Setting Times stories to music: From Kasabian to Snoop Dogg
The soundtracks for the first two Great Reads of the week were by Scottish bands: We Were Promised Jetpacks, and Jesus and Mary Chain. (Don’t the Scots have a knack for great band names? The former is one of my favorite names ever.)
I lived in Scotland as a kid, and ever since I’ve gravitated to Scottish bands, from the Proclaimers and Mull Historical Society to Camera Obscura and Teenage Fanclub. (Embarrassing confession: even have a sneaking fondness for the S-S-S-Saturday in the Bay City Rollers’ “Saturday Night.”)
The latter two bands in particular -- no, not the Bay City Rollers -- have that perfect combo of pure pop and clever lyrics. Catnip to me.
Sometime it would be grand to have a whole week of Scottish soundtracks. Actually, next week would be perfect, because the Scots are voting on their independence referendum Thursday. Cannot wait to hear the result.
Anyway, in these roundups of the week gone by, I’d like to offer the first paragraphs of each Great Read (or, as they’re known in print, Column One) -- maybe they’ll buy your eye and you can settle in for a good weekend read. And you’ll also get the songs that inspired me while editing the stories, or reading them later if my fellow editor Millie Quan ushered them through. A story soundtrack!
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San Diego homebuyers get an unwelcome feeling
Jerald Rice typed his wife’s name into an Internet search engine. A series of unsettling stunts had perplexed him.
Advertisements for sex with his wife popped up. “Adult entertainment of all types when my husband is not home,” the ads said. “Not for the faint of heart. Come see me during the day while my husband is at work and we can get our freak on.”
Some ads contained the couple’s address and a photograph of the home they shared with their two children. Some had his wife’s photograph, he said.
Alarmed, he called his wife at work and then spoke to an FBI agent. He installed security equipment and pleaded with the online sites to remove the ads.
Janice Ruhter, Rice’s wife, had just given birth to their second child. “I was scared,” she said.
Since buying their home in San Diego’s upscale Carmel Valley, the couple had been plagued with strangers at their door, deluges of books and magazines they had not ordered, solicitations they had not sought.
Someone wanted them out of the house.
#soundtrack: “This Is My House, This Is My Home,” by We Were Promised Jetpacks. I thought the song had the appropriate amount of dread.
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Secrecy and doubt shroud Nicaragua’s huge canal plans
The Chinese engineers passed by Antonio Cardenas’ dusty plot of land the other day. They didn’t say anything to him. They never do.
In this town on Nicaragua’s Pacific coast, a withering drought is scorching farmland and parching cattle. Once-green fields have turned yellow-brown. The Brito River is nothing but a dry ravine.
But the Chinese engineers and the people who hired them see something different. They see a $50-billion shipping canal that would divide Nicaragua in two as it traveled from the Pacific to the Caribbean, bisect Central America’s largest lake like an engineering Moses, and dwarf the 100-year-old Panama Canal.
Cardenas, 32, grew up on this land. Brick and wood shacks with concrete floors are the only buildings on the plot. Two girls swung in a hammock and a baby did not stop crying. Eight bony cows stood behind a wire fence.
“They pass by, tell us nothing,” Cardenas said of the engineers. “Are they going to pay us? Give us other land? Send us to live on some mountain?”
Nearby, Jose Miguel Alvarez has been planting bean, corn and banana, and raising cattle, on his plot for 30 years. Even amid the drought, fruit trees and bougainvillea on the property were surprisingly lush; a small concrete swimming hole sat empty but spoke to future dreams.
“When I came here, there was nothing,” he said. “I wouldn’t sell it for anything. This is my children’s patrimony.”
#soundtrack: “Coast to Coast,” by Jesus and Mary Chain. Such a great band.
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His own words help bring down New Orleans prosecutor
Sal Perricone always had something to prove. Growing up poor and Italian in a city dominated by Creoles and Anglos, Perricone found respect on the streets after high school by becoming a cop. He pulled graveyard shifts to put himself through college and eventually took night classes to earn a law degree while serving as a New Orleans police detective.
The law degree helped him jump to the FBI, where he was a special agent for five years. In 1991 he landed at the U.S. attorney’s office in New Orleans, crusading against fraud in a city as known for political corruption as it is for jazz. Over two decades, he went after the Mafia, cops, judges and even a former governor. He became one of New Orleans’ most feared prosecutors.
The people he put behind bars — the thugs, the high-power politicians — were intent on seeing Perricone fall. His enemies left a fake bomb and other death threats on his front porch. They never touched him. Instead, it was his own arrogance and a burning secret resentment toward the world of privilege and power that brought him down.
His prosecutorial misconduct was exposed by a pretentious writing style, particularly his fondness for obscure words found usually only on SAT exams or in the work of Victorian poet Robert Browning.
The “online 21st century carnival” Perricone created, in the words of one federal judge, swept away nearly the entire leadership of one of the nation’s largest U.S. attorney’s offices and imperiled some of the state’s biggest criminal prosecutions.
#soundtrack: “Bigmouth Strikes Again,” by the Smiths. A friend coincidentally sent me the link to this video of a live performance in 1986. Beefcake Morrissey!
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On a night out, Minnesotans hope to get lucky at meat raffle
They sit at a table near the bar, the three farmer’s daughters and their boisterous friend, all of them single, in their 40s and 50s. With Johnny Cash on the jukebox, their cocktails before them, they’re ready for an action-packed Saturday night.
Sure, there are plenty of eligible men on hand up here in the Minnesota north woods — good-looking ones too, with summer tans, fishing caps and ready smiles — but these women are eyeing another quarry entirely.
Like a package of raw T-bone steaks, beef tips, thick bottom rounds, butterfly pork chops or a nice roast. In a pinch, they’ll take chicken breasts, ribs, sausage, bratwurst or, heck, even hamburger.
The women are among the crowd at Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 3839, home to a long-standing cultural practice that’s as much a part of this state’s identity as hockey, brutal winters and Lake Wobegon: the meat raffle.
At hundreds of bars, pubs and American Legion halls — in big cities and in small towns like Moose Lake, Long Prairie and Fergus Falls — the faithful gather for a few drinks and a chance at taking home that night’s dinner without having to shoot it themselves.
Mary Wiener (her real name, honest), a lab technician from St. Cloud, starts a cheerleader’s chant, and the farmer’s daughters — out for a women-only camping weekend — join in, raising their glasses as though engaging in some holiday toast.
“Do we want grilled steak?”
“Yeah!”
“Do we want bottom round?”
“Yeah!”
Wiener, a true meat-and-potatoes woman, sips her first Miller Genuine Draft of the evening. “I’m going for the bacon,” she says.
At a dollar a chance, patrons bet on meat raffle and meat bingo, spinning the big wheel or drawing numbers from a jar. They eye their tickets until the winners are called, the losers ripping up their stubs like gamblers at the track.
#soundtrack: “Butcher Blues,” by Kasabian. As a vegetarian I toyed with going with “Meat Is Murder” but decided to go with the flow.
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Murder, they wrote, using this doctor’s ingenious ideas
The doctor’s phone rang. It was another request for his expertise.
A murderous son was donating an organ to his aging father. Somehow, the procedure had to kill the dad. Somehow, the murder weapon had to be the organ itself.
Can you help? pleaded the crime writer, who had six weeks to finish his book.
It is the kind of call cardiologist Douglas Lyle, 67, relishes. He’s gotten many like it — in fact, he’d helped the writer kill before.
When he’s brooding over such questions, Lyle lights a big cigar on the patio of his Lake Forest home and pours himself some good bourbon.
A stout man with penetrating blue eyes and a thinning fringe of exuberant curly hair, Lyle has an encyclopedic memory, a Southerner’s gift for back-porch raconteurship and an expertise in the myriad mechanisms of unnatural death.
He spends two days a week saving patients’ lives at his Laguna Hills heart clinic. The rest of the time, he writes crime novels and tries to answer other crime writers’ questions about how to end their characters’ lives in weird — but scientifically plausible — ways.
When your Mac isn’t working, you go to the Genius Bar. When your car won’t start, you find a mechanic. When you want to find out how long your character will live if his body is stripped of skin, or what kind of poison a killer in medieval Europe might use, or whether a body mummifies if it’s been bricked into a wall for several years, you call Lyle.
“Plot the perfect crime, and the harder it is, the smarter your protagonist will look when he solves it,” Lyle says.
#soundtrack: “Murder Was the Case (Remix),” by Snoop Dogg. I admit that rap and hip-hop aren’t my strength. But I really like this.
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If you have ideas for story soundtracks of your own, tweet the title and artist to @karihow or @LATgreatreads with the hashtag #soundtrack.
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