Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
Our own Frank Bascombe is branching out, and this week, he’s got an interview that begins here on AICN and concludes over on Bookmunch.com. Nice to see someone else picking up Bascombe’s work. Can’t wait to dig into this month’s edition...
It's summer, which means I'll be busy with baseball, roundball is over, and Tiger proved again that he's "the man", as tiring as that's got to be for the rest of the PGA tour players. To fill in the gaps you've got to have books, and in this day and age it seems to be the only thing that you know is going to be a constant and something you can turn to. You've all read the reviews over the last year and some of you were kind enough to "talb back" which I'll admit I read, with a smile. And I swear I'll never do this again. Take a moment and go to your local bookstore or library and pick up BIG IF by Mark Costello, just went on sale. Try it out, read it, and when you do, let me know what you think. They're will be a link to e-mail me at the end of the column. It's a powerful book about things that are going on right now, and things that are nailed down so tight that it's scary. Here's my original review for THE BIG IF. We've got lots of good stuff arriving everyday, and in the months to come I hope to have more reviews worthy of your time. Until then...
IT'S NOT A SECRET IF I DON'T TELL ANYONE
THE SILENT MEN by Richard H. Dickinson
It’s hard these days to write something that is very specific and about a broader subject all at the same time. That something is The Silent Men. A book I’ve dubbed the Vietnam Sniper Thriller. Over at Rugged Land, a small little behind the scenes publisher of high quality fiction and non-fiction, things are really firing on all cylinders. With their launch a few months ago we’ve been pleasured with the likes of Henry’s List of Wrongs by John Scott Shepherd, The War of Art; Winning the Creative Battle by Steven Pressfield, who’s known for so many other things that this book is a brilliant kick in the ass to anyone who’s ever dreamed of doing something creative, to get motivated. On the military side of the publishing platform, recently published Steel My Soldiers Hearts: The Hopeless to Hardcore Transformation of the U.S. Army, 4th Battalion, 39th Infantry, Vietnam by David H. Hackworth and Eilhys England, the later, Hackworth is THE MAN when it comes to this type of stuff. His career was the one Brando’s character was based on for Apocalypse Now, you remember that dossier? That’s this guy. The crew over at Rugged Land won’t be behind the scenes anymore, they’ve got not only this phenomenal publishing program moving mountains, but a film side to all of this as well. Talk about being a double threat. Authors on everyone’s up and coming list should be thanking their lucky stars if the triple smart risk takers at this indie house take them in. I’ve been taken to task for reviewing books from Random House Inc and the big guns, but it’s down these mean streets you’ll find some really good shit.
Oh yeah, Silent Men. This book is a long way off on the horizon, but if it were to land right now, expect it to bump Michael Moore and the other dead wood off the bestseller list’s across this great country. From the very get go your on the move through the jungle with two snipers who are out on a detail that is completely brutal. That’s what Dickinson is really good at, he knows where he speaks from, Vietnam, front to back, he’s got a tight grasp on all the particulars. The jungle is a weird and quite place; it’s silent and yet completely audible. These guys are making their way to a “hide” that will give them a good view of a road populated by the enemy. Hours pass, the sun rises, and finally a black pajama clad soldier appears, accompanied by a dog. One, two, three, and there both shot dead, out of no where, like a clap of thunder that wakes you on a dark night. Tim O’Brien explained Vietnam in many of his books, my favorite was in Tomcat In Love, there is a scene where the main character is walking through the jungle, comes to a field, and starts walking for what seems like days, he say’s he was walking for so long that the path disappeared. This book has that same quality, but without the leading descriptions. Both men bend the weeds back into place after they’ve crawled past; they lie under cover of brush, and take breaths away from five hundred yards. This stuff is for real. There is a larger plot that engulfs this book, one that I found to be a necessary structure for the rest of the story to fall into, but at the same time filled with bureaucratic nonsense that made me angry. But that’s the point being made, Vietnam was about holding the men back, from stopping them from doing what they were trained to do, and that’s kill. These two snipers get sent out on a suicide mission, with so many holes in it that I was the most surprised person to see any success come from it. They’ve got an enemy general to put on ice, and they’ve got to do it from what seems like and insane distance. Dickinson writes every single emotion perfectly, men getting gutted in the helicopters, cut down in battle, fear stricken with blood of their comrades on them, these guys know that if they make out alive, it will be a miracle. I’ve only seen Vietnam through movies, and of course was too young to attend. The men that went into this battle, especially the snipers that did what seems like some incredibly difficult work, really impresses and awe’s me. Moments before all hell breaks lose during the critical moments of their mission snipers Monroe and Patterson feel that moment of calm just before the storm. The section where it does all come crashing down is perhaps some of the finest “in the moment” writing I’ve ever read. I’ve got to share a small piece of this stuff with you. Cho is the general they are sent out to kill.
Cho went down as if he’d run into a clothesline. The bullet impacted at the base of his throat, ripping out his esophagus, which went flipping through the air like a bloody snake. The troops behind him dropped to the ground, again frozen with confusion, still too far from the tree line to see a muzzle flash. As before, the sound of Monroe’s shot reached them after Cho had exploded in a spray of blood. The bullet came out of nowhere.
This book will keep you completely submerged in the world of fringe Vietnam, and explain everything to you on the way. You’re on the front lines with author Richard H. Dickinson, and he never ceases to amaze, dazzle and stun you with the absolutely horrific and violent time period of the Vietnam War. This book if published tomorrow would be in everyone’s hands on every plane, train and in every beach bag. It’s great to read something so incredibly detailed and at the same time it’s making a huge statement about a period of our history that’s only just begun to be properly examined.
Well Moriarty promised an interview, and I’ve found a way to deliver. Mark Costello was kind enough to grant me an hour or so of his time and discuss his upcoming book BIG IF, and it should be on a shelf near you right now. I don’t normally recommend this, but do your self a favor and go out and at least read the first chapter, and if you have any reservations, read the second, and if you take my word for it, buy the damn thing, it’s so good it’s sacry. One more thing, we’re going to do something a little different with this interview. The first half will be here at AICN, the second half can be read on BOOKMUNCH.COM, that’s the place where I moonlight. A great British book review web site that was kind enough to ask me over for a sentence or two. So, check it out, here and over there.
20 QUESTIONS FOR MARK COSTELLO
FB You’re used to work in Boston as a prosecutor? Tell me a little about that, and why did you write your first novel BagMen under a psdydenum?
MC I was a prosecutor in NY, and in NJ for 9 years. Bagmen my first novel was published while I was a prosecutor, which is why I used a psydnum. , and I left right after that.
FB - Spending so much time in Boston, did you find the criminals to be of a more refined nature or rough around the edges, in comparison?
MC - Being a prosecutor in Boston, and what people don’t realize is that there are a lot of poor white people in Boston, it’s really blue collar, I mean there are white ghettos in Boston, some of that is the same in the Bronx in the ny, Albanian neighborhoods, but I don’t think there is anything like Boston in any other major American City.
FB - Where you afraid people you worked with would question you on why you wrote BagMen?
MC - I didn’t want that book to be read as a tell-all. You know it’s set in 1965, it’s operatic, in terms of the plot, there are a lot of voices going on, it’s really amped up, it’s not like a quote unquote gritty crime novel, though I hope it succeeds at that level, but it is pretty amped up. So I didn’t think there would be a lot of danger that people would think that this was just a reflection of the day to day. But I wanted to make sure that didn’t happen, because I didn’t want to write that kind of book, so the psydeneum would put some distance between what I was doing, and the book.
FB - Being from the Northeast my self, you absolutely nailed the accents of all the characters in BAGMEN, especially from Boston, it’s so dead on, it’s scary, and how difficult was that to write?
MC - I just imagined my mother talking. My mother is all the roles in that book, she’s the Narq cop, she’s everyone, and she’s got a wonderful Boston accent.
FB - In BAGMEN you have the characters discover LSD. It’s so new to them that they don’t even have a way to test for it. Everyone is getting fucked up on this new drug, and some really nasty people are behind it. Where did that idea come from? And why place it in 1960’s 1970’s Boston? An unlikely place for hippies and free drug use.
MC - I wanted to write a book that would be about, it would take sort of, bascically in crime fiction nothing ever changes, it’s the same old same old. That’s friends of eddie coyle and that’s Ellroy too, it’s that eternal wheel. And, I wanted to set the basic expectations of the crime novel against something really changing in the world, so 1965 is something that really interested me, I dig the 1960’s, not the hippie thing, but sort of Mat Helm movie, the late Brat Pack sort of '64 '65, the look is kinda like, did you ever see the T.V. show Crime Story?
FB - Sure, that’s one of my all time favorite television shows.
MC - Hugely underrated.
FB - Enormously underrated.
MC - So that’s the look, I dug that look.
FB - Two years that was it for that show.
MC - Ends with the nuclear weapon going off.
FB - It’s so great; in my opinion Michael Mann is one of the greatest shapers of American Cinema over the last ten to fifteen years.
MC - I dug that period and it sort of struck me that this was, and you had the English language Mass and the all the changes, and you had Boston, and LSD becoming criminalized, it just sort of, I started thinking of what it would be like, and at the time I was a Narq, and I just being one, and it was sort of right after the crack wave, which was a drug that changed things, I felt what it be like the first time the Narq’s came into contact with LSD, what would that be like. They wouldn’t believe in it that absolutely wouldn’t believe in it. And they wouldn’t believe that any changes were possible; so that’s the stuff I was playing with. 1965 was the first year I spoke, actually spoke, for some reason I was a late talker, I was three years old. And that’s how the novel ends, with them speaking the Mass in English, it was sort of like it was becoming a language, I don’t know.
FB -1964 things really did change, Kennedy getting shot, things really have not been the same.
MC - And I think that time period is more interesting than say ’68 or ’69. Even summer of love, people are hanging out, and the change has happened, and it just hang over. But I think the moment in ’65, with free speech, and Timothy Leary on the cover of Time, that’s the moment when things break open.
Again, to read the rest of this interview and check out a tremendous site that is devoted to books, go to BOOKMUNCH.COM, it will be at the top of the page.
THE BOOK OF ILLUSIONS by Paul Auster
I’ll bet my lunch money that a good many of you out there in book land are dripping for this one. Certainly, life on a desert island could not be considered complete with out a copy of The New York Trilogy, or The Music of Chance, two of my favorites. A few years ago, while stumbling through a bookstore in Soho that’s no longer there, I found a copy of The New York Trilogy, and quickly sat down with a coffee to see what this was all about. After a week or so my life had practically changed from reading this trilogy. By far, The Locked Room is one of the best things Auster has ever written. The stuff about the father renaming everything in the world in efforts to create a new language and his explanations of why George Washington didn’t believe in money or society, even life itself; it’s inspiring, and I know a lot of people agree. From there I went on an Auster binge, devouring everything he wrote, even Squeeze Play written under the name Paul Benjamin, that’s a great, great book, good luck finding it, a paperback original. Leviathan, Moon Palace and Mr. Vertigo are absolute kick ass stories, aimed at the world with needlepoint precision. The Christmas Story of Auggie Wren is the inspiration for Smoke, and Blue in the Face, which he had a hand in directing, was a spin off of that, but you geeks out there in movie land know all that, I don’t need to waste your time. Lou Reed’s glasses invention is completely inspired genius; you can thank Auster for that. His books are all around, perhaps in my top fifty favorites of all time. It’s really hard for me to say anything bad about him. In the New York - Brooklyn area, and on Fresh Air on NPR he’s legend, and the title could not be more fitting. So when I was thumbing through that toilet companion Entertainment Weekly and saw that he had written a new book, and it was not due for a good seven months I did everything possible to get a copy.
The Book of Illusions is just that, a book of things that happen, then disappear and seem like they never happened. Auster has an ability to create stories that fold over and over on themselves, and create a wonderful origami effect on the reader, and then make that final fold in on it’s self, and become a complete perfect infinite loop. There is an overwhelming sense of urgency, self-reflecting tragedy that seems to seep into Auster writing. Don’t know where it comes from, but he’s got a quite sense of calm about him, that just one look at his picture on the book flap, and you can see the wheels are spinning. David Zimmer, father, husband, teacher, widower. His wife and children are killed in a plane crash in the first five pages. Don’t worry; they spoil it on the book flap. This book isn’t about this tragedy; it’s about Zimmer’s search for the identity of an aging silent film star. When I first heard of the premise I was miffed, I wanted something from his wheelhouse, something he’d done before. A grand mystery, a riddle wrapped inside a conundrum, something truly Auster. This is it, but it’s cloaked in a very high-end novel, about a man’s search for another’s identity, and while on this search he ends up finding him self and not being completely thrilled with what he finds. Quickly Zimmer disappears into the Vermont wilderness to begin a translation of a French writer, something Auster himself is fond of. But then he suddenly discovers Hector Mann a silent film comedian from the early 1930’s who mysterious disappeared at the peak of his career. Zimmer begins writing the only soup to nuts book on the film star, and of course, as in all Auster stories it takes one event to unleash a series of other events that bring Zimmer to a fuller realization of what he’s actually stumbled upon. Slowly with perfect timing and authentic prose filled with heartfelt consideration Auster brings Zimmer through the abyss and out the other side to ask him self if any of what we’ve just read actually happens. Telling anymore of the story would be a huge failure on my part, so I won’t. You’ve two months to wait, more or less, and if your savvy enough to snag an advance readers copy, then you’ll be engulfed in this wonderful achievement that reminds readers, reviewers, critics and other writers that Paul Auster is all at once bread maker, cook, butcher, gardener, thief, banker, broker, lawyer, doctor, and magician. He’s got more style and substance than a thousand other writers of this generation put together. Books come and go, and Auster proves that he is not only here to stay but that he deserves to be held right up there with the best.
Write me. You know you’re dying to. Don’t deny yourself the sublime joy. Write me now.
