Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“Books are a uniquely portable magic.” – Stephen King
In case you’re counting, during week number 29 I started reading book number 39 for 2022, Low Pastures by Bill James, an English mystery about a murder in, you guessed it, a boat dock. This is a book in James’ Harpur and Iles series about two UK policeman who don’t actually get along and his writing style resembles what a mystery written by Douglas Adams might look like. If you enjoy Adams, you will love Harpur and Iles.
I just finished reading The Monster’s Bones: The Discovery of T. Rex and How It Shook Our World by
Book of the Week
There aren’t many books about crime fighting photographers as there are about crusading reporters. Peter Parker seems to be the only character that comes to mind but now Gary Philips gives us a photographer who does just that in One Shot Harry, ($16.94 hardcover, $14.99 Kindle) a title that has a double meaning. Harry Ingram is an African-American photographer in 1960’s Los Angeles who shoots for the Black-oriented newspapers of that time. He’s also a part-time process server to help make a few bucks because everybody knows photographers are woefully underpaid. (Don’t get me started…)
And while Phillips gets the technical aspects of film photography wrong as often as he gets it right, he is a powerfully elegant story teller that drags you along on Harry’s mission to find out who make have killed an old Korean War buddy and along the way he stumbles into nests of communists, greedy capitalists, white supremacists with conspiracy theories aplenty, while at the same time showing what it’s like to be black man, even a war veteran, in sixties LA. It ain’t a pretty picture. The racial aspects of the story ring true and, in many ways, feel sadly contemporary but Phillips doesn’t let that doesn’t get in the way of a story, which rips along like a runaway train.
A continuing thread that runs through the entire book is a planned visit to Los Angles by Dr Martin Luther King to speak at an event in the city. How that speech and Harry’s desire to get an assignment to photograph King pop up every now and then like a MacGuffin but unlike a mislaced Hitchkockian story element there’s a payoff near the end of the book. In many ways ‘One Shot Harry’ reminds me of the movie, Chinatown where Jake Getties investigates what seems like a simple case only to find puzzles, within puzzles within more puzzles. And the same kinds of things happen to Harry Ingram. He ultimately finds out who killed his friend and (maybe) why but it only opens Caligari’s Cabinet of what can happen next… If Phillips is setting us up for a sequel with his vague ending, I can’t wait to read it and neither will you.
PS: Just a reminder: My Podcast #5 is now available on my YouTube channel, Joe Farace’s Videos. Also my video Why Film, Why Now is available featuring a look at a my reasons and philosophy about why I like to shoot film.