Hello everyone! Look- I’ve been busy. I’ve been working my day job, my side hustle, training for a new jiu jitsu belt, organizing stuff, selling books, etc. So I’ve only got one review. I’ve got three in the chamber I need to write and I’ve barely read anything this week! Plus a discography. HOWEVER, there is the long-awaited return of Ed’s Corner this week, so enjoy that!
CONTENTS
Reviews
Ryan, The Dynamite Freaks
Lagniappe
Ed’s Corner: How to Write An Ethical Police Procedural & Being A Literal Asshole
REVIEWS
Donald Ryan, “The Dynamite Freaks” (1972) - I picked up this little pulp cheapie at a pretty great used bookstore in upstate New York. They had a lot of titles like these, what I think of as “exploitation paperbacks” - lurid titles and covers, stories ground out by the dozen by pseudonymous hacks. Now, people who collected those sort of books are dying or going to retirement homes, and their books — and the scifi and romance heads, and the collectors of dozens of cheap paperback editions of what were at the time deemed classics — are dumped on the used book market, to get scooped up by the likes of me. You see it more outside of higher-end used book markets like those in New York and Boston- upstate, Cincinnati, other places I’ve been.
Anyway! This exploitation novel exploits the New Left and the counterculture, especially the wave of bombing undertaken by groups like the Weather Underground. If you were expecting a sensitive sociological portrait of what would drive people to blow up banks, well, you’re not gonna get it here. You’re also not going to get much in the way of moralizing or a cop/right-wing protagonist bringing those dirty hippies to rough justice, either. Remember, these were contemporary exploitation novels, published by entrepreneurs trying to stay with a shifting audience and keep them buying.
There’s a lot more sex in “The Dynamite Freaks” than there is violence, though there’s a good amount of both. The main character, recent college graduate Carol Waring, and most other women in the book are described primarily via talking about their breasts (weirdly enough, this skeezy book very seldom talks about other sexualized parts of the body). Carol winds up in the clutches of a hippie communist terrorist gang basically because she was a grind in college and the first guy who paid attention to her (despite the author taking pains to convey that she is, in fact, very hot) was a hippie communist, so there you go. The closest thing to a “good guy” protagonist is a dude from her college who goes looking for Carol on behalf of her parents, and who muses that if only he had slept with her, she might be ok now. It’s that kind of book.
Selection pressures have drawn forth the best pulps of earlier eras, especially the thirties and forties, so when we think of pulp from that time, we think of tightly-crafted crime novels by the likes of Hammett and Chandler. To the best of my knowledge, no one’s done that for this era. The main blog dedicated to this stuff is “ain’t it cool” level criticism (run by a Trump chud to boot). So when you dip into this stuff like I do occasionally, you never know what you’re going to get, craft-wise. I do get the impression that latter-era pulp often disregarded plotting in favor of what could be called “sensation” (thanks, Spillane, thanks, Fleming), but that could be bias based on the aforementioned selection pressures.
In any event, there’s not much plot to “The Dynamite Freaks.” Carol starts out pretty in deep with dirty hippie Kurt and his band of miscreants, plotting to blow up a statue at her university graduation (and show off her body in a bikini under her robes- it is that kind of book), and only gets deeper until she meets a gruesome end borrowed from what happened to the Weatherman around the time they thought they were going to bomb a GI dance. The dude tracking her sucks at tracking and fighting (despite supposedly being a Green Beret?). The juice is all in the author (Donald Ryan is a pseudonym… or perhaps a “house name”) trying to twist the knife of transgression. For someone who grew up with the Internet, it’s quaint, almost touching, and at times disturbing by turns, what midcentury straight guy types do in art to shock. They seem to think that depictions of smoking doobies, of many different levels of violence, and of both consensual sex and of rape are more or less in the same category and will yield similar responses- shock and titillation. “Ryan” makes sure to throw in as many exacerbating details as possible- race stuff, family stuff. Violins for the poor little rich girl given everything by (a rather sexualized) daddy (with a heavy overtone of “watch this rich bitch get what she REALLY wants” as a sort of carnival barker come-on), etc.
I could appreciate the craft, such as it was. It also made me think about what “square” society thought was going on with the whole new left/counterculture thing. A lot changed, quickly- and even more seemed to be changing, superficially, while remaining fundamentally the same (different haircuts, same capitalism). There is a certain reciprocity between the sensationalism of the book and the motivations of the hippies in it. Spoilers- Kurt is taking money from a right-wing politician to do bombings that the politician can then use for political gain. In the end, Kurt declares he’ll take money from anyone to keep doing his thing- he’s only in it for power, more or less for its own sake.
A lot of people did a lot of shit in the sixties for a lot of reasons, and we look at them in various ways for various reasons of our own. We way overstate the importance of collegiate radicals like SDS/Weather Underground, for instance, and almost completely ignore waves of working class radicalism at the same time. Weather Underground might be the militant group in the world with the highest books-written-about (or by! lots of memoirs) to effective actions ratio… and hell, here they are, more or less, in pulp novel form. Maybe we keep thinking about the white collegiate radicals because they’re hard to figure- they could have been anything, they became… that, not just revolutionaries, but mostly shitty, vain revolutionaries who then all got book deals (the ones who actually seemed to mean it didn’t get rich and often wound up in prison for decades). Maybe they thought like Kurt did, that they could somehow ride their youthful bravado and a changing society to ultimate power, severely misunderstood the situation, and used their privilege to come back in… or maybe I’m just reading into a cheap, sleazy, diverting airplane read. ***
LAGNIAPPE
Ed’s Corner: How to Write An Ethical Police Procedural & Being A Literal Asshole
Hello out there to the Melendy Ave. reviewed in our audience! As you may have noticed, I’ve been away from my Corner for a bit. There’s no particular reason, things have just been pretty busy at work. That whole “snagged up supply chain” hits all the harder when you work ten yards away from a loading dock. What exactly my job entails isn’t really worth the telling, it’s a pretty boring job that no one is going to be making a TV show out of in the near future. Probably the closest you’re going to get is that one episode of The Office that focused on the warehouse crew, and even then, I don’t actually work for the warehouse, I’m subcontracted to do one particular thing that gets pretty repetitive, and I couldn’t tell you about it anyway for security reasons.
No, my job isn’t one of those interesting professions that’s a go to for procedural television, like a doctor, or a lawyer, or a cop. That last one I want to take a moment to expound on, as despite my personal philosophy of ACAB, I really do enjoy a good crime procedural every now and again. Although, I’m rather put off by the modern iteration of the genre, like the various CSI’s or NUMB3RS, or Bones, where crimes are solved by empirical science by someone in a sterile lab, or in front of a computer screen projection next to a white board, and they never have to dirty their hands with the actual messy realities of life on the streets where the crime might take place. I also don’t much care for the bootlicking of shows like Blue Bloods or later seasons or spin offs of Law & Order, where otherwise entirely ethical cops must make difficult morally grey decisions to protect helpless innocents from sicko criminals whose sole motivation seems to be a diagnosis of sociopathy. Both of these genres of procedural don’t really get into the nitty-gritty of why someone might commit a crime outside of the assistant DA or whoever spouting off some psychobabble about the perp being a paranoid schizophrenic with a genius level IQ. Criminality, posits these procedurals, is something born out of mental, and not societal, disorder.
This view of crime, and the police response to it, is essentially just propaganda for the societal role of police. The forces of law are a bastion of both logic and morality, and crime is an insane rejection of the safety and stability provided by unwavering trust in the forces of law enforcement. Nobody in these types of shows are particularly relatable, not the brilliant, heroic and morally upright police officers, nor the deranged alien minds of the criminals. These fictional cops are living computers that crawled out of the lowest depths of bad STEM major interactions, and while you shouldn’t expect any human emotion or compassion from them, they’re at least better than the affable but evil madmen that lurk around every corner. Furthermore, it seems the police in these shows are only moral by virtue of people describing them as such. If judged solely by the actions we see them take, like roughing up or psychologically torturing suspects to make the case, or bending all sorts of laws to violate the privacy of innocent citizens to put exactly one bad guy away, they’d look quite different. Being a cop is the entirety of the protagonists’ identity, and the villains only have a personality insofar as to create a front to hide their nefarious schemes behind.
Honestly, the most relatable cops aren’t from procedurals at all, but are from drama series with comedic bents. Examples include such classic shows as The Andy Griffith Show or Barney Miller, and the recent Fox offering Brooklyn 99. In general, the police in these shows do a better job of relating to the criminals they interact with as part of their job, and are more concerned with the good of their community than “catching the bad guy.” The comedic frame of these shows allow the stakes to be lowered from the foiling of overwrought megalomaniacal serial killer terrorists that make up the bulk of the previous batch of police shows’ weekly rogues gallery. In general, a police themed comedy, or in the case of The Andy Griffith Show a comedy where the main character happens to be a member of law enforcement, are more focused on a character, or characters, in the station house than they are in the actual procedure of policing. The accoutrement of the badge and gun is more a means of adding interesting elements into the plot rather than the focus itself.
I seem to recall a few episodes of both The Andy Griffith Show and Barney Miller where the title characters took great pains to not arrest someone, and instead help them work through their problems. While these depictions might be more wholesome, they don’t ring particularly true to the realities of actual police in their domestic lives. If only every cop dutifully unloaded and locked up his gun as the very first thing he did upon getting home as Barney Miller did, you wouldn’t find nearly as many hits for “off duty police officer + shooting” as you would if you went to google that right now. Brooklyn 99 in fact struggled with exactly this kind of issue in its last season, realizing that it was essentially laundering the reputation of the notoriously racist New York Police Department. They tried to have it both ways, by having a plot where the force had merely lost their way in some respects, and the “good cops” had to do their part to put the force back to right. I don’t know how that ended up, I never really watched it despite the exceptionally positive reviews of it because as funny as it was, I just couldn’t get over the way in which it muddied the waters of how exactly the police operate in society.
Honestly, the original detective stories of Edgar Alan Poe seemed to have the right idea. Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin in both The Murders of the Rue Morgue and The Purloined Letter goes out of his way to state he has his own motivations in getting involved in any given case that have very little to do with a civic duty to help out the police, whom he treats with contempt.
For a while, I pegged the best compromise as to how to have a police procedural without glorifying the police as taking the formula of the legendary procedural Columbo. The formula was fairly even handed as to the relationship between criminals and the police. The first third of any given episode is from the criminals point of view, which humanizes and explains how this particular person came to commit that particular crime, and most of theses criminals are at least somewhat sympathetic, (except for that one stage magician who was trying to cover up that he was a fugitive Nazi, fuck that guy). While Columbo is perhaps interesting and endearing, he isn’t quite relatable, as he’s something of a cipher. We know him to be a bit disheveled, a bit long-winded and distractible, that he drives a rust-bucket Peugeot while chasing down clues, that he has a wife, but it’s all somewhat muddled. While Peter Falk’s famous Lieutenant talks an awful lot about himself and various relatives of his, his wife being a particular favorite topic of his, we’re never actually sure if these people are real or just characters Columbo made up to bamboozle whatever high class dandy has up and murdered someone this week. For all he talks of his wife, she never seems to show up, even when he says she’ll be somewhere he always tacks on some improbable excuse for her absence when it’s mentioned she’s missing. Columbo is unknowable, he’s an archetype, a spirit of justice who happens to take the form of a police lieutenant because that’s what people imagine when they picture someone finding them out for their crimes. There’s a certain sense of class relations at play in any episode of Columbo; almost all of the murderers are wealthy socialites who’d be otherwise beyond the reach of the law, who have the time, resources and clout to stage nearly perfect murders. And they all would have gotten away with it too, had not this apparition of justice appeared. His wheedling, nagging questions are mirrors of their unquiet consciences.
However, I think I’ve recently rediscovered the actual answer to how to stage a police procedural without eliding the actual ugliness inherent in the police profession, and it’s from the most unexpected of sources. I’m referring to the almost universally unwatched show on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim programming bloc, Assy McGee, a cartoon police procedural where the main character is just a walking, talking butt without the top half of his body. You can watch the whole series over on the Adult Swim website for free, as nobody’s interested in buying the rights. (In fact I seem to remember even when it aired on Adult Swim nobody would advertise during the show, so they just ran ads for other shows in the same animation block).
Now you would think that a police procedural about a walking talking asshole would be a one note carnival of crude humor, but while they do get some gags out of Assy being just a butt, with his low and often slurred cop monologues are often punctuated by little fart noises so that his low growls are even less intelligible for instance, most of the humor is derived from playing up police procedural cliches to the hilt, and Assy’s role as the loose cannon cop in the midst of all of it. Just by way of example, Assy is introduced in the series by him drunk driving into a freshly taped off crime scene, (although the murder being investigated turns out to be several centuries old by this point, and thus a waste of everyones time), and then exiting his car and opening fire indiscriminately, killing cops and bystander alike. During the entirety of the rest of the series, Assy doesn’t solve as many murders as he commits in the first minute of his screen time.
Assy McGee is a perfect police procedural protagonist because he very accurately represents the ugliness of law enforcement, in stark contrast to the saccharine portraits that police procedural comedies attempt to paint. While Assy McGee is itself a comedy, it plays the style and tone of a gritty police procedural pretty straight, but undercuts it in other ways, such as the gritty rundown gutter of a city Assy tries to clean up being Exeter, New Hampshire. Assy is also quick with an action movie one liner, but they often come out muddled and confused. When he draws down on a perp, who is merely dressed up as the guy who he believes committed a murder 200 years ago, he quips “I just loaded in a bullet with your e-mail address on it, don’t make me hit send.” After thwarting a bus jacking by shooting one of the gunmen in the leg, the gunman cries out that he “needs a doctor,” Assy, in attempting to extract the name of his accomplice, shoots him in the other leg and tells him, “yeah, well now you need two doctors.” When the Chief tells him to “do this investigation by the book,” Assy shoots back “too bad for you, I’m illiterate.” And finally my favorite Assy one liner, while protecting a Cuban diplomat at a soccer game, Assy freaks out about an unrelated blimp flying over the stadium and uses a rocket launcher to shoot it out of the sky with a perfectly delivered “adios... blimp.”
The police procedural cliches are fun and all, but I think the main thrust of the comedy is just how terribly callous Assy is in his career as a cop. He kills far more people than he saves, often killing people entirely unrelated to any crime. He never pays for anything in the entire series, either extorting goods and services by virtue of his badge, or if that doesn’t work committing casual acts of police brutality to punish those who don’t give him what he wants. In one scene he very casually murders a flight attendant who barely survived a plane crash, which he caused after she refused to have sex with him, and matter of factly admits that’s why he did it. He once gave a baby a loaded gun because “I thought it would be funny to see a baby shoot an arch-bishop,” (to his credit, it was). He misrepresented the demands of a hostage taker in a hostage negotiation to score some free drinks from the local cop bar, and has traded sexual favors in exchange for suppressing evidence. The criminals he chases down rarely make it to court, and in the one instance where he did get his perp in front of a judge, the case was thrown out because it was based on a flagrantly illegal apartment search performed without a warrant. Possibly my favorite instance of Assy’s lack of moral scruples is when he tracks down a rogue CIA cell that’s been stealing bikes off the streets of Exeter and shipping them to Pakistan in exchange for weapons in some sort of Iran-Contra type deal. Assy just asks if he can get his bike back, and lets the massive rogue CIA operation continue in his jurisdiction unabated despite the fact that several people have turned up dead as a result.
His police work is equally shoddy, and rarely does he catch the criminal he sets out to. Occasionally, he’ll miraculously stumble upon another criminal in blindly shooting his way through the streets, but just as often he’ll kill a few dozen people and let the perp walk free at the end of the episode, or kill the wrong person and just pin the crime on them. My favorite example of this is his “uncovering” a drug mule on a plane, by noticing that the town she said she was from was the fictitious “Middletown, New Jersey.” Except in talking with the Chief to explain how he made the collar, the Chief says there *is* in fact a Middletown, New Jersey, and that he personally “grew up in Metuchen, Middletown’s right near there.” Assy just kind of shrugs that one off, and goes back to the beat. Importantly, it’s not just Assy who’s the one bad cop amongst an otherwise honorable force. The Chief is complicit in covering up several crimes by members of the force, including Assy. Assy’s straight man partner, Sanchez, murdered an unarmed man in prison, and is a secret arsonist. Several members of the force are involved in a protection racket, and the less said of the extra-legal affairs of the undercover agent Donnie “the Douche,” the better. By literalizing the ugliness of the carceral system by having the character be a literal asshole, you can distance yourself enough to start drawing some interesting conclusions about the police that aren’t literal assholes, but are quite similar to Assy, in attitude at least.
One final flourish that sets up an important contrast between Assy the policeman and Assy the person is that while he’s often bad at his job, and miserable even while indulging in the life of sleaze the law profession exposes him to, at the end of most episodes he seems to express himself beautifully through some kind of artistic endeavor, whether it be painting, a blistering harmonica solo, or a very animated breakdancing routine. It’s quite something else to see just the lower torso of a man breakdancing, but more engaging than you’d think. These interesting “art spots'' at the end of an episode throw the often absurd and pointless police proceedings into sharp relief. Why is he bothering chasing down criminals that he himself is more dangerous than, that he rarely brings to justice, and that he hates doing when he could otherwise just be expressing himself through some artistic means? The writers of Assy McGee never make this argument directly, but it’s just a subtle note to end most episodes of a show about a talking butt who shoots people for no reason.
Woof! Thanks Ed! Mithra agrees with you, I think