Hoagy's 100

Taken (Pierre Morel, 2008)

Peu de films français peuvent se targuer d'avoir engrangé 150 millions de dollars au box-office américain, ce qui suffit à assurer à Taken une place dans l'histoire du cinéma que ses qualités intrinsèques auraient été bien en peine de lui valoir. Non qu'il s'agisse d'un mauvais film, mais c'est pour l'essentiel un produit de série, aux ambitions très terre-à-terre: produire un cocktail de sensations fortes assez efficacement doté pour ne pas laisser au spectateur le temps de réfléchir. Pari dans l'ensemble réussi, pour peu que le spectateur accepte de jouer le jeu et d'oublier que l'histoire est un tissu platement filmé et à peine cohérent de situations et de personnages vus et revus cent fois. Liam Neeson y est pour beaucoup et si vous doutiez encore qu'il soit un grand acteur, alors c'est le film que vous devez voir, car il tire le maximum du matériau qui lui est donné, et arrive presque à rendre crédible son personnage de super-agent-à-la-retraite-mais-toujours-redoutable. D'autres auraient joué la carte du second degré ou assuré le service minimum; Neeson lui y va à fond, sans nuances, et ça marche. Chapeau l'artiste!

Very few French films can be said to have grossed over 140.000.000 $ on the American market, so that feat alone makes sure Taken has a place in the history of cinema - a place that its own qualities would've had difficulty to secure. Not that it is a very bad film, but it is essentially a cookie-cutter product whose ambitions are fairly down to earth: to embark the viewer on a roller-coaster ride so fast and eventful that no time is left for thinking. This objective is mostly met, assuming the viewer is good-natured enough not to notice how the whole thing is a poorly-directed rehashing of situations and characters seen a hundred times before. Liam Neeson is the film's main (sole?) driving force and if you still have doubts regarding his acting abilities then Taken is the film you need to see as he makes the most of what he is given (not much) and makes his retired-merciless-and-almost-indestructible-special-agent almost credible. Others might have played it tongue-in-cheek or opted for minimal service but Neeson goes for the jugular, without caring too much for nuances - and it works. Chapeau l'artiste!

There Are Still Changes Being Made

As you can see, I've changed the background image - less bookish, less colorful, but more personal. According to the website from which I borrowed the picture (I hope they don't mind) this is Villa Adrienne in Antibes - and I can't help but thinking it would've made a wonderful setting for a Golden Age mystery; a fitting illustration for this blog then.

Holding On

Ed Gorman is right: Elizabeth Sanxay Holding is one of the greats. Not only her books are awesome, but they make awesome movies, too:

Some auteurists will say that you can't go wrong with Max Ophuls behind the camera, and James Mason before it was certainly a plus, but the excellence of the film also rests on a nice script that is quite faithful to its source, including the decidedly amoral ending (a flagrant violation of the Hays Code; God only knows how it escaped the censor's ire)

Has anyone seen the remake starring Tilda Swinton?

There Are Some Changes Being Made, Ctd.

I just offered the Villa Rose a facelift, and I dare to say it was much needed - I hated the old template and had long wanted to drop it. I also imported the tiny archives from The Small Back Room and added some new features and links. This is of course a work in progress. Let me know how you like the new version so far.

There Are Some Changes Being Made

When The Villa Rose opened its doors, three years and fourteen days ago, I didn't think it would live that long. My previous blogging experience had been short-lived for the same reasons I thought would plague this one: a lack of regularity in posting and a natural shyness keeping me from marketing myself, meaning that I would be my sole reader. I was right to worry about the former - more on that later - but wrong about the latter, and I'd like to thank the few but faithful readers who kept reading and encouraging me over the years. 

Now to the point. As you may know, I own two other blogs - three actually, but the third was never officially launched, so it doesn't count. Mayhem Parva is supposed to be a French-language version of this blog, whereas The Small Back Room's aim is to collect my film criticism. Both are pretty somnolent, because of my recurring bouts of writer's block and the simple fact that managing three blogs, while a bed of roses in theory, proves to be quite difficult in practice. Since I've decided in the meantime to launch yet another blog devoted to my creative writing, I thought it might be a good idea to merge all those dealing with my "random thoughts" into a new, and I hope improved, Villa Rose. No, you won't have to update your bookmarks: this blog remains the same, at the same address. The only difference is that it will be bilingual, and, while remaining a mystery blog first, will occasionally deal with non-mystery matters such as film or the other kinds of books I read.

If you have any complaint, question or suggestion about these changes, feel free to voice it in the comments, or drop me a line - I love mail.

Lost in Translation: Stanislas-André Steeman

Martin Edwards' glowing review of Six Dead Men ("Six Hommes Morts") provides me with a much-needed opportunity to revive my "Lost in Translation" series (when I said it would be irregular, I didn't mean it would appear only once a year!) and tell you about one of the greatest authors of the French Golden Age, and arguably one of the greatest mystery writers of all times: Stanislas-André Steeman.

It's hard not to think of his fellow-compatriot Georges Simenon when considering Steeman's trajectory. Both were French-speaking Belgians ("Wallons") hailing from Liège, stopped their studies early and dabbled into journalism. Both were precocious writers and gained celebrity thanks to their mystery novels. What sets them apart, however, is that Simenon mostly saw the mystery genre as a vehicle - and a convenient, if sometimes boring, way to make a living - whereas Steeman always regarded himself as a mystery writer first and foremost, one fully at home in the genre and its conventions - while never afraid to subvert them. Most of all, Steeman had an almost carrian devotion to fair-play which he always kept even though he distanced himself from the formal detective story in his later years.

Steeman, as said above, was a precocious fellow - he created his first comics (Steeman was as gifted with a pencil as he was with a pen) at age six. He later branched into poetry and wrote several "histoires légères" for Parisian specialized magazines whose editors were unaware of their prolific collaborator's tender age. Then he joined the staff of the "Nation Belge" where he befriended journalist Herman Sartini, a.k.a. Sintair. Together they wrote what they intended to be a parody of the roman-problème so popular back then, and sent it to the French publisher Le Masque as a joke. To their great bewilderment, it was accepted and Le mystère du zoo d'Anvers (The Anvers Zoo Mystery) was published in 1928. It was followed by Le treizième coup de Minuit (The Thirteenth of Midnight), Le maître de trois vies (The Master of Three Lives), Le diable au collège (Devil at High School) and Le guet-apens (The Trap). Sintair, however, never intended to become a full-time writer and their collaboration ended; Steeman was now on his own.

His first three solo detective novels were experimental works at the fringe of the genre as commonly known then: one of these, Zero, introduced Inspector Aimé Malaise who can be described as Steeman's own Maigret. He struck gold with the comparatively more orthodox Six Dead Men, which earned him the Grand Prix du Roman d'Aventures in 1931, and definetely established him as a major mystery writer at only 23. The book marks the first appearance of Steeman's favorite detective, urban and witty Wenceslas Vorobeitchik, and sets the tone of his later production: extremely clever, ironic, respectful of the rules while at the same time gently poking fun at them.

Steeman followed with another Wens mystery, La Nuit du 12 au 13 then surprised everyone with an atmospheric novel in the Simenon vein, Le démon de Sainte-Croix, manifesting that he was not one to be bound by categorizations. Steeman's output in the thirties, while not as prolific as his fellow-compatriot's, is extremely varied in tone, genre and style. "Traditional" mysteries featuring Mr. Wens alternate with thrillers (Le lévrier bleu*), fantasies (Feu Lady Anne**) parodies (L'Infaillible Silas Lord***) and more psychological works like Le mannequin assassiné**** (Malaise again) or La maison des veilles *****. Even in his comparatively more orthodox work, Steeman finds room for experiment: L'ennemi sans visage, which borders on weird fiction, is a good example. His works are very representative of the French Golden Age of mystery fiction with its emphasis on originality and inventivity, while rivalling at the same time with the Anglo-Saxon masters in terms of rigour, fair-play and cleverness. The points culminants of this period are Le trajet de la foudre (The Course of Lightning) and L'Assassin habite au 21 (The Murderer Lives At Number Twenty-One) a London-set story of a serial killer going by the name of Mr. Smith, arguably his masterpiece in the whodunit genre. This book provided Henri-Georges Clouzot with his first shot behind the camera, and the result was a film that is as brilliant as its source, with Pierre Fresnay starring as Mr. Wens.

As the war broke, Steeman slowed down. He started an imprint in Belgium, Le Jury, which revealed promising writers like Thomas Owen, Paul Kinnet or André-Paul Duchâteau. The experiment was short-lived as the German occupation forces because of the imprint's (and its creator's) alleged "anglophilia". Steeman published only one novel during the war years, Légitime Défense, a brief yet seminal work as Steeman went further in "pushing the envelope" than ever before - the result is a psychological crime novel to please Julian Symons - except that Steeman even there didn't abdicate his fondness for clever plots with surprise endings. Henri-Georges Clouzot made a remarkable film out of it, arguably the best adaptation of Steeman's work and one of the summits of French cinema - Steeman, while recognizing the film's qualities, resented that it changed the guilty party; Steeman's relationship with the big screen was always a sour one.

The post-war period brought some radical changes to the genre, and Steeman's work experienced some as well. After a final traditional mystery, Crimes à vendre (Crimes for Sale) Steeman engaged in increasingly experimental work. First he dabbled into soft-boiled fiction with three novels starring private investigator Désiré Marco: Madame La Mort (Madam Death) Dix-huit fantômes (Eigtheen Ghosts) and Faisons les fous (Let's Go Crazy). Then he brought Mr. Wens back, but a Mr. Wens nothing like the old one. The Wenceslas Vorobeitchik of Poker d'Enfer (Hell's Poker) and Six hommes à tuer (Six Men To Kill) is a fregolian, desincarnate character who can and does assume any appearance and identity; who he is, where he is and what he does replaces the standard "who's done it" as the books' big questions. Naturalism in these stories is completely abdicated but not Steeman's usual outstanding cleverness, and the plots, wild and hard to follow as they are, remain scrupulously fair.

The last decade of his life saw Steeman turning to suspense fiction, and his work getting increasingly bitter and darker. Impasse des Boiteux, Le condamné meurt à cinq heures (The Convict Dies At Five) Une veuve dort seule (A Widow Sleeps Alone, much admired by Boileau-Narcejac) and his final novel, Autopsie d'un viol (Autopsy of a Rape) a courtroom mystery set in the United States, display a grim worldview with none of the author's previous flippantness. Not gone, however, was his mastery of plotting and misdirection which remained firm and strong to the end. When Steeman died in 1970, he still had a lot of projects (including a promising Crime On Orbit) which never came to fruition - and this world is a poorer place for that. He was only 62.

Steeman, while not a household name like Simenon and often berated by fans of the latter, is a capital name in the history of French-speaking mystery fiction. He was one of the earliest writers to take the form seriously, both formally (he was a notorious perfectionist, and entirely re-wrote some of his early books as they didn't please him anymore) and conceptually. He was also one of the few pre-war mystery writers to try and come to terms with the new paradigms that emerged after WWII, and managed to stay relevant without abdicating any of its individuality and principles. Finally, he was one of the greatest and most inventive plotters of all times, ranking with Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr for the period before the war and Margaret Millar or Fredric Brown for the period that followed. It is a shame that he remains so little-known in English-speaking countries where only two of his books were translated.

Let's end with an anecdote typical of Steeman's sharp wit. Having stayed in a hotel whose service he found mediocre, Steeman as he left was asked by the manager to write some words in the hotel's golden book. He complied and wrote: "Souvenir of an unique stay at the X hotel". The manager gushed with pride and asked: "Unique? Why?" To which Steeman dryly replied: "Because it is the only one I'll ever have!".

* The Blue Greyhound.

** The Late Lady Anne

*** The Unfallible Silas Lord

**** The Murdered Dummy

***** The Waking House