YouTube and the Louise Paxton Mystery
I like YouTube and I find myself spending more and more time on there. My visits are usually spent watching clips of American television comedic stars of the 1950s, 60s and 70s such as Jackie Gleason, Dean Martin and Johnny Carson. You watch these guys and you realise what is missing on television today. Recently, I discovered a series of videos that are very different and much more modern. Louise Paxton’s channel page and her series of strange and frightening videos has caused some fierce debate in other YouTube videos and on the comment threads. Her videos use the medium of YouTube to create a mystery narrative video-by-video in a more updated form of serialisation. In the first few videos (which were all made and posted in 2007), the twenty-three-year-old Louise Paxton explains how she is starting a video blog to keep in touch with her friends, as she is moving from her home town of Norwich to an apartment in London. She is rather vague about her reasons for the move, and a number of motives are subtly suggested. She is trying to make a new start after a difficult end to a long-term relationship, and her grandmother has passed away leaving her inheritance money, which Louise uses to put down a deposit on an apartment. The first few videos are not menacing at all. They mostly show her enjoying her new home. But then a new narrative begins to emerge. Louise starts to believe she is the victim of a stalker. The videos show her up late at night too terrified to sleep: she can hear strange noises at her door, shadows flicker across the screen and things begin turning up in her flat for no apparent reason. Is it all in her mind? Is she really the the victim of a stalker or is it a case of the paranormal? The tension builds and the final video contains a truly shocking climax. It is of course all a hoax, although there appears to be plenty of internet users who think it is genuine. The videos are supposed to be casual blogging but they are in fact well acted and directed episodes in a serial internet drama. The videos seem to be partially inspired by Gothic drama and are vaguely reminisicent of Orson Welles’ 1938 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds, which fooled thousands of Americans into believing they were genuinely being invaded by aliens. To perform such an elaborate hoax is ethically dubious, but the videos are genuinely compelling and the perfect alternative to television in our internet age.
Below you can watch one of the first videos in which Louise believes the stalker is at her flat. Although it is well worth watching all 38 episodes in order.
Read my follow-up post, Zoe Richards and the Louise Paxton Hoax. Also, here’s my interview with writer-director Andrew Cull who created the Louise Paxton mystery.
Reuniting Raymond and Cissy Chandler–Updated 09.09.2010
For the past year or so Raymond Chandler aficionado Loren Latker has been working to have the ashes of Cissy Chandler reunited with the remains of her husband Raymond Chandler, who is buried in Mount Hope cemetery in San Diego. Loren has spent quite a lot of time investigating Chandler’s relationship with Cissy and his detective work helped with putting together my post last year to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Chandler’s death. Loren has a useful Raymond Chandler timeline on his Shamus Town site which corrects many errors and omissions from the two Chandler biographies.
Chandler had a difficult relationship with Cissy, who was almost 20 years older than he was, but she was the love of his life and there is little doubt that he wanted them to be together in death. Yesterday an application was filed on Loren’s behalf by lawyer Aissa Wayne in the San Diego court to have Cissy’s ashes disinterred and moved to the Mount Hope cemetery. The application goes before a judge on April 26th at 2.30pm
Update 18.03.2010: Loren is starting an email campaign to persuade the judge that the Chandlers should be together. He says “Have people email me and cc Aissa Wayne at aw@waynelawgroup.com, and tell us that they wish to see Pearl Cecily Eugenia Chandler reunited with Raymond Thorton Chandler.” Update 8.04.2010: A campaign web page, which includes copies of Raymond Chandler’s will and codicil, is here.
Loren explains more about Cissy’s family, about the process of having her remains moved in this segment from his wife’s show on Talk Radio One.
Updated 09.09.2010: Yesterday the San Diego court granted the petition to have Cissy’s remains moved to the grave of her husband. More here.
Great Crime Reporters – Jerry Capeci
Perhaps you haven’t been reading about the legal problems of Danny ‘the Lion’ Leo, the current Boss of the Genovese Crime family. But for those of you who are, like me, grimly fascinated with all things to do with the Mafia (or La Cosa Nostra as it is known to its members) then there is only one place to read about Danny ‘the Lion’ and a host of other Mafia-related stories and that is Jerry Capeci’s Gang Land News website. Capeci is America’s leading Mafia expert. He began writing his Gang Land column for the New York Daily News in 1989, and the column went online in 1996. Capeci has also co-authored (with Gene Mustain) three major books concerning the Mafia: Mob Star: The Story of John Gotti (1988), Murder Machine: A True Story of Murder, Madness and the Mafia (1992) and Gotti: Rise and Fall (1996). What sets Capeci apart from other crime reporters is that he understands people’s fascination with the traditions and the rules of the criminal secret society. Public fascination is one of the factors that led to Mario Puzo’s Mafia family drama The Godfather (1969) becoming one of the bestselling novels of all time. Capeci leaves no ambiguity that he personally finds the Mafia’s actions to be morally repugnant. Although he is prepared to occasionally criticise the F.B.I. if he feels they are subverting justice to ensure a conviction, which has often happened through their use of the controversial RICO Act, in many ways a precursor to the anti-terrorism Patriot Act.
Capeci is particularly knowledgeable about the late Boss of the Gambino Crime family, John Gotti. Gotti is perhaps symbolic of the public’s fascination with the Mafia as he revelled in his reputation as a gangster who was elevated to celebrity status. Gotti became the Boss of the Gambino family after orchestrating the assassination of its then Boss Paul Castellano in 1985. He was found not guilty of a host of criminal charges in three separate criminal trials, subsequently earning the nickname ‘the Teflon Don’, as nothing would stick to him. Gotti was finally found guilty on charges of murder and racketeering in 1991 and sentenced to life imprisonment. Capeci’s book Gotti: Rise and Fall is widely regarded as the definitive biography of the Mob Boss. Capeci wanted Gotti to write the introduction to the book himself. Gotti refused, so Capeci wrote the introduction as John Gotti, using his extensive knowlege of the gangster to try and imagine how Gotti would introduce his life story.
You can read a segment from the introduction below:
Back in ’87, when I beat this case a little girl prosecutor tried to fuck me up with, a real frame job, a guy comes running down the street. This was when the fuckin’ Mets weren’t no lay-down Sally team. The guy says, “Queens has two world champions. The Mets and John Gotti!”
I was on the cover of Time. People. New York. I don’t know how many fuckin’ others. I lose track. They wrote songs about me and played’ em on Howard fucking Stern. Fuckin’ public television did a big show on me. It was right after they did one on Eleanor Roosevelt or maybe Winston Churchill, some famous fuck, I don’t even remember.
They called me lots of names. Johnny Boy. Dapper Don. Teflon Don. Prince of Mulberry Street. Two with fuckin’ “king” in it – King of the Volcano. King of Queens. Naturally, they also called me the Godfather. You gotta go read the book to understand them all, but just John suited me fine. People get famous, they only need one name. Cher. Madonna. Magic. Michael. John.
Recently I wrote a post about a wonderful book of correspondence, A Friendship: The Letters of Dan Rowan and John D. MacDonald 1967-1974. Dan Rowan was a nightclub comedian who found tremendous success on television with his anarchic variety show Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. At the advice of a mutual friend, Rowan became pen-pals with the crime novelist John D. MacDonald. The book covers the seven years of their correspondence and the letters end when their friendship ended suddenly in 1974.
One aspect of the book that I am beginning to rediscover is the penetrating insight that the letters express regarding the complexity of the creative process. The majority of Rowan and MacDonald’s conversation is focused on the inner workings of the production of Laugh-In. Rowan frequently vents his frustration about issues such as trying to get certain sketches past the censors, the omnipresent threat of cancellation and maintaining the high quality of the show through all six series. By comparison, MacDonald is slightly more guarded in describing his writing process for the Travis McGee series of novels. At one point in the correspondence, when their friendship was at its closest in 1968, it seemed that Rowan and MacDonald might actually work together on a television series. Rowan describes his vague idea to MacDonald:
One day at the beach at Manasota Key I was lying in the sun waiting for the Dutchman to come and take a walk in search of shark’s teeth. As usual there were no people in hearing distance and it was naturally silent. A sudden loud squawk made me blink my eyes open, and peering through that red, bright haze I first saw a crab just emerging from his hole not three feet from me and his open mouth aped the sound I had heard which had come from a large blue heron. It struck me as funny at the time and made me think that the relation between sight and sound is tenuous; that we are often in the midst of wondrously fascinating things and are unaware of them.
Rowan’s idea developed out of vagueness into something more substantial, albeit he would never get to the stage of having a finished working script. Rowan wanted the show to consist of an abstract series of scenes which would explore the relation between sight and sound, or more importantly man’s unawareness of this wondrous connectivity:
EXAMPLE: The guard in the Metropolitan Museum, surrounded on all sides by some of the world’s art treasures, reading Playboy. Bored and unseeing he spends his life with beauty and isn’t aware of it.
EXAMPLE: The steelworkers in the open hearth of the mill, surrounded by gigantic wonders, blazing heat and ear-splitting noise, looking at a print on a workshop wall of one of the art works at the Met.
Rowan’s idea for two scenes do not contain a linear structure but do have some striking parallels. This was abstract and original material for a comedian. Perhaps it is even more revealing to read that MacDonald was very interested in being involved with the show:
About your idea. I like it. D likes it. I want to let it sit on one of my back shelves for a time and ripen before I make any comment. I know right now that it is a highly creative and stimulating and kind of timeless thing. It is what just here and there, infrequently, the best of the foreign directors will do. And there is so much scope in making visual comment on the way people anthropomorphize things.
Son, I would be right proud and happy to have something to do with a thing like that. Once upon a time Dorothy walked through the main public park in St. Pete and saw a lady on one of the benches, so withered and frail she looked a hundred and nine. She was reading, with avid concentration, a magazine called Your Future.
It is remarkable to think what a unique addition this project would have been to the careers of Rowan and MacDonald. It would have been unlike practically anything Rowan had done before, but at least Laugh-In was renowned for its quickfire, zany sketches with little or no connectivity. That mad-cap style evidences itself in this idea, but comes through in a more sombre art-house form. For MacDonald it would have been an even bigger departure in style. Critics have argued that in crime fiction every scene, character, even line of dialogue has to connect as part of a larger narrative puzzle. In this unnamed project the connectivity is deliberately more fluid and allusive. Only MacDonald’s science fiction novels could be seen as a comparable career shift from his main identity as a crime novelist. Of course all of these points are now academic. The television show never happened. Laugh-In proved to be the peak of Rowan’s career, not the launch-pad to better things he had hoped it would be. Rowan and MacDonald’s friendship came to an end and they never worked together professionally other than to publish their correspondence in A Friendship, shortly after they reconciled in 1986. But the idea itself has been explored by other artists before and since Rowan conceived his never producued television series. As MacDonald comments Rowan’s idea is similar to the work ‘of the best foreign directors’. He is probably referring to European film directors of the time such as Luchino Visconti and Federico Fellini. But in those cases stylised sequences are part of a wider, coherent narrative. Rowan’s idea is perhaps too slight for a television series. Once the viewer finishes marvelling at the originality of the concept, the whole thing is in danger of becoming tedious very quickly. Still it is remarkable to imagine a crime writer and a comedian working on a project that was completely different from anything they had done before. It is a testament to Rowan and MacDonald’s skill as creative artists that they would attempt such a project, and it is a terrible shame that it was never completed.
David Cage’s Heavy Rain
Heavy Rain, the new Playstation 3 video game is released today, and it is receiving a lot of good publicity for its innovative, groundbreaking style. Written and directed by David Cage, Heavy Rain takes the form of a mystery thriller with the player in charge of one of four main characters hunting a child killer. Unlike a mystery novel or film, the moral choices the player makes affect the outcome of the story. It is ironic that this particular game is billed as artistic, since mystery fiction is often dismissed as not being an art form of itself. Yet with this game David Cage hopes to elevate the video game format to a new level of respectability. The reviews so far are mixed, the Telegraph argues that the dialogue is poor, but the Evening Standard has an interview with the American writer and director Neil LaBute in which he talks of the excitement that Heavy Rain is generating in Hollywood. All in all, we will have to wait to see if Heavy Rain becomes the Citizen Kane of video games.
You can watch the trailer to Heavy Rain below:
Mildred Pierce Remake and Homosexuality
The A.V. Club has the story that H.B.O. has finally greenlit a remake of Mildred Pierce. Mildred Pierce (1941) is one of James M. Cain’s best novels and it was originally adapted into a film noir classic by Michael Curtiz in 1945 with Joan Crawford in the title role. Kate Winslet is to play Mildred, ‘the woman of stone’ and it will be directed by Todd Haynes. Unlike the film version the remake will be adapted into a five part mini-series, and according to early reports, homosexuality will be a major theme. Haynes is openly gay and homosexuality has been a theme in much of his past work. Crawford is a gay icon, although only in retrospect is that term applied– it is fair to say that she did not intend to be. I find it difficult to see where homosexuality is a major theme of the novel. Unless you read Mildred’s obsessional love for her horrible daughter Veda as being rooted in sub-conscious lesbianism, but this would be a reductive analysis of the narrative. Not every adaptation has to be literal, Michael Curtiz’s version is a brilliant film, but a murder is added to the narrative which is not in the novel to make the story seem more traditionally film noir. Another reason to consider that homosexuality is not important to the novel is that it is fairly well known that Cain was homophobic. In another classic Cain work, Serenade (1937), the lead character John Howard Sharp is an opera singer who is being blackmailed by a male colleague and probable former lover. Although the character of Sharp is sympathetic, the portrayal of homosexuality is not. Sharp says of his affliction:
Every man has five per cent of that in him, if he meets the one person that’ll bring it out, and I did, that’s all.
Cain claimed to have scientific backing for his views on homosexuality, but he never considered it to be a valid form of love. There is an intriguing anecdote in Roy Hoopes excellent biography of Cain. Cain was friends with the British actor Charles Laughton. Laughton liked Cain because Cain could spot things in his film performances that were lost on his other friends. One night Laughton took Cain to see his film The Ruggles of Red Gap (1935). The film is a comedy in which Laughton plays an English butler who, through an unusual set of circumstances, ends up working for a hick family in the American West. When Cain mentioned to Laughton that the butler was merely a comedic exaggeration of Laughton himself, Laughton burst into tears as Cain had inadvertantly reminded him of his very poor former life in England. Laughton recovered from this embarrassing moment and invited Cain to his house to look at some of his recently acquired art pieces. Cain accepted, but while he was looking at the art he noticed that Laughton was staring at him intensely, which made Cain feel uncomfortable. Cain made his excuses and left. He would never see Laughton again. Hoopes’ take on the situation was that Laughton had broken the convention of friendship which states that friends should not be too intimate with each other. However, there are differing accounts as to what happened. Laughton’s wife Elsa Lancaster claimed that Laughton was a homosexual and that their marriage was a sham to conceal his sexuality. Did Cain break off contact with Laughton because he discovered he was a homosexual? And if so, was Laughton staring at Cain out of desire that night at his house?
Of course these questions are academic. It would be a shame to remember one of the greatest American crime writers, which Cain was, as merely a homophobe. That being said, it is difficult to see how homosexuality is a major theme of Mildred Pierce, and it will be interesting to see how Todd Haynes intends to make it one.
Below is a clip of Joan Crawford as Mildred Pierce. Crawford won an Academy Award for her performance, which definitely ranks as one of the finest of her career:
Liberal Bias in the Arts? Not in Crime Fiction
The Daily Telegraph recently reported with considerable glee that crime novelist and Tory peer PD James had given BBC Director Mark Thompson an unforgettable grilling on Radio 4’s the Today programme. Baroness James was highly critical of the bureaucracy and the huge salaries at the BBC and Thompson was left struggling to find a decent answer to her criticisms. The Telegraph seemed overtly happy with what must have been an uncomfortable interview for Thompson because, as a newspaper with a conservative editorial position, it is often critical of the perceived left-wing bias in the media generally and at the BBC in particular.
This may be issue in which crime fiction is once again bucking the trend. Literary critics do not carry the same assumption that crime novelists are as left-wing as their contemporaries in other arts, which is perhaps why some critics do not consider crime fiction to be an art form. There are many crime novelists who are left-wing by nature but there are also perhaps more who are conservative in their politics. Mickey Spillane was only slightly less right-wing than his most famous creation, Mike Hammer. The more measured conservatism of Joseph Wambaugh is rooted in his former career as a policeman with the L.A.P.D. Some crime writers have proven almost impossible to define politically. James M. Cain was a registered Democrat for most of his life, but he supported the Republican candidate Thomas E. Dewey in the 1944 presidential election as he considered, quite prophetically as it turned out, Franklyn Delano Roosevelt to be in too poor health to be President. In the 1948 presidential election Cain returned to the Democrats and backed Harry S. Truman in the election no one thought Truman could possibly win. Cain felt Dewey had become too hubristic in his second challenge for the White House. Truman won. Cain was appalled at the McCarthyite witchhunts of the 1940s and 50s, but as a veteran of the First World War he resented the fact that many communists were writing for the movie studios at the time.
As in the case of James M. Cain it should be remembered that not every writer fits neatly into a category of left or right, liberal or conservative. In an interview on Real Time with Bill Maher, Gore Vidal said of the Bush administration: ‘They were not conservative. I consider myself a conservative.’ One writer who is all too often dismissed as a right-wing lunatic is James Ellroy. I am currently studying the many interviews Ellroy has given over the course of his literary career, and I have found he often expresses complex and nuanced social views in an eloquent manner. On the other hand, there is Ellroy’s Demon Dog literary persona which allows him to give outrageous and wilfully obscene opinions designed to offend everybody.
Below is a clip of Ellroy in brash and extroverted mood on a German television show. He is joined by fellow writer Bruce Wagner and the actress Rose McGowan, and they are discussing the then forthcoming 2008 Presidential election:
Dick Francis (1920 – 2010)
The bestselling thriller writer Dick Francis has died at the age of 89. Francis was a former professional jockey who famously rode Devon’s Loch, the Queen Mother’s horse in the 1956 Grand National. His novels, set in the world of horse racing, were derived directly from his own experiences. Yet throughout his literary career, Francis was dogged with rumours that his wife secretly wrote all of his novels. You can read the Guardian obituary of Francis here and the Telegraph obituary here.
The Observer Discovers Crime Fiction
The Observer newspaper, Sunday sibling of The Guardian has discovered crime fiction. Again. Stephanie Merritt, one of its columnists, has written a crime novel (under a pseudonym, naturally) so now the landscape has changed and crime novels are acceptable. It’s certainly true that at universities crime fiction (and genre fiction in general) is still not taken as seriously as it might be. But outside the academy I’m not convinced about a sudden ‘acceptance’ of crime fiction among readers. It’s always been popular, hasn’t it? Merritt seems to suggest so in fact. Here’s some of what Merritt has to say in her novel’s press release article:
It was only when I came to apply to university that I discovered that the detective novels I loved were regarded as somehow second-rate. Crime novels, I was given to understand, would not impress in our ancient universities. If I wanted to be considered well read at my interview, I must replace my PD Jameses and Ruth Rendells with “literary” fiction. That which was popular, entertaining and sold well, I learned, had – almost by definition – little value as art.
This artificial division persisted in the literary world I came to work in after university. Crime and thrillers were dismissed as genre fiction, which was – in those days, at least – scorned by the literary establishment. There was no prestige, it seemed, in writing genre stuff; even when such respected “literary” authors as Julian Barnes and John Banville turned their hand to crime novels they did so under a pseudonym (Dan Kavanagh and Benjamin Black respectively). I always wondered if this was because they were slightly embarrassed about it.
…
Meanwhile, the public appetite for crime stories and thrillers, fuelled by the popularity of television murder mysteries and police procedurals, seems only to have grown in proportion: a successful ongoing series, with a central character who can engage readers’ sympathies sufficiently to create a desire for new episodes, is an attractive proposition for a publisher in such uncertain times.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo on Film
The Swedish film adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo opens in British cinemas on March 12th (March 19th in the US). Here’s the trailer:
The Venetian Vase 