Helen Davey Reviews Fever Dream

I have just finished reading Dennis Palumbo's book, Fever Dream, the second in a series of action-packed, cleverly constructed tales featuring Dr. Daniel Rinaldi, a clinical psychologist who specializes in working with the Pittsburgh Police Department treating victims of violent crimes. The intricate plot twists and surprises keep the reader turning pages, and the short chapters invite us to read just one more. To my surprise, I finished the book in just one sitting.

However, it wasn't just the intricate story that kept me riveted; it was the writer's in-depth understanding of trauma. As a therapist myself, I appreciate the author's emphasis on the need for his character Rinaldi to be able to put himself into the "world" -- the subjective experience -- of a patient who's in a traumatized state.

Drawing heavily on Dr. Robert Stolorow's groundbreaking work on trauma (See "Counting

My People"), Palumbo -- this Hollywood-screenwriter-turned-psychotherapist -- deepens the mystery story with his own clinical observations of traumatized patients gleaned over his 24 years in the field of psychology.The theme of trauma spills over into Palumbo's poignant, intensely vivid descriptions of his hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The author's strong sense of place makes this city I've never seen come alive for me, as if I'm familiar with its essence.
 

Pittsburgh itself becomes one of the characters, struggling between the old and the new, gentrification versus the old blue-collared immigrant identity, and the anxiety that comes with the loss of an identifiable culture. The story of Pittsburgh is being repeated all over this country, where the uncertainty that comes with modernity weighs heavily on all of us.

The character of Daniel Rinaldi is that of a flawed human being who's learned -- through his own work on himself -- to trust his own impulses and instincts. Using his capacity to empathize with others, Daniel intuitively solves puzzles that others can't -- though despite his herculean efforts for the Police Department, he remains a thorn in their side. I'm sure this theme will be further developed in future books in the series.

I look forward to reading Night Terrors, the third book in the series, and to seeing what mind-bending new mystery Dr. Rinaldi will solve.  


Reposted from Huffington Post

Peter O'Toole and Sid Caesar: Two Fallen Redwoods

But, from a personal perspective, the two iconic performers whose deaths resonated most with me were actor Peter O'Toole and comedy genius Sid Caesar. In differing ways, their lives intersected with mine in a manner that had a profound impact.

Though I've been a licensed psychotherapist for the past 26 years, in my prior career I was a Hollywood screenwriter. One of the scripts I co-wrote was for a film called My Favorite Year, which starred Peter O'Toole and featured a fictional 1950s TV comic named King Kaiser -- who was based on Sid Caesar.

As the character named Alan Swann -- a thinly-disguised Errol Flynn -- O'Toole gave what I and many of his fans consider one of his best performances. He perfectly captured Flynn's exuberance, narcissism and insecurity -- as well as the famous swashbuckler's self-deprecating wit.

In the role of King Kaiser -- host of a weekly comedy series based on Your Show of Shows -- Joseph Bologna replicated Sid Caesar's enormous personal energy, embodying his infamous anger as well as his comedic intensity.

Both O'Toole and Caesar were, in their heyday, larger than life personalities. Famous for their struggles with alcohol, they were willing to live life on their own terms -- even when the consequences of that choice caused them more grief than glory.

Regardless, each, in my opinion, should have been given the opportunity to work much more than they did. Especially when both performers were at the top of their game. That they weren't always afforded that opportunity is our collective loss. In fact, it's unlikely that we'll see many performers of their monumental talent and outsized personalities again.

When each of their deaths were reported in the news, I thought of something a friend of mine had said when film director Stanley Kubrick died. "Well, that's one more fallen redwood in a rapidly dwindling forest."

That forest is now missing two more redwoods.

As a fan, and as a former screenwriter who'd once been professionally connected -- at least tangentially -- with both men, I mourn the passing of Peter O'Toole and Sid Caesar. And offer a posthumous thanks for the richness that each added to my life.

Rest in Peace.

A former Hollywood screenwriter, Dennis Palumbo is a licensed psychotherapist and author of Writing From the Inside Out. He also writes the Daniel Rinaldi mystery series.


Reposted From The Huffington Post

PITTSBURGH: The Steel City in Transition

Senator John Heinz History Center

Old Soho Furnace

ca. 1876

Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation Collection Photographs, 1864-1953, MSP 33, Library and Archives Division, Senator John Heinz History Center

 
With the publication of my novel, Mirror Image, a lot of people have asked why I set the mystery thriller in Pittsburgh. My usual, somewhat facetious answer is that New York, LA, San Francisco, Chicago and Miami were all taken.

The real answer, apart from the fact that I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, is that my home town provides the best setting possible for a contemporary novel, and for the most obvious of reasons: it represents what is happening to many cities throughout the country. At least, the ones that are struggling to survive the transition from the 20th to the 21st century, from an industrial and manufacturing-based economy to a digitial and information-based one.

When we think of eastern cities, we think of Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Detroit. Burly, muscular cities whose very foundations were laid by immigrant men and women, hard workers whose daily toil fueled those cities' economic engines.

Pittsburgh was an exemplar of that depiction. With the accent on was. Famous for its steel mills and factories---and for the resultant smoky air and soot-coated buildings---the Pittsburgh I knew as a child has undergone a renaissance in the past thirty years.

For example, the seventeen miles of steel mills that once lined its converging rivers are no more. (I remember them well; for two summers during my undergraduate days at Pitt I shoveled coal into the blast furnace at J&L Steel on Second Avenue, popping salt pills to stave off dehydration.) Moreover, with the arrival of software companies and the proliferating financial institutions, the downtown has sprouted shining new towers and off-loaded many of its older, WW-II era structures. And the air is pretty clean and soot-free.

What makes Pittsburgh an interesting phenomenon is the way it's handling this transition. Not that it hasn't been, nor continues to be, rocky. Nor without its casualities---primarily blue collar workers and their families. What Billy Joel sang about in "Allentown" is true for most of Pittsburgh's small outlying communities and cities whose survival depended on the steel and coal industries. Even at the newly gentrified core of downtown Pittsburgh, the Steel City itself, what new steel there is---embedded in freshly-poured concrete---is imported from Japan.

But, like it or not, in today's economy---let alone today's global marketplace---eastern industrial cities have to change or die. Pittsburgh is changing---has changed---and this resulting mix of old and new actually gives the city a fresh opportunity to grow. When you add to this its rich bounty of endowments
from such heavy-weights as the Mellons, the Scaifes and the Carnegies, as well as its nationally-known universities and hospitals, Pittsburgh is well-positioned to be as relevant as any other American city. Plus, it boasts the Steelers!

Of course, change is a mixed blessing, especially for those of us whose lives straddled both "eras" of Pittsburgh. A fact I make use of in Mirror Image. After a traumatic experience involving one of his patients, the novel's narrator, a psychologist named Daniel Rinaldi, is musing on how mixed that blessing is as he heads home...

"We made the turn onto my street, whose edge fell away onto a panoramic view of the Three Rivers and the glistening lights of contemporary Pittsburgh. Gone were the steel mills and factories; in their place stood razor-thin buildings of glass and chrome, of software and bond trading.

"The city had changed a lot since I was a kid, a shot-and-a-beer town colliding with the Information Age. Though sometimes, like tonight, I missed the Pittsburgh I grew up in. Forged by immigrants. Musty like the smell of damp wool. A mosaic of thick accents and old neighborhoods, clanging trolleys and cobblestone streets. Before mini-malls and decaf lattes. Before spaghetti became pasta."

I guess, in the end, though a blessing may be mixed, it's still a blessing. In these difficult, uncertain times, that's something every Pittsburgh native---even if reluctantly---has come to understand.

Holmes and Watson in the Great Outdoors

With the success of the new film Sherlock Holmes, starring Robert Downey, Jr. as Holmes and Jude Law as Dr. Watson, I'm reminded of the following pithy little fable. (But I'll be damned if I can remember where I first heard it.)

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson went for an outing one weekend far north of London. They pitched camp, ate a rustic meal over a wood-fueled fire, and sat contently as night fell, smoking their pipes and talking about nothing in particular.

Finally, they decided to turn in.

Some hours later, Holmes woke up his sleeping companion and pointed up at the ink-black sky, dotted with hundreds of luminous stars.

"Tell me, Watson," said Holmes. "When you look up at the night sky, what do you perceive?"

Watson blinked awake and contemplated the heavens above them.

"Well, meteorologically, I can tell from the striations of cloud that the weather will soon turn inclement. Astrologically, I can see that Orion's belt has shifted a bit toward the horizon. Astronomically, I understand that those stars twinkling above are actually roaring suns, giving off tremendous energy. Chronologically, I realize that the distances between those stars and our world are so vast, the light we see now actually shone from them millions of years ago. And, philosophically, I comprehend that in the limitless vastness of the universe, man and his works are quite small and insignificant."

Then Watson turned to his friend.

"Now, Holmes, what do you perceive?"

Holmes sighed. "I perceive that someone has stolen our tent!"

I don't think a Zen monk could have fashioned a better story about mindfulness, and the seductions of over-intellectualizing the world we experience. Plus, it's funny.

I'm also reminded of a quote by Fritz Perls, one of the founder of Gestalt therapy, who advised his clinical students to "Dare to be superficial." In other words, when working with a patient in therapy, pay more attention to what's actually happening in front of you than to any elaborate theories you may be formulating in your head.

Anyway, as the current (and certainly post-modern) version of Conan Doyle's great detective character continues to make noise at the box office, I could think of no better time to re-visit this wonderful anecdote about Holmes and Watson. And if anybody has any information about the story's origin, I'd be happy to hear it. 

Through a Glass Darkly: Crime Fiction as a Window on American Culture

 
The author Tom Wolfe (The Bonfire of the Vanities) once said that the purpose of fiction was, among other things, to chronicle a society's "status details." In other words, to give the reader a felt sense of the social, cultural and political realities of the world the novel portrays.

Usually, this task has been seen as primarily the province of the "literary" novel, such as Wharton's The Age of Innocence, Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, or Updike's "Rabbit" novels. But I believe that, in a similar manner, the best crime fiction has been exploring and illuminating the contours of American society for years.

For example, to get a sense of how Los Angeles worked in the 30's and 40's -- how money and power actually operated in the lives of both the powerful and the desperate -- you need only read Raymond Chandler. The "mean streets" that private eye Phillip Marlowe walked took the reader from the monied mansions of robber barons to the back alleys of two-bit hustlers and the chumps they made their prey.

Just as, fifty years later, nobody provides a clearer view of contemporary L.A. than Michael Connelly, particularly with his Harry Bosch novels. From the O.J. trial to the Ramparts police scandal, from the self-inflicted woes of the wealthy and influential to the municipal response to torrential rains, Connelly uses his dogged police detective to dissect life in the City of Angels.

For a wry, amused and knowledgeable look at Boston society, high and low, you'll find few better guides than the late Robert B. Parker's character Spenser. Or equally few authors who capture the self-delusions and broken-hearted dreams of petty criminals as well as Elmore Leonard. And I can't think of a writer who better reveals the dark, noirish heart of the ostensibly laid-back surfer scene than Kem Nunn.

My point is, great crime fiction offers what no sociology text can provide. To feel the living, breathing essence of New Orleans, both pre- and post-Katrina, check out the Dave Robicheaux series by James Lee Burke. In similar fashion, Tony Hillerman brought the Native Americans of the modern Southwest to life in his novels about Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn. Just as Sara Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski gave fictional heft to the idea of a strong female protagonist, and Walter Mosley's "Easy" Rawlins gave us perhaps our most well-known African-American one. Since its inception as a genre, crime fiction has both mirrored and commented on society's often-tumultuous change. In short, it told the truth about it.

So forget FrontLine. If you want to get the straight dope about the thriving gun trade going on along the border between the US and Mexico, look no further than T. Jefferson Parker's thriller, Iron River.

If you want to know what it's really like to be a cop, read Joseph Wambaugh. If you want to hear the authentic street rhythms of New York's Lower East Side, read Richard Price.

What all these fine crime novelists have in common is their use of suspense and intricate plots to underscore the conflict among vivid, fully-realized characters; and, moreover, how that conflict is inevitably intensified by the social context these fictional men and women find themselves in. Utilizing the high stakes and narrative drive of crime fiction, these writers demonstrate how issues of class and status, and the yearning to re-invent oneself, continue to define the American character.

In my view, no genre of fiction illuminates the "status details" of our evolving, conflicted society better than crime fiction. Where and how that conflict is played out, and how realistically it's depicted, determines how powerfully the novel affects us.

In a line stretching from Dashiel Hammett to Dennis Lehane, from James M. Cain to George Pellicanos, from Ed McBain to Sue Grafton, the best crime fiction -- like all great fiction, period -- shows us who we are.