My wife and I watched Certified Copy, a beautiful film by Abbas Kiarostami with Juliette Binoche, William Shimell, last week. It’s such a rich, moving film I wanted to write about it. All you need to know about the plot is that an English author on a book tour in Italy meets a French woman, both of them art lovers, and they spend the day in a neighboring village. All the tension I enjoyed in this story came from my knowing no more than that. What follows will be my attempt to talk about this film without spoiling any enjoyment for those who have yet to see it.

The first quarter or so of the dialogue is dominated by the ideas of originality and copies. What makes an original work of art uniquely superior to an excellently made replica? What is genuine? What is false? Is there a purpose in a composition or statue that the original fulfills but the copy does not? The two look briefly at a painting that was thought to be original, but discovered to be a recent copy of much older work. She is fascinated by it and hopes he will be too, because it fits the subject of his book, which is also called Certified Copy, but he isn’t. He tries to keep his distance from art, he says. It can be dangerous. I have to wonder if he keeps this distance because he is uncomfortable with that which is truly genuine, beautiful or hopeful.

The Englishman, James Miller, brings up another idea early on, that humanity’s purpose is pleasure. People should be free to do their own thing. The woman counters by saying people have responsibilities, such as family, that need tending, and she tends her own family with a bit of irritation. At one point, he continues talking about this need for living one’s own life while she is on the phone with her son, who can’t find something. She calls her son an idiot for not looking where she is telling him to look. He’ll find it if he’ll listen to her. Though they are not talking to each other, she and James are talking about the same thing. He is looking for self-fulfillment; she is telling him she knows where to find it.

She seems to tell him again indirectly in a scene in which she disappears into a church for a few minutes. He looks in at the door and believes he sees her praying. When he asks her about it, she shrugs it off saying she was doing something else, but the church setting must be significant. She is a figure of hope, a call for self-sacrifice, and she draws him to the church (which seems to either interest or trouble him; it’s hard to tell). In the same space, an elderly couple, probably married for 50 years or more, inches across the courtyard from the church door to an inn door. They are a picture of the love and faithfulness James wants know but believes does not exist.

Now, having thought this far, I think I’ll have to turn on the spoiler alert. Sorry. Continue reading Certified Copy →

He rattled his ice. “The death of friends, or death of every brilliant eye that made a catch in the breath.”

“Yours?”

“Yeats. I came across it in a book the other day while I was looking for something else, you know the way you do. Can’t get rid of it.”

“What’s it mean?”

“The lights are blinking out, buddy. Every night there are a few less than there were the night before.” He set down the glass sharply. “Let’s go out in the sun.”

I tend to think of Loren D. Estleman as one of the new kids in the detective novel biz, because that’s what he was when I first started reading him. But in fact he’s an old veteran now, a solid purveyor who unashamedly works Raymond Chandler’s old corner, instead of trying to put out big, thick thrillers about government conspiracies like so many others in the genre. He gives honest value for the reader’s money, and I relish his books. Among those, Every Brilliant Eye is (in my opinion) one of the strongest. It’s not a new book – it goes back to the 1980s, yet it felt fresh to me.

Amos Walker of Detroit, Estleman’s series detective, gets a call to go and collect his old friend and army buddy Barry Stackpole, who’s fallen off the wagon, out of a “blind pig” bar in a bad part of town. Barry is Detroit’s top crime reporter. The bar gets raided before Amos can extricate Barry, but he manages to sneak them both out (by punching a cop). The next time Amos sees Barry, he’s dried out again, but then Barry disappears completely. The newspaper’s lawyer hires Amos to look for him, because he has a date to testify before a grand jury.

Searching for his friend, poking into his affairs, Amos finds evidence that Barry had been writing a book about their time in Vietnam, and he comes to believe that Barry is dead, and that he’s dead because he was uncovering an old crime from the war. There’s police and civic corruption (business as usual in Detroit) involved, and Amos finds himself set up for a fatal accident, among other threats.

There’s real pleasure to be had in plain, old-school mystery writing, and I enjoyed Every Brilliant Eye immensely. Recommended. Cautions for language, violence and adult themes (including the hero committing adultery).

English writers are well known for mysteries, but not (so far as I’ve noticed) much for hard-boiled mysteries. English private detectives tend to the very cerebral, like Sherlock Holmes, or the very domestic, like Miss Marple. If novelists want to write gritty crime stories, they’ve traditionally chosen police procedurals.

But Keith Dixon has broken ranks. In the novel Altered Life he introduces private eye Sam Dyke (one assumes the name’s a tip of the fedora to Dashiel Hammet), a two-fisted shamus who works the mean streets of Manchester (and they’re plenty mean).

As the novel begins he’s meeting with Rory Brand, who runs a high end consultancy service that’s branching out into software development. Rory believes somebody’s plotting to ruin him, and he wants Sam to investigate. Sam says no thanks. The job calls for skills he doesn’t possess. Anyway, he doesn’t like Rory much.

The next day Rory is dead, his neck broken. And when Sam (rather guiltily) attends the funeral, he meets someone important from his own past. One of Rory’s subordinates hires him to investigate the murder, and there’s a kidnapping, and things get dangerous.

The prose is good, and I had only a few nitpicks about word choice. Although there’s one sour comment about Margaret Thatcher, there’s also a positive view of the business world that frankly surprised me in an English book. Sam Dyke is as tough a detective as you could ask for. All to the good.

On the negative side, I found him kind of dull. I know it’s a trope to make a hard-boiled gumshoe a wisecrack artist, but that serves a purpose, like the fools in Shakespeare’s tragedies. It prevents things from getting too dark, and keeps the detective from being a bore. Although Sam has a couple moments of cleverness, all in all he’s a dour fellow, and I got a little tired of him.

Also, in the final showdown, I thought he was just foolhardy, walking unprepared into a situation he knew he couldn’t control, leaving his fate to dumb luck.

Nevertheless, I thought Altered Life a commendable debut, and I might just read another Sam Dyke story.

Cautions for language, violence, and adult themes.