This issue of Idiosyncratic Musings is a lot of information about my forthcoming novel, followed by gushing about the Olivier Assayas HBO series Irma Vep.

Novel Excerpt & Presale!

The Lethe Killer, the sci-fi detective novel I wrote with my friend Joe under the name J. J. Carswell, is on presale for release on June 8, 2027. You can order it from Powell’s, bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, many other bookstore websites, or by requesting it wherever books are sold.

The first mystery from the book is available as a free excerpt on Kindle or at www.jjcarswell.com/excerpt. At 35 pages, it’s both a standalone story & a good introduction to our detective Iraj & her world. The excerpt has its own Goodreads page.

How To Help

If you are excited to support the book, thank you, thank you, thank you. There are three very helpful things you can do:

1. Buy lots of copies.

Preorders matter a lot. It might seem strange to order a box full of copies of the same book, but please think of this as a Kickstarter campaign to help me keep doing what I love. Whatever you might be willing & able to contribute to that cause over the next 7+ months, please consider dividing it into many copies of The Lethe Killer. I will be eternally thankful.

2. Tell everyone.

Most books get sold by word of mouth. I often describe the book as "a futuristic detective novel" or “sci-fi noir” published by Hyperion Avenue / Disney Books.

3. Invite “J. J. Carswell” to your group.

Book clubs, classrooms, writers' workshops, any group Joe & I can talk to (virtually or if we come close to you next summer) about the excerpt or the process or the full book when it’s out, we will make it happen.

Everyone’s excitement & support means more to me than I can say. And while you’re waiting for June 8…

Irma Vep!

For reasons I don’t fully understand* & despite being the only person in America with no desire to write, direct, or appear in a movie, I have always loved movies about moviemaking. Mulholland Drive! The Player! Sunset Boulevard! Close-Up! Living in Oblivion! Once Upon a Time in Hollywood! 8½ & Contempt don’t get exclamation points but they are monuments for a reason, & I’m certain I will love Day For Night when I get to it.

Yet somehow I had missed Olivier Assayas’s 2022 meta-sequel to (or meta-remake of?) his 1996 meta-classic Irma Vep. Four years late, I can report that while I like the ’96 movie, I love the ’22 miniseries.

The term “meta” suffers from overuse & may be primarily pejorative at this point? I am happy to admit that Irma Vep is too clever for its own good. In 1996, French director Assayas made a movie about a French director who has cast Hong Kong star Maggie Cheung in his remake of the 1915 serial Vampires, a classic of French silent film. Maggie Cheung played herself in Irma Vep, then married & divorced Assayas, then starred in another movie of his. Eighteen years after that, Assayas makes a limited series about a French director who, unsatisfied by his previous remake of the 1915 serial Vampires, is remaking it once again as a limited series, which production is haunted by memories of his ex-wife, an actress from Hong Kong who starred in the previous remake.

All this winking self-reference is funny in places but also turns out to be strangely moving. Actual French director Vincent Macaigne, who plays fictional French director Rene Vidal & seems intended as a stand-in for Assayas, is wonderfully neurotic & sweet & I want to be his friend or his character’s friend or however one might sort that out. Alicia Vikander, who takes the Maggie Cheung role as the international star playing Irma Vep, is tremendous, balancing can’t-look-away star quality with stars-are-people-too humanity. Lars Eidinger steals nearly every scene he’s in. The whole series is playful & sexy & earnest/self-mocking in equal measure about the magic & seriousness of art. It’s so French but also a time capsule for how global & American all filmmaking has become since an earlier Rene Vidal first remade Vampires in 1996.

Total catnip for me.

*Speculative reasons I love movies about moviemaking:

(1) I enjoy that everyone involved sleeps, eats, breathes movies & I can soak in their creative passions with enough psychological distance from any creative passion of my own. Related, movies are very personal to moviemakers & I like very personal art?

(2) I enjoy cinema magic & these movies make it feel all the more magical by showing it dead & then alive, like Naomi Watts turning a ridiculous script into the breathtaking audition scene in Mulholland Drive. Lars Eidinger does a bit of this in Irma Vep, though I think we are mostly supposed to take the Vampires scenes we see as not so good.

(3) I am a sucker for meta cleverness, especially of the life-imitating-art-imitating-life variety perhaps because I spend a lot of time in made-up places inside my own mind.