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Movie List – “Adventure” from 2018

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What are Adventure Films?

Adventure Films are exciting stories, with new experiences or exotic locales.  Adventure films are very similar to the action film genre, in that they are designed to provide an action-filled, energetic experience for the film viewer…(amc filmsite). Whilst this list is not definitive, and indeed I have to admit that I have only seen one of these movies, the reviews I have read of them are very informative and do make me wish I had had the time (and the money) to see all of them.

Time Will Tell!

Maybe as time moves on, I will have that chance through one of the various movie sites, or when they finally get around to being played on television.

Black Panther February 13th, 2018 134 min Action Avengers: Infinity War April 25th, 2018 160 min Superhero
Maze Runner: The Death Cure January 10th, 2018 142 min Action The Incredibles 2 June 14th, 2018 126 min Animation
Tomb Raider March 5th, 2018 118 min Adventure Annihilation February 22nd, 23018 115 mins Drama/Thriller
A Wrinkle In Time March 8th, 2018 109 min Family Ready Player One March 28th, 2018 140 min Action  
Deadpool 2 May 18th, 2018 119 mins Action/Comedy Early Man January 28th, 2018 89 mins Animation/Adventure/Comedy

The Swinging Detective

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The Swinging Detective

by

Henry McDonald

Gibson Square

ISBN 97817833441177

This is a ’prentice effort for Henry McDonald ( The Swinging Detective), at least in writing a sustained, 330-odd pages, of a fairly complex novel.The Swinging Detective - Henry McDonald It is in the form of, essentially, a ‘thriller’ (fair enough ‘thriller’ is not up there with bildungsroman or novella as a literary form, but it has some formal attributes – bear with me). The biographical ‘blurb’ on the book’s back-cover claims McDonald “has a deep knowledge of Marxism” and “the German punk scene”. Which means Henry was once the rising star of the Workers’ Party of Ireland (formerly ‘Official’ Sinn Féin / the Republican Clubs) in its glazed-eyed Muscovite days. But the element of ‘inside knowledge’ is quite lightly handled, and while Martin Peters, the central figure of the tale is a useful ‘outsider’ he knows Berlin intimately.

That is because he was a British ‘spook’ in the days before the Wall came down – Belfast also comes into the matter. Peters (the similarity of the moniker to the England ‘World cup’ team member is acknowledged – so far as England soccer fans are concerned there is only one World Cup worth consideration – that of 1966). Peters is haunted by the killing of (an exotically-named, female Loyalist assassin) the description of the actual killing of this unlikely person fits that of an actual UVF operative, Brian Robinson. He was a pillion passenger on a motorbike, and was shot dead by Brit (or possibly RUC) spooks. He and his driver were on an Ardoyne (north Belfast) ‘Fenian’-killing expedition.

The Swinging Detective - Thailand and Sri LankaThe book itself is largely about the killing of ‘paedophiles’ – men convicted of sexually molesting children in Thailand and Sri Lanka. There are very good descriptions of the social reaction to this series of events. The police have the problem of having to offer some sort of protection to men who are at the bottom of just about anybody’s list of worthy citizens; complicated by the fact that these men are simultaneously in dire need of protection on a 24 / 7 basis – and don’t want to draw attention to themselves. The attention comes in the form of an ad-hoc Mothers Against Paedophiles group, led by a loud, publicity-grabbing ‘targe’ of a woman. And an assassin who specialises in killing these men in increasingly imaginative ways. The tabloid press joins in the whipping up of social hysteria about ‘paedophiles’ (the numbers of whom, in society are, as ever, hugely over-inflated).

The killing of these people – generally deemed to be socially worthless (human, if that, garbage), leads to all sorts of complications – the chief one being the bullying of entirely innocent elderly men, and the stretching of police resource, human and otherwise to breaking point. Peters eventually tracks down ‘St Christopher’, the executioner of the men who had gone abroad to molest, mostly elementary school age boys. We are spared descriptions of the ‘interaction’ with the children in the Third World, but the results of such things are obvious – destroyed socialisation and driving into drugs (including alcohol).

The killer of these men turns out not to be a ‘moralistic’ avenger. His motivation is anti-imperialist, this is just the dirtiest element in the over-all exploitation of these boys (it is implied very strongly, that girls and young women are victims too). This is a well-written and – arresting – is the only word, novel.

It is well worth some hours of your time.

External links for further information:

THE COLD COLD GROUND

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THE COLD COLD GROUND

Adrian McKinty

Serpent’s Tail

ISBN978 1 84668 823 2

The Cold Cold Ground,  involves an RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary – now PSNI, the Police Service of Northern Ireland) criminal detective Sean (sic) Duffy. His position as a (Northern Ireland) Catholic in an overwhelmingly ‘Protestant’ environment is lightly handled. A colleague in an armoured personnel carrier apologises for using ‘sectarian’ language when patrolling a ‘Taig’ area of Carrickfergus, the south Antrim port of which Duffy is a native.

Adrian McKinty is a native of that place too, which makes the descriptions of the town and its layout ring true, though no doubt some things have been ‘moved around’ to keep the story uncluttered. The story involves a number of disparate killings that Duffy, an under-promoted Detective Sergeant (he has “solved six murders prior to this”) feels are connected. He dismisses involvement by the UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force) or the UDA (Ulster Defence Association – including its (‘killing wing’ covers most eventualities), the UFF (Ulster Freedom Fighters). A ‘drug scene’ was only a gleam in south Belfast Hoods’ eyes at this juncture (the UDA has probably ousted them, but the UVF, while tolerating low level drug taking takes a pretty hard line against the trade. The looser UDA is characteristically all over the place about ‘drugs’, especially as most working class areas in Northern Ireland function on a cocktail of cheap booze and prescription tranquilisers.

Duffy has all sorts of adventures in this narrative, he is part of a riot squad mobilised to police the Falls Road / Andersonstown areas of west Belfast the evening of the day of Bobby Sands’ death. That seems unlikely, as there were already hordes of police and army on standby. He does make the point that his team witnessed the clashes from Knockagh ‘mountain’. I wondered if this was a hint to some readers that some elements in this book were insisted on by the publishers. Knockagh was where various ‘Loyalist’ paramilitary’s dumped ‘enemies of Ulster’ they had killed. They were to a person (some women were killed too), entirely innocent Catholic shift workers, drunks, or those just on the streets at the ‘wrong’ time.

Back to the book; this is a well-written thriller with a number of sub-themes, the statutory ‘love interest’ (a sexy surgeon), the nosy ‘spook[s]’, military as well as police, even nosey neighbours (Duffy, perforce, lives in a heavy-duty Loyalist area – a divorcé, he can’t afford to live in a police ghetto in pricey north Down) which brings him into daily, unpleasant proximity with real, and would-be, Loyalist hard-boys. There are some oddities here Duffy joins the RUC as a result of an encounter with the nasty realities of life in 1970 Belfast. It would much more likely to have driven him into the IRA (the given reasons are off-hand and unlikely; nasty Catholics being beastly to police personnel). Given that the police were, in part anyway, a gendarmerie better-armed than the average Brit squaddie, and enthusiastically beating any sign of political dissent, much less violence, in Taig / Catholic areas, it is out of time – but then there would not have been a story.

Intertwined among the bodies and bullies is the killing of Gay men by a ‘moral’ avenger. This, like a number of other matters in this book, seems to be based on actuality. There were a (largish) number of killings of queer men in Belfast in the 1980s. Some, that of Anthony (Tony) McCleave, being particularly brutal (he was impaled by the throat from the spikes on the railings around the Albert Memorial (clock – Belfast’s ‘leaning tower’). The killer probably worked on the assumption that a mere queer’s family would be too embarrassed to push for a thorough police enquiry. He (it is extremely unlikely that it was a ‘she’) got the McCleave family wrong. They demanded and got a full inquiry, but it ran into the ground, there were no witnesses to the encounter between Tony and his killer, much less the actual killing.

Sinn Féin and the IRA appear here as groups without a history or ‘hinterland’, such an approach strained my credulity. It is possible the author, or his editors, thought the ‘RA was embedded in the reading public’s consciousness alongside the Nazis or Pol Pot. The attitude of the public in Great Britain to the “men [and women] of violence” is complex and changes over the years – and not always in ways the ‘political class’ and their media would approve.

This book is well worth reading; just remember it is a ‘police procedural’ cum thriller, not a documentary.

Seán McGouran

The Cold Cold Ground - Carrickfergus

Furthjer reading or viewing: