THE HITCHCOCK MURDERS review

SPELLBOUND  
Alfred Hitchcock makes deeper cuts than usual in Gavin Collinson's entertaining debut novel.

Danger: maestro at work. (Image copyright: BFI)

I’ve always been envious of people who can write fiction. With factual writing you get to a point where you know it’s complete, whereas with fiction you can keep editing and refining endlessly. That being the case, I’m delighted to be able appraise my friend Gavin Collinson’s first novel The Hitchcock Murders. It’s a great idea: a serial killer is targeting attractive blonde women – a fetish of the famous thriller director Alfred Joseph Hitchcock – and dispatching them in grisly ways based on the slayings in Hitchcock’s movies.
          

As it’s such a great idea it has been done before. The 1973 film Theatre of Blood, in which a deliciously camp Vincent Price played a Shakespearean actor who took out his critics in murders based on murders in the Bard’s plays, is the most obvious example. Then there’s the TV series Whitechapel, which has serial killers basing their modus operandi on historical crimes, not to mention numerous episodes of The Avengers, where villains fanatical about everything from cats to clowns dispatch their victims in bizarre ways that reflect their obsessions. 

More recently, there’ve been Ben Aaronovitch’s books about the Folly, a secret division of the Metropolitan Police which deals with supernatural crime, in which an ingénue officer is paired with an experienced mentor. There’s the same kind of relationship in the newly promoted Detective Chief Inspector Josa Jilani and veteran criminal consultant Daniel Blake at the centre of The Hitchcock Murders, but unlike Aaronovitch, Collinson roots his story firmly in an every day here and now. 

Josa is a British Asian Muslim woman and, apart from dealing with a Hitch-obsessed killer, has to cope with prejudice inside and outside the police, as well as the political pressure of being the poster girl for the Home Secretary’s ethnic initiative within the force. This angle, together with other genuine touches, such as how a new DCI wins over their team, the gulf between commander and rank and file officers and the amount of tedious slog involved in investigations, indicate that unlike some of his contemporary writers Collinson has actually been inside a police station. His authentic grip on Josa’s working environment adds a lot to the story and is an effective contrast with the macabre sequences.

Collinson is also hip to the role of the press in complicating and compromising police investigations, together with the absurdity that can result in a 24 hour, 24/7 greedy media culture. For instance, the day the Hitchcock connection is announced, the Shopping Channel has features on how blondes might like to try on a selection of ridiculous new hats to hide heir hair colour, as well as a new type of sponge that lets you have an all-over body wash without the need for a shower (so you don’t end up in a watery grave like Janet Leigh did in Psycho). Observations like this are just some of the novel’s many incidental pleasures.

Refreshingly, the flirtatious relationship between Josa and Blake isn’t so much will-they-won’t-they, as they’re-both-gagging-for-it-but-the-crimes-keep-getting-in-the-way. Josa and Blake are so well realised that you’d like to hang out with these people, and because of that are compelled to keep turning the pages to see what happens to them. There are also tantalising hints about the enigmatic Blake’s dark past, cannily set up to be developed in successive novels (and it’s a sign of he publisher’s confidence that the second, They Keep Killing Marilyn, is announced at the end of the book). 

Every thriller needs a great suspect, and Collinson really knows his stuff here. Professor Paul Salinger, a pompous and arrogant academic who just happens to specialise in teaching Hitchcock, dances around Josa and Blake swapping verbal volleys to revel in. This is a character steeped in a history of memorable confrontations that take in Bond and Blofeld, Holmes and Moriarty and Dr Who and the Master/Mistress, to name a few. If you like any of those you’ll love the battle of wits here.

A supporting cast of regular characters also make an immediate, engaging impression: the stiff-necked Superintendent Kim Gilmour who’s Josa’s careerist boss; the garrulous, American bear-of-a-man Jack Dempsey who’s Blake’s ‘father’ (you can just see Edge of Darkness’s Joe Don Baker playing him); Preya, Josa’s statuesque older sister, who the detective is slightly jealous of and Karen Sherwood, a blatantly opportunistic journalist, all live and breathe through sharp, clever and funny dialogue. In fact, Collinson’s lines are so good they could drop unaltered into a screenplay adaptation. 

The prose style is a joy to read too, particularly in the way physical descriptions are used to define characters’ personalities. Two that stick in the mind are portraits of one of Salinger’s students and his personal assistant: Todd Marten has ‘something inverted about him. It was like he was embarrassed there was so much of him, as if he’d prefer to have taken up less space,’ while Cordelia Smith has a face ‘invariably set in an expression of mistrust and displeasure, as hard and warm as a butcher’s slab.’ I’ve rarely seen action scenes described better, too. It’s as if Collinson storyboarded them first (as a film director would) before he wrote them up. Maybe he did.  

Did Salinger do it? Not saying. Even though The Hitchcock Murders is a hefty tome, the pace is so strong that you’ll be devouring the pages to find out and be delighted that there’s still more to read. 

I know next to nothing about Hitchcock, so a handy filmography at the end, which is very informative and enlightening, is an extra bonus. And the cover is just beautiful, inspired by Hitch’s graphic designer Saul Bass. 

All together, a very stylish package and a striking debut. Gav done good.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Hitchcock-Murders-Gavin-Collinson-ebook/dp/B00SV9QU1K

KINGSMAN – THE SECRET SERVICE review

THE CORRECT WAY TO KILL

Fun, spectacular and rather rude, Kingsman - The Secret Service  is a refreshing new spin on the spy movie.

The Avengers was never like this... (Image: Moviestore.com)

  

Still wrestling with the blues and unemployment, I threw caution to the wind on Monday and went to see a film. As a tonic for the blues, for me there are still few things better than going to the pictures and, as the last film I paid to see was Pride last summer, I thought it was way past time I did my small part to help out the British film industry again. Kingsman: The Secret Service seemed a good choice as I’d heard positive things about it and it was about spies, one of my favourite fascinations.

Stone being blasted out of a Middle Eastern fortress and forming the film’s credits hinted at something a bit out of the ordinary. I’d heard somewhere that the film was based on a comic but I’ve never seen or read it. As it unfolds, you’re intrigued by the revelation that the sophisticated Harry Hart (Colin Firth, having a ball) works for Kingsman, an ‘independent international intelligence agency’, whose operatives are all suited and booted in bespoke tailoring. When Gary ‘Eggsy’ Unwin (Taron Egerton, impressively confident), the son of one Harry’s agent’s killed in Iraq, asks for help with the police, Harry takes him under his wing and trains him up in the organisation’s secret arts.

The film is at once a fresh spin on a well worn genre and defiantly old fashioned. The contemporary social observation is new: Eggsy’s mum (a highly believable Samantha Womack) slides from being a grieving army widow in 1997 into being, in the present day, the punch-bag for a criminal step Dad in charge of a gang of low-life chavs. Eggsy himself has given up a promising career in the marines, settling for ‘drugs, petty crime, never [having] a job.’ You don’t normally see the British underclass in modern spy fiction and it’s done pretty authentically.

On the other hand, there’s always been the tradition of the working class outsider getting the better of a predominantly upper espionage class establishment in spy fiction, and it’s a punch-the-air moment for long-term spy fans to see Michael Caine – Harry Palmer, the working class hero himself – turn up as Kingsman’s chief. With Eggsy up against a batch of toff recruits, the film settles into an enjoyably predictable groove as he gets the better of them in ingenious ways thanks to his street smarts, most notably in a brilliant, heart-in-mouth aerial parachute drop. He also bonds with posh girl Roxy (the spirited Sophie Cookson), albeit with a lot more four letter words than Palmer or David Callan used.

There’s also self-aware fun to be had for spy-fi fans in spotting more references to other films, primarily with the pleasingly up-to-the-minute villain Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson), an internet millionaire who knows he’s the evil mastermind in a spy film. Hart and Valentine even nostalgically discuss vintage spy movies, finding modern ones ‘a bit serious’ and reflecting that ‘the old Bond films were only as good as the villain.’ In a similar vein, Valentine’s master plan is gratifyingly insane – complete with a traditional countdown to Armageddon – but, elsewhere, Kingsman cleverly subverts old super spy film conventions, in a couple of scenes to particularly dramatic and shocking effect.

Every spy film baddy has to have a henchman or henchwoman, and Valentine has the sensual assassin Gazelle (Sofia Boutella), who uses Oscar Pistorious-style walking blades to kill (an upgrade of Rosa Klebb’s poison blade-concealing shoes in From Russia with Love). In light of what happened to the South African runner, I couldn’t help feeling uncomfortable about this aspect of the film, not to mention thinking that it was in questionable taste, even as I was carried along by the action.

And, if you like action, Kingsman will have you open-mouthed at some sequences. As a fan of The Avengers, I got a blast from seeing immaculately suited secret agents getting the better of the opposition with umbrellas again in elaborately staged, Manga-style ballets of violence. Colin Firth must have revelled in the chance to be an action hero at last, particularly in the utterly insane, over the top, but brilliantly shot and choreographed sequence where he takes on the entire congregation of a church. I don’t know how they did it, but it’s hugely enjoyable. I can’t say much more about the action scenes without spoiling the fun, except that one near the end is breathtaking in its ultraviolence.  

As is the tradition with spy films of a certain age, Kingsman ends on the risqué realisation of Eggsy’s belief that ‘posh birds love a bit of rough.’ Let’s just say it makes Roger Moore’s saucy ‘Keeping the British end up, sir,’ from the conclusion of The Spy Who Loved Me, look like something by Noel Coward. 

Is Kingsman un-PC? I have to say so. Is it extremely violent? Guilty as charged. Is it a fun action film with some clever, intelligent and unexpected touches? Yes – and that’s why it’s worth a night out.

 

MENTAL HEALTH

BLACK DOG DAYS

Some words of encouragement for depression sufferers.

Grrrrr... (Image copyright Black Dog website).

  

OK, so far 2015 hasn’t go off to a great start for me. For various reasons I wasn’t able to move out of London as I’d planned and now have to find another lodger. The accumulated stress has, unfortunately, put me in a depressed state of mind.

The thing is, this is nowhere I haven’t been before: since I was 30, I’ve had the illness and always manage to weather the storm. It’s tougher now I live on my own, but the fact that I’ve managed to overcome bouts of depression since getting divorced in 2008 shows that, like most depressives, I’m a lot tougher than I think I am.

So what works me for me? Here’s what doesn’t: staying in bed all day, watching telly all day, not eating, isolating yourself. As I rationally type this I know without a doubt how bad this combination is, but I won’t pretend that I don’t still give in to it.

The most important thing for me is getting up. Non-sufferers will be puzzled by how significant this innocuous daily ritual is, but anyone who’s suffered from depression will know that it will make the difference between a good and, frankly, terrible day. Whatever’s keeping you stressed, upset or worried, it’s far better to get up and face it because, encouragingly, it doesn’t seem half so bad when you do. Putting your feet on the floor and throwing back the covers is the absolute key to beating the daily blues.

When you’re in a depressed state of mind, every day things – having a shower, a cup of coffee, putting on Breakfast TV – all make a difference because they’re part of a normal routine and, once you get into that groove again, they have a cumulative effect: the more you do, the better you feel. For me at the moment, because I’m not working, I try and make sure I get out of the house and go to the library because I know people there and it’s a good atmosphere to be in. Handily, it’s also a 20 minute walk away, so I’m getting enough exercise (another important black dog remedy). It’s that or jumping around the front room to ‘5 Minutes’, which is equally effective.

Writing also helps. Even if I only manage an hour a day, and even if it isn’t perfect or finished, I find it incredibly therapeutic. Being nice to yourself every day is essential. And even if you just speak to a mate on the phone, it’ll make a helluva difference.

I’ve known since 2008 that I’m bi-polar and being on the right medication has made a big difference but, as I’ve said, it doesn’t make you immune from recurrent bouts of depression. Knowing the danger signs is crucial, and if things do start going seriously awry, the number one thing you should do is see your GP so you can be referred. If you’re worried about doing that, try the excellent and very understanding mental health charity MIND.            

Hey, The Stranglers have just arrived on Breakfast TV! Today’s first pleasant surprise, and not something you’d be able to enjoy if you were hiding under the pillow.

Things will get better.