Time Capsule: December 2014

Reading: Full Force & Effect by Mark Greaney

It’s really good to know that the Tom Clancy universe is in great hands following the tragic and untimely death of the best-selling author back in 2013. 

For some time, there’s been internet conjecture about how much of the co-written work Clancy actually wrote, but it hardly matters because Mark Greaney, the heir apparent to the Jack Ryan world – apparently, and hopefully – does the characters and situations that Clancy created justice. Full Force and Effect is the first book that features Jack Ryan to be published since Clancy’s death.

The one thing I found somewhat annoying about Clancy was his overindulgence when it comes to the explanations of technology. I don’t need four pages (or even four paragraphs) on the workings of a 9mm Glock pistol. Thankfully for my tastes, Greaney has eliminated this, and the book is shorter and, as a result, moves far better.

Jack Ryan is back in the White House and his son, Jack Jr., works for the covert intelligence agency The Campus, and both covert and overt arms of the intel community are working on unravelling a new plot masterminded by North Korea, who has a new leader eager to show the world what he is made of. Nuclear capability is sought by the North Koreans, and they plan to achieve that via mining a just-discovered valuable mineral deposit.

Of course, the Ryan’s, and their usual associates – among them, John Clark, Ding Chavez, Mary Pat Foley and Dominic Caruso, to name only a handful – are trying to prevent that from happening, whilst dealing with the usual mix of espionage and political entanglements. Okay, so maybe it isn’t quite as detailed as Clancy’s work, but it reads like a Tom Clancy novel, and that’s good enough for me. I devoured the book. Hopefully Greaney writes many more.

Watching: The Musketeers

Thanks to Foxtel bumping up my channel package, I get BBC First now, which introduced me to The Musketeers, a new take on the famous novel by Alexandre Dumas. It’s filmed in the Czech Republic, and, like so much else that gets a run on the British public broadcaster, this project has movie-type production values. If only our public broadcaster, the ABC, was given so much money to make spectacular television like this.

If you don’t know the story of The Musketeers, it’s fairly simple: they are elite soldiers protecting the king and queen of France, and also their country’s interests, against various foes – the Spanish get a fair run in this regard – and there’s plenty of musketry, sword-fighting, close escapes and witty dialogue as Athos, D’Artagnan, Aramis and Porthos carry out missions as assigned to them by Captain Treville. 

Of course, the shadowy Cardinal Richelieu makes an appearance, and is excellently played by Peter Capaldi of Doctor Who fame. Being a British production, all the French characters here have English accents, but you soon forget about that little quirk, because the show itself is so much fun.

I’m on Season One, and a second season premiered recently. Most of the cast are locked into long-term deals, so there’s a hope that we’ll get a long-running series. It’s a good show to watch for some escapism. When you want to watch something without a thousand and one plot lines, a show where there’s good and there’s bad, and a clear line between them, you can’t go past The Musketeers. It’s good fun – check it out!

Listening To: Indian Summer by Tyler Hilton

You might know singer/songwriter Tyler Hilton as the obnoxious Chris Keller from One Tree Hill or, more probably, as Elvis Presley from the excellent Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, but aside from acting, Hilton is an accomplished artists as well. He did all his own vocal work on both One Tree Hill and Walk the Line, and has a string of excellent albums to his name, all of which are criminally under listened. I felt so strongly about this project that I was a part of the crowd-funding to get it off the ground, and, for that, got an advance copy of the album. It’s on high rotation now.

The most recent release is the acoustic-based Indian Summer, which features music leaning towards folk and modern country, and the stripped-back sound allows Hilton’s vocals to shine. There’s nothing better than an artists who writes everything he records, and Indian Summer is lyrically strong. It’s also catchy, with summer themes throughout – as you’d guess from the title.

As an aside, One Tree Hill, for, on face value, just a teen drama, is actually more than that, and responsible for some great music from artists we might not have otherwise heard of, among them, Bryan Greenberg, Kate Voegele and Bethany Joy Lenz. That trio are still releasing music to this day. We can only hope that Tyler Hilton has plenty more up his sleeve, too.