• Started Warren Ellis’s Crooked Little Vein but gave up halfway through. I thought the first chapter was great (and I think it’s free online somewhere), but it went off the rails into pointlessness after that. And the main character ends up with a superhot Gothy sexpot sidekick who contributes only the discomforting sensation that Ellis was getting his rocks off while he was writing it. I don’t know, maybe I’m just not getting it. After all, there’s a similar old-man’s-fantasy sidekick in Joe Hill’s Heart Shaped Box, and I thought that book was brilliant. Then again, the main character’s a sleazy old rock star, so it does make sense in context. In Vein, the protagonist just kind of picks her up off the street.

• Mind you, Ellis is in good company because I didn’t manage to get more than twenty or so pages into Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island either. Which is odd, because the premise is intriguing (it’s the mid-fifties, and two US Marshalls have to locate a prisoner missing from an asylum on an island isolated by a huge storm, and the staff of the asylum are more than likely up to no good themselves) and I’ve read every other one of his books over the past couple of months and really enjoyed them. Maybe I’m just not in the right frame of mind at the moment, in that I’ve been making my way through Ian Rankin’s catalogue and I’ve probably attuned myself to a different style of crime writing for the time being. Then again, the introduction seems to be promising mind games played on the protagonists by a former-intelligence agent turned psychologist, and dear God there’s more than enough of that kind of thing in the genre already.

• Also, Leonardo DiCaprio will be starring in the upcoming Scorcese adaptation of the book, and his nauseating taint has unavoidably contaminated my enjoyment of the story. You know the taint I mean. The cheesy exudation of the terminally smug.

• I can wholly recommend the DVD Special Edition of A Fistful Of Dollars. While most commentary tracks are a bit shit, this one is provided by Sergio Leone biographer Christopher Frayling, and it’s fascinating. Incidentally, Frayling is also the chairman of the Arts Council England, and his appointment in 2004 was a little controversial because he’s, frankly, a pop culture junkie. How much of a junkie? Well, according to The Independent, when he was knighted in 2000 he took as his motto the Latin phrase “Perge, Scelus, Mihi Diem Perficias”, which translates as “Proceed, varlet, and let the day be rendered perfect for my benefit.” Or, to put another spin on it, “Go ahead, punk. Make my day.”

• More doom’n'gloom surrounding the Watchmen film. I was starting to feel a little optimistic about it after a chat with Brother Paul, who remains enthusiastic about the adaptation. Then I found out who was playing the second Silk Spectre. “Actress” Malin Akerman last appeared in otherwise-inoffensive chick flick 27 Dresses (and I bet you lot never thought that film would get a mention in the Journal), and she was absolutely fucking awful. Her skill was commesurate with a rotting, maggoty length of driftwood. Actually, that’s doing the hypothetical driftwood a disservice as the driftwood is showing signs of life. Because it’s riddled with parasitic fungus. I’ll concede that one bad performance doesn’t preclude a radical improvement, but we’re talking extremely fucking radical here; when a guitarist’s having trouble with barre chords- no, when a guitarists having trouble with open chords- actually, no, when a guitarist’s having trouble figuring out which way up the guitar goes, it’s unrealistic to expect her to be shreddin’ hot solos like Steve fucking Vai six months down the line.

They’re all very well-written, readable crime dramas, if not quite as good as Mystic River. Of course, he had about ten years to improve between that one and the first. In fact, it’s easy to see how the former is a culmination of all the things he learned from his previous work, as if he had to figure out what his style was before writing a whole book in that mode.

Because the Kenzie and Gennaro adventures can be summed up, in a way, like film pitches. A Drink, Before The War, with its gang storyline and shady city politics, is like The Shield set in Boston (though it predates the series by a fair bit of time). Darkness, Take My Hand is a typical serial killer whodunit, and Sacred is a Robert Mitchum-type noir. And if Gone Baby Gone is anything, it’s a Hollywood kidnapping thriller, complete with gunfights and action sequences.

Of course, it’s the only one that’s actually been adapted into a Hollywood thriller, but in such a way that it’s not a typical thriller at all.

A lot of people get shot in the book series, which isn’t unusual for the genre. What makes it a little odd is the setting. Because Lehane does a brilliant job of capturing working class life in Boston (I have no idea how accurate it is, only that it feels sufficiently realistic), it’s a bit of a jolt to get into the action sequences that are also a big part of the books. There’s one character in particular, Bubba Rogowski, a psychotic arms dealer who wires up his apartment with antipersonel mines instead of a burglar alarm, who seems completely out of place, and I wondered how they’d handle him in the film. The answer is, he’s downgraded to a minor-league drug dealer.

A lot of things get that kind of low-key downgrading in the film, whether simplifying the chaotic plot of the novel, the scope of the final conspiracy, or the shootouts. But it’s all necessary, as the tack director Ben Affleck chooses to take is more the realistic portrayal of life in Dorchester, and that’s always been the most interesting part of Lehane’s books. What he keeps in are the impossible dilemmas that face all the characters.

A key scene in the book and the film is the execution of a child molester by Kenzie. Even though the scene is described far more brutally in the book than is shown in the film, the latter is still more horrific. If anything, it’s easier to understand Kenzie’s motivation in the film without his inner monologue. We don’t really need to know why he did what he did, because we’ve seen it for ourselves. Put in the same position as him, it’s easy to see how anyone would do the same thing, regardless of whether the person gunned down was unarmed or harmless. Kenzie’s guilt, however understandable his actions were, effect his judgement for the rest of the film, facing another impossible decision of leaving the missing girl with her kidnappers and a happy, promising future, or returning her to a neighbourhood that has destroyed so many other lives.

The film benefits from not being one of a series, like the books are. It’s the first time we see Patrick Kenzie, so we don’t know all the other tragic things that have happened to him. We don’t know his history with his father, or that he’s had to kill before (I’d assume that, continuity wise, film-Kenzie doesn’t have the baggage of the books), so we find it that much easier to identify with him, although we do get hints of his uncontrollable anger when he pistol-whips a guy in a bar towards the beginning. And even though Casey Affleck’s accent is damn near impenetrable.

It’s a grown-up film for grown-ups, so it’s not necessarily and easy watch. The whole cast are great, and the setting seems really authentic. The only character who gets a little short-changed is Angie Gennaro. In the book she’s explicitly dangerous, not only tough on her own terms but also the grandaughter of an old Boston mob boss. In the film, she just kind of cries a lot, and moans at Kenzie. The whole cast is so brilliant, it’s a fucking shame that they decided to cast the second most important character in the film by essentially looking for the next moderately famous attractive young actress to wander along. In a film so non-Hollywood, it’s typical that the Hollywood mentality still had to piss on the chips, even a little bit.

A while ago, back when I worked at the bookshop, I read Lehane’s Mystic River. I don’t recall why I chose that particular one. I don’t think it was because I knew it was being made into a film, but not long after I finished it I heard about Clint Eastwood having a crack at directing it.

It’s a brilliant book, but I thought the film was shite. It seemed like everything I’d taken from the book was de-emphasised in the film, and I don’t know if that’s further evidence of how people can have completely different takes on something, or if I got completely the wrong end of the stick when I read it. I do know that my mates weren’t keen on the film either.

Sean Penn was really good, don’t get me wrong (and by good, I mean overacted in just the right melodramatic way to be considered Good Acting), but the film was so completely grounded in his all-encompasing grief at the murder of his daughter that everything else was secondary. The other two key characters (Kevin Bacon and Tim Robbins) were hardly in it, Bacon’s role in particular not much more than a cameo. That really struck me as a mistake, because my understanding of the book was about how these three characters lives were intertwined since they were children, and changed completely after Robbins was kidnapped and abused while the other two escaped. It was broadly about a copper versus a criminal, but at the same time a whole lot more: why people end up being who they are, the inevitability of character, about all the uncontrollable things that can drag us down, and lead us to our fates.

In short, the book was structured around Penn and Bacon’s characters being two sides of the same coin, almost like two forces in inevitable opposition. The film is nothing like that, Bacon’s character coming across as a wet bit-part rather than the main protagonist. This, of course, has nothing to do with the book I’m actually meant to be reviewing here.

A Drink, Before The War was Lehane’s debut novel and the first appearance of Kenzie and Genarro, his reoccuring PI characters. I started reading it after Mystic River, but didn’t finish it. It’s not as good a book, which isn’t really a surprise. It treads a lot of the same ground as a lot of other gritty detective stories, and there’s not much subtlety to be found.

Even so, where it differs from other books is the uncompromising way Lehane deals with working class life in Boston, and the racism and violence ingrained in all the organisations of the City, from criminal gangs to state politicians. It’s strikingly similar to the themes found in The Wire, a programme that Lehane himself ended up writing for. It’s this undercurrent that’s most interesting in the book, and that raises it about the usual grim crime story.

Anyway, the reason I brought up the Eastwood film is that it’s Ben Affleck’s turn to adapt one of Lehane’s books. Gone, Baby, Gone was out in the US last year, but is only landing this side of the Pond next month. It’s got a couple of good write-ups, but if I’d seen Mystic River the film first, I wouldn’t have bothered with the book. So I need to read the book first, but it’s the fourth in the series, and thanks to nerd obsessiveness I need to get through the other ones first. They’re on order from the library, and Darkness, Take My Hand is up next.