Some Breaking Bad Cheers And Boos

Needless to say, MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD

my favourite were the existential episodes

1. Cheer. The season finale. Glad they brought back all the old characters, tied up the loose ends and gave us the pleasure of seeing the really bad guys brought down and the not quite so bad guy (Walt) go out in a manner of his own choosing. And Jesse lived. And got away. Not quite as good as the fantastic Face Off season finale but fairly satisfying never the less. And certainly not the disaster that was Battlestar Galactica, Lost, The Sopranos, Seinfeld etc. etc.
2. Cheer. The deaths of Todd and Lydia. Among the most cathartic and fan pleasing moments in any show. Ever.
3. Boo. The money. I never bought the whole premise for that plot development about them "finding his money". As if brainy Walt wouldn't have checked whether the van he was driving out into the desert had GPS or not. You or I might have forgot. Walt, no.
4. Boo. Skyler White. Hmmm. Never bought Anna Gunn's performance and the dialogue and scenes between her and Marie were always dreary. When the Big Bang Theory decided to have 3 female leads they brought in female writers. Breaking Bad never did and it showed.
5. Boo. Merchandising. The merchandising around this show has been ridiculous. This isn't Star Wars. Its a dark, adult crime drama. You don't need to merchandise it to death. No one needs the money. Not cool. And as for Talking Bad don't get me started on that tacky infomercial of a show that really is an utter embarrassment.
6. Cheer. Albuquerque. When I lived in Denver I used to drive down to New Mexico a lot. I'm glad many more people are going to visit the blue collar (and pre BB largely untouristed) city of ABQ.
7. Cheer. From Mr Chips To Scarface. Even though they took this cheesy idea literally for the season finale it still kinda worked.
8. Cheer. The existential episodes. My favourite episodes were the ones where not much happened and we went off into a Samuel Beckett play (like the one were Walt looks for a fly in his meth lab). That was a breath of fresh air in a television industry that seems obsessed by the need for every scene to turn the wheel of the plot (an idea pushed by the likes of David Mamet). The only drama show that seems to do that now is Louie and Louis CK only gets away with it because people think they're watching a comedy.
9. Boo. New Hampshire. New Hampshire didn't look a bit like New Hampshire. The sky was the wrong colour.
10. Cheer and Boo. BB is everywhere. I'm glad but also a little sad that this has become a pop culture phenom. When I started plugging Breaking Bad on this blog five years ago no one had heard of the show. Now look at the monster. Two(!) front page stories in The New York Times, mentions on the TV news, entire features in serious magazines. I'm a little wistful of the days when me and six other chemistry geeks were watching this programme in our basements.

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Page Proofs

I've been working on the page proofs for the third Sean Duffy novel, In The Morning I'll Be Gone. It's the school holidays at the moment and the house has been a little nuts so I took a cheap flight down to Hobart and then a bus down to Dover, Tasmania where I rented a cabin for a few days - which seemed like something a real writer would do. Dover is a pretty little out of the way town. There are a few fishermen, a few retirees and a few dodgy looking jailhouse inked Brits who I reckon have been shipped here to the far side of the world in some kind of Scotland Yard witness protection scheme.
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You don't really think of extremes of cold in Australia but the first night in my cabin it was raining so hard and it got so cold that I had to get up and turn on the gas cooker and get warm by the welcoming blue flame. In the morning the mountain behind the town, Adamson's Peak, had a dusting of snow on top (but most of the snow had burned off by lunchtime when I took this photograph). There wasn't much to do in Dover which was precisely the point as I was forced to work my way through the galley proofs of In The Morning I'll Be Gone. Although if I'm perfectly honest I was so bloody freezing that I had to take breaks every twenty minutes or so to warm my fingers over the gas cooker.
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And how is the book? Well I think it's the best Duffy yet. There's a taut thriller element, Michael Forsythe makes an appearance and if you like the intellectual puzzle of a locked room mystery I think you'll dig it. It'll be out in January and as usual I'll give away one of the rather attractive galleys here on the blog some time before that. 

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Hikikomori, JG Ballard, Oblomov And The Deep Map

Have you ever heard of the Hikikomori? They are a subculture of young Japanese men who refuse to leave their bedroom. This is from the BBC story on the phenomenom: 

A conservative estimate of the number of people now affected is 200,000, but a 2010 survey for the Japanese Cabinet Office came back with a much higher figure - 700,000. Since sufferers are by definition hidden away, Saito himself places the figure higher still, at around one million. The average age of hikikomori also seems to have risen over the last two decades. Before it was 21 - now it is 32. So why do they withdraw? The trigger for a boy retreating to his bedroom might be comparatively slight - poor grades or a broken heart, for example - but the withdrawal itself can become a source of trauma. And powerful social forces can conspire to keep him there. One such force is sekentei, a person's reputation in the community and the pressure he or she feels to impress others. The longer hikikomori remain apart from society, the more aware they become of their social failure. They lose whatever self-esteem and confidence they had and the prospect of leaving home becomes ever more terrifying. Parents are also conscious of their social standing and frequently wait for months before seeking professional help.

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I know we're supposed to view the hikikomori as a bad thing but I remember reading the Russian novel Oblomov about a man who refused to get out of bed and thinking that it seemed like a very good idea. And then there's this adaptation of the JG Ballard story "The Enormous Space" about a man who refuses to leave his house and instead ventures off into what JG Ballard often called 'inner space' (as opposed to outer space.) It reminds me a little of some of the ideas of the German Romantics and I've quoted the German Romantic mystic Novalis here before and I'll do it again now: Nach innen geht der Geheimnisvolle Weg: inward goes the way full of mystery. Check out the BBC JG Ballard adaptation below and see if you agree with me that at the very least it's an interesting and different way to make a William Least Heat Moon style Deep Map of your familiar own home. 

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The Broken Windows Theory

According to Wikipedia: The broken windows theory is a criminological theory of the norm-setting and signalling effect of urban disorder and vandalism on additional crime and anti-social behavior. The theory states that maintaining and monitoring urban environments in a well-ordered condition may stop further vandalism and escalation into more serious crime.

The back wall of the St Kilda Police Station

The theory was introduced in a 1982 article by social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. Since then it has been subject to great debate both within the social sciences and in the public sphere. The theory has been used as a motivation for several reforms in criminal policy. The broken windows theory has received support from several empirical studies and has also been the subject of criticism. If you've read the studies you'll see that the Broken Windows Theory of law seems to work - in some jurisdictions - at reducing crime. If you crack down on the little things the atmosphere improves and criminals become more furtive and reluctant. If you let the little things slide then deviancy gets defined down and criminal activity becomes more prevalent. 

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I live in St Kilda which is a part of Melbourne that used to be notorious for drug dealing, prostitution and assaults. As the neighbourhood has gentrified these crimes have certainly diminished but they haven't gone away completely. Our next door neighbour - a 68 year old nurse who works the nightshift in a mental hospital - was burgaled a few months back, our car has been broken into several times and most seriously of all: a prostitute was murdered round the corner from us in July. 

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The photograph to the right is of the back wall of St Kilda Police Station. They clearly either don't believe in The Broken Windows Theory or they're just too lazy to do anything about the graffiti on their place of work. I don't know how you feel but I think it's crazy that the St Kilda Police are allowing their police station to be tagged like this. The message it gives out to the general public is one of surrender - we can't even control the wall of our own police station so no wonder you're on your own out there on the streets. It also sends a message to the pimps, drug dealers, vandals and gangbangers of Balaclava and St Kilda: this street belongs to you, not us. The prostitute who was murdered in late July was dragged off Carlisle Street two hundred metres from the police station and then beaten to death on Greeves Street. Perhaps if the St Kilda Police would remove the graffiti from the police station walls it would prove to the criminals that they can keep their own house in order and these potential offenders wouldn't then feel that they have the tacit permission of the St Kilda police to commit their crimes. Perhaps. 

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How To Read Thomas Pynchon

I just started reading the most recent Thomas Pynchon novel Bleeding Edge last night. Its pretty good so far and I'll try and get a full review up here next week, but in the meantime I thought I'd reblog this little primer on Pynchon I came up with last year with Bleeding Edge now added to the list: 
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Now don't ask me how I know but I know that a lot of you out there have never finished a Thomas Pynchon novel; you've tried but it's never quite worked out. You sat down in a comfy chair with a mug of tea and a packet of McVities Chocolate Digestives and everything was great for a bit but then you found yourself hurling Gravity's Rainbow across the room in exasperation. This is a problem for me. I like Pynchon very much and I want you to like him too so I thought I would provide you with a little reading list primer that will help you get into the books...
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1. Inherent Vice: read this one first. It's a crime novel set in a slightly exaggerated version of 1970's LA. It's full of stoners, groovy language, flower power with a crazy missing persons plot. Its got lots of pop culture references that anyone should be able to get if they've been paying attention at all for the last couple of decades. It's more or less Robert Altman's Long Goodbye crossed with a Cheech and Chong movie, and, of course, Paul Thomas Anderson's real movie version of this book will be out next year...
2. The Crying Of Lot 49: after reading Inherent Vice you should be able to handle Lot 49 which is basically set in the same milieu and is only a little bit weirder and more discursive.
3. Bleeding Edge: a paranoid shaggy dog detective novel set in the Manhattan of 2001 just before the 9/11 attacks. It begins with a Westlake quote and its a spicy blend of Westlake, Hammett, DeLillo and Woody Allen. (With an unfortunate David Foster Wallace cruise ship rip off/homage thrown in there for good measure.) It's pretty funny and it concludes a thematic trilogy of sorts of that began with Inherent Vice and Vineland.
4. Vineland: America in the early 80's. Reagan, Star Wars, George Lucas, Brock Vond. And again most people should be able to get the refs. As I say Inherent Vice, Vineland and Bleeding Edge form a kind of paranoid alternative history contemporary trilogy that should be accessible to most general readers.
5. Gravity's Rainbow: Pynchon's WW2 novel which won the National Book Award. His best book? Probably, yes. It's quite a difficult text but by no means impossible to read especially in a trade paperback edition with big clear print. You'll need to know your mid twentieth century culture quite well to get all the refs this time. And just to warn you, amidst the humour and horror there is a pretty gross scene involving coprophilia.
6. V: my favourite Pynchon. A literary romp through early twentieth century history. Very abstract, strange and off putting for the uninitiated. But a great read once you get the momentum of the story. 
7. Mason & Dixon: the story of Mason & Dixon surveying the land that will become the North and South of the USA. This is my second favourite Pynchon. It's written in eighteenth century prose so it could be tricky for some people, but not for those with Clarissa, Tom Jones or even Neal Stephenson under their belts. 
8. Against The Day: This is for completists only. A dense, difficult story of turn of the century America. My favourite scenes were set in a beautifully crafted wild west Denver. 
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Additionally: Mortality And Mercy In Vienna, a strange out of print novella that I read in the Columbia University stacks before it got stolen and Slow Learner a nice collection of short stories, the highlight of which is probably Entropy.  

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What To Do About The Troll Under The Bridge

When you're a writer you have to accept criticism. It goes with the territory and the best thing to do is grow a thick skin and shrug it off; but what do you do when you start getting attacked for racist, sectarian or political reasons? And what do you do when you are being trolled by a single person or a small group of individuals who havent even taken the trouble to actually read your books? 
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About this time last year my old pal Stuart Neville discovered that he had been trolled on Amazon.co.uk. Stu reacted with vehemence and determination: he publicly named the troll and it started a furor that ended up involving the BBC, the Irish crime writing community and it led to a somewhat startling confession by one prominent non Irish crime writer that he had invented a "sock puppet" to review his own books and those of his competition. (A similar scandal erupted in British history circles a year or two back when the prominent historian Orlando Figes admitted that he also had invented a "sock puppet" to review negatively the works of his rivals.)  
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I also have been trolled but I am not as combative as Stuart. I don't want to give my troll(s) the oxygen of publicity by publicly naming him/them but I do want to do something and that something is this blogpost. I first noticed my troll when he reviewed my novel The Cold Cold Ground on amazon.co.uk claiming that I was a foreigner who knew nothing about Northern Ireland. He said that the book was full of inaccuracies and he knew what he was talking about because he was from the street where I grew up in Carrickfergus and had lived there during the time the book was set. He then reviewed my novel Dead I Well May Be and this attack was even more bizarre: he didn't even read the book on that occasion but decided to give me a one star review on the basis of the title alone. In his review he further explained that I didn't have the approval of the local council for what I was doing (yes that left me baffled too), he again said that I was not from Carrickfergus and then in a massive display of chutzpah he said that I had invented sock puppets to attack him in various places. I decided to do a little detective work and through his twitter feed I found out his real name. I discovered, unsurprisingly, that he was a liar: he wasn't old enough to remember the events of The Cold Cold Ground and he certainly didn't live on Coronation Road in Carrickfergus in 1980-1. Now he doesn't live anywhere near Carrickfergus. My troll is a married man with two kids and appears to be some kind of right wing Loyalist lunatic who hates my books purely for sectarian political reasons. Fortunately for me I've been attacked by both sides in Northern Ireland - the Republicans don't like me because they say I mock the IRA and the Loyalists don't like me because they say I mock the UVF. I think it's a very good thing for a novelist setting his stuff in Ulster to be attacked by both sets of extremists because it proves that you're doing something right. But of course the sensible middle isn't going to leap to your defence because they're far too sensible to leap anywhere. 
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So what to do about my troll and his clones? Like I say, unlike Stu, I am not going to name him. If you want to you can read his review of Dead I Well May Be on amazon.co.uk and you can read his review of The Cold Cold Ground there too and apparently he's all over Good Reads as well. He's gradually making his way through all my books on amazon, not a chore for him of course because he doesn't actually have to read them. I still think the best thing to do would have been to ignore him but alas some of my titles have so few reviews attached to them (especially on amazon.co.uk) that his little campaign has actually had an impact. Anyway what I would like is if some of you reading this blog were to give me a few positive reviews to balance out the work of this very busy troll. If you could possibly review me and my books on amazon.com or amazon.co.uk or on Good Reads it would really help, especially on those books whose amazon and good reads ratings have been taken down by the vindictive spite of one bitter nutcase.
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I really appreciate this and if you could let me know in the comments below what reviews you've added that would be cool too. (But please don't let me know in the comments if you've found other reviews by the troll/trolls - that'll just get me all worked up which is not good for my blood pressure.)    

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1000 Words A Day And Other Myths About Writing

Another myth about writing, good writing that is, is that you need to write a 1000 words a day, every day. Preferably before breakfast. This of course was and is the habit of a lot of great writers. Trollope and Somerset Maugham were the masters of getting their work done early in the morning and then taking the rest of the day off.  JG Ballard (my favourite British novelist of the twentieth century) would get the kids off to school, pour himself a stiff glass of whisky, line up the typewriter and force himself to write a 1000 words, rain or shine. It's good discipline if you can do it. At the Brisbane Writers Festival last week I talked to half a dozen writers who are able to do the 1000 words before breakfast thing and they all seemed happy and successful. But it's not me. Not me at all. First of all my brain doesn't function that well before breakfast or indeed for a good while after breakfast and then there's the 1000 words themselves. 1000 words a day is 7000 a week and before you know what's happening in 3 months you've got a new novel. But if I was to do this it wouldn't be writing it would (to borrow a line from Truman Capote) merely be typing. I go slow. I spent a month working on the first page of The Cold Cold Ground: on a good day I think I managed a couple of sentences. I also spent a month on the first couple of pages of I Hear The Sirens In The Street. Many many combinations of lines and sentences went into the wastepaper basket. Indeed the great Isaac Bashevis Singer said that the "wastepaper basket is the writer's best friend." At the end of the month I had a couple of pages that I felt worked and a few weeks later I had a chapter that I thought worked. If I'd been under an artificial pressure of 1000 words a day I would have stressed out and I wouldnt have come up with anything. In my opinion the first page of a novel is very important. It deserves to tinkered and fussed over like a poem. You should spend however long it takes to get page 1 right. And even more important than the first page is the first line. That deserves to be tinkered with even more. I read so many books with a shit opening line and my heart just sinks because I know the author didn't put any thought into it at all. Whereas: "A screaming comes across the sky." or  "It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen." or "Mother died today." or "Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K."
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I'm not really working on a book at the moment so I'm not doing any writing at all. And this too I think is a good thing. If you're writing 1000 words a day when do you take time off to reflect and to read? Reading and reflection is what keeps a writer fresh not more bloody writing. Even the prolific Philip K Dick would take time off to read. 
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So what am I saying here? I'm saying that if the 1000 words a day thing works for you that's great, but if it doesn't don't sweat it. Taking your time and making your book good is far far more important than the arbitrary word count on your computer. 

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Life Without The Boring Bits And Other Myths About Writing

So I spent the last week or so at the Brisbane Writer's Festival doing a few readings, a few panels and conducting some writers workshops (whenever I use the word 'workshop' in a non carpentry related context I always think of that Kingsley Amis line from Jake's Thing "If there's one word that sums up everything that's gone wrong since the war, it's Workshop. After Youth, that is.") I met many other writers, talked to readers, potential authors etc. and I've got a few thoughts that I'd like to share with you about the nature of writing in this and maybe one other post. 
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Many of the crime writers I talked to this week have absorbed the great Elmore Leonard's "10 rules of writing" and repeat these rules as if they are gospel. If you'll recall this is what Leonard says (you'll notice that there are actually 11 rules here): 

1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said”…he admonished gravely.
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. 
6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
11. My most important rule is one that sums up the 10. If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Now Leonard was a sensible chap and a terrific writer and much of this is common sense; rules 3,4 and 5 are solid but, to me at least, the rest of these "rules" are utter bollocks. My old editor at Scribner told me that you'll "never lose a cent underestimating the intelligence or the patience of the reading public" and this is the unspoken master principle behind Leonard's rules and it's what many writers deeply believe. But what it amounts to is fear. You're afraid of being boring. You're afraid to make your reader work, you're afraid to make your reader sit through a scene of real life or a potentially tedious description of the real world. You're afraid of poetry. You're afraid of tangents. You're afraid, you're afraid, you're afraid. Yeah well, I say bugger that. Write the way you want to write and if people don't buy your books fuck 'em. Be brave. Tell your story your way. Follow your rules. Write the book for yourself, not for some imaginary lowest common denominator reader who doesn't know anything. Dan Brown is so afraid of his readers that he explains everything in his novels and talks to us as if we were five year old children. Do you really want to go down that road? Contra Leonard I say if it sounds like writing then well done you, you're probably taking trouble with your prose not just writing any old shite that moves the plot along. Dare to be purple or wordy or dull...I promise you that it won't kill you. I've just finished reading Red or Dead by David Peace and he breaks every single one of Leonard's rules. In spades. Red or Dead will annoy many (perhaps most) readers but Peace doesn't care because he's an artist who drags his literary plough over the stony ground. In Red or Dead Peace uses repetition and leitmotif to take British literature into terra nova and because of that he will still be read 100 years from now, long after the Dan Browns of this world have been consigned to the dustbin of history. 
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Joseph Conrad said that "A work of art should justify itself in every line" and I think that's a far more useful principle than any of the above rules by the late great Elmore Leonard. (Except for that thing about the exclamation marks and adverbs - yes Ms Rowling I am looking at you.) So what am I saying here? I'm saying ignore the bloody "rules" and write for yourself and if no one else digs it but you, maybe your book is complete and utter rubbish but maybe, just maybe, you're onto something new.  

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A Walk Up Mount Coot-tha

At the Brisbane Writer's Festival yesterday I had a free morning and afternoon so on the advice of Trip Advisor I decided to hike to the top of Mt Coot-tha from my hotel in the South Bank. Google Maps estimated that this was a 2 hour walk and the ever optimistic Apple Maps said it was a 1.5 hour walk. In fact there and back took me six hours but I do have a bad knee so I'm not blaming the map aps. The view at the top of the mountain was worth it. Looking east you can see all the way to the Pacific Ocean and twenty K back into the bush looking west. You climb up through suburbs and then mostly through rather lush and pretty Eucalyptus forest. I didn't see any animals but I did see several sulphur crested cockatoos which admittedly didn't wow me that much because they are exactly the same cockatoos which live in my backyard in St Kilda and begin screeching at 6-00am every morning. 
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After the hike I went to my last event at the writer's festival a rather fun "reading" at the Ipswich Library. (I always say reading in quotes because I never end up actually reading anything as I blabber on for so long...but to be honest no one ever seems to mind that much.) 
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At the festival I did do a lot of talking to other writers and a lot of thinking about my own writing in particular and crime fiction in general and I'll blog all about that later in the week. (Its more interesting than it sounds - trust me.)
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In the meantime here's a little bit about Mt Coot-tha from Wikipedia and some photographs I took on my ipod of the eucalypt forest and the view from the top of the mountain looking east towards the sea.
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Mount Coot-tha, which is 287 metres above sea level, has the highest peak in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Mount Coot-tha forms the eastern extent of the Taylor Range and is a prominent landmark approximately 6 km to the west of the Brisbane central business district. Visible from much of the city, Mount Coot-tha is a popular bushland tourist destination. Before the Moreton Bay penal settlement, Mount Coot-tha was the home of the Turrbal Aboriginal people. Early Brisbane people called it One Tree Hill when bush at the top of the hill was cleared except for one large eucalypt tree. The Aboriginal people of the area used to come to the area to collect ‘ku-ta’ (honey) that was produced by the native stingless bee. Mount Coot-tha (Place of Honey), a derivative of (the indigenous term), replaced the former title ‘One Tree Hill' in 1880 when the area was declared a Public Recreation Reserve.

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The City And The City

This book kept coming up yesterday at the Brisbane Writer's Festival (where I am at the moment) as a possible direction for the crime novel in the future. (Where crime and sci-fi and noir meet.) I loved it so I thought I'd reblog this little review from 2 years ago:
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China Mieville's The City And The City may be the most original crime novel I've read since Declan Burke's Absolute Zero Cool or possibly all the way back to James Ellroy's American Tabloid. It won the 2010 Hugo Award in a tie with Paolo Bacigalupi's excellent The Windup Girl. It also won the Arthur C. Clarke award and was nominated for the Nebula. It was ignored by the all mainstream crime awards, which is a bit odd (and embarrassing provincial of them) because at heart the book is basically a noir detective story. I was impressed by The City And The City's technical prowess and literary ambitions; Mieville has done a great job taking a new slant on a rather staid and somewhat moribund genre.  
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The book is set in Eastern Europe in the cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma, which are actually adjoining city states somewhere close to Romania and Hungary. A different language is spoken in each city and they are culturally and economically distinct. Fracture lines run through the cities and initially one thinks of East and West Berlin or possibly Buda and Pest; but what makes Beszel and Ul Qoma so interesting is that they actually share much of the same topography. Streets that exist Ul Qoma exist also in Beszel, but travel from one city to the other is utterly forbidden. From a very young age children are trained to "unsee" vehicles and people who are living in the other city. This sounds weird and it takes a while to completely buy into it, but Mieville does convince you that this bizarre state of affairs could work. Mieville has been inspired by the work of Kafka and especially Bruno Schulz and that's no bad thing in a noir. 
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The novel begins when Inspector Borlu is called upon to investigate the murder of a young woman in Beszel. He quickly discovers that her body has been transported to the crime scene from the neighbouring city of Ul Qoma and this raises all kinds of difficulties. Crossing the "border" from one city to city is the most serious crime of all in the two cities and once proof of an encroachment becomes manifest the mysterious entity Breach spirits the breachee away to God knows where. The investigation takes Borlu into the forbidden world of Ul Qoma and there the fun really begins as we begin to see conspiracies within conspiracies and the possibility of a mythical third hidden city know as Ocriny. Borlu remains a bit of a cipher throughout but this fits squarely into an old school noir trope and I didn't mind that at all. I loved the scenes with Borlu in Ul Qoma looking across to his home city of Beszel, trying to unsee familiar shops and people and realising just how strange this all was. I won't reveal any more of the plot, suffice to say that although there are no real surprises the third act of the novel is still satisfying within the predictable Kafkaesque conventions of such a narrative. 
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China Mieville is very much the new Iain Banks, comfortable writing in various genres but with a background in science fiction. Like Banks he is prolific. I've read four of his books and my other favourite is Perdido Street Station a very original fantasy novel set in another fascinating city of dreadful night. Check him out.  

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