Messing with Mr. Inbetween

I was pretty stoked to not only cover Mr. Inbetween, one of my favorite-ever crime shows, on the Watch with Jen podcast, but for the opportunity to interview creator and star Scott Ryan. Such a personally gratifying thing to be a part of. Big thanks to Jen Johans for having me on. The episode starts off as a conversation about Mr. Inbetween with Jen, Rob Belushi and me before we're joined for the interview by Blake Howard.

I wrote about my enthusiasm for Mr. Inbetween on this blog three years ago during its third and final season on F/X (streaming on Hulu) and now that it's finished, I'm even more enthusiastic about it. The final episodes really played out the themes incredibly richly and just, y'know, stuck the landing the way you're always hoping the great things do. Think I've watched the whole show through five or six times by now and it keeps revealing layers and themes I'd somehow missed before. 

It's not only one of the funniest and most heart-breaking shows I've ever seen, but I'm hard-pressed to think of an example of gnarlier TV violence. Gorier? Okay. Grosser? Yeah, of course, but violence that can turn your stomach with its cold, brutal bluntness and lack of affectation and style? I'm drawing a blank. Yet, it's still a show I would recommend to normal folks. You don't have to be a basement crazy noirhead to dig it. 

Anyway, I'm still recommending Mr. Inbetween to people who've somehow not even heard of it two years after this interview. Trust me, you're gonna love it.

For anybody interested, I put together a Letterboxd list of the films I watched in preparation for the episode which included all the Blue Tongue films I could get ahold of, the short films of Nash Edgerton (who directed every episode of Mr. Inbetween) and other Australian crime films featuring cast members, and especially films directed by cast members (I think Ryan and Edgerton enjoyed casting directors as actors and really abusing them onscreen).  I revisited Ryan's own The Magician a couple of times and of course Benoît Poelvoorde, Rémy Belvaux, and André Bonzel's Man Bites Dog which Mr. Inbetween owes a lot to. Most of Edgerton's shorts can be found on youtube and a few of them are on Hulu as well.

Code 46

Back in the late nineties and early aughts my favorite filmmakers tended to be those uncommitted to a signature style, whose range was broad in scope and whose accomplishment was evenly dispersed across a multitude of genres and tones. Alan Parker was an early favorite, Steven Spielberg too. Steven Soderbergh really grabbed my attention early in the 90s with the very stylish Kafka and the slick indie Sex, Lies & Videotape which he followed up with King of the Hill, The Underneath (his remake of Robert Siodmak's Criss Cross) and the losing his movie mind Schizopolis; each picture stylish in different ways and confident at various volumes. 

Rising roughly in tandem to Soderbergh on the other side of the Atlantic English filmmaker Michael Winterbottom wouldn't really arrive on my radar until his Thomas Hardy adaptations Jude and The Claim treated me rough, but memorably, and I started to look for what else he was up to. He followed up The Claim with 24 Hour Party People, the flashy, funny biopic of Tony Wilson and the Manchester music scene's evolution over a fifteen-year period. It was his first feature to star his longest-running collaborator Steve Coogan, but before they took The Trips Winterbottom dropped the near-future sci-fi romantic thriller Code 46 starring Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton. 

And I think it's a low-key masterpiece. 

The story about Robbins' fraud investigator called to Shanghai to find a forger operating inside a large multi-national company producing travel papers for restricted people. He uses an empathy virus to help him intuit things about people and when he meets Morton's forger he is immediately smitten and lies to his clients about the identity of their black marketeer. The pair spend his single night in Shanghai celebrating her birthday and beginning a love affair that has tragic results. 

If you think it sounds like William Gibson writing a Graham Greene story than you and me are in agreement and if that sounds like a heady proposition to you, let me assure you that it is. In fact you can listen to me talk quite a lot about what I enjoy and appreciate about it on this episode of the Projection Booth with Mike White and Dylan Davis. The episode includes interviews with Code 46 screenwriter and frequent Winterbottom collaborator Frank Cottrell-Boyce and producer Andrew Eaton.

Winterbottom has had a long and prolific career, and I've moved on to my crime obsession, so our paths have less-often intersected than I thought they might for a few minutes there in the early aughts. I do really dig his Jim Thompson adaptation The Killer Inside Me and I'd still love to follow Dev Patel's character from The Wedding Guest through a short franchise's worth of adventures and holy hell his producing of the Red Riding Trilogy based on the David Peace novels remains one of the best projects of the 21st century, so I still have an eye on his output, just nothing as intensely as I did after Code 46.

If I were looking to compliment the sci-fi vibes of Code 46, I'd say it's got DNA in common with... Blade Runner, Boarding Gate, Children of Men, Demonlover, Gattaca, Minority Report, New Rose Motel and Until the End of the World. Do with that what you will.

Heroic Perverts

Reading a lovely and beautiful wisp of a book punching above its wordcount weight on my front porch in the oppressive heat of July last week and found innerworldly cool relief from the briny breeze with every turn of the page. S.L. Coney's Wild Spaces is a tentacle horror, coming of age, southern gothic/rural noir adjacent heartbreaker that I'll be thinking about for a long time (and if you think that genre combo sounds like a gas please check out Chad Crawford Kinkle's Jug Face or Laura Benedict's The Devil's Oven, maybe Southern Gods by John Hornor Jacobs). 

Anyway, it got me thinking about themes of transformation transcendence, transgression, evo/devolution and adaptation which inevitably lead me to think of David Cronenberg. If you're a fan you might check out the anthology of essays and short fiction inspired by the earliest films of his, Children of the New Flesh edited by Chris Kelso and David Leo Rice. 

You can read my interview with Rice about the book at Southwest Review. I was particularly pleased with his definition of and ruminations on Cronenberg's use of the heroic pervert archetype. The heroic pervert is easily plugged into science fiction and supernatural horror, but its often effective in more crime blog-relative spaces like drug fiction, gutter stuff and generally transgressive fiction.

I wouldn't call Ottessa Moshfegh's Homesick for Another World crime though some of the stories touch its outer boundaries, but I recently enjoyed following her heroic perverts on their downward spirals and knuckleball pitches. I haven't read her crime novel Eileen, but I did catch William Oldroyd's adaptation starring Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway and I'd be happy to see everybody involved continue down the dark path (really need to see Oldroyd's Lady Macbeth too - Johnny Shaw recommended it here).

Sara Gran's Holistic Detective Agency

Recently had occasion to recommend a detective novel to someone without any real idea of their taste and the first thing that came out of my mouth was Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead by Sara Gran. Didn't think about it till the next day what a strange one that was to take off the top of my head. I think it might have been because there's something for everybody in it. Of course, there's a lot for everybody to be turned off by too. It's traditional, but it's very weird, it's cerebral, and it's explosively violent. It's definitely not boring and Claire DeWitt is a series character who doesn't outstay her welcome - only three books (so far).

Anyway, I'm a big fan of Sara Gran and I'd like you to be too. Here's something I wrote for another site way back when Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead was first released in 2011.

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Here’s a blurb from Lee Child on Sara Gran’s amazing 2006 novel Dope:

“If Raymond Chandler knew then what we know now, he might have written a book like this”

It was a classic hardboiled detective novel set in the romantic era that Chandler wrote in but had the gilt-edging stripped away with the perspective benefit of fifty years’ remove. Well, brothers and sisters, with the release of her latest, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, I pose this question: could Chandler have written anything like this even with a fifty-year forward-glimpse? Answer: I doubt it.

No slight to Chandler, gawsh I love his stuff, but it’s kinda refreshing to read an American PI novel where his ghost hand is not immediately visible, hovering over the author’s. Claire DeWitt is the most bracingly original fictional sleuth I’ve seen in years, which is not to say that her influences aren’t apparent, (some Nancy Drew here, some Columbo there, a touch of Holmes, and some Sam Spade too) only that her particular cocktail of parentage has so many previously antithetical and adversarial qualities packed snugly into her frame and sounding cozy behind her first person narrative, you’re going to get dizzy trying to keep up. She’s terribly new-agey, knows the I Ching, combs through her own dream interpretations for clues and is so sharply spiritually tuned, she’d shame Dale Cooper and Dirk Gently even if they teamed up against her in an intuit-off. On the other hand she’s also an angel-dust-smoking, tattooed, gun enthusiast, hand to hand fighter and generally just kind of a badass – “I’d shot four people. I’d killed two. None were in self-defense.” (Check out Sara’s blog The Abbott Gran Medicine Show that she keeps with Megan Abbott for more on the origins of Claire DeWitt.)

She sees her vocation as a detective as nothing less than her sacred duty and moral destiny and speaks so earnestly about her desire to ‘solve mysteries’ that at first I cringed. It was like listening to my favorite band discuss openly their desire to ‘be cool’ and proven strategies toward that goal. I want my rock stars to be cool without ever addressing it, and yeah, I generally appreciate some tasteful reluctance on the part of my investigators, but Gran bids us immerse ourselves in Claire’s world, and who am I to resist? That world (this time out) is New Orleans, so regal in its ruin and exotic in its very Americanism (N.O. has always been our national funhouse compact mirror), and Claire changes its already charged atmosphere simply by entering it. She’s come to town to find a missing person who disappeared in the storm (yeah, this is 2007) and once accepted, she’s prepared to solve the case and uncover the truth regardless of who is hurt, angered or exposed by it.

She takes as a matter of course that no one really wants her to find the truth (nevermind what they say or think). She’s prepared to be unpopular because she’s committed Detection by Silette, the voice crying out of the wilderness that all elect investigators understand to be their very own guru-prophet-philosopher-L. Ron Hubbard to memory and faithfully adheres to the wisdom and guidance it provides. The origins of Silette and his near impenetrable tome are mysterious themselves and a good deal of Claire’s backstory revolves around the sisterhood she founded with two childhood friends when they discovered the book, hidden away like the object of great power from any classical myth, and decided to become detectives. Twenty years later, one of them has disappeared and Claire is estranged from her remaining former companion. Her back-story is at least as intriguing as the central, forward-moving case, but reserves resolution for a later date, and I suspect that it is this over-arcing storyline that will be the real hook for the series.

Bringing together the mystery element of Dope and the touch of the supernatural that played a more prominent role in her first two novels, Saturn's Return to New York and Come Closer, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead is perhaps the most distilled essence of Granishness we’ve yet been privy to, and I can’t wait for another shot of the hard stuff.

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The DeWitt adventures Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway and The Infinite Blacktop followed and I have reason to hope there will be a fourth Claire DeWitt title someday. 

Meanwhile I've got The Book of the Most Precious Substance sitting on my shelf waiting for the right moment to surprise me with whatever the fuck its deal is. 

One Season Wonder: Terriers

I was very happy to join Jen Johans on the Watch With Jen podcast to discuss the one season wonder television phenom Terriers. Created by Ted Griffin and executive produced by Shawn Ryan with Donal Logue and Michael Raymond-James out front as an ex-cop and ex-con barely running a scrappy detective agency in Ocean Beach, California. 

The show is a favorite re-watchable for me that gets better and more impressive with subsequent revisits. The episode was a lot of fun to research and, as always, the discussion with Jen was great (please consider becoming a patron for Jen's film writing and podcast).

Terriers belongs to a lineage of shaggy private eyes stumbling through SoCal dealing with substance abuse, dependency, divorce and broken family relationships as well as iffy honor codes and the high cost of living, but resolute in their rumpled righteous refusal to play the man's game. Shit, that may even be optimism. 

Of course they're destined for heartbreak or to be the fool in somebody else's story if fortune smiles on them, and far worse and darker than amber destinations if reality bites, but the game is afoot and the feet are sandaled and the sun is shining on even a dead terrier's ass. 

Here are a few more Terriers tangential titles I believe the show cribs something from.

Ross MacDonald's character Lew Archer is in California, and his investigations run up against a lot of kookie characters, but he's a lot more put together than most of the examples on the list. I've read a few of the books in the series, but I'm much more familiar with the film versions. For the movies Lew Archer becomes Lew Harper (supposedly in order to keep Paul Newman's hot-streak of H-titles alive - Hustler, Hud, Hombre) for Harper. Based on the novel The Moving Target, it is an extremely self-conscious 1960s private eye movie clearly looking to compare itself to the gold-standard of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe books and films including Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep - a film that opens with the detective being interviewed by an eccentric wealthy man about the kind of man/detective he is and having the rich man's daughter throw herself at him. Harper opens with the detective being interviewed by a wealthy woman, (Lauren Bacall - Bogart's wife and co-star in The Big Sleep) about what kind of man/detective he is, her missing husband and then their daughter throw herself him. 

Lew Harper grows old and Paul Newman becomes Harry Ross for Robert Benton's Twilight which includes other casting nods to 60s/70s detectives (Gene Hackman as the MacDonald-esque Harry Moseby in Night Moves which, for as much as Harper wanted to be seen as a "new kind" of private eye movie seems awfully stuck in the studio system compared to Night Moves directed by Arthur Penn whose Bonnie & Clyde -from a script by Benton- announced the expiration date on the old Hollywood studio picture and the beginning of the New Hollywood era, and James Garner from Marlowe based on Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister as Raymond Hope). 

The Drowning Pool was the only official sequel to Harper, but Twilight effectively turns the flicks into a trilogy with the ending re-creating the climactic scene from Harper with Newman's detective unsure what to do with the curse of solving the case and finding a friend at the heart of it. If you consider Newman to be the same character in both films the similarities don't strain credulity (how can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?) but rather re-enforce the themes and demonstrate that as much as they want to be separate themselves from what came before and be era-defining stories, nothing's changed (of course the same shit is still happening). 

Nothing's changed in people, but the person Newman's old man has turned into handles the same old shit a different way. Which way is more heroic? Either? Neither? Could he get it right both times? Wrong both times? Both endings stick. 

The title Twilight evokes the aging of the cast and characters all looking back on their days, the memories of which seem bleached from too much exposure, while the dusk makes the same old shit beautiful because it will soon be invisible. 

But the sun also rises and just like Jake Barnes, the emasculated by gunshot main character of Hemingway's masculine romance, Harry Ross finds himself rumored to have suffered a similar injury after being shot high in the thigh by the daughter of best friends Hackman and Susan Sarandon on the job.

Benton is an under-noted contributor to crime film culture. He co-wrote Penn's Bonnie and Clyde and Joseph L. Mankiewicz's There Was a Crooked Man... and he co-adapted Scott Phillips' The Ice Harvest with Richard Russo for Harold Ramis and he directed The Late Show, Still of the Night, Nadine and Billy Bathgate too. His directorial debut Bad Company is a western that pits Jeff Bridges against Tom Huddelston in the finale, a matchup next seen 25 years later in The Big Lebowski which shares similar stoner-noir DNA with Terriers - see also Thomas Pynchon's novel and Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation of Inherent Vice. 

Lebowski is really kind of a comedic remake of Adrian Passar's much darker Cutter's Way right down the casting of Jeff Bridges as the aimless central character whose biggest ambition is having a place to get comfortably stoned at the end of the day, and whose single moment of clarity is picked up on by their unhinged conspiracy-nut Viet Nam veteran best friend (John Heard and John Goodman respectively) who won't let it go and proceeds to drag our hapless easy-going central character unwillingly along a bizarre path toward the truth.

Adapted from the (even darker) novel Cutter & Bone by Newton Thornburg, Cutter's Way represents the grim end of Terriers' DNA. The dialogue is every bit as witty, but it's inescapably sad and dour; an uncompromising endless bummer set in the sleepy SoCal beach town of Santa Barbara. The specter of Viet Nam filters the sunny setting so effectively you'll think it's midnight at noon.

Somewhere in between the bitter hopeless nihilism of Cutter's Way and the goofy nihilists and post-idealism of The Big Lebowski is Jeremy Kagan's adaptation of Roger L. Simon's novel The Big Fix starring Richard Dreyfuss as Moses Wine a former 60s student radical eking out a living in the late 70s as a private investigator. His former compatriots either died in Viet Nam, fled the country to avoid the draft or are serving time in prison for their radical actions, but Moses finds himself a divorced father of two struggling to pay alimony and feeling some survivor's guilt over the sixties. When an old flame shows up and tells him she's working for a politician who wants to hire him to uncover the source of a smear campaign linking the establishment Democrat to a long-disappeared Weather Underground-esque terrorist he takes the gig feeling like it's just one more indication that he's sold out. The tone vacillates between light-hearted comedy and paranoid thriller with less consistently gold results than Terriers, but they share similar heartbeats and affections for the people who survived intense times because they were too weird to die.

The detective out of time bemusedly shuffling through Los Angeles equally out of place among the beach front neuvo-bohemians, the suspicious and fascist police force and the hip and sleazy gangster underbelly just trying to find some Curry brand cat food in the middle of the night and taking up the cause for strays, runaways and close friends in their hour of need is part of the Terriers brand, but maybe the best known example is Robert Altman's Chandler adaptation of The Long Goodbye starring the improbably perfect Elliott Gould as Marlowe as Rip Van Winkle. I know a lot of folk bristle at this treatment of classic text, but they need to wake up and smell the times, man. 

The 70s weren't all revisionist takes on classic noir tho. Roman Polanski's Chinatown served up Jack Nicholson as a slick hat-wearing private eye content with his station in life doing well-paying divorce work and regular gumshoe fare but who digs in deeper on a case when he finds his client set him up to look foolish. Professional reputation on the line he uncovers institutional corruption and moral rot among the powerful manipulating the whole city. So effective and devastating a story, Chinatown's plot has become kinda boilerplate for neo-noir recognizable in descendants like Terriers, Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress, James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential and another shaggy detective duo half-comedic favorite, Shane Black's The Nice Guys.

The buddy element of Terriers is a huge part of its appeal. Donal Logue and Michael Raymond-James have fantastic chemistry and serve up the fast patter and easy-going ballbusting so essential to the buddy genre. If you think of the buddy crime movie as the homo-affectionate version of a classic screwball comedy you'll understand the value of that verbal repartee. Ted Griffin is clearly a fan of both. 

I think the cornerstone of the buddy crime picture is probably George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid with folks like Walter Hill (48 Hrs., Red Heat) and Peter Hyams (Busting, Running Scared) helping establish tropes before Shane Black took it supernova (Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, The Long Kiss Goodnight). 

Add to the buddy element the beach noir of John D. McDonald's Travis McGee series (boat noir?), Don Winslow's Boone Daniels books and California Fire & Life, plus Kem Nunn's seminal surf noir Tapping the Source, (also The Dogs of Winter and Tijuana Straits), throw in a healthy dose of The Rockford Files and... maybe you'll get something kinda like Terriers.

Following the Terriers episode Ted Griffin expressed his appreciation and even contributed his own episodes to the Watch with Jen podcast including this one on Leo McCrary and this one on Curtis Hanson. Donal Logue also became a Watch with Jen regular so hey that's cool.

Here's hoping Terriers gets a DVD release. For now it's available on Hulu.

Looking for more Terriers episodes? Check out the Terriers podcast Beach Cop Detectives.

Testing... testing 1-2... Is this thing on?

Not saying the site is back. Not saying I am either. But there really isn't anything/anywhere else I have an outlet for some of the things this blog once provided for me and... I miss it. The pandemic and the global and domestic state of things really did a number on me and I'm not the same person I was before. 

But rather than start a brand new thing on some other platform or look to publish in other journals I may from time to time post something here... probably won't promote it. Not interested in guest pieces at this point, but... 

Find me on letterboxd if you like. I don't really talk much about films there, but I do post film lists sometimes and if you're so inclined you can follow my viewing habits.

Not on many social media sites, but the ones I am on don't provide the kind of outlet I once enjoyed there, but hey, feel free to look for me and ask a question if you have one.

We'll see as 2024 ramps up the insanity how long I can hang here, but... I do miss some things about this place. 

Hardboiled Wonderland was an active blog for 12 years, but it's inactive now. Lot of stuff I'm proud of in these pages and plenty that makes me cringe now. I've changed my opinion of many things and changed the way I would choose to speak about some of the subjects. I've been tempted to delete the blog many times and may someday, but I'm leaving it be for now. The main reason I never nuked it is that a lot of the books and some of the films covered remain under-valued and under-exposed and they deserve to have some record preserved. 

I made a lot of friends and no enemies that I'm aware of on this site and some of them are no longer around. Some of them have gone from amateur status to successful careers that's a cool thing too. Some of them wrote kickass guest pieces for this site too. I'd hate to lose those by deleting the blog.

If you were a reader of, or a contributor to the blog, thanks so much. I appreciate it.