Blood Triangle

Blood Work, Michael Connelly (1998)

This is the cleverest and best-plotted crime novel I’ve ever read. That’s why it would be a bad place for newcomers to start reading Michael Connelly’s work. As good as some of his other novels are, none of them pack the punch of Blood Work and they’re all going to suffer by comparison. So the Connelly-curious should start with some of the early Harry Bosch adventures, then come to Blood Work later.

That’s what I did: started with the Bosch novels. So I was familiar with Connelly and knew he was an excellent writer, but nothing prepared me for the cleverness of the twist at the end of Blood Work. An FBI detective called Terry McCaleb has retired and gone back to civilian life after a heart-transplant. He needed a new heart because the stress of his job had wrecked his old one: he worked to catch serial-killers, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing. It was the failures that ate away at him and triggered the virus that attacked his heart. He almost died waiting for a transplant, because he has a rare blood-type and a suitable donor took a long time to arrive.

The donor, a young Latina called Gloria Torres, had to die to give him life, of course. In fact, she was murdered but the police can’t find her killer. She was just unlucky, a random victim brutally but casually shot in the head as a potential witness to the robbery of a convenience store in Los Angeles. The owner of the store was shot dead too and with no witnesses and just blurred CCTV footage from a single camera in the store, the hunt for the killer hasn’t gone anywhere. That’s why Gloria’s sister tracks McCaleb down after a story about him appears in the LA Times. She asks him to put his old FBI skills to work again and he can’t refuse: he and Gloria have the most intimate of connections and he owes her his life.

What he doesn’t realize is that he and she are two corners of what you might call a blood triangle. The third corner of the blood triangle is revealed when McCaleb finally works out who the killer is and visits his abandoned lair. A deadly message is waiting for him there on a live computer:

He clicked the mouse and the document quickly filled the screen. McCaleb began to read like a man reading his own obituary. The words filled him with dread, for he knew that they unalterably changed his life. They stripped his soul from him, took any meaning from his accomplishments and made a horrible mockery of them.

Yes, that’s when the twist is sprung and Blood Work may become for you what it is for me: the cleverest crime novel you’ve ever read. I had a distinct memory that the twist appeared on the last page of the book. And that once I’d recovered from it, I turned to the first page and read the whole book again straight through, marvelling at how everything was now cast in a new light. Well, I know I’m right about re-reading the book, but I’m wrong about the twist being revealed on the final page. The book has 47 chapters and the twist is revealed at the end of chapter 40. Maybe I re-read the earlier chapters before finally finishing the book or maybe I carried on to the end and re-read the whole book then. But I understand why my memory was at fault: the final chapters just aren’t memorable by comparison with the power of the twist. The loose ends are tied up but Blood Work would have been more powerful if they hadn’t been. That twist, that literally heart-wrenching twist, should have been the last page of the book.

That’s what my subconscious obviously thought after I’d finished Blood Work for the first time, which is why I had the false memory of reaching the last page, then immediately re-reading the book because of what I’d found there. Memory isn’t static but dynamic. It can’t be trusted. And in fact that’s another of the themes of Blood Work. What and who can we trust? McCaleb lives on a boat after his retirement and the sea is one of the characters in the book. And one of the sources of symbolism. The sea is salty like blood and sometimes surges and quickens like blood. And it can be treacherous and deadly like blood. All of those themes run through the book and help make it the best of a very good author’s many books.

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Linkin’ Lawyer

Resurrection Walk, Michael Connelly (2023)

Although this is billed as “A Lincoln Lawyer Thriller”, the Lincoln Lawyer doesn’t really get a look in. That’s because the Lincoln Lawyer – the defense attorney Micky Haller, who uses a Lincoln sedan as a mobile office – is only Michael Connelly’s second-best character. And when he shares a novel with the ex-LAPD murder detective Harry Bosch, who is Connelly’s first-best character, he gets overshadowed.

That’s even though Haller might seem to have a big advantage: he has chapters in the first person, so everything’s seen through his eyes, heard through his ears, touched, tasted and smelt with his fingers, tongue and nose. Bosch, by contrast, is always described in the third person. But in fact that works to Bosch’s advantage and helps his character become more powerful. Bosch is a lone wolf and nobody really shares his world. Not characters in the novel and not readers of the novel. Even when he worked for the LAPD he did things his own way. You can’t get close to Bosch the way you can get close to Micky Haller, who relies on a team of other people behind the scenes. He’s a Lincoln Lawyer who’s also a linkin’ lawyer, because he’s tied into a network. And Haller is a public performer, a master of court-room technique and legal trickery who relishes the limelight and the battle of wits with the prosecution and judge.

The trickster is trapped at the end of Resurrection Walk, however. After all, he’s up against a female judge and it’s a rule in Connelly books that professional women are highly competent. So although Haller wins his case and frees his client, the judge has seen through one of the tricks he used and isn’t going to stand for it. Maggie McPherson, Haller’s ex-wife, is another of the highly competent women in the Boschiverse, as you might call the linked novels Michael Connelly has written about a variety of characters. She appears here for the state and humiliates Bosch by suggesting he’s past it. He’s always been uncomfortable working for the defense anyway and Maggie McFierce lives up to her nickname after she gets him on the stand and starts asking him tough questions.

Connelly is good at bringing his settings to life with little details like nicknames. That’s how courts and police departments work, as he saw during his years as a crime reporter with the Los Angeles Times. He mined his experiences to write his novels, but he’s now starting to mine his earlier novels to write his later ones. The plot of Resurrection Walk partly recycles the plot of The Brass Verdict (2008). And the plot of The Crossing (2015), because Resurrection Walk involves another unjustly imprisoned ethnic. That’s another rule in the Boschiverse: miscarriages of justice and unjust imprisonment always involve Communities of Color. It’s a Hispanic woman called Lucinda Sanz here and the rule that applies to her is stricter than the rule that applies to highly competent women who are very good at their jobs. After all, she’s unjustly imprisoned partly because of a corrupt female cop called Stephanie Sanger.

Sanger is white, of course. That’s a third rule in the Boschiverse: all evil and error can be traced back to whites and white institutions. The white male Michael Connelly has a core commitment to combating whiteness in general and white maleness in particular. But that doesn’t get him off the hook, I’m afraid, because he himself often commits a serious thought-crime in his novels. He commits it again in Resurrection Walk. Lucinda Sanz is an ethnic victim, yes, but she doesn’t free herself by her own efforts. It’s Bosch’s dogged detecting and Haller’s legal legerdemain that do that. So it’s two white males who enable her to bring the title of the novel to life at the end, when she emerges on her resurrection walk from the living entombment of unjust imprisonment. So what do we have? We have a severe case of W.S.P. – White. Savior. Syndrome.

That simply isn’t acceptable and I hope Connelly repents of his sin in future. But just as the novel has double leads in Bosch and Haller, so the title has a double meaning. Bosch is on his resurrection walk too, because the ill health he suffered in Desert Star (2022) seems to have been cured. For the time being, anyway. And something else that was wrong in Desert Star has been cured in Resurrection Walk. What else was wrong? It was the presence of Renée Ballard, the irritating ethnicky female detective who joined the Boschiverse in The Late Show (2017). She shared Desert Star with Harry Bosch, which made the novel a big improvement over the stand-alone Ballard novels. But Connelly seems to have said “Bollocks to Ballard!” for Resurrection Walk. Or almost. She appears briefly at the beginning and then the reader enters a blessed Ballard-free zone for the rest of the book.

Which makes Resurrection Walk one of Connelly’s best in years. I don’t think he’s ever going to match those early Bosch novels again, but who could expect him to? Like Bosch himself, Connelly is nearing the end of his career. But, like Bosch again, he can still deliver the goods and show the rest how it should be done.

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Previously Pre-Posted on Papyrocentric Performativity…

• Grim Pickings — review of Connelly’s Desert Star (2022)
• Pair’s Fair — review of Connelly’s The Dark Hours (2021)
• Marred Moon — review of Connelly’s Void Moon (2000)
• Double WHAMmy — review of Connelly’s The Reversal (2010)
• All Bosched Up — thoughts on Michael Connelly and his characters

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Grim Pickings

Desert Star, Michael Connelly (2022)

Let’s suppose that Michael Connelly’s books are jazz albums that he produces and engineers himself. Then you could say that he made Desert Star a much better listen than The Dark Hours (2021) by doing two simple things at the mixing-desk. He turned down the young female vocalist and turned up the old guy on tenor sax.

In other words, there’s less Renée Ballard in this one and more Harry Bosch. Renée Ballard is Connelly’s new-ish female detective of color-ish. Harry Bosch is Connelly’s old white detective who fought in Vietnam. And boy was Ballard irritating in The Dark Hours. And in The Night Fire (2019). And in all the other novels she’s appeared in. She’s a goodthinkful PC paragon and I suspect that Connelly doesn’t like her himself. I also suspect that he’d have preferred to make her Black. But he must have realized that, with a Black Ballard, he’d certainly have got in trouble for writing a WoC while being a WHAM (that’s “Woman of Color” and “White Heterosexual Able-Bodied Male”). So he made her part Hawaiian (possibly) and got away with it.

But there was still a problem. Ballard is nowhere as good a character as Bosch and I suspect that Connelly’s readers don’t like her either. For example, as of August 2023 no-one has written articles for any of her novels at Wikipedia. So Bosch had to be brought back in The Dark Hours to dilute Ballard. There was still too much of her, though, so there’s even more Bosch in Desert Star. And it works. The plot isn’t as good as it is in The Dark Hours, but the relief of less Ballard makes up for that.

And in one way the plot’s the same. Indeed, the same as ever. In Connelly novels, the villains are always white and almost always white men. The victims of miscarriages of justice, on the other hand, are always Black or Hispanic. There are two big villains in Desert Star and both are white men. There’s one victim of a miscarriage of justice and he’s a Hispanic man. His girlfriend gets raped and murdered, so the corrupt and cruel American justice system, which is designed to oppress Communities of Color, decides that hedunnit and sends him to jail. But he didn’t dunnit, of course. He’s a Person of Color and Persons of Color do not commit rape or murder in a Michael Connelly book. And they especially don’t commit rape and murder. Never. Nunca. No way, José.

Fortunately, although Bosch is a white male he’s on the side of truth and decency. So his clever detective work and intuition rescue the Hispanic victim of injustice and track down the real villain in that half of the plot, which is about a white man raping and murdering Women of Color. As white men so often do. Bosch’s clever detective work and intuition also track down the villain in the other half of the plot, which is about a white man murdering a whole family, including kids, and burying them in the desert. As white men so often do. But everything in the plot has appeared in a Connelly novel before. For example, there was an unjustly-imprisoned-for-rape-and-murder Hispanic man in The Lincoln Lawyer (2005). And a slaughtered family somewhere else. But what hasn’t appeared in a Connelly novel before is the saddest but most natural thing in the world finally and fully happening to Bosch.

It’s called old age. Bosch is old now and some of the nastier characters in Desert Star – the white male ones, that is – mock him for it. His life is nearly over and his body is starting to let him down. At one point, Ballard notices that he’s struggling to carry something up some stairs. She asks him if he wants help. He says no, of course, but it’s still a sad moment. Some readers will have lived with Bosch right from the beginning, in the string of excellent novels that introduced him to the world in the early 1990s. He was young and vigorous back then, but that was thirty years ago. Now the novels are no longer as good and Bosch isn’t young or vigorous any more. I didn’t start read the Bosch novels when they were first published, but I still feel as though I’ve travelled with Bosch through time. And I like him as a character and as a person, despite the political correctness that has always governed his plots. Connelly is a good and realistic writer who’s been able to make Bosch breathe and bleed on the page. Okay, after thirty-six previous novels, it’s not surprising that Desert Star isn’t a classic. But it still has its moments. This bit of dialogue was effective, for example:

“Let’s drop these at the pod, then you and I can go somewhere to talk,” Ballard said. “I want your take on a couple of things.”

“Roger that.”

“You gotta stop saying that. Everybody has to stop saying it.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“When influencers are saying it on TikTok, it’s jumped the shark.”

“I don’t know what a word of that means.”

“Which is a good thing.” – end of chapter 15

Bosch is still going his own way as the shadows thicken around him and the Grim Reaper gets ready to swing his scythe. He’s pre-internet, even if he’s not pre-PC, an old white man in a world of wokeness. And I’ll be sorry when he’s finally gone. It will feel as though a real person has left the world and the Bosch novels will feel different to read. They’ll no longer feel as though they’re about a living person, someone who has real memories of what the novels describe, someone who bears real scars on his body and on his heart.

Michael Connelly isn’t a giant of literature like Arthur Conan Doyle and the Harry Bosch novels don’t have the depth or cultural importance of the Sherlock Holmes stories. But Connelly is still a clever and compelling writer, and he’s brought Bosch to life in the minds of millions of readers. I won’t be alone in feeling sorry that there’s another way in which Bosch won’t be like Sherlock Holmes. When Bosch is gone, he won’t be coming back.

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Previously Pre-Posted on Papyrocentric Performativity…

• Pair’s Fair — review of Connelly’s The Dark Hours (2021)
• Marred Moon — review of Connelly’s Void Moon (2000)
• Double WHAMmy — review of Connelly’s The Reversal (2010)
• All Bosched Up — thoughts on Michael Connelly and his characters

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D for Deviant, K for Korpse…

Doktor Deviant’s Diary of Depravity: Kandid Konfessions of a Kompulsive Korpse-Kopulator, ed. Dr David Kerekes and Samuel P. Salatta (Visceral Visions 2022)

Praise for Doktor Deviant’s Diary of Depravity…

• “Doktor Deviant makes David Fuller look like Mary Poppins.” — Nancy Mailer
• “Fetid fakt or fukked-up fiktion? YOU decide!” — Zac Ziali
• “Dank, deplorable and disgusting. I delighted in it!” — Dr Miriam B. Stimbers
• “D                                                                              ” — David Slater
• “David Slater makes Doktor Deviant look like David Fuller.” — Philip Tatzenrott
• “Wow!” — Justin T. McGliverton
• “An extraordinary excursion into the darkest domains of death.” — Chibo Bassher
• “Headpress hits it outta da park again.” — Freddy Goragadescu
• “Maxed-out morbidity. Mmmmmmmmmm!” — Dr Mikita Brottman
• “David Kerekes makes David Slater look like Doktor Deviant.” — Roger Prendergast

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Previously Pre-Posted on Papyrocentric Performativity…

• Fuller Frontal — a review of Deviant. Devious. Depraved.: The Sickening, Slimy and Sizzlingly Septic Story of Noxiously Nasty Necrophile Nonce David Fuller, David Kerekes, with an introduction by David Slater (Visceral Visions 2022)

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In the Bland of the Blind

An Unexplained Death: The True Story of a Body at the Belvedere, Mikita Brottman (Canongate 2018)

This is the second Mikita-Brottman book I’ve tried and the second Mikita-Brottman book I’ve failed to finish. It’s a much better book than Crossing to Kill (2003), but that doesn’t make it any good. The title is uninspired and so is the book. If Mikita is as bland in person as she is in print, I’m not surprised by her complaint that she’s “invisible” to many people. They meet her, then fail to recognize her when they meet her again. Understandably, Mikita doesn’t like this, but there are worse things to suffer in life.

I spotted some of those worse things as I read the book. Or rather: I failed to spot them. Yes, there’s a deep unacknowledged irony at the heart of An Unexplained Death, because even as Mikita was complaining about her own invisibility and the erasure of her personhood, she was invisibilizing others and erasing their personhood.

And unlike privileged white Mikita, those invisibilized others lead genuinely difficult lives and suffer from genuine injustice. This book is about Mikita’s life in the luxurious Belvedere Hotel in an American city called Baltimore. Maybe you’ve heard of Baltimore? Ah, you have heard of it. And what does Baltimore mean to you? That’s right: Baltimore is world-famous both for the rich, vibrant culture of its Black community and for the suffering of that community, whose Black bodies are under 24/7/52 assault by the hegemonic forces of white racism and white supremacy.

Mikita Brottman has lived in the Black-majority city of Baltimore for over ten years. She has been surrounded by both the rich, vibrant culture of the Black community and the suffering of the Black community for every second of those more-than-ten-years – that’s more than 315,360,000 seconds. But does she deign to notice the slightest crumb of that Black culture or the slightest tear-drop of that Black suffering in this book about her more-than-ten-years in Baltimore? You guessed it: she doesn’t. Or at least, not that I saw in what I read of An Unexplained Death. I didn’t see her reference the Black community once. Not once. So one thing is for certain: she did not center the Black community in her book about Baltimore, as she would have done if she had any decency and compassion.

Instead, Mikita Brottman centered herself and her tony world of white privilege. It’s true that, yes, the “Unexplained Death” of the title references a Hispanic male, Rey O. Rivera, who died by falling from the roof of the Belvedere. But Rivera was a rich, white-adjacent Hispanic businessman. What about the many, many Black victims of “unexplained death” in Baltimore? Mikita obviously doesn’t care about them. She doesn’t identify with them and she can’t use them as a mirror for her own neuroses and self-obsessions. So can you wonder that I felt sickened to my stomach, repeatedly, as I read the book? I kept thinking to myself: “You ain’t a Mikita, baby: you’re a go’damn Karen.”

But even if I hadn’t been sickened by the book and its white-centered self-obsession, I wouldn’t have found it any easier to read. The main story, of Brottman’s search for the truth about Rivera’s death, just wasn’t interesting. Not to me, anyway. I found myself skipping forward to the digressions Brottman sprinkles through the book. She talks about everything from vultures and their unsavory thermoregulation techniques to how a mouse can survive a fall that would shatter a human being or liquefy a horse. Those were the best bits, for me, but they didn’t last long enough to rescue the book from its white-centeredness or redeem Brottman’s sickening invisibilization of Baltimore’s Black community.

I don’t think anything could ever redeem that. And inevitably I found myself comparing Miki with Miri. And Miki did not come well out of the comparison. What am I talking about and whom am I comparing with whom? I’m talking about Mikita Brottman and Miriam Stimbers, and I’m comparing the former with the latter. Mikita Brottman and Miriam Stimbers were both bright young Britishers from humble backgrounds who, by dint of sheer cerebral effort and dogged determination, won scholarships to study English Literature at Oxford University. First they did a BA, then they did an MA (probably), then they did a PhD, then they entered the wider world.

And it was now that both Mikita and Miriam faced the same stark and simple choice. Either they could embrace white supremacy, exploit their white privilege, and coast to success in terms of the literary world. Or they could oppose white supremacy, refuse to exploit their white privilege, and achieve success only and entirely on merit. I am afraid to say that Mikita chose the former course. Miriam, in complete contrast, chose the latter.

But it was not the first time that their life-trajectories had divagated in terms of core ethical dilemmas. During her time at Oxford, Mikita had written for Headpress, the journal of strangeness and esoterica overseen by committed counter-culturalist, proud Gypsy and unashamed gargoyle-fan David Kerekes. Miriam, however, had refused to write for Headpress, on the ground that Kezza, although a proud Gypsy and unashamed gargoyle-fan, was nevertheless a dim but devious adolescent voyeur, like a cross between a Daily-Mail reader and a necrophile.

In short, Miriam was prepared to take an ethical stand. Mikita was not. Sad to say, after she wrote for Headpress, Mikita’s embracement of white supremacy and ruthless exploitment of her white privilege came as no surprise to perceptive observers. Having moved to America, the headquarters of white supremacy, Mikita became the life-partner of a rich and successful white writer, acquired a well-connected white literary agent, and began to write acclaimed but underwhelming white-centered books like An Unexplained Death. But when Miriam moved to America, things were very different. In complete contrast to Mikita, Miriam became the life-partner of a member of the Black academic community, the proud Black-African Diasporan Dr Nigel M. Goldbaum, acquired a Black literary agent, Rebecca Rubinberg, and began to write masterpieces like Jane in Blood: Castration, Clitoridolatry and Communal Cannibalism in the Novels of Jane Austen (TransVisceral Books 2021).

But Miriam’s masterpieces have not enjoyed a tenth of the success nor received a hundredth of the exposure of Mikita’s mediocrities. Why not? It’s simple. Miriam is fighting white supremacy and rejecting her white privilege, rather then embracing white supremacy and exploiting the hell out of her white privilege. That’s for why. Mikita’s An Unexplained Death is a case in point. It has an uninspired title and it’s an uninspired book. But it’s been much more successful and been much more extravagantly praised than all of Miriam’s masterpieces put together. In the land of white supremacy, the Karen is Queen.

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Previously Pre-Posted on Papyrocentric Performativity…

• Cannibal HolocAusten — Miriam Stimbers and Rebecca Rubinberg interrogate issues around Jane in Blood: Castration, Clitoridolatry and Communal Cannibalism in the Novels of Jane Austen (2021)

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The Cult of Ult

1312: Among the Ultras: A Journey with the World’s Most Extreme Fans, James Montague (Ebury Press 2021)

I used to think that “ultra” was the Italian word for “football hooligan”. I was wrong. But not completely wrong. Fighting is often an important part of being an ultra. Sometimes it’s the most important part. But some ultras aren’t violent and aren’t interested in fighting. Other ultras aren’t interested in football. It’s the buzz of the fighting and the choreography and the pyro and the singing that attracts them. Or the chance to make money from selling merchandise or tickets or drugs. In some countries, like Italy and Argentina, ultras have become criminal gangs.

But that fits, because being an outlaw is also part of being an ultra. The mysterious title of this book, 1312, is a numeric code for letters of the alphabet. 1312 = ACAB and ACAB = “All Coppers Are Bastards.” The two abbreviations, 1312 and ACAB, are now used by ultras all over the world, because whether or not they like fighting and whether or not they like football, ultras are united in hating the police. Well, almost united. There is really only one thing that all ultras have in common: they try to go beyond – ultra – the normal limits of fandom. And so criminal ultras are often involved in other extreme things, like neo-fascist politics. James Montague visits the Mussolini-loving Irriducibili (“Unyielding Ones”) of Lazio in Rome and allows them to speak. But he also visits ultras at the opposite end of the political spectrum, like the idealistic left-wingers of Atalanta, a team from Bergamo in northern Italy.

But while the Atalantini are idealistic, they also like fighting and have built themselves a fearsome reputation. Their team plays in black-and-blue and they do their best to leave fans of opposing teams sporting the same colors. They don’t share the infamous Italian taste for knives: it’s fists-and-boots only for the Atalantini. Elsewhere, in Russia, Ukraine and Poland, ultras have taken that body-parts-only violence to another level and organized a system of organized brawls between dozens or even hundreds of fighters. The two sides battle until everyone on one side is knocked out. In Russia, it’s called okolofutbola, meaning “around football”. It’s vicious, but it has rules: when an individual opponent is down and out, you stop kicking and punching. Those rules don’t exist in Indonesia, as James Montague discovers when he visits the country to investigate its newly emerged ultra scene. This is what he experiences “Somewhere on the Ah 152 Highway outside Bandung”:

When you believe you are about to die – truly believe that the end is upon you – your body changes. After the adrenaline of survival, and your options close, it becomes warm and soft, as if it is preparing to absorb impact. There is a light-headedness, like anaesthetic. You no longer feel the beat of your heart which, moments earlier, was thumping so hard you suspected you might cough it up. It’s now fluttering above you at an exponential frequency. – ch. 14, “Indonesia”, pg. 323

He was in a bus with fans of Persija from Jakarta when the bus broke down and fans of Persija’s rivals Persib Bandung caught up with it beside “a busy six-lane highway with traffic whizzing by at 100kph.” Persija weren’t even playing Persib, but neither set of fans lets the fixture-list get between them and their fighting. On this occasion: “The Persib fans weren’t holding clubs but machetes.” And so Montague thought he was going to die.

To learn how he got away, you’ll have to read the book. And it’s a good book, visiting many more countries and offering much more than, say, Tobias Jones’ Ultra: The Underworld of Italian Football, which looks at ultras in only one country and mostly through fans of a small club in the far south. Admittedly, that one country both named and defined “ultra” for the rest of the world. But the ultra phenomenon is bigger than Italy now and some of its roots lie outside Italy in South America. Montague visits Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil, then goes to Europe, Asia and America. Some ultras are attached to world-famous clubs, some to clubs I’d never heard of.

It’s a good mix, but I was disappointed that Montague didn’t get to Spain. It would have been good to hear more about Spanish ultras both at famous clubs like Real Madrid and Barcelona and at obscure clubs like Osasuna and Real Betis. I wasn’t disappointed that he didn’t get to England. Ultras aren’t an English-speaking phenomenon, even though the symbols of classic English hooliganism have been taken up by modern ultras all over the world. You could say that those ultras are trying to combine Italian style, South American passion and English swagger. It can be an unpleasant and even deadly mixture, but it’s almost always interesting. Trust the Yanks to make things banal: the wannabe ultras at Los Angeles FC “support gay pride” rather than Mussolini.

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Fuller Frontal

Deviant. Devious. Depraved.: The Sickening, Slimy and Sizzlingly Septic Story of Noxiously Nasty Necrophile Nonce David Fuller, David Kerekes, with an introduction by David Slater (Visceral Visions 2022)

Headpress have done it again. In spades. This passionately putrid publisher prides itself on incendarily issuing at least one core counter-cultural classic a year. This year they’ve done it early. Their new book Deviant. Devious. Depraved. – or D3, as I’ll call it for short – is surely destined to be both a feral fan-favorite and a bulging bench-mark in the atrabilious abyss of toxically transgressive true-crime. But make no mistake: as good a job as David Kerekes has done in the bulk of the book, his long-term thinking-buddy David Slater has possibly gone one better in the introduction. That intro truly is one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever read. Or rather (spoiler alert): it’s one of the most disturbing things I’ve never read.

That’s coz Slater’s introduction consists of three blank pages. And I mean exactly that: blank pages. No words, just empty paper. It’s as though Slater has sat there, fingers poised above the keyboard, ready to begin churning out his usual 120+ words a minute… and then realized that nothing he could write could even begin to plumb the depths of deplorableness repulsively represented by the cranium-convulsing crimes of David Fuller. Those crimes were simply too dark, too disgusting, too demonic for him to describe.

And when David Slater, simul-scribe of seminal snuff-study Killing for Culture (1996), recoils at the task of tackling the teratically toxic transgressions of a sizzlingly septic slayer, you know that said slayer has really been a naughty boy. Just quite how naughty, David Kerekes describes in the rest of the book. David Fuller murdered at least two young women. And that’s how he finally came to the attention of the British police, when analysis of stored DNA from the crime-scenes belatedly brought him to book. Kerekes produces good evidence that his real body-count may have been much higher. But that merely scratches the surface of Fuller’s fetidness. What really put him in a league of his own – and what really brought him to the attention of committed corpse-crime contemplator Kerekes – was what he got up to on the sly in the mephitic mortuaries of at least two British hospitals.

Fuller was a core corpse-copulator on an exhaustively industrial scale, deviantly, deviously and depravedly defiling the bodies of scores, possibly hundreds, of dead women and girls. And he fetidly filmed his noxiously nauseating necrophilia. Wow. No wonder Kezza felt that he had to write a book about him, like. And no doubt other books by other authors will attempt to tell the same sickeningly sordid story. My confident prediction is that no-one will do it with anywhere near the priapismatic passion and esoteric obsessivity as with what Kerekes and Slater have done it in this core counter-cultural classic. D3 is a book that you will read, retch over, and reprehensibly remember for the rest of your life.

Gangrenously guaranteed.

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Elsewhere Other-Accessible…

• Headpress — the Home of Heresy

Previously Pre-Posted on Papyrocentric Performativity…

• Voy Veh — review of Gay Talese’s The Voyeur’s Motel (2016) by Dr David Kerekes

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Pair’s Fair

The Dark Hours, Michael Connelly (2021)

When Michael Connelly is good, he’s very good. Blood Work (1998) may be the best and most ingenious crime novel I’ve ever read. But The Dark Hours isn’t up to that standard. Nowhere near. I don’t think it’s up to Connelly’s average either. It’s uninspired and one half of the plot is like the far better Connelly book The Scarecrow (2009). Renée Ballard, Connelly’s new-ish female detective-of-color-ish, is on the hunt for a pair of tag rapists nicknamed the Midnight Men. “Were they white, black, brown?” she asks a possible new victim, trying to learn if they’ve struck again.

You have no guesses what the victim replied. Sex-criminals in a Michael Connelly book are always the same color. And quite right too. But the depraved crimes of the Midnight Men are even worse than they first appear, as Ballard and her unofficial partner Harry Bosch will learn before the end of the book. At the same time, they’re solving the murder of a hard-working Hispanic mechanic which, like the rapes, is even worse than it first appears. That half of the plot is like the far better Connelly book Trunk Music (1997). And I’d rather have read Trunk Music for the fourth or fifth time than read The Dark Hours for the first.

But how was I to know before I’d read it? Fortunately, Connelly doesn’t make Renée Ballard come to life in the way he often managed with Harry Bosch when Bosch was on his own and battling both crime and the LAPD. It’s a relief that Connelly fails like that. If he’d managed to bring Ballard fully to life, she would be even more irritating. She’s a goodthinker and never deviates from the politically correct line on any subject, whether it’s female empowerment, racism or the “homeless community”. Connelly likes to keep his books as up-to-date as he can, so The Dark Hours is set during the dark days of the Covid epidemic and the vicious attempted insurrection at the US Capitol of January 6, 2021. Obviously, then, Ballard is thoroughly Covid-compliant and even drags a reluctant Bosch off to be vaccinated. Plus, she watches the attempted insurrection with “stunned surprise”.

And quite right too. But I wonder whether Connelly himself is subconsciously irritated by his character’s PC behavior, because he gives her mild concussion half-way through the book. She tries to stop a fleeing man, a Thai-American crime-victim who’s scared of a dangerous gang called the ABZ or Asian Boyz and doesn’t want to talk to the police. She can’t stop him and gets knocked over, hitting her head on concrete and injuring herself. That means she meets the paramedic who’s her love-interest in the rest of the book.

But could Connelly not have found a less painful way for that to happen? Of course he could. So I don’t think he really likes his new character. I know I don’t. Bosch is better, but Bosch’s presence in this book can’t rescue it from mediocrity.

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Kops. Kameras. Kerkees.

So. If you’re a keyly committed core component of the counter-cultural community, you may well be aware that core counter-cultural compendium Headpress (“The Journal of Strangeness and Esoterica”…) used to run a feral feature called “It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World…” in which the antics of the mentally ill were esoterically exposed for the amusement and edification of Headpress’s incendarily intelligent and ruthlessly radical readership… As Headpress CEO Dr David Kerekes still likes to chuckle: “Loonies are a lorra, lorra laffs, like.”

He’s right, of course. But it isn’t only keyly committed core components of the counter-cultural community like Dr Kerekes and his incendarily intelligent readers who find loonies a lorra, lorra laffs… As you can see here…

An alleged police culture of impunity helped an officer who took selfies while on duty at a murder scene commit a litany of disciplinary offences on an “industrial scale” for six years, it has been claimed.

PC Ryan Connolly, 37, from the Merseyside force, resigned after his taking and sharing of photos of the vulnerable came to light, as well as his sharing of racist and offensive images.

The Guardian revealed that between 2014 and 2020 Connolly took photos on his mobile phone of people in mental health crises, in hospitals, and had photos and graphics on his mobile phone that were grossly racist, including an image of a Ku Klux Klan member.

Merseyside police and court officials confirmed that Connolly was also convicted in November of three counts of possessing extreme pornography. He will be sentenced next month at Manchester crown court. — A Kop and his Kamera

Wow. Even though cops are, as a core commenter at Papyrocentric Performativity has rightly pointed out, “the least counter-cultural group on earth”, they too enjoy Headpressean things like laffing at loonies. And watching extreme porn. (But racism is not Headpressean, obvs. As a proud and passionate member of the Gypsy Community, Dr Kerekes has always been a keyly and corely committed component of the anti-racist community.)

So. Anyway. The next time you see a core component of the cop community, just think to yourself: “It is more than possible that this entirely unesoteric individual enjoys core components of Headpresseanism.” Or to put it another way: “Kerekes and kops are komrades under the kutis.” A strange and disturbing thought, ja? Which is to say: a Headpressean thought…

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Previously pre-posted on Papyrocentric Performativity…

Noxious. Nekro. Narratives. — an earlier esoteric exploration of the unkanny parallels between Kerekes and the Kop Kommunity…

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Elsewhere other-accessible…

Another Kop and his Kamera — how a cop took secret (wow) photos of nekkid laydeez…

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P.S. “kutis” = cutis = a medical term for the inner layer of skin.

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KOPS. KHAVS. KEREKES.

KOMRADES IN KAMERA

(et sub kute)

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Noxious. Nekro. Narratives.

Readers’ Advisory: Key counter-cultural quotations contain core corpse-contemplation (and worse)…

PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK.

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Headpressean:

Met police officers plead guilty over photos [wow] taken at scene of sisters’ deaths

A police officer made degrading and sexist insults about two murdered women as he shared pictures from the scene where they were found with a colleague photographing their bodies [wow] and also sharing the images via WhatsApp.

The two Metropolitan police officers pleaded guilty on Tuesday after sharing photographs from the crime scene they were supposed to be guarding in a London park, where two sisters, Nicole Smallman, 27, and Bibaa Henry, 46, were found stabbed to death.

PC Deniz Jaffer, 48, and PC Jamie Lewis, 33, admitted misconduct in public office at the Old Bailey, with the judge, Mark Lucraft QC, warning that they were “extremely likely” to be jailed.

Jaffer left the post he had been assigned to in June 2020 at Fryent Country Park in Wembley, north-west London, and went into bushes where the women had been left by their satanist-obsessed killer. The officer took out a mobile phone and took pictures of the bodies [wow].

He sent four images to Lewis [wow], who edited one of the photos and superimposed his face on to it with the two murdered women visible [wow] in the background. – Cops Contemplate Corpses, 3xi21

Headpressean:

Plumber, 57, put cameras [wow] in female customers’ toilets ‘to meet his sexual needs’

A plumber who secretly installed spy cameras [wow] in his customers’ toilets “to meet his sexual needs” has been jailed for 12 months. James Hulme, 57, was caught when a female client spotted a hidden camera [wow] on her sink in her downstairs toilet and reported him to police.

Detectives discovered that Hulme, from Glendon Drive, Sherwood, Nottinghamshire, had put secret devices in up to six other women’s bathrooms. After a search of his home, officers found 302 indecent images of children and pornography involving animals.

Hulme pleaded guilty to voyeurism [wow], making indecent images of a child and possessing extreme pornographic images. He was jailed for 12 months at Nottingham Crown Court last Wednesday. The court heard he was caught while carrying out work at a woman’s home in Clifton, Nottinghamshire, in June 2018. She confronted Hulme when she found a spy camera attached to a sink in the downstairs toilet.

Hulme admitted being responsible and fled the property with the recording device when the woman called police. Hulme was arrested a short time later, and Nottinghamshire Police said he admitted recording the customer, as well as five or six others, “to meet his sexual needs”. – Cameras for Culture, 2xi21

Very Headpressean:

David [wow] Fuller: man admits two murders and sexual abuse of multiple corpses [wow]

Trial of former hospital electrician is believed to be worst case of necrophilia in British legal history

An electrician who admitted murdering two women in 1987 also sexually attacked scores of corpses [wow] in a hospital mortuary in the worst offending of its kind in British legal history, prosecutors say.

His trial heard that he also sexually assaulted women’s corpses [wow] in the mortuaries at Kent and Sussex hospital and Tunbridge Wells hospital while working there. When Fuller’s home was raided police discovered 4m images of sexual abuse. Most were downloaded from the internet, but Fuller had also recorded himself abusing bodies [wow].

The CPS said Fuller’s necrophilia was unprecedented in British legal history: “Searches of Fuller’s home following his arrest uncovered hard drives concealed [wow] in a hide in his home, revealing evidence of prolific sexual offending of a kind no British court has seen before. Between 2008 and 2020, Fuller had filmed and photographed himself sexually abusing the bodies of dozens of women and girls [wow] at two Tunbridge Wells hospital mortuaries he was able to access through his job as the maintenance supervisor.”

Fuller was arrested for murder on 3 December last year after new analysis of decades-old DNA evidence, and officers searched his home. There they found images of dead women at the two hospital mortuaries being abused by Fuller [wow], the prosecutor, Duncan Atkinson QC, said on Monday.

Officers then found four hard drives with 5TB of data storage in total attached to the back of a cupboard. “When these hard drives were examined, they were found to contain a library of unimaginable sexual depravity [wow],” Atkinson said.

Libby Clark, of the CPS, said: “This highly dangerous man has inflicted unimaginable suffering on countless families and he has only admitted his long-held secrets when confronted with overwhelming evidence. I have no doubt he would still be offending to this day had it not been for this painstaking investigation and prosecution.”

Sajid Javid, the health secretary, said the NHS had written to all health trusts asking for mortuary access and postmortem activities to be reviewed [wow]. An independent review has started at the trust where Fuller worked and the Human Tissue Authority has been asked for advice on whether rules need to be changed. – Devious Dave copulates with corpses, 4xi21

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Elsewhere other-engageable…

• Killing for Culture – the seminal survey of the sizzle of snuff…

• Serial Slay (UK) – Britain’s biggest and best serial-slayer surveillance site. Updated daily.

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