Joe's View

As I head off for a two-week vacation, I want to recommend a wonderful thriller I just read, Joseph Finder’s “Vanished” (St. Martin’s Press). I couldn’t save this perfect beach book for my own jaunt to Delaware because I had to read “Vanished” to prepare for an interview with the author that will run in my “Book Beat” column in Sunday’s Pulse section (it should be online Saturday).

Finder has written a number of popular stand-alone suspense novels — including “Power Play” and “Killer Instinct” — but “Vanished” marks the start of the writer’s first series. Judging by the initial installment, Finder will be giving Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series a run for its money.

Like Reacher, Nick Heller is as smart as he is physically capable. He knows the way that the darker realms of our society operate and is ready to step in to aid the helpless.

Heller is an investigator on staff at a high-powered private intelligence firm that deals mainly with corporate cases.

The book centers on a painfully personal case for Nick — his estranged brother, Roger, who works for a shadowy Haliburton-style military contractor, is abducted one night outside a D.C. restaurant.

Roger’s wife, Lauren, is assaulted in the process and has no idea why her husband was taken. Nick is closer to Roger’s stepson, Gabe, than he is to his brother, and he takes on the case at the request of the teenage boy and his mother.

We learn that Nick and Roger’s father was a enormously wealthy man who was jailed in a major financial scandal and that the two sons have gone their separate ways — Nick into the Special Forces and then into private investigation work, Roger back into a business life that might be just as corrupt as the father’s.

“Vanished” teaches us a lot about the way government and business operate in D.C. and the result is a scary, impossible-to-put-down paranoid thriller cut from the same cloth as those great 1970s Watergate era thrillers written by Robert Ludlum and classic movies such as “Three Days of the Condor.”

I can’t wait to read Nick’s second adventure already set for publication next year.

I didn’t have much time to write the blog posting below about Dominick Dunne yesterday — right after I put those few notes together, I had to come up with the 24-inch obit/tribute that ran in the newspaper and online this morning (see link below). “Nick” Dunne was one of my favorite interviews because he was always so quotable and so funny.

 Remember that old game people used to play about which celebrity you would want to be stuck with in a semi-private hospital room for a few days?

In my case, it would boil down to two people — Dunne and Alan King — the smartest and funniest show biz insiders I’ve ever met. In both cases, I did multiple features over the years just because I knew I would have a great time doing the interview and come back with a good story for the paper.

Like Dunne, King was what folks in show biz call a “hyphenate” — although he was best known as a comedian, King also was a terrific actor and a producer of film, TV and theater projects.

I felt the same pang when Dunne died yesterday that I felt when King died in 2004. No more hilarious stories about the ups and downs of life in L.A. and New York. No more master classes in how the business of show really works.

Today the internet is full of tributes to Dunne written by reporters who had the same experience with him that I did. Terrific interviews followed by nice personal gestures.

The only challenge with Nick was to boil down the two or three hours of wide-ranging talk in his Hadlyme living room into a reasonably tight and lucid Sunday book feature.

Back in the 1990s, Dunne was focused on his novel writing so I did “Book Beat” columns when “An Inconvenient Woman,” “A Season in Purgatory” and “Another City, Not My Own” appeared.

We had another great session when his fantastic photo memoir “The Way We Lived Then” appeared in 1999. Nick knew everybody who was anybody in Hollywood and the Manhattan smart set, so you could just fire a name at him and he would reel off personal anecdotes.

For years, Dunne talked about the book that Crown will finally publish this December, a magnum opus that he told me in the 1990s would be in the style of one of his all-time favorite writers, Somerset Maugham.

Dunne had trouble with the novel on two fronts — after the O.J. trial made him into a multimedia star, most of his time was spent on television projects and covering other show biz trials. But I think he put the novel aside for another, more technical reason — the terrible mistake he made in killing off his alter ego character Gus Bailey at the end of his poorly received 1997 novel, “Another City, Not My Own.”

Dunne told me a few years later that he regretted killing Gus — who had been his observer/stand-in in most of the novels he wrote. Nick said he was toying with the idea of simply pretending Gus had not died at the end of  “Another City” and using him again as a narrator guide in “A Solo Act.”

This was years before the producers of the James Bond and “Star Trek” franchises decided to “reboot” their series — i.e. acting as if the earlier movies had never been made.

Dunne asked me what I thought about the idea of restoring life to Gus. I told him it was a great idea. I didn’t have the nerve to tell him that I believed most of “Another City” had been a major miscalculation — a weird fictionalized version of his own coverage of O.J. in which real people mingled with made-up characters — and that few people would make it to the final chapter.

When Dunne found out he had cancer a few years ago, he decided to finish the novel that had been hanging over his head so long. In the press coverage today, Crown reported that the book was no longer being called “A Solo Act.” When it lands in stores in December, the novel will have the title ”Too Much Money.”

Here’s hoping Nick found a way out of his creative dilemma and that the book will end his amazing career on a high note.

(http://www.connpost.com/ci_13211116?source=rv).

David Patrick Columbia reported in his New York Social Diary blog earlier today that novelist and journalist Dominick Dunne lost his two-year battle with bladder cancer last night at his Manhattan home.

The 83-year-old Hartford native spent a lot of his time in a cozy retreat near the Connecticut River in Hadlyme where I was lucky enough to interview him a few times. 

To use one of his own favorite words, Nick Dunne was a “classy” guy who made thank-you calls to fellow reporters and seemed to enjoy nothing more than shooting the breeze (both on and off the record). 

Up until a few weeks ago, the writer was seen out and about in Manhattan.

Earlier this year, Dunne was still doing revisions on his long-in-the-making novel, “A Solo Act,” which he began work on more than 10 years ago. Dunne told me in 1999 that he hoped the novel would be his masterpiece.  

Here’s a link to New York Social Diary:

http://www.newyorksocialdiary.com/

There is a tendency in rock journalism — and rock documentary filmmaking — to focus on personalities and bad behavior at the expense of the music.

“It Might Get Loud” is a refreshing change in direction — a documentary designed to explore the musicianship of guitarists Jimmy Page (of Led Zeppelin), The Edge (of U2) and Jack White (of The White Stripes). These men are rather colorful personalities, to be sure, but producer Thomas Tull and director Davis Guggenheim spend most of the time showing us how they got into music, what it is about the guitar that grabbed them, and how the three men continue to explore their relationships with the instrument.

The artists were brought together by the filmmakers in a Los Angeles studio for interviews and jam sessions. In long cutaways, we are shown mini-biographies of each guitarist, packed with wonderful performance footage.

Since Page is the oldest of the trio, his sections of the movie are perhaps the most entertaining because they open a door into more than 40 years of pop music history. Page picked up the guitar at 12 and became an accomplished London session musician before he was 20. It’s fun to look back at the London scene of the early to mid-1960s where Page worked on an incredibly wide variety of records (including the great Shirley Bassey recording of the title tune of the 1964 James Bond film, “Goldfinger”).

The material on The Edge (right) shows us how the punk movement of the late 1970s inspired a whole generation of kids that included the guitarist and his U2 bandmates. The deceptively simple musical style of U2’s early recordings is traced in detail by The Edge as he takes us through some old demos and talks about the role that “repeat echo” has played in his guitar performances.

Jack White (above) is the most whimsical and guarded of the three men — something to be expected of the youngest one in the trio and a guy who still seems to be crafting a public persona. I’m not sure that I believed all of White’s anecdotes about growing up poor in Detroit 20 years ago, but there is unvarnished truth in every piece of his music that we hear.

Anyone looking for the sex and drugs components of the rock lifestyle will be sorely disappointed by the way that Tull and Guggenheim ignore whatever skeletons might be rattling in the closets of the three men. If you love the music of these men, however, you will have a fantastic time at “It Might Get Loud.”

(“It Might Get Loud” opens Friday at the Avon Theatre Film Center in Stamford, the Garden Cinemas in Norwalk and the Bow Tie Criterion in New Haven.)

Margaret Maron has won nearly every prize given to mystery fiction for her novels about North Carolina judge Deborah Knott.

Maron kicked off the series 16 years ago with “Bootlegger’s Daughter.” The new “Sand Sharks” (Grand Central Publishing) is the 15th book about this very wise and witty woman who manages to run into almost as much crime off the bench as she does in the courtroom.

Maron grew up on a tobacco farm near Raleigh, but spent many years living in Brooklyn, Washington, D.C. and Italy, before she and her husband returned to North Carolina.

The years spent away from home allow Maron to be clear-eyed about her native state.

The writer’s love of the place is on every page of “Sand Sharks,” but North Carolina has changed drastically since Maron was born there in the Depression era.

The state has veered from agriculture to high tech and tons of newcomers have arrived in the form of retirees from the North. The new novel is set in the coastal communities of Wilmington and Wrightsville Beach where a new wrinkle has been added to the North Carolina scene in the form of movie and TV production.

“Sand Sharks” follows Deborah to a summer beach conference for the state’s district court judges — she looks forward to combining business and pleasure in a brief break from her recent marriage to a cop with a nine year old son. Deborah loves the boy but is looking forward to a little time on her own.

Just when the power of the sun and the sand — and the seafood — is working its magic on our heroine, one of the judges is found strangled. The list of suspects includes most of his peers as well as the star of a TV series being shot in Wilmington and the staff of the resort restaurant where the victim was dining on the fateful night. Deborah quickly learns that the dead man was a corrupt judge and a pretty miserable human being. 

The mystery is a good one, but the real pleasure in “Sand Sharks” comes from the humor and social observations of Deborah (and the novelist pulling her strings).

Deborah knows the incredible nostalgic power many of us feel each summer when we return to a favorite beach town:

“The moon, the stars, the thick brine-ladened air — I had stood gazing out to sea like this on dozens of other summer nights and memory held me in its grip, sending kaleidoscopic images coursing through my head of weekends with Mother and Daddy and my brothers back when I was a child: musty summer cottages borrowed from a more affluent aunt or uncle, pallets of quilts on the floor, sand underfoot no matter how often the floors were swept.”

“A week at the beach for high school graduation, chaperoned by my brother Seth and his new bride: beach music and (dancing) the night away on the boardwalk at Atlantic Beach and sneaking sips of beer when Seth’s back was turned, trying to forget for a few hours of time that Mother would be dead by the end of that summer.”

“Sand Sharks” will delight the fans who have come to know Deborah Knott so well over the course of more than two dozen books. But, Maron has always done a fine job of making her novels work as stand alone experiences, too (although I have a strong hunch her new readers will be very happy to have all of those earlier stories to read).

With more than 200 plays to choose from spread out over two weeks — and a universal $15 ticket price — the NYC Fringe is one of the great summer bargains and theater adventures.

$15 is barely more than the price of a movie ticket in New York City and in past summers I’ve seen some terrific cutting-edge theater. Part of the fun of the Fringe is not knowing what you might see and going to a bunch of stuff hoping for the best.

Yesterday I lost the Fringe crapshoot, however, with a half-baked import from San Francisco, “Abraham Lincoln’s Big Gay Dance Party” by Aaron Loeb.

The show is a hot ticket — even before its first public performance last week, all five shows were sold out and an extra one added due to genuine popular demand.

At the Here Arts Center Sunday there was a sizeable cancellation line before the matinee performance.

The title doesn’t really serve Loeb’s play very well, promising something much zanier and livelier than this rather dour comedy-drama about homophobia in the Heartland. “Abraham Lincoln” follows an Illinois teacher (Lorraine Olsen) who writes and directs an elementary school Christmas pageant that makes a passing reference to Lincoln’s “close” relationship to another man when he was a young lawyer in Menard County.

The first scene promises a Christopher Durang-style satire in the vein of “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You” as we observe the about-to-be-controversial holiday pageant. But the play soon bogs down in the teacher’s trial and the attempt of a local politician (Joe Kady) to use the controversy as a launch pad for the governor’s race. The politico has a closeted gay son — Jerry played by Michael Phillis — who is quickly outed by a very bizarre Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter (Mark Anderson Phillips). The Times guy seems more gay activist than journalist and his seduction of the politician’s son is both crude and unbelievable.

Loeb tries to give his three-act dramedy some experimental edge by having an audience member select the order in which the three acts are played — each act presents a different character’s point of view of the trial.

The playwright’s call for gay marriage and the end of Heartland homophobia is admirable — and perhaps would still be considered shocking in some parts of the United States — but the whole thing seemed like a rather redundant exercise for a downtown Manhattan venue in 2009. I don’t think many minds need changing there.

(The New York International Fringe Festival runs through Sunday. Ticket and schedule information are available at  www.fringenyc.org)

I’ve been having fun reading the text by Naomi Fertitta and enjoying the photography of Paul Aresu in the new guide book/coffee-table book, “New York: The Big City and Its Little Neighborhoods” (Universe).

The title says it all. Fertitta and Aresu take the intimidation factor out of New York by zeroing in on small neighborhoods and their charms. There are few better examples of the “melting pot” cliche of the great city than the book’s overview of nearly two dozen ethnic enclaves, from “Little Beirut” in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn to “Little Egypt” in the Astoria section of Queens.

The real core strength of New York lies in the steady influx of newcomers who bring their culture and their energy to the vast metropolis — they think enough of the city to uproot themselves and relocate there, and they bring with them food and entertainment and history that the rest of us can enjoy, too.

The size of New York City is its curse and its blessing — it’s sad that the city is too big to ever be completely absorbed, but it’s great that you can never get to the bottom of it, too. There is no excuse for being bored in New York — just get out of the comfort zone of the places you know well and go to a new block or a new section.

Coincidentally, I just happened to visit one of the nightspots Fertitta mentions in her section on “Little Mexico” in East Harlem within the past few weeks — the terrific Cuban restaurant/nightclub Amor Cubano (at Third Ave, and 111th St.). A friend who recently moved into the neighborhood — and who spent a year living in Cuba — wanted to check out the place. Authentic food, super mojitos and live Cuban music turned a blah rainy night in Manhattan into a memorable occasion.

There are hundreds of examples of similar off-the-reservation adventures in “New York: The Big City and Its Little Neighborhoods.” I can tell that this book will get quite a work out from me over the next few months. Who knew there was a “Little Sri Lanka” on Staten Island?

A romantic comedy-drama involving a man with Asperger’s Syndrome would be a tough sell any time of the year, but I think Fox Searchlight made a big mistake opening the charming “Adam” in multiplexes in the middle of August.

When I saw the movie last weekend, I was an audience of one. While that made for a quiet, relaxed screening, I felt bad for the people who made this solid little movie.

“Adam” sports some of the standard features of a contemporary Hollywood romance — the two leads are the very attractive Rose Byrne and Hugh Dancy and the story is set in upscale Manhattan — but the movie deals with the hero’s Asperger’s in a honest manner that rules out a formula ending for the story.

The trailers for “Adam” made it look coy and sappy — a disease-of-the-week TV movie crossed with a sitcom — but writer-director Max Mayer avoids most of the cliches seemingly built into the premise.

Dancy doesn’t sugar-coat the title character’s strangeness. Adam is incapable of telling a lie or of understanding someone who tells a white lie to him — a good trait on paper, but a major annoyance in real life. He also focuses on his own quirky interests in an extreme manner that tends to alienate would-be friends and lovers.

We meet Adam in crisis. He has just lost his father/caretaker and is rattling around on his own in a big Upper West Side apartment filled with memories of the deceased parent. Adam has a job working as a techie at a video game company, but his perfectionism makes his ideas expensive to realize and he is let go. Dad arranged this job for Adam and the young man doesn’t really know how to go about getting another one — his social skills are virtually non-existant.

Enter new neighbor Beth Buchwald (Byrne), a teacher at a nearby school, who is clearly attracted to Adam physically before she starts to understand the handicap he is dealing with. Mayer believably shows the development of this friendship into a tentative romance.

What gives the movie added texture is Beth’s family crisis, involving her businessman dad Marty (Peter Gallagher) facing criminal charges for his Wall Street wheeling and dealing. Beth’s mom, Rebecca, is beautifully played by Amy Irving. The parents are concerned about their daughter’s new relationship, but can’t really focus on it because of the legal crisis. Adam is drawn into the situation with far from positive results.

Mayer keeps us wondering what will happen next and fearing there is no way the couple can stay together.

The movie is smart and keeps the sentimental possibilities in the story under control. Perhaps if the story was gooier and more predictable it might have been a summer sleeper. ”Adam” appears to be doomed to a short theatrical life but has all of the elements that could lead to its discovery on DVD later this year.

Sadly, some good movies just cannot be marketed successfully for mass release — especially in the summer, when theaters want to dump non-performing pictures as quickly as possible to make room for the next potential hit.