Hang on St. Chrisopher: Adrian McKinty's New Irish Crime Drama

 

 

Hang on Saint Christopher: A Sean Duffy Novel (2025)

By Adrian McKinty

Blackstone publishing, 296 pages.

★★★★

 

Hang on Saint Christopher, with the hammer to the floor

Put a highball on the case, nail across the door...

There's a 750 Norton busting down the door.

 

The new novel from Irish writer Adrain McKinty takes its seemingly odd title from the above lyric from a Tom Waits song. And, yes, 750 Norton motorcycles factor into the mystery. This is another installment in McKinty’s Sean Duffy series, but here's all you need to know to get up to speed. For many people in Northern Ireland the fictional Duffy is a traitor. Not only is he a cop, he’s also a member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). Sean is a Catholic boy who in the minds of enemies might as well be a Protestant. When in Northern Ireland Duffy maintains a home in Carrickfergus, which is far enough away from the outbursts of violence in Belfast and close to the ferry dock to Cairnryan, Scotland.

 

Duffy is an RUC part timer required to spend just six days a month in Northern Ireland. This will be his life for the next two years for Sean to accumulate enough time to retire and bid adieu to The Troubles. He has built a new life in Scotland with his wife Beth and their daughter Emma. He has no time for the murderous Irish Republican Army (IRA) and is almost as contemptuous of the RUC. To his mind the RUC is filled with screw-ups and careerists, the latter of whom pass the buck when they make a hash of things but grab the glory when something goes right. As if he couldn't be more conspicuous, Duffy drives a flash BMW. His Carrickfergus neighborhood appears to be upscale in the minds of many, though it’s more safe than posh.

 

He and Frank “Crabbie” McCraven are on the same part-time reserve retirement scheme. They generally manage to keep a low profile by doing paperwork; after all, why hand big cases to guys who are six days on and three weeks off? Sean has even groomed his successor, Lawson. As fate would have it, Lawson is on holiday in Spain and Sean and Frank are sucked into investigating the murder of two IRA gunmen. If Duffy had his way, of course, he'd be happy to spit on their graves. But the fragile truce in Northern Ireland doesn't work that way. The two deaths are high-profile cases and the very truce that has reduced violence has made some areas around Belfast even more tense. That’s because not everyone wants peace and even more radical faction of the IRA has arisen. It falls to Sean and Frank to defuse the situation. Or, should I say to Sean? He's a lot like Robert Parker's Spencer with a brogue, a live-wire loner with attitude and filled with wisecracks and disrespect for official/legal procedures. Why play it straight if you can take matters into your own hands?

 

Like Spencer, Duffy tempers violence with big dollops of humor. There is a set up scene in Hang on St. Christopher that will make you chuckle at how Sean deals with troublemakers in his neighborhood. Moral: Don't mess with the Beamer and don't be a bloody fool!

 

If only the two murderers lent themselves to such out-of-the-box solutions. The humor is there, but add bigger dollops of grit, danger, hairy escapes, and bloodshed. This investigation has a bit of everything: carjacking, bugged phones, motorcycles circling like Indians attacking the cavalry, an art forger, and deep looks at the IRA ‘s influence in the United states and beyond. (Cue the CIA!) Even Iceland gets into this drama. Duffy faces the moral dilemma of whether to cut a deal with a known IRA gunman that he despises in order to stop a potentially worse one. Being that it's Ireland, the two creeps are brothers.

 

Duffy is a pain in the arse, but the thing about rule-breakers is that they seldom get hung up on moral qualms if there's a way to keep devils at bay. One of my favorite Duffy traits is that the man is a musical genius. From classical to classic rock by way of punk, folk music, rap, reggae, and beyond you can't stump Duffy in a game of Name that Tune. And maybe you can't stuff stump him at Know Your Art either. Or can you?

 

Rob Weir

 

Kehinde Wiley and the Last of the Lost Cause?

 

 

Rumors of War, 30' tall

 

The Last of the Lost Cause?*

*This essay/review is part of a larger in-progress project on Civil War mythology.

 

If you don’t follow the art world carefully, you might not know the statue above. It is a work that subverts one of the biggest lies of the past 160 years. The sculptor is Kehinde Wiley. If you can’t quite place the name, I’ll bet you know his presidential portrait of Barack Obama, but first things first. 

 

Wiley portrait of Barack Obama

 

 

Wiley’s equestrian statue is titled “Rumors of War” and is meant to shock. Instead of a wig-topped noble or a dashing solider, Wiley’s defiant figure is a black man with his dreadlocks tied back suggestive of a crown or an Indian sachem’s topknot. The figure is also wearing high-top sneakers, blue jeans, and a warm-up jacket. You can find this statue outside the main entrance to Richmond, Virginia Museum of Fine Art (VMFA).

 

Wiley based “Rumors of War” on a statue of J.E.B. Stuart that once sat atop a similar pedestal on the city’s Monument Avenue where it shared company with other “heroes” of the Confederacy. You might recall that those came down during Black Lives Matter protests in 2017. There is but one statue remaining, that of tennis great Arthur Ashe. CSA president Jeferson Davis was among those that pulled down and defiled. Wiley’s statue suggests that the real “war” was/is that of black freedom. That’s not the way the story is usually told.

 

Jefferson Davis vandalized; Stuart statue in storage

   
 

 

The Confederacy was defeated, but you’d hardly know that from the way the Civil War was retold before all the bodies were put to rest. The so-called “Lost Cause” was the ideological precursor to legal and customary segregation that sought to strip newly emancipated enslaved peoples of their political, economic, and human rights. The so-called “Jim Crow” era was the order of things until most of its vestiges were outlawed by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Even then, the “war” Wiley wants you to ponder still rages: the one for black equality and dignity.

 

The Lost Cause did as much, perhaps more, to ingrain racism deeply into American culture. It claimed that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery and invented a host of specious and nonsensical alt.realities. You name it and it was tried: tariffs, the interference of Northern radicals, states rights, attempts to subvert the Southern agricultural system, a Northern political power grab, Southern honor…. Some of these have validity, but it’s simply impossible to fashion an explanation for the Civil War that doesn’t have black slavery at its core. (Tariffs are rising today, but I don’t detect a serious call to arms!) The Lost Cause created myths: the genteel South vs. the money-grubbing and unkempt North, a war of Northern aggression foisted upon the South, Scarlett O’Hara-like plantations marked by easy-going relations between white and blacks, kindly Southern “massas,” illiterate” slaves better off in bondage, evil abolitionists, etc. Some of that has a kernel of truth as well, but it all rests upon a worldview in which all whites were viewed as better than any black person. 

 

Currently in garden by Valentine Museum. Soon to be reinstalled at the Ironworks. 

 

When this statue was placed in front of the Tredegar Ironworks in Richmond, howls of protest erupted and white people committed acts of vandalism against it. Ditto the Arthur Ashe monument. Do we presume they did so genteelly?

 

Looking down Scarlet's stair case

 

For the record, Southern charm is not my thing, but parts of the South retain an air of grace. I might have been just as happy to have some barbecue and listen to the blues, but we had lunch one day at the Jefferson Hotel in down Richmond and it’s quite a place. Scarlett O’Hara even sashayed down its staircase in Gone with the Wind. There are tons of plantation homes below the Mason-Dixon Line that ooze with elegance as long as you don’t think about who and what sustained them.

 

As Bob Dylan put it, though, “the times they are a changing...” (Okay, he dropped the final “g.”) A Richmond friend and I visited the “Southern White House,” where Jefferson Davis quartered during the war. In many ways it’s more democratic that the one in Washington DC. It belonged to a bourgeois doctor who made it a home. Davis did all of his serious presidential duties at the state capital building a block away. The dining room picture is about the biggest thing in the house. Make no mistake, though; Davis was a Confederate and a racist. The good news is that guides no longer try to whitewash that. Nor do they fail to tell you that the house “staff” was comprised of wage-earning whites and white indentured servants, but the vast majority of workers were enslaved black folks. 

 

Not exactly the State Dining Room

 

To circle back to art, Kehinde Wiley is far from the first artist of color seeking to put African Americans back in the historical narrative. He is, though, one of the most successful and clever. He’s a lot of things the hardshell right hates: black, gay, has an Ivy Legree degree (Yale), and possess an impressive grasp of art history. If you wonder what’s up with the flowered backdrops of his portraits, know that his role models are precisely those Old Masters (and Mistresses) venerated by white cultural elites. The VMFA has a Wiley painting titled “Willem van Heythusen Posing with a Sword.” Why the Dutch name? It’s based on Frans Hals painting done in 1625. He has done the same with religious paintings and most of his portraits. Things look a bit different when we replace white bodies with black ones and update the drapery, doesn’t it? 

 

Frans Hals

Wiley

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Joker II Should be Subtitled Folly for Two

 

 

 

Joker: Folie á Deux

Directed by Todd Phillips

Warner Brothers, 138 minutes, R (violence, nudity)

★★

 

Joker (2019) made a billion dollars, garnered 11 Academy Award nominations, and won two: Best Original Score and Best Acting (Joaquin Phoenix). Joker: Folie á Deux (2024) is why many moviegoers hate sequels. It had the same director, Todd Phillips, Joaquin Phoenix returned as Arthur Fleck, many of the secondary actors reupped, and megastar Lady Gaga joined the cast. It cost four times as much to make as the first movie but earned 1/4 of what the first film raked in at the box office. Counting promos for overseas markets, it lost about $150 million. There were no Academy Award nominations, but 7 Golden Raspberries including Worst Remake and Worst Screen Combo (Phoenix and Gaga).

 

Was it bad? Yes, it was. It's again a thriller, but also a musical–if one has an expansive definition of that term that doesn't include staying on key or paying attention to melody. Whose bright idea was it to sign Lady Gaga, a seriously talented vocalist, and direct her to sing badly?

 

The thin plot picks up where the first movie left off. Party clown Arthur Fleck (Phoenix ) is in jail/mental hospital for five murders and that's not counting killing his own mother, which no one knows about. The scenes inside Arkham are depressing, bleak, and chilling. (Arkham is a now-empty isolation hospital in Bellevue, New Jersey.) Each day is like the previous. Prisoners are roused from their sleep and line up to dump their slop buckets, before being sent to a day room where  Arthur, the would-be clown, is badgered into  telling a joke. Dozens of seriously demented prisoners watch TV as guards look on, both to keep the peace and to seize opportunities to practice sadistic discipline. Jackie Sullivan (Brendan Gleeson) is the worst of the lot, though he feigns sympathy for Arthur. Outside the walls, street anarchists and attention-starved young people chant Joker’s praises.

 

Some of this might have been powerful had not Phillips and co-script writer Scott Silver turn the film into demented musical theatre devoid of logic. For some reason, there are also women in the institution, including self-committed Harley “Lee” Quinzel (Gaga). Well-behaved men can sit in group therapy sessions with the women. Hmm… what could go wrong? Lee sees Arthur as a hero to her outward rebel, poor girl persona. Before you know it, Lee is sneaking into Arthur’s cell where they pledge their love and bodies to each other.

 

How? Beats me. They also sing tuneless songs to each other. Is real or a fantasy?  Show tunes without the show? The central theme is “That's Entertainment.” If only it were. But nothing is quite as strange as the attempt of Arthur's attorney Marianne Stewart (Catherine Keener) to win a new trial for Arthur based on the grounds that he can’t be guilty of murder because he was insane at the time but is now recovering. Huh? Contrary to what most believe, the standard isn’t sanity perse; it’s whether a defendant knows the difference between right and wrong. Oh, Arthur knows! His in-house interview with a TV journalist doesn't go well and neither does his trial.

 

To put it indelicately, this movie stinks. Stop here if you’ve never seen it but still want to. Read on if you're convinced I'm saving you from the pain of doing so. Here come the spoilers!

 

Arthur does exactly what his character would do; he sabotages his trial. He would rightly be locked up for life, except a firebomb blows up the courthouse, and kills numerous people. Arthur stumbles out of the rubble to search for Lee. When he finds Lee and says she's the only one who has ever seen him as he really is, she’s no longer interested. She wants Joker, not pathetic Arthur Fleck. He is recaptured, sent back to Arkham, and is ostracized by guards and prisoners alike. Another psychotic stabs Arthur, who bleeds out.

 

Near the end Lady Gaga sings with power and authority. What a waste! The best that can be said of this misguided project is that the Looney Tunes-like “Me and My Shadow” at the movie’s beginning is beguiling. What was the point of the rest? A lampoon of woke lefty culture? How the young can be led by their nose rings? I hope not. Otherwise this film can add backdoor Trumpism to its list of sins.

 

If Joker Two really hemorrhaged $150 million, it deserved to lose every penny.

 

Rob Weir