The Unathletic Camper's Baseball Glossary and The Nation Softball Team

Right Field. A quiet place, where you can sit for long stretches and play with dandelions. Until suddenly you hear a clang and some shouting and immediately understand that life is about to get much, much harder.
Mark Phillipe Eskenazi, The Unathletic Camper's Baseball Glossary (The New Yorker, Aug. 4, 2014)

I never did go to camp (we were too poor) but I did play sandlot ball when I was a kid, in a vacant lot on a hill in my small town, where if the ball got past the outfielders it would roll down the hill for a home run.  I wasn't a particularly good player -- I was often chosen last -- but I was left-handed and loved to play first base, cherishing my first baseman's glove. (Baseball Glove/Mitt. Something that you buy with your parents, oil up, place under your pillow, and carry around the house in the weeks before camp, never fully understanding how it works).  When I was twelve I tried out for Little League and didn't make it and I lost interest in baseball for some time, only finding out much later that the tryouts were fixed:  the sons of Elks Club members (they sponsored the league) were automatically accepted.  Growing up in a small town where one was either a jock (many) or an intellectual (few) I went away to school and always chose, among the required sports, those that took the least time.  Only after I finished college did I discover the geometric and strategic beauties of squash and tennis and took them up enthusiastically.

When I went to work at The Nation in 1983 I joined the softball team, which managed to play a few games a year, and soon took over a team that barely existed.  At first we were not part of any league and played in Central Park between official fields; with no umpires there were no balls and strikes so the rule was that one was allowed three swings.  This caused many problems, as pitchers wouldn't throw the ball over the plate and therefore batters wouldn't swing, but as I set up games with other publishers we were eventually invited into a publishers league, with umpires.  The biggest problem I had was recruiting players, which had to include at least four women for each game, and then convincing the staff of The Nation that these games were for fun (I even had to ban some players who took the game too seriously).

"Oh Man!  Maybe."  Your polite refusal when asked "So, will you come to one of the company softball games this summer?"  You're an adult now.  It can't hurt you any more.
Recruiting men for the games was difficult enough -- they seemed afraid that they might look bad, making errors and striking out -- but it was even more difficult to recruit women, many of whom had stories:  the father who spent all his time watching baseball and ignoring his daughter, the sibling who hit the ball hard and made his sister chase it, the gym teacher who made fun of the women for "throwing like a girl." etc.  I usually spent most of the day when we had a game making calls to see who would be there; a "maybe" always meant no.  Of course much of the staff had an excuse:  we were a weekly magazine with a small staff and there were deadlines to meet.  So each game I usually had to include a fair number of ringers, from former interns to friends and old acquaintances from my days as an art history graduate student, when we had regular games between pre- and post-1800.

Fly Ball  When the sun drops a boulder into your eye.
When I was actually able to get people to come out for the games and show them that we were having fun (I encouraged them to come as spectators first, if they were uneasy) I found that most players had very little understanding of the game and were often afraid of the ball:  a player told to play second base would go stand on the base, a left-handed batter hit the ball and ran to third (she was Canadian, which may have been a factor, and I told her that we usually run the bases counter-clockwise) and the catcher would stand behind the batter, jump out of the way when the ball went past the batter, wait for the ball to stop rolling, pick it up and then hand it to the umpire to throw it back to the pitcher!  But running the bases turned out to be the biggest problem, especially when one was on base and a fly ball was hit to the outfield.  After numerous problems caused by running on fewer than two outs and not running on two outs I started doing seminars on base running.  After explaining what to do on a fly ball, including going halfway with no outs or one out, I asked the players (and there were both men and women), "okay, now what do you do if you're on base, there's one out, and a fly ball is hit to the outfield?"  I got blank looks from everyone, until someone piped up with "could you please explain again what a fly ball is."

Baseball  A dangerous sport characterized by long periods of daydreaming, punctuated by intense bursts of unmanageable violence, panic, and people screaming at you.
When I make the occasional trip home to the small town in which I grew up I seldom see any sandlot baseball.  One can only hope the day will return when baseball is somewhat less serious and more fun.

Turner Classic Movies in August

I cannot say enough in praise of the estimable TCM, the only station that shows classic films uninterrupted, uncut and in the proper aspect ration, the only reason I still have cable TV.   A few things to mention about TCM in August.

This week I wrote about Walter Pidgeon and a number of his films are showing on TCM in August.  Of the ones I have seen I strongly recommend John Ford's How Green Was My Valley, in which he plays a sympathetic and understanding minister, and Otto Preminger's Advise and Consent, in which he plays the very human and very intelligent majority leader of the Senate.

There are also a number of Barbara Stanwyck movies, as we wait for the second volume of Victoria Wilson's biography.  I particularly like King Vidor's Stella Dallas (Durgnat and Simmon, in their book on Vidor, say Barbara Stanwyck's performance is a "knockout") and Douglas Sirk's There's Always Tomorrow, one of the best films about the American bourgeois family.

I strongly recommend Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth, this very serious comedy about love is often lumped in with other so-called "screwball comedies," but I'm a splitter, not a lumper, and I see it as an intelligent and perceptive film that also happens to be very funny.  Walter Reisch and Charles Brackett, who wrote comedies for Lubitsch and Wilder, also wrote Mitch Leisen's The Mating Season; Leisen usually does a good job when he has a good script (he directed a couple of marvelous Preston Stuges scripts) and this is an amusing film about class and social snobbery in America.

Two beautiful Westerns are also on TCM in August:  King Vidor's Duel in the Sun and Anthony Mann's The Naked Spur, as well as excellent films noirs:  Walsh's White Heat, Rudolph Mate's D.O.A. and Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street, and the important gangster film, Howard Hawks's Scarface, with its intense performance by Ann Dvorak.

Also recommended are Preson Sturges's Christmas in July ("if you can't sleep at night it's not the coffee, it's the bunk!") and Chaplin's A Woman of Paris.  The Chaplin is not a comedy and he does not appear in it; Chaplin himself felt it was too old-fashioned and kept it out of circulation for many years (I even know people who made special trips to East Berlin when they had the only available copy).  It was both influenced by early Lubitsch films and influenced later ones, as one can see in the several Lubitsch films on TCM in August.

Ann Dvorak and Walter Pidgeon

I mention these two actors because I recently watched them together in Leslie Fenton's Stronger Than Desire (1939), in which Pidgeon plays a lawyer who defends Dvorak on a murder charge, not knowing that his wife (Virginia Bruce) actually did the shooting, although it turns out in the end Bruce actually missed.  But what the film is about is infidelity, something the film takes seriously in the way current movies often don't, e.g., Little Children, Todd Field and Tom Perrotta's film I watched recently, an amusing satire of suburbia but with cartoonish infidelity.  In Fenton's film Dvorak is at her wit's end with her husband's infidelity, while Bruce has taken up with Dvorak's lounge lizard husband (Lee Bowman) to retaliate against Pidgeon's infidelity.  Dvorak, who was never happy with the film roles she was given, plays her part with sad intensity, while Pidgeon is moving as the husband betrayed, punishment for his own betrayal.  Neither of these actors ever received the parts they deserved, but soared on the rare occasions they did:  Dvorak as the out-manipulated wife in Albert Lewin's Private Affairs of Bel Ami and Pidgeon, at the end of his career, as the solid majority leader in Preminger's Advise and Consent (1962); another rare good part for Dvorak was in Howard Hawks's Scarface (1932) and Pidgeon was quietly effective as the minister in John Ford's How Green Was My Valley, the same year as the Fenton film.

John D. MacDonald's Murder in the Wind

So while Hilda moved up the Gulf, the rain moved up the coast, falling on innumerable motels and motel signs, on the raw bulldozed land where houses would soon be built, on the dredges and the draglines that were filling in the bays; it fell on a million pottery flamingos and uncounted shell ashtrays; it pounded gum wrappers, ice-cream spoons, broken coke bottles into the sand of the littered beaches; it thundered on roofs that sheltered the twined bodies of honeymoon and the slack bodies of the dying.
John D. MacDonald, Murder in the Wind (Fawcett, 1956).

MacDonald wrote many paperback originals (there is still an Edgar award for them) over many years; Murder in the Wind bears interesting similarities to one of his last books, Condominium, also about the destructive powers of a hurricane on the shoddy constructions of Florida.  Interestingly, few of MacDonald's books were made into movies because, though Murder in the Wind may end with a disastrous hurricane, character is more important to MacDonald than action and most of the book is about the lives, interior and exterior, of people affected by the wind and the rain:  the juvenile delinquents (an expression seldom heard today), the family who moved to Florida for their child's health and had to give up and return North, the widow who came to Florida to pick up her husband's ashes after his suicide, the tennis pro and his wealthy young wife, the Florida wheeler-dealer and his incompetent assistant, the young truck driver brooding about his unfaithful wife, the government agent tracking down the terrorists who killed his wife.  MacDonald brings the thoughts and lives of these people vividly alive as they try to escape fate and Florida.
 

Hallelujah

Certainly the film [Hallelujah] affirms the value of the family, the land, the rural community and (at least in its emphasis on diligence, frugality, hard work, and family individualism) the puritan ethic, mediated through an Afro ethnicity.
Raymond Durgnat and Scott Simmon, King Vidor, American (University of California Press, 1988).

King Vidor's 1929 film has a special significance for me:  of movies that I walked out on when I first started seeing movies it has one of the most powerful endings, as Zeke stalks and kills Hot Shot in the primordial swamp.  It is a difficult film for modern audiences, made in the very early days of sound with an all-black and mostly amateur cast, but moving and rewarding if one gives it a chance.  The conflicts are common ones in Vidor's films:  city versus country, the family versus the individual, sex versus religion.  Vidor had a long career, from 1918 to 1959, and is largely unknown today, in spite of having made wonderful silent films (The Crowd, The Big Parade), deliriously beautiful sound films (Duel in the Sun, Ruby Gentry) and everything from superior soap operas (Stella Dallas) to complex epics (War and Peace).  Vidor perhaps had too many interests and passions and didn't emphasize a consistent theme that reviewers could pounce on.  Like many great directors who started in the silent era (see my posts on Allan Dwan) he knew how to convey things visually and this served him well with Hallelujah, with themes conveyed visually or musically or both, from Nina Mae McKinney's dancing to the baptisms in the river.  Zeke (played by Daniel L. Haynes) starts out as a sharecropper, loses his money in a crap game when he falls for Chick (McKinney), becomes a preacher when his brother is killed (and brought home in a wagon, shown in a powerful foreshortened shot, with worn-out shoes), falls for McKinney again, kills her lover Hot Shot (William E. Fountaine) when she tries to run off with him, goes to prison and eventually is released to join his family and marry his childhood sweetheart.  This is all accompanied by spirituals and Irving Berlin's "Waiting at the End of the Road."   The dialogue is mostly post-synchronized but the joys and frustrations of family and religious life are shown in all their complexity.

MoMA (continued) and Making Your Dissatisfaction Known

My post on July 11 mentioned my frustration at MoMA for showing Bergman's film of The Magic Flute with the overture missing.  So I wrote a letter of complaint to Charles Silver at MoMA's film department and was quite surprised to receive a letter of apology with free passes to MoMA and an offer of a private screening of the film! He takes full blame for "not being more thorough" in checking the film and said that the reels were mislabeled and the final reel was the overture.  What he conspicuously does not say was whether the screenings on July 10 and 11 were corrected to include the overture (we were there on July 9).  I would have said something to someone at the time of our screening but there is no mechanism at MoMA for such complaints, nor are e-mail addresses of MoMA staff members available on their web site.  I hope at least this will cause the staff at MoMA to check prints of films more carefully.

I also made my dissatisfaction known at our daughter's daycare when they canceled dance classes over the summer, classes she was thoroughly enjoying.  They listened to me and said they would continue with the classes if they could get a minimum number of participants.  They succeeded and classes were resumed! It sometimes pays to speak your mind (always in a courteous way, of course).

John Updike

Without warning, David was visited by an exact vision of death: a long hole in the ground, no wider than your body, down which you are drawn while the white faces above recede.
Pigeon Feathers, in John Updike's The Early Stories 1953-1975 (Knopf, 2003)

I will have more to say about Updike, an author about whom I have been hot and cold, presently but right now I wanted to mention Carl Rollyson's review in the June 2014 The New Criterion of Adam Begley's biography.  It is a short review but quite perceptive about not only Updike but biography in general and the relation of an author's life to his work.  Rollyson focuses on the short story Pigeon Feathers, published --as were many of Updike's stories -- in The New Yorker and emphasizing an adolescent's crisis of faith.  It captures the feeling of an adolescent who reads H.G. Wells and P.G. Wodehouse and can't get satisfactory answers about death from his clergyman.  Rollyson feels, correctly, that the religious elements of Updike's work have been neglected for the sexual elements and he suggests that Updike is possibly not the smug writer that some of us have thought lately, but rather more philosophical.  Of course someone who produced as much work as Updike did is bound to have a range of quality in his work but Rollyson says "Rather than a reason for us to deplore a prolific artist, a sizeable body of work affords an opportunity to admire a dedicated craftsman unafraid of failure" and Rollyson suggests a number of new ways to look at Updike's work, with the assistance of Begley's biography.

Why I Don't Like the Baseball All-Star Game

If there is any reason to support the All-Star game it is because the money from it, last I knew, went to the players' pension fund.  But players are so well paid today perhaps they should contribute to their own pension fund.  Meanwhile, reasons I don't care for the game:

Fan selections.  Once again, with on-line voting, the ballot boxes are being stuffed by fans from the big cities.  If fans could be trusted to vote for the best players it would be one thing but the teams are relentless when promoting their own players.  Ballot box stuffing by Cincinnati fans in 1957 resulted in seven starters being from the Reds and baseball went back to having managers choose the teams until the return to fan voting in 1970.  If we want the best players we should go back to the managers' choices.

The winning team gets home field advantage in the World Series.  The absurdity of this needs no comment, especially since this is an exhibition game.

The use of the designated hitter.  Even in interleague play the DH is not used in national league parks; this should be true in the All-Star game.

How players are used.  This is up to the managers, but most players go three inning or so, including pitchers.  This is antithetical to the game of baseball, where players are in or out due to strategic decisions and not in order to give everyone a chance to play!  In 2002 the game was declared a 7-7 tie when both managers ran out of pitchers, something that would not be allowed to happen in a regular game, even if Wade Boggs had to pitch.

The Home Run Derby.  This odious and lumpy spectacle, part of the All-Star game celebration, is a remnant of the steroid era and only fuels the passion of ignorant fans for home runs. 

I think the All-Star game time could be used to give the players, and even the fans, a rest from the relentless season and would lead to better baseball in the second half.

MoMA, The Magic Flute, Man to Man

I have received an excellent education in film at MoMA, having seen thousands of movies there, many of them memorable; my favorites would include Citizen Kane (the film that first awakened me to the possibilities of movies), D.W. Griffith's Intolerance in a beautiful nitrate print (with live piano accompaniment) and The Searchers, in a gorgeous Vistavision print, with Harey Carey, Jr. in attendance.  But I have also had strange and unpleasant experiences there:  a riot that broke out during a screening of Chabrol's La Rupture when a woman in the movie hit her husband over the head with a frying pan and some people laughed and offended other members of the audience; a tribute to Blake Edwards that included a scanned-and-panned print of The Party, causing a near-riot; a screening of Oshima's Diary of a Shijuku Thief missing the color sequences, and a screening of Lang's The Woman in the Window, with Joan Bennett herself in attendance, in which the reels were projected in the wrong order!  Add to this my experience this past Wednesday at MoMA, where they showed Bergman's The Magic Flute with the overture missing!  No explanation was given and some members of the audience were confused, because one member of the opera's audience who had been shown in the overture was also used for reaction shots during the film and only those of us who had seen the film previously knew who she was.  At least this print was shown in the proper aspect ratio -- 1.33:1 --which was not the case when I saw the film in the 70's at Manhattan's Festival Theatre.  I like Bergman's film but the opera seemed quite abrupt without the overture and there were perhaps too many close-ups, not surprising since the film was made for Swedish TV.  Generally I don't think opera can be successful on film or TV; one misses too much whether the shot is close-up or long shot (this is even more true of attempts to put ballet on film or television, though Balanchine had some success in doing studio versions of his ballets for TV broadcast.)  The only other two operas I know of that were made specifically for film are Joseph Losey's Don Giovanni and Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's Parsifal:  the Losey I thought was a disappointment, with arbitrary camera angles, but I liked the Syberberg, which was somewhat successful in using a pre-recorded soundtrack with lip-synched actors (opera singers can't necessarily act and actors can't sing opera).

On some levels a minor and even routine film, it (Man to Man) is executed with deep conviction and with the stylistic intricacy befitting a masterpiece.
Frederic Lombardi, Allan Dwan and the Rise and Decline of the Hollywood Studios (McFarland and Company, 2013)
One of the first series I ever saw at MoMA was the Dwan series in 1971, to celebrate Peter Bogdanovitch's book-length interview of the director, who also appeared in person.  Dwan had a long career -- his first movie was made in 1911, his last in 1961-- and his output is uneven, though even his weaker films have beautiful moments.  I recently saw Man to Man (1930) on Turner and was impressed with how much style it had; many of the directors who started during the silent era were skilled at telling stories with minimal dialogue.  There is an extraordinary sequence at the beginning of the film when Michael Bolton and his girlfriend are parked near a train track at sunset as a train goes by, cut to a newpaper headline of Bolton losing a college election and then cut to Bolton in a train, on the same track, seeing his former girlfriend in a roadster with another man.  The flimsy plot of Man to Man is an excuse for Dwan to show the details of small town life, complete with elegant tracking shots through the town, as well as the pettiness and bigotry underneath.

Jean Renoir's This Land is Mine; Alan Furst's Midnight in Europe

With This Land is Mine I wanted to show the Americans a less conventional view of occupied France.
Jean Renoir

Sight and Sound's most recent poll of 854 critics, programmers, academics and distributors lists Renoir's La Regle du Jeu as the fourth best film of all time (after Vertigo, Citizen Kane, and Tokyo Story) but it seems to me that few people under fifty have any awareness of this great French director, son of painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir.  When I was in college La Regle du Jeu (1937) and La Grande Illusion (1939) were considered great and important films, the first for its exploration of class, the second for its pacifism, but when I watched This Land is Mine, made in America in 1943, I thought that Renoir might be too much of a humanist, with too much understanding of human motivations and reasons, for this more cynical and anti-intellectual age. This Land is Mine takes place in occupied France and Charles Laughton (who looks rather like Renoir) is a fussy and cowardly schoolteacher who gradually comes to realize that the Nazis can't just be ignored or collaborated with in the hope that they would eventually go away; they represent a threat to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and  of the Citizen, which he reads to his students just before he is arrested.  Some people resist, others collaborate or go about their daily business, sometimes benefitting by the occupation.  The disturbance of the Nazis riding into an empty town square, at the beginning of the film, means different changes in each individual life and Renoir observes and chronicles these changes with sympathy and understanding.

Alan Furst's Midnight in Europe (Random House,2014) is a serviceable spy novel, taking place in 1939.  The main character is trying to help Republican Spain in their losing struggle against Franco and there are intense and beautifully written scenes about smuggling money into Germany and stealing weapons in Russia.  John Le Carre has shifted his attention, now that the Cold War has ended, to terrorism, but fanatical terrorists are not as interesting literary material as literate and intellectual spies and it makes sense that Furst would be writing about Europe just before WWII.  I discovered Furst while roaming through the stacks at the Brooklyn Public Library in Grand Army Plaza, something I have not done in a while.  At that point in the 90's Furst was not well known and I found his early works, such as Red Gold and Dark Star, fascinating in their elegant complexity; Franco's spies in Midnight in Europe tend to be obvious femmes fatales and spying plays a small role in the narrative, full as it is of detail about life in pre-war Paris.

Baseball and The New York Times

It seems to me that The New York Times is doing a good job with longer and more detailed pieces, as well as more in-depth analysis.  Two recent examples:

Now Pitchers Have the Power by Tyler Kepner, July 4, 2014.  This piece, by the always reliable Kepner, is an intelligent analysis of how pitchers are now ruling the major leagues:  Strikeouts continue to rise; walks and home runs continue to decline; and the major league batting average, .251, is the lowest since 1972, the year before the creation of the designated hitter. The increased use of the shift (see my recent posting on that subject) has also been a factor.  Buck Martinez, former manager and catcher, says of 1968, when the major league batting average was .237 and Denny McLain won 31 games, "It was a beautiful game.  Every pitch was meaningful. Now it's home runs, home runs, home runs."  But that is changing as the so-called steroid era is ending and fans are getting more educated, with attendance still high, and one hopes that more and more casual fans, who have grown up on home runs, will learn to appreciate the beauty and subtlety of the stolen base, the sacrifice bunt, hitting to the opposite field, the hit-and-run. The abolition of the designated hitter at this point is probably too much to hope for, unfortunately.

Jim Brosnan, Who Threw Literature a Curve, Dies at 84 by Bruce Weber, July 6, 2014.  Brosnan's book, The Long Season, was published in 1960, based on his diary he kept as a major league pitcher, and was a big influence on me, a kid who loved to read and who loved baseball but had never related books to the national pastime.  Here was a pitcher who could think and write, temporarily keeping me interested in baseball when my attention had started to wander to literature.  The Times continues to publish thoughtful and intelligent obituaries and Weber beautifully places Brosnan in historical context, being influenced by Lardner and Malamud and in return influencing Jim Bouton, Roger Angell and others.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Godard once said, and I agree with him, that the best films take place halfway between you and the screen.  No film better illustrates this than Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. It was made in 1975 but not shown in America until the early 80's, when I saw it at the Film Forum and then again at the Museum of Modern Art.  Its minimalist style and 201-minute running time have put some people off, but I find the film constantly engaging and beautiful, influenced as it is by Ozu and his static camera as well as Preminger and his long takes. We see widow Dielman go about her extremely orderly routines, as the camera remains in one position, without cuts, in each room, as she makes a meatloaf, takes a bath, makes her bed, does the dishes. She has one different visitor each day, who pays her for sex, and when her son comes home from school they converse briefly about his father, read Baudelaire and listen to classical music on the radio.  Her son does not seem to have a room of his own and stays in the living/dining room to do his homework and to sleep on a pull-out couch.  Dielman (played by Delphine Seyrig) goes out every day to shop and to have coffee at a café and the exterior shots have a geometric beauty, with a bench on a square in the foreground and white, green and blue cars in the background, while the geometry of the tiny elevator to her apartment and the apartment's grey wallpaper seem to enclose and trap her.

The film takes place over three days and by the third day the routine and order has started to deteriorate:  Dielman drops the brush while shining her son's shoes, her son notices she has a button unbuttoned on her housecoat, she drops a piece of silverware and lets the potatoes cook too long.  When she goes out to shop the butcher is closed and when she sits down for coffee at the café the camera is where it was the day before but there is someone else in her seat and she has to sit on the right side of the frame, with a stranger now in the center.

When Akerman' s film came out it was seen as some kind of feminist statement but when I saw it again recently on Turner Classic Movies it seems to be much more than that.  It's about, among other things, how difficult it can be to maintain perfect order in an entropic world. 

Yankee Stadium, July 2, 2014

I finally got to the new Yankee Stadium, five years after it was built.  The reason it took so long is simple:  I preferred going with my wife and son to the Staten Island Yankees and the Brooklyn Cyclones, where the seats are better, the prices are much lower, the fans are more intelligent and sober, and the elegant geometry of the game is the same, albeit at a slightly lower level of skill.  Also, major league baseball has few day games during the week; even in Chicago they are fewer, as television money calls the shots.  With our young daughter in daycare we were able to go to the day game on July 2nd and it was a lovely experience.  During the day during the week the fans tend to be older folks and young kids, often grandparents with their grandchildren, and one can avoid the drunken louts of night and week-end games, talk baseball history with the old-timers and share the enthusiasm of the younger fans.  We sat in the third row of the grandstand, upper deck (out of the sun, fortunately),, and I found the view comparable to the fourth ring of the NYC Ballet:  one is close enough to see everything well while enjoying the whole spread of the spectacle.  From the first inning, when Brett Gardner in left field ran in a straight line to intersect the parabola of a line drive hit by Sean Rodriquez, I enjoyed watching how all the elements of the game intersected; even watching a high pop-up, with the white ball against the blue sky, or fans chase a foul ball, was enjoyable.  One could see a player rounding third as an outfielder fielded the ball and threw home, or watch the catcher cover third base when there was a shift on.  It was even a good game until the sixth inning when, with the score tied 3-3, Yankee reliever Shawn Kelley gave up a two-run homer, the Tampa Bay Rays winning 6-3.

Don't Look for Me by Loren Estleman

It was shaping up to be the damnedest disappearing act I'd covered in a long, long time.

You can tell a lot about a man by what he puts on his feet.

But I know women, in so far as a man can know them, which is damn little.

Loren Estleman, Don't Look for Me (Tom Doherty Associates, 2014).

The best pulp detective writers are rooted in particular places:  John D. MacDonald in Florida, Dashiell Hammett in San Francisco, Raymond Chandler in Los Angeles, Loren Estleman in Detroit.  In Don't Look for Me detective Amos Walker looks for a missing wife, as he encounters Mossad agents, drug dealers, porno actresses and all the rich and poor of Detroit.  His ventures into lesbian bars and motorcar museums eventually lead him to his nemesis, the international drug dealer Charlotte Sing.  Walker also has a love affair with a woman named Smoke, whom he meets during his investigation, and both the love affair and the investigation end unhappily.  It is difficult these days to write a detective novel without irony but Estleman keeps the irony and self-consciousness to a minimum, with one foot in the present and one in the past.