Noir fiction for the modern reader.

Christmas again. Can you believe it? I think I just celebrated New Year’s last week! I wonder why the time flies much more rapidly as you get older. Anybody got any ideas?

Anyway, I thought I’d do a little post about my favorite Christmas movies. These films convey to me a Christmasy feeling, even though some of them don’t deal directly with the Christmas holiday. In no particular order they are:

HOLIDAY INN (1942) / Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, Marjorie Reynolds, Virginia Dale. Director: Mark Sandrich. Crosby-Dale-Astaire song and dance team is broken up when Astaire takes Dale away. Crosby eventually heads for Connecticut (always shown in these movies to be a rural kind of place populated with funny Hollywood types), where he opens up an inn that operates only on holidays. Irving Berlin wrote a song for each of the major holidays, including the legendary White Christmas, performed for the first time in this film. Lots of charm as Bing sings and Fred dances. As expected, Berlin’s tunes are top drawer.

YOUNG AT HEART (1954) / Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, Gig Young, Ethel Barrymore. Director: Gordon Douglas. Classy remake of 1938 film, Four Daughters, in which a down-and-out piano player arrives into a warm and fuzzy home, and things are never the same. Sinatra shines as the loner with an attitude and Day warms up her cutesy persona that would permeate her films of the late 50s and early 60s. Barrymore, as Aunt Jessie, delivers many great lines.

A CHRISTMAS STORY (1983) / Peter Billingley, Darren McGavin, Melinda Dillon. Director: Bob Clark. Now-classic holiday yarn set in the 1940s, told from Ralphie’s (Billingsley’s) point of view. He craves a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas, but his parents are adamant: it’ll put your eye out. McGavin scores big as Ralphie’s father, the “furnace fighter”, and Dillon as the weary mother. Movie touches every Christmas nerve in your body and gets better with each viewing. Often runs as a 24-hour marathon on Christmas day.

IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946) / James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore. Director, Frank Capra. Stewart runs a small-town building & loan company and is well-liked by everyone but Barrymore. Things turn sour for him and he’s about to commit suicide when he is saved by his guardian angel, unforgettably played by Henry Travers. What follows is a look at what his life would’ve been like if he’d never been born. Imaginative, fanciful piece of filmmaking by Capra, who was inspired to make this movie after visiting Seneca Falls, New York, the town on which the fictional “Bedford Falls” was created.

CHRISTMAS IN CONNECTICUT (1946) / Barbara Stanwyck, Dennis Morgan, Sydney Greenstreet. Director: Peter Godfrey. Stanwyck writes for Greenstreet’s magazine and has everyone fooled into thinking her Martha Stewart-type articles reflect her real lifestyle, when in fact she is completely un-domestic. Enter returning war veteran Morgan and the fun begins. Pour some hot cocoa and curl up with this film on Christmas Eve.

I’LL BE SEEING YOU (1945) / Ginger Rogers, Joseph Cotten, Shirley Temple. Director: William Dieterle. Wartime tale has Rogers as convict on Christmas leave from prison. She meets Cotten, a war vet who has recovered from his physical wounds but not from the mental problems he incurred during the battles. Memorable MGM drama with the stars at the top of their form. Haunting title song stays with you.

MIRACLE ON 34th STREET (1947) / Maureen O’Hara, John Payne, Natalie Wood, Edmund Gwenn. Director: George Seaton. Gwenn is hired as a last-minute replacement Santa Claus for Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, eventually becomes the store Santa for the Christmas season. Pretty soon, he’s claiming to be the real Santa Claus. Good-natured film hits all the right spots in attaining its well-deserved classic status. Film won four Oscars, including one for Gwenn in a supporting role. Lost out for Best Picture to Gentleman’s Agreement.

Politics has reared its ugly head again on the blogs. I just wish people would save it for the dinner table instead of spilling it out onto Facebook and onto the crime fiction blogs, where it doesn’t belong. I wrote about this over a year ago, and here it is again. I guess this will be an annual post of mine.

I’ve been following the “People vs Frank Miller” inquisition with interest. I have to admit I’ve never read anything by either Miller or Alan Moore. I saw the movie of SIN CITY years ago, and I didn’t particularly care for it, but that’s as close as I’ve come to any familiarity with either writer.

Having said that, I think it’s ridiculous to trash a fellow author and his work on the basis of his politics, which is exactly what this is all about. Miller made a few comments about the occupiers (which should have been confined to his dinner table) that were unpopular. Okay, you disagree. Maybe I do, too. But in the wake of these comments has come a torrent of rage and piling on that’s out of control and totally unjustified. About the only reaction I haven’t seen is demanding the death penalty for Miller, although they’ve certainly demanded it for his work.

I routinely buy books by authors whose politics are not in line with mine. All I care about is what’s on the page, and does it make me want to find out what’s on the next page. I don’t give a shit how the author feels about the trade deficit or the capital gains tax.

A lot of creative people in the past have espoused unpopular points of view. Artists are by nature contrarian. What else is new?

Who among us can say that we conform perfectly to the opinions of our times?

Who among us can say that someone with “forbidden” political views is unwelcome in the world of crime fiction?

Who among us can say we will ONLY read the work of those whose politics we agree with?

I loved Chinatown. I loved the Thriller album. I still do, even after learning that Roman Polanski and Michael Jackson were probably child rapists.

Cutting oneself off from artists who think differently is never a good idea. Because who knows where that kind of thinking might lead?

FORTY-EIGHT YEARS AGO, on this date, Nov 29, the Beatles released I Want To Hold Your Hand, and the world was never the same. Oh, they had other records before that one, but I Want To Hold Your Hand was the one that flung them into the stratosphere.

Coming in the immediate wake of the Kennedy Assassination, the song was a welcome shot of sunshine over a darkened nation. It caught on immediately, and within three months, the group landed at Idlewild Airport in New York for their first US tour. It would be an abbreviated visit, highlighted by appearances in two consecutive weeks on the Ed Sullivan Show. The first was in New York at the CBS theater and the second was in Miami Beach. Between the Sullivan shows, however, the Beatles took a train to Washington, where they would play their first real US concert at the Washington Coliseum.

I was in college at the time, going to Georgetown in Washington, and a friend approached me the day of the show, asking if I wanted to buy his ticket. He had purchased it, but something came up and he was unable to attend. It was a $4 ticket, the most expensive, in the fourth row. I remember seeing it on the ticket. He was letting it go for $2. I refused, thinking the Beatles were nothing more than a flavor-of-the-month fad, whose principal asset was their ability to make screaming teenage girls throw jellybeans at them. I have kicked myself so many times over the years, my ass is about worn away.

And it all started 48 years ago today.

Yes, you’ve heard the buzz! You’ve seen the TV ads! You’ve felt the thrill! Now, at long last, my new novel, The Ghosts Of Havana, is available on Kindle, Nook, and iPad. Paperback will follow soon.

It’s a tense tale of old vendettas, the second book in my Key West Nocturnes series, where I lift the veil off Key West, revealing it as a true noir city. Here’s a brief description of The Ghosts Of Havana.

A young woman is brutally murdered in the back of a Key West nightclub. Robbie, the club’s owner, and Elena, the victim’s sister, believe that a local strip club operator is to blame. However, they soon learn that larger, far more sinister forces are behind the killing, and they become ensnared in a deadly race to a safe deposit box in Las Vegas, whose contents hold the key to decades-old secrets and threaten national security.

The second exciting novel in Mike Dennis’ Key West Nocturnes series, The Ghosts Of Havana continues to lift the veil off Key West, revealing it as a true noir city, on a par with Los Angeles, New Orleans, or Miami.

This book can fairly be called a noir thriller, if there is such a thing. It’s currently available on Kindle, Nook, and iPad for $3.99. The paperback, which is a couple of weeks away, will be $14.95. All formats come with a sneak preview of Man-Slaughter, the third novel in the series.

Please, everyone rush to Amazon, specifically here, or B&N’s Nook page (here), and buy the book. You won’t be sorry. And neither will I.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve got plenty to be thankful for today, not the least of which is the fact that I’m once again living in my beloved Key West. It’s coming up on a year since I moved back here from Las Vegas, and I’m very fortunate to be where I am, and to have so many great friends who have welcomed me back.

There’s an old song called Lucky Touch, which I play once every year around Thanksgiving. It’s a dark song, a reminder to myself to show gratitude for my good fortune and that things can always be a lot worse. Used to be, I would play it on Thanksgiving night in whatever club I was appearing that year, but since I retired from my musical career a few years ago, I just play it at home, usually by myself. Last night, I did it in front of a half-dozen friends. They got the song and the sentiment behind it. It was a very profound moment for me.

There are other important things in my life for which I’m thankful, but I won’t go into it here. Suffice it to say today is a good day for me.

I hope it is for you, too.

This is the weekend of the Miami Book Fair. I’d planned for months to go to it, and I joined the South Florida Writers Association so I could sell my books from their table at the fair. I reserved a room in a nice hotel and my best friend and his girlfriend were going to accompany me and my girlfriend  for three great days and nights up in Miami. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, to start with, my girlfriend came down with a severe cold. She didn’t think it would be wise to spend three hours in a car with me, and then spend the following three days with our friends. I agreed, so she stayed home. I left around noon on Thursday.

My friend decided to take his car up there because his girlfriend wanted to go shopping and he wanted to be able to take her around without inconveniencing me. However, when he found out I was going up alone, he told me he was staying home, since the idea of the trip was two couples having a good time. Unfortunately, he didn’t tell me this until I had hit Florida City, the first town out of the Keys on the mainland, only an hour or so south of Miami. So now, I’m going to be there by myself. No problem, I said, I’ve traveled alone extensively. I kept going.

Along about this time, my girlfriend emailed me with the directions to the hotel. They came off her GPS. Now, I have to add here that I never use GPS because it never gets you where you want to go, at least not via the shortest route, and often doesn’t get you there at all. I don’t trust it. Her GPS’ directions seemed needlessly complex, but I followed them anyway.

Long story short, I travel forty miles northward on the Florida Turnpike looking for a nonexistent exit, which the GPS assures me will lead to my hotel. I turn around and head back south on the Turnpike, searching for the exit, but no luck. No exit, no hotel, no Book Fair. I kept going south till I got back home.

To say the least, I was not pleased. I’d awaited this weekend with great anticipation, mentally preparing myself and gearing myself up. But once again, I was foiled by a GPS.

Anyone else distrust these things, or am I just crazy?

Good news, Nucky fans. Boardwalk Empire, the stunning HBO series centered around Atlantic City in the early 1920s, has been renewed for a third season. For the uninitiated, the story arc deals with the dawn of Prohibition and the resulting birth of nationally-organized crime. The birth, as we learn, was difficult. The gangsters groped around looking for inroads in the liquor business, cooperating uneasily with each other.

This show has proven once and for all that the television public will sit still for a thoughtful, considered rollout of characters. In order to do this, you need time, time to flesh out each character and present them not only as breathing individuals, but in tangled relationships with other characters. This is not easy in a medium that often brings in characters for the briefest of periods just so they can be killed off in a dramatic set piece. In contrast, Boardwalk Empire treats each character with care, even the minor ones, and reveals their intimate relationship with the overall story and with others. Only great writing can pull this off successfully.

And then there’s the acting. Nucky Thompson, Jimmy Darmody, Margaret Schroeder, the Commodore, Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Arnold Rothstein, Chalky White, Gillian Darmody, and all the rest of the principal characters are well-thought-out and played to perfection by a hand-picked cast. But even the minor characters ring very true. A young Meyer Lansky, Lucy Danziger, Nucky’s overwhelmed butler Eddie Kessler, Madame Jeunet, and especially Richard “Half-face” Harrow all score. Jack Huston as Harrow is truly a standout, stealing nearly every scene he’s in with his scary face mask and his unnerving presence.

Ten million people watch Boardwalk Empire every week. That includes the repeats and On Demand, but still that’s a pretty impressive figure for a premium cable channel. It tells me this show has struck a chord out there, a chord which will continue to resonate as long as the creators can keep the quality high. Let’s hope they do it for years to come.

How about you? What do you think about Boardwalk Empire?

“I don’t think any word can explain a man’s life. No, I guess Rosebud is just a piece in a jigsaw puzzle. A missing piece.”

So ends what might be the greatest film of all time, Citizen Kane.

Readers of this blog know that a week or so ago, I picked up the 70th Anniversary boxed edition of Citizen Kane, and described its contents at length. I also proclaimed it to be well worth the money. Now that I’ve watched all the DVDs, I can easily say my proclamation was correct. It’s a great buy.

The film itself was digitally remastered frame-by-frame. I can’t even imagine how long that must have taken, or the skill involved. And it’s even more remarkable when you realize the original negative to the film no longer exists. The final result is breathtaking in its beauty. Welles’ long shots, with their now-famous depth-of-field innovations spring to life in sharp clarity.

Another thing Welles pulled off in the film was many long, no-cut takes. He would later become famous for this technique in the opening scene of his later film, Touch Of Evil, but in Citizen Kane, he used them to great advantage. You could make the case that Welles was really a stage actor, accustomed to long scenes, so he brought this sensibility with him to the Kane set. These scenes, in the hands of a lesser “stage actor”, might have made the whole film look like a photographed stage play, certain to put the audience to sleep.

Instead, as Peter Bogdanovich pointed out in his outstanding commentary to the film, Welles used unusual camera angles and movement, along with lighting techniques never before tried. When you see these scenes after Bogdanovich’s explanations, it dawns on you what an incredible imagination Welles possessed.

There’s a DVD documentary included in this set called The Battle For Citizen Kane, which outlines the trouble and controversy Welles faced once it got out that the film was a thinly-veiled biography of newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst. The documentary traces the lives of both Welles and Hearst from their childhoods, transforming them into breathing humans. Their egos were enormous, and Welles, even at 26, was clearly not cowed by the much older, more powerful Hearst.

RKO executives, who were not even allowed on the secretive Kane set, were furious once they learned the truth. Hearst threatened to refuse all advertising for RKO films, a move which might have put the studio under. He also leaned hard on the other studios, promising to plaster the country with newspaper headlines about how the Jews really ran the movie business, a fact not generally known outside Hollywood at the time. Fearing Hearst and his power to singlehandedly damage their industry, a consortium of studio heads, led by Louis B Mayer of MGM, approached RKO, offering more than $800,000 in exchange for the negative and all existing prints of Citizen Kane, for the purpose of burning them. This amount would have covered all RKO’s expenses in the shooting of the film, plus added a little profit for the studio. I shudder when I think about what we would have missed, what the movie world would have missed, had RKO accepted the offer. Seventy years later, filmmakers are still learning from Welles’ masterpiece.

Another thing I learned from this great boxed set is that Welles wanted to make Citizen Kane with actors who had never previously appeared in movies. In Bogdanovich’s commentary, he mentions that Welles almost succeeded. There was a scene with two waiters, and it seems that one of them didn’t make the call, so Welles had to hire a studio extra who had appeared in many other films, mostly as a waiter. Welles was very upset with this despoiling of his “perfect” cast.

A third DVD in the set contained the HBO film, RKO 281, with Liev Schreiber as a very convincing Welles. It chronicled Welles’ tribulations in making the film and its aftermath. John Malkovich as screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz is a standout.

There are other little extras in the set, which I mentioned in my previous blog, such as a slim hardcover book about the film and poster repros, but one final thing I want to say here is a tribute to Dorothy Comingore, who played Suzan Alexander, Kane’s mistress. A tragic character, she was molded by Kane as an opera singer, down to the last detail. Her lack of singing talent quickly became apparent, and she became the one thing Kane could not create with his will and his money.

Comingore turns in what is arguably the best performance of the entire film, topping even Welles himself. At first glance, it looks like she doesn’t do much except sit around and work jigsaw puzzles, but at second glance, you begin to realize she’s a powerhouse actress, bringing this complex character to life in a very original way. As one might expect, Comingore was offered many choice parts after Kane, but she turned them all down, thinking none of them were good enough, and her career soon faded. She died an alcoholic in 1971 at 58.

Well, at last, the Yankees have gotten their comeuppance. And in Yankee Stadium, no less. I haven’t felt so good since the Marlins beat them in game 6 of the 2003 World Series in the house that Ruth built. I didn’t see the end of the game last night and it went on too late for the papers to carry the final result. Should it surprise anyone that I actually had a slightly difficult time learning the Tigers had won?

Do you think if the Yankees had won that it wouldn’t be plastered all over every Internet site and on everyone’s lips? Crawls across the bottom of every 24-hour news channel would be filled with quotes from all the Yankee players and management about who they’re going to start in the League Championship Series, and of course, looking ahead to the inevitable World Series.

I don’t know about you, but I’m really tired of this New York-centric culture we live in, which I’ve had to put up with my whole life. You know, it’s the greatest city in the world, they have Broadway shows, Times Square, blah, blah, blah. The Yankees, according to New Yorkers, have been permanently anointed and are therefore supposed to win the World Series every year. Those years which do not result in a championship are considered failures. Give me a break.

Being eliminated in the first playoff round is particularly humiliating for such a team who feels entitled to scarf up everything in its path, who feels other teams should, by definition of being “other teams”, lie down and allow the Bronx juggernaut to steamroller over them. Fortunately, the Tigers had other plans. And now we will be spared having to gaze at Derek Jeter’s fucking smirk until next season. I’m actually surprised that the breathless countdown to his 3000th hit didn’t continue beyond it, so that we’re constantly informed that he’s now at 3001, 3002, my God that was hit number 3003! Anybody remember such hyped-up reporting surrounding Rafael Palmeiro’s 3000th hit? I didn’t think so.

My advice to the Yankees: go back to New York and get another year older.

Once again, James Scott Bell has reeled me in to his topic du jour over at The Kill Zone. Today he waxed eloquent about the treacherous path from idea to story. Seems he had an idea for a full chapter some years ago, so he wrote it down. Then he set it aside as other projects commanded his attention. Eventually, though, he went back to it and extracted a novella from it. That brought to mind a similar experience of mine.

Approximately 25 years ago, a friend of mine said, “When I write my novel, I’m going to start off with this line: I moved into the Napoleon House on the day XXXXX died.” (I forget the guy’s name who died, but he was well-known around the Napoleon House in New Orleans) The line struck me as a good one. I loved the idea of tying a new-day-dawning event with someone’s death. I was well into my first novel at the time, but this line stayed with me.

Fast forward to 2009. I’m ready to start a new novel. I’m casting about for ideas. I know that, since I can’t really make up stories in advance, I’m going to have to wing it, as always, letting my characters tell the story while I merely write it down. That line, which had festered in the outer swamps of my memory, awaiting reclamation, finally showed itself and I jumped on it.

I changed it around a little, turning it into, “I got back to Key West on the day Aldo Ray died.”

Of course, I now had to add tens of thousands of additional words to complete that story, and I had no idea what those words would be, but the line got me going. I asked myself, “Who’s coming back to Key West, why is he coming back, and what’s the deal with Aldo Ray?” Ray was a movie actor from the 1950s, usually assigned to tough guy roles, so I took it from there and before you could say “Key West noir”, the book had taken flight.

Which brings me to the title.

I had actually completed the first draft without a title. I had absolutely no hints as to what this novel would be called. I was getting desperate and my title-idea well was virtually dry. Fortunately, I was playing professional poker at the time at Bellagio in Las Vegas and that would be my salvation.

In Las Vegas cardrooms, if a player wants a new deck, he/she requests it from the dealer. The dealer then calls out to the floorman for a setup, which is casino parlance for a little box containing two new decks of cards. One day, a player at my table made such a request and the dealer hollered out, “Setup on fourteen!”, since we were playing at table fourteen at the time. Something snapped inside me and I mentally transformed that to “Setup On Front Street“, and I had my title.

I’m just glad we weren’t sitting at table five or something. I’d probably still be searching.