Tip #1: Meet Harry Bosch

Happy New Year's Eve! In honor of the coming new year, I'm going to- with no muss and no fuss (and no photos, too!)- give you fifteen short posts recommending fifteen things I enjoyed over the past year. And away we go!

I've been enjoying the Bosch detective series on Amazon Prime these past years, so it was a treat to finally try out one of Michael Connelly's original Bosch novels, The Black Echo. I actually listened to the novel, which was a recently-produced special edition featuring Titus Welliver, who plays Harry Bosch in the series, narrating the book. It's the first novel in the series, and it was immediately fascinating to note how the Bosch of the printed page was adapted into the Bosch of the show. And it made me want to read or listen to more of the novels. So I guess this tip is promoting both the show and the books, but especially that first novel, which was a moody, solid detective thriller. A great Q&A featuring the author and the actor rounds out the audiobook.

Tip #2: Discover Lew Archer, P.I.

Been doing some classic Ross MacDonald detective fiction lately, and though some are way too convoluted for my taste, if you just sit back and let them wash over you they aren't bad and you can see why they have a good reputation. All the ones I've read were part of MacDonald's Lew Archer series, including The Wycherley Woman, Sleeping Beauty, and The Blue Hammer (the last in the series). The first one I mentioned was actually quite clever, plot-wise (and I was able to follow it!), but generally all the Archers are worth your time.

Tip #3: 007 in Russia

With a Mind To Kill, the latest James Bond novel by Anthony Horowitz, is set immediately after Ian Fleming's final Bond novel, The Man With The Golden Gun, and I liked it a lot. Bond is sent to Russia to confront the generals and doctors who had previously brainwashed him into almost killing his boss, M, in Golden Gun. It's a good spy story, with moody, effective descriptions of daily Soviet life in the 60's. I hope Horowitz will write a few more Bonds here and there.

Tip #4: Matt Helm as he's supposed to be

Courtesy of Audible (Amazon's audiobook service), I recently discovered Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm series, and they are nothing like the Dean Martin/swinging 60's movie series of years past. These are serious spy thrillers, with thoughtful characterizations, especially of the main character. Check out the first one, Death of a Citizen, and see if you agree. The Wrecking Crew was another good one. I'm looking forward to listening to a lot more entries of this long-running series in 2023.

Tip #5: Thunderbolts assemble!

I still read graphic novels and comics sometimes, and I recently caught up with a popular series of a couple of decades ago when I enjoyed a collection of the earliest issues of The Thunderbolts, a superhero series with a twist (and it's better if I don't say more) that debuted in the late 1990's and remains popular today. Check out any of the various trade paperbacks collecting the early issues of this mainstream but offbeat series and enjoy, then you can see what you'll think of the upcoming Marvel Studios television adaptation coming soon to Disney+.

Tip #6: French is always a decent read

I liked Tana French's The Searcher, so more recently I dived into her novel The Witch Elm. Various cousins hang out with their uncle at his welcoming home, and one day a body is found in his yard... and it's been hidden there a while, in the tree of the title, in fact. Is the body tied to something in the cousins' or uncle's past? The journey to find out is quite involving, but the destination and solution are good, too.

Tip #7: Good kids, evil parents

As well as discovering The Thunderbolts (mentioned somewhere above), I also recently caught up with a another popular comic book series of a couple of decades ago when I enjoyed Marvel's Runaways, The Complete Collection, Volumes 1 to 3. A group of teens discovers that their parents are basically gangsters and super villains so they, well, run away from them. But then they confront them. It's good, mainstream comics with an edge and I hope my library soon gets volume 4.

Tip #8: Do a weighty movie for a change

The Banshees of Inisherin, now on HBO (or HBO Max, in my case) after a brief theatrical run, is well worth your time. But this tale of two friends who are having a bit of a crisis, is not the light, whimsical tale the trailers and ads promised. The movie, set in 1920's Ireland, is literate, allegorical, complex, violent, and frequently tragic. It's a good movie, though, and worth talking about. Just be aware of what you're getting if you tune in.

Tip #9: Fantasy laced with horror delivers

Stephen King's Fairy Tale pushes 600 pages, and in a genre I don't read very often, but I tore through it pretty quickly.  I found the non-fairy tale part set in our world (encompassing about the first 200 pages) as good as the fantasy story that eventually kicks in. But I thought the whole thing, a story of a boy and his dog and how they try to save a dying kingdom, was pretty entertaining reading from beginning to end.

Tip #10: A space opera for adults

While Star Wars often delivers excellent all-ages entertainment, the new series Andor (now streaming on Disney+) is unapologetically Star Wars for adults. The plots are complex so you need to pay attention, and we really see the brutality and moral compromises of war. Surprisingly, Star Wars has demonstrated that it is flexible enough to accommodate the more nuanced fare presented here.

Tip #11: Follow Matt Scudder around town

With my recent enjoyment of All The Flowers Are Dying in print and A Drop of the Hard Stuff on audio,  I only have one book left in Lawrence Block's classic Matthew Scudder detective series. If you read crime fiction, you really should dip into these books. They are talky but never tedious, nicely balance plot with Scudder's own interesting life, and feature New York itself is a major character: we see how the city changes over the course of this long series. I really hope Block writes another one or two of these.

Tip #12: Weather the long running time

Avatar: The Way of Water surpasses the stunning visuals of the first film, in both craftsmanship and in the variety of things we see, and I found the story to be a little more compelling and involving, too. But, yeah, it's long, more than three hours. But it really should be seen on the big screen. Just go already.

Tip #13: Stone Barrington still delivers

After reading the first dozen or so entries in the late Stuart Woods' (sadly, he passed earlier this year) Stone Barrington series, I'm still enjoying the different types of stories- some moody, some funny, some exciting- featuring Woods' lawyer, investigator and adventurer. Two Dollar Bill and Dark Harbor were two recent good ones. 

Tip #14: Weird horror is always good

Barbarian, which has nothing to do with Conan, is a decent, offbeat horror film now streaming in various places, following a theatrical run earlier this year. It starts off as an unsettling two-person drama but then launches into crazy horror that you won't soon forget.

Tip #15: Take vacations while watching TV

The two short seasons of HBO'S The White Lotus are literate, fun, and visually striking. Set in the first season at The White Lotus Resort in Hawaii and in the second season at its resort in Italy, you'll enjoy the various stories of the lavish resorts' guests and staff. The show demonstrates that smart can be fun.

Calm before the storm

Saw a couple of movies in the past day or two that were amiable time passers and not much more, but that's okay. It's still a novelty to be back to going to movies again. I suspect the producers, too, knew these movies were perfectly okay but not much more, hence the early spring release dates, keeping them away from the summer's heavy hitters.

The Lost City, with Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum, has a little romance, a little adventure, and a decent extended cameo by Brad Pitt. I liked it well enough, though it'll play much better when it's available to see via streaming, without the hassle of driving to the theater and buying an expensive ticket. It's not quite good enough to justify those two things, but as a couch movie in the near future you'll likely enjoy it just fine.

Morbius is one of Sony's superhero movies, the ones that try to compete with Marvel Studios' polished-to-the-nines superhero films, with varying success. Morbius was created in the comic books as a villain to fight Spider-Man, but here he's on his own. So Sony did what they did with its slightly better Venom movies, which also involved giving a Spider-Man villain its own movie: they made the Morbius character a bit more sympathetic than his comic book counterpart, and gave him an even bigger villain than he is to fight. 

Like The Lost City, Morbius also passes the time without too much restlessness, but again will come off as more enjoyable at home without the effort and cost to go out and see it. And I'm speaking as someone who likes getting in the car and going to see a movie.

Anyway, these two films did their jobs and helped me mark time until the big, anticipated films of late spring and early summer arrive. After all, it's like I blinked and the new Dr. Strange movie is only a few days away!

 

Dark doings at the beach

After reading six or seven thrillers about Stuart Woods' benevolent womanizer Stone Barrington ("benevolent" because Stone never seems to intend to sleep with a lot of women, it just turns out that way), I was anxious to see how author Woods handled a series with a central female character.

Orchid Beach is the first in the series featuring former military officer now police officer Holly Barker, and it's a decent read. And to build on the theme expressed at the outset, the attractive Florida police official (she is hired as Deputy Chief) is permitted to have a healthy sex life just like Stone Barrington, though interestingly Woods quickly pairs her off with a stable love interest. So Woods may not have Holly pinball around with various liaisons like his male protagonist. 

Is it sexist that Woods is making his female character more sexually conservative and prim and proper than his male hero? Maybe mildly so. But then again, this is only the first book in this series, so who knows what will happen to Holly in this area in future books?

Even more interesting is that Orchid Beach, which features a female lead, ultimately turns into more of a big, broad "men's action thriller", complete with an assault on the bad guys' huge compound, than any of the Stone Barrington books (at least the early ones I've read so far). Well, Stone did assault and destroy his enemies' yacht in Swimming to Catalina, but that was just a quick chapter or two.

The big action-packed close of the novel was fun, but I enjoyed the set-up and middle chapters, where we get to meet and know Holly and her supporting cast, more. So while I certainly recommend Orchid Beach if you enjoy Stuart Woods, I hope subsequent installments have action driven more by the cast and their personalities, and less big, broad action (ultimately featuring lots of generic cops, FBI agents, and bad-guy foot soldiers) than this book offers. Because Holly, her dad, and her boyfriend, as well as a few other cast members (including her dog!), are good characters who are fun to read about.

Lavish murders

Kenneth Branagh has been in the news lately because of his well-regarded art film Belfast, which has been nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award. But that isn't the only current film he's attached to at the moment. He also stars in and directs his second Agatha Christie adaptation, Death on the Nile, which demonstrates once again he is equally at home with "mere" entertainments as he is with loftier material.

Death on the Nile is an old-fashioned murder mystery, lavishly filmed in wonderful locations, on a beautiful vintage pleasure craft (of course it isn't vintage to the early 20th century passengers), and peopled by top-of-their-game stars and character actors. And Branagh being Branagh, a little art creeps in, as well... mostly in the form of the ghosts of the past that frequently trouble master detective Hercule Poirot. Though many of the passengers on the sumptuous cruise along the Nile have their own ghosts and demons, too, also artfully and subtly conveyed.

The murder mystery itself is very clever, suitably complex but also playing fair. You can figure it out if you pay attention and have the imagination to fill in the blanks. Myself, I got halfway there: my suspicions went in the right direction but I couldn't figure out the mechanics of the crime. But that's okay, I enjoyed it when Poirot explained it all to me, which I'm sure was Mr. Branagh's intention.

Scream and scream again

Maybe it still feels like a novelty to enjoy movies at the theater again, but I enjoyed the new Scream.  They dropped the numbers after the title, but it's still the same Scream characters from the other films, though a handful of new ones are along for the ride, too. Some of the reviews haven't been kind, using words like "retread" and "nothing new here" but, I don't know, one person's dull repetitiveness is another person's comfortable familiarity.

So, yeah, I went in expecting the usual tropes of this series: Pretty people, sharp and quick pacing, decent suspense with bursts of graphic violence, and a serviceable whodunit. And I got all that. If I can think of one criticism, the movie went a little heavy on the "rules of horror movies" discussions, but then all the movies in this series give you a little more of that than you need.

Anyway, it was fun to see this in a theater with other people, as scenes with knife-wielding maniacs always are more fun in a crowd. And in a couple of years, sure, I'll be ready to sit through another Scream movie. Because, while I'm certainly not against new elements and some updating, I'm also perfectly fine with having a pretty good idea of knowing exactly what I'm gonna get.