Joe's View

Carolyn Hart has proven herself to be an heir to Agatha Christie in two long-running mystery series that are models of great plotting as well as acute studies of the psychology of murder.
Hart made her name with the “Death on Demand” series revolving around the proprietress of a mystery book store on a small island off the Carolina coast.
She then added a second series about a retired journalist named Henrie O. whose crime-solving-while-traveling adventures recall such Christie classics as “Evil Under the Sun” and “Murder on the Orient Express.”
The books have brought Hart millions of devoted readers and several major crime-writing awards, including the Agatha, the Anthony and the Macavity.
Hart has often suffered from being labeled as a “cozy” writer within the crime genre — a tag that lazy reviewers and book store managers apply to any mystery that doesn’t include torrents of blood and explicit sex and profanity — but Hart’s books are too sophisticated and too well-written to be lumped with the saccharine Jessica Fletcher knock-offs.
The writer has just launched a charming and daring new series that takes her into the realm of the supernatural without any loss of Hart’s story-telling abilities or understanding of the emotions that swirl around a violent crime and its aftermath.
“Ghost at Work” (William Morrow) introduces us to Hart’s latest sleuth, Bailey Ruth Raeburn, who just happens to be dead.
What might sound like a crazy idea for a series turns out to be a thoroughly delightful book in the vein of “Topper” or “Heaven Can Wait.”
Bailey is as funny and as down to earth as Hart’s other series heroines but in the course of solving her first case she also takes us on a mind-expanding journey into what we might find in the place she now calls home: Heaven.
Reading the book I thought of that great old Hugh Martin and Timothy Gray tune — “Home Sweet Heaven” — from “High Spirits,” the Broadway musical adaptation of Noel Coward’s “Blithe Spirit.”
The ghost Elvira sings of the joys of her new home in lines like: “Caruso sings there/Salome swings there” and “No angel choirs/but we have stereo/and merry open fires” and “It would really bowl you over/Watching Casanova/Try to flirt with Gertrude Stein.”
In “Ghost at Work,” Bailey takes us to an similarly enchanted but recognizeable place where she is able to catch up with long-departed notables like Barbara Stanwyck, imagine herself in any beloved earthly locale, and attend classes in any subject that interests her.
Still, Bailey is thrilled to get her first assignment back on earth and back in her beloved Adelaide, Oklahoma, where she is sent to help a minister’s wife who will most likely be charged with murder if the cops find a dead man on her property. Kathleen is innocent but has a pretty solid motive for wanting the man silenced.
Bailey is given a list of rules she must follow on her return to Oklahoma — including “Avoid public notice…
Become visible only when absolutely essential…Make every effort not to alarm earthly creatures…(and)
Information about Heaven is not yours to impart. Simply smile and say, ‘Time will tell.’”
In addition to its marvelous experiments in crime fiction form and content, “Ghost at Work” has given Hart the chance to set a mystery in her home state of Oklahoma; the writer’s affection for the place and the people comes through on every page.
Once Bailey arrives in Adelaide, the book presents us with a wonderfully satisfying mystery — there is a long list of possible suspects and lots of twists on the way to the final chapter — that lives up to the high standards of the other Hart novels.

You never know what you’re getting into when you pick up a show business memoir.
Some are unreadable.
Some are so egotistical and/or vitriolic that you end up hating the author (and yourself for wasting so much time).
Every once in a while, however, a superior example of the genre comes along — the Lauren Bacall and Mia Farrow books come quickly to mind.
But, Christopher Plummer’s new book, “In Spite of Myself” (Knopf) is in a class by itself.
Unlike some premature memoirists — who put out their first “book” in their 30s or 40s — Plummer has lived a full life and career worth writing about. A stage and screen star for more than a half-century, Plummer has earned the right to tell his story because he has triumphed in classic stage roles in New York, London and his native Canada and has proven himself to be an extraordinarily durable and powerful film actor.
The star has worked both sides of the show business fence — the high art of Shakespeare and the other great stage writers and the slightly lower art involved in being a jobbing film and TV actor.
Many actors tend to get a bit soft and sentimental as they age, but Plummer has stayed as sharp as a tack into his 70s, giving spectacular late-life performances such as his Mike Wallace in the Michael Mann film “The Insider” (1999) and a towering Lear at Lincoln Center two seasons ago.
I’ve had the pleasure of talking with Plummer a few times over the years — a recent interview will run in this Sunday’s Arts & Travel section of The Connecticut Post — and know him to be a wonderful story teller.
“In Spite of Myself” reveals Plummer to be a terrific writer who takes us through the highs and lows of his career with an unflagging sense of humor and a down-to-earth style that draws the reader right in (the 648 pages race by).
Of course, there are full acounts of such famous Plummer projects as “The Sound of Music” (1965) — which he has come to admire after dissing it in the years right after its huge success — and his key stage triumphs in the Archibald MacLeish-Elia Kazan collaboration “J.B.” and “Barrymore.”
But what I really love about the book is the way that Plummer tips his hat to the other actors who have played important roles in his life and career. Jason Robards and Julie Harris are just two of the legendary performers who are featured prominently and Plummer also took the time and space to remind us of such lesser known (and long gone) stage greats as Edward Everett Horton and Kate Reid.
“In Spite of Myself” takes us back to a halcyon era on Broadway in the 1950s when plays were as important as musicals and Plummer spent countless nights carousing in theater district bars with scintillating folks like Elaine Stritch, Jack Warden and Ben Gazzara.
There are several chapters that Plummer could have expanded into small books, especially his funny and scary account of the chaotic Russian production of “Waterloo” which he worked on with Rod Steiger in the late 1960s.
Another memorable chapter is devoted to Plummer’s experiences starring in one of the biggest and most expensive epics in movie history — “The Fall of the Roman Empire” (1964) which failed at the box-office in spite of awesome sets and costumes and a cast that included Sophia Loren, Alec Guinness, James Mason and Omar Sharif.
“In Spite of Myself” is a very big book, but I was still sorry to reach the last page.

Tonight at 7, I’m hosting a “Critic’s Choice” screening of the wonderful 1970 Francois Truffaut drama, “The Wild Child,” at the Avon Theatre Film Center in Stamford.
What makes the night really special is the fact that Avon programmer Adam Birnbaum has lined up a new 35mm print direct from its recent revival at Manhattan’s Film Forum.
In this age of increasing home viewing of new films and classics — and video projection in some theaters — it’s great that there are still places to see films projected on a large screen. Film may be an increasingly archaic “delivery system” for movies, but it was the way motion pictures were shot and screened for the first 100 years of the medium’s history.
Truffaut’s cinematographer Nestor Almendros won a prize for his gorgeous black-and-white work from the National Society of Film Critics in 1970 and if you attend tonight’s screening you will see why he got the prize.
“The Wild Child” tells the true story of a boy who was found living like a wild animal in a French forest in 1798. A doctor named Jean Itard took on the mammoth task of “civilizing” a child who had been abandoned for unknown reasons several years earlier.
Some critics compared the film to Arthur Penn’s “The Miracle Worker” — about the relationship between Anne Sullivan and her famous blind and deaf student Helen Keller — but Truffaut saw the picture as a companion piece to his debut film, “The 400 Blows,” released 11 years earlier, which was about a rebellious urban “wild child” based on the director’s own turbulent youth.
The material demanded an extremely natural performance from the gypsy child Jean-Pierre Cargol. Truffaut decided the only way he could guide the amateur actor was to play the doctor.
“I feel that if I had turned over the role of Dr. Itard to an actor this would have been, of all my films, the one that gave me the least satisfaction, because I would have had no more than a technical job,” Truffaut wrote after finishing the film.
Actually, Truffaut was so effective in front of the camera that a few years later Steven Spielberg hired the great director for a role in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
(The screening of “The Wild Child” will be at 7 p.m. The Avon Theatre Film Center is at 272 Bedford St. in Stamford. For more information call 967-3660.)

“Scarface Nation” (St. Martin’s Griffin) is a brief but insightful book about the enormous cult that has formed around the 1983 Al Pacino-Brian DePalma kitsch extravaganza, “Scarface,” in the 25 years since it debuted.
The gangster drama is not quite in the so-bad-it’s-good class of “Valley of the Dolls” (1967) or “Mommie Dearest” (1981), but it too is embraced by fans for its craziest excesses.
Al Pacino’s performance as the Cuban gangster Tony Montana is one of the greatest scenery chewing displays in movie history — on a par with Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford and Patty Duke as Neely O’Hara in “Dolls.”
Some critics charge Pacino with racist stereotyping, but the movie wouldn’t be remembered today without the star’s manic and hilarious performance — if you don’t respond to what Pacino does as Tony, you won’t respond to the movie that barely contains his star turn.
Tucker writes about Pacino’s slightly sheepish acceptance of the “Scarface” cult. No other movie the actor has ever done has elicited such fan devotion and that has to be slightly bizarre for a man with “The Godfather” and “Serpico” and “Dog Day Afternoon” on his resume.
In 1983, “Scarface” created something of a scandal with its over-ripe dialogue, suggestions of extreme violence and depiction of the cocaine explosion of the late 1970s and early 1980s. “Scarface” received some respectful reviews, but was also vilified by cultural icons such as Kurt Vonnegut who stormed out of a pre-release celebrity screening.
Tucker points out that the film struck a nerve in the entertainment industry because of its focus on cocaine which was then causing so much trouble in Hollywood (the late 1970s were marked by wildly out of control productions such as “New York, New York” and “1941” where drug use reportedly played a role in mammoth cost overruns and narrative incoherence in the finished products).
DePalma and screenwriter Oliver Stone were viewed as bad boys telling tales out of school by some industry insiders who knew of Tony Montana-style monster addicts within their own community.
“Scarface Nation” is a tad skimpy in terms of bang for the buck — the type is huge and there are only 267 pages of text — but it is a valuable reminder of how slightly trashy movies can inspire the most devoted followings.

A very entertaining documentary about the dangerous “space race” competition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union — “Sputnik Mania” — debuted on The History Channel Saturday night (with repeats set for Dec. 15 at 8 a.m. and 2 p.m.)
Filmmaker David Hoffman takes us back to the near-hysteria in this country after the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik, into orbit on Oct. 4, 1957.
A sense of jubilation around the world over man’s first big step into outer space almost immediately turned to international anxiety over the military implications of Sputnik’s launch.
Sputnik was an incredible scientific and technological achievement — one that paved the way to today’s global communication via satellite — but it also raised the spectre of a too-quick-to-halt nuclear war in which the bombs would be delivered via missile.
Hoffman takes us back to the beginning of an era baby boomers will remember well — the feeling in the early 1960s that the end of the world was a real possibility because of proliferating nuclear weapons and rising tensions between the world’s two major super powers.
Then Senator Lyndon Johnson compared the launch of the Soviet satellite to Pearl Harbor and within a year a Gallup Poll showed that 60 percent of the U.S. public believed nuclear war was inevitable and that it would kill 50 percent of the country’s population.
Hoffman shows how Hollywood shifted from nuclear mutation monster movies (such as the 1954 classic “Them!”) to pictures about the aftermath of nuclear war (1959’s “The World, the Flesh and the Devil” and “On the Beach,” among them).
In this still nervous post 9/11 environment, it is easy to forget the even greater nuclear war fears that reached a peak in the Cuban missile crisis of October, 1962.
Fortunately, wise and stable leaders like President Eisenhower did their best to find positive aspects of the satellite race between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.
Ike insisted that our new space agency — NASA — would be a non-military branch of the government and he used one of our first satellite launches to broadcast a message of peace from outer space.
“Sputnik Mania” shows us how the Soviet triumph pushed our government to get its act together, setting the stage for President Kennedy’s 1961 pledge that we would send a manned space ship to the moon by the end of the decade.

You wouldn’t think that there would be too many laughs to be found in murder and prostitution, but you might change your mind after reading Scott Sherman’s debut mystery, “First You Fall” (Alyson Books).
I picked up the book after hearing the writer speak at a panel at the annual Bouchercon mystery writers’ conference in Baltimore in October and I’m glad I did. Sherman has pulled off the mean feat of writing a Janet Evanovich-style comic crime novel about a New York City male escort named Kevin Connor.
The range of professions in amateur sleuth crime fiction these days is quite amazing. Coffee shop operators, nurses, gardeners, crossword puzzle creators, tattoo parlor managers — you name the job and there’s a good chance some clever author has used it as a jumping off point for a mystery series.
Sherman breaks new ground with his escort hero who juggles a number of compelling personal problems — including the sudden death of a dear friend, a surprise visit from his hysterical mother who is convinced Kevin’s dad is cheating on her, and the search for a stable romantic partner — while plying his trade in the oldest profession.
What makes the book distinctive (and memorable) is the way that Sherman juggles laughs and drama (and terrific plot twists) in a story that opens a door into the world of men who make their livings as sex workers. The author doesn’t glamorize prostitution, but he shows us how attractive “the life” can be for young people who are just starting out in New York. What other job pays several hundred dollars an hour and often includes fine dining and free trips to the best cultural attractions Manhattan has to offer?
Kevin Connor makes a very nice living working for “Mrs. Cherry,” a madam of unknown gender with a large stable of male escorts (the name Sherman chose for the escort manager is just the first of many sly references to gay icon Barbra Streisand in the novel — Mrs. Cherry was the very odd madam played by Yiddish theater legend Molly Picon in the 1974 Streisand epic, “For Pete’s Sake”).
Most of Kevin’s clients are low maintenance types who are willing to pay considerable amounts of money for companionship and role-playing. But the young man’s work leaves him in a very vulnerable position when his own life appears to be in danger — going to the cops is not an option for an escort in trouble.
Mystery and tragedy enter the book early on when one of Kevin’s older friends — not a client but a regular customer for some of Connor’s associates — falls to his death from a fancy Central Park West apartment. The cops rule the death a suicide, but Kevin knows that the late Allen Harrington would never kill himself. Soon we meet a large pool of murder suspects, ranging from the man’s homophobic grown sons to at least one of Kevin’s fellow escorts.
Through Kevin’s search for Allen’s killer, Sherman explores the unique mix of high life and low life that makes Manhattan such a compelling — and sometimes dangerous — place. The result is an unusually substantial piece of light entertainment that will leave most readers wondering what might happen to Kevin in follow-up novels.

Did you catch the Diane Sawyer-Ashley Dupre act on “20/20” Friday night?
It still boggles my mind that Sawyer is considered a “journalist” by ABC News after the Michael Jackson-Lisa Marie Presley debacle of a decade ago and the Elian Gonzalez shaming in 2000, but there she was two nights ago looking suitably “shocked” and “compassionate” as the Eliot Spitzer call girl told her tales of woe.
The ex-beauty pageant contestant and loyal secretary to President Richard Nixon — Diane followed Nixon back to San Clemente after he resigned in disgrace in 1974 — is a better actress than many of the stars her husband Mike Nichols has guided to Oscar nominations over the past 40 years.
Whether it is looking sympathetic sitting across from the Jackson-Presley trainwreck marriage or getting down and playing on the floor with little Elian, Sawyer has always seemed to be auditioning for the sob sister newspaper-woman role in “Chicago.” She makes Barbara Walters look like Helen Thomas.
Years ago in the musical “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” there was a hilarious number sung by a mock-outraged Houston TV reporter — “Texas Has a Whorehouse In It!” — and I recalled that tune as Sawyer kept working up a new look of surprise and moral superiority every time Dupre explained that there are lots of men in this country who pay young women to have sex with them (No!)
Way back in the early 1980s I used to enjoy Sawyer on the CBS version of “The Today Show” where she handled light features and co-host banter with considerable charm, but as she has risen up the ladder into harder news slots, Sawyer’s reliance on pseudo emotionalism and ignorant moralism has become increasingly repellant.
Fighting with colleague Barbara Walters for each new ABC newsmagazine “get” — and making who-knows-what sort of deals with her scandal-sheet prey — the newswoman is an embarrassment to her profession.

Tomorrow night it will be my privilege to co-host a free screening of the 1995 Claude Chabrol film, “La Ceremonie,” at the Fairfield Library at 7 p.m.
The movie is the second in a new monrhly series the library is calling “Fringe & Foreign” (my pal, Drew Taylor of The Fairfield Weekly, is selecting the indie cult titles and I’m choosing the foreign films).
“La Ceremonie” is a perfect choice for a library showing because it is an excellent adaptation of the novel “A Judgement in Stone” by the great British crime writer Ruth Rendell.
Rendell has always been more interested in how crimes happen than in the traditional whodunit. She likes to examine the forces that push seemingly ordinary people to violent eruptions.
“A Judgement in Stone” is one of Rendell’s finest novels, with a much-discussed first sentence that gives away the ending of the story. The author names the perp and her victims flat out and readers who aren’t familiar with Rendell might wonder how she can keep us turning the pages toward a pre-ordained finale.
Instead of diminishing the suspense, Rendell increases it by making us wonder and wait to see how things could possibly end so badly for a group of people with no history of violent crime.
Chabrol made one major change in the Rendell book by omitting that opening declaration. He just tells the gripping story of how horrific things transpire after a bourgeois French family decides to hire a rather aloof but very hard-working young maid.
I think even viewers who have never read the novel feel a sense of dread very early on, when it becomes apparent there is something wrong with the maid. So, the film generates the same sort of suspense as the novel — we wonder what terrible things are going to happen.
Sandrine Bonaire (above, left) gives a very understated performance as the maid, allowing us to draw our own conclusions about what is going on under a series of rather blank expressions.
The trigger for the events of the final third of the story arrives in the form of a discontented postal worker who dislikes most of her customers and matches the maid in terms of loneliness and emotional repression. The French call this sort of unhealthy pairing a folie a deux.
Chabrol regular Isabelle Huppert (above, right) plays the part of the postal clerk with a subtly subversive humor that allows us to share her character’s resentment of the comfortable country lives of the wealthy Parisians who own lavish weekend getaway estates outside her village.
Chabrol turns the screws by making the rich family sympathetic — despite their being oblivious to the lives of the underclass people all around them. Jacqueline Bisset plays the working wife and mother — she runs an art gallery — who is so grateful for her new maid’s work ethic that she doesn’t pay much attention to the young woman’s simmering anger.
The final 15 minutes of “La Ceremonie” are as creepy and as shocking as any horror movie finale without resorting to any graphic displays of violence. It’s a movie most people remember long after the credits roll.
(The Fairfield Library is at 1080 Old Post Road in Fairfield Center. Call 256-3155 for more information on the free screening Friday at 7.)