The Ice Harvest - book and movie

Last week I read Scott Phillips The Ice Harvest (review later this week). I thought I'd watch the movie over the weekend to see how it translated to the big screen. It was somewhat of a disconcerting experience. The book and the movie are quite different; the movie being a strange echo of the book. The Billy Bob Thornton character in the movie only has a couple of pages in the book, and whilst some of the scenes mirrored the book, most of the plot had been altered to some degree, including the relationships between the characters, and just about all the dialogue had been re-written. Even the scene in the book where Charlie Arglist's brother-in-law crawls across the ice to be sick in the car's footwell - a scene that had me in a fit of giggles - had been reworked and lost just about all it's impact. I'm kind of baffled by this as the movie would have worked just as well, if not better, if it had followed the book. And as for the movie ending - the book nearly flew at the television! The book is pure noir - let's just say the film was heading that way until it bottled the end and went all Hollywood. The movie wasn't bad, but in my view it was a shame it didn't follow the book more faithfully.

Lazy Sunday Service

Kerrie's review of The Rule Book over on Mysteries in Paradise has given a lift to what has been a busy few days in which I taught an entire twelve week course (usually two hours a week) over four days, whilst trying to do all the usual stuff. Always nice to get a positive review. Hopefully, Ghostland, the third McEvoy book will see the light of day at some point - it's stuck in submission limbo at the minute. I've been making good progress on Good Cop/Bad Cop over the past six weeks and only have four more chapters to write to finish the book off. Talking of which I better get back to it.

My posts this week:
Life sized virtual doubles
Review of Black Diamond by Martin Walker
A last attempt to keep allied lobby groups and voters on side?
Montreal/Quebec crime fiction
Code/Space book cover
Review of Tilt-a-Whirl by Chris Grabenstein

Life sized virtual doubles

In an effort to speed up security clearance at Manchester Airport from next week they are using full sized holograms of staff to prepare travellers as they enter the security zone (see story here). The idea seems to be that passengers are more likely to take notice of a person than a tannoy announcement or a television screen and the virtual self takes some of the work away from their real counterparts. The holograms are realistic enough that some passengers are fooled into trying to hand them their travel documents. I'm sure there are all kinds of plots that could be linked to such holograms, with witnesses being fooled into seeing a hologram rather than the real person, thus providing an alibi, etc. Kind of like virtual twins. If it works, it'll be interesting to see if the world starts to be populated with very helpful virtual doubles.

Review of Black Diamond by Martin Walker (Quercus, 2010)

In the Perigord region of France, Captain Bruno Courreges keeps the peace in the small town of St Denis. Tension is high in the town with the forced closing of the saw mill due to a rivalry between father and son, there are reports that a scam is operating in the local truffle market, and a tit-for-tat war between Chinese and Vietnamese food vendors has broken out. Not long after Courreges starts to investigate the latter two crimes, one of his close friends, Hercule is found brutally murdered. Hercule has a shady past in the French foreign service and his death attracts the attention of specialist services in Paris. As the feud between father and son, and the Chinese and Vietnamese escalates, Courreges tries to solve the murder and dissipate the building tension.

It took me a while to warm to Black Diamond, and even then my interest waxed and waned as I progressed through the story. What saved the novel from the did not finish pile was the character of Captain Bruno Courreges and the contextual framing with respect to France’s bloody colonial exits from Vietnam and Algeria. Courreges is a complex, multi-layered character who’s likeable and enjoyable company. Where I struggled with the book was the somewhat lifeless prose – though occasionally it sparks into life, especially around scenes with food – the uneven pacing, with several pages devoted to relatively inconsequential events and other scenes dealt with quite quickly, and especially the dialogue which is wooden and formal, with all characters speaking through the same voice. The plot is relatively straightforward and became more interesting as the story unfolded. Overall, a book with some merits – especially the character of Courreges, but the unevenness of the prose and pacing, and the weak dialogue, let the reading experience down for me. That said, it has some very good reviews elsewhere, for example, this review in the Independent.

Montreal/Quebec crime fiction?

I'm off to Montreal in mid-March for a week. We've been doing some work on Canada and potential diaspora strategies and they're flying us over to present the findings and discuss them more fully. I like to try and read crime fiction set in the places I visit, but I'm not really aware of novels set in Montreal or Quebec more broadly. Since I probably need to think about ordering books now if I'm to have them in good time for when I travel, I thought I'd post to see if anyone had any recommendations? I'm interested in any crime sub-genre.

Update:
My review of The Main by Trevanian is here.
My review of Still Life by Lousie Penny is here.

Code/Space book cover

The designer at MIT Press has just emailed through the cover design for our forthcoming Code/Space book. What do you think? Good? Needs tweaks? Hopefully should be out March/April time.

Review of Tilt-a-Whirl by Chris Grabenstein (2005, Carroll and Graf)

Part-time summer cop, Danny Boyle, and his mentor, Iraqi veteran, John Ceepak are having breakfast in Sea Haven, New Jersey, when a blood soaked girl stumbles up to the Pancake Palace. The girl and her father had sneaked into Sunnyside Playland at dawn to sit on the tilt-a-whirl before the amusement park opened for business. There a crazed gunman has shot her father dead. It turns out that he’s Reginald Hart, a billionaire developer with his fingers in many pies and a list of enemies a mile long. Ceepak vows to the girl that he’ll protect her and capture the man that killed her father, and he’s a man of his word, living by what he calls his ‘code’. With the town in a panic, a small police force stretched to the limit, and various vested interests circling the case, it’s a vow that he’s going to find difficult to fulfil.

In Tilt-a-Whirl Grabenstein creates an authentic feeling seasonal seaside town with its tourist shops, local haunts, and ragbag collection of characters ranging from homeless bums to entrepreneurial mayor. The characterization is generally good, if a little clichéd, and the writing engaging and lightly amusing, with a good pace. The telling is kind of a mix between a cosy and a police procedural, told through the first person narrative of twenty four year old, rookie part-time cop, Danny Boyle. Where I felt the story was a little stretched was in relation to the plotting. It had its twists and turns, and it tugged the reader along, but it felt a bit lightweight in places due, I think, to the levity in Grabenstein’s writing. Also, for some reason I sensed very early on who the killer was, and the ending felt kind of clunky and not fully worked through. Overall, I enjoyed Boyle and Ceepak’s first outing, and feel that Grabenstein is onto a good thing with these characters and the setting of Sea Haven, but felt a little let down in that this had the potential to be my first five star review of the year. I’ll be keeping an eye out for other books in the series.