On the Move to Malta

Writing a quick one here from the airport where I’m waiting once again to begin another tourney journey. Heading to Malta this time for the European Poker Tour festival which has already begun there on the tiny archipelago just off Italy’s boot.

This’ll be a new destination for your humble scribbler. I’ll admit I don’t know a heck of a lot at present about where I’m heading.

Back during my full-time teaching days I had a colleague swing a year-long sabbatical to Malta, although I never really talked much with him afterwards about his experience. Of course, Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 novel The Maltese Falcon is one of my fave reads, although that book has about as much to do with Malta as it does falcons.

In fact, toward the latter part of my detective novel Same Difference -- which is pretty deliberately meant as an homage of sorts to Hammett, Chandler, Cain, and other hard-boiled greats -- characters joke around a little about that novel’s story and how the Maltese falcon at the heart of it turns out to be a fake. (There’s a similar reference to the even more elusive postman in Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice.)

We’ll see what comes of this new poker plot I’m embarking on, and will try to sort out the important from the trivial. As always, I’ll try my best to keep in touch here as it goes.

More later from the Mediterranean!

Now That’s a Lot of Cabbage

Something recently reminded me of that specialized “hard-boiled” lingo one finds in novels by writers like Dashiel Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and others. I think it must have been a delayed echo from that Robyn Hitchcock show I was writing about a couple of days ago, specifically his tune “Raymond Chandler Evening” I’ve continue to hum all week.

I was going back through some posts on the blog recently -- just cleaning up some dead links here and there. Ended up lingering for a while, reading several including a few early ones where I tried (somewhat vainly) to write using that “hard-boiled” patois.

That didn’t last very long (thankfully), although a few phrases and words have stuck over the years, including using “cabbage” to refer to money. It wasn’t my normal voice, of course, and while my detective novel Same Difference has a few hard-boiled elements (including style-wise), I didn’t go for the lingo so much there, either, finding it hard enough to tell a story without giving myself that additional challenge.

I’ve toyed with another novel idea, a story set in the late 1920s, actually, where it would be not inappropriate to include characters sounding like Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. So ripe for parody, that. Can only really be done with tongue partially in cheek.

Probably wouldn’t have made it to one year on here writing about poker had I tried to keep up that applesauce. Let alone ten, a milestone that’s coming up in just over a week. (No shinola.)

Playing It Safe

I paid my life insurance today. A monthly ritual, that.

Perhaps idiosyncratically, I choose to write a check and deliver it by hand to the insurance office, located just around the corner from where I live. I’m sure I could probably pay online or set up some sort of automatic withdrawal from my bank to take care of it, but for some reason I like to pay this one in person. Might well be some sort of hidden psychological explanation for that, if one were to search hard enough for one.

I first purchased the policy last summer shortly after leaving that full-time “day job” I’d had for many years. The job included some nominal life insurance -- like a year’s salary or something -- and so losing that I decided to get a new policy once I’d struck out on my own.

I recall going into the office and meeting the agent last spring. Gave him all the necessary info. And perhaps some not-so-necessary, too, as he was a friendly fellow with whom it was easy enough to chat. Such conversations are probably not altogether without meaning, actually. It helps, I imagine, to know a little bit about a person who is about to take out a life insurance policy on himself.

At one point in our conversation -- after terms had been reached and there was nothing left to do but fill out all the required boxes -- I brought up James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity (1943), one of my favorite novels about which I’ve written here before. That’s the one about an insurance agent who falls for a femme fatale with whom he brazenly plots to murder her husband so they can collect on a policy he sells to them.

“I don’t believe I’ve heard of that one,” said my agent. I asked if he had ever seen the film adaptation, also from the 1940s, directed by Billy Wilder and starring Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck. “Nope,” he said, shaking his head, adding that he’d have to check it out. He even wrote down the title on a scrap of paper as a reminder.

I keep forgetting to ask my agent if he ever did see the film. Thinking back, I guess it probably wouldn’t be so great for your insurance agent to say he was a big fan of Double Indemnity.

I remember asking a similar question at a dentist visit long ago. A particularly unpleasant dentist visit, in fact.

I can’t recall all of the details, but I was in need of some sort of filling work, and the dentist -- a new one to me -- had some sort of newfangled procedure that he employed. Whatever it was, lasers were involved, and novocaine was not.

At some point I was starting to become increasingly aware of the pain he was causing me. Perhaps you’ve experienced something similar, maybe even at the poker tables when things aren’t going well.

I can deal with this, you say. It’s all good. Then, suddenly, you are hit with a kind of wait-a-minute-this-is-much-worse-than-I-thought-in-fact-I-hate-hate-this kind of revelation. The sort of epiphany that’s usually followed by some immediate action to counter the direction things are going. If you are in a state to do so, that is.

Was too long ago for me to remember exactly what I said, but I did somehow bring it to my tormentor’s attention that I was hurting. Really hurting. His response surprised me a little. Rather than show concern, he instead seemed to offer some sort of rationalization. Something to do with the new method.

I wasn’t sure how to respond. For some reason -- either out of confusion or a desire to lighten the mood -- I asked him if he’d ever seen The Marathon Man (1976).

You remember that one? With Laurence Olivier as the Nazi war criminal drilling the teeth of hapless Dustin Hoffman while asking him repeatedly a question which has no meaning to him -- “Is it safe?”

In fact, The dentist had seen the John Schlesinger-directed thriller. And far from finding my alluding to it humorous, he was Not Amused.

Uh oh, I thought. Seem to have hit a nerve.

“A live, freshly-cut nerve is infinitely more sensitive...”

Olivier’s slow cadence pulsed through my brain, surfacing amid the wavy rhythm of the laser’s hum. I don’t remember much after that.

Don’t believe I scheduled a return visit to that particular dentist. And maybe I won’t bother to bring up Double Indeminity again to my agent. No reason to give him any ideas.

Audacity and Poker

I haven’t added it up, but I probably spent somewhere in the neighborhood of 30-plus hours or so in airplanes getting to and from Marrakech, Morocco to help cover the WPT-Chilipoker event last week.

Spent much of that time either listening to tunes or reading. Music-wise it was Steve Hillage, Cheap Trick, Metric, Tortoise, Brian Eno, Eric Dolphy, and a few others filling out the playlist. And as far as reading went, I was in mostly hard-boiled mode for much of the time, including reading through a couple of novels, George V. Higgins’ The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1972) and James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity (1936).

Have probably read the latter a half-dozen times -- a short, tough, no-nonsense novel about an insurance salesman who gets involved with a femme fatale to plot her husband’s murder. Was first serialized in 1936, published in book form in 1943, then adapted as an excellent film noir in 1944, a film directed by Billy Wilder and co-scripted by Wilder and Raymond Chandler.

While these travels have interrupted my progress a little, I continue to work on a second novel, another murder mystery as was the case for the first one, Same Difference. (Available via Amazon, Lulu, and elsewhere!) I’d certainly list Cain among a handful of writers whom I’d call direct influences, and would love to be able to produce a story as lean and mean as Double Indemnity.

I’ve always thought there were many links between this mode of storytelling -- the crime/detective/mystery stories typical of “hard-boiled” fiction -- and the kinds of stories produced by the game of poker. While Same Difference has no poker in it per se, there’s a lot of gamesmanship and strategy and “partial information” that one might say makes the unfolding of the plot not unlike the unfolding of a hand of poker.

Thus am I constantly reminded of poker while reading such books. Happened again with this latest read of Cain’s novel. More than once, in fact, although I wanted to share just one example.

Near the beginning of the novel, the insurance salesman, Walter Huff, and Phyllis Nirdlinger quickly decide upon the plan to murder her husband and collect insurance from a policy Huff himself has sold to them. It is an audacious plan, with lots of potential pitfalls that could sabotage it. But Huff believes he has everything worked out.

Speaking of audacity, when it comes to the murder itself, Huff insists that it must be carried out boldly -- that audacity, in fact, is one of “three essential elements to a successful murder.” The first element is having help to carry out the murder -- that is, a co-conspirator. The second, says Huff, is careful planning, knowing the time and place well in advance.

“The third is, audacity,” says Huff. “That’s the one all amateur murderers forget... [the one] only a professional knows.”

He goes on to describe to Phyllis the example of a gangster-style killing, with the victim being shot in front of a crowded movie theater: “right there, in the glare of the lights, with a couple hundred people looking on, they let him have it.” What happens, explains Huff, is the witnesses haven’t time to provide adequate eyewitness testimony, the spectacle of the shooting being too intense -- too wildly out-of-context -- for them to be able to say for certain what exactly they saw.

“They were only seen for a second,” says Huff of the killers, “by people who were so scared they didn’t know what they were looking at -- and there isn’t a chance to convict them.”

This ability to act with audacity is something that distinguishes the pros from the amateurs in poker, too. One could pursue the analogy further, I suppose, and talk about possessing a “killer instinct,” but that’s not necessarily what I’m getting at here. Rather, I’m referring more generally to being ready and willing to act boldly -- to make plays that are unexpected or perhaps may “expose” one, and be undeterred by worries about consequences while making them.

Such seems an important -- perhaps even essential -- skill that helps some players “get away with stuff” while others cannot. Put in such situations, only a few can act audaciously and “pull the trigger,” it seems, while most haven’t the capacity to follow through.

So... is Huff’s plan audacious enough to work? Go read Double Indeminity and find out.