Origins: COLD! STEEL! JUSTICE!!! by Alexander O’Hara

Editor’s Note: In a rather pleasing development, the sub-sub-genre of Irish crime writing seems to be throwing up some writers who are either maverick geniuses (genii?) or permanently bombed out of their gourd. The first such to come to my attention was the redoubtable Captain Joseph Barbelo with BARBELO’S BLOOD; the latest crazily shining rough diamond is Alexander O’Hara, aka Darragh McManus. To wit:

Origins: COLD! STEEL!! JUSTICE!!!

Okay, this might get a little confusing. My name is Darragh McManus and I’ve just published a comic crime novel called COLD! STEEL! JUSTICE!!! Except the author is actually called Alexander O’Hara, and the book was originally called The Nutcracker. And wasn’t a book at all, but a movie script.
  Sorry. Let me start over. COLD! STEEL! JUSTICE!!! has just been self-published by me (as in Darragh) as an e-book at Amazon.com for Kindle and Smashwords.com for other formats. I used the Alexander O’Hara nom du guerre to differentiate “funny me” from “serious me”; as has been discussed here before, the “industry” doesn’t like eclecticism in writers. So I thought, what the hell, I’ll just invent a new writer altogether.
  The bumpf – written either by Darragh or Alexander, I actually can’t remember anymore – goes something like this: “COLD! STEEL! JUSTICE!!! is a rollicking, rocking riot of raw, roaring reading, about renegade detective Christian Beretta, his resurrected-from-the-dead sweetheart, his partner with an over-eating problem, and the evil Mayor who wants control of the drugs trade – and wants Beretta deader than dead… In Paradise City, all hell is about to break loose!”
  And the whole thing of the film script? Our story begins – and the story began – all the way back in 1999 during downtime in my first real job. There was a lot of downtime, and The Nutcracker was a lot of fun to write. (The title, by the way, refers to our hero’s trademark method of “interrogation”: squeezing the baddies’ testicles in a tourniquet. It gets results, dammit!).
  I basically took every cliché I could think of, from every piss-poor, straight-to-video 1980s cop movie I’d ever seen, and played around with them. End result: something like The Naked Gun crossed with The Simpsons crossed with Monty Python crossed with that drunken conversation in the pub one night about which Z-list actor you’d cast in a remake of Bloodfist 9: The Killening.
  So you’ve got a loose cannon cop who’s been kicked off the force for – yes – being “just too violent”. And a grizzled Italian Chief of Police, feisty and beautiful journalist girlfriend, tubby black sidekick who’s a solid family man, sleazy Mexican drug lord, camp European assassin, deranged media billionaire, huge-toothed chat-show host, insanely sexy femme fatale who wears rubber cat-suits quite often, and so on and so forth.
  For Beretta, I wanted a guy who looked, sounded and acted more-or-less like Dirty Harry having an especially bad goddamn day. But better-looking, and considerably dumber, and probably a wee bit more warm-hearted, underneath all the macho bluster. His name had to reflect that, so I picked something both tough (Beretta, as in the pistol) and soft (Christian, or Chris as he’s known to loved ones – this sounds like the name of a tousle-haired little boy, or that cuddly, bespectacled man in your office who always wears a colourful tie with short-sleeved shirts.)
  Then I took all these eejits and started writing about them; it was pretty much as simple as that. Of course, I needed a storyline of some sort, on which to hang all the surreal lines, slapstick gags, amusing non-sequiturs and self-referential in-jokes. So I thought to myself, what are these dreadful movies always about? Answer: a big drugs deal, generally involving “the merchandise”.
  That was about it, and that was about all I needed. The plot, amazingly, made some sense by the time I’d finished; it had structure and pacing, things happened in a vaguely chronological order, there was a beginning, middle and end. Too many spoofs, I’ve since been told, concentrate on japery at the expense of an actual storyline; The Nutcracker had one, albeit the most daft and ridiculous storyline you’ve ever encountered.
  You want a mad Kerry-born Mayor who wants to televise the trial and execution of criminals? You got it. An army of castrated international guns-for-hire, led by a man called Englebert who bears a disturbing resemblance to a young Julian Sands? You got that, too. A conversation between our heroes that lasts for fifteen minutes, during which they’re continuously taking the longest pee in history? Sure, why not. A flashback scene where Beretta enters a moment of Zen totality and shoots six ducks from the sky without looking? What the hell, let’s throw that in there as well.
  Eventually, the thing was written. I sent it to Roger Corman’s long-time associate, Frances Doel; she was charming and friendly on the phone and I never heard from her again. A few other producer types had nice things to say about it, but I kind of realised after a while that The Nutcracker, as a movie, fell uncomfortably between two stools: too stupid to be respected, too clever to sell to a stupid movie audience.
  Readers, though, are a different kettle of fish. Despite what the “industry” might presume, readers like all sorts of things from books. They like to be challenged. And when it comes to comedy, they don’t necessarily want all the jokes teed up 15 minutes beforehand, then quickly followed by canned laughter, real or metaphorical, to really hammer the point home. They’re okay, I think – I hope? – with a book that’s dumb but clever in its dumbness but dumb in its cleverness but simultaneously clever and dumb.
  So I took the original script and fleshed it out as a novel, adding descriptive prose, more dialogue, inner monologue, character motivation, and about eight thousand fresh jokes. Well, when I say “fresh”, I mean “not in the original script”. They’re not fresh in the sense that I – and, indeed, other writers – haven’t used them before. More than once.
  Finally, I changed the title. The Nutcracker was a bit vague and allusive; it made sense, and was amusing, to me, but I didn’t know that everyone else would get it, or like it. At least not until they got to the actual nut-cracking part, round about the end of Chapter 5. So I racked my brains for something that captured the dumbness, crassness, obviousness and weird obsession with exclamation marks that characterise all my favourite rubbish ‘80s cop flicks. You know, masterworks like Unkillable Bastard!, Rampage of Destruction IV!!, and of course, Gutz ‘n’ Bulletz 2: The Return of Fat Larry!
  The end result was COLD! STEEL! JUSTICE!!!: the book of the movie of the comic of the book of the screenplay of the movie of the game of the TV show. Of the book. And it’s funny: DEAD FUNNY. Guaranteed, you will laugh at least once per paragraph. That’s right, PER PARAGRAPH – no mealy-mouthed “per page” promises here – or your money back. (Note: guarantee is not a guarantee. CAP accepts full responsibility for any disappointment caused. Caveat emptor, terms & conditions apply, exit on your left, etc etc etc.)
  And so here we are: me, Alex, Christian, India the fiery girlfriend, Spud the tubby sidekick, O’Flannigan the crazy Mayor, the castrated assassins, the Oedipal-fixation Mexican gangster who gets incinerated in his own car to the strains of Herb Alpert playing The Girl from Ipanema … and hopefully a whole bunch of you, the paying customer.
  Welcome to Dice City, everybody. Where justice walks tall, quips smart, busts shit up on a regular basis and totes a hand-cannon so fucking enormous that the toting itself carries a minimum ten years. Cold! Steel! Justice!!!: sooner or later, everybody gets delivery of theirs. Fuck yeah!!
  Thanks for listening, Darragh. (PS: I mean Alexander. I think.)

  COLD! STEEL! JUSTICE!!! by Alexander O’Hara is published on Kindle.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review - Mesrine: Killer Instinct / Public Enemy No. 1

Jacques Mesrine – it’s pronounced Meh-reen; you called him Mez-reen at your peril – was the French equivalent of Martin Cahill, aka The General. A Robin Hood-style folk-hero, Mesrine was essentially a bank robber during a career that lasted from the early ’60s until 1979, when he was allegedly executed in the Paris streets by a shadowy police unit.
  Being French, of course, Mesrine was considerably more flamboyant than Cahill. A master of disguise known alternatively as ‘the Man of a Hundred Faces’ and ‘Jacques Du Monde’ (Jacques Everyman), he actively courted the media. His ability to escape from maximum security prisons, in France and Canada, struck a chord with a nation that was struggling to escape from its perception of itself as it came to terms with the emerging truth of the dirty war in Algeria. (Mesrine himself served in Algeria in 1956, where it’s alleged that he was a member of a torture squad.)
  By pitching himself as an anti-establishment rebel in a series of high-profile media interviews with outlets such as Paris Match, Mesrine captured the French imagination at a time when France itself was experiencing the social and cultural unrest that would culminate in the protests and riots of the student revolution of Paris ’68.
  His signature trademark was the double-whammy stick-up: after robbing a bank, Mesrine would run to the next street and rob another, while the police floundered at the scene of the first.
  In thumbing his nose at the authorities in such a fashion, Mesrine garnered potent enemies among the police, the judiciary and the political establishment. Yet it was this flagrant contempt for the powers-that-be that secured him a cult hero status in France on a par with Che Guevara. All of which has contributed hugely to the critical and commercial success, in France, of the movies Mesrine: Killer Instinct and Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1.
  Directed by Jean-François Richet, the movies are superb thrillers that capture Mesrine’s charisma, devil-may-care attitude and cavalier spirit. Captured in Canada after a failed kidnapping, for example, Mesrine is asked on TV for a quote, and responds with “Long live Free Quebec!” In a microcosm, the moment sums up Mesrine’s appeal: media savvy, cheerfully defiant in the face of apparent defeat, a man of the people, a rebel with a cause for each of his hundred faces. With their free-wheeling style and irrepressible kinetic energy, not to mention their uncomplicated and largely uncritical celebration of his lifestyle, the films are garnering favourable comparisons with Mean Streets and Goodfellas, due in no small part to a terrific performance from Vincent Cassel in the role of the eponymous anti-hero.
  And yet the subtitle of Richet’s first movie, Killer Instinct, is an uncompromising one and should give pause for thought to those who would champion Mesrine’s freebooting adventures. Mesrine was a killer who boasted of 39 murders in total. That may well be a wildly exaggerated number, given that Mesrine makes the claim in an autobiography he published from prison in 1977, also titled Killer Instinct, and which he subsequently asserted he wrote to confuse the authorities in the lead-up to his latest trial, and because his public expected any book from Mesrine to contain a high body-count. And yet there’s no getting away from the fact that, his reputation for glamour, high living and wooing beautiful women notwithstanding, Mesrine’s capacity for murder remained undiminished during the course of his career.
  Richet’s movies are not the first time Mesrine’s exploits have been committed to celluloid, although André Génovès’s film from 1984, Mesrine, confines itself to the 18 months the outlaw spent on the run – after escaping in 1978 from the maximum security prison specially designed to keep him behind bars – with his then girlfriend, Sylvia Jeanjacquot, who was by his side when his car was riddled with bullets in Paris. The fact that Richet devotes two films to Mesrine’s exploits may seem excessive, but there are strong arguments in favour of his approach.
  The first is that Mesrine packed a hell of a lot of incident into his relatively short life. Bank robbery was only one string to the bow of a man who was equally happy robbing casinos and kidnapping for profit. He was also unusually loyal, given that he operated in a milieu in which the notion of ‘honour amongst thieves’ is virtually always revealed to be a myth. After escaping from a Canadian prison, for instance, Mesrine later returned with an accomplice, both heavily armed, in a failed bid to break out some of his old comrades. Later, on the loose after yet another escape, Mesrine telephoned his then girlfriend, who was still incarcerated. She had to plead with him not to come and rescue her, on the basis that she had only a short time left to serve on her sentence.
  Moreover, Mesrine had an incorrigible sense of theatre, and it’s impossible to fully dislike a man who can unlock his handcuffs in court and throw them in the face of a judge, and later bound from the dock to kidnap the judge whilst his trial is ongoing, escaping to the street with his hostage in tow and from there to freedom, yet again.
  All of which fits very neatly with the Mesrine mythology, in which Robin Hood meets John Dillinger and provides a very satisfying movie for fans of gritty, violent and entertaining thrillers.
  The second movie, Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1, is a different affair. Slower in pace, more thoughtful in its appraisal of Mesrine’s public persona, it covers a period in which the criminal becomes ever more politicised, until such time as he is stating that his robberies are actually politically motivated. He claims fraternity with international causes such as the Palestinian struggle and the Red Brigades, and seems to be trying to pass himself off as a French Carlos the Jackal. While it is entirely probably that Mesrine did business with a wide range of individuals and organisations, not least when it came to trading information and / or purchasing weaponry, the grandstanding comes across as poignantly quixotic attempt by a common criminal to give his prosaic actions some socio-political ballast.
  It’s as if Mesrine, acutely aware of the power of the media, eventually came to believe his own press, despite the fact that he was the one responsible for creating much of the mythology. What is particularly poignant, however, is that he seems to have come to believe that he had transcended the law and its minions, and that he would be judged, when the time came for final reckonings, by the court of public appeal.
  Of course, the success of Richet’s films suggests that the court of public appeal has come down very much in favour of Mesrine and his self-aggrandizing rhetoric. Meanwhile, that a career criminal and self-confessed killer is the cause celebre du jour with both the disenfranchised youth and the intellectual elite in France suggests that a new work-out routine is the least of Nicolas Sarkozy’s problems this summer.

  Mesrine: Killer Instinct is released on August 7th. Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1 is released on August 28th. This article first appeared in the Irish Examiner.

  Meanwhile, friend of CAP and aspiring crime writer Darragh McManus has posted the first chapter of his magnum opus crime spoof COLD! STEEL! JUSTICE!!! to the web, suggesting that, if enough people are interested, he’ll post Chapter Two. Make it so, people …