David Matthews

Robert B. Parker (1932–2010) in his 1971 doctoral dissertation “The Violent Hero, Wilderness Hero, and the Urban Reality: A Study of the Private Eye in the Novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald” placed the hard-boiled private detective in a romantic tradition dating back to James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, a tradition Parker  himself was soon to revitalize with the appearance of Spenser in The Godwulf Manuscript (1973).

Hammett’s Sam Spade, Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, and Macdonald’s Lew Archer were cool, flippant, and irreverent, governed by an idiosyncratic code of honor and the determination to live life as much on their own terms as one is able. They were outsiders and loners whose moral compass not infrequently put them at odds with conventional morality, mores, and the letter of the law in a world where the cops were apt to be crooked, the politicians seedy and corrupt, and society’s upper crust decadent and depraved. They were more likely to show their toughness by taking a beating than by handing one out, and they solved cases less by clever deduction than by poking around the hornet’s nest until they stirred up a denouement.

After Spenser came a new golden era of such finely drawn figures as James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux, Walter Moseley’s Easy Rawlins, Sara Paretsky’s V I Warshawksi, Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone, and Robert Crais’s Elvis Cole, to name but a few. Burke, Paretsky, et al., may not rank with the very best novelists of their generation, but they may not be so far behind either. As Parker noted (Charles L.P. Silet, Robert B. Parker Author Interview on Writing Mysteries: “Five Pages a Day”), the quality of the writing is what matters, and this is limited only by the author’s talent and ability, not by genre. I would quibble with Parker only by way of extrapolating that the best writers transcend genre, as for instance, Dostoevsky with Crime and Punishment, Robert Stone with DogSoldiers, and Cormac McCarthy with No Country for Old Men.

Some of the real action these days is in Europe, especially Scandinavia, where the protagonist is likely to be a cop but remains an individualistic outsider, bound by a stringent code, whatever his quirks, flaws, and all too human foibles. To my mind the best of them writing today, American or European, are Ian Rankin, whose John Rebus prowls the streets and pubs of Edinburgh while listening to music played in the dorms when I was in college 1970–1973, and Henning Mankell from Sweden, who I think of not as a writer of mysteries or thrillers but simply a novelist, and quite a good one.

On the cusp of the 21st century, Carol O’Connell debuted Kathy Mallory in the 1994 novel Mallory’s Oracle. Some ten years later Mallory was joined by her Swedish spiritual cousin Lisbeth Salander, one of the two protagonists of Steig Larsson’s Millennium trilogy now all the rage, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest.

Mallory was abandoned on the streets of New York at the age of six, cared for to the extent she was cared for at all by prostitutes, a child sociopath living by her wits and thievery until taken in by a cop and his wife who became her foster parents. She followed in the footsteps of her foster father and became a police detective, but she plays by her rules. Mallory’s maxim is, “If you didn’t catch me, I didn’t do it.” She instinctively bucks authority, and authority puts up with her only because she gets results. She has no scruples about breaking the rules if that is what it takes to get them.

Salander’s childhood was every bit as harrowing than Mallory’s. A victim of rape and abuse, with a history of violence, she is determined by the authorities to be mentally incompetent and placed under a guardianship. Her first guardian is a kindly man who is sympathetic to this strange, clearly troubled and just as clearly very bright girl with multiple piercings and tattoos, but when he suffers a stroke, he is replaced by a middle-aged weasel who does not have her best interests at heart, for which Salander will see that he receives his just desserts. She supplements the Taser and mace packed in her knapsack with a hammer on the principle that you can take care of a lot of problems with a good hammer.

Mallory and Salander are women others cross only at their peril. They are loners who keep a small circle of friends at arm’s length while remaining in their way fiercely devoted and protective. They are not inclined to explain themselves, much apologize for anything. To be open is to be vulnerable, and vulnerability must be guarded against at all costs.

Both women are freakishly intelligent, among other things world-class computer hackers. Mallory is drop-dead beautiful, Salander less conventionally attractive but no less desirable. If all this seems to require a bit much suspension of disbelief, well that rather goes with the territory. Spade, Marlowe, and Archer routinely shrug off the effects of being sapped and pistol whipped with no more than a passing headache, while Korean War vet Spenser beats the crap out of hooligans half his age and enjoys terrific sex with the love of his life, lovely übershrink Susan Silverman, in some pretty contemporary settings.

What Parker traced to Natty Bumppo is itself part of a broader tradition of the Romantic outsider who sometimes flaunts and is sometimes merely indifferent to the conventions and approval of society. The Byronic hero, bohemian artist, and hard-boiled detective are not so distant kin. They may be jaded and made cynical by the ways of man and the world. The hard edge they adopt to protect themselves from being hurt may condemn them to turn away from those for whom they care most (Spenser being a notable exception to this last trait). Yet they are after their fashion idealists too who take their stand against hypocrisy and philistinism and evildoers who are rich, respected, powerful, and seemingly immune to justice. They never give up on the quest for authenticity, whatever its cost and whether it is to be had in the end or not. They are heroes for a dark time.

postscript 1 June 2010

A better title, or perhaps a subtitle, for this one would be “notes toward a future essay.” Or perhaps multiple essays, considering themes of kinship between the hard-boiled detective and the bohemian and of Mallory and Salander as distinctive variations on the type, just as Spenser represented a substantive variation on his predeccesors. To do that I would have to go back and reread some Hammett, Chandler, McDonald, and O’Connell, at the minimum. That would be fun but would require time at the expense of other projects. Maybe some day.

David :: May.31.2010 :: Literary :: No Comments »

“Only Crime and Punishment was read during 1866, only it was spoken about by lovers of literature, who often complained about the stifling power of the novel and the painful impression it left, which caused people with strong nerves almost to become ill and forced those with weak ones to give up reading it altogether.” — Nikolay Strakhov, Russian philosopher of Dostoevsky’s era (quoted in Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky:  A Writer in His Time, Princeton University Press, 2010. pp. 462, 463)

Can we imagine a novel having such an impact in our time? Can we imagine someone even saying such a thing about a contemporary novel, justified or not?

David :: May.24.2010 :: Literary :: 1 Comment »

From today’s Wall Street Journal (Ben Casselman and Guy Chazan, Disaster Plans Lacking at Deep Rigs):

The Minerals Management Service, the government agency that oversees offshore drilling, in recent years moved away from requiring specific safety measures in offshore drilling and instead set broad performance goals that it was up to the industry to meet.

…

In joint MMS-Coast Guard hearings into the Deepwater Horizon accident, Michael Saucier, an MMS official, testified that the agency “highly encouraged,” but didn’t require, companies to have back-up systems to trigger blowout preventers in case of an emergency.

“Highly encourage? How does that translate to enforcement?” Coast Guard Capt. Hung Nguyen, who is co-chairing the investigation, asked at the hearings.

“There is no enforcement,” Mr. Saucier replied.

That seems to about cover it.

David :: May.18.2010 :: Politics & Current Affairs :: No Comments »

The Bicycle Thief in a newly restored 35 mm print is into the second week of a run at Portland’s Hollywood Theatre. I saw this classic of Italian neorealism at least twice before last Sunday afternoon, but it had been many years and I forgot just how good it is. So it was I ventured to the Hollywood more from a sense that I ought not miss an opportunity to catch an old classic and should support theaters that show these films than from genuine enthusiasm. Sometimes we are rewarded for doing the right thing.

Directed by Vittorio de Sica, The Bicycle Thief was made in 1948 and released in the U.S. in 1949. The setting is Rome just after the war, where armies of unemployed men are desperate for work. Antonio Ricci is offered a job for which he needs the bicycle he pawned to buy food for his family. His wife pawns the bedsheets to get the bicycle out of hock, and Antonio happily goes to work plastering film posters featuring Rita Hayworth on building walls, only to have some lowlife steal his bicycle the first day on the job.

Antonio files a report with the police, who do not have resources to spare to search for a stolen bicycle. The only good the police report will do is to serve as evidence if he finds the bicycle himself. So Antonio and his son Bruno embark on a desperate but fruitless search that takes them all over the city, to bicycle markets, a mission, the river where a boy almost drowns, a cafe, and a brothel.

The camera loves Bruno, a tousle-haired little boy in shorts and a jacket, with a scarf worn jauntily around his neck. Somewhere in the neighborhood of eight years of age, the little fellow has a streetwise air and just a little bit of a swagger as he runs after his father, eyeballs an assortment of bicycle horns looking for one that belongs to the stolen bike, hastily genuflects before the cross as they are chased from the mission when Antonio disrupts the service questioning an old man he thinks has a connection to the thief, eyes a little girl from a well-to-do family enjoying a sumptuous meal in the restaurant where Bruno and his father eat bread and mozzarella as Antonio  exclaims today we are free and pours a little wine into a glass for Bruno.

Antonio is not a deep thinker, just an ordinary fellow trying to provide for his family. His thoughts are in the main pedestrian, his focus entirely on the job and getting the bicycle back. At the film’s end he and Bruno find themselves outside a stadium where a soccer match is in progress. Antonio spots a bicycle leaning unattended against a building around the corner and up the street and is overwhelmed by temptation. Anguished, he turns away from the bicycle and back to Bruno, sitting on the curb. Then back to the bicycle. He gives Bruno money and tells him to take the streetcar to a place where they will meet up later. It goes badly, and the film ends with Antonio walking grim-faced, without hope, through the darkening city, Bruno at his father’s side, clutching his hand.

Somerset Maugham said there are three rules to writing a novel and nobody knows what they are. There are many ways to go about making a novel or movie or a poem or a painting. The Bicycle Thief is devoid of dazzling pyrotechnic special effects. The dialogue is not snappy, the plot turns neither convoluted nor complex. The characters do not exhibit the psychological and spiritual torment we find in Bergman or Fellini’s special brand of ennui mixed with joie de vivre. The Bicycle Thief succeeds as the unadorned but compelling story of an unexceptional man caught up in the most human of conditions. When I walked from the theatre I felt moved…and alive.

Roger Ebert’s 1999 review is an exceptional tribute to exceptional film.

David :: May.15.2010 :: Film :: No Comments »

Spring comes to Portland cool, damp, and incredibly lush. Alas, the names of trees, flowers, and plant life generally, like French vocabulary, have never stuck in my mind the way sports trivia does. For instance, off the top of my head, starting line-up for the 1964 UCLA national championship team coached by John Wooden: guards Gail Goodrich and Walt Hazzard, forwards Keith Erickson and Jack Hirsch, center Fred Slaughter, sixth man Kenny Washington from Beaufort, SC. (I confess to a momentary brain cramp that led me to google the roster to confirm I was correct about Hirsch.) But what is that tree across the street? The vine crawling up the fence? The incredible wine-dark leaves of what I have in my mind is a Japanese maple but could be mistaken. Absurd, isn’t it? To my good fortune, the capacity be moved by these wonders is not diminished by the limits of my knowledge, though I believe knowing more is generally better and more delightful than knowing less and appreciation is enhanced by it.

With spring comes the transition out of the winter running routine, when I cut back my mileage a bit. I do not recall when I began doing this. It was not so much a conscious decision as something I sensed was happening only after the fact and thought, yes, that seems reasonable. The weather is less than optimal, cold and often as not in Portland raining, runs on workdays are in the dark, and there is almost without fail at least one ratty cold that causes me to take enough time off to lose a little conditioning and some of the mental edge that comes with routine.

The challenge in winter is getting myself into the running clothes and out the door. It is way too easy to come home from the office tired, cold, and damp and think this would a good day to take a day off. Once out and putting one foot in front of the other, most days it is good even in cold and rain as long as it is not too cold and the rain holds back to that Portland drizzle we know and love, but there is an element of that which is to be endured in even the best of the winter runs. They are worth enduring, and more, if only as preparation to enjoy running in the early mornings and late afternoons of spring, summer, and autumn.

Backing off a bit from time to time also gives my body a break, and it is not just the body that benefits from it. By late winter when we are tantalized by brief spells of warmer, sunnier weather, I find myself eager, anxious, excited at the prospect of jacking up the mileage and getting back into those longer runs that are qualitatively different from the shorter ones. Talk of mileage is always relative. I have run at a pretty low level for years. Thanks in part to Big T’s Memorial Day visit when he tried to peer-pressure me into training for a marathon, I put in more miles in 2009 than any year going back at least to 2004, and that was largely due to a fairly modest 25-30 miles a week July through September, as satisfying a period as I have enjoyed in a long time.

Ten days into May and I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I’ve run in t-shirt and shorts. I’m looking forward to more of those days, but I’ll take the ones I’m having. Temperature was around 45, not cold but coolish, when I set out on the Springwater Corridor to Sellwood run the last two weekends, a glorious loop somewhere in the neighborhood of twelve miles. Yesterday marked only the third time I have gone that distance since September. The run started off somewhat problematically with discomfort in my right Achilles tendon area. This first cropped up Thursday, toward the end of a 5.5 mile run. I stopped to stretch a bit then and was okay the rest of that run. Yesterday the discomfort appeared not a half a mile into it. I paused to stretch, continued a few blocks, then stretched a bit more, and was fine until near the the end when I felt it again as I built some character coming out of Ladd’s Addition up Harrison to 30th, but heck, I’m supposed to feel discomfort on that mother of a hill. Aches and pains and injuries are part of the deal. It is important to pay attention and back off when it’s called for, difficult as that may be this time of year. There is a fair chance the current discomfort is nothing serious and can be resolved with some special attention, a little extra stretching. We’ll see how that goes.

The sky was blue and cloudless, the streets quiet, the air bright and fresh. I sighted a dragon boat on the river at the Hawthorne Bridge as I turned south along the Eastbank Esplanade and another as I ran down past OMSI to pick up the trail that would take me on to Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge and Oaks Amusement Park with fellow runners, bicyclists, walkers, three kids with fishing poles clambering up from the river bank, two geese with three little ones in the grass. Two cats were there at the food and water bowls just the the other side of the fence that separates the trail from the railroad track where the week before I saw two women filling those bowls.

I have yet to encounter two women I regularly met last summer coming up the trail as I approached Sellwood. One was a tiny Asian woman a bit older than I am, the other a middle-aged woman who runs like a fury. Both women ran alone, as do I. We smiled and waved as we passed and continued on our way. A gesture, a small thing, yet each week I found myself looking forward to that part of the run. Maybe some Saturday soon we will meet again.

David :: May.10.2010 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

The fuss about reading Miranda rights to terror suspects strikes me as, well, suspect. Are we to suppose that captured terrorists routinely sing like Pavarotti until read their rights, whereupon they are rendered mute? As if it would not have occurred to them not to cooperate with their captors until informed of the right to remain silent.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R–SC) said at a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing this week that he believes Miranda warnings are counterproductive. Graham told POLITICO he is working on legislation to redefine the public safety exemption to Miranda warnings “so law enforcement can go to a judge somewhere and make the case that the detainee is a suspected member of Al Qaeda or the Taliban and have the judge approve continued interrogation without Miranda rights.” The law would apply to U.S. citizens as well as foreign nationals. (Sen. Lindsey Graham: Miranda rights ‘counterproductive’).

The law would be directed only at those who join terrorist organizations as designated by the State Department. “It would be members of Al Qaida — not Timothy McVeigh,” said Graham, without explaining why the exception for a McVeigh type.

Meantime, a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report states, “Membership in a terrorist organization does not prohibit a person from possessing firearms or explosives under current federal law. However, for homeland security and other purposes, the FBI is notified when a firearm or explosives background check involves an individual on the terrorist watch list.” Of background checks on 1,225 people on the watch list, 91 percent were approved for gun transactions.

Even Joe Lieberman thinks this “dangerous loophole” is “stunning and infuriating.” (Huma Khan and C. Byron Wolf, ABC News/Politics, Guns and Terror: Should People on U.S. Watch List Be Barred from Buying Firearms?). The Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, of which Lieberman is chairman, is considering legislation to bar people on many U.S. watch lists from purchasing guns.

Whoa, nelly, says Graham, concerned about the bill’s impact on constitutional rights of individuals whose names may be on the watch list in error. Graham said, “Before we subject innocent Americans who have done nothing wrong, I want us to slow down and think about this.”

Graham and his ilk like to carry on about the sanctity of the Constition, the founders’ original intent, and all that. Yet they tend to be almost blithe in their consideration of which parts should be held sacrosanct and which might be treated as more open to, I am tempted to say “liberal,” interpretation.

Graham rears up in righteous umbrage at the possibility that suspected terrorists might be accorded protection against self-incrimination guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment (no person “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself”). We might speculate as whether this is the source or the consequence of his conviction that terror suspects should be regarded not as criminals but as enemy combatants, but the relevant point here is that the Fifth Amendment is not one the good Senator is willing to go to the wall for. Not so the Second, whose inviolability demands that no law or regulation may be enacted to make it difficult for a terrorist to obtain guns if that would so much as inconvenience an innocent American who wishes to purchase a firearm.

Not everyone sees these issues the way Graham does, but he is far from alone, and  I am unable to fathom that kind of thinking. Once more I feel myself a man out of tune and out of touch with his time.

David :: May.08.2010 :: Politics & Current Affairs :: 2 Comments »