Let it snow!
No sign of a white Christmas? Well, get stuck into this winter wonderland
This past week I’ve been lucky enough to see some real life snow in the Alps & despite being past the grand old age of forty, I still get excited about snow. It’s the wonderful kind of wintry*: everything looks that bit less bare & that bit prettier, sound is muffled and it’s lovely to be wrapped up warm either inside with a hot chocolate & a roaring fire or outside on a pair of skis or building a snowman.
(*though when experienced anywhere not equipped to deal with it, snow is a right pain)
As a result, this week’s post is all about wonderful wintriness from all over. When writing about wintry tales, it can be difficult to find anything that isn’t scandi-noir or true crime, but I’ve managed it. The first half is quite crime-tinged (though not entirely) and the latter half is not at all - so feel free to skip down there if crime takes not your fancy.
TL;DR
Read Snow by John Banville and Clockwork, or All Wound Up by Philip Pullman, watch Fargo and Trapped, listen to 30 for 30’s episode ‘On the Ice’ and watch Cool Runnings, Groundhog Day and I’m Thinking of Ending Things.
READ
John Banville is hardly a ‘hidden gem’ of an author but he is an intriguing one. He was shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize with The Book of Evidence (which I highly recommend) and later won the Prize in 2005 for The Sea. A prolific writer with well over twenty novels to his credit, he used to sometimes publish under the pseudonym B.W. Black or Benjamin Black. Banville began publishing under the moniker in 2007 in order to free himself of the literary expectations placed on him when publishing a new book: he has a reputation for big-ass words that I’d never heard of before & spending up to a day perfecting just the one sentence.
Writing as Black allowed him to bash out whodunnits in a matter of months & the author’s true identity was never a secret. In 2020, he released himself further with the publication of Snow, under his own name once more.
A 1950s murder mystery novel featuring Quirke, the dipsomaniac pathologist from the Benjamin Black books, working alongside detective StJohn Strafford, it wound up becoming the first in a new series to which Banville can add a new title roughly once a year. It’s beautifully written, perfectly plotted and so evocative as Banville describes the snow-deadened landscape in which a murder takes place.
Philip Pullman is a master of the ‘wintry book’ genre: just look at the gargantuan success of the His Dark Materials trilogy (if you haven’t read them, please do so. Immediately.)
In this non-crime caper, Clockwork, or All Wound Up tells the story of two men who have started something they don’t know how to finish and how each man’s challenge becomes intertwined with the other. It’s a short novella that’s easily read, quick to finish and worth revisiting each winter.
WATCH
As a devotee of the Coen Brothers, I wasn’t so sure when I heard that their 1996 masterpiece, Fargo, was being made into a TV series. But thankfully I needn’t have worried. Rather than simply rehashing the story for the small screen, Fargo for TV takes inspiration from the film and runs in its own direction with it.
The biggest testament to the quality of the the show is that though it started without any involvement from the Coen Brothers, they came on board as executive producers after the first season as they were so impressed with the script.
Set in & around Fargo, North Dakota, each series is its own contained crime-caper storyline, set in a different time period with different characters. The cast in every season features actors you’ll recognise & those you won’t and the accents alone kept me entertained, never mind the plots: North Dakotans sound great.
The final crime instalment for this week comes from Iceland - I am nothing if not international. I stumbled across Trapped on Prime Video back in one of the later lockdowns and soon binged both seasons in quick succession.
It’s a classic scandi-noir tale that starts with a dismembered torso washing ashore. The town’s chief of police (recognisable as the murderous Yank in the ten gallon hat to those who watched the first season of The Tourist with Jamie Dornan on BBC; turns out he’s no Yank, but Icelandic - fair play) reckons the body likely came from the weekly ferry which is currently in-port. The ferry is held and, as the investigation begins, we learn about all the horrid things all the people on board have been up to. If you enjoyed The Bridge and The Killing, I cannot tell you how much you will love this.
LISTEN
On the Ice is the tale of the first all-women team to trek to the North Pole. In 1995, a newspaper ad called for interested women to apply for a spot on the adventure - no experience necessary. After ‘auditions’ on Dartmoor, a group of 60 was whittled down and, following training & lots of media interviews, off they set on 14 March 1997.
Told through their own words, the story touches on each of their personal circumstances beforehand & experience during the journey: one of the team had young triplets, another had recently had a double mastectomy following breast cancer. They describe themselves as ‘ordinary women’, as in they weren’t experienced Arctic explorers prior to this expedition, but listening to their story will prove otherwise. The team members are self-deprecating, funny & warm - all people I would love to sit down with & listen to for hours. It’s really worth your time.
WATCH
Last week I extolled the virtues of movies from the 1980s, well, this week I’m all about the ‘90s: 1993 to be specific, when the first two of my three recommendations were released.
Cool Runnings is so much fun and works so well as a winter film because a large part of it also features the island of Jamaica. So you get a lovely balance of beautiful sunshine followed by the snow-capped peaks of the Canadian Rockies. It’s peak feel-good (see what I did there??) & you’ve all probably seen it before but always worth a re-watch.
Another classic winter staple and yet another Bill Murray recommendation from me is Groundhog Day. Apparently this was Murray’s last time working with Harold Ramis who had co-starred alongside him in Ghostbusters, thanks to Murray’s outrageously awful behaviour on set and the pair only reconnected just before the latter’s death in 2014.
For those who don’t know, Murray plays a horrible weatherman Phil Connors who is sent to a small town to cover a story involving a groundhog (yes, it’s a real animal). Connors sees everything & everyone there as beneath him and is forced to relive the same day over & over again until he learns his lesson. It sounds preachy, & I guess it is if you want to look at it that way, but it’s also considered one of the greatest comedies ever made.
As an added bonus, read Adam Daniel’s piece for the Conversation on his experience of watching the movie every day for a year.
Finally - neither crime nor comedy but Kaufman. Charlie Kaufman is known for writing Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, for which he won an Oscar. But he has also directed films - one of which is 2020’s “I’m Thinking of Ending Things”.
Starring Jessie Buckley, Jesse Plemons (did the casting director have a thing for Jessies??), David Thewlis and the incredible Toni Colette, I’m Thinking of Ending Things is as weird & unexpected as all Kaufman movies. It tells the story of Lucy going to meet boyfriend Jake’s parents for the first time - they have only been dating for six weeks. From there on it becomes surreal as you’d expect from Kaufman with more than a tinge of wintry horror to it, thanks to the blizzard, the age changes and the concern external characters have for Lucy’s safety.