Dave's Fiction Warehouse

I've had a hard time figuring out what to say about No Country For Old Men , the movie based on Cormac McCarthy's bleak novel of the same name. My first reaction on coming out of the theater Friday night: I liked it a lot -- right up until the abrupt ending. One guy in the theater actually cried out, "What the hell?" From what I could see, It was a reaction widely shared. Having read the book, I wasn't expecting Home Alone . But the novel's nihilism was leavened somewhat by some reflective passages toward the end that left you with the feeling that the story had been told; that if morality is meaningless, at least it helps you sleep at night. The movie tries to do the same thing with a single short soliloquy and a cut to black, and I don't think it works. Still, anybody who appreciates the craft of movie-making should see it, because there's so much to admire. Start with the casting: It's hard now to see how anyone but Javier Bardem could play the ...

My staff here at the warehouse has departed early for the Thanksgiving weekend, disregarding my explicit instructions to make sure the Big Box O' Blog Ideas was full before leaving. Also, someone appears to have raided the petty cash drawer. It's so hard to get reliable help these days. Anyway, once again I'm going to have to pull something out of my ... well, let's just say I'll have to make something up. Since I've read no books, seen no movies and watched no television in the past couple of days, this is harder than it looks. Hmmm. Perhaps something with a Thanksgiving theme? So when's the last time you read a mystery where Thanksgiving, the holiday, was a prominent element in the story? I can name a dozen Christmas-themed crime novels just off the top of my head, and probably as many set around Halloween. Several for the Fourth of July, even one or two for Valentine's Day. But Thanksgiving doesn't seem a great inspiration for mystery writers. It...

Here's the kind of report guaranteed to make a curmudgeon's head explode: The National Endowment for the Arts has discovered that on average, Americans ages 15 to 24 spend almost two hours a day watching TV, and only seven minutes of their daily leisure time on reading. Seven minutes? That much? I'm trying to think of the last time I saw someone 15 to 24 reading a book or a newspaper. Maybe they only do it one minute at a time, at different times of the day, so it's hard to catch them at it. The predictable reaction, of course, is to lament the decline of literacy and prophesy doom for America. But really, does it matter? If so few young people are reading these days, maybe it's because it doesn't matter. People have to eat to survive, and endlessly fiddle with their iPods, but they don't have to read. So why should they bother? Presumably, there will always be a small subset of humanity capable of reading something to them, should the need arise. I here...

You've probably heard of Amazon's Kindle. It's like a book, only it costs $399 -- just like every other electronic gadget now on the market. Notice how everything costs $399? When I was a boy, everything cost $1.98. Except for DC comics, which, at the beginning of my Superman period, would fetch anywhere from 10 to 12 cents. I mocked the concept of an e-reader back in September , but now that Amazon has rolled out the Kindle, I've prepared a guide to help decide if there should be one under your Family Tree this Holiday Season. 1. Do you like to read more than one book at once? If so, you'll want the Kindle, because it will store 200 of them. And they won't be just any books, but selected titles from publishers that have inked a deal with Amazon, so freshness is guaranteed. Imagine that: carrying around a big bag full of books in a package about the size of a Stephen King novel, though hopefully not as heavy. Click a few buttons, accidentally shut it off and ...

I haven't yet read P.D. James' 1992 novel The Children of Men , and after seeing the movie a second time, I'm not sure I want to. This is a departure for me, but the movie's such a cinematic tour de force I can't see how the book would not pale in comparison. It may be one of the rare cases ( Blade Runner is another) where the screen adaptation outperforms the source material by a large margin. I saw Children of Men on the big screen just after Christmas last year. At the time, I was blown away by three long single-shot sequences that appeared almost impossibly complex to choreograph. I've since discovered that a bit of editing was involved in each, but those scenes delivered such a visceral punch that I was determined to see them again. So thanks to my friends at Netflix, I watched the movie a second time last night, this time on the small screen. Bottom line: This is still the best film of 2006, and I'm still incredulous that it earned no Oscars (it wa...

I'm taking a short break from reading crime fiction. One reason for this is that I haven't seen my brother Mike in awhile, and I always rely on him to load me up with boxes of paperbacks, which he consumes like popcorn. Then I'm still working on the novel, a project that proceeds at a glacial pace despite the impetus of getting a new computer to write it on. Finally, I think it's a good idea for any writer to stray outside the genre once in awhile. Which is why I recently bought Ken Follett's World Without End . Many years ago (about 17, I guess) I picked up his Pillars of the Earth expecting to be bored silly and found that I couldn't put it down. Set in 12th-century England during the construction of the fictional Knightsbridge cathedral, it's one of those sweeping old-school historical novels that spans decades. World Without End is the sequel. This will sound churlish, but I should mention that I discovered it quite on my own, without Oprah Winfrey...

HBO has the best show on TV with The Wire , so it's probably fair to point out that it also has the worst: the bleak and tedious Tell Me You Love Me . Because of the buzz about the explicit sex scenes, I caught portions of this overly-earnest angstfest during its first season. But I had never forced myself to sit through a full episode -- a precaution I unwisely cast aside for the season finale. It's an hour of my life I will never get back. The show is not only as bad as my initial impression -- it's far worse. How do I hate this show? Let me count the ways: The casting: All white couples, all pretty much the same age, all with the same acting coach. Two of these women and two of the men are indistinguishable from each other. The men all remind you of Darren on Bewitched , except they never smile. The women, I think, must be sisters. One is tortured by the lack of sex and one is tortured by not being able to have a baby. All three are tortured by general dissatisfaction, ...

I recently read the much-lauded Wash This Blood Clean From My Hands , by French author Fred Vargas, and like many others found it quirky and engaging. Her deft writing left me happy to have found another series character to follow: Commissaire Adamsberg. But that's not what this post is about. I've decided that others do a lot better job with reviews than I do, and I hate laboring over my shallow insights only to find later that I've echoed what everybody else said a long time before. (And yes, I can hear you saying: "But that's never stopped you before." True enough. Nor will it now.) So, short version: Wash This Blood is a good book. Buy it. But for all the talk about it being "eccentric" or even "kooky," it does share one key device with nearly all other detective fiction: the sidekick. Adamsberg's reliance on gut instinct and intuition is sharply defined by the hard-nosed, scientific approach of his second in command, Capitaine ...

Recently, at the invitation of my oldest daughter, I created a profile on Facebook. It's not much of a profile: the same stupid picture I use here, a brief mention of my interests, the sort of music I listen to, favorite books and movies and so forth. So far, I have gathered together an elite cadre of three friends. That includes the daughter. ( Not sure who that doofus is in the picture; wonder if he'd like to be my friend ). Friends are the currency of Facebook; like dollars, you can never have too many. The first thing you must do, after listing a few zany personal details, is start inviting everybody you can think of to be your friend. Everybody, no exceptions. I haven't gotten around to that yet, but when I do, I expect to have so many friends that Facebook will have to add another server just to accommodate them all. Good friends. Then, when my page displays all the avatars, it will slow the Internet to a crawl. Until then, I'm making do with just the three. We...

Somewhere in the last few months, I came across a discussion of the use of supernatural elements in crime fiction. I can't recall any novel that uses them so overtly, and so well, as The Coroner's Lunch , by Colin Cotterill. In this story of an aging Lao doctor pressed into running the country's only morgue following the Communist takeover of 1975, the supernatural consists not just of the odd hunch and prescient dream, but is an integral part of the story itself. Dr. Siri Paiboun has little equipment and even less training in forensic science, so the aid he receives from the spirit world is fortuitous. Think how it might help the CSI: Miami crew if the ghosts of crime victims were available to offer tips during the autopsy. Fortunately, Cotterill has created a memorable and amusing character in whom such paranormal phenomena do not seem too convenient, and do not obviate the need for conventional sleuthing. When a dog begins behaving oddly, for example, or the mark of a ...

I can't be bothered to properly review the movies I see. It takes too much time and too much thought, and if I go on for more than three or four paragraphs, it becomes painfully evident that I'm no Pauline Kael. Then again, I always need something to blog about. So here are a few thoughts on American Gangster , which I saw last night in the company of the brunette, a bottle of wine and a platter of hors d'oeuvres, ensconced in a luxurious balcony loveseat at the 13th Street Warren Theatre here in Wichita. Let me tell you, even crappy movies are good under those optimal conditions. Fortunately, American Gangster is not a crappy movie. (I hereby grant Universal permission to use the preceding sentence in promotional materials.) Denzel Washington plays real-life heroin kingpin Frank Lucas, who created his drug empire the American way: by eliminating the middle man. Lucas personally met growers in Thailand and arranged to have 100 percent pure heroin shipped back to the state...

It's taken about four months , but thanks to my good friends at Netflix I'm finally through the first three seasons of The Wire . A pair of clueless cats roused me about four this morning, and since I couldn't get back to sleep I watched the last two episodes on my laptop. I'm now willing to concede that my son and mother-in-law are right: This show really is better than The Sopranos , that other HBO series I've wasted too many hours on. While not perfect, I've come to admire the writing and plotting above all else. David Chase knew how to craft memorable characters and conflicts; The Wire 's David Simon and company know how tell stories, and -- more importantly -- how to conclude them. Each season of The Wire unfolds like a 12-part novel, with a genuine beginning, middle and end. Story arcs never really seemed to matter with The Sopranos -- a point that became maddeningly clear in the finale, when Chase simply jerked out the plug and mocked those who exp...

It's no sign of my blogging prowess that roughly eight out of 10 of my posts concern J.K. Rowling, but here goes another one. The creator of gay icon Dumbledore has finished her first work since closing out the Potter series: The Tales of Beedle the Bard . It's about the failure of the U.S. intelligence apparatus in the run-up to the Iraq War. No, really it's a collection of fairy stories, and the title comes from a book mentioned in Deathly Hallows as a gift from Dumbledore to Hermione. Yes, somebody could have fun with the book description, but it won't be me. In case you're thinking of being first in line at Barnes & Noble, you'll be waiting a long time. Only seven copies of Beedle the Bard will be in print. It's ironic that the pinnacle of success puts Rowling on the same level as me, when it comes to readership. Seven turns out to be the same number of people who read my latest short story. Maybe we can do lunch sometime.