Dick Francis died in his home on the Cayman Islands. He was 89.
A successful steeplechase jockey, Francis turned to writing after he retired from racing in 1957. He penned 42 novels, many of which featured racing as a theme. His books were translated into more than 20 languages, and in 2000 the Queen – whose mother was among his many readers – honoured Francis by making him a Commander of the British Empire.
For more info: The Globe and Mail
A mature, stubborn wealthy widow gathers up a group of brittle, neurotic or lonely girlfriends to help her daughter succeed as a journalist for one of the lesser entertainment magazines. The helpful project helps the girls in turn. A Red Hat Club imitation, without the charm.
L.A./Hollywood relived by a suicidal ex-husband ex-producer ex-Jew with a screenplay. The screenplay is fresh off the bus from New Jersey, delivered to Charlie (post suicide) by his 21 year old nephew, Lionel. It is about Disraeli but that doesn’t matter. The screenplay is his property, and all Charlie needs to make it (again) in this town is one property.
The screenplay, nicknamed Ben and Bill, or Bob and Bill, somehow makes itself known to a studio, an agent, a casting director, who manage to get a black pro-Israel karate expert to play Disraeli, the Jew.
The characters are mimetic:
The studio executive assistant has the unwieldy habit of walking to the nearest ladies room, locking the door, and screaming. (It is always a mistake to actually read the screenplay.) We visit with her and her Beverly Hills therapist in intimate one hour sessions, at which she arrives hystericized with laughter. The therapist is straight out of DSM-V and full of noteworthy advice, relevant to any and all professional women over 35 who work among men. Cut out a small nook of rationality inside the chaos.
The director is paid in dinar which have been blocked from leaving Yugoslavia, and doesn’t talk to the actors. The actors are not worth characterizing.
Prepare to grow a dry grin and giggle while reading.
Let’s just say that murders happened in the middle of other things: a cop, a lawyer, a fire investigator get up, they fight with their wives, they eat. Sometimes they think. The law is something they think about. How it came to be what it is, where it came from, when it changed. If you have a father who reads, who respects the history of things, who loves the Law, you think about what a lawyer should be, what the law should be, what an institution like the law allows human beings to be.
In Europe, rich people sometimes keep a modest apartment in a poor or marginal area of their city. They call it their “pied a terre”. Translated, this means “foot on the ground”. It is said that their purpose in maintaining these small apartments is to remind them of their roots and to keep them in touch with reality. And that’s exactly why I always keep my copy of Letters To A Young Lawyer in my briefcase. The words within, the philosophy, Harris’ love of simplicity and reverence for the law, this is my psychological pied a terre.
Has anyone else noticed a spectacular and embarrassing silliness among the old guard of East Coast scribblers? As though they were trying to write comic books, and couldn’t figure out how to convert text into images? Gone are the wry, dry, street talk, the inside cracks of persons, cities, institutions. Gone are the political or intellectual references and resonances. Gone are the differences, the mannerisms, the languages that make themselves loved or remembered or both.
Advice? Use a pen not a keyboard, and write your age.
There is a yummy baked goods kitchen feeling, because the woman baking the cookies has an organized sense of her world, she has friends, one dead and one living ex-husband, girl-children, and flour in her pantry. But — and there are 50 years worth of buts– she also has a daughter that miscarries, and friends with bad husbands and gruesome stories, and fears that don’t go away with the rules of the Cookie Club.
Forget the tax on sugar. Tax bad dialogue, dreadful characterizations, idiotic psychological profiles. To wit:
When he was a child the twitch had made him the target of merciless teasing and bullying. It had made him burn with hatred. And that hatred had driven him to succeed. Victor Orlov wanted to beat everyone and it was all because of the twitch in his left eye.
Read it as farce.
Quiet, patient, relentless intelligence spills over the pages of this story about a girl geek, a journalist, a news magazine devoted to the critique of corrupt Swedish institutions, and an odd assemblage of Stockholm’s thugs, bureaucrats, intellectuals, and cops. None are verbose. Men and women think. Thinking happens without talk, without sounds, without annunciation. It is sometimes signaled by cigarettes. Sometimes by a walk. Much goes unsaid, and unshared.
All the good guys use Macs. Some of them smoke. The geek uses a powerbook, the journalist a Mac ibook, the magazine editor an Airbook. The geekgirl (Salander) is skinny, occasionally violent, abnormally intelligent, obsessively private. She does not emote; she enjoys: mathematics, sex, hacking. She has lesbian girlfriends, bank accounts in the Canary Islands, lawyers in Gibraltar, and a local accountant. She buys a 2.5 million kroner flat with a view and decorates it in one day of shopping in Ikea, for a total of 97,000 kroner.
Wonderful, well developed characters modeled on silly, overchewed, Oprah-certified victim-types. The victim of an alcoholic, depressive, schadenfreude-mother, the victim of a childhood kidnapping by a pedophile, the victim of an unforgiving corrections system, the victim of overwhelming emotions, overwhelming fears, overwhelming doubts, of poor parents, poor teachers, poor morals, poor taste. But magnetic and memorable, nonetheless. The woman who for no apparent reason leaves a pleasant husband and a pleasant child is a curiosity: for the police, for us. The mild mannered husband with quiet habits and no past is, likewise, unusual, and leaves us wondering.
Lots of interesting characters on Blossom Street: a widow with an adopted daughter, a tough ex-punk happily married and unhappily smoking, a good son and chocolate factory owner with a growing heart problem, a charmed and charming owner of a knitting store, a gorgeous single girl getting over an ex-fiancee who fancied prostitutes. Too bad all the characters sound like a relentlessly perky meet-and-greet girl selling God on morning talk radio.
