I had hoped to have the next MYTEK book ready for release this week, but I'm going to delay it until next week as a couple of things have come up which might mean I can't get books out of the house as promptly as I would want to, especially given the problems I had with timely deliveries with the first two volumes. There's a family matter causing some concern and a couple of ongoing projects that I want to focus on for another week before all hell breaks loose (a slight exaggeration) and I spend a couple of days packing books.
It hasn't been all bad news, as I was planning to take things a little easier ahead of the book launch and I've managed to finish one book and start another, and I've caught up on some movies.
The book, which I shot through in about ten days (quick for me) was Tatiana by Martin Cruz Smith, the eighth in his Arkady Renko series (the first was Gorky Park, which was filmed). The story has plenty of engaging elements, the murder of a translator, a journalist and a Russian gang boss, an unsolvable cipher in a notebook, a very expensive bike that has gone missing... Smith often deliberately obscured any clues to solving a mystery, but this one is fairly straightforward, but whodunnit isn't nearly as important as what were they doing and why.
There's also a progression in Arkady Renko's personal life that has been building up in the last book or three, his relationship with Anya and his adopted son, the chess prodigy Zehenya. Their presence is strongly felt and I look forward to seeing how things develop in the next book. (Sadly, I only have three more to read as Smith died earlier this year. I recently updated a cover gallery I put up some years ago.)
The films have been a mixed bag. At the end of most I've thought, "Well, I've watched it now and I never have to do that again." F1 had Brad Pitt and some high speed action, but a hackneyed plot about an old-timer teaching a youngster how to win—mostly by putting other drivers' lives in danger at every turn. The selling point of Nobody is that you believed Bob Odenkirk was just a regular guy and the pleasure in the film was discovering that he was extraordinary. Nobody 2 held no surprises and 90 minutes of Odenkirk punching his way through a family vacation wasn't as fun as I'd hoped. Exterritorial, or Die Hard in the US Consulate in Frankfurt, sees Jeanne Goursaud kicking the butts of every trained soldier she meets in search of her missing son. There weren't any surprises except that I thoroughly enjoyed it!
Pixar's Elio was disappointing. They've done the same kind of thing before and better and while it's a perfectly serviceable movie I spent quite a lot of it wishing I was watching The Incredibles. The Naked Gun also had me wanting to watch the originals, but while comparisons are inevitable, this wasn't as bad as some have painted. It had the same kind of silly jokes you'd expect of a Frank Drebin movie (and, best of all, the original Police Squad! TV series) and some laugh-out-loud moments. Liam Neeson plays it straight, unaware of the chaos around him.
And, finally, the film that kept me up until one o'clock this morning, Kansas City Confidential, a 1952 crime-noir about a bank heist that's blamed on an ex-con. The crooks are masked whenever they meet, so cannot identify each other or the Mr Big behind the job. The crooks are the usual bunch of cowards, tough guys and a sweaty sex-pest played by Lee Van Cleef; the hero isn't just in it for revenge—he wants some of the money, too. And Mr Big has his own plans to sell everybody out. I put this on planning to watch for ten minutes and then doze off, only to be sucked in for the full 95 minutes.
In between, I've been working hard on some biographies of artists. Having written up a British artist last week, I was back to Google Translate for the latest batch: two Italians and an Argentinian who went to live in Italy. I'm enjoying writing these little essays as it is exposing me to a huge amount of European and South American work that I wouldn't otherwise know about. It's a shame that I don't have three lives to live so that I could really indulge myself in reading these strips.
I began writing little biographical essays in the BEYOND THE VOID book and I've continued ever since; they're a feature in the AIR ACE COMPANION and will be a feature in this new index that I'm working on, which will similarly romp through the lives of a dozen or so key artists.
Mind you, back in 2012 I did a book called NOT FORGOTTEN, which was a collection of 34 essays on comic creators who had died in 2009-10, and it bombed. In the ten years I kept it in print it sold two dozen copies. I kid you not. That's 2.4 copies a year! In the end I thought I'd pull it and one day I'll figure out where I went wrong. All I can say is, if I hadn't written it, I'd have bought a copy.
Maybe I should gather them all together with all the other essays and call it WHO'S WHO IN BRITISH COMICS (Volume 1). Or maybe set up a Patreon or a Substack so that I can earn a bit while I'm writing entries. Something else I need to think about.
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