Friday, June 14th at 11:30 pm TCM is airing the 1957 film The Burglar, starring Dan Duryea. It’s based on the David Goodis noir of the same name.

Then later that night at 2:45 am TCM is airing the 1973 remake called The Burglars, starring Jean Paul Belmondo and Omar Sharif.

The novel by Goodis is excellent; Goodis is perhaps the bleakest and most existential of the 40′s-50′s school of hardboiled authors.

Gentlemen (and ladies) start your DVRs!;-) lol

It’s annoying when good writers are translated. I read two horror stories by Belgian writer Jean Ray who is unknown in the English speaking world but among the French speaking is consider a figure similar to Poe or Lovecraft. Very little of his work is available in English and a lot that is hard to find (and expensive when you do.)

For me, the crime fiction of Manuel Vazquez Montalban and Paco Ignacio Taibo made me want to read Spanish. There are a few Montalban/Taibo titles out in English, but there are still many titles waiting to be translated.

I was stoked a few years ago when MVM’s first Pepe Carvalho novel, Tattoo, was translated.

Anyway, the result of my efforts is that I can now read/speak a little Spanish but not really enough to decipher the few Spanish editions I own. It’d probably have been better if I took a course at my local community college instead of trying to learn from a CD Rom.

Some writers are suppose to improve when translated Dostoyevsky is suppose to be really turgid in the original Russian. I know that some people say Baudelaire’s translation of Poe is better than Poe in English, which is probably unfair to Poe.

As someone who has studied a second language, I know certain things–slang, euphemisms, etc., simply don’t translate easily, if at all. And even in foreign films with English subtitles it’s fairly common to see odd and incorrectly spelled translation.

Makes me wonder how much of the original novel I’m missing when I read English translations of French, Spanish, authors.

The main character is a heister. He goes by several different identities; in Heistaway he’s primarily called Magwich, and in Consequences he goes by John Wemmick. Fans of Charles Dickens may recognize these aliases.

Now, be forewarned: Heistaway is a mix of erotica and crime fiction. There are plenty of sex scenes, many of an S and M nature. Consequences is more crime/adventure but still has some explicit sex scenes.

My primary interest was in the adventure/crime aspects. Wemmick is an awfully intriguing character. By the end of Consequences many questions are still up in the air concerning who he is and what he does. He’s a corporate “fixer” for a CIA front; a non-repentant bank heister, along with his partner in crime “Mr. Black”, but there are still many mysteries about the enigmatic Mr. Wemmick to be unraveled.

I’m hoping Mr. Bethune continues unraveling these mysteries in many future novels!

Again, these books are, to me, highly original. I can’t really quite think of any writers working in this kind of “field”, So if you aren’t particularly prudish, and keep an open mind, you may be quite surprised at how creatively Mr. Bethune develops his characters and plots.

Oh, yeah; for the financially strapped amongst us–the E-Books are quite inexpensive.

I guess it depends on the situation!;-) lol