Sidney Reilly: The Bottom of the Deck

Although novelty has its rewards, one of the dividends of leafing through the streaming services, PBS Masterpiece, BritBox, Acorn, MHz, and so on, is rediscovering previous favorites, a few of which have held up pretty well.  One is Lovejoy, still lively and clever, Ian McShane very much a treat, as always; and another, if showing its age a bit, is Reilly: Ace of Spies, first broadcast on PBS in 1983.

Reilly was a risk for Thames Television, they’d never done a mini-series, but they got a good return, selling the show in every major market.  Although it’s been outpaced in the export market by Thomas the Tank Engine, Mr. Bean, and Benny Hill, it was a commercial success at the time, and it made Sam Neill a star. 

Sam Neill

Sidney Reilly was a real guy, and while the scripts played a little loose with the facts, the storyline was in many ways less fanciful than the rake’s progress of Reilly’s life.  You could also be forgiven for playing up his charm, and playing down his murderous opportunism.  Reilly was written by Troy Kennedy Martin, based on a book by Robin Bruce Lockhart – Lockhart the son of R.H. Bruce Lockhart, a famous spy in his own right, resident in Moscow after the Bolsheviks came to power, and credibly linked to Sidney Reilly in a 1918 plot to assassinate Lenin.  Half the stuff Reilly got up to never even makes it into the TV show. 

He was born Rosenblum, in Odessa, in 1873.  Or not.  His given name was Sigmund, or Georgy, or Salomon.  He was the illegitimate son of Perla and Mikhail, fathered by the cuckold Mikhail’s cousin Grigory.  Or perhaps the last heir of a Polish-Jewish family with an estate at Bielsk, on the edge of empire, the frontier of Belarus and Poland.  He first shows up in official paperwork in 1892, eighteen or nineteen years old, when he’s arrested by the Okhrana, the secret police, for political indiscretions, and the best guess is that he turns informant to avoid jail time.  This shape-shifting is a pattern that emerges early.  He fakes his death, in Odessa, and beats feet for Brazil.  He claims to have saved the life of a British officer, who rewards him with a passport and 1500 pounds sterling, but when he shows up later in London, in 1895, the money may well have been stolen from two Italian anarchists on the train from Paris to Fontainbleau, who had their throats cut.  How much of this is fiction?  The two Italians are dead enough to make the local paper.  Sidney is clearly inventing himself as he goes along.  In the trade, this is known as a legend, creating a false biography for cover.  It might simply be convenience, but it seems to be a developing habit of mind, Sidney shedding his skin.

Sidney Reilly

He takes a lover, Ethel Boole, later Voynich, who writes a roman à clef about him, The Gadfly, which goes on to enormous success, in Russia!  Because of her Russian émigré connections, it’s suggested Sidney was actually spying on her for Special Branch.  By this time, he’s gone undercover for Scotland Yard’s intelligence chief William Melville, and it’s Melville who comes up with his new cover identity, Sidney George Reilly.

He’s also gotten married.  His wife is the recent widow of a clergyman.  They’d been doing the horizontal mambo before the husband’s death; her husband changed his will a week before he died; his death was certified as influenza by a doctor resembling Sidney, and no inquest was held; the rev was buried thirty-six hours after he died.  The young woman inherited £800,000.  Sidney married her four months later. 

Reilly reconnoiters in the Caucasus, and here’s where the series first picks up his story.  He’s working for the Admiralty, but he’s also being paid by the Japanese, and he eventually shows up in Port Arthur, in Manchuria.  This is later on the first strike of the Japanese against the Russian navy – the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905.  Reilly has gained the reputation of an international adventurer.  He makes a deal to secure Persian and Iraqi oil concessions for the Brits.  He infiltrates the Krupp works at Essen, and steals German armament plans.  He spends the war years in New York, selling weapons to both Germany and Russia, until the U.S. enters the war and embargoes the German market, and then the Russian Revolution deposes the tsar.  Sidney keeps an eye on American radicals, reporting to British military intelligence, and takes on some industrial espionage.  It gets him recommended to SIS, in London.

1918.  Sidney Reilly had come full circle, when the Secret Intelligence Service recruited him and sent him back to Russia.  His job was to assess and report on a chaotic situation.  Kerensky’s provisional government had fallen to the Bolsheviks six months before, but civil war had blown up between the Reds and the right-wing Whites.  Reilly immediately put his energies into a counter-revolutionary plot to murder Lenin and overthrow the Communists.  He had support from British Naval Intelligence, Lockhart, acting for the Foreign Office, and SIS.  Allied troops had landed at Archangel and Murmansk.  The coup looked plausible.  But it fell apart when a former anarchist, on her own, made a premature attempt on Lenin’s life, and the Cheka struck back savagely.  Feliks Dzerzhinsky, head of state security, had informants everywhere, and it’s been suggested - even by Lockhart – that Reilly could have been a provocateur, in Dzerzhinsky’s pocket.  Reilly, as it happens, bluffed his way out of Petrograd, and got to London by way of Helsinki.  Others weren’t so lucky.

Lenin, Stalin

He was back, not long after, assigned to reconnoiter the anti-Bolshevik forces in southern Russia, along with Capt. George Hill.  (Hill was another clandestine intelligence operative with nerves of steel and a price on his head, a celebrated agent in both world wars, who’d worked covert with Reilly in Moscow and Petrograd, and helped him escape to Finland.)  They attached themselves to Gen. Denikin’s army, which along with the Cossack cavalries, made up the White resistance in Ukraine and the Caucasus.  Reilly reported back to London that with Allied military support, the Whites stood a chance, but he probably didn’t have that much effect on British policy.  Reilly is really only a footnote in the White story, which is a sad and complicated narrative – well told, most recently, by Antony Beevor, in RUSSIA: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921 – but the problem for the Whites wasn’t half-hearted and inconsistent help from the West.  The problem was that they had no real internal consistency, themselves.  They opposed the Reds, but they were stitched together out of monarchists, and democratic socialists, and conservative Tsarist army officers, along with fanatic anti-Semitic reactionaries like the Black Hundreds.  It was a marriage of convenience, and an inconvenience to everybody it touched.

The most interesting part of Reilly’s story comes at the end, and his undoing came not through his own perfidy, slippery and unscrupulous as he was, but by keeping the faith.  The triumph of Bolshevism was never a foregone conclusion, they could have been strangled at birth, if their adversaries had been ruthless enough – it was Lenin who turned out to have the necessary iron in his pants – but there were a few who banked the fires, even as late as 1925, when the Communists were securely in control, and Stalin had succeeded to power.  One of these was Winston Churchill, who was at this point in and out of government, and another was Sidney Reilly.  Reilly took a meeting in Paris, accompanied by a representative of SIS, with a small cadre of White partisans.  The counter-revolutionaries in exile were disenfranchised, with little political leverage, and no credible intelligence sources inside Russia, but Reilly somehow convinced himself they could organize a grass-roots guerrilla campaign through their underground movement, the so-called Monarchist Union of Central Russia, known colloquially as the Trust. 

It was, of course, a trap.

Dzerzhinsky’s OGPU – the Cheka went by many different worknames, over the years – had developed the Trust as a long-term deception, loading it up with backstory, and peopling it with characters, like salting a worthless mine with gold nuggets.  They fabricated an alternate reality, where a stubborn resistance movement, burning with righteousness, held out against the Communist devils to bring back Holy Russia.  Utter poppycock, but it was constructed to lure in anti-Bolsheviks of exactly Reilly’s stripe, the unrepentant, who dreamt of turning back the wheel of history, and he fell for it.  Smuggled across the Finnish border, he was arrested two days later, the mission compromised from the outset.

Dzerzhinsky

He was interrogated at the Lubyanka, and after a couple of weeks, he was ready to give up any and all, regarding the American and UK spy services.  Even allowing for embroidery on Reilly’s part – the problem with enhanced interrogation being that the subject tells you what they think you most want to hear – this would have proved useful to Soviet espionage, but in spite of his obvious value to the Russian security apparat, he wasn’t persuasive enough.  There was that luckless conspiracy to assassinate Lenin, back in 1918.  It proved the final nail in his coffin.  Dzerzhinsky was overruled by Stalin.  Reilly was taken out and shot. 

The question most of us would ask is, Why did he go back, that last time?  He was never an idealist.  The answer seems to be that he heard what he wanted to hear.  He must have suspected, he knew he was a marked man, but he thought he still had the moves, that he could dazzle the crowds with his footwork.  And there was always the chance it was real, that the Trust was what they claimed, that the days of the Red Terror were numbered, and Sidney Reilly would be the man who frustrated their Destiny. 

Not every story we wish to be true is false, the fabled spy-hunter James Angleton once remarked.  He meant that a deception, to have legs, needs to be more than simply convincing; it needs an element of the unreachable, of the fantastic.  Reilly was drawn to the flame because he read his own story as myth.  A lesser man wouldn’t have believed it, and been able to save himself.

Seize the Day

I changed my regular morning take-out order the other day, after many, many mornings of exactly the same, and it reminded me, out of the blue, of the opening of Heinrich Böll’s postwar novel, Billiards at Half-Past Nine.  The new guy in town, an architect, goes to the local café for breakfast, and since it’s his first time, orders something a little eccentric, trying to make an impression.  But this act of daring comes back to haunt him, because now he’s expected to get the same damn thing for breakfast for the next sixty years.  Böll also goes into a very funny sidebar about how Germans will never ask the price, when it’s not listed on the menu, for fear of embarrassing themselves.  And a common daily routine offhandedly becomes a reflection on the national character. 

Billiards at Half-Past Nine is in some ways an analog of Irwin Shaw’s novel Voices of a Summer Day.  Böll published his book in 1959, Shaw published his in 1965.  Böll was born in 1917, Shaw in 1913.  Both served in the war, Böll with the Wehrmacht, Shaw with the U.S. Army.  Both of them wrote about their experiences in the war, Böll with The Train Was on Time, Shaw with The Young Lions, and both had critical and commercial success.  (Shaw, of course, had enormous commercial success later on, with an extra helping of critical schadenfreude.)  Billiards at Half-Past Nine and Voices of a Summer Day are mid-career novels, the two writers stretching their legs but not showing strain, using a comfortable voice but not falling into lazy habits of mind.  Structurally, very similar, both books generational, but the narrative arc a single day, told in flashback and multiple POV.  In other words, very fluid and fluent, with a lot of grace notes - Dickensian, even, meant very much as a compliment, and not to imply cluttered.  The books are actually terrifically clean, tight and exact and effective, like a good pitcher in the sixth inning. 

Böll is also that generation of German writers who lived through Nazism and the war, and wrote what might be called stories of atonement, although the Germans call it die Trümmerliteratur, literature of the rubble.  Günter Grass is another – born in 1927, Grass was 17 when he was drafted into the Waffen-SS, an admission he made long afterwards – and German historical guilt is his subject.  Hans Hellmut Kirst, author of Night of the Generals, was born in East Prussia in 1914, and was not only in the military, but was a Nazi party-member.  Nobody wants to admit they’re in a club of murderers, he later said.  His books are often comically horrific, with fervent wartime Nazis effortlessly putting on sheep’s clothing for the gullible Yanks. 

 

I’ve talked about German “atonement” before.  We’d do well to remember that an entire generation of younger Germans wanted nothing whatsoever to do with regret, or war guilt, or the whole concept of collective responsibility.  They thought the Nazis were their parents’ problem, not theirs.  In the late 1960’s and early ‘70’s, when Baader-Meinhof was active, the young German Left accused the government of being riddled with Nazis – the chancellor, Kurt Kiesinger, had in fact been a party member, so the Left wasn’t all that far wrong.  My point here, is that those kids indulged their own unexamined moral superiority.  We have a similar blind spot in white America about the legacy of black slavery.  The sentiment is expressed the same way, I was never a Nazi, or I never owned slaves.  It’s got nothing to do with me, in other words.  But white Americans are the residual legatees of slavery; we’ve benefited from a system of apartheid and class warfare.  And black Americans have carried the burden of Jim Crow and race hatred.  You can’t wish it away.  American writers like Twain and Faulkner have made the case that slavery is our Original Sin, and I think much the same can be said about the historical weight of Nazism.  Writers like Böll, and Grass, and Kirst have made it their central concern to put it front-and-center in contemporary German consciousness. 

Speaking of Baader-Meinhof – I’ve said this before, too - it’s a sign of maturing political health in the German social psyche, that the toxic hand-me-downs of that era, crocodile tears over the Red Army faction, the culture of betrayal encouraged by the Stasi, the self-satisfaction of bourgeois West Germans and their condescension to Ossis, is all fair game.  I was startled when the movie Downfall was released, about Hitler in the bunker, and even more so by The Lives of Others, about the brute surveillance regime in East Germany.  In a less reflective national mood, they never would have been made.  Germans aren’t much given to inner curiosity or self-doubt, any more than Americans are. 

Only the weak accommodate history.  The bold march on. 

Naomi Hirahara: Evergreen

I was a big fan of Naomi Hirahara’s Clark and Division, in 2021, and I wasn’t alone. She took home the Agatha, the Anthony, the Bruce Alexander best historical from Left Coast Crime, and the Mary Higgins Clark, at the Edgars. It was named a NY Times mystery of the year.

The story begins in late 1944, and Clark and Division is both a specific geography and place in time, and a stop on a journey, the Chicago neighborhood where many American Japanese, released from Manzanar and other detention camps, have been allowed to resettle, to try and rebuild a life. They haven’t been allowed to go home, which in the case of the Ito family is Los Angeles, but they’ve been offered parole. Aki Ito, the younger daughter, looks forward to being back with her adored older sister Rose, who had been released earlier, and gone on ahead, but when Aki gets to Chicago, her sister is dead, killed when she fell off a subway platform, in front of an oncoming train. An unhappy accident. A suicide, perhaps. Aki suspects not.

Clark and Division takes its time, building the world Aki navigates, the hostile, the indifferent, the familiar, and the mystery of her sister’s death.

The resolution isn’t an easy fix, in keeping with the ambiguities of culture, and dislocation, and loss. And the undercurrent of wartime, like a bass melody, behind the brighter notes of the piano. All told, an immersive experience.

Evergreen is the sequel.

1946. Aki, now married to Art Nakasone, is back in California with her family. But what they left behind isn’t recoverable, the physical properties no more than their emotional histories. Everybody’s got battle fatigue. Literally, in the case of Art, who fought with the 422^nd, the Nisei regiment, and has nightmares about combat. All of them suffer post-traumatic stress, even if they keep it to themselves. It’s the key theme of the book. Evergreen is the name of the cemetery in Boyle Heights, where Aki lives, and every character is haunted in some way, if not by the past, then by their lost futures.

I don’t think Evergreen is as successful as Clark and Division, and I’m at a loss as to why. The mystery doesn’t seem as personal, in one sense, but it gets under Aki’s defenses, all the same. I wonder if it isn’t that the canvas is so much bigger. Hirahara keeps the focus on Aki, and tells the story through her eyes; Aki is a clear-eyed narrator, and not easy to surprise. She characterizes herself as unsophisticated, but that’s her own habit of thinking– she’s very savvy, particularly about navigating the structural politics of the postwar American Japanese. Maybe that’s the difficulty, that the environment is so dense, socially, and yet internally conflicted, which seems very un-Japanese. They’ve lost harmony, and community.

More disconcerting are of course the contemporary echoes, and all too obviously, that’s what kept catching my mind’s eye, and taking me out of the fictional comfort zone of Aki’s story.

We’re sharply reminded that the isolation and humiliation of the American Japanese isn’t some historical anomaly. What happened to the Itos and the Nakasones is happening to other families, as we speak, but this time it’s the Garcias and the Quintanas. The effect on people is the same. The willful and gratuitous violence, the small cruelties, the morass of legalisms, which only remind us how carefully the Nazis documented the Final Solution.

The soft-spoken subtext of Clark and Division, and of Evergreen, isn’t that It Can’t Happen Here, but that it has happened here. All it takes is to turn a blind eye.

Martin Cruz Smith

Martin Cruz Smith died the week before last. I met him at Left Coast Crime, in Santa Fe, some years ago. I’ve always been a huge fan, and I’m very sorry he’s left us.

Gorky Park was published in 1981.

It was a big deal. At this remove, we might not remember just what a big deal it was. There’s the famous story that when Smith’s agent Knox Burger sent the book out, he asked for a floor bid of a million bucks, hard-soft – and Random House took the bait. There’s the allied fact that you couldn’t elevator pitch the novel, it wasn’t Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger as twins. Publishers are scared of anything new, but if it’s too familiar, it’s dismissed as derivative. Editors read for rejection, Henry Dunow once told me, the first sentence they have to read a second time is the last sentence they’ll read. Gorky Park didn’t pay any attention to this. The book played by its own rules.

It was sleight of hand, and I didn’t snap to it right away.

He takes a situation that almost feels commonplace, the police procedural, which observes certain conventions, and with the accretion of detail, drifts into the Twilight Zone. Because the details themselves throw you off. Here’s one. Two cops, working a homicide, talking in the one guy’s office. While he’s talking, the guy takes his phone off the hook, puts the receiver on his desk, and dials the operator – this is the Soviet Union, it’s the 1980’s, they’re rotary phones – but he doesn’t release the dial, he sticks the eraser end of a pencil into it, and stops the dial from turning back. The two dicks keep right on talking, neither of them remark on this, since it’s routine. They know their phones are bugged, and this trick creates static on the line. They take for granted they live in a surveillance state, and if they can generate a little aggravation for KGB, so much the better.

The effect these physical details have is to make you realize there’s a psychological effect. These people are muted. They self-censor their speech, but they self-censor their thoughts. Arkady Renko, the senior homicide detective, has had plenty of practice, and he has to unlearn his survival mechanisms, the habit of policing his own doubts, if he’s to have any hope of winning back his self-respect, let alone unravel the case, self-respect being the first victim of moral exhaustion.

There are eleven Renko novels, the last, Hotel Ukraine, published just before Martin Cruz Smith died. As striking and original as Gorky Park is, my money’s on Red Square (1992) and Wolves Eat Dogs (2004) as the best books in the series. And while your math may differ, my own personal favorite happens not to be a Renko book – as good as they are. The one I like the best is Stallion Gate, which is about Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project, during the war. (I read it long before I moved to New Mexico.)

I was talking to him, on the sidelines of Left Coast Crime, and when I mentioned that I’d been a Russian linguist in the military, he grinned, and told me he didn’t speak any Russian.

I was like, Wait, what? How did you come up with that vocabulary thing in Red Square?

[SPOILER ALERT]

The title, Red Square, refers to the urban space in Moscow, and the climax of the novel takes place there, with Boris Yeltsin making a cameo on top of a tank. “Red Square” is also the name of an avant-garde painting by Kazimir Malevich, long thought stolen by the Nazis, which turns up on the black market. A language misunderstanding throws everything into disarray. “Where is Red Square?” is the question, in English, on the dead man’s fax machine. Russian has more than one word for “square,” however. “Red Square,” the physical place, is translated as Krasnij Ploshchad’, but “Red Square,” the geometric shape, comes out as Krasnij Kvadrat. And everything turns on this. For lack of a nail, the shoe was lost.

I think, in seriousness, that there are writers who change the way you look at writing. I don’t mean the use of language, so much, as I mean a sense of what can be done. Sometimes, something enormously simple, and you say to yourself, What did they do there, and how did they do it? I’ve mentioned Mary Renault, in that regard, John le Carré, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Ursula Le Guin, John Crowley. I want to add Martin Cruz Smith to the batting order. He had a gift for the reveal, for turning the last card face up.

Deadlines

Somebody famous, Sir Walter Raleigh, or one of those guys, on his way to the block, said there was nothing like a date with the headsman’s axe to sharpen your wit.

Which got me thinking about deadlines.

Both literally, and otherwise.

For instance. We here, at SleuthSayers, all collaborated on a mystery anthology last year – titled Murder, Neat – with each of us contributing a story. I, of course, dragged my feet until the last minute. I had a title, and the set-up, which is nought but bare bones; I didn’t have a clue what kind of pickle I planned to put my guy in, let alone how to get him out of it. And then, the deadline loomed, and it was like that old joke, “With one tremendous leap… Off to the races.

In another case, though, I missed the deadline for the Black Orchid submission, at the end of May, this year. I think I can explain the difference. With the Murder, Neat story, “Shuffle Off to Buffalo,” I had a tight internal timeline – the arc of the story itself is only a couple of hours – and a single setting. It was a physical trap, with the clock running out. In other words, writing the story was like winding a watch. But the Black Orchid novella was a bigger, shaggier animal. I wanted the story to open up, across a wider canvas, I wanted you to breathe in, and fill your lungs, to feel the whole of a landscape. I wanted that room to breathe, myself, to give the story interior space, as well as outside. From my immediate perspective, I don’t know whether I’ve pulled it off, I’m still too close, but my point is that one kind of story benefits from pressure, and another doesn’t.

Harper Barnes

It’s partly about narrative compression.

What is it you want to say? Say it, and get it done. This is what newspaper people always tell you. Lead with a jab, soften ‘em up with some combinations, finish with a roundhouse punch. Decades ago, I wrote a movie column for an alternative Boston weekly, the Phoenix. Often as not, I was turning in my material right as the paper was going to bed, locked in for the press run. I remember, one night, I was there in the empty offices, in the Back Bay, me and my editor – Harper Barnes, a real newspaper guy, who’d made his bones with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch – with me at a borrowed desk, pounding out copy on a big Royal manual, the floor shaking, I was punching the keys so hard. Typing MORE at the bottom of each page, full caps, yanking them out, never a backward glance, and on the last page, typing em-dash, 30, em-dash. Old newspaper thing, from the days of movable type, to let the typesetters know they’d hit the end of the copy. (Even if the Phoenix was photo-typeset.)

Were those columns back then any good?

I’d like to think they were literate, at least. I’ll tell you this. Banging on that typewriter, handing my pages across the desk to Harper, no hesitating, no second thoughts, no sucking on my knuckles for inspiration, nothing but my ass in that hard chair, I felt like I was Jimmy-God-damn-Breslin at the New York Post taking on Carmine DeSapio and Tammany Hall. That good. Never be that good again.

- 30 -

Dennis & Dutch

I read two books recently, back to back, and as dissimilar as they are, what they had in common was voice.  Dennis Lehane’s World Gone By, from 2015, and Elmore Leonard’s The Hot Kid, 2005.  I’d never read either book before, clearly an oversight.  I must have been looking in the other direction.  I’ve also never thought of Lehane and Leonard as being much alike, as writers.  Not that they’re unalike, completely, but they’re very individual. 

Here’s what.  Both novels are period pieces, World Gone By the 1940s of wartime Tampa, The Hot Kid the tail-end of the Roaring 20s, and the rise of celebrity gangsters like Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd.  Lehane’s book is the third in the Coughlin trilogy, and if you know the back story, you won’t be surprised by black comedy or the heartbreak of Fate.  Leonard’s book isn’t exactly a sequel, but his hero is the son of a Marine blown up when the Maine goes down in Havana harbor – witnessed in Cuba Libre, from 1998. 

There’s a natural process of myth-making in both novels, slightly more self-conscious in the Leonard, because some of the boneheads in his story are trying to manufacture themselves as public enemies, and make the front page – Joe Coughlin, in World Gone By, is trying to live down his previous lifetimes.  The Hot Kid is relaxed, and sort of ballad-like, which makes a certain sense, when you’re reminded Woody Guthrie wrote a song about Pretty Boy Floyd, and turned him into a Robin Hood of the Dust Bowl, but Leonard’s book isn’t romantic, even if some of the supporting cast are fueled by romantic delusion.  Lehane’s book is melancholy, but that’s a different thing, nostalgia it ain’t.  Joe Coughlin understands the distinction. 

The word I want to avoid here is elegaic.  Neither of these guys is composing a swan song.  And whatever’s going on is very much of the moment.  All the same, the voice they’re using is what you might call the Epic Familiar.  I know I’ve tried to explain this previously, as a narrative method.  It’s the voice Jim Harrison uses, in Legends of the Fall, or Larry McMurtry, in Lonesome Dove.  Maybe, to a degree, T.H. White, in The Once and Future King.  I think it imposes itself – or you can’t avoid it – because of the largeness of story.  You scale up; you fall into cadences that evoke the Homeric.  Interestingly, you don’t hear those echoes in Don Winslow’s current City trilogy, which is drawn directly from the Iliad and the Aeneid.  He keeps it intimate.  It’s an intentional choice, and I think in Winslow’s case, more a matter of dialing it down.  Dialing it up, is what Lehane and Leonard are doing.

Lehane has done it before.  Mystic River has that quality, of seeing the characters against a horizon line.  But in Leonard’s case, less characteristically.  Even going back to his earlier Western stories, you see him not glamorize the bad guys, and even less so the good guys.  “3:10 to Yuma,” or Valdez Is Coming.  Not that Leonard’s characters, or Lehane’s, don’t rise to the occasion, and bring the Furies home to roost, but they don’t posture, or turn to see how they look in profile.  Their lack of self-consciousness is in part why they appear heroic.  But in Classic times, if we look at Hector or Achilles, they’re actually defined by submitting to Fate.  The heroes in Homer are too well aware of destiny, and fated meetings.

Achilles is offered the choice, also.  To die young, and have undying glory, or to live into old age, and sit by the hearth, to be forgotten by the sons of men.  We know which fate he chooses.  You could contrast Joe Coughlin, in World Gone By, and Carl Webster, in The Hot Kid, by pointing out that Carl is young, and tempted by fame, while Joe’s been there, and done that, and knows better.  They’re not overly familiar, or generic, but like Homer, on the windy plains of Troy, we know the landscape, we see the figures, thrown into relief along the horizon, the contesting wills, the naked warriors.  And the sisters, spinning out the threads, as pitiless as bronze. 

Cover Up

Here’s an oddment.  Cover Up, released in 1949.  William Bendix, Dennis O’Keefe, Barbara Britton, Art Baker.  Directed by Alfred E. Green, whose career goes back to the silents; first picture of note is the pre-Code Stanwyck, Baby Face; did biopics of Jolson, Jackie Robinson, and Eddie Cantor.  Original screen story by O’Keefe, under a pseudonym.  Cinematography by Ernest Laszlo, who also shot D.O.A., Stalag 17, and Kiss Me Deadly, before going on to Judgment at Nuremberg, and an Oscar for Ship of Fools.  The razor-sharp black-and-white in Cover Up is the best thing about it.  The picture is less than the sum of its parts – not incoherent, but lukewarm – and you can wonder why I was curious about it in the first place.

For openers, Bendix.  He gets top billing, although he plays second banana to O’Keefe.  Bendix did a lot of lovable saps, the best-known being The Life of Riley, but he did solid work for Hitchcock, in Lifeboat, with Alan Ladd in The Blue Dahlia, and as Babe Ruth.  You could do worse, though, than to check him out in The Dark Corner, a nifty little noir where he plays very much against type.  Dark Corner has two serious weaknesses, Clifton Webb doing the same character he did in Laura, a year or so before, and Mark Stevens, who’s a Godawful stiff, as the hero.  It has two serious strengths, Lucille Ball, as the private eye’s Girl Friday, who gets him out of the frame, and Bendix, who has the part that used to go to Raymond Burr, before Perry Mason.  Bendix plays the muscle with alarming menace, thick-tongued, and his eyelids shuttered.  His body English is top-heavy, but he has a predator’s grace.  He’s sly, like many stupid people, and gets what he deserves, in the end, spoiler alert. 

Secondly, we’ve got Dennis O’Keefe.  You either know or you don’t.  O’Keefe did a lot of amiable and undemanding B’s, but in 1947 and ‘48 he made two pictures back-to-back with Anthony Mann, T-Men and Raw Deal.  Raw Deal is probably the best part O’Keefe ever got, and it features Claire Trevor, along with both John Ireland and Raymond Burr as the bad guys.  T-Men, though, is the one that really holds your attention.  Undercover cops, infiltrating the mob.  Alfred Ryder, almost invariably a yellowbelly and a slime, in over a hundred features and TV episodes, here gets to play the stand-up guy, who goes down without ratting out his partner to the mob torpedoes.  Charles McGraw, who once in a blue moon got to crack a smile or even be the hero (in Narrow Margin), is the torpedo in this picture, and one of the chilliest psychopaths in the Anthony Mann stable, which is going some.  O’Keefe, at the end, coming after McGraw, is past the point of no return, and clearly off the leash.  He heaves himself up the gangplank, in a fury, and you can feel his physical force.  It isn’t a shock cut, or a sudden scare, or some camera trick.  The camera’s steady.  He’s coming at you, and you shrink back.  His forward movement is that implacable.  You can’t help it.  Raw Deal and T-Men were both shot by the great cinematographer John Alton.

So, what is it with Cover Up?  It just doesn’t have any tension.  You keep wanting it to go somewhere, like it’s the Little Picture That Could, and the air keeps going out of its tires.  O’Keefe comes to town, he’s an insurance investigator, he’s going to file a report on a suicide.  He meets cute with Barbara Britton.  They’re a little old for their characters, but believable, and kinda sweet.  He checks in with the local sheriff, Bendix, and begins to smell a rat.  The guy shot himself, but the gun’s gone missing.  Bendix affects unconcern.  O’Keefe pokes around.  The town clams up.  It doesn’t take long for O’Keefe to figure out it’s murder, staged as a suicide.  Bendix, no fool he, already knows.  The question is, why is Bendix covering it up, or is he in fact the killer?  But mostly, O’Keefe is sticking around because he’s moony over Barbara.  Her dad, the local banker, turns out to be a suspect.  O’Keefe, however, is half-hearted about all this.  Oh, and it’s Christmas.  You can tell because they keep playing the opening bars of carols on the soundtrack.  Then, the only real suspect, the saintly retired doctor you never actually get to see, dies off-screen of a convenient heart attack.  The best moment in the movie, coming up.  Barbara finds the missing gun, at her dad’s, and goes to plant it, at the doctor’s.  O’Keefe shows up.  She hides.  He finds the gun.  Over his shoulder, you can see her reflection in a framed picture on the wall.  He sits at the dead doctor’s desk, and you realize at the same time he does, that the dead doc was left-handed.  Of course, so was the murderer.

Yadda-yadda-yadda. It isn’t Bendix, and it isn’t the dad.  O’Keefe and Barb realize the only obstacles to their happiness are their own cold feet, the stage door closes as Dancer and Prancer lift off.  Inoffensive.  It’s a pretty poem, but you can’t call it Homer.  In other words, it’s not noir enough.  O’Keefe pretends to be hard-boiled, but come on, he’s soft on the girl.  Bendix tries on some ambiguity, but too much Dutch uncle, not enough sinister.  The dad, with his rosy cheeks and white hair, is he cooking the books at the bank?  Not.  You want the worm in the apple, the serpent in the garden.  I expected a little less sugar, and a little more bite.  The snake never shows up.

l'Art du Crime

The Art of Crime is another show I’ve discovered, streaming on MHz, and I like it, but…

It’s funny what pulls you in, and what waves you off.

Very often, you find a book series, or TV, to be an acquired taste. I wasn’t drawn in right away, for example, by Jackie Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs books. I loved her memoir, This Time Next Year We’ll Be Laughing, but it took me a couple of books to warm up to Maisie. (Once I was sold, I was sold.)

I’ve tried to read James Benn’s Billy Boyle series – I read two start to finish, and cracked the spine on a couple more, hoping my first impression was wrong – but I’m sorry, they leave me cold as a mackerel. (This is a private opinion, obviously; your math may differ.) 

A show it took me the entire first season to even tolerate was Brokenwood, and well you might ask why I bothered, but something kept pulling me back, and I’m glad it did: I think I had to get over my aggravation with DI Mike Shepherd, who just seemed like one of those guys you’d go out of your way to avoid in the workplace.

 A classic example of this is Death in Paradise, which is hands down the most annoying show on television. They had the inimitable Ben Miller for the first season, and he’s the reason I watched Primeval (along with Doug Henshall), but then they cast the utterly execrable Kris Marshall, and almost killed the show. Seriously, if not for the supporting characters and the Caribbean landscapes, I would have given up.

Speaking of, although I’m nuts about Deadly Tropics (which is a terrible and uninviting title), but like the cast more than the scripts, I’m crazy about the local scenery of Martinique. Here’s another one. I was on the fence about Signora Volpe, even if the hot ex-spy and her hot Italian love interest give it romantic appeal, what convinced me were the fabulous Umbrian backdrops. Which, circling back, is a big selling point of The Art of Crime.

It’s shot in Paris. Ça suffit. Some of the surrounding countryside ain’t too shabby, either. But mostly, it’s in the city itself, and often some unrecognizable alley, off the beaten path. It’s not always the Champs Elysées, although you get a lot of I.M. Pei’s pyramid at the Louvre. I think they shoot inside the Louvre, too, but staircases and hallways, not the galleries, apparently. I’m not actually sure. They obviously got permission to shoot interiors at the Musée d’Orsay, once famously a train station, serving the southwest of France. And certainly other locations I don’t recognize. This is a big plus for me,

I have to admit, and not just in this show. I love the genuinely terrible Armin Mueller-Stahl policier variously titled Midnight Cop, or Killing Blue, because they shot it in Berlin and never showed a single familiar landmark, like the Brandenburg Gate or the Memorial Church. The Art of Crime opened an episode at the Temple de la Sybille, an architectural folly on top of an artificial waterfall in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, sixty-one acres of manicured grounds in the Nineteenth that I’m embarrassed to say I never heard of, or visited. And it’s clearly as famous to Parisians as the Bois de Boulogne. That’s exactly my point. When somebody who knows a place intimately uses the landscape as character, you see it with a fresh eye.

I don’t mean to damn The Art of Crime with faint praise. It’s got a cool premise, not necessarily art theft, but art adjacent crime. This is the French OCBC, not a fictional crew, that investigates cultural property trafficking – smuggling, counterfeits, money laundering – and our entrée is to team a streetwise plainclothes cop with an artwise academic. They expend a little too much nervous energy at the beginning, rubbing each other the wrong way, but you let it go. (It’s like Jonathan Frakes; you don’t take Riker seriously until he grows his beard.)

 The obligatory exasperated senior officer, on the other hand, is a much better character in this show, not a wet blanket but a full narrative partner. There’s also the trope where the art expert explains herself to her psychiatrist, not to mention explaining herself to imaginary artists, Toulouse-Lautrec, Hieronymus Bosch, da Vinci. The only superfluous character is the art expert’s dad, an unnecessary aggravation.

I should be clear, that I in fact find it quite charming, in spite of the occasional too-cutesiness.

You realize they established certain dynamics, but after the shakedown cruise, they didn’t throw the excess cargo overboard. Somebody on the team was too proprietary. Be that as it may. I’ve finished Season Three (out of an existing eight, but only two episodes a season), and I’ll finish them.

I think, as I’ve said before, that there’s a different rhythm to European cop shows. It’s an enlivening change of pace.