The proverbial end of the line.
I finished my 20,000 word crime novelette, The Track, the day before my 60th birthday. As noted in a previous post, it’s about a naive young woman who gets involved in a Ponzi scheme set in a fictional Florida town on the coast. Crime fiction seems to be my long suit in many ways. The story also gave me a chance to write about Florida, a place I have something of a love-hate relationship with. I like the weather, especially in the winter, endless beaches and surf are two of my favorite things, but there must be something about the place, either too much bright sunshine or some kind of toxins floating around in the air, that seems to drive everyone out of their minds. The Floridian compulsion to engage in bizarre, hopelessly misguided, deeply criminal behavior is so pronounced and prolific it’s even become an Internet meme, Florida Man (As in, Florida Man, High On Bath Salts, Eats Woman’s Face Off!). Given this propensity for deviation and degeneracy and the anything goes atmosphere that almost continuous fine weather provides, the state is a natural breeding ground for criminal behavior. The Track is a career history of an extreme example of the Floridian Flaw, CEO and President of the Centurian Hedge Fund, Jamie Spurgis. I won’t provide any spoilers, but hopefully will soon find a publisher interested in bringing his illegal shenanigans to the world’s attention.
Ah, what a darling man!
In a somewhat related vein, I treated myself on my birthday and went to see Black Mass, the film about notorious Irish hood Jimmy Whitey Bulger, a sociopath who murdered, beat, tortured, and extorted all over Boston for years under the FBI’s protection. This is one of the better gangster movies I’ve seen and I speak as a big fan of the genre. It’s probably the best example of its type since Goodfellas. Johnny Depp gave an amazing performance as Bulger, one of the best I’ve ever seen him do. He was so well made up and so much into character that I frequently forgot I was actually watching Depp (something that usually never happens in his other films). He was Bulger, and what a scary, brutal thug that guy was indeed. No scoundrel like an Irish one. There are a few night scenes in the film where, with his receded, gray hairline and soulless, blue eyes, Depp bears a more than passing resemblance to Nosferatu, the undead vampire in the F. W. Murnau silent, German film. Whether deliberate or not, it’s an effective touch. As portrayed in the film, Bulger seems so implacably brutal, almost completely removed from human feeling (especially after his mother and son’s deaths), that he really resembles some supernatural monster, a pure force of evil, rather than a human being. Fine performances were given all round and not just by Depp with stand out turns by Benedict Cumberbatch as Billy Bulger, Whitey’s straight, successful politician brother (nice Southie accent from a damn Brit), and Joel Edgerton as John Connolly, the FBI agent and childhood friend of the Bulgers who Whitey played for a complete sap. Anyone who’s a fan of gangster/crime movies should see this film.