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Noir at the Bar – Evening of Crime Fiction in Vancouver, BC

11 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by Martin J Frankson in Mystery and Thriller, The Arts in General, Uncategorized

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crime fiction, Dietrich Kalteis, ER Brown, Frankson, linda l richards, Mystery, Noir, noir at the bar, owen laukkanen, robin spano, Sam Weibe, vancouver


noiratbarcover

I arrived at the Shebeen Whiskey House right in the heart of Gastown in great anticipation for the crime fiction literary event of the year so far in Vancouver, Noir in the Bar, an opportunity for fellow writers and fans of crime fiction to meet and listen to selected readings off eight accomplished BC/Vancouver crime writers.

The venue was just the right size and the atmosphere was informal and relaxed but no less professionally and seamlessly conducted. There was no stage or a barrier between the featured writers and the audience which added to the democratic and collegiate manner of proceedings. The writers introduced themselves  from the floor from where they read excerpts from their work. The audience were within stabbing distance (figuratively speaking of course) of the writers and this added to the intimacy of the event.

I perched myself on a tall chair and sat my favourite cocktail, an Old Fashioned (having delusions of being Don Draper from Mad Men fame) on the brown leatherette table top and settled down into the literary joy of noir that awaited and what a magnificent evening it was.

The featured writers, in order of appearence were:

E.R. Brown (http://www.erbrown.com/) read from his Edgar-nominated Almost Criminal.

Deitrich Kalteis (http://dietrichkalteis.blogspot.ca/) who read from his wonderful debut novel Ride the Lightning

Dietrich Kalteis

Owen Laukkanen (http://owenlaukkanen.com/) who read from his third and critically acclaimed novel Killing Fee.
I had a good conversation with Owen before the reading about Vancouver and writing in general and is a very warm and approachable chap.

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Linda L Richards (http://www.lindalrichards.com/) gave a wonderful preamble to her reading about how her father, an immigrant from Germany, learnt to perfect his English from watching old gangstermovies which led to his speaking in the manner of the colourful characters who graced the silver screen in their suits, cocked trilbies and a gun tucked in their belt. The audience reeled with her anecdote of her father telling her when a child to go to sleep:

“Shut your peepers and go to sleep or you’ll be in trouble like nobody’s business’ (apoligies Linda if I didn’t get that 100% correct! but I think that was it! Feel free to correct me though…)

Linda’s novels are all set in 1931 during the height of the Great Depression. She read from one of her many novels and the language was pure lean noir with a good dose of sparkling clever dialogue and wry humour.

Linda and Mike Linda with her son, Mike who compèred the evening’s proceedings.

Robin Spano (http://www.robinspano.com/)is the author of several novels that feature the enigmatic female detective Clare Vengel. I confess to only discovering Robin’s work last week when I picked up her novel Death Plays Poker at the John Forte library in Denman St but what a discovery. I was reeled in by the neo-pulp cover art and I just had to take it from the shelf and read it within a day. Her writing reminds me of the work of Krista Faust which features strong plot, edgy characters, shady dealings and a strong female protagonist with cajones and a heavy dollop of clever humour and turns of phrase.

Robin Spano

This evening, Robin read not from her novels but a stand alone short story based upon the colourful and notorious Mayor of Toronto Rob Ford. In fact, Mr Ford has inspired a flurry of fan fiction and even a musical based on his esoteric and eccentric style of governence. The story was rip roaringly funny and showed Robin’s versatility in turning her craft to any subject matter.

Sam Wiebe (http://www.samwiebe.com/)is the recipient of the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Unpublished Canadian crime novel for his debut work Last of the Indepedents.

One of the last remaining indepedant booksellers in Vancouver, White Dwarf Books who specialize in crime and mystery literature, were in the room, giving those present an opportunity to buy some of the books written by the authors featured in the evening’s billing.

I’ve been to many book events, big and small but this was one of the best I’ve ever been to. The authors freely mingled with the audience and were generous with their time and were willing to engage. As a writer who is still trying to clinch that prize of a conventional bookdeal, I find this generousity of spirit to be uplifting and encouraging as all writers, even those who with many books on the shelves off our bookstores, have a story to tell about their struggles at the start of their own careers.

Very very few published writers have had it easy at the start. Their tales of rejection letters and self doubt serve to show us that perserverence and the encouragement of our nearest and dearest are the winds that can steer our wind-blown ships to the harbour of success only if we work hard enough at writing and improving our craft.

Many thanks to the organizers and most of all to the authors who took part.

 

 

 

 

 

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Hidden Gems of London: The Cellar Door, Aldwych, London

25 Monday Feb 2013

Posted by Martin J Frankson in Review, Uncategorized

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burleque, cellar, cellar door, door, Frankson, jazz, kitty la roar, London, martin, Noir


Close your eyes and imagine London without its dark little secrets.

Can you?

No?

Don’t worry, why would you want to. To imagine such a London is like imagining a family without its drug-addled aunts and uncles no one speaks off.  What would be the point?  It would be a little dull indeed.

The Cellar Door jazz bar on Essex Street, just a couple of blocks south of Covent Garden, is certainly one of the most decadent little secrets in town as not many people seem to know about it which is a shame in some ways but selfishly, I was a little pleased about this. It occupies a tiny subterranean converted space that once was a Victorian gentleman’s convenience.  

 The entrance is quite non  descript and in fact, unless you knew it was there, you could scurry past it many times without knowing it was there. In fact, I had mistaken it for the entrance to some underground construction site as you can see below:

CELLARDOOR1

My friend and I indeed walked past this spot several times looking for it at night until I saw a remarkably well dressed man descend down the steps at 7pm. Either he was a ghost or someone who didn’t mind getting his threads dirty in an underground sewer. I deduced he was neither and on closer inspection, I saw a very small poster on one of the perspex panels. It was then I knew we had found the right spot.

We made our way down and through the black doors and into a world of black sobrieny and shimmering rose-red where we were greeted by a hostess who took us to our table. The interior decor put me in mind of all those 1920’s Berlin and 1950’s Soho cabaret clubs that we have seen in dozens of movies and retro-television depictions but a lot smaller. At first, it seemed a lot bigger but the far walls were decked in floor to ceiling mirrors that gave a false but welcome sense of roominess otherwise it would have felt a little claustrophobic.

Just enough room to swing a cat in more than ways than one.

We took our seats. There were only a dozen or so people in. A mixture of city girls catching up with one another over salads, night time prowlers, couples, city types, office workers delaying the homebound train until as late as possible and two very intense looking Chinese businessmen with white shirts open and ties so distressingly undone that they looked like tightly coiled wires of stress.

We were there for the evening’s entertainment, Kitty La Roar and Nick of Time in the longstanding Kit Kat Kabaret evening of decadant jazz and swing. The black curtains in the corner were opened to reveal Nick on keyboards, a saxophonist and Kitty herself.

She looked like Betty Draper from Madmen meets Marilyn Monroe. She looked every inch the tragic bottle blonde. Her mannerisms, facial expressions and stance were almost cartoonlike in their faithful representation of the eras that her chosen musical genre incubated in. I dont mean that in a negative way however. I had felt I had timetravelled to that certain past of the smoked-filled 20th century and had come face to face with one of it’s citizen femmes fatales.

The lights dimmeds, the cocktails were served, the ice cubes chattered and the music started.

Jazz and swing standards, infused with experimentation, improvisation and original numbers filled the next couple of hours with the most perfectly and enigmatically executed jazz and swing performance I have seen for a very long time. These were artists at the top of their field.  Being at close quarters magnified the force of the impact. This was an evening of sultry, sexy jazz in a sumptious, glitzy little cabal of a retro yet sleek winebar. As the evening wore on, more people melted in from the outside and I think there were no more than forty people present at any one time.

Kitty La Roar is no work-a-day jazz singer. She has performed for Hugh Hefner and Prince Ranier of Monico as well as much bigger audiences. I doubt very much Kitty La Roar is her real name but I want it to be her real name.

She seemed to much in character to be a real person. I couldnt imagine her shopping for ready meals in a Tesco Metro or queuing up to have her gas card being topped up. She only comes into existence when the lights go down and the music strikes up. She does not come on stage but is conjured. She doesn’t so much as perform but embody a bygone age and sling it into the far future which we occupy right now.  Her highheels, each a dagger that has speared a man’s heart or twenty, sharpening on each and every note ready for the next lady-kill.

She was jazz. She was swing. She was night-time itself.

Later on that night, an older man sat down in front of me. He wore a shades, a hat and what looked like a sheepskin jacket. Many people made their way to him to greet and pay homage to him. I have no idea who he was but he seemed to be a face. My friend and I exchanged many postulations and imaganeerings of who he might be. A gangster, an impressario, a major artist?

Who knows and I don’t want to know. In my mind he was presumed-dead gangster who faked his own death and only spends his time amongst a small coterie of the entrusted. Who were these people? He was adulated by scruff and Savile-row alike before they slinked back to their seats moments later.

At around eleven, the performance segued to its conclusion and fini.

My friend and I had trains to catch so with sadness, we gathered our coats, scarves and bags and left and made our way back to the real world above. I emerged too quickly as I felt the  onset of artistic bends forming bubbles in my blood.

How the cold air of this February evening felt like the kiss of an aunt hot on the heels of being kissed by a vampiress.I’ve always maintained that the singular fatal flaw of addiction is that it opens up the doors of rooms that are beautiful but forbidden and it’s the devil himself to leave them. Sure, we can leave them but the memory of their evil splendour can never be got rid off.

That was how I felt on my way to Covent Garden tube station, snaking through the snakes and dancing past the detritus of the night. I kissed my friend goodbye as she went eastwards on the Jublilee and I westwards to Green Park. On my way back to my hotel,  I felt deflated at being flung back into the arms of the ordinary world I had only a few hours earlier, took leave off but yet I was still in a mellow haze and I never felt so chilled out in such a long time.

Jazz like that beats valium any day of the month.

A mesmorizing performance and only for a tenner entrance fee too and the drinks menu was surprisingly reasonable in price.

So, you might be wondering, is held on the other nights of the week. At the time of this going to press, The Cellar Door plays host to burlesque, drag nights, Saturday afternoons of ‘High Tea and Tease’ which includes card games and magic and open-mic night on Tuesdays.

CELLARDOOR2

 

If you love jazz or the sultry-but-ever-so-slightly-seedy but in a respectable and safe and kosher setting, I cannot recommend The Cellar Door enough. I will be setting many scenes in this bar in my next novel such was my inspiration.

As I alluded to earlier in this review, I get the impression not many people know about this place. It’s a shame but like that free car parking spot you found that’s handy to work, why spoil it by telling everyone.

My many many thanks to my dear friend Fiorina for recommending this! It always takes an Italian to recognise a class act I always say!

 Visit: http://www.cellardoor.biz

Book Review : Raymond Chandler – A Life by Tom Williams

26 Wednesday Sep 2012

Posted by Martin J Frankson in Review

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biography, crime fiction, Frankson, Noir, pulp fiction, Raymond Chandler, review, Tom Williams


ImageTom Williams has embarked on a very daring literary journey in writing a biography of a man whose life seemed to have been definitively covered  by Frank McShane’s seminal 1976 biography ‘The Life of Raymond Chandler’.  

So whither ‘A Mysterious Something in the Light’ ? Is this biography the equivalent of stealing into the orchard at night after the fruit pickers have gone home for the day?

You would be forgiven for thinking so but let me assure you that, this is not the case with this particular biography. Chandler was highly complex individual whose personal life, work and psyche were a byzantine nest of subterranean tunnels that to this days, decades after his death, still retain many darkly virgin coal seams of uncovered facts and secrets that shine a new light into the many shadowy corners of one Raymond Chandler, iconic and pioneering mystery and crime writer of the early to mid twentieth century.

Chandler was born to Maurice and Florence Chandler  nee Thornton in Chicago 1888. Florence was originally from Waterford, Ireland and from rather comfortably-off Anglo-Irish Quaker stock. Maurice was an American engineer. Mother and father were ill suited.  He was unreliable and prone to alcoholism and violence. In 1900, Florence after having given her failing marriage many chances, decided enough was enough and returned to Waterford with the twelve year Raymond.

But this was not a typical Irish family by any means. The Anglo-Irish fell between two cultural stools. They were not Gaelic but descended from wealthy English landowners who didn’t see themselves as Irish yet they were not quite English.

A people lost between nations.

Soon after, he and his mother left for London where he was educated at Dulwich College where he thrived and remained until 1904. It was here that Chandler decided to become a writer but his first ventures into literary waters were not the crime or mystery that he’s known for but pastiches of Arthurian/Chivalric legend

Not quite American, not quite Irish, not quite English, Chandler harboured a sense of being an outsider, not quite belonging. This was one of many shadows from his childhood that cast a long umbra for the rest of his life.

The young Chandler had enough and left the emotional safety of his life with his mother Florence and returned to America where he believed he could reinvent himself and start anew.

Like many young men of perhaps a sheltered upbringing, the First World War thrust them into corners of the world that they otherwise would not have seen, shaping Chandler’s persona further. He had worked in a succession of dull office jobs which reminds of what Orwell wrote in Keep the Aspidistra Flying ‘Why are young men condemned to a good job in an office’? However during this time, Chandler was writing poetry and had his first tastes of literary success in the long forgotten Chamber’s Journal, still couched in the vein and influence of Arthurian legend.

Chandler joined the Canadian army. His decision was actuarial as the US army would not pay to support his mother, Florence if he were killed. Chandler returned to Europe where he saw front line action in the trenches. He made it through the war, physically at least and in 1918, joined the RAF before being demobbed in 1919 and returned to LA where he fatefully fell in love with the woman who was shape the rest of his adult life, Cissy Pascal, 18 years his senior.

The ravages of war had turned the young Raymond to an alcoholic albeit a seemingly high-functioning one.

“When I was a young man in the RAF, I would get so plastered that I had to crawl to bed on my hands and knees”

But now married and established as a high flying oil executive and moved to Los Angeles during the era of Prohibition, a tense and edgy era where corruption and organised crime were born and grew quickly in a dark symbiosis which coloured every strand of the civic and social fabric of the precocious new upstart of a city. It was during this time that Chandler’s fingers were burned by the flames of an attractive investment scam namely that of Julian Petroleum. It was both this direct and other indirect news items of injustice that gave form and shape to the noir sensibilities of corruption that became the hallmark of his most famous works.

His alcoholism became more noticeable during this time and indulged in extramarital affairs which led to a short-lived separation between Chandler and his wife Cissy. They got back together but his troubles with the bottle and the negative effect it had on his mood and behaviour had a large part to play in his eventual firing from his oil executive post in 1931. He was 43 but this cloud had a silver lining and gave him the impetus to focus on his writing full-time.

It was a financially challenging time, living on  $25. This is the equivalent to $462 per week in today’s money according to  http://www.usinflationcalculator.com. Not a sum that allowed a couple to indulge in luxury and life was pretty meagre but it was an auspicious time as this was the heyday of the new pulp magazines that captured the nation’s imagination, one of the most famous being The Black Mask. It was establish in the early 1920’s but steadily grew in reputation and circulation, its stories being steeped in the realism that its readership craved. Dashiell Hammett and Erle Stanley Gardner were regular contributors, such was the pedigree. Their work drew its realism from Hammett’s work as a real life private detective and Stanley’s own law practice. Chandler did not have this advantage but he used his imagination and knowledge of the crookedness of Los Angeles to whet and hone his literary style.

1939 saw the publication of his first novel The Big Sleep followed by Farewell, My Lovely in 1940, novels which introduced Philip Marlowe to the world. It was his second novel that caught Hollywood’s eye when it was produced as but morphed into the 1944 film Murder My Sweet in the US but released under the original name in the UK.

Despite his novels having stirred up rumours of repressed homosexuality, literary success and acclaim followed leading to a spell as a Hollywood screenwriter where he had a very uneasy working relationship with Billy Wilder which nevertheless, led to the production of the stylistic and cinematically acclaimed Double Indemnity in 1944. Chandler later worked with Hitchcock but their relationship was strained. Alcoholism seems to draw a veil of taciturnity over every aspect of Chandler’s life and poisoned most of his key working relationships which should have been more fruitful.

In 1946, Chandler left Paramount, disenchanted and indignant of the many perceived dishonourable practices he witnessed and partook in.  He and Cissy returned to La Jolla in California where he wrote two further novels The Long Goodbye and the not so well known Playback. However he was unable to replicate his original happiness there. Old friends and associates were no longer there and Chandler entered a period of introspection and detachment, exacerbating his increasing penchant for misanthropic grumpiness – a vicious circle.

In 1952, the Chandlers realised their long held dream of visiting London but Cissy was in poor health and the London of their daydreams was a disappointment in its realisation such as the still extant expectation of formal etiquette, something that the more relaxed culture of California had allowed Chandler to forget. However, he did discover that he was more respected as an artist and writer in England than in his adopted American homeland

‘In England I am an author. In the USA just a mystery writer’ he wrote to Paul Brooks.

After two months, the Chandlers returned to the US but Cissy became frailer.

In 1954, Cissy died and Chandler entered into a period of ever quickening decline. A paucity of literary output of any worth and a string of short lived and some bizarre love affairs were the background to his increasing alcoholism which reached terminal point in 1959 when he died in hospital.

Tom Williams, the author and latest Chandler biographer, has performed a worthy, lucid and very well written exercise in judiciously mining of rich seams of new found fact and epistolary evidence and has given new and refreshed insight into the man and surprisingly remarkably detailed information on the genesis and development of his craft as well as the trajectory of his somewhat mixed up, chaotic personal life. The prose is quite workmanlike but it lets the facts speak for themselves. Williams does pepper this biography with conjecture of Chandler’s thoughts and situational analysis where direct evidence may not exist but nevertheless, it is intelligently based on the ample evidence that Williams has dug up and there is little doubt in my mind that it is as near the mark as any biographer could come up with bar a time machine.

This is an excellent biography and I thoroughly enjoyed reading and savouring it.  Chandler like most literary heroes was a terribly flawed man but his canon mitigates this and thank goodness it is his literary reputation that eclipses his foibles and faults.

 

(I received this book courtesy of Rhian Davies @crimeficreader  & http://itsacrime.wordpress.com )

 

 

The Asphalt Jungle (1950) Dir. John Husten

05 Thursday Apr 2012

Posted by Martin J Frankson in Cinema, Review

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Tags

cinema, Marilyn Monroe, movie, Noir, The Asphalt Jungle


There is probably little that is left unsaid about this movie out there in Internet land but tonight, I watched this amazing movie for the first time in years and I feel compelled to add my warble to the singing choirs of critics, both professional and perhaps armchair like myself.

The Asphalt Jungle is considered to be a classic of the genre of Film Noir and I do not disagree.

So what does Noir mean to me? It certainly means many things to many people.

Firstly, the aesthetics are the bait to a syberite of the senses like myself. The shabby glamour. The suits whose creases slowly succumb to crumple and crimson during the course of the story; party dresses that the dames forgot to change out off at the end of the night before, incongruous with the morning sun.

But that’s the thing; there is no day and there is no night in Noir. The inhabitants of Noir occupy a perpetual twilight that segues into a perpetual night.

Black and white. Shadow and light.

This a dualism incarnate. It’s a world where there is only good and evil. It’s land where we see its people scrabble around, flailing their legs and arms to better themselves with a quick ill-gotten buck obtained courtesy of Mssrs Colt, Smith or Wesson, only to be slowly but surely swept down the vortex of fate.

Noir is a world where there was no golden age. How oftendo people of a certain age fall into the reverie of returning to a post World War Two world, a world of no crime, narcotics, terrorism and where children obeyed their parents (Mom and Pop naturally) and front doors were strangers to lock and key.

A world where everyone was sure of their place and their purpose.

I guess all epochs need their Garden of Eden allegory. Humanity needs a narrative that tells of a time we lived in a land of milk and honey and through  greed, envy or stupidity, was banished, cast from Paradise to wander in the darkness ever since, trying to find and recapture our lost idyll in the unlikliest of cornerswhatever that we may find ourselves in. The Paradise Lost, Eden narrative is perhaps the  raison d’etre, the driving force behind our species.

Howeve, Noir shows us that no such Eden ever existed. Murder, rape, robbery, cheating and the whole gamut of human frailty is as well represented in whatever era of history we care to mention. The only difference is, technological advancements in communications and media spred light into the shadows of ignorance and more is exposed and exhibited to the world.

The past was a place were its dark secrets were swept under the carpet.

The Asphalt Jungle was made in 1950, just before the Eisenhower Presidency. The dawn of modernity as we know it today. America was on the cusp of unparalleled prosperty and political and military power in the world yet why was this era such fertile ground for such a genre?

Well, it may have been 1950 but as we know, social decades do not start on January 1st of a year ending in zero.  America was still basquing  in the dark afterglow of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, World  War Two. Even the Great Depression, was only less than two decades ago at the time and its scars were very much visible and felt on the psyche of the nation.

Stylistically, The Asphalt Jungle belongs to the 1940’s, or even the last 1930’s. We meet a very young ingenue, Marilyn Monroe whose name does not feature on the opening credits. She plays the mistress of a sugar daddy, the seemingly wealthy big-shot lawyer Lon Emmerich whose lavish lifestyle indirectly sets the scene for his downfall. It’s a story of a heist that goes wrong. The story is well documented in other sites, notably Wikipedia but one aspect of the storyline which seems to be largely overlooked is that of one of the central characters Dix Handley (played by Sterling Hayden).

Dix plays a displaced farmboy from Kentucky whose family lost everything, their land, their farm and each other as a result of the Depression. He finds himself in the city, alone, dispossessed and disconnected. We already see the allegory of a  lost idyll. Dix even speaks nostalgically about this at the very start.

Within the context of the Judeo-Christian tradition, this puts me in mind of the story of the fallen angels who rebelled against God  and were cast forever from Heaven to spend eternity in the darkness, in a world which would never know the touch of the light of love again. Ditto for Adam and Eve cast from Eden. Many cultures and traditions have similar legends and tales.

Dix is in his version of Hell and dreams of making enough money to buy back the farm his father lost all those years ago. He is mortally wounded during the course of the heist but by hook and by crook, manages to drive the whole ten hours all the way from the city to the farm of his childhood, with the money to buy it back in his pocket.

But a rapidly expiring Dix collapses in the field and dies without ever fulfilling his dream.

Ok, he catches one final glimpse of his Heaven but he never had a chance to enter it. This is the ultimate message of the genre : whatever your Heaven is, you will never get there. You may think you will and you may even come as close to its gates but humanity has ain in-built self-destruct button and we just clutch defeat from the jaws of victory in the end.

Art does not exisit in a vacuum. It reflects society, its mores and values, its hopes and fears. Noir is a reflection of a society that while believing in struggle, planning and endevour, subconsciously does not believe that its trees will bear any fruit. It reflects a society that hopes for the best but doesn’t really expect it. Noir reflects a society that psychologically prefers to live in the shadows because if you live in the shadows, there is no light to go out.

Will Noir return as a force in mainsteam cinema? Perhaps not stylistically but in spirit, only if social, economic and political planets align in that form once again.

Who knows.

Brown Mushrooms

22 Thursday Mar 2012

Posted by Martin J Frankson in Short Stories

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

brown mushrooms, flash fiction, Martin J Frankson, Noir, writing


He checked his watch.

5pm.

A rather serious programme on Radio 4 about council tax rebates had just finished  He felt drained and rather uninspired. It was Radio 4 or nothing and Radio 2 just would not do.  He turned the radio off but the seconds of thick silence that followed stuck in his windpipe.

Panic.

He shot his hand over to the wall-socket and turned it back on again and changed the station to Classic FM.

But it was all so quiet.

He didn’t hear a thing.

He turned up the volume to ‘Max’ and sat down on the chair beside the kitchen table. It was still quiet. He wondered if he had broken the volume control. As soon as he got up, cacophony and mayhem ensued.

A blatter of blind oboes and the caterwauls of strings broke the silence into hundreds of pieces of anxious moments that lay invisibly on the floor.

He ran over and switched it off.

Bloody classical music, he thought. Either as loud as the cracks in the sky of judgement day or as quiet as plotters in the alcove. He liked classical music but he always found listening to it on the radio frustrating.

Too wide a symphonic range.

Heart pounding, he checked his watch again.

It’s around this time he made supper for both himself and his wife. He went to the fridge and took out a packet of rindless bacon, eggs and a punnett of mushrooms and set the food down on the worktop next to the sink. It was then that he noticed that the mushrooms were turning brown around the edges. He peeled back the torn cellophane and held the packet up to his nose and sniffed a few times.

Detecting nothing noxious nor foul, he removed ten mushrooms exactly and nipped off the brown bits with his finger nails.

He sliced the bacon and chopped the mushrooms and fried them for about five minutes before adding the whisked eggs. Five minutes later he served the omelette onto two warmed plates and laid them down on the dining table.

 “Freda!” he called out.

Freda and he were not on the best of terms. They had an almighty row only a couple of days earlier and hadn’t spoken since. It was over something stupid. Freda wanted to watch Coronation Street. He wanted to watch the History of Mathematics on BBC4.

He sat down to his supper and tucked in, wolfing it down.

Omelettes get cold so quickly.

Before he knew it, he was nearly done. Freda’s plate remained untouched

“Freda! Your dinner’s getting cold”

Within seconds he finished his meal. He lifted Freda’s plate and touched the omelette with his fingers. It was more luke than warm. He placed it in the microwave without turning it on for sake keeping.

Knock. Knock .Knock

On the front door.

 He sat still, not saying a word.

Knock

“Who is it?” he shouted

“It’s Gertrude”

He ran out of the kitchen and down the hallway to greet Gertrude.

He pressed his left ear, his best ear to the door.

“What do you want?”

“I want to see Freda; I’ve come all the way from Huntsville you know”

“I don’t know where she is, let me go and find her. You wait there a second”

“Oh”  she said.

He turned around to Freda .

“Do you really want to see Gertrude while you wait for your omelette to be heated up?”

Freda smiled but she was smiling for days.

Freda lay still and quiet on the hallway floor, smiling but without knowing it.

“It’s nice to see you so cheerful love”

He bent down and kissed her on the lips.

“You’re very cold, dear. Let me get you a blanket”

Gertrude knocked once more

“Let me in this once”

A film of sweat formed on his back, sucking his shirt towards it to form a second skin. He lifted a porcelain clock from the occasion table and held it in his hands. It was a wedding present but had suffered minor damage just a couple of days earlier but nothing that anyone would notice close up.

He held the clock with his left hand,behind his back and reached over to the latch with his right.

“You can join Freda very shortly!” he said.

He turned to Freda, caressing her limp yellow hair.

“Gertrude is coming to stay with you. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

 Image ‘Black and White Photo of a Bench in Elizabeth Park in West Hartford, Connecticut, at Night: Photo by Sage Ross’ courtesy of http://www.annedarlingphotography.com

Kindle : How To Email Documents to Yourself for Reading on Kindle

20 Monday Feb 2012

Posted by patrickmartinthewriter in Self Publishing

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Tags

Fiction, kindle, Martin J Frankson, Noir, writing


One of the many wonderful features of Kindle is that you email your humble documents to yourself for reading on Kindle.

“How do you that?” I hear your whisper

Well, I have pieced together the following and it’s a definitive guide:

First of all, log into your Amazon account and choose Your Account from the top right

 

 

1. Save the document as a pdf file to your computer’s hard drive.
2.  Email the document as an attachment to your special email provided by Amazon.  In the subject line of the email type the word “Convert”.  This is the magic word that lets the document “reflow” or resize text once it hits your Kindle.  Send the document.
3.  In under a minute (in my experience) you will receive an email from Amazon telling you that your converted document has arrived and is available for download.  Download the .azw file to your hard drive.  Pay attention to where you save it.  I have a folder named “My Kindle Docs” to which I save converted documents.
4.  Connect your Kindle to your computer via the usb cable.  When you first connect the Kindle it acts like a removable drive.  Open this Kindle folder.  Drag the .azw file you received in the email to the documents folder on your Kindle.  Viola!  You can now read the document and resize the text size as needed.

Trapped in Myopia : Short Story : Episode 4

20 Monday Feb 2012

Posted by Martin J Frankson in Short Stories

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Crime, dead zone, Frankson, Myopia, Myopic Books, Mystery, Noir, priest river, turtle neck sweater, writing


“Hello? Hello?” I called out.

I was greeted with silence.

I heard a light snigger, from the back. I went back but there was no one there.

I called out again.

Nothing. If there was anyone there, they didn’t hear me.

Or didn’t care.

I pushed each of the shelves that were bolted to the walls but there was no give. Some books fell down and I peered into the gaps they left behind. I stuck my arm into the gaps but I felt nothing but brick. I kicked the shelves and the books but nothing. I took out my cell phone to call the police. Silence. No bars, a dead zone.

I called out again. I started to panic. “Can anyone hear me? I’m trapped. Can someone get me out”

“Yes, eventually” said a voice..

I turned around. By the counter stood a young man. He wore a trimmed beard, brown turtle neck sweater and a pair of flared Levi’s. He looked like a pleasant liberal cliché.

“Thank God for this” I said. “I swore someone was playing a trick on me”

The man smiled.

“How’s that?” he asked

“Well…” I said, “You won’t believe this and I feel like a real goof-ball saying this but as soon as I was about to leave, those two shelves there just behind me, closed in on me, blocking my way. The thing is, I have to go now, I’ve friends to meet across the road at the Earwax Café…”

A lie. I had no friends in Chicago. I had no friends in Priest River neither.

Needs must.

The young man crossed his arms and blinked like his eyes stung. He didn’t reply.

“Well, I was wondering if you could let me out” I asked, filling the awkward gap where the young man’s reply should have been.

“Yes, I can let you out “ he said.

“Great! Thanks” I replied. I stood there expecting him to move somewhere or walk somewhere or do something but he didn’t. He just stood where he was, smiling at me. I started to feel a little cold. The temperature dropped somewhat yet a film of sweat formed on my back and my forehead.

“Could I leave now?” I asked. “I have to really leave now”

“I’m afraid you can’t” he said.

I freaked a little.

“Listen here mister, I have to fucking go now and you let me out of here. You’re holding me against my will. That’s a crime the last time I looked”

I lunged at him, aiming to grab his lapels but as soon as I grabbed them, he vanished. My fists held nothing but frustration and clammy air. Cold sweat oozed from every pore. My heart beat a crescendo, I could even hear it. Heartbeats freak me out at the best of times but this one, boy. I turned around.

There he was again, but now standing where the gap in the shelves used to be. He lowered his head, staring at me with his cold blue eyes. He was still smiling an assassin’s smile.

“What the fuck is going here, who the fuck are you?”

He cleared his throat.

“We don’t like being ignored and we’ve had enough” he said.

“I don’t understand, who doesn’t like being ignored?” I asked

He raised his hands and moved them from side to side.

“Us, my friend. The books. We are tired of being ignored. We sit there, day after day, week after week, year after…you get the picture. People come in and browse. They glance at us, that’s a match one. Get plucked off a shelf, match two…”

He started to walk around, circling me.

“…flick through us, match three. Take us to the counter and buy us, well, that’s a lottery win”

I decided I had enough.

“I don’t know who you are but you are not a book you freak. Just get me the fuck out of here” I grabbed him. He didn’t vanish this time. He felt solid, real. I started to laugh.

“I know what this is” I laughed. He smiled. “This is some TV show. You’re a magician. You’re like David Copperfield” I laughed again. He mimicked my laughter. I thought I rumbled him. Any second now, the shelves would roll back to reveal a television crew and a round of applause from the staff-in-hiding and bystanders. I’d feel a bit foolish for a second or so but I’d also feel really relieved. I grabbed his lapels and we both laughed like hyenas but he floated off into the air, waiving at me as he looked down at me, gliding upwards until he stopped hovering a foot from the ceiling.

“My friend” he chuckled. “You believe what you will to help you get through this”

Beast in View : Novel by Margaret Millar

16 Thursday Feb 2012

Posted by Martin J Frankson in Review

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Beast in View, Crime, Fiction, Frankson, Margaret Millar, Noir, writing


There is something about a golden era that makes one want to dive in, root around and relish finding dust bunnies caked to the base of the Jimmy Chu, rabbit fur masquerading as mink, grins dressed up as smiles, seething frustrations; gilded ,unfulfilled lives, forbidden love, tiaras on tormented heads. This book, Beast in View fits the bill completely.

Set in, 1950’s America (the book was written and published in the 1950’s and in America and there is nothing in the book to suggest it being set in any other time period), the book opens up with a menacing phone conversation between the main character, Miss Clarvo and an Evelyn Merrick, her nemesis. In fact, she’s everyone’s nemesis but that’s for later.

Miss Clarvo cuts a Miss Haversham figure. She is wealthy, lives a reclusive life yet there are contradictions. She is actually very young, in her twenties and despite her aversion to companionship, chooses to live in an apartment in a busy downtown hotel in Los Angeles.

With her wits close to an end, she reaches out to an old family acquaintance, the steadfast Mr Blacksheer who has worked as the Clarvo’s financial advisor. However, Miss Clarvo wants to take him on as a private eye to investigate the seemingly mysterious disappearance of a sum of money and the whereabouts of the menacing Evelyn Merrick.

 All seems straightforward, doesn’t?  The methodical, dependable Mr Blacksheer will have this wrapped up within ten pages but aficionados of noir and the psychological ways of the night will know better than to expect that for Blacksheer’s investigation uncovers layer upon layer of dark and unsavoury family secrets ranging from alcoholism to long term estrangement; from the tragedy of closet homosexuality which was sorrowfully rife in those times to murder, suicide and blackmail.

 And that’s not to say or assume that each of these aspects of gloom occur only the once either or that order.

 It’s a short book by modern standards, clocking in at only 170 pages but the story is lean and taut. If this novel were a room, it would be a dimly lit, deceptively large room, expensively wallpapered in black and silver retro Graham and Brown; minimally but tastefully furnished with sparse placings of mahogany ornamentation.

Put your glasses on and take a closer look and you will see cobwebs, dust and dead roaches on their backs, swept to the recesses and further reaches of the skirting boards for this novel invokes grandeur in irreversible decay, lives in a spiral of entropy and unravelling; the upper middle class American family with its finery and manners, turn out in the end to be a merely tea party of living skeletons who never found the energy to find their rightful graves.

 This is one of the darkest and psychologically involving I’ve ever read. For years it was out of print but thankfully, it’s having a new lease of life courtesy of Orion Book.

ISBN 978-1-7802-2022-2

 

 

 

Two Shades of Darkness – A book by Martin J Frankson (aka Patrick Martin)

19 Tuesday Jul 2011

Posted by patrickmartinthewriter in My Collections

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Crime, Fiction, Frankson, Mystery, Noir, Thriller, Two Shades of Darkness, writing


 This is a duet of two stories firmly set in the dark terrains of noir/mystery.

Unread Stories is set in Chicago’s Wickerpark where a man has a bleak and fateful encounter in a bookstore that has devastating consequences.

GarbageMen is a tale of dissonance, psychopathy and unresolved childhood issues that simmer and burst forth for an unfortunate roommate – but which one?

I have published this collection under the pen name of Martin J Frankson and is for sale on Amazon

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Two-Shades-of-Darkness-ebook/dp/B005D5BZOC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1311087663&sr=8-1

My First Literary Rejection

01 Friday Jul 2011

Posted by patrickmartinthewriter in All Things Writing

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

art, blog, Fiction, Martin J Frankson, Noir, Pmartinwriter, publishing, writing


Well, it’s a landmark that almost all writers experience; the rejection letter. Firstly, it wasn’t as bad as it seemed. I shan’t mention the agency in fear of prejusticing future dealings but they did reply very positively:

“you are undoubtedly a very talented writer and there’s much to enjoy in the chapters. Although I really enjoyed your work, my reaction wasn’t strong enough to represent it”

The agent continues…

“The main concern to me was I got a bit thrown by the structure and jumps in narratives. In the commercial market, it’s really important that the characters don’t overshadow the story”

In short, there were only 3 chapters to judge my entire novel on. Within those 3 chapters, I had two POVs. I feel perhaps that this gave the impression that my novel was too experimental and jerky.

I know it’s not like that but I didn’t give this impresssion. This is how the industry works and there’s no point in complaining about. As a writer, I have to fully understand the industry insofar as knowing exactly who I am sending my manuscript too.

I did my research in that I sent my submission to an agent with many great crime writers on their roster but I should have known that perhaps the mood and tone of my work didn’t fit with the mood and tone of the writing that agency represented.

We all know not to send our crime and noir masterpieces to Mills and Boon but it’s not quite enough to just send your work to any old agent of crime fiction.

Read widely in your genre. Get to know whose writing style closely resembles yours. In doing so, you’ll be able to target your submissions that little bit more smartly.

The agent who rejected me did so because she knows what works in her camp. At the end of they day, she can’t spend time or money on writing which will may not fit into her agency’s brand which in turn may not sit well with the other stable mates.

As I said, work with with the industry and work it to your advantage. There is an agency and publisher out there for you but you have to kiss many frogs!

Good luck and happy hunting

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