Modern Gumshoes: fearful & forward

Detective Fabio Montale is having a rough week. His best friends are dead, he keeps getting beaten up, and his city is descending into, as the title of the novel he stars in suggests, Total Chaos. The kitchen is an escape for this harried gumshoe, but Total Chaos, part of author Jean-Claude Izzo’s Marseilles trilogy, is not mere escapist literature. Mr. Izzo used detective fiction to shine a light on France’s rugged southern port and the corruption that turned his stunning hometown into one of the most dangerous cities in Western Europe. Source: observer.com


In the final matchup of the Noir bracket, instead of Chandler, we have two novels by modern writers, James Ellroy and Michael Connelly, who were inspired by him. Both are here by virtue of slaying a heavy hitter -- Connelly's The Black Echo actually knocked out Chandler's The Big Sleep in the first round. And last round, Ellroy's L.A. Confidential took out Cain's Double Indemnity.


There is a connection between the two writers. A crime reporter at the L.A. Times at the time he wrote The Black Echo, his first novel, Connelly based his hero in part on Ellroy after reading about the murder of Ellroy's mother.


Connelly told Mysterynet.com, About the time I was putting this all together Ellroy's book The Black Dahlia came out, he got a lot of local press attention that revealed his past, especially that his mother was murdered when he was a boy. It was pretty obvious to me, obvious to everyone, that that is what he's about. What ever happened to his mother and so forth, he's working it out now by writing about murder. I thought that was very interesting, so I made the jump and instead of a writer working out his mother's murder by writing about it, I thought what about a detective who's solving murders and in some way that helps him deal with his own mother's murder? It's just hinted at in most of the books, and in the details it is quite different from Ellroy's life. And so Connelly's detective, Harry Bosch, was inspired in part by Ellroy's life. L.A. Confidential is an opera -- sometimes a messy opera, yes, and overwrought in the way operas are overwrought. It's exhausting. But it's the far superior book. Source: blogs.laweekly.com


Josh Hartnett understood the precept. His filmic Bucky Bleichert packs that torch for someone out there. The physical Hartnett is my described Bucky and me. He's tall, lanky, and dark-haired, with small brown eyes. Hartnett's performance nails Bucky with no histrionic excess. He excels at projecting cognition. Bucky Bleichert is always measuring and thinking. He's circumspect, intelligent, watchful. He's persistent, self-protecting, and reluctantly decent. He made specious moral choices early in life and brought a grievously flawed soul to the Dahlia. Hartnett captures that. He appears in every scene and narrates the film. He carries the film's moral vision. He embodies a positive strain of the Hilliker code: you're fearful, but you always go forward.


The design is near-German Expressionist. It's L.A./it's not L.A./it's L.A. seen by Dahlia fiends in extremis. The cinematographer was Vilmos Zsigmond. The production designer was Dante Ferretti. The costume designer was Jenny Bevan. The film commands you to savor every scene and revel in your visual entrapment. This textual richness symbolizes the Dahlia's hold on us. We can never look away. She won't let us. -James Ellroy Source: www.angelfire.com