Cover design by J.T. Lindroos
The first three novels in the Hector Lassiter series—One True Sentence, Forever's Just Pretend and Toros & Torsos—are newly available from Betimes Books. (Ordering information below)
Saturday, September 6, 2014
COVER SNEAK PEEK: THE GREAT PRETENDER
Just a teasing glimpse of the next title in the newly released and repackaged Hector Lassiter series. Available soon for pre-order, THE GREAT PRETENDER: Orson Welles, voodoo curses, Nazi occultists, the War of the Worlds Panic Broadcast of 1938, the secret history behind the noir classic, THE THIRD MAN, and a search for the Spear of Destiny. Check back for further updates.
Cover design by J.T. Lindroos
Cover design by J.T. Lindroos
Wednesday, September 3, 2014
TOROS & TORSOS: SURREALIST ART AND MURDER IN OUR TIME?
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| Cover image by Dali for Minotaure Magazine |
The first five novels in the Hector Lassiter series—One True Sentence, Forever's Just Pretend and Toros & Torsos—are newly available from Betimes Books. (Ordering information below)
—————————————————————Art imitates life; death imitates art?
A time back, I put together a post regarding the second novel in the Hector Lassiter series, Toros & Torsos, (now available from Betimes Books) and the fact it spins on the premise that surrealist art and aesthetic theory might have informed or inspired several bloody, unsolved crimes of the 20th Century — most notably the murder of Elizabeth Short, the so-called “Black Dahlia,” as she was dubbed by panting L.A. journalists, circa January 1947.
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| Statue based on Dali illustration. |
The correspondences between Elizabeth Short’s mutilation murder and photographs and paintings by Man Ray and Salvador Dali were first put forth by Steve Hodel in his 2003 nonfiction study Black Dahlia Avenger, a New York Times notable book and Edgar® Award finalist. (To be fair, James Ellroy had made a particular painting an element of his 1987 novel based on the Dahlia murder.)
Hodel’s theories were greatly expanded upon by Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Bayliss in their excellent 2006 release, Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder.
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| ELIZABETH SHORT |
Using the Nelson, Bayliss and Hodel works as a springboard, I extrapolated outward to construct a multi-decade saga that encompasses not only the Dahlia murder and the all-too-real post-war Hollywood surrealist art circle (which included such diverse personalities as John Huston, Fanny Brice and Vincent Price), but also the Spanish Civil War in which the surrealists played a pivotal propaganda role.
Further research in that area uncovered allegations of jaw-dropping reports of Spanish torture chambers designed and constructed to surrealist aesthetics — tantamount to a crazy cross between Escher and Abu Ghraib.
I mixed in some female torsos that began turning up in the vicinity of Ernest Hemingway’s Cuban home in the 1950s…actual mutilation murders touched on by Hemingway in the published version of his posthumous novel, Islands in the Stream.
It takes a strong stomach and a cold eye to confront the evidence put forward in the Hodel and Nelson/Bayliss books — particularly in Exquisite Corpse. But once key surrealist works are compared to Elizabeth Short’s autopsy photos (reproduced in graphic detail in the Nelson/Bayliss books) it’s difficult to shake the notion surrealist imagery was very much on the mind of Betty Short’s twisted, never-apprehended killer.
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| Man Ray's "Minotaur," meant to evoke the head of a bull. The upper portion of "The Black Dahlia's" severed body mimicked this position when found in January 1947. |
Life imitating art…art imitating death, and for some twisted type, it seems, it wasn’t truly art until somebody died.
Well, that was then. I posited my killer surrealists operating in the period between 1935-1959—again, it was fiction grounded in apparent fact. Many critics of Toros the first time around thought the concept...fanciful.
A while back, Woody Haut, author of the excellent crime fiction studies Pulp Culture and Neon Noir, among others, very kindly reviewed Toros & Torsos. In passing, he noted, “And don't think surrealist murders are simply the stuff of urban legend. In the part of the world where I'm currently living, near Perpignan, there were a handful of such murders a few years back, the corpses of which supposedly replicated paintings by Dali.”
I followed up on that intriguing aside of Mr. Haut’s. I found an article from The Guardian regarding those Dali-esque crimes… As the author of Toros & Torsos, reading the article was frankly chilling.
As indicated earlier, occasionally, as a novelist you find yourself the subject of these sometimes cutting remarks about the plots of your novels turning on an “outrageous” or “absurd” premise, or you get the left-handed compliment that your novel works despite its “far-out concept” that surrealist art might inspire serial murder.
Yeah, well… Maybe you can’t make this stuff up.
From the March 9, 2000 edition of the Guardian: “Police are wondering if they are not dealing with a serial killer inspired by the tortured visions of Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali i Domenech, born May 11 1904, died January 23 1989. ‘It's a theory they've tested and are continuing to test,’ says Mohamed Iaouadan, a lawyer. ‘I've seen the files, believe me. They've commissioned analytical reports from art experts on the significance of Dali paintings.’”
As the lawyer quoted in the article goes on to say, “I'm not sure what I think. Maybe it's madness, this Dali stuff. But killers are inspired by films, aren’t they? Why not by decapitations, eviscerations and dismemberments in the painting of the man who made this town famous?”
For more on the contemporary “Dali” case, you can check out the full (and very graphic) account of the crimes in the Guardian here.
Sunday, August 31, 2014
FATHER FIGURE: THE MAN BEHIND HECTOR LASSITER
"Each of my victims had larceny in his heart."
In discussing and writing
about Hector Lassiter's supporting "fictional" cast, I've tended recently to focus
on Hector’s first great love interest, fellow author Brinke Devlin, crediting her for “creating” the man we come to know as Hector Lassiter in ensuing books.
That’s all true enough, I
think.
Brinke returns in Forever’s Just Pretend, the only novel
approaching a direct “sequel” in the Hector Lassiter series.
But everyone has parents,
and, for better or worse, your folks go at least as far in
shaping you as your first great love does, right?
Well…
Hector Mason Lassiter was an early, tragic orphan.
You don’t learn that until you’re
about four books in if you encountered the series in its original, partial publication
sequence.
Your first inkling comes when Hector confesses his father shot and
killed his straying, lusty mother. Hector confides that grim nugget first and only in full-detail
to Brinke Devlin after they make love on one dark-night-of-the-soul in 1924 Paris.
In retribution, little Hector
shot—but only winged—his wicked-ass father. (The state of Texas did the dirtier
deed of putting down Grafton Lassiter
for the long count, and with all-due, patented Lone Star haste.)
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| Joseph "Yellow Kid" Weil |
So, at base, young Hector
was shaped and raised by his maternal grandfather, a storied conman and
so-called “Big Store” impresario modeled on real-life grifter Joseph “Yellow Kid” Weil. The Kid said you should never soak a mark so dry they're tempted toward self-destruction. "Never send 'em to the river," he cautioned. That motto was damned near the title of Forever's Just Pretend, at one point.
Hector Lassiter's grandfather was also inspired by grifter/playwright Wilson Mizner and a certain beloved and recently deceased TV-actor’s first signature role.
Hector Lassiter's grandfather was also inspired by grifter/playwright Wilson Mizner and a certain beloved and recently deceased TV-actor’s first signature role.
Con men: I love them dearly, and in an admittedly wrong-headed way. I have since I was a kid. Maybe it's in the genes.
You see, my mother had this
thing for James Garner and Maverick. Seems I came this close to being named “Bret” in
honor of Garner’s first starring TV-role. (My father was leaning toward
“Harlan” in deference to some now-forgotten trap-shooter—thank God I dodged that bullet, so to speak. My eventual first name is
owed to actor Craig Stevens of Peter Gunn
fame, another of my mother’s TV obsessions. At least they kept it in the
neighborhood of noir.)
Growing up, I didn’t know my
mother dug Garner and Maverick.
Then, one night in the early
1970s, I started watching this TV series because I recognized James Garner as
the guy in Support Your Local Sheriff,
a movie I’d liked a lot not too-long before.
That TV series turned out to
be The Rockford Files and the
first-run of an episode called Tall Woman
in Red Wagon in which Rockford runs around with a mini-printing press,
cranking out bogus business cards and passing himself off under all flavors of
false identities.
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| Scene from Rockford Files: "Tall Woman in Red Wagon" |
I loved it.
I watched the next Rockford episode
with my mother; she told me about Maverick.
In those pre-cable, pre-VCR/DVD days, it was an enticing form of torture to
know this other series with Garner was out there but frustratingly unobtainable.
Then, in the 1980s, one of
Ted Turner’s stations started playing vintage Maverick episodes.
The installment in question
is called Pappy. Some Maverick
purists and the series’ creator, Roy Huggins, detest that one.
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| James Garner as Beauregard Maverick |
Let’s concede a certain knowing love for it. Pappy introduces—about 50 episodes in—the
Maverick brothers’ oft-quoted but previously off-camera sire, Beauregard
Maverick, played by…James Garner.
(In a kind of meta, Lassiteresque plot twist, Garner ends up playing
his own character, his father, and
himself impersonating his father—call it mirrors-within-mirrors.
As noted, it’s pure Lassiter.)
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| James Garner and, er, James Garner, and Jack Kelly: Three mavericks; two actors. |
Hector’s grandfather—the man
who raised Hector and must surely have gifted the young Lassiter with a
penchant for The Story, The Patter and a certain yen for The Big Con—is Beau
Stryder, a thinly-veiled homage to James Garner and “old Beau Maverick.”
Mr. Stryder is in full,
later-life flower when we meet him in the opening pages of Forever’s Just Pretend. Beau's penchant for confidence games casts new light on some of the later games his grandson plays with historical relics in The Great Pretender and in Head Games (all those bogus skulls...).
It’s also established in Pretend that Stryders are gifted with
unusually long lives...
As a certain author said of an
iconic conman in a novel from the early 19th Century, it’s just
possible you might meet Beau, this venerable confidence man, again at some point down the road.
To quote that author, and that
novel: “Something further may follow of this Masquerade.”
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