Nicci French Blog

Something Rotten in the State of Denmark

We've just finished watching The Killing 2, gulping it down two episodes at a time. My feelings about it are much the same as the ones I had about the first series - but even more extreme.

The good bit about it - which is much the most important - is very good. The portrayal of Copenhagen is wonderfully bleak - even the daytime scenes seem to be at night. The characterization is bleak as well - even the nice characters are weak and flawed. (By the way, from this point on there is almost nothing but spoilers.) The lovely, faithful wife of the unjustly imprisoned Raben turns out to be unfaithful. We last see the incorruptible politician, Thomas Buch, in a shot quoting grimly from the last shot of The Godfather. The plot has the visceral forward momentum of a show like 24. 

Above all, Sofie Grabol's Sarah Lund is one of the screen detectives: driven, flawed, borderline insane, utterly compelling.

However...

The story sort of makes sense as you watch it. But, at the end, when you go back over it from the villain's point of view it becomes almost insane. (This is an important issue for anyone planning a thriller, by the way. If you tell the story from, say, the detective's point of view, you still have to imagine the story from, say, the murderer's point of view. Why did he or she do what they did? What was their plan? Is it remotely plausible?)

The crime is this (spoilers, obviously): A maverick Danish special services soldier kills a family in Afghanistan, because he thinks the father is a Taliban informer. For some reason that is far from clear, he kills them in front of a unit of Danish soldiers. Back home, he 'covers this up' by killing them all one by one, along with their lawyer, and disguising it as the work of Islamist terrorists.

Oh, and (as we finally discover) the killer's other job is as a policeman investigating the murders himself as partner to Sarah Lund. When Lund is about to be taken off the case because she is the one person who doesn't believe the fake motive he himself has confected, he - utterly bafflingly in retrospect - says he doesn't believe it either and demands she be kept on. 

After watching the series, you can play a sort of game, working out in your head all the stuff that the murderer managed to do as part of his dastardly plan while still holding down a full-time job as a policeman - creating fake Islamist websites, stealing explosives from military bases, planting bombs in Sweden. The man is a genius. He makes Hannibal Lecter look like a shoplifter.

Great fun, though. Roll on part three.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reading our lives

Nicci:
I've just read, very belatedly, a feature by James Wood in last November's New Yorker, in which he describes sorting through his dead father-in-law's library of books and asks how much we can tell of a person's life and self from what they have on their bookshelves. In Wood's case, he concludes that we can tell less than we might imagine (although in a piece that was a curious mixture of intimacy and cool dispassion, his father-in-law emerges as a fierce lover of learning, a prickly and fervent self-educator).

But it made me wonder what someone would make of our bookshelves, were they to walk round them like a detective looking for clues. Although we repeatedly attempt to cull them before they overrun the house, we own a lot of books and we try to put them in categories - otherwise the best place to loose a book is among crowds of books. It's not what individual books you own that describes you, but the categories that speak. Apart from obvious ones - classics, modern novels, thrillers, biographies, poetry - it is clear from a cursory glance someone (Sean) reads a lot of books on moral philosophy and history, particularly modern history. He has dozens and dozens of books on the Second World War. Adrienne Rich and Kate Millet and Germaine Greer and Ellen Moers and books about the backlash and about pornography jostle together. We obviously make more resolutions than we can keep: there are several feet of often untouched teach-yourself-language books (Swedish, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Modern Greek….). It could be deduced - from all the literary criticism, as well as from earnest pencilled remarks written next to Eliot's poetry or down the margins of Ulysses - that one or both of us studied English at university. We like cooking - far more cookery books than we could ever need. We like roses, birds, English trees. We like maps. Grammar. Graphic novels. We probably have a greenhouse. We like biking and walking. We like wild swimming. When we go to an exhibition we tend to buy the catalogue. There are chess players in the house. We have children who are now grown up - there's a set of shelves in the corridor full of beloved children's books, with cracked spines and pages coming loose: The Mousehole Cat, all of Dr Seuss, the Moomintroll books, The Owl Babies, All Join In… read aloud over and over again. Next to Sean's side of the bed is an entire bookshelf devoted to the hundreds of books he is in the process of reading: each one of them has a bookmark of some kind showing where he's got to. Books I read are stained and battered, with turned down pages: Indian mud and Greek sand and Swedish lake water are held inside the covers. 

Then there are numerous odd shelves: books on mountaineering (for writing Killing Me Softly), memoirs by people who were stalked (Beneath the Skin), Freud, Jung, Klein, police handbooks, forensic medical books. Books about London. About dreams. About night. About pain and death. About hidden rivers.  

Recently I helped my parents moved from the family home. They never throw anything away - there were seed catalogues from the Seventies and B&B guides from the Eighties, text books dating back to my father's university days. There was a Guinness Book of Records from decades ago, school atlases of the world before vast countries split apart and spawned dozens of new ones. My father doesn't read much anymore, except poetry, and my mother's blind and so can only listen to audiobooks. Yet these old books have taken their place on the new shelves because somehow they seem to represent the lives of the people who have owned and loved them.

Weird Things Online Part 42

If you go to Art Garfunkel's website, you can see a list of every book he's read since 1968. There are a lot of them, even for forty-four years. It's rather impressive, but also rather weird. The very first one is Rousseau's Confessions. The most recent is Fire and Rain by David Browne, which is, in part, actually about Simon and Garfunkel. But that's not typical. He reads all kinds of fiction and all kinds of non-fiction.

Of course, he presumably had time on his hands while Paul Simon was writing all the songs and playing all the instruments. Does that sound mean? It's not meant to. I'm not especially keen on his solo work, though I do like this. But he was an underrated screen actor. He was good in Carnal Knowledge and very good in Bad Timing (a film so controversial that it was denounced by its own distributor). 

 

 

 

Pass the Envelope, Please

What have Around the World in Eighty Days, Gandhi, Terms of Endearment, Out of Bloody Africa (not its real title) and Driving Miss Daisy in common? Answer: They all won the Oscar for best film. So, I think we can agree that the Academy Awards are basically silly. 

So, I resisted reading Mark Harris's Scenes from a Revolution: The Birth of the New Hollywood. But my brother, Karl, said it was really good. I read it and he's right; it is really good. It tells in rivetting detail the story of making and reception of the five films nominated for the 1967 best film award: Bonnie and Clyde, Dr Doolittle, The Graduate, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night. 

The ostensible subject is the transition from the stuffy old traditional Hollywood (represented by the disastrous Dr Doolittle) to the groovy new Hollywood of the future (represented by Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate). The other two were trapped in the middle. 

But of course (as Harris shows), it's much more complicated than that. The producer of Dr Doolittle, Dick Zanuck, went on to produced that ultimate new Hollywood movie, Jaws. Warren Beatty and Mike Nichols were arguably products more of the fifties than the sixties. There's a wonderful moment where Dustin Hoffman tells a group of adoring student fans that he's not one of them. He's too old. (He was thirty when he played Benjamin in the The Graduate.)

A few thoughts:

In the forty-five years since Bonnie and Clyde, Warren Beatty has made only fourteen films, of which I really like only two: McCabe and Mrs Miller and The Parallax View.(In the same period, both Clint Eastwood and Woody Allen have made over fifty films. Of course, that has brought its own problems.)

Success is a tricky concept: 

Rod Steiger won Best Actor for In the Heat of the Night (which also won best film) and then didn't get a job for a whole year.

Sidney Poitier starred in two of the nominated films, as well as one of the year's most profitable films, To Sir With Love. Yet this triumph marked the end of his career as a leading man. He was the first black leading man, the first black actor to win an Oscar, but in complicated (and sometimes in simple) ways, this symbolic role ruined him as an actor. Yet he was a true hero. (Kevin Sessums has just written a beautiful tribute to him.)

Similarly, the career of Stanley Kramer, director of the mocked but highly profitable, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, suffered much more than that of Richard Fleischer, director of the utterly disastrous Dr Doolittle. It's one of the great puzzles of the movie business. At a time when nobody would give Orson Welles the money to make a picture, Fleischer went on to make the farcical Che! and the catastrophic Tora! Tora! Tora! Question: is an exclamation mark the sign of a lousy movie?

Finally, we have a winner in the Parties-We-Are-Grateful-We-Didn't-Go-To category. Rex Harrison, star of Dr Doolittle, was difficult enough on his own, but even worse in the company of his alcoholic wife, Rachel Roberts. In Harris's words: 

'The couple's problems were becoming dangerously public: They showed up disheveled and disoriented at a tribute to George Cukor one night, Harrison with his toupee stuffed in his jacket pocket; on another occasion, Harrison appalled a room fulll of the Hollywood establishment - among them William Wyler, Billy Wilder, Jimmy Stewart, and their wives - at a party at the Los Angeles restaurant the Bistro, singing obscene lyrics about his penis to the tune of "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face" while Roberts, who was not wearing underwear, did handstands.'

Hooray for Hollywood!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Canal Routes

A reader once pointed out that every single one of our books (up to that time) had featured a canal. They're irresistible, really, like secret tunnels through the middle of the city, part rural idyll, part urban dereliction. You can walk along them, run along them, cycle along them (you can even go along them in a boat - but I've never done that in Britain). One of our favourite cycle routes takes us along the Regent's Canal into the East End. And one of our favourite spots in the East End is the building above. It's always intrigued us. When it was built, presumably in the 18th century, it must have been an elegant Georgian country house (it was there before the canal was built). Almost every equivalent house in Hackney has been gentrified but this one presents particular problems. On one side is a bus garage, on the other are a pair of spectacular gasometers. 

All of which makes it more interesting from our point of view. It would be a good place for a body to be found, or for someone slightly strange to hang out. Imagine our irritation then when, over the weekend, we watched Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and found that it played a prominent part. It's the house where the 'mole' is finally captured. We felt like someone had stolen our idea. (The fact that we hadn't told anyone is neither here nor there.)

Two more fun facts about the area in the picture:

Walk five minutes in one direction and you get to the scene of a murder in Blue Monday; five minutes in the other and you get to the place where Nicci and I got married.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Getting your hands dirty

Nicci:

I have a good friend who is an artist - a real, old-fashioned, oil-paint and watercolour and turps and brushes artist. She wears tatty layers of clothing and old paint-spattered shirts to work in. She mixes colours onto a pallet, swirls brushes in jam jars of murky water. She stretches canvas and has strong views on the grain of the paper. At the end of the day, when she cleans everything meticulously, screws caps back on tubes, her hands are stained and there are new daubs of colour on her clothes. It's such a physical process, so satisfyingly connected to making. Writing, by contrast, is a clean and unphysical business, especially now - from the brain to the computer screen, with mistakes swept away with a cursor. Writers can have rituals, of course - pencils (who uses pencils now?) to sharpen, objects to arrange around us, music perhaps - but it can still feel like creating something (words) out of nothing, thin air, and that's rather scary. It feels like writing is always on the edge of not-writing, of a horrible silence.

I often long for the mess and craft of painting, but I can't paint, and have never been patient and determined enough to get beyond my failures to even the most basic competence. So I've turned my efforts to other things. Last year, I grew chillies from seeds. I bought a propagator and compost and for weeks sprayed water onto soil and finally saw green shoots. I felt a bit like a scientist in a laboratory. I overdid it a bit. I grew hundreds and hundreds of chilies, of different sizes and colours (purple, yellow, red, even a chocolatey-brown) and then I made them into jellies and jams and dried them. 

Then a couple of weeks ago, I booked myself onto a pottery course, and spent a weekend learning to use a wheel. When the teacher showed us, it was like seeing shapes grow out of her calm hands: candleholders and bowls and mugs rising in smooth columns from the spinning surface. Magic. When I did it, bits of brown clay flew round the room and shapes mushroomed and then collapsed into ugly lumps. But in spite of that, it was such a consolation and relief to be using my hands in such a way - like being a cook and a gardener, kneading mud, cutting it, shaping it, baking it, watching it grow.

This week, one of my daughters has persuaded me to knit. Many times, I have cast on 125 stitches in nice green wool, and after two or three rows, I mysteriously have 128, 141, 121 stitches instead. I have spent two days repeatedly beginning again. My eyes are sore and my wool is kinked and I have nothing to show for it. But I'm going to persevere. By the time I'm sixty I will have a green jumper. You can't write with wool, or chillies or pieces of clay - but you can move away from the clean terror of the computer screen for a while, into the rich mess of the material world.

The 'Anything Can be a Thriller' Department

Here's the beginning of one story. A woman registers on a dating website and starts looking through the images. She finds herself drawn to one face in particular:

'It was so, so weirdand I can't explain it. Just from looking at him I knew I was going to be with him. I knew. In my head I started planning things, planning years ahead. It was just ridiculous.'

Then she contacts him...

Here's the beginning of another story. A man is randomly flicking through TV channels and sees a pop star being interviewed. He has a 'premonition' that he is meant to be with her. He contacts her and arranges to meet her. They meet in a pub and have a conversation lasting half an hour. At the end, he says to her: 'You could just run out of here and I'll never see you again, but I really think we're meant to be together. I think we should get married.' She says...

So what happens? Are we watching Fatal Attraction or Truly, Madly, Deeply? Is this an example of true love or de Clérambault's Syndrome? 

In fact, both these examples are from a St Valentine's Day article in the Guardian. When you read a story connected to St Valentine's Day, you know it's either going to be a love story or a slasher movie. 

To paraphrase Shakespeare, it's a fine line between Richard Curtis and Tobe Hooper. 

PS The woman in the first story concludes: 'We had a baby girl in July. It's all terribly romantic. I'm sickly sweet and happy. I still have butterflies in my tummy when I see him. It's the best thing I have ever done in my life. It was a total whirlwind, but I don't regret any of it for a moment.'

The couple in the second story, singer Nerina Pallot and producer Andrew Chatterley have a one-year-old son. They christened him Wolfgang Amadeus. No pressure then.

PPS Our own version of this story takes a slightly different turn.

 

 

 

 

 

No Police Like Holmes

I'm sure that Anthony Horovitz's new Sherlock Holmes novel, The House of Silk, will be terrific, but I've been puzzled ever since I first heard about it. It has been referred to, for example here, as commissioned by the Conan Doyle estate.

My first thought was: why is there a Conan Doyle estate and what is it doing commissioning books? Arthur Conan Doyle died in 1930, which means that his works came out of copyright in 2000. Which means that anybody can commission or write a Sherlock Holmes story, right?

Well, there really is a Conan Doyle estate and it has a website. Most relevantly of all it has a page dealing with the issue of licensing. This concedes that Conan Doyle is out of copyright in the EC area, 'but after that date a number of characters created by the author will enjoy trademark protection.' Eh? I'll get back to that.

It adds that in the US, the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act of 1997 has extended the copyright of certain works for another twenty years. The act was actually enacted in 1998 and is popularly known as 'The Mickey Mouse Protection Act' because a signficant motivation for the legislation was Disney's wish to stop us all being able to make our own Mickey Mouse tee-shirts. 

Even so, this protection would only apply to final Sherlock Holmes collection of stories, the much inferior Casebook of Sherlock Holmes. 

But what's this about trademarks? The estates claim that Sherlock Holmes, Dr Watson, Mrs Hudson and even the bloody Hound of the Baskervilles are now trademarked. What does this mean? How can a character created in 1887 be trademarked? Can anyone do this? Can I get in quickly and trademark, say, Count Dracula? Or Gulliver? Or Don Quixote? Who gets to do this? Who doesn't get to do this?

I feel that this should be tested in court, but that, immediately, is the problem. There is a serious question about whether Disney's Mickey Mouse copywright is valid. But do you want to make your own Mickey Mouse movie and take on the Disney lawyers? (I must confess that I never cared for Mickey Mouse even as a child.)

Much the same goes for Sherlock Holmes. If you write your own brilliant Sherlock Holmes story in which the great detective lives in a menage a quatre with Dr Watson, Mrs Hudson and the Hound of the Baskervilles, a publisher might well agree with you that the characters are in the public domain. But are they going to spend a hundred grand on lawyers to prove it?

 

 

 

I-Plates

The second most interesting thing I know about Steve Jobs is that - by his own account - the crucial course he took at college was not in coding but in calligraphy. But the most interesting thing, which I learned from this terrific article, is that Jobs drove the only car in the US without number plates. 

It was a perfect Steve Jobs gesture because it was a zen version of megalomania, an unassertive version of aggression, an in-your-face version of abnegation.

It had an absurd sort of practicality - presumably to maintain some sort of privacy by not showing his number plate to the world. But what is less private than being the only car in the country without a plate?

It was also technically illegal, but for fascinating reasons explored in the article, Jobs had presumably calculated - rightly - that he was unlikely to be prosecuted. 

It was a gesture that was both rather splendid and utterly fatuous and futile and trivial.

It must have taken a lot of thought.

I bet Thomas Pynchon wishes he'd thought of it first.

 

 

 

Obscure Objects of Desire

How did we ever do without the term (coined by movie critic, Nathan Rabin), 'manic pixie dream girl'. It stands for, in his words, 'that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures'.

The term has clearly gained traction since it was first identified in 2008. (The classic examples were Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown and Natalie Portman in Garden State.) You can see a list of films featuring MPDGs here. There's a really nice article in this week's New Yorker that mentions it. And Rabin himself as incorporated it into his terrific book, My Year of Flops, in which he spent a year looking at cinematic disasters.

There's a serious point as well, which is worth any film or fiction writer considering. The MPDG has no desires of her own. She only exists to rescue the slightly ineffectual/depressed/shy hero and show him how to lighten up/get a life/discover himself. When you're writing, you should try imagine the story from the point of view of every characer, however minor. What do they want? What drives them? 

Bringing Up Baby is very nearly my favourite film. But I've always been nagged by something. I can see what Katherine Hepburn is bringing to Cary Grant's life. But what is Grant bringing to Hepburn's life? (Apart from being Cary Grant.)