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Rebecca Cantrell

Liberty for All

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It’s been an eventful few days!

Last week I received my ISBN number for CITY OF DRAGONS, an occasion for much celebration–which I did as a guest blogger on Working Stiffs, through the generosity of the wonderful Joyce Tremel and other friends on that fabulous grog.

My friend Rebecca Cantrell is in town to launch her extraordinary novel, A TRACE OF SMOKE … we were the literary salon guests of one of the most wonderful and fascinating people in a wonderful and fascinating business, Mystery Readers International founder (and chocolate lover) Janet Rudolph.

Becky had a SRO launch party at one of my favorite places, M is for Mystery–and if you haven’t had a chance to pick up her book, you should. Historical noir at its finest–and at its darkest (the setting is 1931 Berlin).

And I’ve been chugging away at various deadlines, editorial and non-editorial, with nary a moment left over for noirish indulgence. But soon, soon … particularly as I’ll be blogging over on Pop Syndicate about my favorite film noir flickers.

Today, however, I want to talk about Memorial Day and San Francisco.

Beyond the normal tourist sensations of Fisherman’s Wharf–the ode to consumerism that is Pier 39, the gimmicky restaurants, the cheap t-shirts, the always-real and welcome barks of the sea lions and smell of sourdough bread–behind the wizard’s curtain is another chapter of The City’s history.

I’m talking Pier 45.

Just a short stroll down a working pier–yet miles away from the silver men and the keyboard players in the parking lot–is the Jeremiah O’Brien. One of two remaining fully-functional Liberty ships surviving from World War II.

She shares the berth with the U.S.S. Pampanito, a valiant WWII era submarine that has been preserved under the auspices of the National Park Service: the San Francisco National Maritime Park Association, to be exact.

The Jeremiah, though, isn’t part of the park. It stays afloat–and takes full-throttle cruises, particuarly during Fleet Week and for special commemorative occasions like the anniversary of D-Day–solely through memberships and volunteers.

Think of it! A living, breathing, working ship, one of only two remaining of 2,710 built–iron and steel, history in the water. And all through the tireless efforts of volunteers who love her, who maintain her, and who make sure that the Jeremiah will live over Memorial Days past counting.

I’ve had the honor of sailing on her–for the 60th anniversary of D-Day. And while most of the world knows her–if they know her at all–from the engine room of James Cameron’s Titanic (yup, she doubled for the tragic White Star liner), her legacy, her courage, and what she stands for touches us all.

The Jeremiah O’Brien is a Liberty ship. She is the last unaltered example of her kind. A floating museum of a war that was not predetermined, that was not a foregone conclusion. She and her sister ships ferried supplies and cargo to the front lines, and were a core part of the lend-lease program to Britain before the US joined the war. Roosevelt said this class of quickly built and aesthetically plain ships would bring liberty to Europe. And so they did.

In 1994, the Jeremiah O’Brien journeyed from San Francisco to the beaches of Normandy, revisiting her part in Operation Overlord. She was the only large ship to return for the 50th anniversary.

If you ever have a chance to see her, I hope you do. She–and the Pampanito–are floating Memorial Days, 365 days a year.

Next: More film, more San Francisco and more news!

The Meming of it All

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I’m not sure that “meming” is a word — but it’s January, so new words are allowed. How else do little dictionaries grow?

This is the month of Noir City and post-holiday cookie sales … a month of anticipation, back-to-the-gym promises, of hope and resolve and potential. Of dark, rainy streets projected in glorious 35mm on the Castro Theater screen, of sunshine in San Francisco backyards, and a new inauguration for a New Deal and a New Day in Washington.

You can probably tell I like January.

This week, I’m meming … it’s a receding economy, and in the spirit of “make do and mend”, and “reduce, reuse, recycle”, later this week I’ll post a meme originally created on Facebook. Today, though, I’ve got a new one for which I was tagged by that talented dame of hardboiled fiction, Linda L. Richards.

You may possibly be wondering exactly what a “meme” is. In the context of Bloggerville, it’s one of those response-oriented lists that float from tagger to tagger, wherein you list five foods you won’t eat, seventeen most embarrassing moments, seven times you’ve broken the law or three impossible things before breakfast.

You know the kind of thing. Here’s a link to more specific definitions, but their real purpose is to save a busy blogging world a lot of time and let you discover trivia about other people.

So–drum roll, please … What book, movie and television show makes you cry the most?

(And keep in mind that I give good weep. From the “Old Yeller cry” (the horrible cry of loss) to “La Marseillaise cry” (the choked up cry of sentiment, in this case over the singing of the Marseillaise in Casablanca), I cry at, over and for a lot of things.)

Book: I might cry over my own if I get a particularly nasty review. I first read Tess of the D’Urbervilles, The Return of the Native, and Jude the Obscure (all by Thomas Hardy) as a young woman (and re-read them subsequently), and I cried buckets. The sound of my tears used to wake my mother up in the middle of the night. They’re among the most powerful novels in English, and Jude the Obscure, hands-down, is the most gut-wrenchingly devasting book I’ve ever read. Only Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath comes close.

Two more get honorable mentions: Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Ayn Rand’s We, the Living. The latter was one of my favorite books, and I used to harbor dreams of making it into a movie (I’m far from being a political disciple of Rand’s, but she was one hell of a writer.)

A special section might be devoted to children’s literature: I cried over the Harry Potter saga as an adult, and as a kid used to wail over Charlotte’s Web.

Movie: The aforementioned Casablanca scene always makes me cry. But It’s A Wonderful Life makes me cry from the opening scene, just in anticipation (voiceovers of various cast members are praying for George Bailey). I avoid sad animal movies entirely. Crying is a catharsis, and if you’ve experienced the loss of a beloved pet, you realize crying doesn’t help. I don’t need an entertainment vehicle to remind me of it.

Television Shows: TV mostly makes me cry in horror–especially the “Queen for a Day” reality programming. Most television–which, when I was growing up, was all network–is presented in bite-size chunks, making it much more difficult to sustain the emotional connection necessary. So I don’t think I’ve cried at TV since the last, farewell episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. And for some reason, probably related to why I’m a noir writer, Carol Burnett used to make me teary whenever she dragged out that damn old bucket to play the scrub-woman. I’m sure I would’ve cried at the last episode of MASH, too, but I was rehearsing for a play in college–and the little (#$^@ student director thought that directing meant being a dictator, and forced us to miss the episode. This in the days of no TiVO. I’m still holding a grudge.

Quid pro quo time: I’m tagging Laura Benedict, Jennie Bentley, Rebecca Cantrell, Bill Cameron, and Alex Sokoloff. And Linda, right back atcha. Memes away, guys! 🙂

Real Travel

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Sometimes you have to open portals in time as well as space. So eventually I traveled back to Berlin myself to search for more intangible responses. I walked down the streets that my main character, Hannah Vogel, strode in my imagination, or what’s left of them. Many of the locations in my book were flattened in World War II. And to make matters worse, some were never rebuilt, but were paved over and had a giant wall built through them for 28 years. But I prevailed upon a Berliner school friend as beautiful and determined as the city itself. She took me on a tour of the major locations in my book on a hot summer day in 2006. That’s when we moved into the sixth sense.

Hannah’s apartment? Gone. Her office? Still there and recently restored. It’s closer in appearance to where she worked than at any time since 1931, when she typed her make believe news stories there. Eerie, but very cool.

But eeriest of all was the gay bar El Dorado. It’s where Hannah’s brother Ernst, a drag queen decades before we invented the term, mesmerized audiences with his singing. The Nazis closed the actual bar after the elections in 1933, and, not skilled at recognizing irony, turned it into a political headquarter.

In the 1990s the bar reopened. When I ordered a Berliner weisse beer, my old college favorite, they only had raspberry red shots. I laughed, because that is all that Ernst would have ever ordered anyway, red being his signature color. At last, Ernst’s old haunt was restored, not as it was in real life, but as I invented it with him in my novel. Goosebumps raised on my arms as I studied the oil paintings that lined the walls. Reproductions of Georg Grosz’s Metropolis, each was a deja-vu-inducing scene from my book. El Dorado today looks less like it did in 1931, and more like a representation of the world I created in my novel. I wasn’t the only one who fell in love with Berlin in 1931 and tried to recreate it whole.

Again I sit on my lanai. This time I must imagine an even darker Berlin. In The Night of the Long Knives, Hannah and I have been drawn into the murderous Berlin of 1934. I step into its shadows. In spite of devoting years and pages to it, Berlin still won’t let me go.

Where would you travel to walk in the footsteps of your favorite literary character? What would be changed? What would be the same? And, most importantly, what would you snack on?

Time Travel

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While Kelli is traveling through space to Denver, I want to talk about traveling through time. Like Kelli, I write historical fiction and to do that, I have to be able to travel back in time through whatever portals I can force open.

To write Even Smoke Leaves a Trace I didn’t have to go quite as far back as Kelli, though, just to 1931 Berlin, 12 time zones and 70 years away. Why face just a historical distance when I can face twice the challenge by writing from a diametrically opposed location too? I gazed out at dancing palm trees and warm waves from my lanai in faraway Hawaii, and filled my pages with coal and cobblestones.

With my heroine, Hannah Vogel, I moved into Berlin in 1931, the year before Germany was completely lost to the Nazis. I started at the top level of research with secondary sources, thick scholarly tomes like The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, but only through page 387 because I wasn’t interested in the fall yet, just the rise. I romped through Otto Friedrich’s history of Weimar-era Berlin, Before the Deluge. And where else but in Hawaii would I have time to start the thousand year history of Berlin, Faust’s Metropolis by Alexandra Richie?

I dug deeper, down into the primary sources to see how Berliners felt at the time. Luckily, Berlin in 1931 housed wonderful diarists like Count Harry Kessler, Bella Fromm, William Shirer, Viktor Klemperer, and the grim articles of Joseph Roth collected in What I Saw. I read until their ghost voices haunted my sleep. Not always fun, because 1931 was their last moment of freedom and some of them, especially Roth, knew it. When the Nazis took power in 1933, Roth wrote a scathing indictment of all European intellectuals and moved to Paris where he drank himself to death.

I listened to the rough voice of Lotte Lenya, widow of Kurt Weill, belting out an enchanting “Mack the Knife,” a song released in—you guessed it—1931 in Berlin. Now to see their world. Berlin’s UFA Studio was the center of the German film industry from 1917 to 1945. Amazingly gifted directors who worked there would later come to the United States and become famous enough that even their early films are available on Netflix, only a few days shipping from my tiny TV, classics like M, Emil and the Detectives, and Nosferatu.

It was pure self indulgence but, I wanted to taste the city too. I trekked to a specialty grocery store and brought home boxes of bockwurst, Berliner weisse beer, chocolate, and apple strudel mix. It wasn’t quite Berlin in 1931, but at least it was my Berlin from 1985. Writers get to have fun too.

How do you like to travel back in time? If you could travel any where and any when, where would you go, and what would you bring back?

Questions to Ponder …

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A short post this week, because we’re in a whirlwind of activity getting ready for Left Coast Crime in Denver …

There’s promotional stuff to pack, clothes (and shoes and hats) to choose … I sometimes wish (always when I’m packing) that I was one of those people who can throw any old wearable into an overnight bag and somehow emerge at a destination, refreshed and coiffed, and somehow make a stained sweatshirt look good.

Wait … there really aren’t people like that, are there? Stained sweatshirts never look good outside of an action movie.

Anyway, point is I have to give thought to what to pack, and thought (and packing) takes time … and time is always in short supply. Tempus fugit, as Virgil pointed out (we owe so much to that man, and he still gets the short end of the stick compared to Homer. But at least he didn’t have to suffer the ignominy of Brad Pitt playing his protagonist). But I digress …

So before I leave you with a question to ponder for the week, until guest blogger and fantastic noir writer Rebecca Cantrell checks in, I wanted to tell you why Helen Mirren doesn’t have to worry.

I watched E:GA in Seattle, and it’s not that Cate Blanchett isn’t one of the best actresses working today. It’s that Elizabeth: the Golden Age was a ninety-odd minute film, not well directed (enough with the spinning, apotheosized Virgin Queen, for God’s sake!) and tried to fit a mini-series worth of content and character into one movie. In other words, like a lot of films, style was more important than substance and content. (Clive Owen swinging on a rope? Did we really need this? And I’m even a fan!)

And when, oh when, will anyone ever get the “I may have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a King” speech right? They stuck Glenda Jackson on a podium in the ’70s; they had Helen picking up dirt balls and laughing with her troops as the Armada sailed (the only “huh?” moment in that series). Here, they don’t use the the lines at all, though they at least put E. on a horse.

Well, enough of my grumbling. Lord, what fools these directors be.

So here’s your question to ponder: why is Paul Giamatti playing John Adams?

Look at the movie poster. And think about it.

Until next time, when I’m back from the Mile-High Thrill of Left Coast Crime, and posting about exciting new theater news in San Francisco!!

It’s Alive!

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You ever have one of those Dr. Frankenstein moments? Maybe even a Young Frankenstein moment?

You know, when you pinch yourself because you just can’t believe that you and Igor have actually succeeded?

Well, it happened to me on Friday. The ARCS (advanced reading copies or galleys) of Nox Dormienda arrived. Did I think of a snappy, noirish line from one of my favorite movies? Did I raise an eyebrow like Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, or sing “Put the Blame on Mame”?

No.

Two lines occurred to me … the aforementioned “It’s Alive!” as uttered by the imitable Colin Clive, and those immortal words of Teri Hatcher’s, when she guested on Seinfeld:

They’re real–and they’re fabulous.

So now Mondays are the new Sundays, as we assemble press kits, reviewer addresses, and requests from relatives into mass mailings of what looks like a book with my name on it … nah, couldn’t be. This isn’t real … is it?

It’s a landmark along the road, another reason to celebrate. Your book is real, like parenthood, when you hold the responsibility for it in your hands. Even an advanced reading copy. And it’s necessary to celebrate, as I’m reminded when I read the wonderful Write Free newsletter, which should be a must read for everyone who writes or wants to write, or really, anyone who is trying to fit creativity into her life.

Check it out, give it a try. You’ll be glad you did.

Something else I’m reading? Well, I just finished an advanced reading edition of another author, Jordan Dane. Jordan is going to be everywhere very soon — her first book, No One Heard Her Scream, pubs in March — so I’d suggest ordering now before they sell out, and don’t forget you heard it here first.

She’s got three books pubbing back to back this spring, all in the romantic suspense genre, but really–they cross over into thriller, mystery, police procedural categories. Vivid characterization, intense suspense, creepy and all-too believable villainy … you owe it to yourself to check these out! The next two coming up are No One Left to Tell and No One Lives Forever.

Another fine author (who also happens to be a real heroine — an emergency-room pediatrician) is CJ Lyons, who is launching Lifelines in March. I’ve read a sneak preview of the first chapter, and if you like medical thrillers and shows like ER and Grey’s Anatomy … well, you’re in for a treat. I’ll be picking up my copy at Left Coast Crime.

CJ, Jordan and I — and my guest blogger, whom I’ll be discussing in a minute — are all members of the Thrill Begins, the International Thriller Writers Debut Authors Group. We’ve all been on this journey together. So my enthusiasm is doubled–first, because the books are tremendous, and secondly, because we’re part of the same class, so to speak. That’s a terrific feeling, and a relatively new one in publishing circles, spearheaded by the Killer Year group of authors. KY, incidentally, has a killer anthology out … another recommendation.

Now, what about that guest blogger? Well, I’ll be posting for Declan Burke’s Crime Always Pays when we get to Denver. And fellow debut author and historical noir writer Rebecca Cantrell will be stepping over here, to Writing in the Dark, to share her observations about all kinds of things … including how to write noir in sunny Hawaii, where she lives, and how to channel early ’30s Berlin when you’re sipping mai tais in 90 degree weather. Becky’s book, Even Smoke Leaves a Trace, will be debuting in 2009, and I’m already in line for an ARC … it’s haunting and elegiac, the kind of poetry that noir inspires in the best of writers … and she is one of the best.

Speaking of noir … I saw Ida Lupino’s favorite film the other day. Ladies in Retirement (1941), another example of period-setting noir. The environment is a lonely house on some rugged, decayed looking English moor, circa the 1880s. Ida co-stars with her husband at the time, Louis Hayward, noir stalwart Evelyn Keyes, Elsa Lanchester, and a great supporting cast.

Charles Vidor (Gilda) directed; the story is based on a stage play popular the year before. Essentially, Ida plays a woman willing to do anything — emphasis on the anything — to keep her barmy sisters happy and out of the insane asylum.

It’s a marvelous film, owing something to Night Must Fall, but Vidor’s angles, the starkly contrasting cinematography, and the cat-and-mouse game Ida plays with Hayward’s character make it, in my opinion, even better. Lupino was one of the greatest actresses of the golden age … and never nominated for one of those glittery and sexless statuettes they call an Oscar.

Unfortunately, Ladies in Retirement isn’t on DVD or VHS … I caught it on TCM. Watch your listings, which is almost as good a sign-off as “That’s the way it is.”

See you next week, with my last post before Denver and Left Coast Crime!