Literary highlights of Comic-Con

By now most everyone has packed up and left San Diego in the wake of Comic-Con, which wrapped up its four-day run Sunday. The conference is a gigantic celebration of comics, movies and fan culture; this year, there were a few particularly bookish highlights.

John Cusack talked about playing Edgar Allan Poe in "The Raven." The 2012 film, named after the author's famous poem, focuses on the mysterious last days of Poe's life -- he died at age 40 in 1849 in Baltimore, possibly from overindulgence in alcohol. "I saw some of Hunter S. Thompson in Poe -- his unflinching ability to delve into the abyss and come back. He reminded me of Hunter in that way," Cusack said at his panel, where he called the author "the godfather of Goth." Hero Complex reports that to amp up the story of the writer's final days, the filmmakers have thrown in a serial killer plot. Oh, Hollywood.

Poe was seen elsewhere at the convention, specifically, on the faces of the audience at the preview of Francis Ford Coppola's movie "Twixt." The film is an original script by Coppola, and is about a horror writer (played by Val Kilmer, who also attended) whose career is in decline and who begins having dreams of orphan girls and a certain long-dead author. The movie is partially -- only partially -- in 3-D, and the Poe masks served as 3-D glasses. Coppola told Hero Complex:

[W]e were in Constantinople and I was meeting with a Turkish lawyer whose sister shows up at dinner and they start giving me this beverage called raki, which is very alcoholic, and I went home to my hotel, fell asleep and had this vivid dream. It was all this Edgar Allan Poe imagery and the scary forest and this little girl with braces saying, “You’re looking at my teeth! You’re looking at my teeth!” and children coming out of a grave in the floor, and then Edgar Allan Poe shows up and I was saying, “This is a gift. I’m being given a story” and I said to Poe, “Guide me.”

If that's not enough Poe for you, stay tuned for a possible Poe television show. In January, ABC picked up a pilot for "a crime procedural" that stars Poe, "the world's very first detective, as he uses unconventional methods to investigate dark mysteries in 1840s Boston." Right.

But back to Comic-Con. For the first time the top prize at the Eisner Awards ended in a tie. Both "Wilson" by Daniel Clowes and "Return of the Dapper Men" by Jim McCann and Janet Lee were awarded the Best Graphic Album-New prize, the top graphic novel award at the Eisners. Other winners included writer Joe Hill for his work on "Locke and Key"; Hill is the son of novelist Stephen King.

Another first: Steven Spielberg made his first ever Comic-Con appearance, with his adaptation of Hergé's classic comic series, "The Adventures of Tintin." The well-loved series launched in 1929 and has been published in 80 languages. Before Spielberg began showing footage from his motion-capture film, he asked, "How many here have ever read a Tintin book?" and recieved a cheer in response, Hero Complex reports. "That makes my job easier," Spielberg said. 

Another literary adaptation discussed at Comic-Con was "Paradise Lost," an adaptation of John Milton's epic poem. Star Bradley Cooper, who read the classic work as an undergrad at Georgetown University, appeared on a panel where he talked about taking on the role of Lucifer. Cooper's take: It's an "intimate family story" and he'll be giving the devil his own sympathetic spin.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photos, from top: John Cusack as Edgar Allan Poe on the set of "The Raven" in Budapest in 2010; Poe masks at Comic-Con. Credits: Bea Kallos / European Pressphoto Agency; Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times

 

Happy birthday, Raymond Chandler!

Raymond Chandler was born on this day in 1888 in Chicago to an Irish mother who, when he was 8, took him to England -- his father, a railroad man, had split. Chandler later returned to America and made his way to Los Angeles back when the city was young, in 1913. He'd go on -- eventually -- to become of one of Los Angeles' finest crime writers. Or rather, finest writers, period.

The author of "The Big Sleep," "Farewell My Lovely" and "The Long Goodbye" didn't start writing until he was well into his 40s; his first book was published when he was 50 years old. In our pages, I wrote about what it's like sharing a birthday with Chandler, whose life choices could be troubling -- he drank so much he was fired from his job in as an oil executive -- but whose writing was iconic.

After seeing that article, writer Geoff Nicholson sent me a link to an amazing 1957 interview between Ian Fleming and Raymond Chandler on the BBC. It was the first time I'd heard Chandler speak, a strange and marvelous experience. He's a little moody, a little distracted, and quite possibly drunk. The two were, apparently, sitting in the same studio in England.

Here are some of the Chandler-focused highlights from the interview, which was supposed to be a conversation between the two writers -- but Chandler lets Fleming do all the hard work.

Fleming starts things off: "In my mind, you don't write thrillers, and I do," he says. "You write novels of suspense."

"In America, a thriller, a mystery writer as we call them, is slightly below the salt," Chandler says (what a phrase: "below the salt"). When Fleming notes that Chandler's writing, with Dashiell Hammett's, is taken seriously, Chandler admits that maybe it is. "How long did it take me? You starve to death for 10 years before your publisher knows you're any good."

Fleming: Where do you get your material? Always a California setting ...

Chandler: Well, I lived many years in Los Angeles, and Los Angeles had never been written about. California had been written about -- a book called "Ramona," a lot of sentimental slop. But nobody in my time had tried to write about Los Angeles' background in any sort of realistic way. Of course now, half the writers in America live in California. (here Chandler cracks up, and it's a sort of backward-inhaling, self-aware laugh that seems trademarkedly geeky to me).

Fleming asks about Nathanael West, who Chandler insists came along much later -- which Fleming, who seems to realize that the onus is on him to make these 25 minutes of radio work, lets slide. In fact, the last of West's books, "The Day of the Locust," came out in 1939, the year Chandler's first novel, "The Big Sleep," was published.

The next line of questioning gets strange. Fleming mentions a killing in New York having to do with racketeering and the docks. "How is a killing like that arranged?" Fleming asks, as if Chandler, merely by nature of being an American crime writer, might know the inner workings of the New York mob. Chandler at first demurs, but, when pressed, starts spinning a tale -- and darned if I don't think he's just making it up, just fictionizing right on the spot. Fleming wants details, how much they get paid, whether the killers wear gloves. "How many fingerprints have been taken off guns?" scoffs Chandler. "Yes, quite," Fleming muses.

Fleming, unable to coax Chandler into asking him anything about his work, volunteers that he's just finished his next book. Chandler perks up, interested. "What's it called?" Fleming replies, with a kind of juicy excitement, "Goldfinger." It takes Chandler a few tries to get it, but we know it, and it's thrilling to imagine Fleming sitting there on another Bond masterpiece, rubbing his hands like a classic Bond villain, thinking, yes, yes, this one is going to be good.

Earlier, Chandler had said, "I don't ever in my own mind think anybody's a villain." Now, he takes a different tack, asking how Fleming can write so many books; Fleming says he writes a book each year during the two months he spends in Jamaica. "I can't write a book in two months," Chandler cries, almost offended.

Late in the discussion, Fleming asks directly if the Philip Marlowe character is based on Chandler himself. "Not deliberately," Chandler hedges. "If so, it just happened."

But earlier, Fleming was talking about leading men. "Your hero, Philip Marlowe, is a real hero. He behaves in a heroic fashion. My leading character, James Bond, I never intended him to be a hero. I intended him to be a blunt instrument wielded by a government department, who would get into bizarre and fantastic situations and more or less hoot his way out of them. He's always referred to him as my hero, but I don't see him as a hero myself."

"You ought to," Chandler replies. They talk about emotions in both characters, which Fleming says Marlowe has more of than Bond. "A man in his [Bond's] job can't afford tender emotions. He feels them, but he has to quell them." Chandler says. About Marlowe, he explains, "He's always confused," then you hear his chuffing laugh. Quietly, he adds, "He's like me."

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Raymond Chandler in 1946. Credit: Associated Press

Tom Cruise, perfect to play Lee Child's 6-foot-5 tough

Tom Cruise is in talks to play Jack Reacher, the 6-foot-5 tough guy created by author Lee Child. And Child says he doesn't mind that the actor, 10 inches shorter and perhaps a bit older than his fictional killer, may take on the role.

"Reacher's size in the books is a metaphor for an unstoppable force, which Cruise portrays in his own way," Child said, according to Deadline Hollywood, which has an exclusive report on the potential film deal.

Although the exact film in which Cruise may star is based on the Jack Reacher book "One Shot," the character figures in 15 books by Child. The latest, "Worth Dying For," hit the L.A. Times bestseller list. In all, Deadline Hollywood reports, Child's Jack Reacher books have sold more than 40 million copies.

Kenneth Turan explained the character in our pages in 2009:

As he details in his resume in "Gone Tomorrow," he started out in the Army, "thirteen years a military policeman, the elite 110th investigative unit, service all over the world." Then, when the Cold War ended, "suddenly getting cut loose."

On his own, Reacher decides less is more. He travels around the country with no luggage, no belongings, no home, nothing to tie him down. He goes with the flow to a certain extent, like those tourists who want to leave only footprints, but at a certain point something happens while he's around and he has no choice but to get involved and tidy up. ...

One of the great conceits of the Reacher novels, however, is [in the novel "Gone Tomorrow"] in force and that is the tendency of the folks he deals with to consistently underestimate him. Unlike Sherlock Holmes or Paul Temple, Reacher is not known to the criminal world, and the bad guys are always telling him, "Stay away from this," "You're out of your depth" and the ever-popular "You got lucky." You want to scream at them, "This is Jack Reacher for pity's sake, he'll eat you for breakfast!" He will, you know, and that's why we keep coming back for more.

If all goes as planned, "One Shot," starring Tom Cruise, will film in Pittsburgh before Cruise begins work on another film scheduled to begin shooting in January. But is Jack Reacher a match for Batman? Because "The Dark Knight Rises" is scheduled to film on those same city streets this summer.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise at a premiere in New York in September 2010. Credit: Evan Agostini / Associated Press

In our pages: John Le Carré still looks good

John Le Carré's classic, seminal spy novel "Tinker, Tailer, Soldier, Spy" has been reissued by Penguin with a new introduction by the author. In it he reveals that an early draft of the novel proved so frustrating that he took it outside and burned it.

When he started over, Richard Rayner writes in today's L.A. Times, Le Carré came up with what is "perhaps the greatest spy novel written."

The reader's unlikely guide through these labyrinthine intricacies is George Smiley, a plodding, padding spy-as-bureaucrat .... he's a mournful aging hero as determinedly unglamorous as he is dogged and brilliant. Le Carré introduces him thus: "[H]e was by appearance one of London's meek who do not inherit the earth. His legs were short, his gait anything but agile, his dress costly, ill-fitting, and extremely wet."

Smiley's overcoat has a "hint of widowhood" about it, and his serially unfaithful wife, the lovely Ann, says he looks like "an egg-cosy." James Bond or Jason Bourne, Smiley is not. He's presented to us as being out of favor, living in enforced retirement, shabbily treated as the result of a secret op botched by his former boss and mentor, a character known simply as "Control" who, in the latter stages of his career and life, became obsessed with the idea that the Soviets had turned his networks inside-out through the agency of a mole.

Read Rayner's full review.

This fall, a film version of "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" will hit theaters just before Thanksgiving, starring Gary Oldman (will I be the only one in the theater trying to reconcile Joe Orton, Sid Vicious and George Smiley?). Alec Guiness starred as Smiley in the 1979 version "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy," produced for television by the BBC.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: John Le Carré in 2008. Credit: Cristian Barnett / Hodder & Stoughton

Don Winslow's 'Savages' gets film and prequel

Mystery writer Don Winslow is getting an unexpected bonus out of Oliver Stone's adaptation of his book "Savages," about pot growers in Southern California getting in too deep.

First, the film begins shooting next month with the Oscar-winning director at the helm. With Stone comes a star-heavy cast, including John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Emile Hirsch, Salma Hayek, Taylor Kitsch, Blake Lively, Aaron Johnson and Benicio Del Toro.

So what's the bonus? Winslow is now writing a prequel to "Savages," an idea that came out of working with Stone and screenplay co-author Shane Salerno, Deadline Hollywood reports. Not coincidentally, the new prequel will be published by Simon & Schuster around the time of the film's release in 2012.

"Savages," which juxtaposes high-end California living with the dangers of the drug trade, includes a powerful drug cartel, a beautiful girl's kidnapping and a dangerous criminal scheme. Our reviewer called it a "marvelous, adrenaline-juiced roller coaster of a novel" and it includes lines such as: "You can spend fifty thousand years practicing meditation or you can buy a gun." 

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Don Winslow in 2008. Credit: Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times

 

The official trailer for 'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo'

Director David Fincher's adaptation of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" is, the trailer promises, going to be the feel-bad movie of Christmas.

The film stars Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig. The music? That's Karen O covering Led Zeppelin with the help of Trent Reznor.

Although the trailer is little more than quick cuts and dark, stylish shots, you don't need to learn the plot -- you already know what the movie's about. Stieg Larsson's "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" is a longstanding L.A. Times bestseller. So are its sequels, "The Girl Who Played With Fire" and "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest."

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

 

Epistemology and Scandinavian crime fiction: 'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo' in a new light

What could be more exciting than reading about Lisbeth Salander? Listening to academics discuss Lisbeth Salander.

Who needs "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" when you've got the presentation "The Millennium Trilogy in Genre Historical Light: Stieg Larsson and the Swedish Tradition(s) of Socially Critical Crime Fiction"?

Why page through "The Girl Who Played With Fire" when you could attend "From Periphery to Center: women in Scandinavian 'Femi-crimie'"?

Set aside that copy of "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest": "Negotiating Swedishness in the 21st Century: Swedish, European, and African Alterities in Henning Mankell's Crime Novels" awaits.

That's just a sampling of panels at the symposium "Stieg Larsson and Scandinavian Crime Fiction" taking place right here in Los Angeles, at UCLA's Royce Hall. Presented by the Scandinavian Section at UCLA, the Nordic Council of Ministers and the Embassy of Sweden, the event begins Friday at 8:30 a.m. and continues through a 4:30 p.m. presentation on Sunday.

The highlight of the event may be Friday's keynote address by Daniel Alfredson, the director of the Swedish film adaptations of "The Girl Who Played With Fire" and "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest."

Or it might be one of the academic talks, presented by an array of international scholars. Other presentations include "Representing and Investigating: Epistemology and Scandinavian Crime Fiction," "Solving crimes in sagas: Society, law and narrative in early Iceland," "Conventionally Unconventional: Lisbeth Salander's Sisters in Crime," "Is there Room for a Bad Cop? Contemporary Finnish Crime Fiction and the Demand of Realism" and "The Outlaw Heroine: Lisbeth Salander, Smilla Qaaviqaaq, Jaspersen, and the Ecology of Crime."

The Stieg Larsson and Scandinavian Crime Fiction symposium is free and open to the public; guest parking on UCLA campus is $10.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander in the Swedish version of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo." Credit: Music Box Films

 

Mary Higgins Clark & Carol Higgins Clark: Mysteries of a mother-daughter writing team

“How in the world did you do this? How did the two of you make this wonderful mother-daughter mystery-book-writing team when my daughter and I can barely make cookies together?” asked Los Angeles Times reporter Mary McNamara with genuine awe as she sat between suspense novelists Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark on Sunday at USC’s Bing Theater.

Daughter Carol Higgins Clark explained that it  mostly started by accident. Noticing how overwhelmed her recently widowed mother was, balancing several jobs  while raising  five children, Carol volunteered to retype the manuscript to one of her mother’s suspense novels (this was back when computers were just a silly fantasy).  Carol did this for several novels; learning from her mother’s writing, asking questions and making valid suggestions. It did not take long before Carol realized that she had a passion as well as a knack for writing suspense. It was then that her mother bestowed  invaluable advice: “If someone is mean to you, make them the next victim in your book,” Carol shared, with a good-natured smile.  

Today, mother and daughter still sit proudly side by side, Mary just having completed her 30^th novel, a suspense novel about identity theft, murder and kidnaping titled “I’ll Walk Alone” and Carol having completed her 14^th novel titled “Mobbed,” a fast-paced mystery filled with Carol’s trademark humor. The two not only write in the same genre, but over the past eleven years they have co-authored five Christmas suspense novels.

The Clarks discussed that one of the greatest challenges when writing mystery and suspense today is that with all the technology and social media available, it is difficult to set a suspense story in the modern day without making it seem incredibly simple to get in touch with a missing individual. “Between Facebook,  Twitter, cellphones and text messages, if someone goes missing today for even a few hours, you are already worrying and you are already turning to one of these modes of communication to contact them,” said Carol. McNamara emphasized this dilemma and  got laughs laughs from audience members when she explained, “Right, like Romeo and Juliet. If that happened today, she could just text Romeo and say ‘I’m not dead. Don’t worry.’”

However, through challenges and struggles, Mary and Carol Higgins Clark have succeeded in finding their own unique voice and style, always writing according to what they enjoy reading. Mary shared her advice to hopeful writers and said, “Look at your bookshelves and ask yourself, ‘What do I pick up at the end of the day? What do I take on airplanes with me?’ That’s where the treasure lies — that’s where you belong and that’s what you should write.”

-- Jasmine Elist

Photo: Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clarkat the 2011 Festival of Books. Credit: David Livingston/Getty Images

Festival of Books: The death stats behind those crime thrillers

What does it mean when we talk about crime syndicates today? The panel "Mystery: Organized Crime" on Saturday morning explored the topic and the changing nature of criminal groups lurking in the shadows and, often, right out there under our noses. Criminal organizations are extremely structured, explained moderator April Smith, whose Ana Grey series of thrillers continues in June with "White Shotgun."

How structured?

"It's a shadow market that cycles drugs, people, merchandise," said Smith, whose new book pits Grey against Mafia forces in Siena, Italy. "It's a $2-trillion industry that's transnational. Organizations that you all have probably heard of -- the Yakuza, the Mafia, Mexican cartels, Eastern European groups -- are in bed together."

T. Jefferson Parker laid out other statistics -- the death count in Mexico over the last five years, he said, is about 40,000 people -- and also the problem with these stats. The problem?

"Numbers go in one ear and out the other," explained Parker, whose most recent novels, including "The Border Lords," portray the struggle between Mexican cartels and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives along the U.S-Mexico border.

This point brought the panel to the first of several interesting discussions: the role of the thriller novelist to bring these stats to life.

"My job, as I see it," Parker went on, "it to take one of those 40,000 deaths and try to make it real. I try to put a face on it."

Stuart Neville, whose books "Collusion" and "Ghosts of Belfast," explore violence in Northern Ireland, agreed.

"If you were to ask me the names of those killed there, I'd tell you their name is 3,000. That's the challenge for all of us," he said.

Smith acted as a deft moderator, smoothly moving the panelists between questions and issues:  how much, for instance, should a story be tied to research? Only, they all said, in service to the story. When research starts to ruin the flow, then imagination must take over. "It is fiction, after all," said Attica Locke, author of "Black Water Rising."

While Smith described the patriarchal, paranoid structures of the Mafia in Southern Italy, Parker said he relished plunging into the layers of the ATF. In Locke's case, she stumbled on her shadow organization -- a group conspiring to hide oil and rig gas prices -- when she was well into the writing of her story about an average guy who finds himself suddenly in over his head.

Neville didn't stumble upon the various paramilitary and shadow groups in the course of his own research -- they're all unavoidable in his part of the world, he said. The recent deaths of Irish police from hidden bombs, he said, makes it impossible to forget this reality.

"The stuff is all still going on despite the peace, it's all a relative peace," he said. "The talk is about diplomacy, politics, but there are still those clinging to the belief that they need to be fighting something. It's right there in front of us."

In giving a face to these various groups, the writers all pointed out an important value, aside from entertainment, in creating the worlds of their thrillers. Namely, there's an opportunity to unexpectedly hold up a mirror on ourselves.

"The crime syndicates are their own bureaucracies," Locke mused. "They're as caught up in petty problems and infighting as the good guys are. It just shows the sheer humanity of it all. In the end, these stories can show readers that what the good guys are fighting is just a reflection of themselves."

-- Nick Owchar

Illustration: Valeria Petrone / For The Times

Coming to the Festival of Books: Yunte Huang

Yunte Huang's book "Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous With American History" unpacks the many complicated layers of Charlie Chan with humor and affection. The book, our reviewer wrote, "is a scintillating, provocative work of discovery, a voyage into racial stereotyping and the humanizing force of storytelling. It is also a deeply personal book in which Huang draws on his own upbringing in China and the questions of race and identity that he continues to consider today." It was a finalist for the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award in biography.

Huang, who is on the faulty at UC Santa Barbara, will be at the L.A. Times Festival of Books on Sunday at the 11 a.m. panel "Larger Than Life: Behind the Icon." He answered our questions via email.

Jacket Copy: Your book looks at the original detective upon which the Charlie Chan detective was based, as well as the books and movies in which the character appeared. Was there any one thing that you discovered that surprised you the most?

Yunte Huang: The most surprising thing for me was how long a cultural icon can live on in people's memory even after having disappeared from the limelight for many years for various reasons.

JC: There are many layers of identity in your book -- although Chinese, Charlie Chan, was played on film by Swedish actor Warner Oland; author E. D. Biggers created Charlie Chan and took his exploits from Chang Apana before ever meeting him; and Apana, when the character became famous, often took on the Charlie Chan persona. It seems a little bit like assimilation, but more complex. What would you call it? Do you think it still goes on?
 
YH: I would call it imitation, an artistic form that can be creative or lame, empowering or demeaning, inspiring or racist. Racial ventriloquism was historically a driving force of American creativity. It is still ubiquitous in comedic genres.
 
JC: Do you have a favorite Charlie Chan book or movie?
 
YH: The first Charlie Chan novel "The House Without a Key" is really a great novel. "The Black Camel" (1931) is my favorite Chan film, partly because it was made on the beaches of Hawaii and partly because of all the forty-seven or so Chan film, it is closest to the original novel.
 
JC: Have you found yourself using Charlie Chan aphorisms?
 
YH: Yes, but you'd have to take my answer with a grain of MSG.

JC: Are you looking forward to anything in particular at the Festival of Books this year?
 
YH: As someone who has spent a lot of time writing book reviews, I look forward to meeting some book review editors in person.
 
JC: Is there anything you plan to do in Los Angeles while you're here, apart from the Festival of Books?
 
YH: Santa Barbara is my home, but I just spent a year living in the snowy woods in Ithaca, NY. So, coming to LA directly from Ithaca is really my sweet homecoming. Being at home is what I plan to do.

Tickets to the L.A. Times Festival of Books are available now from Eventbrite.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Left, Warner Oland as Charlie Chan. Credit: Reuters. Right: Author Yuente Huang. Credit: Miriam Berkley