Tag Archives: Crime

The Man with the Getaway Face by Richard Stark

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Tough guy Parker needs a new face because he’s in trouble with the Outfit. He gets his new face but keeps his old attitude toward other people: “They were in and he worked with them or they were out and he ignored them or they were trouble and he took care of them”.  

This is the second in the long series of novels about Parker, who steals for a living. The time is 1963. The target is an armored car. Parker doesn’t like the setup but he needs the money. The plot doesn’t make a lot of sense, but Parker is always fun to be around, so long as he’s “taking care” of someone else.  (12/27/11)

The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity by James M. Cain

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Cain wrote these two novellas in the 30s. Each is about a man and a woman who knock off the woman’s husband. Both are written in the first-person, from the man’s perspective. There are few descriptive passages, just fast-moving narrative and lots of dialog. The men and women meet and quickly start plotting their crimes. Neither story ends happily. And neither story is very plausible. (Maybe greedy, passionate people trying to commit the perfect murder always come up with plans that are too complicated.)

One bit of commentary from Double Indemnity: “I had killed a man, for money and a woman. I didn’t have the money and I didn’t have the woman”. That sums up the situation for both these guys.  (12/10/10)

Breakout by Richard Stark

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One in the series of Parker crime novels. Tough guy Parker gets arrested doing a burglary and has to break out of jail. Then he agrees to perform another job and that gets fouled up too. Earlier ones in the series are better.  (1/14/10)

What We’re Up Against Regarding Guns

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The governor of Arizona has signed a law that requires guns acquired in gun buy-back programs to be sold. If a police department in Arizona buys your gun in order to reduce the likelihood that it will be used to commit a crime (such as shooting a police officer), they can’t destroy it. They have to sell it to a gun dealer, who can then resell it and return it to its rightful place in the community.

Police had argued that they were allowed to destroy guns acquired in such programs, even though an earlier Arizona law required that they sell any guns seized during crimes. The NRA and gun fanatics argued that destroying valuable weaponry is wasteful.

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/ariz-bill-requiring-resale-buyback-guns-signed

It’s Nice When the World Makes Sense

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Even if the underlying facts aren’t so great at all.

Case 1: Paul Krugman ties together two recent stories: how the economic evidence for cutting government spending during a recession is non-existent, and how cutting spending on programs like Medicare and Social Security is the preferred strategy of the rich. It probably won’t make any difference that the scientific support for government austerity during an economic downturn has been demolished, since facts don’t necessarily trump ideology. For the most part, the political class is subservient to the upper class. Marx, who helped generate a vast number of ideologists himself, wasn’t wrong about everything.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/26/opinion/krugman-the-one-percents-solution.html?ref=paulkrugman

Krugman cites the study I wrote about under the title “What the 1% Want from Washington”:

https://whereofonecanspeak.com/2013/04/07/what-the-1-want-from-washington/

Case 2:  According to the New York Times, the Boston police commissioner admitted this week that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (joh-KHAHR’ tsahr-NEYE’-ehv) and the boat in which he hid were both in the 20-block search perimeter all along. It’s not clear why Tsarnaev wasn’t found during the manhunt, but it wasn’t because the boat was 1 block outside the search perimeter, as the Watertown police chief claimed. (See the post below, which includes a transcript of the police discussing where to search.)

In this case, it didn’t make sense that a small army of police failed to search an area 2 or 3 blocks from where the guy dumped his getaway car. What didn’t make any sense now makes some sense. People make mistakes and then make excuses. No shock there.Â