Klausner also seems to feel compelled to imbue I Don’t Care About Your Band with some sort of social relevance. Sometimes I think she hits on a genuine insight, but scattered throughout are cringe-inducing bits of armchair sociology derived from from observing a small population with an intrinsic selection bias. Few things get my dander up like sweeping generalizations about gender and sex role behavior, e.g., the “only women can be bisexual, men can only be in the process of turning gay” trope, which gets aired here.

* some versions of this pull-quote substitute Cat Power, which would have made me somewhat less likely to read the book.

needs more demons? just a few

…a car horn rendition of “La Cucaracha” sounded outside. I looked out the sidelights of the front door to see a white van with foot-long wrought-iron ants welded along the roof, making it look like a giant motorized sugar cube at a picnic. The termite guy.

His name was William Watson, and he was carrying a black vinyl binder at least six inches thick. “Call me Bill,” he said twice, once as he shook Greg’s hand, once as he shook mine. Bill was a short, skinny man of about sixty with a well-trimmed salt-and-pepper beard and ears that were as gnarled and meaty as tree fungus. He listened to our tale of the previous night’s insect horror with his eyes turned toward the floor, his head cocked as though he were an oncologist and our complaints might hold the first subtle signs of a malignancy larger than we were prepared to face.

I liked Novak’s debut novel Five Mile House, which shares protagonist Leslie Stone, a troubled ex-cop with a lot of baggage. Innocence demonstrates exactly the sort of progress I’d hope for from an author continuing to improve her craft: it’s more nuanced and subtle, more solidly structured, told in a more authoritative set of voices.

The end was a tiny letdown, with most of the plot threads gathered up just a little too neatly and too quickly. The one significant stray thread is likewise a hair too expected, like the question mark floating into a film’s “The End” title card.

In general, though, if I enjoyed every suspense novel as much, I’d read more suspense novels.

needs more demons? no.

The basic ingredients are the same: historical fiction, hardboiled whodunnit, comedy of manners, political intrigue, and romance. But the proportions are quite different this time around. In particular, the prominence of whodunnit elements is so reduced that the book barely qualifies as a “mystery novel” in the traditional sense, although the mystery sub-plot is too well integrated to be gratuitous. (And although Falco spends comparatively few calories trying to build links between corpses and killers, The Iron Hand of Mars gives him puzzles of other sorts to wrangle.)

The Iron Hand of Mars even features some armed-parties-tramping-through-the-woods-looking-for-things action which almost gives it a fantasy novel vibe — except that a clash over who wins the contract to supply an army base with tableware is the sort of nuts-and-bolts conflict which Davis excels at depicting, and which few fantasists would deem worthy of consideration.

Finally, Falco’s distinctive narrative presence holds everything together. He’s a wise-cracking private investigator (informer, in Roman parlance) in the classic mode — wry, self-deprecating, observant, and incisive (apart from the requisite blind spots). He’s also a Roman citizen who dwells in a richly detailed, complex, and credible social environment. The seamlessness with which Davis melds these disparate elements continues to astound me.

Needs More Demons? Nope.

In her acknowledgments Crystal Zevon writes,

Over the three years [of writing the book] I … fell in and out of love hundreds of times. There were weeks when I was sure I’d hate him forever; nights when I’d cry myself to sleep missing the sound of his voice; and many moments when I wondered how I could expose what he’d asked me to expose … I’d made a promise to tell the whole truth — “even the awful, ugly parts.”

I suspect that many readers will have an experience similar in character, if less intense and personal. I’m glad I read Miles Davis’ autobiography Miles first; that was a formative experience for me in resolving conflict between enormous respect for a musical talent, and repugnance at the man behind that talent sometimes being a real shit. There were many points in Zevon’s story before he got sober where it was hard to have any sympathy for him at all. Even the sober Warren Zevon was hell on anyone he was romantically with, and often hard to deal with for most who knew him. It seems unlikely, for instance, that the world would have had any of his “comeback” records from the mid-80’s on, if not for the perseverance of Andy Slater:

..when [the record company executives] got to Warren, somebody said…”We’re going to terminate him.”
I stood up and said, “Terminate him? He’s the best artist we have.”
There’s all this harrumphing and one of the principles said, Slater, he’s 180,000 dollars in debt [to the I.R.S.], he doesn’t live her anymore, he has no record deal, and he doesn’t want to work.” I said, “Yeah, but he’s a great artist. And he’s the best writer here.” This guy says, “Then you manage him.”

After weeks of coaxing, Slater gets Zevon started on the road that led to his album Sentimental Hygeine, and his first substantive experiences with sobriety. Throughout their association, Zevon continues to use Slater hard:

I got a call from Warren. He said, “I’m in big trouble, Andy. You’ve got to help me. This girl is pregnant. I’m not in love with her, and I don’t want to be with her, and she’s going to have the kid. You’ve got to come here and explain my life to her.” I said, “Okay.”

but ultimately, even Slater gets fed up:

When I went to rehab, Warren was finally in good financial shape, sober, had a healthy touring base, and was about to release a new record. I called him from treatment… I said “What’s going on? How’s the record? blah blah blah.” He said, “Yeah, it’s going fine. I’ve got to talk to you about something.” He says, “Look, Andy, I just got off the phone with Irving [Azoff]. He said that if I fire you … he’ll really work my record and I’ll get better promotion and marketing… I think I’m going to do it.”
I hung the phone up, and thank God I was in treatment…It was devastating to me because here was somebody I had been friends with for almost ten years. I had … made it my mission to get him back in the record business when he was drunk and living in Philadelphia. I had taken him to rehab three times…Then, when I had a problem, he wasn’t there.

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead is subtitled “The Dirty Live and Times of Warren Zevon.” Like all of the chapter titles, it’s a phrase drawn from one of Zevon’s song titles. Crystal Zevon admits to drawing a veil over the most baldly pornographic of Zevon’s reminisces, but there are racy bits a-plenty:

I invited Jeanette over and we made love, wonderful. Feel great. Went to the tanning place. Sure enough, there was Susan & before I knew it we were fucking on the carpet, then on the tanning bed.

But in addition to the typical trashy rock star excesses of sex, booze, and tax woes, and the less typical excesses of Calvin Klein gray shirts, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead offers more than the usual share of insight into Zevon’s artistic process. And that’s ultimately what makes it a compelling and moving read.

Needs More Demons? Ye gods, no.

Matlock’s musical contributions to the band also fascinate me. I’m convinced that the strange alchemy between Matlock and Steve Jones is at least as important to the band’s enduring success as Lydon’s characteristic sonic sneers and McLaren’s image-mongering. Matlock wrote lovely pop songs and Jones stripped away the fiddly bits and reduced them to their elemental essence. (The fantastic EMI documentary Never Mind the Bollocks has many examples of this process in action).

Matlock (with help from co-author Pete Silverton) proves a breezy and entertaining narrator unburdened by false modesty. He’s got about as little patience for the myth that the Pistols couldn’t play as I do. He portrays McLaren as more of an opportunist than a master manipulator, and since he worked in McLaren’s shop even before it was renamed Sex, his is presumably a well-informed opinion. His account of the infamous Anarchy tour is markedly different than the others I’ve read; he was insulated from the press furor and mostly remembers being dead bored in hotel rooms.

A brief quote will give you a feel for the book’s flavor, and also show why Matlock didn’t ultimately fit well with the band:

…What they were interested in was prostitutes. It was all, let’s go and get Glen a tart. It may sound like I was a party-pooper but I wasn’t interested. One, I had my eye on a girl at the Paridiso [the club where the band was booked]. Two, I had a couple of songs to work on and one of the songs I wrote there turned out to be “Rich Kids” which sold 100,000 copies, thank you very much. So sod going off after a tart.

I read the original 1990 edition, but glenmatlock.com indicates that Matlock has revised the book with new material covering the recent reunion tours. Dang. I might have to read it again.

Needs More Demons? Not really.

A month or so ago I was flipping through a book rack and spotted The Incompleat Nifft by Michael Shea. My brain registered the variant spelling of “incomplete” and the presence of “Shea” and I checked the book out of the library under the presumption that it was some sort of latter-day sequel. (I’ve made similar mistakes before — once I brought home one of Robert Parker’s novels about the detective Spencer when I’d been looking for one of Donald Westlake’s novels about the detective Parker. Oops.)

In fact, Shea’s collection of loosely-linked long short stories/short novels bears no relation to deCamp and Pratt’s creation, but evinces instead a remarkable resemblance to another fantasy series which originated in the 1940s, Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories.

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are two of the original cornerstones on which the “sword & sorcery” subgenre of fantasy was built (for better or worse). They are best appreciated today with a liberal dose of historical perspective. Leiber’s duo encounters tropes that have long since become dreadful “Dungeons & Dragons” clichés (the fabled temple treasure that turns out to be a monster, the mysterious shop with mysterious goods which mysteriously appears and vanishes, etc), but which were fresh when the stories were first published. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser were a bit like the French Connection car-chase scene of sword & sorcery, if you’ll let me stress a metaphor. The stories were short on character development, thematic content, and even on sophisticated plot constructs. They were long on dense prose with a rather 19th-century quality — “lush” or a bit “purple,” depending on your disposition to it. Arguably, the central “character” of the stories was really Leiber’s imagined world of Newhon itself, which was richly and vividly imagined.

Michael Shea’s Nifft the Lean and Barnar Hammer-Hand follow this template in virtually all particulars. Shea mixes in a touch of Lovecraft’s xenophobia, and is more explicitly grisly than Leiber, and there are sadomasochistic overtones, particularly when Nifft and Barnar go to Hell (which they do with some regularity). Shea is perhaps a better prose stylist than Leiber, which I think is the root of my strange reaction to the book. Like a “real” work of literature it takes more effort to read than most books which offer simple escapism. But I don’t think it offers commensurate rewards. Its characters are too shallow to offer any insights into human nature, and what thematic content it holds can be reduced to truisms like “pride goeth before a fall.” There’s nothing to learn from it but the details of a geography that is exotic, but wholly imaginary.

I found myself resenting not only the time I wasted reading (roughly half of) the book, but the time that Shea wasted writing it. He has an undeniable ability to write evocative prose and conjure memorable (if frequently nasty) images, and it seems to me that he ought to be able to write much better (and less derivative) books.

What bothers me about my response to The Incompleat Nifft is that I find myself making some of the same arguments that people make against the worthiness of fantasy/science fiction genres in their entirety. It has nothing to teach us. It’s decadent and valueless, a waste of time.

And I don’t feel the same way about the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories themselves. The same arguments apply, but Leiber was at least doing something that hadn’t been done before. I think what offends me about The Incompleat Nifft is the combination of its extreme derivativeness from a single template; the narrowness of its literary scope; and the amount of craft, care, and talent expended in its construction.

Which leads me to the odd conclusion that if The Incompleat Nifft had been written less well, I might have been able to enjoy it as a simple escapist lark. At any rate, I might not have felt compelled to excoriate it at (probably tedious, sorry) length.

Needs More Demons? Needs more something. Actually has a lot of demons.

But on the other hand, it can be really rewarding to see a film with no preconceptions at all. Surprises can be fun (even if they’re not sufficient to redeem a bad flick). I treasure some of the film experiences I’ve had where I knew nothing about the movie I was about to see. (I used to belong to a preview club that screened films that hadn’t yet secured distribution deals; I miss it.) I’m glad I went through the effort necessary to see Blair Witch Project and Memento without much foreknowledge.

Some years ago I read Like a Hole in the Head, Jen Banbury’s first (and, sadly, still only) novel. Like a Hole in the Head starts in a very conventional light comic mystery mode, and abruptly turns into a completely different sort of book. Knowing its genre could reduce some of the joy of a first reading, even if it wouldn’t exactly constitute a spoiler. And — this is the tricky part, and the reason I never tried to review the novel — even knowing in advance that there will be a shift in narrative tone and focus could lessen its impact.

The film Incident at Loch Ness left me with a similar feeling. It reminded me powerfully of a wonderful TV miniseries that I don’t think I should name. If you think you agree with me about makes for a good movie, I urge you to just see it without reading another word about it. It’s directed by Zak Penn (perhaps best known as the screenwriter of X-men 2) and features a scene in which Werner Herzog shops for razor blades. Agh, I’ve said too much already.

I will succumb to the temptation to mention that the DVD commentary track is entirely worthwhile, and then I will shut up.

Needs More Demons? Nope.