My (Our?) Changing Reading Habits

by
Scott D. Parker

I always find it interesting when one of my own odd habits is shared by another.

I've made no secret of my embrace of e-reading. I started with my Palm Pilot III and then onto my then-color Palm Zire. I still have both devices and I somewhat easily made the transition to small-screen reading over a decade. Granted, it was not my go-to reading device but, when a spare few minutes showed up in the workday, it was nice to pull out the device and read some lines.

Thus, when I got my iPod Touch and it's brilliant screen and fantastic fonts, I was already primed. The apps--all of them: Nook, iBook, Kindle, Stanza--were filled with reading material, both fiction and non-fiction. Not only did I still find those spare minutes in the workday, I also found myself reading on the iPod at night. It was a fantastic reading companion.

In the years since, I have acquired a Nook Simple Touch e-reader and an iPad. I like the iPad, of course, and do read a lot of material on it, but I find myself gravitating towards the Nook for straightforward fiction reading. I tend to think of the iPad as the nice hardback book and the Nook and the light, rugged paperback.

With all of the fantastic ebooks out there, and, truth be told, with their lesser cover price, I have increased the number of books I purchase electronically over traditionally. Now, I love the feel, the smell, and the pleasure of turing pages like any traditionalist, but I also love the economy (both price and size--i.e., no need for physical storage) of e-reading. And the samples you can download and read are fantastic. I have branched out and tried things and bought things I might not have.

I can do all of these things from the comfort of my house, my office, or wherever I have a Wifi connection. Consequentially, I don't always go into bookstores, much less than I used to. When I do, however, I've developed a strange little pattern. My favorite tables at Barnes and Noble are the trade paperbacks. I love their size and feel. More often than not, I'll browse the covers--you cannot truly browse online--and when I see something I think looks interesting, I'll read the back cover. If that hooks me and I have my iPod with me, I'll download the sample onto the Nook app. That way, I get to avoid the impulse buy--I'm a veteran of impulse book buying, a recovering one, you might say--but still get to give the book another chance.

More and more, however, I'm leaving the Ipod at home, preferring my simple phone for communication and pen and paper for any note taking I need to do. Additionally, I get to get my nose out of a little screen of glass and actually see the world. In these cases, I'll still browse the tables and shelves in Barnes and Noble, but I'll have to write down authors and books.

And, lo and behold, last Sunday, I was doing just that. Two science books had caught my eye--Space Chronicles by Neil DeGrasse Tyson and The King of Infinite Space: Euclid and His Elements by David Berlinski [can't, for the life of me, prompted me not only to pick up that book but download and read the sample]--and I was busily writing the authors and titles when a gentleman said to me, "You have a Nook?"

I looked up, confused. How in the world did he know? I had neither Nook, iPad, or iPod on me. I said yes, and he nodded with a knowing look. "I do the same thing," he said. That is, he comes to the bookstore to browse, find books he likes, and then downloads them.

It was a nice little event, knowing that I'm not the only one with odd habits, but it was his age. He was slightly older than me. That, to me, was key. It told that e-reading is not limited solely for the young. We middle aged folks do it as well as the older folks.

On another tangent of e-reading, I happened to read this passage from Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey, a SF book set far in the future when mankind has colonized the solar system:

The OPA man,, Anderson Dawes, was sitting on a cloth folding chair outside Miller's hole, reading a book. It was a real book--onionskin pages bound in what might have been actual leather. Miller had seen pictures of them before; the iead of that much weight for a single megabyte of data struck him a decadent.

Interesting, no? A throwaway line from a SF book about something that, in 2013, seems so natural. Traditional paper books will never die. Of that, I'm convinced. I will almost always still purchase them--I'm reading one now: Alan Dean Foster's Icerigger--but I really do love the convenience and portability of ebooks. And I'm glad that I'm not alone in the odd idiosyncrasy of changing reading habits.

For those of y'all who do read ebooks, how do you find your titles other than reading book reviews?

The Problem with Parker

By Russel D McLean
 

“When a fresh-faced guy in a chevy offered him a lift, Parker told him to go to hell.”*

That’s how readers met professional criminal Parker in 1962.  Parker strode across the Brooklyn bridge, after escaping near death and deciding to get the money he was owed by his double crossing accomplices. Donald E Westlake had imagined this character on just such a stroll (except Westlake wasn’t out for revenge, just fresh air), the professional thief springing almost fully formed into the writer’s mind.

“His hands, swinging curve-fingered at his sides, looked like they were moulded of brown clay by a sculptor  who thought big and liked veins… the office women looked at him and shivered. They knew he was a bastard, they knew his big hands were born to slap with, they knew his face would never break into a smile when he looked at a woman. They knew what he was, they thanked God for their husbands and still they shivered. Because they knew how he would fall on a woman in the night. Like a tree.”**

There is no questioning the danger that Parker represents within the first page of The Hunter. We don’t know who he is and what he wants, but we know he’s dangerous and he doesn’t give a damn for anyone. And we know that while men don’t want to be him and women don’t want to be with him, that he’s still someone we can’t help but watch, can’t help but be fascinated by. He’s beyond the “bad boy” that we’re used to. He’s a whole different beast. He’s terrifying and alluring; utterly amoral in the truest sense. And he’s a dream to Hollywood; a guy who has no qualms about getting physical, who will single mindedly and ruthlessly pursue his goal.

So why can’t anyone get him right when they try and bring him to the silver screen?

Eight times, movie-makers have tried to get to grips with this force of nature posing as a criminal. And six times so far, they have failed. Even the first time out, when Jean Luc Goddard turned Parker into a woman for Made in the USA, the medium of film utterly failed to understand what made Parker, well, Parker. Nothing to do with the sex changes, but a lot to do with the attitude. As with many film makers who would follow, Goddard would fail to understand the essence of Parker.

“Usually I don’t put an actor’s face to the character, though with Parker, in the early days, I did think he probably looked something like Jack Palance. That may be partly because you knew Palance wasn’t faking it, and Parker wasn’t faking it either. Never once have I caught him winking at the reader.”***

Maybe Westlake never got his wish, but Hollywood almost got it right in 1967. Lee Marvin – using the name Walker – appeared on screen in a character-defining performance for the movie Point Blank. Sure, Marvin talked a little more than the Parker in the books and there’s a little scene where we see him woo his wife that feels slightly off base, but never once does Marvin wink at the camera. He doesn’t even have to hurt someone to scare the hell out of them. All it takes is a look and you see a man who doesn’t care who he has to walk through to get his money back. This version of Parker is completely stripped back. He has one goal. He wants the money he’s owed. And he’ll do anything to get it back. Even when he’s told the money is gone, he acts like he doesn’t understand. Economics of crime be damned, Parker’s owed money and once he’s got it, that’s him done.

Parker is a man defined by what he does. And what he does is steal. He doesn’t do it for kicks so much as he does it because, well, what the hell else is going to do? His amorality makes him the most moral man in his world. Parker won’t kill you unless he has to****. He won’t get in your way unless you have something he wants. And he won’t wisecrack. He doesn’t know how.

All of this (and the on-screen winking) is why Mel Gibson was among the worst choices to remake the by-then classic movie under the title Payback in ’99. Every time I catch this movie I think about Raymond Chandler on Allan Ladd:

“A small boy’s idea of a tough guy.”

That’s Mel all over in Payback. Parker/Porter smirks and gurns his way through the movie, with this kind of ironic smugness that belies everything about the character. Marvin, unlike Gibson, had an instinctual understanding of the essence of Parker: he’s a professional. He is, in Donald E Westlake’s own words, a “man at work.”

Which is why, when the appalling Slayground (with Peter Coyote as “Stone”) came out in ‘83, the film failed even before they deviated so far from the plot that it became a bizarre London-based slasher film with Mel Smith popping up in a bizarre guest appearance.

Stone emotes. All the time. Talks about his feelings. Shows concern for characters that Parker would consider to be idiots best left to their own fate. It’s hard to see how he has the reputation he does, given how appalling his planning of the initial robbery is, and then his plan to deal with the fallout… well I’m not sure what the plan was exactly, but somehow it involves a plane to London just one step ahead of a killer who’s modelled after the then-popular psycho killers of straight to video nasties. It’s a bad film, and a truly terrible approach to the character.

The French had another stab at Parker in 1967 with Mise A Sac (based on the novel, The Seventh). I’ve heard good things about the movie but have never run across a print. It was never, to my knowledge, released with English subtitles. And lots of people have good memories of Robert Duvall in The Outfit. And I’ve never see the Chow Yun Fat starring Full Contact, which again is allegedly based upon the Hunter.

Marvin remains the touchstone. For me, and so many others. He doesn’t have to say anything to creep us out. Check the scene where he threatens the secretary by simply whispering something to her we can’t hear, and tell me you don’t get chills.

Will Jason Statham be able to match Marvin?

On the plus side of the column, they could have chosen Danny Dyer for the role. And Statham has a line in tough nut action. But it doesn’t look like it’ll be enough.

Statham’s persona tends to wink too much at the camera, exude a false machismo that’s designed for a specific kind of action fan. To work as Parker, Statham would need to dial back his blokey bonhomie and find a real sense of driving purpose that isn’t merely misplaced anger. Parker is about attitude. He’s not a man who cares about other people or about justice (even his own misplaced sense of it). He’s a man who cares about what is owed him, about the job and little else. He has no family, he has no love interest (other than Claire, who appears in the later novels, but even then there is the sense that if push came to shove he could still walk away from that relationship).

Admittedly, a brit has already played Parker in all but name. Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey was a Parker homage, with the lead played by Terrence Stamp. Admittedly, Stamp’s character was searching for his daughter’s killer – Parker doesn’t have family, or if he does he doesn’t care to mention them – but that single minded ruthlessness was all Parker and Soderbergh even admits the massive influence of the 1967 Point Blank on his style. Even screenwriter Lem Dobbs admitted to Parker fansite, The Violent World of Parker, that the original title of the screenplay (and name of the character) was “Stark” in clear homage to the pseudonymous creator of Parker.

Statham will have to pull something really special out of the bag to match Stamp and, of course, Marvin. He will need to give Parker more depth than his usual style allows for, let us see a man of massive intelligence. Parker may use violence, but it’s not always his end-game. He is, after all, an intelligent man. He’s cunning. Ruthless. Deadly. And unlike Statham, he never winks.

After all, he’s eluded Hollywood and the silver screen all these years, leaving onscreen only shadows and hints of his presence as though he was never really there to begin with. But then, that’s the way Parker likes it. He’s not in it to be famous. He’s in it for the job. There is no ego. Only money. That’s all he wants. The money he’s owed.

Maybe when Hollywood understands that, maybe then we’ll once more get the Parker we deserve.


*The Hunter by Donald E Westlake
**ibid
***An interview with Donald Westlake at the University of Chicago Press: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/westlake_interview.html
****Look, let’s not mention the “rules” that Statham’s Parker waffles on about in the trailers; Parker never explicitly states his mortality, but we as readers merely understand it from observing him.

Runaway Victims

By Jay Stringer

First to a little bit of bidness. My second crime novel Runaway Town is out next week. But you already knew that, right? Did you know that the song of the same title is out this week? For Old Gold I released a Spotify playlist that acted as a soundtrack to the book.

I'll be doing the same for book 2, but I wanted to try something else. I even tried writing a song myself, but I'm so many years past being a song-writer that I don't think that skill is in my toolbox anymore. I was talking to a friend of mine -who writes catchy songs under the name 8-Bit Ninjas- and the book's title gelled with something he had in mind.

We discussed the themes of the book, and he channelled some ideas that had been kicking around his head. We share a hometown, though we've both moved away,  and the song he wrote perfectly caught the mood I'd had in mind while writing the book. He writes of being being used and abused, and of a town going wrong, and does it with a melancholy voice that could have belonged to the narrator of the book, but sets it to a driving chord progression and, and course, some 8-Bit catchiness.

Not only that, but the song is also a good listen while reading the rest of today's post. So why not give it a go? It's a fun idea that lead to a fun experiment and the result is a great song. I hear there may be an album soon.

It's less than a quid in UK moneys and is available on Spotify, Itunes, Bandcamp

Do it. 

Last week I waxed lengthy-like about some of the issues that spring from the setting I choose to write in. These are the things that you can't ignore. They might not be the story you first set out to tell, but if you pick a setting and then ignore that settings voice, you're going to fail. 

This week I wanted to talk about what first set me writing the book. And I better give out a trigger warning, just in case. 

Victims. Violence. 

"Some say land of paradise. Some say land of pain. Which side are you looking on?"

-Uncle Tupelo

Violence in fiction and the media seems to be a very relative thing. We have no problem seeing people being beaten, tortured, stabbed or shot, but if someone swears or -yikes- shows a little nudity we lose our shit. There is a debate to be had on the casualisation of violence. We know this because blogs have spent years having that very debate. I'm not talking about that, and I think violence has an important part to play in fiction. What sets my spine itching is the casualisation of victims. 

We live in a world full of victims. There are children, women, men, ethnic minorities and immigrants across the globe being turned into commodities, or beaten, or starving, or used as scape-goats. And in fiction we do some extremely violent things to these people, and often skate on by to the next bit in the story. I'm sure we've all heard of that million-selling book that purports to be about how men hate women and how they are used and abused. The same book and film that then goes on to depict a graphic scene of the woman being reduced to a victim. (But hey, it's okay, she gets a revenge scene later, so that excuses it.) Just as we see crime fiction that wants to talk about human trafficking (which is a valid issue to explore) but only in terms of impossibly attractive and well-lit women being forced to do kinky things on screen or page. If the choices we make in talking about exploitation are to exploit, are we examining the issue or using it? And it often seems to be the way. I watched the film Seven Psychopaths and there's a scene when the writer played by Colin Farrell is criticised for having terrible female characters. It feels like the films writer is speaking directly of his own work. Farrell thinks for a moment then says what his script is saying is that it's a terrible world for women. And it is. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has used that excuse at one point or another to excuse a blind spot in our work. But if you're aware enough to know -as it seemed the films writer was- that your work is weak on female characters, maybe just set about fixing that rather than cracking a joke? 

"They're making it easy not to try."

-8-Bit Ninjas

Victims also seem to be relative.

The media tells us that the aggressors are the real victims and that the real victims are to blame. We don't have to go far right now to see that at work. and this isn't just me being on a soapbox about the treatment of women, this is about the treatment of all victims. McFet would probably write a very interesting bit here about the treatment of the working class in fiction and the media, and he's right. We take away the human faces. It's all too casual, all too easy. 

There was a time when crime fiction didn't deal with grief very well. It was the dirty secret that all of the actions we wrote about would produce grief in the real world, but that got in the way of getting to the next bit of the story. Then we started to talk about this a lot, and writers started exploring grief. There are great writers out there who've been doing that very well for a while now. 

When I sat down to write Runaway Town I couldn't help but think about the other kinds of grief. Not just of someone we've lost, but of parts of ourselves that we're losing day by day, and of the parts of themselves that a victim never gets back after the event.  How does violence change us? What does it say about us when we choose who to inflict our violence upon? And how do we get back up again after having violence inflicted upon us?  I wanted to try-It's for others to decide whether I succeeded- to put my story eye to eye with these people. To let them talk about what happened and to not be looking for excuses to do anything else. 

"When this world was made, it was never meant to save everyone in kind. I don't believe God much had me, had me much in mind."

-Ben Nichols