Tag: Falling Angel

I Don’t Want to Know

Thanksgiving Eve, and all is well in the Lost Apartment. I’m up early for Wacky Russian, and I actually woke up a half an hour before the alarm went off, well rested and not tired in the least. There’s something to this vacation thing, or it’s the sleepytime tea I’ve been drinking before I go to bed every night (I started that this week, and so far it’s been pretty effective).

Of course, now that I’ve said that, tonight it won’t work.

Last night I finished reading Falling Angel by William Hjortsberg.

It was Friday the thirteenth and yesterday’s snowstorm lingered in the streets like a leftover curse. The slush outside was ankle-deep. Across Seventh Avenue a treadmill parade of lightbulb headlines marched endlessly around Times Tower’s terra cotta facade…HAWAII IS VOTED INTO UNION AS FIFTIETH STATE: HOUSE GRANTS FINAL APPROVAL 232 TO 89; EISENHOWER’S SIGNATURE OF BILL ASSURED…Hawaii, sweet land of pineapples and Haleloki; ukuleles strumming, sunshine and surf, grass skirts swaying in the tropical breeze.

I spun my chair around and stared out at Times Square. The Camels spectacular on the Claridge puffed fat steam smoke rings out over the snarling traffic. The dapper gentleman on the sign, mouth frozen in a round O of perpetual surprise, was Broadway’s harbinger of spring. Earlier in the week, teams of scaffold-hung painters transformed the smoker’s dark winter homburg and chesterfield overcoat into seersucker and panama straw; not as poetic as Capistrano swallows, but it got the message across. My building was built before the turn of the centuryl a four-story brick pile held together with soot and pigeon dung. An Easter bonnet of billboards flourished on the roof, advertising flights to Miami and various brands of beer. There was a cigar store on the corner, a Polerino parlor, two hot dog stands, and the Rialto Theatre, mid-block. The entrance was tucked between a peep-show bookstore and a novelty place, show windows stacked with whoopee cushions and plaster dog turds.

The book was originally published in 1978 and was an Edgar Award finalist for Best First Novel; it didn’t win, losing to Killed in the Ratings by William L. DeAndrea. It was filmed in the 1980’s as the infamous Angel Heart, starring Mickey Rourke, Charlotte Rampling, Lisa Bonet, and Robert DeNiro. I enjoyed the film very much when I saw it, not knowing it was based on a book; it was another one of those films that drew me to New Orleans and Louisiana. Recently (in the last several months) I came across a listing of great crime novels or the ten noir novels everyone should read or something like that; so I thought, oh, I have to read that and there you go.

The plot of the novel itself was adapted almost perfectly for the film; a private eye named Harry Angel is hired by a strange man named Louis Cyphre to find Johnny Favorite, a singer who was apparently severely injured and left with amnesia during World War II; he owes a debt to Mr. Cyphre and he suspects that Favorite may not be in the hospital he is supposed to be. Angel starts looking for Favorite and discovers that Cyphre is right; Favorite is no longer at the hospital, and soon is drawn into a creepy world of black magic, voodoo, and ritual murder. The primary difference between the novel and the film is that the novel takes place entirely in New York; in the book Favorite’s trail leads Angel to New Orleans.

I guess the filmmakers felt voodoo, black magic, and ritual murders fit better in New Orleans that New York. Whatever; I’m glad they did because again, the film was another step in my journey to New Orleans.

The book is very well done, the pacing is great and as I have said in previous entries, that cynical, hard-boiled noir voice is captured perfectly. I myself have never been able to quite get that style down absolutely right; I do intend to keep trying as I love both hard-boiled and noir styles. Having seen the movie I knew the big surprise twist; I can imagine how surprising and shocking it was back in 1978, or if you haven’t seen the film; the twist was one of the reasons I loved the movie. Even knowing it, I still enjoyed the book tremendously because of the writing.

And now, back to the spice mines.

The Chain

Vacation all I ever wanted…interestingly enough, I’ve been sleeping extremely well since Friday; maybe it’s the cold (for us) snap, but I’ve been getting at least nine hours of divinely deep sleep every night since Friday. Which is lovely, really–the whole point of this stay-at-home vacation was to not only get a lot of work done but to get rested and relaxed. So, I have to say that’s all working out quite well so far, which is lovely. Yesterday I worked and we got caught up on watching some of our shows (Eyewitness, Gotham, Supernatural, The Exorcist, with Arrow and The Flash and Secrets and Lies on deck), and I read some of Falling Angel, which has a great noir voice.

I love me some noir. I think one of the problems I have with writing noir–or when I’m trying to write it–is I can’t ever get that noir voice right. I’m going to try to write a noir novel in 2017; it’s been dancing around in the back of my head for a really long time, and I think the time is ripe for me to try to write it at long last.

Woo-hoo!

The kitchen is a mess this morning, and I do have a couple of errands to run today, in addition to the work I want to get done. One of the purposes of said vacation was to get a good deep cleaning on the Lost Apartment done, and I plan on working on the kitchen today around the work I have to do. It’s funny how you can let things slide for so long…actually, no, it’s not, but I also have to cut myself a break. I work full time, write full time, and edit part time. Something has to give in that scenario, and two of the things that have are my workouts and my cleaning schedule around the house. I need to stop beating myself up over these things; there are only so many hours in a day, and I am fifty-five and need down time sometimes.

I think maybe one of my goals in 2017 will be to cut myself a break every now and again, and accept that I don’t have to try to be Superman anymore.

Wow, just typing that felt freeing.

We’ll see how that goes.

But I feel up to the challenge. In 2017 I am going to write another Scotty book, a noir, and another y/a. I also want to get some of these short stories revised and redone and submitted out and out there. (I also need to update calendar reminders for deadlines re: some anthologies I want to submit to.) I also need to step up my reading, and spend less time on social media.

All right, I need to dive into the spice mines or I’ll start goofing off and get nothing done.

Here’s today’s hunk:

Go Your Own Way

I had planned, all week, to take yesterday as a day off. I am going to have to write and edit like a madman all of my vacation (woo-hoo! I’m on vacation!) and decided that yesterday, and Thanksgiving day itself, would be my days to do nothing but putter around the house and read and so forth. I also somehow wound up in Facebook jail for posting a photo of a guy in a bikini three years ago that someone somehow decided yesterday ‘violated their community standards of nudity’–who knew that a man in a bikini was naked? Puritans. So I went to Costco and cleaned up around the house and spent the day finishing reading Owen Laukkanen’s The Watcher in the Wall, and once I was finished with that, I started reading William Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel, around essays from Barbara Tuchman’s Practicing History.

Damn, I do love to read.

We also started getting caught up on the shows we watch last night.

It was time.

Adrian Miller had planned to wait, a few more days, another week, maybe. Hell, when he woke up for school that morning, before school, he wasn’t even sure he would do it anymore. He’d thought about his mom and dad and sister, about Lucas, and wondered what kind of monster would want to hurt them the way he was planning. He’d hugged his parents goodbye and walked out the front door, and it was a beautiful fall morning, crisp and bracing and clear, and he’d decided, not yet. Maybe not ever.

But then he showed up at school, and it all started again.

Lucas wouldn’t talk to him. Lucas never talked to him, not in public, anyway. Lucas avoided his eyes in the hallway, wouldn’t eat lunch with him, made him wait until the final bell rang and they could go to the park, or to Lucas’ dad’s basement, somewhere far away from school and Lucas’ real friends.

I really, really loved this book.

Take this opening. Laukkanen perfectly captures the experience of what it feels like to be that kid; the one who has no friends, the one who counts the minutes until the final bell rings, who dreads going to gym class or the cafeteria for lunch and going to school every morning; who dreads going to bed every night because it means when you wake up you have to go to school again; what it feels like to wish you would die in your sleep so it would all be over; to wonder if you would ever have the nerve to kill yourself.

I was that kid once.

When I bought the book (because I wanted to read one of Owen’s books) I didn’t realize it was a book in a series, but to be honest, I didn’t realize it was a series until I was well into it, and by then I couldn’t stop reading even if I had wanted to; and it didn’t matter at all. Maybe the reading experience would have been heightened by having read the series in its proper order (I’m a bit obsessive about this sort of thing) but I didn’t feel like I missed anything. It worked perfectly well as an introduction to the series (which I am now going to go back and read), and that’s truly not an easy thing to do. (I don’t think, for example, my series can be read out of order.)

The series characters are Kirk Stevens and Carla Windermere, who work on a joint FBI-BCA violent crime task force. They get involved in this particular case when Stevens’ daughter–distraught about her classmate Adrian Miller’s suicide–asks them to do something about it. There isn’t much they can do at first, but as a courtesy they start looking into it, and soon discover an ugly world on-line of suicide groups and chatboards…and disturbed individuals who encourage the suicidal to go through with it. Adrian was the victim of one such person, and as they start to dig into this subculture more, they soon realize that there will be more kids talked into killing themselves while this person watches via webcam.

What makes the book so brilliant, though, is that Laukkanen takes us into the mind of the psychopath as well; how he became this person who enjoys watching young people kill themselves, how much he enjoys playing the game, and how he has turned it into a for-profit business. And while it is a slithery, creepy, horrifying place to be–at the same time you can’t help but feel some empathy for this awful, horrible person you want to be caught; since you know the backstory of how he came to be this monster. This fleshes him out, makes him more real–and all the more terrifying, as it is easy to see how such a psychopath is created.

Laukkanen also shows us the point of view of his new target, a sad lonely girl who hates her life, lured in by an Internet boyfriend she meets on one of the suicide chat boards and comes to know through Facebook and other social media (he uses the pictures of an attractive boy who committed suicide already to create this fake presence, and we learn how he does this and how easy teenagers are prey to this sort of thing–which is also terrifying), and finally she decides to go meet him, taking a bus from Tampa to Louisville…and the race is on for Stevens and Windermere to save her.

The pacing is amazing; you never want to put the book down. The writing is superb, and Laukkanen’s characters are all very real.

Oddly enough, once I finished reading this I realized I actually already had the first book in the series, The Professionals, in my TBR pile.

Looking forward to reading some more of Owen Laukkanen.