Cycling Art: Pat Cleary

The Watercarriers: Tour de France 1961

Ludo Peeters: Paris - Roubaix 1982

Merckx and Poulidor

Marco Pantani

All images from Pat Cleary's website.

Fuck Buttons: Sweet Love for Planet Earth

As heard on the Top Boy soundtrack.

Patrick Kelleher and his Cold Dead Hands: Contact Sports

My Little Pony as Pop Culture Icons

Edward Scissorhands

Alien

The Joker

Princess Leia

Images from The Guardian (where there are a number of other My Little Ponies dressed as Star Wars characters - both franchises having a large common fan base, it seems). 

(Bad) Bookcovers: Hector Garrido

The Little People, John Christopher (Hector Garrido)

The back cover informs readers that:

They speak German. They carry whips. And they are connected in some mysterious way with Nazi experiments carried out in the charming old Irish castle during World War II.

 Image and blurb from Good Show Sir.

Stuckism: Jane Kelly

If We Could Undo Psychosis 1

If We Could Undo Psychosis 2

Self Portrait as a Victoria Sponge Sandwich

Images from stuckism.com.

The Empty Hours: An 87th Precinct Mystery

The Empty Hours departs from Ed McBain’s usual winning formula; rather than a police procedural novel, The Empty Hours is a collection of three novellas.

The Empty Hours (the first story also serving as the title of the collection) concerns the discovery of a decomposed body in a furnished room in a slum. The body is that of a wealthy heiress – what was she doing living in a dive on South Eleventh?

The story follows Detectives Steve Carella and Meyer Meyer as they try to discover the identity of the killer by tracking down the names that appear in the victim’s cancelled cheques. The Empty Hours manages, in a mere 86 pages, to provide readers with a proper 87th Precinct mystery - McBain even manages to squeeze in one of his trademark musings on the nature of the urban spaces:

The City doesn’t seem to be itself in the very early hours of the morning.

She is a woman, of course, and time will never change that. She awakes as a woman, tentatively touching the day...

McBain continues on in a similar vein for another page and a half.

With the exception of such anthropomorphic meanderings, The Empty Hours is very tightly plotted, and one of the best 87th Precinct mysteries that El Tarangu has yet read.

J, the second story, deals with the murder of a rabbi. The nature of the victim results in Meyer Meyer playing a central role in the investigation. J is good in that the reader gets more of an insight into Meyer than they usually get, but the story is resolved a little too quickly for our liking.

Not bad; not great, either.

Storm represents the greatest departure from the 87th Precinct conventions, as the story, *gasp*, doesn’t even take place anywhere near Isola. Cotton Hawes is taking his lady friend, Blanche Colby, up to the ski resort of Rawson for the weekend. But the romantic tryst is disrupted when someone is murdered on the ski-lift.

Storm’s ski resort setting allows McBain to play around with some genre conventions that could not be used in a story set in Isola. The reader is informed that all roads into Rawson are snowbound, so the killer must still be somewhere on the resort...

And Hawes steps all over the toes of the local law enforcement during the course of his unofficial investigation into the murder, big-city, out-of-jurisdiction detective that he is.

After some initial macho territorial posturings from both Hawes and the local sheriff, the two strike an accord and agree to work together to capture the killer.

Blanche, needless to say, has her holiday ruined.

Storm was an entertaining foray into the whodunit genre from McBain, and we were left wishing that the story had been longer once we had finished it.

Verdict on the collection as a whole: highly recommended.

Buy The Empty Hours from Amazon.

Image from goodreads.com

The Getaway

Carter ‘Doc’ McCoy is a career criminal, a two-time loser who plans to make the bank heist in Beacon City his final score. Carol McCoy is Doc’s moll, as deadly as she is beautiful. Rudy ‘Piehead’ Torrento is also in on the job: a ruthless psychopath, driven only by hatred and rage. In the aftermath of the bank job, things begin to go awry, and Doc and Carol have to evade the ever-tightening net of the law.

The Getaway starts out as a nice, pulpy, crime thriller. The characters are reassuringly two-dimensional and uncomplicated. Doc is a charismatic good ol’ boy from a relatively prosperous family, who turned to crime as it represented to him the most direct path to wealth. Carol was formerly a strait-laced, introverted librarian(!) before she came under Doc’s corrupting influence. Rudy is the classic noir villain: vicious, pathological, and capriciously vindictive. Rudy attempts to double-cross the McCoys; Doc McCoy shoots Rudy but fails to kill him. The McCoys have to remain one step ahead of the vengeful gangster, as well as eluding capture by the authorities.

The first 100 pages or so are standard crime novel fare. Suspicion of betrayal consumes all of the principal characters; as the novel progresses, both Doc and Carol become increasingly paranoid regarding one another’s motives. And Jim Thompson, seasoned hack that he was, gives his readers some nice details in the procedure involved in fleeing a jurisdiction. For example, when hijacking a car, the escapee should always go for one with out-of-state plates - when you murder the hapless driver and discard the body, you will have a little more time before the victim is reported missing. The book features a number of such instances of casual violence (The Getaway is not nearly as explicit as The Killer Inside Me, however).

At around the 100 page mark, proceedings begin to take a surreal tinge. The introduction of the quasi-mythical Ma Santis character stretches the suspension of disbelief to breaking point, and the dreamlike land of El Rey, a haven for criminals south of the border, is positively Kafkaesque. The Getaway’s mad foray into magic realism in the final 50 pages rather undermines the book’s hard-boiled verisimilitude.

Promising beginnings, disappointing conclusion.

Buy Jim Thompson books from Amazon.

Cover image from Tuneupspace blog.

True Grit (novel)

Frank Ross, of Yell County, Arkansas, is gunned down in cold blood by Tom Chaney, a man that Frank Ross had assisted and provided with employment in his time of need. Mattie Ross, Frank Ross’s fourteen year-old daughter, is not prepared to allow her father’s death go unavenged, and enlists the help of U.S. Marshal Reuben ‘Rooster’ Cogburn in tracking her man down.

Anyone who has seen the Coen brothers 2010 adaptation of Charles Portis’s novel, or Henry Hathaway’s earlier adaptation, will be familiar with the novel’s storyline: Mattie Ross, Cogburn, and Texas Ranger LaBoeuf set out across the Indian Territory to find Chaney (neither film’s plot differs much from that of the source novel).

The laconic quality if Mattie Ross’s narration is works very well in descriptions of characters and dialogue; the following is from the scene is which Ross, Cogburn, and LaBoeuf are staking out the dugout, awaiting the arrival of Tom Chaney and Ned Pepper:

Rooster talked all night. I would doze off and wake up and he would still be talking. Some of his stories had too many people in them and were hard to follow but they helped to pass the hours and took my mind off the cold. I did not give credence to everything he said. He said he knew a woman in Sedalia, Missouri, who had stepped on a needle as a girl and nine years later the needle worked out of a thigh of her third child. He said it puzzled the doctors.

Mattie Ross’s deadpan delivery does not work as well when dealing with the narrative’s dramatic elements. El T felt a little let down at the description of the shootout that ensues when Ned Pepper’s gang arrives at the dugout; perhaps it’s because we had seen the film already, but we weren’t completely wowed by the levels of tension.

An enjoyable read, but not as good as the film.

Buy True Grit on Amazon.

Image from getthebigpicture.net

Iconic Explosions Depicted in Cauliflower

The Hindenburg Disaster

 Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster

The Atomic Bombing of Nagasaki

Images by Brock Davies, via Kottke.org.