The Gentlemen Is A Highly Stylized

And Extravagant Gangland “Tall Tale”

Somehow, I missed the British turf-war crime thriller The Gentlemen when it was released in 2020 (maybe the pandemic had something to do with it), but I finally caught it on Netflix last week. It was everything I expected from Guy Ritchie’s highly stylized and extravagant imagination, a “tall tale” driven by an unscrupulous private detective/writer wannabe named Fletcher (Hugh Grant, in perhaps his best performance ever) who wants $20 million to bury his tell-all "screenplay." The subject of his movie is Mickey Pearson (Matthew McConaughey), an American who had made his fortune rolling up Britain’s marijuana trade and now wants to sell his growing operation at a steep price before pot is legalized. Two rivals emerge as potential buyers: an American billionaire (Jeremy Strong) and a Chinese gangster named Dry Eye (Henry Golding). Then there’s Colin Farrell’s “Coach," an Irish boxing club owner who insists he's not a gangster, but gets caught up in the ensuing war. Charlie Hunnan excels as Mickey’s cold and calculated wingman Ray, while Michelle Dockery (“Lady Mary” in Downton Abbey) plays his “Cockney cleopatra” wife. The Gentlemen is a scenic, complex, wild ride from start to finish, coarse yet nuanced, complete with double- and triple-crosses and a touch of sardonic wit that seems so…well, British. And very ungentlemanly.

Hitchcock/Truffaut Is Based On 1962 Conversations Between Two Icons

In 1962 François Truffaut interviewed Alfred Hitchcock over an eight-day period at his offices at Universal Studios to write his classic book (published in '66) in which the master of suspense bared his imagination and exposed the most private aspects of his uniquely talented mind. Today, 56 years later, the book remains, according to The New Yorker’s Nathan Heller, “one of the sharpest, most enthralling studies of creative thought—any creative thought—that’s still in print.” Kent Jones’ 2015 documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut, a French-American documentary film, was inspired by the book and its impact on cinema. Featuring reflections from such directors as James Gray, Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Wes Anderson, David Fincher, Arnaud Desplechin, and Olivier Assayas, the movie is narrated by Bob Balaban, who co-starred with Truffaut in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It was first screened at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival and was shown in the TIFF Docs section of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival. Rotten Tomatoes describes it as “essential viewing for cineastes while still offering rich rewards for neophytes…it’s an affectionate—and well-crafted—tribute to a legend.” Hitchcock/Truffaut is now available for streaming on Amazon Prime, Apple, Google, YouTube (small fee), or Tubi (with ads).

The Great Locked Room Mystery:

Ten Of The Best Novels In The Genre

The first Sherlock Holmes story I ever read (at age nine) was "The Adventure of the Speckled Band," one of the first notable “locked-room” mysteries in which the crime takes placed in a sealed room. What sets locked-room mysteries apart from the rest of the overall crime fiction genre is an element of impossibility, meaning a story in which a crime (usually murder) is committed under seemingly impossible circumstances. As Tom Mead wrote in Crime Reads last week, “These stories often have an ambiance of the eerie and macabre, with apparently supernatural occurrences and a foreboding atmosphere. However (and this is crucial), the whole thing is ultimately unraveled in dazzling style by an ingenious sleuth, and a rational explanation provided.” Just how and when did this sub-genre begin? The "Murders in the Rue Morgue" by Edgar Allan Poe is sometimes cited as the first locked-room mystery, Mead says, because it helped to set the template for the genre in the ensuing years. So did “A Terribly Strange Bed,” a short story by Wilkie Collins who sometimes is credited with writing the first proper “detective novel,” The Moonstone. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote 56 short stories, some of them in the locked-room genre, while Israel Zangwill’s The Big Bow Mystery and Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room were early highlights of a genre, which was still in an upward trajectory. Here’s Mead’s list of books that “represent some truly dazzling work over the last century.”

Gambling Habit Led Texas Man To

Murder His Fifth Wife, Mother Of Two

It’s a story we’ve heard all too often: In 2009, a single mother of two named Doris Andrews ran into an old acquaintance named Mark at a high school football game in Eustace, Texas. Mark was fresh off his fourth divorce, and Doris was still trying to pick up the pieces from her three failed marriages, and she told friends she had found something in Mark that gave her hope that he could be “the real deal.” She had recently completed her education degree at Texas A&M University and her new beau, a truck driver, proved to be a stable presence for Doris and her two daughters, who were 12 and 15 when their mom tied the knot for the fourth time in 2010. The pair settled into a comfortable life in their Texas home, and all seemed as perfect—until his trips to a casino in Oklahoma turned into an obsession. He went from occasionally playing cards at the casino to spending days at a time there, often putting the family on shaky financial ground. He once won $200,000, more than enough to pay off debts and splurge on some luxury items, but by the end of 2015 he was borrowing money to support his habit. On January 8, 2016, Doris was found bludgeoned to death with a hammer; Mark was convicted of her murder two years later, and was sentenced to life in prison. The full story is recounted in Investigation Discovery's true-crime series American Monster's latest episode.

Flamboyant Fashionista/ British Spy

Became Queen Elizabeth’s Dressmaker

During World War II, one of London’s most prominent fashion designers led a secret life as head of an espionage unit operating behind German lines. Sir Hardy Amies became an important figure in Britain's espionage operations against the Nazis, despite secret service concerns over his “precious appearance and manner.” Confidential files at the Public Record Office released last week and reported by Air Mail reveal that, at age 30, the flamboyant young couturier became an unlikely intelligence officer in Brussels. He rose to the head of the Belgian section and was responsible for sending spies across enemy lines in Germany—although he once irritated his controllers in London by organizing an impromptu fashion shoot for Vogue. Recruited in 1941 for the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the young Amies, impressed his controllers with his mastery of French and German learned during his years as an apprentice in the fashion industry. He began work as a training officer in London and within four years had been promoted to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. Amies left the service after the war and founded his dressmaking business in Savile Row in 1946, designing for Princess Elizabeth. In 1955, he was appointed the Queen's dressmaker, and retired at 80, with the Queen's blessing, after she knighted him in 1989.

Seven-Thirty Thursday:

“Reed Bunzel‘s Seven-Thirty Thursday is an intensely personal tale that echoes of both Greg Isles and John Hart. Rick Devlin is living proof of the old Thomas Wolfe adage that you can’t go home again, especially in the wake of his mother’s murder at his father’s hand in his once beloved Charleston, South Carolina. That is until new evidence surfaces that suggests his father may be innocent, leading Devlin to launch his own investigation. It turns out pretty much everyone involved is hiding something and it’s up to him to sort through the grisly morass to get to the truth. This establishes Bunzel as a kind of Will Faulkner of the thriller-writing world. His effortless prose crackles with color and authenticity as the brooding Charleston skies sets the stage for the storm that’s coming.” —Providence Journal