If you want to read on Megabus ...

... bring your own light. The fastidious driver on the Buffalo-Philadelphia leg of yesterday's trip disabled the bus's overhead reading lights because, he explained later, the reflections disturbed him.

Obstreperous clicking of the unresponsive switches drew no response, so I cursed the driver long and silently until I remembered the portable battery-operated reading lamp in my bag. With its help, I finished Fantômas and started on Yishai Sarid's Limassol, finishing the latter just as we pulled into Philadelphia's 30th Street Station. More on both books later.

Reading lamps for use only in broad daylight. On this busiest day of travel in the United States, what is the stupidest travel regulation you can think of?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Fantômas on paper and an early Australian award winner

I'm warding off the slump that can come after a superb book (Peter Temple's An Iron Rose) by reading two books at the same time, and there are good things so far in both.

Charlotte Jay's The Yellow Turban (1955) has the following, among other memorable observations, in its opening pages:

"We had all been at Cambridge together. By that I mean Arthur and Roy were undergraduates when I was working as junior assistant in a rather seedy bookshop off the Newmarket Road. But my lack of social and scholastic distinction had not worried Roy, and what did not worry Roy did not worry Arthur — in those days."

Then there's Fantômas, familiar to readers of this blog from my recent posts about Louis Feuillade's silent-movie serials of 1913 and 1914, but before and after the centerpiece of many novels by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre.

I don't know many crime novels that alongside blurbs from the Village Voice and the Washington Post could carry testimonials from Jean Cocteau and Guillaume Apollinaire, but Fantômas (1911) does. This bit of dialogue might help explain why:

"`Sir,' she said, `I do not know if you are joking or if you are talking seriously, but your behavior is extraordinary, hateful, disgusting—'

"`It is merely original, Princess ...'"

***

If you want get your mystery-loving friends scratching their heads, mention that Raymond Chandler was the first American to win the Edgar Award for best novel from the Mystery Writers of America, for The Long Goodbye.

The first author of any nationality to win? The aforementioned Australian, Charlotte Jay, for Beat Not the Bones in 1954.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Do film studies make people dumber?

I’m now almost three serials into Louis Feuillade's silent Fantômas films, and two things have surprised me: how good the movies are, and how hard it is to find words to talk about them.

Part of the latter is due to my previous ignorance of Feuillade's work. I lack the commonplaces that come so readily to discussions of Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton or D.W. Griffith. But part is due to the films themselves.

Feuillade’s movies don’t hit the viewer over the head with technical gimcrackery, and they don’t monger the sorts of symbols that lend themselves easily to sophomore-level “analysis.” They're just well-written, and they tell good, atmospheric stories, and it’s a lot harder to talk about how writing makes a movie than it is to see Christ symbolism in every crossed set of window mullions.

Good god, and it’s not just sophomores who talk that way. A few months ago, I squirmed in my seat as a film professor breathlessly informed an audience gathered for Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt that the film’s runaway protagonist and his niece are both named Charlie!!! and that this is significant!!!

Anyone who has taken a film course can talk about Orson Welles’ deep focus or D.W. Griffith’s use of close-ups. But anyone who thinks that those devices are what make their movies great is missing the point.

OK, readers and viewers, what's responsible for the great volume of superficial blather about movies — or films? Who are the worst offenders?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Fantômas follow-up and a saga's story-telling

Mike White posts a link to "How to watch Fantômas and why."

And, in the department of proto-crime stories, comes this transition between sections of Kormak's Saga, an Icelandic saga set in the tenth century and likely composed during the thirteenth:

"Kormak hesitated.

***

"There was a woman of evil character named Thordis ..."

===============

Here's an English translation of Kormak's Saga, though its rendering of the excerpt above is less suggestive of suspense and femmes fatales. And here's the saga in its original language, if your Icelandic is up to par.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Detectives Beyond Borders meets Fantômas, plus a question for readers

I've begun my journey down the roads where Noircon 2010 will lead me.

Fantômas, first of Louis Feuillade's five French silent films from 1913 and 1914 about the master-of-disguise thief and anti-hero, included two silhouette shots, one of which John Ford might well have had in mind when he repeatedly framed characters in doorways in The Searchers.

The movie's moral ambivalence and inconclusive ending were not what I expected from a 1913 film serial; I'll be watching further episodes.

Next up, Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain's original 1911 novel, Fantômas.

***

The Web site to which most links in this post take you is rich with articles on such subjects as "Fantômas & the avant-garde" and "Pulp surrealism." Juan Gris included a Fantômas novel in one of his paintings, for example, and René Magritte used the character as a direct source for several paintings.

Offhand, I can think of no other figure from popular culture who held such fascination for high culture. Can you?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

The Hendrick's and Tonic Crime-Convention Cost-of-Living Index ©

(#Noircon2010: David White [left] and Howard Rodman discuss Fantômas)Christa Faust (left), here with Butch on her lap and Vicki Hendricks to the right, provided one of those hotel-bar, a-ha! moments that make crime-fiction conventions such a treat for the mind even as they wreak havoc on the body.

She had bought Darwyn Cooke's graphic-novel version of Richard Stark's The Hunter, an adaptation I'd found slightly disappointing for its fidelity to Stark's novel. I reasoned that a comics adaptation ought to add something that words alone could not accomplish. Christa argued for strict obedience to the source; I defended infidelity.

But then she said look at the hands, at the panels in which hands fill the frame and their attitude tells the story. Stark's novel tells us about Parker's hands, but I don't think it focuses on hands nearly as much as Cooke does. So thanks, Christa, for opening my eyes to the power of hands.

***

So, what is the Hendrick's and Tonic Crime-Convention Cost-of-Living Index (HAT-3C-LI ©)?

A Hendrick's gin and tonic cost $14.24 with tax at Bouchercon 2010's convention hotel in San Francisco; at Noircon's hotel in Philadelphia the cost was $9.90.

Using the San Francisco cost as a baseline and assigning it a score of 100, Philadelphia's Hendrick's score is 69.5, nothing to laugh at in these hard times.

What's your city's Hendrick's score? (Trust me: You'll enjoy the research.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010