Tag Archives: books

3 Summer Reads

Posted on by Steve Higgins

A long time ago I decided that I would set myself the task of reading the entire Hamish Macbeth series of books. There are 34 books in the series, all written by author M.C. Beaton which is in fact a pen name for Marion Chesney. Marion actually wrote many books under various pseudonyms including Ann Fairfax, Jennie Tremaine, Helen Crampton, Charlotte Ward and Sarah Chester. After Marion’s death in 2019 further Hamish Macbeth novels have appeared penned by writer R.W. Green.

Hamish Macbeth is a country policeman in the small Scottish Highland village of Lochdubh. Macbeth is a very relaxed kind of fellow. Some might even call him lazy. He shies away from promotion, even giving the credit for solving crimes to others so he can stay on in his beloved village.

A few years back the BBC made a TV series based on the books. ‘Based on’ is quite an interesting use of that particular phrase because the TV series is actually nothing like the books. The series was filmed in Plockton and Macbeth is played by Robert Carlyle. Macbeth is a laid-back relaxed character, just like in the books. He is not averse to poaching the odd salmon and he likes to apply the rule of law in his own way. He avoids promotion as all he wants is to remain in Lochdubh. That is pretty much where the resemblance to the books ends which was quite a surprise to me. Most of the characters in the series are the invention of the TV writers and not M.C. Beaton who wrote the books.

I’m not sure how happy I would be if someone made a TV show out of my book and then proceeded to change all the characters, still I did enjoy Hamish Macbeth as a TV show. It was an oddball, quirky little drama which ran for only three seasons and a few years ago Liz and I visited the village of Plockton which was very small and to be honest, didn’t actually look like the place in the TV series.

Not long ago after reading Death of a Scriptwriter last year, I put down the Hamish Macbeth books and took a little break from the murders in Lochdubh but as the summer has warmed up nicely and I’ve plenty of time to sit out in the back garden reading, I thought it was a good time to pick up the series again.

Death of an Addict.

This was a little different to the usual Hamish Macbeth novel. Macbeth and another officer, Glasgow DI Olivia Chater, masquerade as drug dealers to trap a drugs cartel operating in the highlands. I have to say that I didn’t like how the book leaves the usual village life behind and to be fair, I didn’t enjoy the book as much as the previous ones.

Death of a Dustman.

All the Macbeth series are titled ‘Death of’ someone and I noticed on the internet that there is one book that differs from the others called A Highland Christmas which seems to come in between Addict and Dustman. Anyhow, I don’t have a copy so I went straight on with Death of a Dustman. All the books in my collection end with the first chapter of the next book and Addict ended with chapter one of Dustman so perhaps the Christmas book is something a little different. Anyway, the action takes place once again in the village of Lochdubh where a new councillor decides to make the village ‘green’ by promoting recycling. As a result, the local dustman causes a lot of aggro when he declines to empty bins containing the ‘wrong’ sort of rubbish and of course he ends up getting bumped off.

Things get a little far fetched towards the end but overall, Death of a Dustman was a fairly pleasant read and another look at highland village life and its various characters.

Marathon Man

I mentioned a while ago about my brother dying and when I was sorting out his things I came across this short novel. Actually it was one of my own books and I must have lent it to Colin years ago and now it has once again come back to me. I can just imagine telling him ‘I told you that you never gave me Marathon Man back!’ to which he would probably reply ‘Well what about that Cary Grant book I lent you?’ Yes, I borrowed the Grant book ages ago when I wrote a post about Cary Grant and it’s still there, part read in my bedroom.

Marathon Man was written by the screenwriter William Goldman and later made into a film using Goldman’s own screenplay. It’s a fairly short book and according to Wikipedia it was the author’s most successful thriller novel. Escaped nazi dentist Christian Szell has been living in Paraguay since the end of WWII. He has a stash of diamonds acquired while he worked in a concentration camp which are in a New York vault looked after by his father. When his father dies in a car crash Szell has to return to New York to get the diamonds. Will it be safe though? Szell thinks that a US agent working for a secret department called the Division may be about to rob him when he picks up the diamonds.

The agent is known by the code name Scylla and Szell meets with him and uses a hidden knife to stab him. Scylla manages to survive long enough to get to his brother’s New York apartment whereupon he dies from his injuries. Szell believes that Scylla must have survived long enough to give his brother, nicknamed ‘Babe’, information about the diamonds and so his men kidnap Babe and he is tortured to reveal any information. Szell is a dentist and so he tortures Babe by drilling into his teeth. Later, Babe, a student who hopes to be a marathon runner manages to get away.

The story was made into a film starring Laurence Olivier as Szell and Dustin Hoffman as Babe. This led to an interesting confrontation of acting styles with Hoffman the ‘method’ actor and Olivier the celebrated traditional actor. On one occasion when Hoffman had to appear tired out after staying awake for three days Hoffman chose to actually stay awake for three days also. Olivier, tired of these antics famously asked Hoffman ‘Dear boy, why don’t you just act?’

(I should mention here that while researching this and checking my facts -I had originally thought that Hoffman had gone running to make himself appear breathless- I found a really interesting article in the Guardian in which the author finished with a wonderful quote about acting from George Burns who once said “sincerity is everything. Fake that and you’ve got it made!”)

The film very much follows the lines of the book except that in the film, it is Szell’s brother, not his father who looks after the diamonds and also in the book, Babe is a little more ruthless and cold blooded than Hoffman portrays him on film. In fact, Babe shoots Szell dead in the book but in the film, Szell is killed by falling on his own knife.

Both the book and the film were highly successful and Olivier’s Szell is one of the most famous screen villains, particularly with his catchphrase ‘Is it safe?’ which he continually asks Hoffman’s character before commencing to torture him. It’s a film which probably put a huge amount of people off going to the dentist for years and the book is equally as scary and also superbly written.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been reading. What are your summer reads?

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Book Bag: Frederick Forsyth

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It was sad to read in the news the other day of the passing of journalist and novelist Frederick Forsyth. He was 86 years old and had published more than 25 books. I’ve read quite a few of his novels and I wrote a segment about him some time ago in a blog post about novels that were rejected by publishers. A number of his books were made into films and so many people must be familiar with his work.

Forsyth did his national service in the RAF and was commissioned as an Acting Pilot Officer in 1956. After leaving the RAF he became a journalist working for the news agency Reuters and later he joined the BBC. He was the perfect choice for a foreign correspondent as he spoke numerous languages including French, German and Russian. In 1967 he was reporting on the war between Biafra and Nigeria when the BBC decided they were no longer interested in that particular war. Forsyth resigned from the BBC and continued to report on the war as a freelance. He even admitted later that this was when he was recruited by MI6 as an informant.

His most famous book and actually one that he struggled to get published was The Day of the Jackal. He apparently had no interest in becoming a novelist but turned to fiction as he was out of work and in dire straits financially.  The Day of the Jackal was rejected numerous times but finally one publisher decided to try a limited print run. The book took off first in the UK and then in the USA. It was a mixture of fact and fiction and Forsyth’s description of how to obtain a fake passport was used by John Darwin, the man who faked his own death in a canoe and later tried to make a new life in Panama. This true story was made into a book and TV mini series called The Thief, his Wife and a Canoe.

Forsyth followed up with The Odessa File, a book about the Odessa organisation which helped former nazis escape detection from the authorities after World War II. He wrote numerous other books but when The Day of the Jackal was re-imagined as a TV series recently on Sky TV, he earned nothing as he had already signed away the TV and film rights with the earlier screen version.

The Day of the Jackal

It was a very long time ago when I first read this book. Someone once called it an assassin’s handbook although I’m not sure that’s really fair. The book is set in the early 60s. The OAS was a terrorist organisation made up of ex-army personnel who were angered at De Gaulle’s decision to give independence to Algeria after many of their comrades had died fighting Algerian nationalists. They were trying to assassinate De Gaulle but their organisation had been penetrated by French Intelligence. To prevent any leaks the OAS top leadership decide to hole up in a hotel and arrange for a professional assassin to kill De Gaulle. The book follows the assassin, code named Jackal, as he plans the murder step by step. The French secret service however decide to kidnap a man who functioned as an aide to the leadership. Under torture he revealed the basic plot but how could the French track down the assassin?

The Jackal arranges three fake identities and the author explains meticulously how he does this. He met with a specialist rifle maker and explained how he wanted a rifle that could be dismantled and fitted into a series of metal tubes, the full import of this is only revealed on the planned day of the assassination.

The Jackal also asks for a number to ring for up to date information and the OAS arrange for an informant to seduce a member of the government and pass vital info to the Jackal.

Forsyth apparently wrote the book in 35 days and continued with a similar non stop workflow for all his subsequent books. He didn’t like the writing process and was anxious to get it all over with as quickly as possible. Even so, the result is a tense and gripping read. Forsyth’s books are heavily researched and often including real-life procedures, political contexts, or military operations. He includes authentic settings and terminology that lend a strong sense of realism to his stories. The characters in his books though are usually pretty functional, just there to carry the plot forwards although in The Jackal we find perhaps his most rounded characters, certainly in the few books that I have read.

The Day of the Jackal was made into a film in 1973 directed by Fred Zinneman.

The Odessa File

Again, it’s a long time since I have read this book but it’s really well put together with a real twist at the end. It’s about a German journalist who discovers a diary written by an old Jewish man who has committed suicide. The man was a former concentration camp prisoner and killed himself after seeing a sadistic SS officer known as ‘the butcher of Riga’ walking free in the city.

The journalist decides to try and track the SS man down and finds out that the nazis run an organisation known as the Odessa, which helps former SS men evade justice, assisting them with fake papers and even travel to friendly countries.

The journalist decides to pose as an ex-SS man seeking help from the Odessa and this leads him on a very dangerous path indeed.

The Odessa File was also made into a film starring John Voight as the journalist and the resulting publicity brought about the exposure of the real life ‘Butcher of Riga’, on whom the fictional character was based. Eduard Roschmann was arrested by Argentine police but then skipped bail and escaped to Paraguay.

The Fourth Protocol

I started reading this book a while ago and like all of Forsyth’s other books it is a very exciting read. I was also surprised to find that it was really quite different to the film which starred Michael Caine.

In the book, a professional jewel thief robs the safe of safe of a well to do civil servant. He takes away some pretty expensive jewels but breaks a golden rule by also taking what appears to be an expensive hand crafted leather briefcase.

It turns out that hidden in the briefcase are some top secret documents which the civil servant has been passing to a member of the South African security forces.

This gentleman then organises a group of thugs to find the case but the jewel thief is alerted just in time and is able to round up some tough guys of his own to combat the thugs. After finding out the thugs were after the briefcase, he discovers the secret documents and mails them to the authorities.

Robert Preston, our local MI5 man, then has to find out where the documents came from and who has been leaking them.

Eventually, Preston discovers that the civil service man was passing the documents to a south African diplomat who was also a Russian spy.

This whole episode was glossed over in the film and in fact in the film version it is John Preston played by Michael Caine who robs the safe forcing the traitor to meet with his contact.

The main story though involves a Soviet plot to destabilise NATO by causing an atomic explosion at a US Air Force base in the UK. Components for the bomb are to be smuggled into the country, set up at a safe house just by the air force base and later detonated.

Luckily, our man Preston manages to save the day.

Once again, this is an excellent read peppered with fascinating information about the workings of spies in MI5 and MI6 and also the KGB.

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Thatcher and Give Me 10 Seconds

Posted on by Steve Higgins

On holiday one of my favourite reads was an autobiography by John Sergeant who was once a political reporter for the BBC. It was called Give Me 10 Seconds. It was called this because the BBC usually had John ready to speak to the camera for perhaps two minutes. John needed to get his broadcast together in his head and would usually ask for 10 seconds for a quick mental rehearsal. The book was a particularly warm and enjoyable read and opened my eyes to the way the BBC works.The author seems to think that the BBC was built on rather military styles. Staff didn’t get holidays but instead were allocated ‘leave’. Numerous layers of management operated the BBC empire and it seemed to me to be very similar to how things operated at my old place of work, the Highways Agency.

John’s claim to fame came when he was reporting live from outside the British Embassy in Paris in November 1990. Mrs Thatcher had just heard that Michael Heseltine’s leadership challenge had garnered 152 votes in the first round of voting and while John was presenting live on television, Mrs Thatcher emerged from the embassy with her PR man Bernard Ingham by her side. Despite Mr Ingham trying to push John aside, he stood his ground and firmly held his microphone to the Prime Minister’s face while she advised everyone that her name would be going through to the second round of voting.

John’s book was a great read. He started out working with Alan Bennett as a comedy writer and performer but when he realised that he probably had no future as a tv comedian he got himself a job as a newspaper reporter in Liverpool and later moved over to the BBC as a radio reporter.

It’s actually really fascinating to hear of the rivalry between the radio news and the tv news, as back in the late 60s the radio people really didn’t have much time for their television counterparts. These days of course, television is the senior partner in news reporting and the cameras of the BBC, SKY TV and CNN take the viewer all over the world in search of news.

Even so, in recent years, people and politicians have been highly critical of the BBC not only for the way it reports but also for what it reports. I’ve seen some interviews with politicians by journalists like Jeremy Paxman which were quite frankly just disgracefully rude. Is there bias in the BBC? I personally think that the days of impartial news reporting is over but whenever something happens in the world, and I want some more information, my first thought is to go to the BBC website.

Mrs Thatcher was the first female British Prime Minister. She was born in 1925, studied chemistry at Oxford and married Denis Thatcher in 1951. She stood unsuccessfully for parliament and then settled down to have her children. Later she was finally elected in 1959 as the MP for Finchley.

Image courtesy creative commons

Mrs Thatcher was given various posts on the front bench and when the Conservatives under Edward Heath won the election in 1964, she was promoted to the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Education and Science.

The Government had to deal with numerous issues such as union demands for higher wages and the three day week and they lost the election in February 1974 but Labour could only form a minority government. They then won a later election in October that same year. Mrs Thatcher then challenged Edward Heath for the party leadership and won, taking over as leader of the opposition in 1975. She finally became Prime Minister in 1979 famously quoting the prayer of St Francis on the steps of Downing St;

Where there is discord, may we bring harmony;
Where there is error, may we bring truth;
Where there is doubt, may we bring faith;
And where there is despair, may we bring hope.

Mrs Thatcher promoted the idea of people owning their homes and even introduced policies aimed at tenants buying their own council houses. She faced up to union demands most notably with Arthur Scargill and the mining unions but became hugely popular when she stood up to the Argentinians who invaded the Falkland Islands.

She led the Conservative Party to victory in three consecutive general elections, twice in a landslide, and she ranks among the most popular party leaders in British history regarding votes cast for the winning party; over 40 million ballots were cast in total for the party under her leadership. Her electoral successes were dubbed an “historic hat trick” by the British press in 1987 and her tenure as Prime Minister was the longest continuous period in office since the 19th century.

Her downfall came in 1990 which brings us back to John Sergeant’s famous moment. Michael Heseltine decided to go ahead with his leadership challenge and Mrs Thatcher burst forth from the British Embassy in Paris to make her statement that she had passed her name forward to the next round of the contest. She had been 4 votes short of victory in the first ballot and therefore a second round was required.

Thatcher seemed certain of going forward into that second ballot but after consulting with her ministers she decided to withdraw and it was John Major and not Michael Heseltine who emerged as the new Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party.

Mrs Thatcher has been portrayed by numerous actresses in film and television most notably by Gillian Anderson and Meryl Streep. Streep starred as Thatcher in the film Iron Lady. She was played frequently on TV sketches and in the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only by comedian and impressionist Janet Brown.  Perhaps the most famous comedy sketch about Mrs Thatcher came on the TV show Spitting Image in which she takes the cabinet for dinner. She orders steak and the waitress asks ‘what about the vegetables?’

Thatcher looks at her cabinet and replies ‘they’ll have the same as me!’

Mrs Thatcher retired from the House of Commons at the 1992 general election. She was a Prime Minister who was loved by some and hated by others and even when she died in 2013 at the age of 87 social media memes were declaring the wicked witch is dead!

Which side of the fence are you on?

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Three Reads from My Holiday Book Bag

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It’s always good to slip out of the pool, dry yourself off and then relax in the sun with a really good book. Here are three of my latest holiday reads. (try the video version by clicking here!)

The Thief, His Wife And The Canoe

I first heard about this story on the TV news many years ago. I’d mostly forgotten about it until recently when there was an ITV drama based on the story. This was the book version and even though the story is fascinating, the book, written by a newspaper journalist wasn’t that gripping.

Essentially, John Darwin was facing bankruptcy after getting hugely overreached on a series of buy to let mortgages. He decided that the only way out was to fake his own death and cash in on some life insurance policies. His wife apparently tried to talk him out of the idea but John, a dominating and overpowering personality, went ahead and faked his own death. Amazingly he even went back to live with his wife, sometimes having to retreat to the bedsits next door when any friends or family came to visit. He arranged a false passport using a method explained in the book ‘Day of the Jackal’ by Frederick Forsyth and then the two, Darwin and his wife, planned to buy property in Panama and live a new life. Later, Darwin decided he wanted to return to the UK under his own name by posing as someone who had suffered with amnesia and in fact one day he disposed of his fake passport, walked into a police station and told them ‘I’ve lost my memory!’

Journalist David Leigh tracked down Darwin’s wife in Panama and managed to extract the entire story from her before she returned to the UK to face imprisonment along with John.

The result is interesting but not really a great read as perhaps the author is more used to newspaper stories rather than an entire book. Either way, it kept me interested for quite a few days.

Death of a President

I’ve read this book before many years ago but even so I thought I’d throw it in the motorhome and give it another read. The President’s widow, Mrs Jackie Kennedy asked the author, William Manchester to write the book so there would be one authorised record of what happened in Dallas when President Kennedy was assassinated. The result is a record, in fact a micro record of what happened to Kennedy and those around him, beginning a few days before the assassination and ending with his funeral and the shooting of his assassin by another assassin.

For me, who has been interested in the JFK assassination since at least 1968 when his brother, Robert Kennedy was also murdered and I was 12 years old, it’s a fascinating record. Others might think perhaps that the author has spread his research too far, that we are not interested in what the President’s pilot thought or did or how the honour guard prepared for the President’s funeral and how the President’s sister or brother-in-law reacted.

Anyway as a passionate JFK researcher, a couple of things stood out. One was a time chart that showed that JFK was shot at 12:30 and that at 12:31 and a half, motorcycle cop Marion Baker intercepted Lee Oswald, the supposed assassin, on the second floor lunchroom of the Texas School Book Depository calmly drinking a coke. That meant that Lee had, in 90 seconds, hidden his Mannlicher Carcano rifle on the 6th floor and got himself down to the second floor to meet Baker. Did he shoot the President or was he in the lunchroom all the time?

Here’s another thing. In one of my favourite JFK assassination books, Best Evidence, author David Lifton reckons that sometime between leaving Dallas and arriving at Andrews Airforce base in Washington, JFK’s body was somehow removed from his coffin and transferred to a body bag and then helicoptered to Bethesda naval base where work was done on the body prior to it being seen by the official autopsy staff. In Death of a President, William Manchester says that Mrs Kennedy spent all her time sitting near to the casket on Airforce One with many of JFK’s team of assistants and secret service personnel. So how was Kennedy’s body removed without anyone knowing?

OK, I’ve gone off into the realm of JFK assassination folklore there but to get back to normality, this was a very well researched book and gives a massively detailed look at the events surrounding a tragic day. If anything, the detail is perhaps a little too much and I could sort of imagine it as a feature film using that split screen effect that you often saw in the 1970s; Kennedy getting into the limo side by side with a shot of the assassin getting ready and so on.

Verdict; an absorbing read, very detailed.

Blue Angel: The Life of Marlene Dietrich by Donald Spoto

This was a very compelling read, a biography of Marlene Deitrich who to be fair, I didn’t know much about until this book.

Marlene was one of those people perhaps born at the wrong time. Today might be a better time for her when lifestyles of gay and lesbian people are not so much of an issue.

Marlene rose to prominence in the film world of Germany between the world wars. She was married to assistant director Rudolf Sieber and together they had a child, Maria. The couple had what we might call an open marriage and Marlene had various partners, both male and female and her husband too found himself another love. A big hit for Marlene was her performance as Lola Lola in The Blue Lamp, directed by Josef Von Sternberg in 1930. Shortly afterwards Marlene and Von Sternberg moved to Hollywood and the two made a series of films for Paramount. While she was away from Germany the Nazis rose to power. Goebbels himself asked her to come back and work in German films but when she declined, the Nazi party rejected her. Marlene became a naturalised American and even entertained the troops -the allied troops during World War II.

She had affairs with both men and women and at one point even began to wear male oriented clothes and once she was denied entry into a Paris night club for wearing trousers.

She was extremely concerned with how she looked in films and always arranged with the lighting crew for a key light to illuminate her face in a particular way, many times even bypassing the director. Alfred Hitchcock for one was not amused.

When the film work fizzled out she reinvented herself as a performer with a one woman show in Las Vegas. The clothes and lighting she organised herself, in fact at home she even had a special key light, just as she specified for her films, that she would stand under when she met journalists and even her friends.

She was always there to help her friends and still stayed close to her husband and his partner. If friends were sick or even just down, Marlene would come round and clean up and make food. She was not only a famous and beautiful star but also a proud hausfrau.

The book opens with her appearing in a short sequence in her very last film, which incidentally starred pop star David Bowie. She performed for the camera perfectly, only one take was required, then she returned to her Paris apartment and except for hospital and doctors’ appointments, she never left again until her death in 1992.

Not the best film book I’ve ever read but still an informative and intriguing read.

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Titanic

Posted on by Steve Higgins

The story of the Titanic, the ship that hit an iceberg and sank in 1912, is one of those stories which seems to be forever in the news. It’s a story that has caught the imagination of pretty much everyone. Even the other day, just scrolling through the BBC news page, I came across an item about some new digital scan of the Titanic wreck which revealed new information about the disaster.

This week I thought I’d take a look at the story of the Titanic and how it has been represented by television and film, well at least the TV shows and films that made an imopression on me, as well as the actual story of the tragedy.

The Titanic was designed to be the new premier ship of the White Star Line. It had been built by Harland and Wolff in Belfast and built alongside its sister ship the Olympic and was launched on the 31st May 1911 and was then towed to another berth where its engines and superstructure was installed as well as its majestic interior. The sea trials of the ship were undertaken on the 2nd April 1912 just eight days prior to leaving Southampton on its maiden voyage. The Titanic was the largest ship in the world and advertised as having the passenger accommodation of ‘unrivalled extent and magnificence’. It was also billed as unsinkable even though a few days into its first journey it would end up at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

The Titanic on Television.

The Time Tunnel

The Time Tunnel was a sci-fi series created by Irwin Allen in the 1960s. The best episode in the series was probably the very first one. A US senator has come to take a look at a secret time travel project and see if the huge amounts of money being spent are justified. Scientist Tony Newman, fearful that the project will be cancelled, decides to trial the new Time Tunnel apparatus and send himself back in time. He activates everything and transports himself back in time arriving in 1912 on board the  Titanic.

His colleague, Doug Phillips also goes back to the same time zone to rescue Tony. The captain of the Titanic naturally doesn’t believe his ship is doomed to sink and back in the Time Tunnel control room the technical staff have a bit of a problem bringing the two scientists back to the present (actually 1968) but manage to transfer them to another time zone and so the scene is set for the subsequent adventures.

The Titanic at the Cinema.

A Night to Remember (1958)

I’ve always liked this film. It starred Kenneth Moore as the Titanic’s second officer, Charles Lightoller, and was based on a book about the disaster. The film was released in 1958 and tells the usual story about the sinking. The ship sets off but during the journey the overworked telegraph officers fail to pass on a warning about icebergs. The ship hits the iceberg and sinks. Despite a limited budget and only 1950s era special effects, A Night to Remember is actually a really good film.

Raise the Titanic (1980)

This was a film produced by TV mogul Lew Grade who was wanting to move his TV production company ITC Entertainment into the world of cinema. He had read the original book and thought that it might be possible to make a film series about US government operative Dirk Pitt in the manner of the Bond series.

In the film Dirk Pitt played by Richard Jordan proposes a salvage operation for the Titanic as he is convinced an American named Brewster had discovered a rare radioactive element called Byzanium which was stowed in wooden shipping boxes aboard the Titanic.

A huge undersea search takes place and the Titanic is ultimately found and raised. The Byzanium is not found aboard though although it does finally emerge in a neat twist at the end.

I’ve always enjoyed Raise the Titanic. It was based on a bestselling book by Clive Cussler although the film did not emulate the book’s success.

A great deal of the budget for the film was used to create a 50 foot model which was filmed at a huge water tank at the Mediterranean Film Studios in Malta. Apparently the three million pound model remains there today rusting away although the water tank is in regular use.

Not long after the film was made the real Titanic was located and it was confirmed the ship had broken up and was lying on the sea bed in two separate sections.

Titanic (1997)

Titanic was written and directed by James Cameron. The main thrust of the story is about two passengers from wildly different social classes who fall in love on the ship although one, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, dies in the disaster and the other played by Kate Winslet survives.

A treasure hunter (Bill Paxton) and his salvage team explore the wreck of the Titanic looking for a famous necklace, the Heart of the Ocean. They discover a safe which they bring to the surface to find it only contains a sketch of an unknown woman. After it is featured on TV the woman comes forward and tells the story of meeting Jack Dawson (DiCaprio) and of course of the sinking of the Titanic.

Director Cameron and his producers built a huge outdoor set in Playas de Rosarito in Mexico with uninterrupted views of the ocean and a water tank in which the Titanic set could be tilted to film the sinking scenes. Overall, the production cost was over 200 million dollars making it the most expensive film of all time. Happily for the producers, it also became the highest grossing film of all time until the release of Avatar, another film written and directed by Cameron.

The Novel

Dreaming a story and making it into a novel or a screenplay sounds pretty fantastic but in 1898 an American writer, Morgan Robertson, wrote a story about an unsinkable ship called the Titan which sailed from England to the USA but during the journey hit an iceberg and sank. The story was published fourteen years before the Titanic disaster. I remember reading the story of this writer years ago, even that the writer saw the story played out in front of him like a movie but all the research I did on the internet for this blog seems to imply that the author was a man who knew his business where ships were concerned, felt that ships were getting bigger and bigger and that a disaster like that of the Titanic was inevitable.

Books

I only have one book in my collection about the Titanic. It’s a big glossy picture book, not about the actual ship, but about the shooting of James Cameron’s film. It documents Cameron’s twelve dives in a tiny submersible which gave him the idea of the treasure hunters looking to find the necklace the ‘Heart of the Ocean’ and his realisation as Cameron himself mentions in the book’s foreword that the main thrust of the story should be a love story with the Titanic disaster almost as a backdrop.

The book tells about the numerous models that were built of the ship both as a pristine sea going vessel and as an underwater wreck. The making of the full size set in Mexico which could be dropped via hydraulic pistons into a huge water tank was an immense undertaking and adds immeasurably to the finished film.

So what actually happened to the Titanic?

The Titanic was on its maiden voyage to the USA. It left Southampton on the 10th April 1912 and stopped at Cherbourg in France to pick up more passengers before heading out across the Atlantic to New York. Four days into the voyage it hit an iceberg. Lookouts had been sent aloft to look for icebergs but their task was difficult. It was a moonless night and pitch black. The sea was very calm which meant that the lookouts could not see waves crashing against the icebergs that they had been warned to look out for. When an iceberg was finally spotted the lookouts rang down to the bridge. The officers there ordered the ship to turn hard to port. Some reports say that the engine room was ordered to stop engines which would not have helped the turn. Either way the ship brushed the iceberg and the resulting contact made a gash along the side of the ship and water rushed in.

The ship had been designed to stay afloat with four of her watertight compartments flooded but it could not stay afloat with the flooding of six. Interestingly the compartments were not sealed at the top so that when one flooded, the water tipped over into the next and so on until the ship sank.

The bow of the Titanic courtesy Wikipedia Commons

In another documentary I watched a few years ago a theory was put forward that the three million rivets that held the steel plates of the ship together were made of poor grade metal which became brittle in the freezing sea water. When the ship impacted the iceberg, the heads of the rivets popped off and sea water flooded inbetween the steel plates of the hull.

RMS Carpathia arrived about an hour and a half after the sinking and rescued all of the 710 survivors by 09:15 on 15 April. More than 1500 people died in the freezing waters of the Atlantic.

Titanic in the News.

As I mentioned earlier, the Titanic was in the news again when a new 3d scan of the wreckage of the Titanic was revealed.

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4 Showbiz Stories

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I started this post off with three ‘showbiz’ autobiographies of actresses/comediennes of the stage and screen. Despite trawling through my book collection I couldn’t see a fourth so I added one which is the odd one out; a biography, rather than an autobiography and a male actor/comedian rather than a female. Either way, all four are stars who made their respective names in the 1950s and 1960s era of radio, TV and film and together make up a quartet of much loved British comedians.

Fenella Fielding: Do You Mind If I Smoke?

This is an autobiography by Fenella Fielding, co-written with Simon McKay, and the title comes from her part in Carry On Screaming when she played a seductive character, possibly derived from the Adams Family, Valeria. In one scene Valeria tries to seduce Harry H Corbett standing in for the absent Sid James as a detective. Valeria asks ‘do you mind if I smoke?’ and then rather than smoking a cigarette, a cloud of smoke seems to arise from her body and envelop her. Harry H Corbett adds ‘just when I was trying to give it up’ before embracing her in the smoke.

Simon met Fenella at a London Pilates class in 2011. The two became friends and began meeting regularly for coffee. McKay realised that Fenella was a wonderful raconteur and asked if he could record her stories. Fenella agreed and later they used the transcriptions as the basis for a themed evening, An Evening with Fenella Fielding. Later the conversations became an audio book and finally this printed version. It was hugely enjoyable and rather than being a standard story of her life, the book talks about various things in no particular order.

Fenella describes her early life in Clapton and her first forays into the acting world. She won a scholarship to RADA but her parents, who were keen at first, don’t seem to have realised what RADA was, that their daughter was becoming an actress which they seem to have seen as just one step away from prostitution.

Anyway despite only completing one year at RADA, Fenella did manage to become an actress. After one particular success on the stage she began to pick up various small parts on television and on film and as I mentioned above, her most famous part was in Carry On Screaming. She devotes a whole chapter to Kenneth Williams who of course could be a very difficult man to work with. She also played a part in Doctor in Clover and was heard as the village announcer in the TV series The Prisoner. In fact a great deal of her work was voiceovers for various things especially TV adverts.

This was a lovely read and came over as very chatty and talkative, based as it was on recorded conversations.

Liz Fraser …. and other characters

In Fenella’s book above, she mentions that she hoped her book would not go the way of a lot of other showbiz autobiographies, interesting at first but then dissolving into lists of plays and films and other celebrities. Sadly, that seems to be the way this book does go, even so I enjoyed it.

Liz was brought up in Southwark, in London. Her mother ran a small shop, one of those shops that used to sell everything that Tesco might sell these days from bags of coal, wood bundles to fresh food. Her father was a travelling salesman but died in 1942 aged only 40.

Like Fenella, Liz attended RADA and afterwards won her breakthrough part in I’m All Right Jack which starred Peter Sellers as a union official. She tells the story of playing minor parts in small plays and eventually got some walk on parts on TV. One day her mother said to her “Was that you last week, walking past Peter Cushing?” It was!

Liz worked on TV shows that were live back in the day. On an episode of Dixon of Dock Green she forgot her line but the crew had a ‘cut key’ which cut out the broadcast sound while they called out the line to the hapless Liz.

To get the part in I’m All Right Jack Liz had to lie about her age as the producers wanted someone younger which led to a career long confusion about her age.

She appeared with Peter Sellers in various films and she reveals that although she liked Sellers she had to fight off his amorous advances several times. Liz shares lots of anecdotes about various people she worked with including Tony Hancock, Benny Hill and Sid James.

She tells about appearing in a few of the Carry On films but like many others is critical of the producers. There was only a one off payment for each film and despite the enduring popularity of the Carry On films, the actors earned nothing from their later success on TV. In later life Joan Sims had a lot of financial difficulty but was helped by actors’ charity organisations. Liz herself was very thoughtful, investing in property and stocks and shares which sustained her during the times when acting work was thin on the ground.

She doesn’t share much about her personal life although her first husband features in a chapter called I Married a Thief. Peter Yonwin was something of a fantasist and their marriage soon broke down.

One shocking disclosure was an incident one night after appearing in a pantomime. Liz took an acquaintance home thinking she could deal with any problem man only to be raped. She doesn’t expand on the incident but seems to just mention it quickly and then move on as if perhaps by talking about it however briefly she could perhaps exorcize this dreadful ordeal.

Liz’s second husband, a TV producer, died of cancer and Liz suffered with cancer herself. She enjoyed fast cars and finishes by talking about her old age.

Liz Fraser died in 2018 aged 88.

According to Dora

I do love my showbiz biographies and autobiographies and one I picked up a while back was an autobiography by Dora Bryan. I love Dora from her many appearances in British films but my favourite film is probably A Taste of Honey. The screenplay was by Shelagh Delaney and director Tony Richardson, adapted from Delaney’s own play which she famously wrote when she was only 18.

Dora Bryan gives an outstanding performance; at times comic but always supremely natural. Dora grew up on an Oldham housing estate. She was a great performer as a child and so her mother took her to dancing school and further encouraged by her mother, she joined Oldham Repertory before moving to London to develop her stage career. She had a great career on the stage as well as on film and TV and appeared in many successful West End productions. The first part of the book is very interesting but then as I mentioned earlier, this becomes one of those books in which the latter part seems to wander off into lists of productions and theatre and TV personalities. Even so, it was a lovely read.

When the Wind Changed (The Life and Death of Tony Hancock) by Cliff Goodwin

This final book is the odd one out in this quartet of British comedy stars. It’s a biography rather than an autobiography. I don’t think Tony Hancock ever wrote one.

Back in his day Tony Hancock was a giant among television performers. Pub landlords complained that their establishments used to empty because people would drink up and rush home to watch Hancock’s Half Hour. I can’t even imagine that happening today to any contemporary comedian not withstanding the emergence of TV recording devices.

Hancock’s half hour was first broadcast on the radio in 1954 and then transferred to television in 1956.

Hancock’s co star on television was Sid James and Hancock decided to part with Sid believing that the public had begun to think of the two of them as a sort of double act. His final comedy series for the BBC was called Hancock but even without Sid James, it was a great success.

An interesting TV interview at this time saw Hancock as a guest on Face to Face, an intensive interview which revealed Tony Hancock to be a different man to the bumbling buffoon of his radio and TV shows, in fact the entire transcript of the interview is repeated in the book. Many felt that this interview made him more and more self-critical which led to him dispensing with many who were important to his professional life such as Sid James and his scriptwriters Galton and Simpson.

After a minor car crash Hancock had to use an autocue for perhaps his most famous TV episode, The Blood Donor. After that, he used the autocue more and more finding it too hard apparently to continue to learn scripts.

His drinking increased. He left his wife for his mistress Freddie Ross who worked as his publicist. Freddie and Hancock eventually married but their relationship later broke down also.

Hancock committed suicide in 1968. He took an overdose of pills and left behind a note which said ‘things seemed to go wrong too many times.’

This is such a fascinating and well written book and if you are interested in actors and performers as I am, it is well worth seeking out.

There are a couple of postcripts to the book but one was so intriguing I have to mention it here. George Fairweather was a great friend of Tony Hancock. When Hancock was delighted to find he had been chosen for the royal command performance he told George that he wished his late father could have been there to see it. George commented that perhaps his father would see it and Hancock replied dismissively that ‘only spirits come out of bottles’.

22 days after Hancock’s death, George received a typed letter with no name or address. It said simply that the writer had received a message from Hancock in the afterlife and wished to pass it on. The message is reproduced below.

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Book Bag: John Grisham

Posted on by Steve Higgins

In my last few posts about books, rather than publish my usual Book Bag posts, I’ve incorporated book reviews into other types of posts; holiday memories and posts about books made into films and so on. During my last few holidays, I always seem to either have a couple of John Grisham books with me or found some in the places, usually rented villas, where we have stayed. I thought it might be an idea to write a John Grisham themed book bag post. Who actually is John Grisham then?

Let’s go over to Wikipedia and see what they have to say:

Born February 8, 1955 John Grisham is an American novelist, lawyer, and former member of the Mississippi House of Representatives, known for his best-selling legal thrillers. According to the American Academy of Achievement, Grisham has written 37 consecutive number-one fiction bestsellers, and his books have sold 300 million copies worldwide. Along with Tom Clancy and J. K. Rowling, Grisham is one of only three anglophone authors to have sold two million copies on the first printing.

Pretty impressive credentials, aren’t they? Most of the inside back covers of my copies of his books say pretty much the same thing and in the back of the last Grisham book I read, The Racketeer, there are extracts from an interview with Grisham in which he mentions his favourite book is A Time to Kill, his first book and apparently the most personal of his legal thrillers.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the books that I have read.

A Time to Kill by John Grisham

As I said earlier, this book turns out to be Grisham’s first novel and he says in the introduction how proud he was of finishing it, as back then he hardly ever finished anything. It also contains some autobiographical elements; Grisham used to be a street lawyer, similar to the character in the book.

The book is set in America’s deep south where there is or was a great deal of racial prejudice. Two white guys decide to kidnap a young black girl, tie her to a tree and repeatedly rape her. They drive her away and dump her like garbage but she survives and the police arrest the two scumbags responsible. Next, the young girl’s father Carl Lee Hailey decides to take a rifle and shoot the two guys. He is arrested and put on trial for murder and street lawyer Jake Brigance takes on the case.

The case ignites the small town of Clanton Mississippi. The Klu Klux Klan become involved as do various other groups and the stage is set for a tense murder trial which goes on while the police and the National Guard try to keep order.

It’s a very exciting read although the ending was a little underwhelming and if you find the N word offensive then this is a book which is not for you as that particular word appears numerous times on almost every page.

The Client

This book was a great holiday read. It’s about an eleven year old boy who witnesses a suicide but before the man kills himself (he is a lawyer defending a known murderer) he tells the boys, Mark and his little brother Ricky, where his client has hidden the  dead body of a murdered US senator. The senator was the victim of a mob ‘hit’ and Mark won’t tell the police or the FBI about the body as he is concerned for the safety of his mother and brother. When he and his mother are in hospital staying with his brother Ricky, as he has gone into shock, Mark contacts a lawyer and a big legal stand off begins with the FBI. Things eventually get settled but I can’t help wondering why the boy wouldn’t trust the FBI or even why he wouldn’t tell them about the body in the first place. Of course, if he had then there wouldn’t be a story. Either way this was a great holiday read and the narrative kept me interested all the way to the end. I didn’t realise it was also made into a film starring Tommy Lee Jones and Susan Sarandon which I must remember to look out for.

The Pelican Brief by John Grisham

This book might be the best book by Grisham I have read so far. The book opens with the murder of two US Supreme Court judges and this in a way plays into the hands of the President as he can now nominate new judges who share his political views. At the same time, law student Darby Shaw is having an affair with her law professor. She decides to look closely at the murders and develops a thesis, an idea about who may have done the murders and why. The thesis becomes known as the Pelican Brief and she passes it to the professor who in turn sends it to his friend, an FBI lawyer. It then gets passed up the chain to the head of the FBI and on to the White House where the President instructs the FBI not to investigate further.

Not long afterwards the professor is blown up in a car bomb which Darby narrowly avoids and from then on, she is on the run trying to evade death herself.

This for me was one of those unputdownable novels which was exciting and kept me interested all the way to the end.

The Firm by John Grisham

There is a process by which I choose books to take with me on holiday. I like to think it’s a thoughtful process combining different genres of books, some novels, maybe the odd classic, and some biographies and autobiographies. What actually happens is that the day before our trip I’ll just grab something near to hand that I know I haven’t read yet and shove it in my suitcase. Anyway, that’s how I ended up with The Firm. Last year I read The Rainmaker by John Grisham and I thought it was a pretty good read. I must have mentioned that to Liz so she filed that away and got me a stack of Grisham novels for my last birthday. The Firm isn’t a bad read and in my case it was a nice change of pace after reading some non-fiction books.

It’s a good story but like a lot of Grisham’s works, it’s more plot driven than character driven. The characters are sort of bland templates that I’ve recognised in a lot of his novels. Anyway, characters aside, this is a really original story about a young guy who graduates from law school and gets head hunted into a firm he has never heard of but which offers tremendous financial benefits, a brand new BMW, and an ultra cheap mortgage as well as other financial bonuses. The downside, as he comes to learn later, is that the firm is just a cover operation to launder money for a big mafia crime family and the FBI wants our hero James McDeere, to help them.

Verdict: Highly enjoyable and a great holiday read but nothing more, although that didn’t stop the book from becoming a best seller as well as a hit film in the 1990’s.

The Racketeer

This is another legal thriller about a man convicted of money laundering, which he denies by the way, sentenced to ten years in a federal institution. Naturally he is not happy but he hoped to get out by using rule 35 of the Federal Rules for Criminal Procedure which means that if the inmate can solve a crime which the federal authorities are unable to solve, then his sentence can be reduced.

The man, Malcolm Bannister, helps other inmates of the prison with their legal issues and in doing so has come across some information about the murder of a judge, in which the Police and the FBI have no clues about the culprit. He plans to barter this information for his freedom but it turns out that Bannister is actually double bluffing the FBI and has a scheme in mind in which he can gain his freedom and walk away with a considerable amount of money as well as a new identity.

Like most of Grisham’s books, this was an excellent holiday read but towards the end it almost feels as though the writer has become a little fed up with this increasingly complicated story and is rushing to get it finished. This was mostly a good read but the end was a little disappointing.

The Boys From Biloxi

This is a very oddball book indeed. It’s not a courtroom drama although courtroom battles do feature in the book. It’s actually a very long-winded story of two families, one on the wrong side of the law and one on the other. One family is part of a rough and ready area of town and owns saloons that have illegal gambling and prostitution on tap and the other family who hope to clean the town up.

A lot of the story is just reeled off like a sort of narration you might listen to in a museum (which is how one review I read described the text). The author just seems to recount a lot of the story in this same long distance way. Eventually the story becomes more fleshed out and detailed when a tornado hits the town and a lawyer with ambitions to become the district attorney helps the residents fight for compensation from insurance companies that do not want to pay out. His success with compensation claims help him to become the DA but he is murdered before he can bring the criminal family to justice. His son however goes on to clean up the town.

Again this was another great holiday read but if I had been reading it at home for twenty minutes or so before going to sleep at night, I reckon that after a few nights I would have perhaps picked up something else to read.

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8 Fictional Presidents

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Donald Trump, the 47th president of the US, has been in the news quite a lot recently. He’s cutting down on the number of federal employees. He has stopped federal help for electric cars, he’s made it known he wants the USA to take over Gaza and he is also negotiating with Russia to stop the war in the Ukraine. He doesn’t seem to have involved President Zelensky in these talks despite Zelensky being the president of the Ukraine. Trump has even cast doubt on Zelensky’s right to be the president as, because of the war, Ukraine hasn’t held any elections. This is quite rich really as Putin, the leader of Russia, has not only rigged the Russian elections but has changed the law in Russia so he can continue as president and has also allegedly bumped off Alexei Navalny, his major political opponent.

It’s a story that you couldn’t write and that got me thinking about fictional presidents so I thought I’d start with a book I’ve just read here in sunny Lanzarote.

President Duncan

The President is Missing by Bill Clinton and James Patterson has been a good holiday read. A helter skelter fast paced read but moves along quickly and has nicely laid out short chapters to enable me to pause, jump in the pool to cool off and then resume reading.

President Duncan has a lot of problems on his hands. His wife has recently died of cancer and he is suffering from some sort of blood disease. On top of that the Speaker of the House has started hearings regarding rumours that the President spoke to a known terrorist on the phone and even helped him to escape capture.

Not only that but the President agrees to meet an unknown woman who knows a secret password known only to the President and his trusted advisors. She asks the President to meet her colleague at a football game without security and the President agrees and dismisses the Secret Service. Happily the Secret Service are hanging about closely and save the President from an assassin’s bullet but now he has to deal with a threat concerning a computer virus that will shut down every computer in the USA including those that deal with nuclear strikes.

One of the reviews on the back cover was from someone who likened the book to the film Airforce One, and to be honest, I felt the same way, even picturing the President as Harrison Ford, who played the President in that film.

The book was a great holiday read although I did wonder what part Bill Clinton played in the writing process. Did he just provide background to James Patterson or did he contribute towards the storyline too?

Anyway, the book was a great holiday read.

President James Marshall

Clearly I have to follow on with Airforce One, an action packed film starring Harrison Ford as President James Marshall. In this film the President leaves Russia in his aircraft, Airforce One after a joint US/Russian mission to capture a terrorist named General Ivan Radek. Unknown to the President, a group of Radek sympathisers have joined the aircraft posing as journalists. They take over the Airforce One but it looks as though the President has got away in an escape pod. However, the President was unwilling to leave his family behind and he has hidden himself in the cargo hold. The film then unfolds in the manner of a Die Hard film with the President bumping off the terrorists and managing to contact the White House and also to free his colleagues pretty much in the way that Bruce Willis might have done.

Not a great cinema experience but I kind of enjoyed it.

President Jordan Lyman

Seven Days in May was a political thriller released in 1964 and directed by John Frankenheimer. Kirk Douglas plays United States Marine Corps Colonel “Jiggs” Casey who works for Four Star General James Mattoon Scott, a highly-decorated officer played by Burt Lancaster. Jiggs thinks that Scott might be planning a coup to remove the President who has just signed a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union, a deal which is highly unpopular with the military. Jiggs discovers that a military group known as ECOMCON has been assigned to seize radio and television networks. He manages to see the President and convince him of the threat. The President, still somewhat sceptical, organises a small group of staff to investigate.

Interestingly, President Kennedy authorised the producers to film scenes at the White House. He had read the book that the film was based on and as he had dealt with critical members of the military himself, was perhaps worried that the fictional scenario could be a real possibility.

The President was played by Frederic March who was one of the great cinema actors of the 1930s and 40s. He was the original Norman Maine in the first version of A Star is Born made in 1936 and even starred with Greta Garbo in Anna Karenina in 1935.

Presidents Palmer, Taylor and Logan

The TV series 24 first appeared in 2001 on US television. Each episode lasted for an hour and is told in real time with a digital clock on screen updating the viewer. The first series is set on the day of the US presidential primary in California. Jack Bauer, a maverick agent of the CTU Counter Terrorism Unit, is detailed to protect presidential hopeful David Palmer from an assassination attempt. Palmer was played by Dennis Haysbert as a potential black US president.

Season 2 details how Bauer, played by Kiefer Sutherland, must prevent a nuclear bomb from exploding and assist David Palmer, now the US president, in finding the culprits. Jack is assisted by a team of agents at the CTU hi-tech control room who are adept at computer manipulation, taking over feeds from CCTV cameras, hacking into other public computers and researching various information to help Jack.

Allison Taylor is the first female president of the USA. She first appeared in the episode Redemption which was a bridging episode between series 6 and 7 as series 7 was delayed due to a writers’ strike in Hollywood. Taylor was played by actress Cherry Jones and almost seemed to be a precursor to a real life female president. As it happened, Hilary Clinton was defeated at the polls and Donald Trump became the president in 2017. (Personally, I always like President Taylor. She always reminded me a little of Captain Janeway from the TV series Star Trek Voyager.)

President Logan was played by Gregory Itzin and first appeared in season 4. He was the Vice President but was later sworn in as President when the previous President was injured in a terrorist attack. As President, Logan becomes involved in the murder of former President Palmer and is eventually forced to resign. Later, he tries to help President Taylor with a peace treaty with the Russians but again, some dodgy dealings lead him to commit suicide. Some thought the character was inspired by real life President Richard Nixon. Whether that was true or not I’m not sure but Logan was a very tricky President indeed.

I thoroughly enjoyed 24. Jack Bauer was an uncompromising agent who was convinced that the end justified the means and would shoot anyone, threaten anyone, good or bad who got in his way. The series was a very slick hi tech espionage show which combined spies, shoot outs and computer science in an exciting TV series.

Presidents Kane and Kennedy

Shall We Tell the President was a novel by Jeffrey Archer first published in 1977. In the book Edward Kennedy has become the US President and FBI agents become aware of a plot to kill the President.

I read this book many years ago but recently came across this new edition, rewritten by the author himself. In real life Ted Kennedy never made it to the White House, his challenge cut short by the ghost of what happened to Mary Jo Kopechene at Chappaquiddick. In this rewrite then, the author puts his own fictional president, President Kane in charge at the White House.

The FBI learn of a plot to murder the President. A Greek waiter, an illegal immigrant, learns of the plot whilst working as a waiter at a restaurant in Washington DC. He calls the FBI and the two agents assigned to the case report quickly to their superior. Soon, one of the agents and their boss, as well as the informant are dead leaving only one agent who by chance has survived a murder attempt. He has six days to track down the assassins.

The book kept me interested but I can’t say it was a great read and I thought some of the dialogue was a little poor, in particular the FBI agent who kept referring to his new girlfriend constantly as ‘pretty lady’ was a little cringeworthy to say the least. Sorry Mr Archer but I’d have to give this one a five out of ten.

Just off the top of my head without using Google, that’s about all the fictional presidents I can come up with for now. Which was your favourite?

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Curry, Tapas and a Read in the Sun

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Over on the front page of this site you will find a whole lot of stuff about me. It tells you that I have always wanted to be a writer, that I enjoy writing as well as Formula One racing, classic cinema and books. In one segment it mentions that I like dining out, in fact it says that dining out is one of the great experiences of life and so I thought I’d start with that, great experiences and see where that leads me.

One of the great experiences of life, as far as I’m concerned anyway is a pretty simple one. It involves lying on a sunbed and relaxing on a hot, or even just warm day. Throw in a dip in the pool and that sensation of lying in the sun while you dry off is made even more satisfying.

Of course, doing that in the UK at any time of the year is not always possible, especially in February which is why for perhaps the last ten years, if you want to get hold of me at this time of the year, you’ll find me in Lanzarote.

What can I tell you about this place? Looking over on Wikipedia I see the Canary Islands emerged from the sea bed during a volcanic eruption about 15 million years ago. There is apparently some evidence the Phoenicians were the first settlers here although the first known records of the islands come from Pliny the elder, the Roman scholar.

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, nothing is recorded about the Canary Islands until 999, when the Arabs arrived at the islands. In 1336, a ship arrived from Lisbon under the guidance of Genoese navigator Lancelotto Malocello, who used the alias ‘Lanzarote da Framqua’ which is where the island’s name comes from. Today Lanzarote is part of Spain.

When we first came here round about ten years ago, we hired a car and drove round the island. We visited the volcano which was pretty much what you’d expect a volcano to look like, although the drive down a very narrow winding road in a coach towards the centre of it was a little scary. Otherwise, apart from the usual touristy stuff, there wasn’t that much to see and we quickly realised that the Marina Rubicon in Playa Blanca is by far our favourite place. Our rented villa is on the bus route and only five minutes walk from both the bus stop and the local shop so renting a car is not a particular concern.

What else do I do on Lanzarote? Well I read a lot of books.

Crossfire by Jim Marrs

I do love a JFK assassination book and this is a good one. It covers pretty much everything there is to know about the assassination from Oswald to Ruby, the Texas School Book Depository, the Grassy Knoll, the CIA, the FBI, the Warren Commission, the House Select Committee on assassinations and everything in between. Who really did it? I’m not sure. Was Lee Oswald the killer or just a patsy? Again I’m not sure but a lot of the evidence against Oswald was compromised. The officers who found the assassin’s rifle said it was a Mauser, not a Manlicher Carcarno. Later all but one of the officers said they were mistaken. The one who said he wasn’t mistaken was later murdered.

Who were the people on the Grassy Knoll with Secret Service IDs when all the SS were in the President’s motorcade? The shells found at the scene where the fleeing Oswald supposedly shot officer Tippet  were marked by a police officer. Later, when asked to identify the shells, his marks weren’t there. I could go on and on. Maybe Oswald did it, maybe he didn’t. Perhaps he was a patsy as he claimed. Will the records which President Trump will release show what really happened? I doubt it but either way, the JFK assassination is such an fascinating mystery.

The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

I absolutely loved this book. I mentioned it last week in a post about detectives but it really is a fabulous read and the film with Humphrey Bogart follows it closely, especially the dialogue.  If you have never read it or seen the film, it’s about Sam Spade, a detective who happens on a group of people all after the mysterious Maltese Falcon statuette worth untold millions and at the same time seeks to find his partner’s murderer.

The only real difference between the film and the book is that in the book, Caspar Gutman’s daughter makes a brief appearance but not in the film. In the film Gutman infers that Miss Wanderley has stolen a thousand dollar bill and Bogart as Sam Spade demands that Gutman confesses to stealing it or stands for a frisk. In the book, Spade surprisingly thinks Miss Wanderley has got the note and forces her to strip naked to show that she didn’t steal it. Only then does he challenge Mr Gutman.

I have to say I have found the works of Raymond Chandler a much better read but this particular story I loved almost as much as the film.

Another book by Hammett, The Thin Man, wasn’t as good. Detective Nick Charles is no longer a detective but many others seem to think he is and he seems to feel compelled to look into a case of murder, even though he doesn’t seem that interested. Perhaps that was why I lost interest early on and kept putting this book down in favour of others.

Going back to the thing I mentioned earlier, the one about dining being one of the great experiences of life, well, only a few minutes walk from our rented villa, just next to the shop I told you about is a really fabulous Indian restaurant. No need to get the bus to the Marina or the centre of Playa Blanca as we can just walk to the restaurant. The funny thing is, Liz and I are part of a curry club and once a month we meet at a curry house in St Annes and settle down for a curry and some chit chat. I was actually thinking of perhaps going every two months or even leaving the curry club altogether. Well, I like curry but I’d had all I really wanted to eat in that particular restaurant and, nice though it is, I perhaps fancied going to the Chinese on that day or the local Italian.

Now however, I seem to be once again hooked on curry. Our local curry house here in Lanzarote, The Indian Gourmet, is a very friendly place. We have established our favourite table. The staff know that Liz hates coriander and they have marked us down as preferring medium rather than hot as regards curry strength. The chef always comes out to see if we have enjoyed his creation and always recommends what we can try next time and so on. The curry house then has become our sort of go to place if we want to eat out and don’t fancy travelling far.

The Client by John Grisham

Time for another book and this one was a great holiday read. It’s about an eleven year old boy who witnesses a suicide but before the lawyer kills himself, he tells the boys -Mark and his little brother Ricky- where the dead body of a murdered US senator has been hidden. The senator was the victim of a mob ‘hit’ and Mark won’t tell the police or the FBI about the body as he is concerned for the safety of his mother and brother. When he and his mother are in hospital staying with his brother Ricky, as he has gone into shock, Mark contacts a lawyer and a big legal stand off begins with the FBI. Things eventually get settled but I can’t help wondering why the boy wouldn’t trust the FBI or even why he would tell them about the body in the first place. Of course if he had then there wouldn’t be a story. Either way this was a great holiday read and the narrative kept me interested all the way to the end. I didn’t realise it was also made into a film starring Tommy Lee Jones and Susan Sarandon which I must remember to look out for.

Another of our favourite places is the Berruga Tapas bar which we have been visiting for years. Sadly, a lot of our favourite staff members have moved on in the intervening year since our last visit. The boss is still here though, Juan who always remembers us and greets us warmly and the food is still the same mix of Spanish tapas and English snack food like burger and chips and so on. It’s a rough and ready sort of place but it’s also a lot of fun. And we do like the freebie at the end of the night; a shot of vodka caramel in an ice cold glass.

So, what will we be having tonight? Tapas or curry or something new perhaps?

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Watching (and reading) the Detectives

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Liz and I are over here in sunny Lanzarote having exchanged the cold of the UK for the warmth of Lanzarote. Of course, it is still February and things aren’t perfect over here. It’s warm but there are plenty of days when gusty winds blow across the island as well as days when the sun has been obscured by clouds. Even so there are still plenty of bars to drink at, plenty of tapas to be eaten and of course we have plenty of books to read, two of which have inspired this week’s post.

The Thin Man is a book I picked up somewhere in a second hand bookshop. It was written by Dashiell Hammett and features his famous detective, Nick Charles.

Dashiell Hammett was born in May, 1924 and became a writer of detective stories after working for the famous Pinkerton National Detective Agency. In his obituary in the New York Times, they described him as ‘the dean of the hard boiled school of detective fiction.’

Time magazine included his novel Red Harvest, published in 1929, on their list of the 100 best English language novels. The Thin Man was made into a film in 1934 starring William Powell as Nick Charles and Myrna Loy as his wife Nora. I’ve only just started reading the Thin Man and it’s been pretty good so far. One interesting element of it though was finding out that in New York in the mid 1930’s it was possible to find an all-night delicatessen that would deliver coffee and sandwiches at 5 in the morning.

A further 5 sequels in the Thin Man film series were made finishing in 1947 with Songs of the Thin Man.

Another book by the same author is one that Liz got me for Christmas, The Maltese Falcon. I’ve only just scanned through it so far but it looks like being a good read. The book was made into a classic film in 1941 with Humphrey Bogart playing the part of detective Sam Spade. Mary Astor plays Ruth Wanderley who contacts the firm of Spade and Archer to help her track down her missing sister who she thinks might be held against her will by a man called Thursby.  Miles Archer, Spade’s partner decides to take on the case but is found dead by the police later that night.

Spade begins to try and find out what has happened and meets various other characters like Joel Cairo and Kasper Gutman played wonderfully by Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. One of my favourite scenes is where Spade and Gutman meet and Gutman asks ‘are you a close mouthed man?’ Spade replies that no, he likes to talk and Gutman responds famously with ‘I’m a man who likes to talk to a man who likes to talk’.

Hammet died in 1961 of lung cancer and Raymond Chandler said this of him: ‘He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.’

That brings me nicely to another of my favourite detectives, Philip Marlowe and he first appeared in the novel The Big Sleep. The book was written by Raymond Chandler and Chandler had this really fabulous talkative way of writing. You can almost imagine hearing Humphrey Bogart’s voice as you read the book. Bogart of course played Marlowe in the 1946 film version directed by Howard Hawks. Here’s a quote from the book, an example of Chandler’s descriptive style:

I sat down on the edge of a deep soft chair and looked at Mrs Regan. She was worth a stare. She was trouble. She was stretched out on a modernistic chaise-longue with her slippers off so I stared at her legs in the sheerest silk stocking. They seemed to be arranged to stare at. They were visible to the knee and one of them well beyond. The knees were dimpled, not bony or sharp. The calves were beautiful, the ankles long and slim with enough melodic line for a tone poem. She was tall and rangy and strong looking. Her head was against an ivory satin cushion. Her hair was black and wiry and parted in the middle and she had the hot black eyes of the portrait in the hall. She had a good mouth and a good chin. There was a sulky droop to her lips and the lower lip was full.

Not bad eh? Dilys Powell called his writing ‘a peculiar mixture of harshness, sensuality, high polish and backstreet poetry’ and it’s easy to see why. Mrs Regan was played by Lauren Bacall in the film version and up until now I had always thought this was the film where Bogart and Bacall met. Wrong! A quick check on Wikipedia and I see the couple met on the set of To Have and Have Not in 1944. Bacall was 19 and Bogart was 45 and married to his third wife Mayo Methot at the time. Sparks apparently flew between the couple and Bogart divorced Mayo and married Bacall the next year, 1945. Despite the great on screen chemistry together the couple only made four films together.

The film version of The Big Sleep was a brilliant adaptation of the book and some of the differences are interesting. For instance, early in the book, detective Philip Marlowe played by Bogart meets General Sternwood’s daughter Carmen. She looks at Marlowe and remarks how tall he is. In the film, Bogart of course wasn’t that tall so the dialogue is reversed ‘You’re not very tall, are you?’ comments Carmen.

The plot of the book and film are pretty complicated, although having read the book recently I think that the book is easier to follow. During the filming the director and his stars wondered who killed the character of Owen Taylor, the Sternwood’s chauffeur. They sent a cable to Raymond Chandler asking him. Chandler told a friend later ‘Dammit, I don’t know either!’

One strange element in the film, certainly for me, is a scene where Philip Marlowe (Bogart) is watching blackmailer Geiger. Geiger has a shop that sells rare books in Hollywood and Marlowe asks for information in another bookshop opposite. There he chats to a bookseller played by Dorothy Malone who, if you are old enough, you will remember her from the Peyton Place TV series. Malone and Bogart seem to hit it off well in the film but he never returns to the bookshop and Dorothy is never seen again in the film.

Every time I watch the film, I always expect Malone to reappear but that’s one of the many dead ends the film leads us down. I think it was Hitchcock who said that every scene in a film should lead the audience somewhere and Quentin Tarantino of course said the reverse. Perhaps director Howard Hawks favoured Tarantino’s view.

Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr Watson (image via creative commons)

Perhaps the most famous literary detective is Sherlock Holmes, created by the author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1887, first appearing in the story A Study in Scarlet. The stories are narrated by Holmes’ friend and companion, Doctor Watson. The Guinness Book of Records reports Holmes as the most portrayed character in film and television history.

My personal favourite Sherlock Holmes in the cinema was the version created by Basil Rathbone in a series of films beginning in 1939. 14 films were made with Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce playing the part of Dr Watson. The first two films were set in the Victorian era and were produced by Twentieth Century Fox. The later films were produced by Universal who set the films in, what was then, the present time period, that of the second world war.

Time now to move onto my favourite TV detective, the bumbling Lieutenant Columbo.

Columbo first appeared in the early 1970s as part of the Mystery Movie TV series. Each week followed a different detective trying to track down a murder case, sometimes it was MacMillan and Wife and other weeks McCloud, Banacek or various others. The most popular one by far though was Columbo.

Columbo was a homicide detective for the LAPD and he was played by Peter Falk, although the role was originally written for Bing Crosby. Crosby however thought a regular TV slot would interfere too much with his golf so he turned down the role, went back to the fairway and the part went to Peter Falk who made it his own.

If you ever see the original pilot, shot in 1968, you can see how Crosby might have fitted into the part, as Falk plays Columbo in a very Crosby like laid back way. The very first guest murderer was Gene Barry who was familiar to TV audiences after playing Amos Burke in Burke’s Law for many years. He also starred in a 1953 film version of War of the Worlds.

The pilot episode also introduced audiences to a particular feature of Columbo, in that we see who the murderer is and how he commits the crime first. Then we see Lieutenant Columbo gradually solve the clues and get his man, or woman. The essence then of a great episode comes in the clever way Columbo nails the murderer. Sometimes that moment is a bit of a non starter, other times it’s nothing short of brilliant. Sometimes, even if that final moment is not so great, it’s still been a great episode.

The Columbo of the early series is an absent-minded quirky fellow although in later episodes, Peter Falk who plays the detective, seems to downplay that quirky element.

Favourite episode? I’m not certain but it might be ‘Murder by the Book‘, starring my favourite murderer, Jack Cassidy. In this 1971 episode, Jack plays a writer, actually part of a writing double act, who together produce a series of novels about ‘Mrs Melville’ who is an amateur detective. The thing is, Jack’s partner wants to ditch the partnership but Jack is not happy about it. He is so unhappy he decides to, yes you guessed it, bump off his co-writer. He does it in a rather ingenious way which foxes Columbo but not for long and to cap it all, the episode is directed by none other than Steven Spielberg!

So who was your favourite fictional detective?

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