As usual, I was on Wikipedia the other night, looking up one of my favorite rock songs of all time—“Deacon Blues” by Steely Dan. There, I was surprised to learn that the first line of the song, “[t]hese are days of the expanding man,” is a reference to a classic sci-fi novel, Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man. Donald Fagan apparently said,
The concept of the “expanding man” that opens the song may have been inspired by Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man. Walter [Becker] and I were major sci-fi fans. The guy in the song imagines himself ascending to the levels of evolution, “expanding” his mind, his spiritual possibilities, and his options in life.
Finding this unexpected reference to Bester’s novel was yet another moment of that Synchronicity for Bookworms phenomomenon that I write about so often, mainly because I had been considering to a post on a great cover I had found for the book. And here it is!
I read The Demolished Man in my late twenties and found it a really bizarre yet engrossing sci-fi novel, one that seems to straddle two eras, “Golden Age” (1940s-50s) sci-fi—with its Buck Rogers’ style future and tropes—and New Wave (1960s-70s) sci-fi—with its trippy, subversive themes and immoral main character. (Roger Silverberg’s The Man in the Maze, which I posted about recently, is very similar in this respect.)
Bester’s novel asks this intriguing question: How does one commit murder in a world where all the police have E.S.P. and can literally read your mind? Yeah, it’s a very, very similar idea to Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report, which was published three years later. In Bester’s book, people with telepathic abilities—“espers,” who come in ability levels 1, 2, and 3—form a kind of privileged Mandarin caste on 24th Century Earth. They run much of the government and law enforcement with apparent competence, benevolence, and integrity. They may only marry and have children within their own esper class, and they prefer their own company. Most importantly, they can suss out crimes, either before they happen (usually) or afterward (always).
So, what’s a brilliant, daring, sociopathic billionaire like Ben Reich to do when his mind tends toward homicide? The target of his animus is an older business rival, Craye D’Courtney, whom Reich despises with a passion bordering on obsession. Reich devises a cunning plan to kill D’Courtney at a swingin’ dinner party they are both scheduled to attend, and he hires the services of a rare corrupt esper to run interference. Reich also—in one of the book’s cleverest plot devices—pays a corporate jingle-writer to play him the most annoying, brain-embedding ear-worm she has. Reich knows that he won’t be able to get the jingle out of his head, which will temporarily flummox any espers who might try to scan him.
After Reich does the deed at the party, an esper police detective, Lincoln Powell, shows up to investigate. Using a mixture of his esper abilities as well as good old-fashioned intuition, Powell immediately realizes that Reich is guilty of the murder but can’t prove it thanks to the layers of interference that Reich has devised. The rest of the book is like a futuristic episode of Columbo as Powell pursues Reich across the solar system, trying to trap him and reveal his guilt.
If Powell does manage to catch him and prosecute him successfully, Reich faces neither prison nor execution but a fate far worse—“demolition,” the process whereby espers mentally strip a person of their memories and personality so that they might be “rehabilitated” as a productive, normal (non-evil, non-insane) member of society.
In this way, The Demolished Man becomes a very suspenseful inverted detective novel, with the reader breathlessly following Powell and wondering how—or whether—he will catch Reich. I also found myself rooting for the wicked, rebellious anti-hero Reich, which was clearly Bester’s intention. The last half of the book has some genuinely surprising and cool plot twists, and it’s very entertaining overall—especially if you can get past Bester’s very 1950s, conservative, often misogynistic sensibilities (which are very similar, alas, to Robert Heinlein’s).
I really like this 1979 cover by Adrian Chesterman because it evokes the sense of horror (of demolition, presumably, but also of insanity, self-discovery, and other dark things) that pervades the book.
Well, the day has arrived. Twice the Troubleis a Kindle Daily Deal today, August 6, 2026. You get a Shamus-Award-winning and Edgar-Award nominated mystery novel for just $1.99. That’s also 85% off from the edition’s regular price of $14.99.
The deal ends tonight at midnight, P.S.T. (3:00 A.M. Eastern Time).
Get it fast. Supplies are limited. (Actually, they’re totally unlimited–digital books and all that. But still!)
Just a heads-up, everyone! Thanks to the good, good people at Amazon, Twice the Trouble will be a Kindle Daily Deal on August 6, 2026. That’s this Thursday, a mere three days from now!
Starting at midnight Pacific Time (that’s 3:00 A.M. Eastern Standard Time) on Aug. 6, the Kindle edition will go on sale for just $1.99. That’s less than half price of a Starbucks coffee. That’s also 85% off from the edition’s regular price of $14.99.
As the name implies, a Kindle Daily Deal only lasts for twenty-four hours, so get it while the gettin’s good.
Incredibly, forty years have passed since David Lynch’s masterpiece, Blue Velvet, was released to theaters. Actually, “released” isn’t quite the right word; it detonated, hitting the cultural consciousness with the force of an H-bomb. Although not a huge commercial hit compared to other films that came out that year (including such juggernauts as Top Gun, Crocodile Dundee, and Aliens), Blue Velvet quickly became the most talked about, joked about, and debated about movie in America, at least among the literati.
This was especially true of the English- and Film-major nerd set of which I was a member. I was, in fact, roughly the same age as Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), the film’s young protagonist, who comes home from college to Lumberton, N.C. He is visiting his hospitalized father (who suffers a stroke in the film’s famously surrealistic opening sequence), and soon finds himself wandering around town, adrift. One afternoon, he finds a severed human ear, which he takes to the local police department and hands over to a good-natured detective. “That’s an ear all right,” the man says, in one of many moments of 1950s camp dialog. Thus begins the dark mystery that propels this very, very dark film.
Again, “dark” isn’t quite the right word. For the movie is as concerned with light as much as darkness. Jeffrey soon finds himself drawn to two very different women—Sandy (Laura Dern), the blond-haired, sweet daughter of the detective; and Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini), the sultry femme fatale who might have something to do with the severed ear. He experiences a life-altering, mind-blowing moment with each of them, in turn. With Sandy, he glimpses a bit of transcendent, romantic bliss when they first dance together at a party, to the angelic voice of July Cruz on the soundtrack. With Dorothy, he witnesses her violation at the hands of a psychotic drug-lord, Frank, who has sexually enslaved her.
That latter scene, which comes at the end of Act I, is one of the most powerful and perverse in the history of cinema. Even today, in our porn-saturated culture, many people find it shocking. And they should. It’s meant to shock. But it’s also meant to question. To ask the viewer: why is evil so seductive? Why is it so powerful?
Or, as Jeffrey asks Sandy, “Why are there men like Frank?” He might just as well have asked: Do all of us have a sadistic streak like Frank (and maybe Dorothy)? Do all of us have a masochistic streak like Dorothy (and maybe Frank)?
For me, this questioning aspect is what separates art from pornography, even when the line is blurred, as it very much is in Blue Velvet. Val Kilmer, who was in consideration for the role of Jeffrey, dismissed the script as “pornography.” He might have been right about that script, but he was wrong about the final product. Blue Velvet is art. In fact, it’s high art. There is something sublime about it. Something that transcends ordinary definitions and categories. It seems to exist on a higher plane of existence.
Looking back on the film, another aspect I find amazing about it is the sheer number of careers it launched—or, in many cases, rejuvenated. MacLachlan and Dern became movie stars almost overnight. (Yeah, MacLachlan had been in Dune, but the movie bombed). Rossellini went from being a model and cosmetics spokesperson to an acclaimed, A-list actress. Veteran actor Dean Stockwell made an instant comeback based on his one, over-the-top scene in the movie, vamping and lip-synching Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” (which the film also re-popularized). And 1960s counter-culture hero Dennis Hopper—whose performance as Frank was so electrifying that he was nominated for Golden Globe—found his career jumpstarted. He went on to star in many films throughout the 1990s, and also to direct a couple.
But the biggest winner of Blue Velvet was, of course, Lynch himself. He went from being that cool-but-weird art film director (who had somehow made both Dune and also Eraserhead) to a Bonafide cultural phenomenon. A phenomenon would reach its apex a few years later in 1990, when Lynch had both the hippest TV show on air (Twin Peaks) and the hippest movie in theaters (Wild at Heart).
Despite all those later successes (and a few failures, too; he was such a great artist that even his “failures” were pretty damned good), Lynch would never top Blue Velvet. Sure, he came close a few times, especially with his phantasmagoric Hollywood tale, Mulholland Drive in 2001, but he never quite equaled it.
And that’s okay. Blue Velvet remains his masterpiece, not to mention one of my favorite films of all time.
The annual Wine, Dine & Death party returns October 10 at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. It’s a literary murder mystery dinner with wine service and a silent auction, all benefiting the Little Theatre of Walla Walla, a community theater running since 1944.
The silent auction will include two signed, hard-back copies of Twice the Trouble, donated by your humble author!
If you’re going to be Walla Walla area this fall, check it out. Tickets are $125. Going fast…!
Whenever I am feeling stressed out in the evening, I re-read something old, familiar, and soothing. For me, that is often the Sherlock Holmes stories. I read a story here, a story there, and pretty soon I’ve worked my way through the entire collection. Again.
On each iteration, though, I discover something new. Recently, I re-read Doyle’s 1904 story, “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton.” It’s one of the lesser known of the Sherlock tales, which is ironic because it’s also one of the best. Part of the reason for its obscurity is due, I suspect, to its boring title (more of a “label” than an actual title). I mean, if you had a choice between reading a story called “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton” or “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” which would you pick?
Anyway, I really admire this story, for a number of reasons. Its titular character, Milverton, is a As for Milverton, we learn that he is a master blackmailer, who funds his lavish lifestyle by obtaining compromising letters (what we would now call kompromat) written by rich, aristocratic ladies. He buys the letters from treacherous servants in the ladies’ households, then uses them to extort ruinous sums from the lady in question, often pouncing right before her wedding to some duke or count or whatever. Holmes explains all this to his friend Watson in 221-B Baker Street as they wait for titular villain to stop by. (Milverton’s latest target, an unnamed rich lady, has hired Holmes to get her letters back.)
It’s a very similar premise to another of Doyle’s great stories, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” which I wrote a post about some years ago entitled “Sherlock Holmes was a Fixer”. As in that prior story, Holmes serves as more of a trouble-shooter than a traditional detective here, using his intellect and knowledge of the underworld to sort out a client’s problems. More importantly, in both stories Holmes finds himself compelled to break the law in order to get his client out of trouble. In “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton,” he disguises himself as a working-class tradesman in order to infiltrate Milverton’s household. As Holmes explains to Watson after the fact:
“You would not call me a marrying man, Watson?”
“No, indeed!”
“You’ll be interested to hear that I’m engaged.”
“My dear fellow! I congrat——”
“To Milverton’s housemaid.”
“Good heavens, Holmes!”
“I wanted information, Watson.”
“Surely you have gone too far?”
“It was a most necessary step. I am a plumber with a rising business, Escott, by name. I have walked out with her each evening, and I have talked with her. Good heavens, those talks! However, I have got all I wanted. I know Milverton’s house as I know the palm of my hand.”
“But the girl, Holmes?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “You can’t help it, my dear Watson. You must play your cards as best you can when such a stake is on the table. However, I rejoice to say that I have a hated rival, who will certainly cut me out the instant that my back is turned. What a splendid night it is!”
I love that line, “You can’t help it, my dear Watson.” It seems to encapsulate the great theme of the noir and hard-boiled detective fiction that would emerge later in America. Namely, how do you fight evil effectively without becoming evil yourself? The answer, of course, is that you can’t. Not completely. As the morally expedient Sam Spade says to his similarly disapproving secretary in The Maltese Falcon, “That’s just the way it is, dear.”
Speaking of The Maltese Falcon, I would bet that Dashiell Hammett read (and re-read) “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton.” The villain of Hammett’s novel, Gutman (played so with such risible gusto by Sydney Greenstreet in the 1941 film version), seems like a direct descendent of Doyle’s Milverton. As Doyle describes him,
Charles Augustus Milverton was a man of fifty, with a large, intellectual head, a round, plump, hairless face, a perpetual frozen smile, and two keen gray eyes, which gleamed brightly from behind broad, gold-rimmed glasses. There was something of Mr. Pickwick’s benevolence in his appearance, marred only by the insincerity of the fixed smile and by the hard glitter of those restless and penetrating eyes. His voice was as smooth and suave as his countenance, as he advanced with a plump little hand extended, murmuring his regret for having missed us at his first visit. Holmes disregarded the outstretched hand and looked at him with a face of granite. Milverton’s smile broadened, he shrugged his shoulders, removed his overcoat, folded it with great deliberation over the back of a chair, and then took a seat.
Now look at Hammett’s introduction of Gutman…
The fat man was flabbily fat with bulbous pink cheeks and lips and chins and neck, with a great soft egg of a belly that was all his torso, and pendant cones for arms and legs. As he advanced to meet Spade all his bulbs rose and shook and fell separately with each step, in the manner of clustered soap-bubbles not yet released from the pipe through which they had been blown. His eyes, made small by fat puffs around them, were dark and sleek. Dark ringlets thinly covered his broad scalp. He wore a black cutaway coat, black vest, black satin Ascot tie holding a pinkish pearl, striped grey worsted trousers, and patent-leather shoes.
Note how both villains are presented as soft, one way or another. That is, both are overweight, (Milverton is just “plump” while Gutman is “flabbily fat”), their girth symbolizing not only their greed but their apparent harmlessness. Which makes them all the more dangerous, of course. People underestimate them. They want people to underestimate them. In the same way, both are impeccably mannered and well dressed, with a bit of the dandy about them. The only really threatening thing about them, on the surface, is their compelling eyes (Milverton’s are “hard,” “keen” and penetrating; Gutman’s are “dark and sleek”).
Yet both are formidable opponents, both physically and intellectually. Milverton, for his part, moves “quick as a rat” when Holmes and Watson try to use physical force against him, drawing a revolver to defend himself. He is so capable, in fact, that Holmes resorts to simple robbery in hope of retrieving the kompromat. After seducing Milverton’s hapless maid, he explains how he plans to break into the man’s library and crack his safe.
As in all noir fiction, Holmes’s corruption is contagious. It spreads. Watson insists on coming along on the caper, and soon finds himself enjoying it. As he relates,
My first feeling of fear had passed away, and I thrilled now with a keener zest than I had ever enjoyed when we were the defenders of the law instead of its defiers. The high object of our mission, the consciousness that it was unselfish and chivalrous, the villainous character of our opponent, all added to the sporting interest of the adventure.
Naturally, the operation goes pear-shaped. After breaking into Milverton’s library, Milverton returns to the room and they are forced to hide behind a tapestry. They listen, helpless, as the man conducts a clandestine, midnight meeting with an unknown woman, one whom he assumes to be another disgruntled maid but who is actually one of his former victims. The lady shoots him dead, then flees. Holmes, having already cracked Milverton’s, tosses all the letters into the fire, after which he and Watson do a runner, barely escaping the dead man’s enraged house staff.
With the main plot essentially over, the story still has a couple of surprises in the last pages. Indeed, there is a bit of transgressive humor near the end, when Holmes and Watson are visited the next morning by Inspector Lestrade, of Scotland Yard, seeking their help in a puzzling new case that has arisen overnight—namely, the burgling and murder of one Thomas Milverton! As Lestrade reports, there were two criminals involved in the matter.
“Criminals?” said Holmes. “Plural?”
“Yes, there were two of them. They were as nearly as possible captured red-handed. We have their footmarks, we have their description, it’s ten to one that we trace them. The first fellow was a bit too active, but the second was caught by the under-gardener, and only got away after a struggle. He was a middle-sized, strongly built man—square jaw, thick neck, moustache, a mask over his eyes.”
“That’s rather vague,” said Sherlock Holmes. “My, it might be a description of Watson!”
“It’s true,” said the inspector, with amusement. “It might be a description of Watson.”
This wonderful black comedy is, of course, another way the story pre-sages noir fiction. Holmes, like Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, takes gleeful delight in outwitting the cops, even though he has no real animus towards them. In some ways, Holmes is a prototype of those later detectives. Like them, he is an island unto himself, obeying the law when possible but otherwise following his own, internal, moral code, no matter where it might lead.
It’s a very modern, almost existentialist version of Holmes, one that is seldom seen in the pop-cultural depictions of him.
Just a heads-up…. My Edgar-nominated and Shamus-winning novel, Twice the Trouble, is a Kindle Deal all this month. You can get the ebook for just $1.99. That’s less than half the price of a Starbucks’ latte (and it will last a lot longer)!
I’m very happy to announce that my new short story, “Hallucinogenic Toreador”, is included in this fine, just-released noir anthology from Jeff Circle and Leonardo Audio! It’s available in Kindle format from Amazon. Check it out…!
There is a scene in Steven Soderbergh’s 1999 noir thriller The Limey when the main character, Wilson, a career-criminal and generally scary guy, is questioning a woman in her house about a man named Valentine. Wilson (played with enormous power by Terance Stamp), is looking for the man who killed his daughter, and Valentine is his prime suspect. The woman, naively, offers to give Wilson Valentine’s phone number, at which point Wilson smiles wickedly and says, mostly to himself, “I’ve got his number.”
It’s a great, almost chilling moment. What we, the viewers, know (and the woman doesn’t) is that Wilson has already killed five men to get Valentine’s “number”, every sense of the term. And Stamp’s delivery of this line speaks volumes about Wilson’s character—his steely-eyed determination, his courage, and his constant, barely controlled rage.
It’s a great moment in a great movie, which marked one of several come-backs in Stamp’s long career. His filmography is so great and varied that one must divide not in stages but in ages. First, there was Stamp the movie star, an epically handsome, Angry-Young-Man who got the lead in several fine, gritty films in the 1960s, including William Wyler’s The Collector and Ken Loach’s Poor Cow. But he never really clicked as a leading-man, either in England or in Hollywood, and his next big break didn’t come until 1980’s Superman II, in which he reprised his role as the evil General Zod (a.k.a. the chief of the three baddies whom Superman’s dad banishes to the Phantom Zone in Superman.)
To this day, Stamp is best remembered for this one, silly role, Zod—at least, in America. But film nerds such as myself admired his work in many other small, supporting roles throughout the 80s. My favorite was his scene-stealing cameo in 1987 Wall Street, playing a redoubtable corporate raider who has reformed his ways and stands in opposition to the evil Gordon Gekko.
Then, in the 1990’s, Stamp had his next, and greatest, comeback with his role as transexual woman in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, which remains one of my favorite films of all time. Stamp was nominated for a BAFTA for that one, and he should have been nominated for an Oscar, too. But no matter. The role is a classic, and it re-introduced him to American audiences.
This led to Stamp’s last leading role in a major motion picture. This was, of course, The Limey, and it is perhaps his greatest performance, in part because he was able to leverage his own, real-life history as 1960s hipster in the role of Wilson, who was a master thief in 1960s England. Indeed, Soderbergh sampled black-and-white footage of Stamp from Ken Loach’s Poor Cow to use in flashbacks of Wilson’s earlier life—a daring artistic choice which, although done with permission from Loach himself, remains controversial to this day. However one might feel about this cinematic cribbing, though, Soderbergh made one hell of a good movie—a genuine classic—in which Stamp finally got a chance to shine in the lead, one last time.
Terance Stamp passed away on Sunday, at the age of 87. Not bad, for such a hell-raiser. I’ll miss him.
Ash Clifton, Writer 