I'll explain this one. There's an entirely fallacious belief out there that gets repeated all the time (I heard JJ Abrams repeating it on TV not ten minutes ago) that a hero is only as good as the villain is bad. The hero is supposedly 'defined by the villain.' This is utter nonsense. In a well made narrative you don't even need a villain or a decent McGuffin you just need a good story and fascinating characters. JJ Abrams worships at the throne of Spielberg but he should remember that the shark in Jaws only appeared on screen for about two minutes and its Spielberg's best movie. And sometimes the most interesting part of the journey is the voyage the hero takes inside his own head. Nach innen geht der Geheimnisvolle Weg, as Novalis said. "Inward goes the way full of mystery." You know?
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Of course with a good story, good dialogue and good characters you can break all the rules above and have yourself a terrific book. But still...you get what I'm talking about... and if you have your own ideas about things you'd like to ban or cliches you'd like to kill please don't hesitate to let me know. 

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Release Day

My new novel I Hear The Sirens In The Street is released in North America today! It's excellent timing to release a thriller as there doesn't seem to be any competition at all out there at the moment... Sorry what was that you said? Dan who? What? Inferno? What is that?
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If you're new to me I shall endeavour to catch you up about the Duffy series: Sirens is a sequel to The Cold Cold Ground and both these books are about Detective Sergeant Sean Duffy and his career in the RUC (Northern Ireland's police force) in the early 1980's. In Cold Cold Ground Duffy gets mixed up in the 1981 IRA Hunger Strikes and Sirens sees him get sucked into the extraordinary and bizarre DeLorean scandal of 1982/3. The latest review of Sirens was in the Sydney Morning Herald, here. 

The best place to start is probably with The Cold Cold Ground which came out with Seventh Street Books last December. All my novels are always standalone but if you read them out of sequence there may be spoilers involved. The Cold Cold Ground won the 2013 Spinetingler Award, it was one of Audible's Best Books of the Year and it was shortlisted for the 2013 Last Laugh Award (for best satiric crime novel), but it's not everyone's cup of tea. If you're looking for a book with a lot of comforting Irish tropes I'm afraid I can't help you. I should also point out that I relish the demotic, so if you are frightened by ancient Anglo Saxon, Gaelic or Ullans swear words you should probably spend your hard earned dollars elsewhere. 

You can read reviews of The Cold Cold Ground, in The Guardian, here. 
or the Irish Independent, here 
The review in The Times is here. 
The Glasgow Herald's verdict is here 
The Sydney Morning Herald's review, is here. 
The Irish Times weighs in, here and the 
Irish Sunday Independent adds its two cents, here. 

If all that sounds intresting, you can get The Cold Cold Ground and I Hear The Sirens In The Street at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk at your local bookshop if you're lucky enough to live in a place that still has a bookshop.
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Finally for all those people who have been gently pestering me about the audio release of Sirens, I can report that Gerard Doyle has finished his recording and it should be available after midnight on May 14 Eastern Daylight Time on Audible, here. Doyle, as usual, does a brilliant job. 

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The Americans

Ok so not everyone on The Americans
looks like a "real person"

The FX show, The Americans, is a bit like a classic "false flag" operation. On the surface it's a TV show about FBI men looking for dangerous Soviet sleeper agents who are out to harm America during the Reagan years. For all I know that's how the show was pitched, but it's not really about that at all; in The Americans it's the Soviet sleeper agents who are the good guys and the FBI men looking for them who are the villains. I like this idea as it's a reversal of a longstanding American TV tradition: I mean we've had mafiosos as good guys, meth manufacturing chemistry teachers as goodies, but until Angelina Jolie's Salt Soviet agents have always been baddies, often the baddest of the bad (see for example the beyond dreadful Russkies in Indiana Jones IV). And yes although the Russians in The Americans are often ruthless operatives (and definitely pathological) they are, at bottom, men and women of honour out to do their best for their country and their way of life. The older Soviet agents in The Americans in particular are all Red Army veterans who heroically fought in the "Great War of The Motherland" against the Nazis. The FBI agents on their trail aren't nearly so interesting or fundamentally decent. They're rather dull functionaries who are working for a Reagan administration which at the time show begins is still supporting the Khmer Rouge, Saddam Hussein and Pinochet's Chile (and which goes onto to invent the Taliban and cook up the treasonous and disgraceful Iran Contra scheme).
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But please don't get the idea that The Americans is a show about black and white characters. It really isn't. It's more complex than that and even the minor players in The Americans get to go against type, to reflect on their actions, to make mistakes and to act, well, like real people. The Americans is as nuanced and as carefully written as Homeland with the added benefit that nobody is as bug eyed crazy as Carrie, as bizarrely beautiful as Brodie's wife or as annoying as Brodie's daughter. And now that I'm thinking of the casting, I love the fact that the actors in The Americans are low key and (for the most part) look like real people. Real people in real situations dealing with real problems and although the show has a lot of action and even (in the season finale) a car chase its essentially a character driven programme that relies on suspense not action to keep the viewer gripped. If Showtime's Emmy award winning Homeland is the, uh, Cadillac of sleeper agent shows on US television, FX's The Americans is the stolid Subaru Outback and anyone who's driven both will know which is the better one to have in your garage/DVD player on a rainy day. 

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It Was A Wandering Daughter Job - Dashiell Hammett's Influence on The Big Lebowski

A post from a couple of years back on The Coen brothers and their links to Dashiell Hammett:
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Joel and Ethan Coen have said that the biggest literary influence on their cult stoner movie The Big Lebowski (1998) was Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. And from the title and structure of their film you can certainly see what they are talking about. Both works are classic visions of Los Angeles and both films follow similar trajectories: a foil gets involved with a disabled rich man, the rich man's daughter, and a runaway from his family who gets mixed up in pornography. Joel Coen has also said that he was influenced by Robert Altman's 1970's remake of Chandler's The Long Goodbye which gave us a slightly baked version of Marlowe played by Elliot Gould. So the Chandler influences are real and obvious but I want to argue that there's a deeper structure to The Big Lebowski which comes not from Raymond Chandler but from Dashiell Hammett.
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Let's backtrack a little first. The Coen Brothers first foray into Hammett country came with Millers Crossing. This is a fairly explicit remake of Hammett's Red Harvest which the Coens apparently became of aware through Kurosawa's version Yojimbo (which later was remade by Sergio Leone as A Fistful of Dollars and again by Walter Hill as Last Man Standing). Miller's Crossing (and Red Harvest and the others) is a classic story of an outsider playing off two rival gangs for his own benefit, however the Coens not only appropriated Dashiell Hammett's plot-line but also his entire argot: "What's the rumpus?" "She's just a twist," "The high hat," "We're not muscle we don't bump guys" etc. The Coens don't seem to have read Hammett as much digested him, absorbing his street talk, his cadences, his slang, his American tough guy voice. (As an aside here I actually think their use of "What's the rumpus?" as "hello" in Millers Crossing is a misreading of Hammett's use of the phrase in Red Harvest.) The Coens of course are suburban college boys with little experience of the actual "streets" but Hammett was a Pinkerton Detective for nearly two decades investigating murders, robberies, insurance frauds with a little union busting thrown in for good measure. The Coens seem to have used Hammett as one of their touchstones for Americana and the more you read him the deeper you see his influence on their work: Blood Simple, Fargo, Miller's Crossing, No Country For Old Men sometimes read like undiscovered Hammett screenplays; but so also do the comedies Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski. Hammett and humour don't seem to go together but he could be very funny in both his private life and in his books - The Thin Man is as witty as any PG Wodehouse and here's an experiment: try re-reading The Maltese Falcon as a black comedy and you'll get exactly what I'm talking about. Chandler has those great lines about a blonde so beautiful she would make a bishop kick in a window but Hammett has those lines too and a dark, satirical edge as well. 

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Yes the Coens used The Big Sleep as their skeleton for The Big Lebowski but the irony comes from Hammett: Donny's death, The Nihilists, The Porn King, The Malibu Sheriff - these seem like straight out of Dashiell's playbook not Ray's. The eccentricity and odd digressions are more like Hammett and of course the snap of the dialogue is more authentically Hammettian too. I think subconsciously the Coens knew this and they either gave us a Freudian hint or a deliberate clue late in the film when Jeff Bridges as The Dude encounters a private detective working for Bunny's parents, the Knutsons. "What are you following me for?" The Dude asks. The Private Dick played by Joe Polito (who also played one of the rival gang bosses in Miller's Crossing) shrugs and explains: "It was a wandering daughter job." And of course if you know your Hammett you'll recognise that as the opening line of the great Continental Op short story "Fly Paper". The Big Lebowski was a wandering daughter job all right and ultimately the daughter stays lost, an innocent guy dies and the bad guy keeps the money, but what else would you expect in Hammett's bleak, entropic and blackly comic universe?

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