Pulp Serenade

"Hell and Gone" by Duane Swierczynski (Mulholland Bokos, 2011)

2012-01-27T12:42:00.002-05:00

“This was a new low. Hardie’s new life was smaller and more pathetic than he ever thought possible.”

When we last saw Charlie Hardie, the ex-cop-turned-house-sitter from Fun & Games, he was having a really bad day. After arriving in the Hollywood hills to look after a house, he stumbled into an assassination attempt by “The Accident People” on has-been action actress Lane Madden and wound up on their hit list, as well. By the end of the book, Hardie was wanted by the cops for murder, and leaking blood all over the place. It didn’t seem that things could get any worse for him…but this is Duane Swierczynski we are talking about, and that dude thankfully has a limitless imagination for madness, mayhem, and dismemberment.

As soon as I opened Hell & Gone, I knew I was going to enjoy this. Who else but Swierczynski would preface a book with quotes from both Dante (in the original Italian) and Frank Stallone? It’s emblematic of the way he merges high and low culture in a dizzying, magical, and totally bonkers crime story.

(Side note: I’ve also been known to sporadically quote Frank Stallone. So, Duane, you are not alone.)

In Hell & Gone, Hardie wakes up in one of the worst places imaginable: a secret, underground detention center. Even worse: he’s the new warden. As he surveys his new surroundings, things just don’t add up. There are only four prisoners, all of whom are forced to wear masks; the guards seem more demented and violent than the prisoners; Hardie’s only communication with the outside world is to a nameless, faceless voice that comes through his headset; and the only possible exit supposedly sets off a death device that will blow-up the entire facility. Who can Hardie trust, how can he escape, why is he in charge, and—most importantly—what the hell is going on?

Once again, Swierczynski manages to top his pervious work, which isn’t an easy feat, considering the awesomeness of books like The Wheelman, Severance Package, Expiration Date, and Fun & Games. But with Hell & Gone, Swierczynski doesn’t just up the antics or the violence—actually, it’s less gory than some of his earlier work. Instead, he challenges himself to go in the opposite direction of his previous books. Whereas Fun & Games was his most epic canvas of action yet, in Hell & Gone Swierczynski takes a more minimalist approach, setting nearly the entire book in the underground prison. The location may be limited to only a few rooms, and the cast to only a few characters, but Swierczynski’s imagination is on hyperdrive, and he’s never at a loss for new ways to explore the space or to pit the characters against one another.

One of the things I like most about Swierczynski’s writing is that, even with all the action and joking going on, there’s still room for some good old fashioned philosophical inquires, like this:

“Was that something in his lizard brain, the lizard brains of all men, dating back to the dawn of time? Did prehistoric men wake up and realize how alone they were, how tenuously they clung to life, how everything they knew and loved could be snatched away from them by a smiling predator, teeth gleaming?”

Also, no matter how far-fetched and fantastic the plot becomes, the characters never lose their average-joe mentality. Even the arch villains seem like someone you’d run into at the slushie machine at 7-11.

“You do realize this is a prison, Warden? Maximum security and all that. Do you think the designers of this place would leave anything to chance, and let some prisoner shimmy up a vent or something? Do you think the designers of this place haven’t seen Star Wars?”

Hell & Gone is another homerun for Philadelphia’s mad hatter of crime fiction. And judging by his track record thus far, Point & Shoot—the third and final entry in the Charlie Hardie series—is going to be even better. I can’t friggin’ wait to see what the twisted imagination of Duane Swierczynski has in store for readers next.

LARB on Paul Cain

2012-01-26T12:48:00.006-05:00

"Somebody always takes it about as far as it’ll go, and no one took the hard-boiled farther than Paul Cain. Cain’s entire contribution to the genre — a slim novel and 14 stories, some of which haven’t seen print since the 1930s — is now available as The Complete Slayers from Centipede Press."

Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Noir Editor Boris Dralyuk discusses the career of Paul Cain, one of my favorite hardboiled writers. Check it out!

"Whisper His Sin" by Vin Packer (Gold Medal, 1954)

2012-01-25T11:31:00.003-05:00

In Whisper His Sin, Vin Packer revisits the collegiate setting of her first novel, Spring Fire. Instead of following a young woman in an all-girls school, however, this time Packer writes about a young man in an all-boys school whose affair with his dormitory advisor leads to murder. But despite the similar setting and central relationship, Whisper His Sin is, in my opinion, even better than Spring Fire. Daring and innovatively structured, the novel is as beautiful as it is bleak. Each chapter begins with a snippet from a newspaper account of the crime, or an interview with someone who knew the boys, casting a mist of inevitable dread over every page. Even when things seem to be going so right for the boys, from the very first page we know just how badly things will end for them.

Whisper His Sin is loosely based on the real life Fredan-Wepman murder case, which was still a recent headline when the book came out. In this fictionalized version, the main character is Ferris Sullivan. When he was younger, Ferris was expelled from school for having relations with another boy. Since then, his mother has tried to make him “normal,” and to turn him away from poetry and fine clothes; his father, on the other hand, has just ignored him. Sent away to college, Ferris was hoping to find acceptance. Instead, he wound up sharing a dorm room with a bullying jazz-head and a muscle builder, neither of whom have any tolerance for their new roommate. Ferris’ only ally is the senior dorm advisor, Paul Lasher, whose attentions shelter Ferris as much as they single him out and bring him more shame.

On Christmas break, however, Paul introduces Ferris to a side of New York he had never seen before, and for the first time Ferris finds himself surrounded by other gay young men like himself. Happiness is short lived, however, as a bully from their past forces a confrontation that threatens to oust Ferris and Paul’s relationship, which would not only cause a school scandal, but bring both of their personal lives crashing down. And now that they’ve tasted just how sweet life can be, the lovers would give anything—or do anything—to keep their secret safe, and to stay together.

It is emblematic of Packer that her sympathy lies with the pariahs and the outsiders, those who live shadowy lives pretending to be someone else in order to survive. In this case, they are also murderers. Packer doesn’t pass judgment on her characters or their actions. She’s more interested in exploring how social oppression and sexual repression affect a person’s mental and emotional state.

Vin Packer’s books, when looked at as a whole, are like an alternate history of the 1950s. It was a decade that we now associate with conformity, but she was looking behind the curtains, exploring characters whom society wanted to forget about, those people who didn’t conform to the norm and strived to be individuals in a world that wouldn’t let them be who they wanted to be. As Ferris’ mother tells her son, “A man who can’t walk with other men, and walk like other men, is a misfit, and a misfit is never happy! Not ever!” A palpable fear of being different runs through many of Packer’s novels, and it is clearly pronounced in Whisper His Sin. Some six decades later, society has a come a long way, but we’re still facing a lot of the same issues, and it’s remarkable to look back and see someone writing so pointedly and honestly about these issues—and, most remarkably, getting them printed. Packer’s Gold Medal books are priceless gems of subversion and social commentary, and Whisper His Sin is a marvelous example of not only her politics and sympathy, but also her meticulous craft.

Gold Medal wanted to capitalize on the topicality of the story—the front cover even advertises, “How a strange and twilight love lighted the way to frenzied murder.” (Oddly enough, the front cover shows a man and woman—perhaps showing two men together might have been too racy?) Packer, however, is not interested in exploitation. She is, at heart, a humanist, concerned with getting into the hearts and minds of her characters, understanding them as real people, unlike the world that sees them only as miscreants and aberrations.

Though the plot might not seem like something out of Woolrich or Goodis, Packer’s characters share a similar mournfulness and despair, and they’d be at home in any of those more classic noir novels.

“Hope was dried up in him, leaving a vacancy he could fill with no other emotion. Not hate, not pity, certainly not love—not even fear. Only envy now, a thin thread of it, for the simplicity of the people around him, for what he was sure they had. Dull, uncomplicated lives, minds that did not have to think, and the ability to sleep.”

Packer also goes to lengths to show that her characters, while not justified in their actions, acted out of human fear and desperation.

“Should I live my life out in a state of abject misery and loneliness, just so strangers who don’t give a hoot about me won’t talk about me? Is that a life?”

And while much of the world considered their homosexuality a sign of mental illness, Packer made it clear that her characters were not insane, weird, or otherwise mentally disturbed.

“Lasher half fought the memory because of an insidious fear that there was something sick about him and Sullivan together like that. He had never been really innocent, he reflected. Sentimental, self-pitying, yes. Soft, and by nature more than a little depraved. But not ever diseased, or deranged to the point of despising innocence, to embrace despair.”

Another of Packer’s recurring themes is that her characters—pariahs, forsaken, and murderers alike—aren’t so abnormal and atypical as one would like to think. They’re in every big city, every small town, every school, and every home. In a way, Packer is able to sneak in an ounce of hope into her novel. Maybe one of her readers feels that he or she is different and that there’s no one out there like them, no one to understand them—as Packer’s novels show, they’re not alone, and that the problem isn’t with them so much as with a society that wouldn’t acknowledge or accept difference.

“I used to feel that way too. Then I shipped out a few times. My God, was I naïve! People all over the world are like me. No matter where I go, I’ll find my own kind. I’m not such a minority as I used to think!”

Vin Packer aired the dirty laundry of the 1950s, turned social norms inside out, and made private shames into public issues. There’s still something very refreshing about the honesty of her novels, and they hold up as not only insights into their time, but also well-crafted and entertaining crime novels.

Whisper His Sin is available from Stark House Press in a two-novel anthology that also includes The Evil Friendship.

"Everybody's Somebody's Fool" by Ed Gorman (Carroll and Graf, 2002)

2012-01-24T12:09:00.000-05:00

Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool, the fifth book in Ed Gorman’s Sam McCain series, is one of my favorites. It’s got one of the best mysteries—a young hotrod racer is accused of murdering the daughter of one of Black River Falls’ most elite families—as well as some of the most moving and tragic love stories. Even though he’s never fully gotten over being rejected by Pamela Forrest, or the pain he caused Mary Travers, Sam has tried to move on. In Save the Last Dance For Me, he started a relationship with a married journalist. Now, he’s seeing Linda Dennehy, a recently divorced nurse and cancer survivor. This is no easy lovey-dovey affair, and Linda’s scars are more than just skin-deep. Gorman gives real depth and pain to their love—Sam struggles to learn that there is more than just affection and commitment to love, while Linda has to wrap her young mind around a whole new vision of her life, her body, and her future.

As the McCain series progresses and Sam himself gets older, there’s an increasing sense of mortality to the books. Wounds from previous stories still linger, and not all things heal with time. It is interesting to compare the parallels between the mystery plot and the love story in Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool. Both are filled with bodily pain, torture, and death—on the one hand, you have the snake ritual, numerous fights, and even murders, and on the other you have Linda’s cancer, which eats away at her from the inside out, the surgery which mutates her body, and the knowledge that it will eventually take her life. Gorman is never one to take suffering lightly, and while the Muldaur-scenario is certainly thrilling, it is Linda’s story that is the most haunting, as well as frighteningly realistic. Gorman reminds us that the biggest mysteries in life aren’t about who killed who, but deeper questions about our own daily lives and loves, and that there are scarier things out there than people with guns.

"Hell, Hurt, Blood and Rapture" at Los Angeles Review of Books

2012-01-23T11:11:00.000-05:00

My most recent post at the Los Angeles Review of Books is called, "Hell, Hurt, Blood and Rapture." Check it out for reviews of Jake Hinkson's Hell on Church Street (New Pulp Press), Reed Farrel Coleman's latest Moe Prager book, Hurt Machine (Tyrus Books), John Rector's Already Gone (Thomas & Mercer), Alan Glynn's Bloodland (Picador), and a Harry Whittington anthology from Stark House Press that includes Rapture Alley, Winter Girl, and Strictly For the Boys.

Read the full article here.

Excerpts below:

Hell on Church Street is one of the rare novels that actually deserves the over-used comparison to Jim Thompson, not just because Webb follows in the footsteps of such crazed protagonists as Lou Ford (The Killer Inside Me) and Nick Corey (Pop. 1280), but because Hinkson takes a risk and deviates from Thompson’s iconic moulds.

Rector writes hardboiled noir with a rare poetic élan, tight, almost violently compressed action, and reticent melancholy... He’s already proven himself among the freshest and most stylistically austere voices working in the thriller field. In fact, labeling his books “thrillers” feels too limiting. There’s a tonal ambience and doleful vibe that permeates his work, which comes as a surprise, considering how action-packed and tense his narratives tend to be. Acutely visual, Already Gone pulses with cinematic urgency and visceral punch.

Reed Farrel Coleman’s Moe Prager saga, about a Brooklyn ex-cop turned reluctant wine merchant and occasional PI, is that rare series that improves with each new entry. Coleman is now up to the seventh book, Hurt Machine, and it’s not only the best one yet but also the darkest... Coleman’s novels, like Ed Gorman’s, impress not with distractingly complex plots (though they’re both certainly capable of spinning real page-turners) but with their profound clarity and expert simplicity. Coleman’s characters don’t need grand schemes or million dollar payoffs as motivations: as Moe too frequently discovers, there’s enough potential for lifetimes of pain in our everyday lives.

Alan Glynn’s Bloodland, a loosely related follow-up to 2009’s Winterland, is a stunningly intricate and timely piece of globalization noir... In its depiction of immoral business practices and the increasingly blurred lines between criminals and politicians, Bloodland is like an amped-up 21st-century version of Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key. From the exploitation of human labor through umpteen middlemen to who-knows-where, Bloodland captures the fragmentary and alienating mechanism of international affairs with prismatic clarity.

The real prize of the anthology, however, is Strictly For the Boys, originally published in 1959, and the only one of the three to bear Whittington’s own name. The story is about a battered wife attempting to flee an abusive husband who refuses to let her, her mother, and her new boyfriend alone. Downright disturbing in its realism and sobering depiction of domestic violence, Strictly For the Boys displays a social consciousness that was prescient for its time, and which continues to be relevant today... Editor and scholar David Laurence Wilson deserves special commendation for his tireless efforts to restore Whittington’s reputation (and, in the case of Winter Girl, to restore the text itself). Wilson and Stark House publisher Greg Shepard give their books scholarly attention on par with the Library of America. Meticulously researched and lovingly edited, Stark House presents these forgotten paperback novels not as pulp curios, but as real literature, and set the bar high for other reprint series.

"Save the Last Dance for Me" by Ed Gorman (Carroll and Graf, 2002)

2012-01-20T13:41:00.002-05:00

Black River Falls is the stage for a religious war in Ed Gorman’s fourth Sam McCain mystery, Save the Last Dance For Me. John Muldaur runs a radical church on the edge of town that is stirring up controversy because of their extreme views and use of rattlesnakes during ceremonies. Muldaur thinks someone is trying to kill him, so he hires lawyer and sometimes-PI Sam McCain to find out who. When McCain and reporter Kylie Burke take a trip to see the rattlesnake services in person, they get more than they bargained for when Muldaur collapses dead in the middle of his sermon. Finding the killer, however, proves difficult when McCain realizes that someone in town was secretly financing Muldaur’s church, and they’d do anything to prevent the truth from coming out. With Judge Whitney’s good friend Senator Richard Nixon paying a visit in just a few days, it is up to McCain to clean up this mess as soon as possible.

Save the Last Dance For Me is important in the McCain series for a couple of reasons. First, because it introduces one of my favorite characters: Kenny Thibodeau, the local paperback sleaze writer. Kenny dresses like a beatnik to look the part of a writer, and he does hackwork to pay the bills, but Sam recognizes that he’s got not only got real literary talent but also a great eye for humanity, both of which pop up now and then in his lesbian-themed novels.

Another reason it is important is Sam’s relationship with Kylie. After finding himself caught between Pamela Forrest (he would-be lover) and Mary Travers (his should-be lover), he’s decided to move on and try to start a new relationship. The problem this time, however, is that Kylie is married. Her husband is a wannabe writer compared to Kenny, someone who goes to grad school and talks fancy and walks the walk but can’t produce anything worth while. He also treats Kylie like dirt. And there is Sam, who once again is trapped in a relationship that is doomed from the start. But we feel for him, especially because he does really care for Kylie. The tragedy is that he understands all too well what it means to hold on to a fantasy, and to give up everything to try and make a relationship work even when you know it is futile. Gorman’s books are filled with damned sad truths that we’ve all suffered in our own lives. Touches like these make the books come to life.

It might not seem obvious to call Gorman a stylist, but when you look at some of his paragraphs and sentences, there’s remarkable a subtlety, clarity, and precision to his prose. It’s style without bombast or distraction. These are some of my favorite lines from the book. The first passage, in particular, hits home—Sam and I are about the same age, so it is easy for me to identify with a lot of his thoughts and problems.

“And then at the grocery store last Saturday, everybody crowded in there buying potato chips and beer and Canada Dry mixes for highballs. I saw a lot of the kids I’d graduated with from high school. And they all had wives and kids in tow. And looked happy. And grown up. And I thought of what a mess my life was and how in a lot of ways I was still a kid and sometimes that was all right but other times it made me ashamed of myself. Maybe I’d never be Robert Ryan but at least I could be an adult like my dad. He had to quit school when he was in tenth grade to help support his family. I guess that grows you up pretty fast.”

“Sometimes, it feels sorta good to be sad. You know what I mean? But most of the time it just feels like shit to be sad. Could you turn up that song? I love it.”

“Judging by the entertainment shows on the tube, everything was just okey-dokey here in the land of Lincoln. But we knew better, didn’t we?”

“But you know something, it was quite likely that both portraits were true. We’re heroes or villains depending on who’s talking.”

The McCain series keeps getting better and better. Up next: Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool.

"The Gallows Land" by Bill Pronzini (1983)

2012-01-19T09:57:00.001-05:00

“I could understand now why my father had always called this kind of country ‘the gallows land’; unless you met it with strength and on its own terms, the way settlers like the ones below had to have done, it would kill you just as sure as a hangman’s rope.”

From the title alone you get a good sense of what Bill Pronzini’s The Gallows Land is going to be like. This is Western Noir par excellence. More than just hazardous landscapes and ruthless denizens, The Gallows Lands captures a haunting sense of desperation and desolation that is central to the genre. These characters are all trying to escape a past that, like a persistent ghost, refuses to abate.

The Gallows Land was originally published by Walker & Co. in 1983, and the copy I read was the 2001 Berkley paperback reprint.

Roy Boone brought his wife to the West start their life anew, and wound up leading her to her death. Not at the hands of Indians or scheming villains, but at their own. She worked herself to death—a weak heart and a persistent spirit lead her to an early grave because—and Roy blames himself. Selling everything he owns, he takes to the road—in search, once again, of a new beginning. Along the way, he meets Jennifer Todd, a battered wife who longs for an escape from her abusive husband. When Roy tries to intervene, he and Jennifer soon find themselves on the run from a mysterious posse that will stop at nothing to stop them from leaving.

The Gallows Land strips the Western of romantic ideals and false advertising. Pronzini reminds what it means for the land to be harsh, for water to be scarce, for the soil to be stubborn—it means life or death, something overlooked in many Westerns. Pronzini also gives the Western landscape a psychological dimension that reminds me of Clifton Adams’ The Desperado and A Noose for the Desperado—the sense that, despite the size of the West, you can’t escape anything. There’s a caged panic to Roy and Jennifer’s flight in The Gallows Land. They can’t outrun the posse, they can’t outrun each other—and they certainly can’t outrun their past.

Pronzini isn’t just concerned with mythology, however. The central issue in The Gallows Land is domestic abuse. There’s a social and moral dimension to Pronzini’s West that anticipates Ed Gorman’s Guild books, as well as Edward A. Grainer’s Gideon Miles and Cash Laramie series. The violence suffered by Jennifer Todd is frighteningly real. Pronzini wants readers to forget about the romance of showdowns at noon or gun fights on the range and to concentrate on the basics of violence, of one hand striking someone’s face, of what those bruises signify, and terror of what is means for someone to not be able to escape.

For Pronzini, the West isn’t a mythical source of regeneration, it’s a place where our darkest elements are unmasked, and where the human threat is as naked and merciless as the landscape. If you like hard-hitting Westerns that mix action with melancholy, then pick up The Gallows Land.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book:

“Sleep came hard. To keep form fretting about Jennifer Todd and my brush with death, I tried to think about the future, about finding a new life somewhere, in California or in the Northwest; settling down again, on land that grew tall, green grass and shade trees instead of hardscrabble vegetation and poor graze; maybe even writing again—dime novels, or something better. But there was no comfort now in any of that. Trying to mold an image of the future was nigh impossible when the present was unsettled and the past filled me with such pain and yearning. Most of my dreams had already been shattered, and the ones that were left seemed empty and insubstantial. They held no more real promise than that powdery soil Emma and I had tried so long to farm.”

“The heroes never seem to have real feelings, do they? Or lives like the rest of us—families, problems, dreams?”

“Killing came easy to some, but not to me; each time I had been forced to kill a man during the war, a small portion of me had died, too, and it was the same this time. It made no difference that it had been done in self-defense. Life was too precious to me, especially now, after losing Emma, to take it from someone—even an outlaw—without a feeling of sadness and remorse.”

"Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" by Ed Gorman (Carroll and Graf, 2000)

2012-01-18T10:55:00.000-05:00

Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? is the third of Ed Gorman’s Sam McCain mysteries. This one is set in 1959, and the Cold War has hit Black River Falls. Anti-Communist sympathies are high when a local professor, Richard Conners—already under fire for his leftist sympathies—turns up dead. McCain has his hands full as he tries to unravel this political conspiracy that has upended Black River Falls.

The titles of Ed Gorman’s Sam McCain books all come from song titles that were popular when the books were set. But they do more than just set the time and mood – there are important thematic elements that are specific to each story. Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? captures the fleeting and impermanent sense of love, and the fear of abandonment and betrayal, felt by the characters in the book. They're so worried about winding up alone that the steps they take for physical comfort leave them at emotionally and psychologically estranged. They all make compromises, and as the McCain series progresses we see the characters start to realize the consequences of their decisions--sometimes it is just depression, sometimes infidelity, sometimes worse. Gorman’s books always have page-turning mystery plots, but it is the interpersonal relationships that always draw me in the most—especially in this book. There’s nothing idealistic about relationships in Gorman’s books—they’re as flawed, imperfect, and screwed up as the people involved. They’re also relatable as hell, too.

One of the things I like about Sam is his growing sense of self-awareness, especially when it comes to his relationships with Pamela Forrest (his long-time crush who is in love with a married man) and Mary Travers (the “nice girl” who loves him but whom he doesn’t love back). It’s incredibly revealing about his character that he can see exactly what is going on—and what is (and is not) going to happen—and still not change his ways. He knows the pain he is causing himself and Mary, but he won’t do “the right thing”—perhaps, because as this paragraph shows, there is no easy “right thing” to do.

“Aw, hell, I do feel sorry for him. You marry somebody and you have the right to expect them to love you to the same degree, or at least not to have anybody else in their heart. But she loves me and I love Pamela, though I love Mary too in some inexplicable way. It’s sexual—she really is a quietly sexual girl—but there’s something so fundamentally good about her that sometimes I can just stand there and watch her and feel this horny sorrow and respect lash me to her. Then I can’t keep my hands off her. Which is why I stay away. I’ve hurt her too much already. I don’t owe it to her to love her—anymore than Pamela owes it to me to love me—but I have an obligation not to deceive her.”

Overall, another strong entry in the Sam McCain series. Up next: Save The Last Dance For Me.

"Wake Up Little Susie" by Ed Gorman (Carroll and Graf, 1999)

2012-01-17T09:51:00.000-05:00

Wake Up Little Susie, the second of Ed Gorman’s Sam McCain books, has just been released as an eBook for Kindle. It is set in 1957, one year before the first book in the series, The Day the Music Died.

The novel opens with the unveiling of Ford’s latest creation, the Edsel. Susan Squires, the wife of District Attorney David Squires, is found dead in the trunk of one of the cars. The local chief of police, Cliffie, suspects the murderer is Mike Chalmers, whom the DA sent to prison many years ago. Of course, Judge Whitney asks Sam McCain to do some investigating of his own. Assisting Sam this time is Mary Travers, a close friend of Susan’s, and Sam’s should-be lover. Mary’s been in love with Sam since they were kids, but Sam has always been more in love with Pamela Forrest who, of course, is not in love with Sam. Working close together, Sam starts to wonder if maybe was wrong about Mary all these years. When Mary suddenly goes missing, however, Sam realizes there might be more to the case—and his feelings—than he realized.

Readers of Pulp Serenade know that I’m a big fan of Gorman’s novels, and his Sam McCain books are some of my favorites. Wake Up Susie has all the hallmarks of his best writing – a compelling mystery, great period detail, a tender but tragic romance, nice laughs, and keen social observations. The book also has several remarkable paragraphs I wanted to share.

“The sky was darker now, stains of mauve and gold and amber, a few thunderheads brilliantly outlined with the last of the day’s sunlight. There’s a loneliness to Saturday night, at least for me, that no amount of noise and movement can ever assuage. There’re a lot of popular songs about Saturday night, about how you live all week for it to roll around so you can go out and have yourself a ball. But deep down you know it’ll never be quite as exciting as you want it to be, need it to be, and the lonesomeness will never quite go away. I think my mom used to feel this when my dad was in Europe during the war. She’d kind of fix herself up on Saturday night and then sit in the living room by herself with her one highball in her hand and a Chesterfield in her fingers. Even when she’d laugh at the radio jokes there’d be a lonesomeness in her eyes that made me sad for her and scared for my dad. But we were lucky. Dad came home.”

This first one is just downright beautiful writing. There’s a real sense of movement to the paragraph, and it could work as a stand-alone story, or even a prose poem. The image of the mother alone by the radio is a powerful one. Despite its simplicity, it evokes such deep feelings. And that last line – just three words, but man, they pack a punch. The words Gorman uses are just as important as the ones he does not, and there’s a lot being said in between the lines. Somehow, he seems to capture the experiences of a whole generation in just a few sentences.

This next paragraph starts out as an astute piece of criticism about John D. MacDonald, and ends up as a strong and insightful comment on the nature of literature and what it means to our own lives. And everything Gorman says about MacDonald’s writing I’d say goes for his own, as well. I’m not sure if that was Gorman’s intention or not, but he sums up exactly why I love reading his own books so much.

“There are no heroes in John D. novels, and that’s probably why I like them. Every once in a while his man will behave heroically, but that still doesn’t make him a hero. He has a lot of faults and he always realizes, at some point in every book, that he’s flawed and less than he wants to be. I think that’s why John D.’s books are so popular. Because we all know deep down we’re sort of jerks. Not all the time. But every once in a while we’re jerks and we have to face it and it’s never fun. You see how deeply you’ve hurt somebody, or how you were wrong about somebody, or how you let somebody down. But facing it makes you a better person. Because maybe next time you won’t be quite as petty or arrogant or cold. Good books are always moral, contrasting how we are with how we should be. And the good writer know how to do this without ever letting on.”

These last two passages capture Gorman’s uniquely sympathetic worldview that characterizes all of his novels. He’s a realist, seeing the best and worst in people, and like he said about John D. MacDonald, there are no easy heroes (or villains, for that matter).

“He was corrupt, violent, stupid, and yet he suffered. I’d seen him in the park holding her one day on his knee. I saw a tenderness and love I wish I hadn’t seen. Even bad guys have good sides. Sometimes that can get downright exasperating.”

“Good men don’t go around murdering people. But sometimes bad people are good people too. Or good people can do bad things. Life is like that sometimes.”

"The Day the Music Died" by Ed Gorman (Carroll and Graf, 1999)

2012-01-16T12:33:00.000-05:00

The Day the Music Died, the first book in Ed Gorman’s Sam McCain series, is now available as an eBook for Kindle. I’ve read seven of the nine books in the series, and they’re all really terrific. You can pick up the series at any point, but now that the first book is available again you might just want to start at the beginning, especially since it is so damn good and because it sets the tenor for the books to come.

The story is set in 1958 in small town Black River Falls, Iowa. Sam McCain is in his mid-20s, a recent law school graduate who pays the bills doing private eye work for Judge Esme Anne Whitney, who is charming and likable despite her class-centered elitism. Judge Whitney’s family comes from Eastern money, and they used to be the royal family of Black River Falls until Clifford Sykes struck it rich in manufacturing during World War II. Now the Sykes clan is in power, and the fat, dumb and ignorant “Cliffie” Sykes, Jr., is the police chief of Black River Falls. Whenever there is a crime, Judge Whitney asks Sam to investigate and prove that Cliffie arrested the wrong person.

The Day the Music Died also introduces Pamela Forrest—the girl Sam has loved since grade school and who doesn’t love him back—and Mary Travers—the girl who has loved Sam just as long, but whom he doesn’t love back.

I find it interesting how often the word “nostalgic” is used to describe this series. Gorman does a great job of evoking the time period, but the Sam McCain series doesn’t revel in daydreams of how good things used to be. This is no Happy Days or Dobie Gillis. These books reveal the dark underside of small town life—the latent hate, prejudice, and resentment that courses through our neighbors’ and family members’ veins. There’s nothing heavy handed about the way that Gorman approaches domestic violence, abortion, corruption, or police brutality—in fact, considering the serious nature of many of his topics, his subtlety is downright commendable. But there’s a greater sense of an innocence lost in these books, which is why it is so fitting that the first one is called The Day the Music Died. These aren’t coming of age stories, per se, but Sam is in his mid-20s, and he still has a lot to learn about himself and about life. Throughout the novels, he comes to realize the bitter, ugly truths about life. He also experiences some real beautiful things, too, tender moments between lovers, unexpected camaraderie and newfound understanding of his neighbors.

One of the things I like about Sam McCain is that he’s a Private Eye without all the romantic nonsense. There’s something very humorous and human about his personality, and he certainly defies the hardboiled clichés. This is one of my favorite passages from the book:

“I gripped my .45 harder, feeling self-conscious. You see so much gunplay on private eye TV shows that you think it feels natural to have a gun in your hand. But it doesn’t. You’re carrying such quick-and-easy death in your hand. There’s so much responsibility, and fear. At least for me.”

Sam, like many of Gorman’s protagonists, feels a devastating sympathy towards others. He recognizes their flaws, but also recognizes the unpleasant humanity in failing, in hurting others, in making life-shattering mistakes.

“A kind of sorrow came over me, one I hadn’t counted on driving out here. I’d always hated him and with good reason. But he’d been sad this morning, human-animal sad, a creature frenzied and forlorn and crazed, and he wouldn’t let me hate him anymore, the son of a bitch, no matter how much I might have wanted to.”

This two lines I love. They show the simplicity of Gorman’s style, and the richness and depth he is able to achieve with such clear prose.

“People do strange things when they’re hurt. I think we have to keep that in mind.”

“Maybe it’s just all the sadness I see in the people around me, just below the surface I mean, and the fact that there’s nothing I can do about it. Life is like that sometimes.”

"Stark's Justice" by James Reasoner (Pocket Books, 1994)

2012-01-15T20:33:00.000-05:00

Kilroy glanced around wide-eyed at the carnage. “You killed ‘em all!”

“Just most of them,” replied Stark.

Stark’s Justice, the first book in James Reasoner’s Judge Earl Stark series, is a superbly crafted revenge Western that would have made Harry Whittington proud. Reasoner alternates between moments of fiery hardboiled action and brooding noir introspection, striking a deft balance between the two sensibilities. Stark’s Justice a hard-hitting Western, for sure, one that is filled with shoot-em-up bar fights and a raucous finale that turns a small town into a raging battle site, but Reasoner never forgets the human toll and real suffering that lies behind the action.

The book begins with “Big Earl” Stark still riding shotgun for a stagecoach and studying law books at night. When the stage pulls into Buffalo Flats, however, Stark gets his chance to prove his legal knowledge at a public hearing, starting him on a new career as a lawyer. His mind may be on law, but his heart is set on Laura Delaney, a girl he had to leave behind. Now’s that he’s made good, he wants her to join him and get married. On her journey, however, her stagecoach is held up and she is killed. Grief stricken and burdened with the guilt that had he been riding shotgun this wouldn’t have happened, Stark puts aside his new career and takes to the trail for revenge. As he hunts for the outlaws, Stark struggles to reconcile his newfound respect for the law and his thirst for vengeance.

I’m a big fan of Reasoner’s books, both his Westerns and Noir/Mystery books, and here he combines the best of both worlds. Great sense of character, sweeping action, and a dark underside – I’d consider Stark’s Justice one of my favorite Reasoner books yet. This was followed by two more Judge Earl Stark books which I haven’t read yet, The Hawthorne Legacy and The Diablo Grant, and I’ve heard rumor there might be a fourth book coming sometime this year. I’m hoping that rumor is true!

Here’s one of my favorite passages from the book. Between the flopping and the blood and the noises, this has a nice Spillane-tinge to it.

“From behind him came a hideous, strangled sound. He turned, gun still in hand, to see the outlaw called Lee Roy flopping around on the floor, trying with his fingers to stem the tide of blood from his bullet-torn throat.”

"The Twisted Ones" by Vin Packer (Gold Medal, 1959)

2011-12-06T15:56:00.006-05:00

A truly frightening psychological thriller on par with Jim Thompson, Vin Packer’s The Twisted Ones (1959) is written with cold desolation and unflinching violence. Structured as a triptych narrative about a sixteen-year-old rapist, a nineteen-year-old murderer, and an eight-year-old arsonist, it is a stark portrait of how three seemingly ordinary young people are driven to murder for reasons beyond even their own understanding. Though their crimes are monstrous, Packer doesn’t treat her characters as monsters, and she gets into their heads with chilling sympathy.

It is, on the whole, a complex and prismatic look at the social, sexual, psychological, and emotional conditions that can contribute to a crime. Some of the situations are ordinary—such as an aloof high-schooler still getting used to his father’s new, and much younger, wife, or an aging momma’s boy struggling for his own independence—while others are more extraordinary—such as an eight-year-old wunderkind with photographic memory winning thousands of dollars on a national game show. But what each of these stories share in common is a deep-seated fear of being different, an unshakeable sense of isolation and anxiety, and an inevitable sense of doom. The family situations, the loneliness, and the alienation felt by the characters seems so ordinary that to witness everything snowball into murder is profoundly disturbing. Packer manages to make her criminals as terrifying as they are identifiable.

Packer is mostly known for her daring and controversial subject matter, but she was also a highly skilled writer who deserves more praise for her formal experimentation. 5:45 to Suburbia unfolds on a series of March 6th birthdays that jumped back and forth between the 1920s and 1950s, while Whisper His Sin, The Girl on the Best Seller List, and The Evil Friendship preface each chapter with excerpts from fictionalized books, interviews, and newspaper accounts. The Twisted Ones is written in seven parts, each broken down into three individual narratives (one for each of the characters) that could almost stand alone as separate short stories, even though by the end characters in one story learn about characters in the others through the newspaper and television. The clean division of the chapters both mirrors the isolation felt by the characters, but it also speaks to the synchronicity of their traumas, as well as their shared social and personal problems. Though they feel alone, their issues aren’t only their own—they are problems that need to be faced by society as a whole, which is a recurring message throughout Packer’s novels.

The big question in The Twisted Ones is—how, as a society, do we even begin to make sense of these seemingly senseless crimes? It is one thing to commit murder to get someone’s money or property, or out of revenge—but what about when even the criminals don’t understand what they did? And how do we come to terms with the fact that they are so young? Youth violence continues to be a much talked-about topic in today’s news: a few years ago it was school shootings, and now it is bullying and suicide. Packer’s novel continues to be relevant some half a century later because she faces the complicated issues of youth violence head-on, examining it from multiple perspectives, and avoiding any reductive conclusions. It’s interesting to compare The Twisted Ones to portraits of youth violence in movies at the time, such as Rebel Without a Cause. As great as Nicholas Ray’s film was, Packer’s novel is far more disturbing, and it lacks the self-destructive glamour of James Dean, Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo. There’s nothing romantic or alluring about the crimes in The Twisted Ones. The book still packs a bleak and unsettling punch, and like a lot of Packer’s novels, this one still has a lot to say to modern readers.

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Cover art by Robert Abbett

NoirCon 2012 Poetry Contest Still Open!

2011-12-05T09:10:00.002-05:00

Calling All Noir Poets!

NoirCon 2012 is hosting their first ever poetry contest. The deadline is March 2nd, 2012.

All the pertinent details are below.

Good luck to all those who enter!

Welcome to the First NoirCon Poetry Contest sponsored by NoirCon 2012

What is Noir Poetry? Noir Poetry is (1)* Poetry that makes reference to the subject matter, dialog or style of film noir or the hardboiled detective genre, or, (2)* Poetry that invokes stark urban landscapes and atmosphere, and which either alludes to crime and perilous attachments or else seems to bear dark knowledge of this territory, or (3) Poetry that tells the story of tortured souls – lovers, psychopaths, obsessives – driven down deadly paths, following desperate plans that are doomed to failure.

What to Submit: Your entry should be your own original work. You must be the poet of the submitted work(s). Entries must be original and unpublished works (either in print or on-line). Submitted poems should concern the subject of Noir Poetry and not exceed 2000 words.

English Language: Poets of all nations may enter. However, the poems you submit should be in English. If you have written a poem in another language, you may translate your poem into English and submit the translation.

Prizes and Publication: First prize: $250 and a copy of the printed program with the winning poem to be read at the NoirCon 2012 Award Dinner on November 9th, 2012. Second prize: $150 and a printed program. There will also be eight Most Highly Commended Awards winners. They will receive a copy of the NoirCon 2012 printed program and official NoirCon buttons. The top 10 entries will be published in the NoirCon 2012 printed program. The judge of the winning poem will be Robert Polito, Professor of Writing at The New School, New York City, New York.

Entry Fee: The fee is $15 for 1 to 3 original, unpublished poems dealing with Noir. Entry fees are not refundable. Entries will be accepted up until March 2, 2012 (postmark dates).

Deadline: March 2nd, 2012. Your entry must be postmarked by this date.

How To Submit: Send poems to: NoirCon 2012 Poetry Contest, c/o Society Hill Playhouse, 507 South 8th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19147-1325. All entries must be postmarked by March 2, 2012. Omit author's name on manuscript and include a cover sheet with name, address, phone, and e- mail. Cash or checks (made out to Society Hill Playhouse, 507 South 8th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19147-1325) should accompany poetry submission.

Announcement of Winners: The winners of the first NoirCon Poetry contest will be announced the week of NoirCon 2012, November 8th, 2012. Entrants with valid email addresses will receive an email notification.

Copyright: If your entry is selected for publication in the NoirCon printed program, you give NoirCon 2012 a nonexclusive license to publish your work in our publication. You may accept or decline this invitation as you choose. Your entry will not be published in print without your consent, and you retain all rights to your work.

Contact Information:
NoirCon 2012
c/o Society Hill Playhouse
507 South 8th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147-1325
(215) 923-0210

Questions: noircon@gmail.com
www.noircon.info

(*)definition by The Los Angeles Poetry Festival "Noir Corridor"

"Dark Intruder" by Vin Packer (Gold Medal, 1952)

2011-12-02T15:16:00.005-05:00

Vin Packer’s first novel, the controversial hit Spring Fire (1952), is famous for being among the first paperback originals to explore issues of homosexuality in contemporary America (in this instance, on a college campus). For her second novel, Dark Intruder (also 1952), Packer chose an even more taboo topic: incest. But as in the case of Spring Fire, Packer isn’t really interested in exploiting the subject for sleaze appeal or shock value. Instead of judging her characters as freaks of nature or perverts, Packer sympathizes with them as social outcasts: people who either can’t or won’t conform to moral standards. Packer’s gift to readers is a great sensitivity for difference, a sociological and psychological insight into human behavior, and an understanding that what is typically labeled as “abnormal” might be more normal—and common—than many would care to admit.

Dark Intruder was published by Gold Medal in 1952. Set in the town of Hillsboro, VA, the novel centers on Jett Black, the 18-year-old daughter of wealthy horse breeder Blake Black. Since her mother died during childbirth, Jett has been the only female in her father’s life. As the father-daughter-lover boundaries get thorny, however, an accident leaves Blake crippled. Enter Luke Hetherington, a temporary manager to keep the ranch going until Blake can get back on his feet. At first, Jett is resentful of Luke’s authority on the ranch, but soon she finds herself increasingly attracted to him. As Blake’s chance of a full recovery becomes less and less likely, he becomes more possessive of all things around him, not only the ranch, but also his daughter. But Jett is no longer the compliant daughter she once was, and no matter what decision she makes, no one will walk away clean from this mess.

One of the things that Packer does well in Dark Intruder is to counter the “backwoods tramp” archetype. In a different setting, Jett could be like one of the young college girls in Spring Fire: naïve, confused, and full of feelings and urges she can’t control. Like the sorority girls in that first novel, Jett doesn’t sit well with the standard life-path that has been set out before her. Strong-willed and independent, she doesn’t want to go off to college—which would most likely culminate with her getting married and becoming a housewife. Instead, she models herself on her father, and wants to hold a position of social and economic power. In this sense, she reminds me of Barbara Stanwyck’s character in The Furies (based on the novel by Niven Bisch), another story of a father-daughter ranching dynasty with incestuous undertones. Ultimately, Packer doesn’t see Jett as just another myopic conception of a girl with “daddy issues”—her troubles go deeper than even she realizes. She’s a young girl who doesn’t fit in her with times or surroundings, and she acts out in the only way that seems natural to her.

Even though Dark Intruder ends with the restoration of conventional morality, just like with Spring Fire, Packer still manages to work in a lot of social criticism. Also like in Spring Fire, Packer’s representations of orthodox heterosexuality are subversive and disturbing. Jett’s first sexual encounter with Luke is particularly shocking in its violence. Packer describes Jett feeling as though “a knife of terror cut through her” when Luke touched her. The whole scene feels more like rape than love—an ironic, and complex, counterpoint to the relationship between Jett and her father. But even that bond wasn’t without its violence—their first kiss ends with him pushing her to the ground. Packer doesn’t endorse incest, but nor does she comply with standard hetero-normative partnerships, either. Her common concern with both relationships is the brutality that Jett must suffer at the hands of both men. Vin Packer was able to smartly subvert the titillating theme of the book and make some smart and progressive comments on contemporary gender politics.

While Dark Intruder might share some of the same themes of Spring Fire, it didn’t have quite the same emotional pull for me. There was something so recognizable—and surprisingly modern—about the characters in Spring Fire. Those adolescents seemed so much more relatable and realistic than anyone in the Dobie Gillis series. The confusions and crises faced by those characters were things that we all went through in our own way and in our own time. That sort of connection didn’t happen to me with Dark Intruder. Packer is such a skilled writer that I could sympathize with Jett, but only from a distance. Luke is, by necessity and design, little more than a store-window hunk—a hyper-masculine fantasy that Packer doesn’t in the least believe in. He’s there to fulfill a plot-function, not as an object of our sympathy. Blake, on the other hand, we understand a little more, but I don’t think we’re supposed to care about him, either. In his own way, he is just as misleading, confining, and corrupting an influence on Jett as anyone—or anything—else in the book.

Fifty-nine years later, Dark Intruder is still an interesting and worthwhile read. Its subversive politics and criticism of conventional gender norms make it stand out from other novels of the time, and singles out Vin Packer as one of the most perceptive and socially progressive writers of the Gold Medal lineup.

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Cover art by Amos Sewell

Interview with Leonard Fritz

2011-11-22T10:52:00.000-05:00

Leonard Fritz’s In Nine Kinds of Pain, the latest from New Pulp Press, is one of those novels that knocks you over the head and leaves you in a daze, as if there’s one of those spring-loaded boxing gloves behind each page. Fritz is full of surprises, ideas, and especially stories, and his debut novel is as audacious as it is awesome. I could keep gushing, but instead I’ll just post a link to my review so we can get on with the interview.

Pulp Serenade: Where did the idea for In Nine Kinds of Pain come from?

Leonard Fritz: Well, I wanted to write some Detroit stories, so I began piecing together personal stories with stories from the neighborhood I lived in. I just followed the ol’ chestnut, “Write what you know.” This book is what I knew.

PS: How similar is the final product to your original conception of the novel? Were there any big changes during the writing or editing process?

LF: The final product is very close to the way I envisioned it from the beginning. I kind of work that way, where I have the concept and then I flesh it out. I usually just allow the ending to happen, though, see where it goes and where the characters take it. In the editing process, there were some things that needed updating, like any reference to any part of Tiger Stadium. I had the old ballpark as a meeting place, but more of the ballpark kept getting torn down every week, so I had to eventually omit that location altogether. I wanted the story to be relevant to now.

PS: Are there any parts of the book based on real events? Like the whole garbage dump-drug smuggling operation?

LF: Most all of the book is based on real events and real people, in whole or in part. And the garbage dump thing was real, too. When I heard about it I thought it was too cool not to include in the story.

PS: Some of my favorites parts of the book are the “Here is Wisdom” segments that engage one-on-one with the reader. Even though they’re not commenting directly on the story, they’re setting the stage. Why did you choose to deliver the information in this manner as opposed to inserting it more conventionally into the narrative?

LF: Because I thought all that info as narrative for the characters would slow the story down, and I wanted it to be fast-paced. And I didn’t want to have the characters deliver all that foundation because they’re not thinking about that—they’re just living their lives. But, I needed a way for the reader to know how Detroit clicks in order to help them understand the why’s and how’s of the story, so I decided to incorporate those look-ins.

PS: To me, the main character of In Nine Kinds of Pain seems to be Detroit itself. You even dedicate the book to the city. It’s not a pretty portrait, but it’s very affectionate. What is your own relationship to the city like? Are you a native resident?

LF: I lived in Southwest Detroit for about 35 years, so I did my time. I’ve worked for the city and was an elected official for the area and loved the city but, like in the story, it won’t love you back. I wanted Detroit itself to be the antagonist, and I guess that must have come through.

PS: So, would you recommend Detroit as a tourist destination? If you knew someone was visiting the city, what would you recommend they do, and where would you recommend they definitely not go?

LF: If you visit Detroit, either stay right near the ballparks—I mean, don’t leave that entertainment district at all—or venture way out into the suburbs. Otherwise, you’re like that idiot I describe at the beginning of the book, wandering into the neighborhoods, not knowing what you’re getting yourself into. Come see the Tigers or Red Wings, soak up the atmosphere of a blue-collar town, then leave immediately.

PS: There are no conventional heroes in your book—no beacons of morality, goodwill, or upstanding citizenship, and no one that you would really want to model your own life after. Yet there is something appealing to them… For me, it had to do with how much more alive they seemed the closer to destruction they came. As I said in my review, they seemed to really appreciate life, even if it wasn’t an ideal one. I was wondering what it was that drew you to the characters, and made you want to get into their heads and under their skin?

LF: I guess just wanting to have characters that were flawed, because that’s what I saw. Even the people we look up to, all of us, are flawed in some way. And I’ve known some great people, some people that would literally lay down their life for me, people that have my back to this day and have giant hearts of gold, but would be considered cold-hard criminals in normal society. It’s a strange dynamic to live in.

PS: Why did you choose to include comic panel inserts throughout the novel? Did you ever consider writing the entire story as a graphic novel?

LF: I’ve always liked to draw, and I wanted to have some fun. At first I thought of illustrating parts of the text, but then I thought little sidebar stories that were illustrated outside of the text would be more interesting. I felt that the whole novel itself didn’t really translate well graphically, though, like the “Here is Wisdom” parts.

PS: There are several illustrative homages in the book: Daniel Clowes, Margaret Kilgallen, Jorge Longaron, and Alden McWilliams. Could you say a few words about these artists, and why you chose to pay tribute to them in this way?

LF: I love Clowes’ darkness and knew that he would be one of the artists that I needed to include in this tribute. Kilgallen’s street sort of tagging quality caught my attention a few years back, and I grew to appreciate her work. Longaron and McWilliams reminded me of the old Sunday comics or the Saturday morning cartoons, and I always loved those.

PS: Who are some of the writers who have been the biggest influence on you?

LF: Bukowski and Irvine Welsh were my biggest influences, I think, just because they gave me permission to write stories that weren’t happy, and I think I needed that. They were sort of my springboard backwards to writers like Camus. And I didn’t read Hubert Selby Jr. until someone in grad school said I wrote like him. I gravitate to the dark and unusual writers, which, I guess, isn’t much of a surprise.

PS: How about Detroit writers—who has gotten the feel of the city right, in your eyes? And what about Detroit on film—any favorite movies set in the city?

LF: Maybe Robocop? I don’t know. I like Elmore Leonard but not because of his Detroit portrayals, but because of his characterizations. I don’t think I’ve ever read a Detroit someone or seen a Detroit something and said, “Wow, they really captured the city!” I’m trying, but I can’t think of any who’ve done the real Detroit justice.

PS: You close the novel with a Nietzsche quote: “To expect that strength will not manifest itself as strength...is every bit as absurd as to expect that wakens will manifest itself as strength.” I was wondering why you chose that quote to end the book? In some ways, it reminded me of the parable of the scorpion who stung the frog who was carrying it across the river and explained, "I could not help myself. It is my nature."

LF: Well, I wanted to end with a quote and Nietzsche’s philosophy definitely lends itself Detroit. Then, once I started re-reading the manuscript, that ending quote popped into my head, because it was very appropriate—don’t wander into the Murder Capitol of the World and expect anything less that what it is, and don’t expect it to change and get mad when it doesn’t. It is what it is, and the people are what they are.

PS: How did you get hooked up with Jon Bassoff and New Pulp Press?

LF: He gave me an opportunity so I sent him my stuff. I’m grateful he gave my writing a chance. Getting published is one of the biggest crap-shoots out there, I’ve found—you really have to have the right person read your stuff, the one who likes your style and your story, and hit them at the right time. I didn’t realize until I was getting my MFA how polarizing my writing was—I had some who loved it to death and maybe worshipped it too much, and others who hated it so much they hated me personally.

PS: How do you discover new books to read? Local booksellers, online, word of mouth…

LF: All of the above. I like to troll around small bookstores, large bookstores, go online, read reviews and such. I did a reading at a small indy bookstore a few weeks ago, and while I was in the back waiting to come out to talk and sign the book, I was looking through their stacks and making a mental list of new books I wanted to get my hands on.

PS: I saw online that you also did the cover for Jake Hinkson’s upcoming Hell on Church Street. Do you do a lot of graphic work outside of writing fiction?

LF: I’d have to say I’m more of a graphic artist than a writer. I know that’s poison to admit, but visual art will always be my first love. I like fooling around on the computer and doing design things, but I really love to take pen to paper and just draw. For me, the line between telling a story with text and telling it through visuals is blurred, and I’d like to incorporate more visuals into my text for the next one.

PS: What’s up next for you? Your website mentions a new novel for next year, You Can Kill Anyone. Can you say a few words about that book, or any other projects you have in the works?

LF: You Can Kill Anyone could be considered a continuation of Nine Kinds, but it’s really a stand-alone story. Some of the characters make appearances in the next one, like Father Costa in a flashback. Jimmy Bible is a main character in the next one, where he is only mentioned as an ancillary character in Nine Kinds. But, it’s a lot like the neighborhood, where you may not know someone personally, but you know their father or sister or cousin and you can relate to them because of that relationship. We’ll see how the next one goes.

"In Nine Kinds of Pain" by Leonard Fritz (New Pulp Press, 2011)

2011-11-12T12:14:00.004-05:00

Opening Leonard Fritz’s In Nine Kinds of Pain is like stepping into the Noir Asylum for the Mentally Insane. It’s cracked-out crime fiction at its finest and most fucked up. There’s power in Fritz’s words, and every page seems capable of catching you off-guard, holding you at gunpoint, stealing your wallet, busting your nose, and leaving you bleeding, black and blue, and blubbering—in a metaphorical sense, that is. In real life, I’d never volunteer for an ordeal like that, but in a book, that’s exactly the sort of stylish bravado I want to see, and it is doubly impressive coming from a debut novelist. In Nine Kinds of Pain is ambitious, but more importantly it is also successful—not to mention batshit crazy, and pretty damn funny.

How does one even go about describing the story? It’s like an explosion of bad people, bad intentions, and bad feelings. There’s Baby, a prostitute who is left bleeding on a pile of garbage by a brutish client; now she wants to get the hell out of Detroit once and for all. Then there’s her two-timing boyfriend, Dante, who’s gotten involved with some dangerous dudes. Father Costa is an alky priest with a bad case of DTs, and whose increasingly whacked-out religious visions all center around Baby. Then you got Dallas, a desperate, horny, and suicidal cop whose wife has dumped him. Meanwhile, Dallas’ crackhead colleague, Ron Frady, is knee-deep in an a big scheme that will either make him rich or get everyone above killed.

Phew—that wasn’t easy, and even that doesn’t do In Nine Kinds of Pain justice. Fritz has constructed a story that doesn’t rely on a linear mystery. There’s only one way this story can end—and that is badly. We know “whodunit” because we’re following them every step of the way. In true noir fashion, Fritz is more interested in the motivating factors that force his characters to make such terrible, foolish decisions. Take for example Father Costa. When he turns the vestry upside-down for a bottle of anything to take the edge off, we feel every shake and every drop of cold sweat. And as his preoccupation for Baby turns into a delusional nightmare in which he plays Jesus, we walk through every Biblical fantasy alongside him. By the end, little that Father Costa says or does makes much sense in the real world, but inside his head, he is playing out a religious drama of futile redemption and martyrdom. Who knows what the rest of the world thinks of Father Costa—we never see him from their perspective. Fritz burrows deep inside the priest’s own booze-addled consciousness, and from his perspective, everything is at it should be. It’s a wild ride seeing the world through Father Costa’s eyes, and he’s only one character among many in this psycho-prismatic novel.

When it comes to style, Leonard Fritz can be as daring and bonkers as his characters—but he’s also a heck of a lot smarter and more self-controlled. The fractured narrative and experimental prose suggested William Burroughs, while the stream of consciousness and gutter rhapsody reminded me of Henry Miller. I mention these authors not only to suggest the sophistication and high-quality of Fritz’s writing, but also to point out that In Nine Kinds of Pain isn’t your run-of-the-mill crime fiction novel. It’s a welcome reminder of just how far-reaching, diverse, and experimental the genre can be. Fritz is an exciting and fearless writer. Throughout the novel, he breaks the narrative and delivers a series of chapters titled, “Here is Wisdom.” These are didactic, direct-addresses from an unknown narrator to the reader, talking about Detroit, the hierarchy of the streets, and the down-low on politics, drugs, and violence that contextualize the story for non-natives. It’s like a tour guide given by Travis Bickle: bitter, disgusted, intolerant, but strangely understanding and poetically perceptive. Fritz’s literary arsenal also includes comic panels (drawn by himself—damn, he’s talented!), and even a mathematical equation, to tell his story.

Call me crazy, but as dark as the book is, I also thought it was pretty funny. That’s one of the things I like most about noir—things are terrible, but sometimes you just have to laugh. And I laughed a lot when I was reading In Nine Kinds of Pain. One of my favorite passages had to do with Dallas and his failed attempt to get back with his ex, Liz. As if things couldn’t get worse for the guy, when he gets home, his neighbor’s dog is gone. The guy is so pathetic, he doesn’t even have his own dog to mourn over—he has to look across the street. Here’s the passage as written by Fritz: “He had been saddened after his date with Liz, a date that didn't go as well as he had hoped, a date in which he had pulled out his penis. He'd been further saddened when he'd returned home and had discovered that Smiley, the one true bright spot in his life, the smile in most smile-less days, was gone.”

I’m not sure whether the Detroit Chamber of Commerce should put a hit out on Fritz or give the man an award—hopefully the latter—because as vicious and vile as the city comes across in the book, it is written with such loving pride and protectiveness. You get the feeling that if anyone else said anything bad about Detroit, Fritz would be the first one to step up and defend his city. While New York City inches closer and closer towards Disneyland, Fritz’s Detroit still has an edge to it. I’ve never been to there but, oddly enough, after reading this book, I kind of want to go. (But I’ll probably stay away from the neighborhoods where Baby, Dallas, and company hang out.)

In Nine Kinds of Pain isn’t for the cozy-inclined—there’s nothing wrong those types of novels, and I occasionally want something lighter as well, but it is worth knowing what you are getting in for with this book. These characters are at rock bottom, and they aren’t redeemed by any hearts of gold or final acts of absolution. They’re addicts, dealers, prostitutes, killers, no good lovers and back stabbers. The best you could say is that they do what they have to do to survive, but even that’s a stretch. What makes them appealing to me, at least, is that when they reach the end of their proverbial rope, they all seem more alive than ever before. Their lives may suck, and they may hate Detroit, but man, they really want to hang on to what little they have. In a weird way, they value existence more than many. These aren’t boring characters. They’re not apathetic and they don’t sit down and watch sitcoms until the cows come home. They’re active and they’re crazy and they’re funny and they’re interesting as hell. Sure, they screw up their lives and everyone else’s, but at least they don’t go down quietly. There’s something wonderful about reading characters so full of life, even if it is an admittedly unpleasant one. But thankfully, even that doesn’t stop them from living—or dying—to the fullest.

Kevin Avery at Strand Bookstore (11/9/11)

2011-11-10T13:10:00.012-05:00

Last night, Kevin Avery spoke at New York City’s Strand Bookstore to discuss the late Paul Nelson, a former critic and editor for Rolling Stone magazine, and the subject of two recent books by Kevin. Joining him on stage was critic Dave Marsh, a friend and colleague of Paul’s from their days at Rolling Stone in the 1970s. Kevin’s two books are Everything Is an Afterthought: The Life and Writings of Paul Nelson (Fantagraphics Books)—a biography and anthology of Paul’s writing—and Conversations with Clint: Paul Nelson's Lost Interviews with Clint Eastwood, 1979-1983 (Continuum)—one of the longest interviews with the director that were conducted for an unrealized Rolling Stone feature. Cover art for both books (and the design for Everything Is An Afterthought) was provided by my good friend Jeff Wong, who also did great work for Busted Flush Press’ Damn Near Dead 2: Live Noir or Die Trying last year.

(Dave Marsh and Kevin Avery)

Paul shared a deep passion for music, film, and literature, and these books show not only how knowledgeable a critic he was in all three fields, but they also reveal a unique insight and original conception about arts and culture at the time. Paul was a mythologist (just as he, himself, became a mythological figure of sorts) who saw the genius of rock 'n' roll, noir crime fiction, and hardboiled film auteurs like Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood years—if not decades—before the rest of the world did. Paul passed away in 2006, but in many ways, he’s still ahead of the times. Kevin’s two books are a testament to Paul’s artistry and brilliance, and a monument to his tragic life and career, both of which ended too soon. (One of the many projects Paul intended to write, according to Dave Marsh, was a series of detective novels in which one of the recurring tropes would be the rising cost of cheeseburgers in NYC. Oh, how I wish those were realized!)

(Cover art by Jeff Wong)

Paul started his writing career at The Little Sandy Review, reviewing folk music in the 1960s (even a young Bob Dylan was influenced by Paul, especially when he ran off with some prized records belonging to Paul and Little Sandy co-editor Jon Pankake). When Dylan went electric, Paul saw how things were changing and decided to change with them. As an editor at Rolling Stone, he championed a whole new generation of musicians in the 1970s. At Mercury Records, he signed the New York Dolls. And then in the 1980s, professional clashes with editors and an increasingly crippling OCD forced Paul to leave Rolling Stone. His writing career came to a stop, even though the ideas didn’t. Later, he worked at a video store in NYC, and ultimately died alone in his apartment. Kevin’s biography, Everything Is An Afterthought, tells the whole sad story. It’s heartbreaking as hell, but I couldn’t put it down. Paul was as compelling and complex as any of the artists he wrote about—and just as talented.

(Kevin Avery, wife Deborah Avery, and artist Jeff Wong)

I had the pleasure of interviewing Kevin about Paul Nelson for Our Town, Downtown. Limited by space in the publication, I couldn’t dig as deep into my own reaction to Paul’s writing as I would have liked, so I’d like to do that here on Pulp Sereande. As a big fan of detective fiction and all things noir—and a noir-ish character himself—Paul seems a natural fit for this blog.

Before I picked up either book, I had only heard of Paul Nelson—I had never read him before. As soon as I dug into them, however, I knew I had found not only a critic I could admire, but also a kindred soul I could relate to. Nelson wasn’t just a reviewer, and he brought a rare artistry and personal style to the field of criticism. At his best, Paul didn’t just review the merits of a particular album, but he dug deep into himself to talk about how the piece moved him, and why it affected him the way it did. It’s not merely autobiographical or confessional—it’s criticism at its finest, examining not only the aesthetic merits of a piece, but also tapping into that spiritual place that great art can take us.

Kevin Avery began the event by reading excerpts from Paul’s review of Willie Nelson’s Red Handed Stranger. It’s an extraordinary piece of writing, as much poetry as it is criticism, history, and mythology.

Teddy Roosevelt claimed loneliness is a quintessential ingredient of our national character, he hit the psychic bull's-eye, ringing up images of pragmatic pioneers, existential outlaws and a long line of heroes who dreamt of the purity of their youth even as they drew their guns to eliminate it. "There are no second acts in American lives," someone once said, and a cursory glance at our gods -- the cowboy/desperado, the gangster/detective, the movie star/rock & roller -- whose lifestyles generally suggest either early and unnatural death or obsolescence, easily reinforces such a statement. To the quiet American, violence, like the perpetual but unreal motion of life on the road, seems to serve as solicitous coin in the realm of the solitary survivor, some kind of necessary stop-gap and occupation while a man waits in the sanctified state of loneliness for something to happen, someone to come along or return, his vague search to end.

From Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid to Dirty Harry Callahan, the mythic American hero is a man, almost always womanless, who has somehow been trapped in that curious nether world between comic innocence and tragic experience; unable or unwilling to make a choice, he can at best (or worst) embrace either adjective, neither noun. He has known happiness once, lost it, and now nothing will help. for the sentimental there is Christianity, the "official" solace, itself an uncanny mixture of loneliness and death, its hero a lost and forsaken son slain only to rise again with the promise of a glorious but distant new childhood in exchange for a worn out, hopeless past. It is small wonder that most Americans worship no god except their own lost innocence, have had, in fact, to rely on popular literature, films and music to provide plausible and workable archetypal "religion," that is more Jungian and Freudian.

Veteran country singer/songwriter Willie Nelson knows all of this -- and much more. His Red Headed Stranger is extraordinarily ambitious, cool, tightly controlled. A phonographic Western movie which brilliantly evokes the mythopoeic imagery of McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Shane and the works of John Ford, the album traces the life of a Montana cowboy who finds his true love with another man, kills both of them and later another woman, then drifts through Denver dance halls into old age, forever unable to cut his early loss but managing in the final years of his life a moving, believable and not unwarranted synthesis of all he has missed… (Rolling Stone, 8/28/75)

From Teddy Roosevelt to Pat Garrett to John Ford to Robert Altman to Jack Schaefer to Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood—all in the first three paragraphs of a review of a Willie Nelson album. Who the hell else had the guts—to say nothing of the foresight, understanding, and intelligence—to write this? This is the type of essay that, in the best possible way, kicks your ass and gives your mind a workout. It also makes you want to run out and listen to the album.

Paul spoke—and wrote—with the language of a true connoisseur. As you can read in his obituary on Ross Macdonald, or in his interviews with Clint Eastwood, he was more than a fan and more than a critic. He spoke about the things we loved with a lived-in intimacy. You got the feeling that these albums, books, and movies had banged around the inside of his mind and passed through his guts three-times over before he sat down to write. One of the amazing things about Conversations with Clint is how he gets the typically tight-lipped actor/director to open up. It’s like sitting in on conversations between two old friends…except they had only met a few times in their entire lives. The instant chemistry between the two is remarkable, and makes for one of the most engaging long-form film interviews I’ve read in years. One of the nicest touches to Everything Is An Afterthought (aside from making the book resemble a box of Nat Shermans, Paul's favorite) is its organization: part one is the biography, and part two is filled with some of Paul’s best pieces (including his Ross Macdonald obit). First you get to know the man through his life, and second you get to know the man through his art. When you finish the book, you begin to realize how Paul’s biography would be incomplete without his own writing.

Paul was, and still is, a game-changer, and reading his work pushes me to become me a better critic.

Thanks, Kevin Avery, for introducing Paul Nelson’s work to me, and putting it back into circulation for long-time fans and newbies alike to enjoy.

Here are some more pictures from the event:

"The Cheaters / Dial "M" For Man" by Orrie Hitt (Stark House, 2011)

2011-11-08T13:48:00.007-05:00

Every time I look at my shelf, I’m thankful for Stark House Press. Greg Shepard and his colleagues tirelessly endeavor to find the hidden gems of American literature—the forgotten classics, should-have-been-hits that fell between the cracks, the critically misrepresented, and the underdogs that never got their due. Orrie Hitt is all of these and more, and now he joins Stark House’s esteemed roster that includes Harry Whittington, Gil Brewer, W.R. Burnett, A.S. Fleischman, Margaret Millar, and Robert Silverberg. This new anthology includes The Cheaters (originally published in 1960 by Midwood), Dial "M" For Man (originally published by Beacon in 1962), as well as introductions from Hitt's children and Brian Ritt, an afterward by Michael Hemmingson, and a complete bibliography of Hitt's work.

Half a century after most of his books were published, Orrie Hitt still carries the stigma of the “sleaze” genre. But, as Brian Ritt points out in his introduction, this “allowed him to portray a side of American life not dealt with in the mainstream media during the 1950’s.” Upon first publication, Hitt’s milieu might have been thought of as licentious, but today his characters just seem real, and all too relatable. They’re working stiffs sick of their day job, tired of their home life, and bored with their surroundings, and they resort to alcohol and sex to take their mind off the monotony and dreariness of their everyday life. Hitt is not an idealist, and his characters are as imperfect and morally bankrupt as the world they live in.

In The Cheaters, young lovers Clint and Ann leave their farm-town of Beaverkill, NY and wind up living in the slums of Wilton, known as “The Dells.” Ann works by day in a diner, while Clint spends his nights tending bar. Soon, he finds himself caught in a web of small-time vice that could lead to big-time problems. There’s the bar’s owner, a fat pimp named Charlie; his buxom, hot-to-trot wife, Debbie; and a corrupt cop with his eyes on Debbie, Red Brandon. When Clint sees his chance to dump Ann, grab Debbie and the bar, and get rid of Charlie and Red, he decides to put everything on the line…

Dial “M” For Man is about Hob Sampson, a twenty-something with his own TV business, a deadbeat business partner, and a frigid, virginal girlfriend. All that changes when he makes a house call on Doris Condon. Her husband, shady business tycoon Ferris Condon, stands in the way of everything Hob wants: he blocks Hob’s bank loan to improve his shop, and he won’t let go of Doris. Sick of his shop, his girlfriend, and his partner, Hob decides to clear out of Hawley, NY once and for all—but not without Doris, and not without exacting revenge on her scheming husband.

Both The Cheaters and Dial “M” For Man are finely crafted novels, blending squalor, suspense, and social realism. The world that Hitt resents is more recognizably human than in many of his contemporaries’ books. Hitt is like William Inge, but with less melodrama, and with more crime and depravity. And forget about the “sleaze” label—these two novels are 100-proof noir, as potent as any of the more celebrated stuff coming out from Gold Medal or Lion. Hitt’s characters are lost in their frustrated desires, unable to get anywhere new and unwilling to go back to where they came from. Instead of digging up and out, they only dig themselves deeper into the grave. Their motivations are the stuff you find sitting next to you on the bus, or behind you in line at the store—working man’s noir. Read this little excerpt from The Cheaters and see what I mean:

“Several times I tried calling the apartment but when I did he answered and I hung up, my hands shaking and my guts tense and tight. All I had to do was think about her and I was a wreck, a hopeless ghost of a man who was blinded by all of the love that was being lost. More and more I turned to the bottle, seeking from the bottle the answers to the thousands and thousands of questions that kept churning around inside of me. I didn’t find any answers. I got drunk and stumbling and I didn’t care whether I worked at the bar or not.”

One thing you can you say about Hitt’s characters: they really go to work. In both books, the day-to-day grind of the job is intimately detailed. Hitt is deeply invested in the notion of work as few authors are. There’s a lived-in, worked-in quality to Hitt’s novels that is unmistakably authentic—the tedium, the irritation, the slog, and the disappointment is utterly real. There’s the sense that his characters have to work for their dollar, for their booze, and for their rent. Not one aspect of daily life is overlooked or taken for granted. There’s a palpable sense of poverty, hunger, and destitution on every page. As Hitt writes in Dial “M” For Man: “Living with her would be constant excitement. Yes, living with her, giving her children—but how would I be able to pay the bills? Poverty, stark and real; she would not want that and neither would I.”

Real-world worries distinguish Hitt’s plots and give them their distinctive edge. He invests classic suspense scenarios with working class woes, and the result in both books is a story as fantastic as it is believable. On the one hand, Clint and Hob find themselves living out their big bosomed fantasies and their paranoid nightmares, but at the same time, they’re never fully divorced from the concerns of putting a meal on their plates or paying their rent. Call it noir neorealism with a little added sex—Orrie Hitt’s 1950’s make many novels of the time seem like vanilla ice cream in comparison.

Another aspect of Hitt’s novels that I love is his style. There’s a natural, unlabored flow that reminds me of Harry Whittington (though Whittington is, on the whole, much more intense). Hitt had a clever sense of humor, and he rarely resorted to clichéd expressions, instead creating his own distinctive style. For example, “She dripped sex like a leaky faucet,” (The Cheaters) or “She had a low voice, hot and sultry, the kind of a voice that could sell bathing suits in the middle of winter” (Dial “M” For Man). Even when Hitt is trying to be sexy, there’s frequently an underlying nuance of poverty and struggle, such as this line from The Cheaters: “She was the kind of a girl you could starve to death with and not mind it at all.” In fact, that is precisely the future that Clint sees for himself unless he can find a way to pay-off Red Brandon.

When it comes to plotting, Hitt doesn’t rush head-first into trouble, and instead lets the situations develop slowly. Both The Cheaters and Dial “M” For Man are more about the build-up than the pay-off. Don’t get me wrong, both have terrific and surprising finales, but Hitt dispenses with conclusions rather quickly. He’s more interested in how—and why—his character get themselves in such a rut. Two of the driving motivations are summarized by Hitt himself:

“I’ve got a bull by the tail here but I’ve got to hang on. If I let go now there won’t be another chance. There’d be just jobs here and jobs there and I’d end up floating from place to place, never earning very much and never being sure what I was going to do the next day.” (The Cheaters)

“How bored can you get and still live with yourself?” (Dial “M” For Man)

Hitt’s characters are as restless as they are in need of a rest. The male characters are afraid of commitment, and frequently realize that they’re no good sleazebags. As the narrator of The Cheaters admits, “I was making big money in The Dells but I was just as bad as the prostitutes who worked out of the bar.” The female characters, in particular, are ready to settle down, but they don’t want to settle for less than they feel they deserve. While many of the women are too easily forgiving of the men and too quickly accept the role of a martyr, Hitt never forgets the hardships they faced in order to maintain their independence. They’re smart, savvy, and world-weary from a very young age. Only the femme fatales—Doris and Debbie—come off as thinly characterized (but “fully” developed, physically speaking) archetypes. But these are also the characters Hitt spends the least time with—he’s obviously not interested in them, nor does he sympathize with those who exploit others for personal gain. His loyalty is with the underdogs, the losers, and the workers.

Two days ago, I was new to Orrie Hitt. Today, I’ve read three novels by him. Not only the two books reprinted by Stark House, but also I’ll Call Every Monday, Hitt’s debut. And sitting by my side is another Hitt novel, Shabby Street. Yup, I’ve been bitten by the Hitt bug, and I’m a happier readier because of it. On page one, I knew I would enjoy Hitt's work, and by the end of the collection I knew I had found a new favorite author.

Thanks, Stark House, and keep up the excellent work!

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Vintage Paperback Covers found at Orrie Hitt: The Shabby Shakespeare of Sleazecore.

"I'll Call Every Monday" by Orrie Hitt (1953)

2011-11-07T23:36:00.006-05:00

The whole world dreads Monday, but insurance salesmen look forward to it. It’s the day when they collect payments from customers, and when they can catch housewives at home alone…

I’ll Call Every Monday, originally released in Hardcover by Red Lantern Books and in Paperback by Avon in 1953, was Orrie Hitt’s first published book. The story is about Nicky Wevaer, an insurance agent caught in a web of women. First, there’s Sally Allen, a local up-and-coming singer who is stuck on Nicky because he was her first lover. And then there’s the recently widowed Bess Walters, whose husband—a colleague of Nicky’s—hung himself after getting caught impregnating a young client and also defrauding his company with phony claims. And then there is Irene Schofield, a buxom blonde whose husband is a pornographer posing as an “artist.” Luckily, he’s dying of cancer. Unlikely, for Irene, he’s not dying fast enough, and he doesn’t have any insurance. But Nicky knows all the tricks of the trade, and for the right price—and the right woman—he could make anything happen.

The influence of James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity is plain to see—how could any “adulterous insurance salesman” plot not be touched by Cain’s masterpiece—but Hitt doesn’t merely repeat the archetypical plot, nor does he mimic his forebearer’s style.

For one, Hitt throws readers deeper into the everyday life of a small-town insurance agent. We see the work at the office, the chitchat between co-workers, the late- night meetings at bars, and the wheeling-and-dealing. Hitt is working with a much larger, ensemble cast, and he is also much more concerned about developing a palpable sense of community within the novel. Social and economic networks have been central to each of the three Hitt novels I’ve read thus far (the other two being The Cheaters and Dial M For Man, both recently reissued by Stark House), and details of this sort are what makes his novels come to life, and makes them still relatable some sixty years after they were first published. Between all the co-workers, clients, spouses, adulterers, lodgers, and bar patrons, it really feels like there’s a whole town at work in I’ll Call Every Monday.

Stylistically, Hitt writes in a calm but confident manner. This is a slow-cooker of a plot that allows each of the characters to simmer until they’re red hot and ready to pop. Hitt doesn’t rush into complications, and at any given moment there are a number of different paths that the characters could take, which would send the story into whole new territories. This is one decided difference between Double Indemnity and I’ll Call Every Monday. One feels that there is never any alternative for Cain’s characters, and that they’re fated to be together “to the end of the line.” But for Hitt’s characters, the narrative feels a bit more open, which not only gives the characters a bit more freedom, but also makes them all the more reprehensible for their own downfall. Nicky isn’t a total patsy—he knows that most of the time he’s a low-down, horny scumbag, and he knows he passes over a potentially good relationship with Sally for a purely physical fling with Irene, whom he knows is hiding something from him, but he’s too busy juggling her figures to worry about that. Hitt’s male protagonists share a self-knowledge that reminds me of Day Keene’s characters—they’re not innocent victims of a dastardly femme fatale, instead they’re knowing schmucks who can’t keep it in their pants. And, strangely enough, that’s what makes them sympathetic and likable. We’ve all known someone like this at some point in our lives. Even Hitt’s femme fatales have this homegrown, small-town quality to them: their busts might be bigger than life, but their villainy certainly isn’t, and their motivations and actions are recognizable.

I also really enjoy reading Hitt’s turns of phrases. Instead of the usual “my knees were shaking,” Hitt describes Nicky’s reaction to seeing Irene like so: “My knees did things to each other.” What better way to convey someone as being dumbstruck than by, well, making them sound momentarily dumb. In a more subtle sense, there’s also the implication that Nicky isn’t even fully aware of what his body is doing when he’s around Irene. Another favorite line is, “My bank account was going down faster than a hand-dug well in dry weather.” It’s clever, precise, instantly visual, and very original. The water metaphor also brought to mind someone dying of thirst, desperate enough to do anything for just a drop of water—and that’s exactly how Nicky is acting, except it is sex, not water, that he wants. Nowhere in Hitt’s line does he talk about “desperation” and “thirst,” but it still communicates those feelings, even without the words. Being able to transmit ideas between the words is the mark of a skilled craftsman, and that’s what Orrie Hitt was: a terrifically talented writer.

Overall, I really enjoyed reading I’ll Call Every Monday. Hitt didn’t invent the “adulterous insurance salesman” archetype, but with Nicky Weaver, he certainly created one of its best incarnations. The plot is filled with colorful characters, and captures that vivid sense of homespun, working-class America for which Hitt is best remembered. All in all, it’s one hell of a first book. Mark me down as an Orrie Hitt fan—and now it is time to dig into my stack of his paperbacks that I’ve neglected for far too long.

If you’d like to read more about I’ll Call Every Monday, you should check out Frank Loose’s review, or read this piece over at Orrie Hitt: The Shabby Shakespeare of Vintage Sleazecore.

"The Criminal Kind" Pt. 2 at LARB: Faust, Bruen, Gorman, and Keene

2011-11-05T14:22:00.005-04:00

The second installment of my Los Angeles Review of Books column, "The Criminal Kind," has been posted on their website. In the piece, I discuss Christa Faust's Choke Hold, Ken Bruen's Headstone, Ed Gorman's Bad Moon Rising, and Day Keene's Dead Dolls Don't Talk, Hunt the Killer, and Too Hot to Hold.

Excerpts are below, or read the full piece here.

Christa Faust
Choke Hold
Hard Case Crime, October 2011. 256 pp.
Written in a casual-but-confident first person perspective, Faust skillfully weaves some of today’s most kinetic hardboiled action with her endearingly earthy humor and moments of unexpected poignancy.

Ken Bruen
Headstone
Mysterious Press, October 2011. 256 pp.
“Taylor, I heard you were dead,” yells a cabbie in Ken Bruen’s ninth Jack Taylor novel, Headstone. Bruen’s series detective has endured enough booze, coke, beatings, and bruises to bury most of his private eye predecessors, but like a hardboiled Sisyphus, Taylor’s eternal punishment is to push bottles back-and-forth across a bar, taking cases as they come, seeking atonement that’s always out of reach, and accepting yet another glass of Jameson as a consolation prize.

Ed Gorman
Bad Moon Rising
Pegasus Books, October 2011. 256 pp.
Gorman is in top form in Bad Moon Rising. Rather than wax nostalgic or reactionary about the sixties, Gorman cuts through the mythology to reveal a much more nuanced and confused socio-political landscape... Sam McCain is Gorman’s most compassionate and endearing character, and Bad Moon Rising is another triumph in an already extraordinary career.

Day Keene
Dead Dolls Don’t Talk /Hunt the Killer /Too Hot to Hold
Stark House Press, August 2011. 371 pp.
Rounding out the Keene anthology is Too Hot to Hold (1959), in which average joe Jim Brady steps into a Manhattan cab on a rainy day and walks out with a suitcase full of money... Circumstances get so twisted that even Joe wonders, “What kind of a nightmare had he gotten himself into?” The type of nightmare that Day Keene can dream up: the result is a lean, dizzying, and masterful thriller to rival any of today’s top-sellers.

"Death Wish" by Brian Garfield (1972)

2011-11-04T16:45:00.002-04:00

Say the title, Death Wish, and most people will think of the 1974 film starring Charles Bronson as Paul Kersey, an architect-turned-vigilante after street punks rape his wife and daughter, resulting in his wife’s death and daughter’s institutionalization.

Behind the movie, however, is a masterfully written novel by Brian Garfield. First published in 1972, the original name for Garfield’s most iconic protagonist is Paul Benjamin, and he was a CPA. The basics of the story are the same—a liberal, non-violent citizen turns into a one-man army to battle injustice and street violence—but the similarities end there. I love me some Bronson, and think that the film is one of the best New York crime thrillers to come out of the 1970s, but when it comes right down to it, the old adage is true: the book is better than the movie.

But with Death Wish, it is more than just a case of “which is better,” because Garfield’s novel has such radically different, and more complex, goals than the movie. The book directly engages in the controversy that surrounds the movie, namely, whether or not it advocates or criticizes vigilantism. Garfield’s Death Wish is not at all an action novel—Paul doesn’t even touch a gun until two-thirds of the way through. Instead, Garfield has constructed a novel equally invested in psychology, philosophy and sociology, and one as disturbing as it is revealing about our modern world. And I do mean “modern,” because even though the book is almost forty years old—and even though New York has been Disney-fied beyond belief—the issues at the core of the novel haven’t gone away. How do we deal with violence when we are victims? How do we respond to our own violent urges, and where do they come from? How do we administer justice? Torn between paranoia and guilt, fear and rage, Paul Benjamin is the moral nexus of American society, someone who so badly wants to believe in Democracy on a conceptual level, but doesn’t know how to live it in the real world.

One of the underlying tropes of Garfield’s work (which unifies his Western and Crime novels) is how the introduction of sudden violence can severely alter the way a person lives and acts. It brings out the best, worst, and most unpredictable of people. In The Night it Rained Bullets, a violent outburst reveals layers of desperation and tragedy in a Western town; in Fear in a Handful of Dust, four kidnapped doctors are dropped, naked, in the middle of a desert and must balance savage nature and cunning intelligence in order to survive; and in Tripwire, set after the Civil War, a former slave-turned-soldier gets fed up with injustice and hypocrisy and sets out on a vengeance mission south of the border.

Out of all of Garfield’s work that I’ve read, Death Wish is his most lucid and profound exploration of the deep emotional, moral, and psychological ramifications of violence, from the perspectives of both victim and aggressor—and what makes Death Wish so complex and compelling is that, here, they are one and the same. It is Paul’s movement from one role to the next that occupies the bulk of the novel. “Now he had to get used to an entire new universe of reality,” writes Garfield, describing Paul’s change in perception. “Now he found himself searching every face for signs of violence.” It is remarkable, and upsetting, how the world that Paul sees—and that we see—becomes increasingly menacing, allowing for our worst fears, prejudices, and uncertainties to manifest with paranoid clarity. “The body rotted, the mind deteriorated; only the demons of subconscious fantasies thrived.”

But Garfield—and even Paul, to a certain extent—isn’t oblivious to the inner change that is going on. “It was no good pretending the soul-sucking darkness wasn’t alive with terrors. The beat of his heart was as loud as the echoes of his heels on the concrete.” This self-knowledge is something that is lacking in the movie. Bronson’s silent demeanor doesn’t allow us access to his thought process, so perhaps he is experiencing the same sorts of revelations, but if he is, he’s keeping them to himself. Not so in the novel, where we wrestle alongside Paul with his transformation.

Another significant difference between the book and the movie is the representation of violence. Death Wish, as filmed by director Michael Winner, is a “thriller”—you experience an emotional rush alongside Bronson. This is definitely not the case with the book. Only the first killing is graphically depicted, but it is more nauseating than exciting. After that, the murders are brief, curt, and uncomfortably detached—which is Garfield’s way of signaling Paul’s sociopathic turn. “The second time—the man who’d tried to rob the bank—he’d felt very little; he remembered it with vague detachment as if it were a scene form a movie he’d watched a long time ago.” Garfield is even more clear with his intentions when he writes this line, which takes all the heroics out of Paul’s vigilante exploits: “He was keeping his own equilibrium only because he seemed to have been struck by the edge of the same malaise that had infected Carol—the inability to feel anything.”

Reading Garfield’s novel today, it is clear that he is not advocating for vigilantism. When I interviewed Garfield, he said how the novel was based out of his own violent reaction when he was victim to a crime, and how revolted he was by his sudden thirst for vengeance.

“The Paul Benjamin character was a sort of everyman to me. Impetus for the Death Wish story came one night in late 1971. At the time, I lived out along the Delaware River, near Lambertville NJ, and I'd driven into New York to go to a party at a publisher friend's. I parked on the street. When I came down I found that somebody had slashed the convertible top of the car to ribbons. It was about a two-hour drive home, and really cold, and I thought about finding the guy who'd slashed the roof. I never did find him, but the novel came out of it so I think I got the better of him.”

The novel Death Wish is about an inner conflict, but some interpretations seem to miss the point. From Newgate Callendar’s review in the New York Times when the book was first published, it seems that even he misunderstood the book’s intentions. Here’s an excerpt from his review:

“Men like [Paul Benjamin] are not normally men of action, no matter what catastrophe may propel them—but Garfield skillfully establishes the change in his protagonist’s character, his thinking, his world-view, then sets him to acting out the fantasies many big-city people (more and more) are beginning to feel. The fantasy of being able to stand up against ‘Them.’ The fantasy of actually living an eye-for-an-eye philosophy. The fantasy of stepping on human vermin.

“The reader’s reason may reject the basic situation, but his emotion cheers it on. That is because Garfield is so very plausible. ‘Death Wish’ is a scary novel about life and death as experienced through the feelings of a citizen in a crime-ridden New York.”

Callendar was right that Death Wish is “scary,” but what he didn’t get is that Garfield wasn’t embracing these fantasies. He was busting the mythology of violence wide open, and taking the romance out of crime fiction. When Garfield started out writing Westerns, he changed the way the genre worked, the types of characters that were around and the physical spaces they inhabited. He’s a realist, interested in real people and real places. Sure, Garfield can entertain the hell out of you when he wants to, construct a breathtaking plot and put it into motion at breakneck speed, but he’s a great writer with original ideas and a unique voice.

It’s a shame that Death Wish hasn’t been reprinted since 1989. Like many of Garfield’s books, they’re only circulating in used editions. But just last month, Mysterious Press announced on their website that they’ll be bringing out new eBook editions of many of Garfield’s work, and Death Wish is included on the list. Hopefully this will win new audiences for Garfield’s book, and win Death Wish the critical acclaim it deserves.

Until the eBook is released, here is one of my favorite passages of the book, which reflects on its own relationship to Westerns:

“He turned on the TV and sat down to watch it. One of the local unaffiliated channels; a rerun of a horse-opera series the network shad canceled years ago. Cowboys picking on sodbusters and a drifting hero standing up for the farmers against the gunslingers. He watched it for an hour. It was easy to see why Westerns were always popular and he was amazed he hadn’t understood it before. It was human history. As far back as you wanted to go, there were always men who tilled the soil and there were always men on horseback who wanted to exploit them and take everything away form them, and the hero of every myth was the hero who defended the farmers against the raiders on horseback, and the constant contradiction was that the hero himself was always on horseback...”

-------------
Edition read: Fawcett Crest paperback reprint, 1974.

"The New Faces of Suspense" at Mysterious Bookshop with Megan Abbott, Duane Swierczynski, Q.R. Markham, and Lawrence Block

2011-11-03T11:34:00.003-04:00

Last night at the Mysterious Bookshop in Tribeca, four of crime fiction's brightest and best gathered for a panel entitled, "The New Faces of Suspense." Discussing their latest books were Duane Swierczynski (Hell and Gone, Mulholland Books), Megan Abbott (The End of Everything, Reagan Arthur Books), and Q.R. Markham (Assassin of Secrets, Mulholland Books), with MWA Grandmaster Lawrence Block (A Drop of the Hard Stuff, Mulholland Books) moderating. When you get four writers as talented--and witty--as these together on the same stage, you know you're in for a treat. This crime fiction crew certainly did not disappoint.

Block's opening remarks referenced a Fred Allen quip about Ed Sullivan, and how anyone could do his job, even a dog, as long as you rubbed meat on the performers. Without missing a beat, Duane chimed in, wondering why no one had rubbed meat all over him yet? Block's classy retort was that, if Duane hadn't done it himself yet, there was nothing he could do about it now. All four writers had a terrific and comical rapport with one another, and they were cracking wise all night long.

Megan talked about how at first The End of Everything seemed an unlikely follow-up to her earlier period novels, but how ultimately she was able to locate the heart of noir in the world of teenage girls in 1980s Midwestern Suburbia. Noir really is universal and inescapable! Megan's books keep getting better and better, and if you haven't read this one yet, you're really missing out! Duane discussed his first attempt at writing a sequel, and his need for creative challenges. After finishing the first book in the Charlie Hardie trilogy, Fun and Games, he decided to set the new book, Hell and Gone, largely in a prison. I haven't read this new one yet, but Fun and Games was...well, "fun and games," but the bloody, violent, explosive kind, which is precisely the kind I like! (Read my reviews of both Megan and Duane's books here at the Los Angeles Review of Books.) Q.R. Markham discussed Assassin of Secrets, the first in his trilogy about Cold War-era spy Jonathan Chase, and how it was inspired by his love for both classic espionage fiction (like Ian Fleming and Eric Ambler) and for men's action novels like The Butcher and The Penetrator. I haven't read this one yet, but I've been looking forward to it for a long time now, so I'm excited I finally was able to buy a copy at the reading! There will be a review here at Pulp Serenade once I finish it.

Some of the highlights of the Q&A included what music each of the writers listened to while working. Megan listened to what she described as music you'd hear in a 7/11 parking lot in the late '70s/early '80s, such as Mott the Hoople; Duane said he stuck mainly with soundtracks and music without lyrics; Q.R. originally intended to listen to nothing but spy soundtracks by Hugo Montenegro and Lalo Schifrin, but that wound up being too cheesy, so he such with Dub and Reggae for the first book in the series, and Samba and Bossa Nova for the second. Each of the authors was also asked to name their book of choice to convert a "literary snob" into a crime fiction fan. Megan chose Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely; Duane suggested Don Winslow's The Power of the Dog, or something by George Pelecanos; and Q.R. went with Graham Greene's "entertainments," Eric Ambler's Coffin for Dimitrios, or Chandler's The Long Goodbye.

And what's next for these authors? Megan hinted that she is working on something about the "dark heart of a cheerleader"; Duane is working on something lean in the style of James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice; and Q.R. is finishing up his Jonathan Chase trilogy. And what about Lawrence Block? "It's a secret," he cleverly answered.

All in all, a terrific reading! Here are some more pictures from the event.

Neal Pollock on Richard Stark's Parker Novels at LARB

2011-10-14T14:23:00.004-04:00

Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Neal Pollock has a great piece about the Parker novels, written by Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake).

In a world ruled by weak bureaucrats and populated by scared alcoholics who eat at cheap diners, Parker is an existential anti-hero, an underground man almost wholly driven by self-interest who hates hippies and mobsters equally. He kills without mercy, though never without reason, and he seems to live almost entirely in the moment. “He was impersonal, not cruel,” Westlake writes. Westlake has called his Parker novels portraits of a “man at work,” and it’s true that Parker is better at his job than you’d ever hope to be at yours. Things often go to shit, but it’s never his fault.

Read the full piece here!

"Edwin of the Iron Shoes" by Marcia Muller (1977)

2011-10-13T08:27:00.000-04:00

“I don’t like being badgered by little girls playing detective.” He stood up.

Harmon was hiding something from me, and not very skillfully either. I took what seemed like a big risk and remained sitting. “I’m not playing, Mr. Harmon. This is for real.”

Marcia Muller first introduced her series PI Sharon McCone to the world in 1977. The book was Edwin of the Iron Shoes. Since then McCone has gone on to appear in 28 novels and numerous short stories, and her creator has won numerous awards, including the Eye Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Private Eye Writers of America. Muller’s latest Sharon McCone mystery, City of Whispers, is set to be published October 26 by Grand Central Publishing. In preparation for that, I decided to go back to the very first McCone case and catch up.

In Edwin of the Iron Shoes, Sharon McCone is a late-twentysomething investigator for All Souls Cooperative legal services. She had been assigned to look into a series of arson and vandalism attacks on a group of antique and junk stores on Salem Street in San Francisco, but was unable to find who was at the bottom of it. But now that one of the shop owners, Joan Albritton, has been murdered, McCone is back on the case.

As she narrows her suspects, McCone’s investigation leads her in several directions. First, there are the developers, like Cara Ingall, who had failed to buy out the Shelter Street shops and build condos—would they be desperate enough to force out the current tenants, even if it meant murder? Then there are Joan’s neighbors, such as Charlie Cornish, a junk dealer and Joan’s sometime lover—but is business bad enough to turn them from compatriots into competition? Oliver van Osten, Joan’s antique dealer, seems suspiciously willing to lend a helping hand, nor does McCone trust Ben Harmon, the bail bondsman who helped Joan’s deceased grandson when he was in trouble. If that wasn’t enough, McCone has to contend with Police Lieutenant Gregory Marcus, who at times seems to be her adversary and at others her would-be paramour.

My first step into the world of Sharon McCone was very positive, and I’ve already ordered more of the series to read next. I was really drawn into the setting of late 1970s San Francisco, and its specific culture and politics that become so central to the plot. At the heart of the mystery are issues of urban renewal and gentrification, topics that are still highly relevant today. Barry Jenkins’ 2008 indie romance Medicine for Melancholy (no relation to the Bradbury story) even touches on similar issues surround modern-day San Francisco. Muller also did an excellent job exploring the intricacies and duplicities of the antique trade, and using those elements to create a unique and atmospheric plot.

The biggest strength of Edwin of the Iron Shoes, though, is its protagonist: Sharon McCone. She’s tough, smart, and very likable, but most important she is also realistic and relatable. When McCone gets into scrapes, she’s certainly capable of taking care of herself, but she’s no superhero. She allows us to witness her trepidation as she waits in her car while a drunk stumbles past late one night. Could she take him in a fight? Maybe. Could he be faking and carrying a knife instead? Perhaps. You never know what will happen in a big city in a dark alley, and McCone isn’t stupid. She’s realistic. She knows the dangers, and she’s prepared—not just physically, but intellectually. McCone also seems like an actual late-twentysomething who is just starting her career: her apartment isn’t nice, and she lives off of cookies, bagels, and chocolate bars. Little touches such as these give McCone that necessary third-dimension to make her stand out from the archetypical private eye.

Edwin of the Iron Shoes was Marcia Muller’s first published novel, but from the confidence and clarity of her prose, the maturity of her characters, and the smoothness of her plot, you’d never guess it. It’s an assured and impressive debut, and I am greatly looking forward to catching up with the rest of Marcia Muller’s bibliography soon.

"The Strike" by Charles Williams (Cosmopolitan, Jan. 1954)

2011-10-12T08:35:00.003-04:00

“Then, last evening, paradise had caved in.”

Charles Williams is best known as one of the top tier noir novelists of the 1950s and 1960s, having published classics for Gold Medal like The Long Saturday Night, but he was also a short story writer. “The Strike” originally appeared in the January 1954 issue of Cosmopolitan. In contrast to Williams’ novels that I’ve read, “The Strike” is strikingly different. While it’s not noir, it’s not quite not “not noir,” either. Williams begins with a quintessential domestic scene that could have started any number of noir stories—an evening at home between a fed-up wife and her neglectful husband—and then gives it an unexpected twist.

All Mr. Courtney cares about tonight is his No. 12 Hendrickson fishing tackle. While he dreams of the trout he’ll be able to catch with it, across the room Mrs. Henderson is tired of reading the paper to herself. After several failed attempts at starting a conversation, she’s decided she’s had enough and is going to do something about it.

“What about my uranium?”

That sure got his attention!

I won’t give away any spoilers, but the story takes some surprising, and very enjoyable, turns. Williams’ superb craftsmanship shows in his tonal dexterity, economic wordplay, and ability to switch moods at the drop of a dime. Alternately tense and comical, “The Strike” is a finely spun tale, and features excellent illustrations from Alex Ross, a regular artist in Cosmopolitan from the 1940s through the 1960s.

Download “The Strike” here from Scribd.

Ken Bruen on Words and Writing

2011-10-11T09:00:00.000-04:00

“There'll be times when the only refuge is books. Then you'll read as if you meant it, as if your life depended on it.”
--Ken Bruen, The Killing of the Tinkers

"London Boulevard" Movie Review

2011-10-10T08:37:00.001-04:00

“I was a criminal. Presently, I’m just unemployed.” So explains recently released ex-con Mitchel, played by Colin Farrell in the movie adaptation of Ken Bruen’s London Boulevard. The movie, written and directed by William Monahan (writer of The Departed), is hitting theaters later this year, but for the time being you can rent it online via Amazon for ten bucks. Unless you are a die-hard Ken Bruen fan, however, you might want to hold off. Maybe my hopes were too high, but London Boulevard was overall a disappointing movie.

The story is about Mitchel (Farrell), who was arrested several years ago for killing a man. Now that he’s out of jail, his old gangster connections want him back in the business, but Mitchel doesn’t want to go down that path again. Instead, he takes a job as a handyman/bodyguard for high-profile actress/painter Charlotte (Keira Knightley), who is being hounded by paparazzi. Big-shot gangster Gant (Ray Winstone), however, won’t let Mitchel out of the business that easily, and soon he begins threatening those closest to Mitchel. As much as Mitchel would like to walk away, he is caught not only because of his growing affection for Charlotte, but also the gnawing desire to find the young punks who killed an old friend of his and exact vengeance.

London Boulevard is an awkward movie. It tries to marry an unconventional narrative (without a central, driving mystery or satisfying closure) with more mainstream stylistic tendencies. Not having read the original book, I can’t comment on how faithful or not the movie is, but on the whole the movie lacks the brutal charm, intelligent wit, and aesthetic grace that one finds in all of Bruen’s writing. It’s like Monahan wanted to take Bruen’s black-and-blue-and-boozy world and give it blockbuster appeal. The resulting movie is too slick and not gritty enough. It's noir lite.

Ray Winstone, as expected, is great fun as the big, bad gangster. And even though Keira Knightley and Colin Farrell surprised me with low-key performances that were at times decent, ultimately they were inconsistent and not always in-tune with the rest of the movie. Farrell’s pretty-boy looks soften his character and he doesn’t quite reconcile the sensitive, Rilke-quoting part of his character with the brutal gangster façade. Knightley’s character, Charlotte, gives a speech about how she doesn’t like acting in most movies because she is either a sex object, or just a sponge that soaks her up male co-stars’ brooding backstory. That’s all well and good, and Charlotte’s character certainly avoids being either of those stereotypes…but her role never coalesces into anything that feels real, and her romance with Mitchel is a little too sweet and naïve for my tastes.

Some reviewers online were complaining about the lack of plot resolution and character redemption. Clearly they haven’t read Bruen’s work before. He’s not interested in such stock conclusions or easy answers, and I’m glad that Monahan at least tried something similar with his movie, even if it doesn’t work. Emotionally, he doesn't pull it off, and in terms of pacing, everything concludes a bit too quickly. Perhaps had Monahan showed more of the violence without flinching or cutting away right before the blood splatters, the nihilistic turn at the end might have carried more weight. As is, the final scene seems more like a punch line rather than the gut-punch it should.

Even though it wasn’t very good, I still was able to enjoy parts of London Boulevard. The story premise is solid, and Ray Winstone is always fun to watch, but this is far from the perfect cinematic evocation of Ken Bruen that we’ve been waiting for. Blitz (which I will review later this week) is a much better movie, and hopefully there will be even more adaptations in the future that will continue to improve.

Max Allan Collins' Favorite Detective Novels

2011-10-09T10:00:00.001-04:00

Over at Flavorwire, Max Allan Collins (The Consummata, Quarry's Ex) talks about ten of his favorite detective novels.

"I could have chosen any one of several dozen Perry Mason novels for this list, but The Case of the Moth-Eaten Mink was my first Mason and the wonderfully alliterative title still makes me smile. The books are much tougher than given credit for, and the cases always hinge on sex, greed or both. The dialogue crackles and no one ever wrote better courtroom scenes than lawyer Gardner." --Max Allan Collins

Read the whole list here.

In Search of David Goodis' "The Burglar"

2011-10-08T10:00:00.000-04:00

Over at Shooting Pool with David Goodis, Aaron Finestone takes a visit to Atlantic City in search of remaining traces of one of Goodis' masterpieces, The Burglar. Head on over to Aaron's site to read about his journey and see photographs of the places he visited.

Read the Pulp Serenade review of The Burglar here.

Louis L'Amour on Words and Writing

2011-10-07T10:08:00.002-04:00

Excerpted from "The West Lives On in Louis L'Amour" by John Riley, from the Los Angeles Times, Oct 19, 1975.

He [Louis L'Amour] writes three or four books a year. Every morning at the breakfast table he reads the classics to his wife, Kathy, an ex-actress, and his son, Beau, 14, and daughter, Angelique, 11. The rest of the day he reads western nonfiction from a huge collection of journals and periodicals and histories. And he writes. He seldom researches any one book specifically. He has set himself the goal of swallowing the West whole and regurgitating it as one long, linked masterwork. Currently, his project is a 40-volume cycle showing three families, the Chantrys, Sacketts and Talons. The hero of "The Man From the Broken Hills" is half Talon, half Sackett. Ten of the three-family cycle are complete.

The most important elements of L'Amour's books are the setting, the terrain, the atmosphere. It is his most important character.

"The terrain is always an important factor," he says. "In those days, you couldn't go form here to Phoenix without worrying about where you could get a drink and where you'd camp tonight. And where the Indians might ambush. I always write about real places. I go to a great deal of trouble to find about that place."

…

"Nothing begins here," he says. "Always in the past writers seemed to write about The West in capitals as a place in limbo, a kind of never-never land where things happened that had no relationship to the rest of the world at all. Well, I don't like that at all. People were coming and going from the West. There was a man named Oliver Wallop who ranched up in Wyoming for 30 years and then went back to England and took a seat in the House of Lords. Men came in and went out contributing and taking from it. Like Teddy Roosevelt coming West a sick man and going back East healthy with the western spirit in him."

"Doomsday Mesa" by Chap O'Keefe

2011-10-06T09:26:00.001-04:00

Originally published as a Black Horse Western in 1995, Chap O’Keefe’s Doomsday Mesa has long been out of print. Thanks to the e-book revolution, it is now available for Kindle. I greatly enjoyed the first Chap O’Keefe book I read, Misfit Lil Cheats the Hangrope, so I was excited going into Doomsday Mesa. It certainly lived up to my high hopes, but it also showed a different side of O’Keefe. From the opening pages, Misfit Lil Cheats the Hangrope was laced with action, humor, and mystery. Doomsday Mesa shows a darker side of the West. It’s not a pretty picture, but neither was life in the old West. O’Keefe mixes the bitter truths of Western history (the Donner party cannibalism tragedy and the Sand Creek Massacre) with a compelling fictional narrative, and the result is another winning Western drama from veteran author O’Keefe.

The protagonist of Doomsday Mesa is Yale Cannon. Once a wild, gun-toting youth, he matured while fighting for the Union in the Civil War and was eventually appointed as a Deputy Marshall. He may be older, wiser, and grayer, but he hasn’t forgotten his youth—or the girl he loved, Jane Bell. So, when he is ordered to proceed to Antelope to bring back wanted murderer William Effingham, he decides to find out what happened to his old crush. But the town of Antelope has other plans in mind for the Deputy Marshal.

Arriving in Antelope, Cannon is mistaken for a cattle rustler cultist and narrowly escapes a showdown. Investigating the matter further, Cannon discovers the town’s boiling resentment towards Brother Abel Anson Pryor and his followers who have taken over Jerusalem Pastures, which the locals are now calling Doomsday Mesa. Meanwhile, Cannon seeks out the town elder, Reverend Ephraim McDowell, and his daughter, schoolteacher Kate, to learn about Jane Bell. Disaster looms, however, as tensions between the townspeople and the cult reach the breaking point, and Cannon finds himself caught between two firecrackers—Effingham and Pryor—and must save Kate’s reckless younger sister, Rose, before she becomes victim to her own naïve delusions.

Doomsday Mesa is a lean book written in tough, compact prose that packs in a lot of drama in short space. Don’t let the size of the novel fool you—O’Keefe has assembled a terrific ensemble cast whose individual stories weave together a complex narrative layered with drama and anticipation.

As with the Misfit Lil books, O’Keefe excels at crafting rugged, independent, and believable female characters that defy stereotype. Kate doesn’t fit the conventional mould of a schoolmarm whose spinster ways melt at the first sight of the hero. Far from it! Kate is a forthright suffragette, and even occupies a position as one of the town’s leaders, but she’s also cognizant of the weight of her responsibilities, both to the town and to her near-blind father, whom she looks after. And of all the characters in the book, Rose is perhaps the most relatable, human, and vulnerable of the bunch. Young, brash, and a romantic at heart, she longs to run away with her lover and rebels against everything her family stands for. How many of us were like that in our own youth? Locating those universal emotions in his characters is what makes O’Keefe’s West so compelling and relatable. He doesn’t treat the West as some static, dusty entity, but engages with the emotional and moral issues the way real people would have.

Doomsday Mesa is a good way to get to know O’Keefe, and now’s the perfect time, as Gary Dobbs over at The Tainted Archive is offering a 2-for-1 promo deal with O’Keefe’s eBooks. See his blog for official details.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from Doomsday Mesa:

“Cannon was merciless. His first shot took one of the gunnies in the leg. He was jerked off his feet, blood bubbling from a shattered kneecap. Flung raglike to the ground, he writhed and mewled helplessly, churning the dust to a chocolate mud beneath his broken limb.”

“Few windows still held glass. They were just black holes in moon-silvered timber siding. ‘Like empty eye sockets,’ said Rose.”

“Atop the rim was a big mesa, covering many thousand acres. Part of it was grassland, but the lately titled Jerusalem Pastures did not live up to the promise of their name. The tableland was poor farming land. Nature had been in a mean mood when she fashioned this rocky section. The mesa was riven by deep, treacherous canyons – and it had not been improved by the scars of more abortive mine workings.”

“Cannon barged past him. Though the crashing of guns had ceased, a wild sound of arguing voices swelled from the saloon. The whole building seemed crouched like a wounded dog cringing in the shadows at the side of Main Street, growling and gathering itself up for another frantic leap into gut-ripping violence.”

"The Consummata" by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins (Hard Case Crime, 2011)

2011-10-05T09:27:00.000-04:00

“Baby, I wasn’t made for this world.”

“Possibly it wasn’t made for you either.”

Forty-four years after he was first introduced to the world in 1967’s The Delta Factor, Mickey Spillane’s one-off character Morgan the Raider makes an encore performance in The Consummata (now available a paperback or ebook). Unfinished at the time of Spillane’s death, The Consummata is the fifth book to be completed by the author’s long-time friend and collaborator, Max Allan Collins, and the second to be published by Hard Case Crime (the other being the excellent Dead Street). In all of the Spillane/Collins books that I’ve read, it’s been impossible to pick the point at which one author’s work ends and the other’s begins. It’s a seamless melding of voices and ideas.

Not being familiar with The Delta Factor, the first couple of chapters of The Consummata was a bit rocky for me. Spillane/Collins had a lot of backstory to convey, but once all the bases were covered the pacing picked up and didn’t slow until the last corpse fell.

Morgan the Raider is a modern-day pirate, but he steals only from governments, gangsters, and other sources whose wealth comes from corrupt means. As the book begins, Morgan is running through Miami’s Cuban neighborhood, being chased by CIA agents who think he stole $40 from the US Government. Coming to Morgan’s rescue are a group of Cuban immigrants who have heard about Morgan’s reputation and want to hire him to locate Jaimie Halaquez, a double agent for Castro and the CIA who ran off with $75,000 intended to help fellow Cuban exiles. The only clue as to Helaquez’s whereabouts is his proclivity for S&M. But with rumors of an elite party thrown by high-priestess of bondage with spy connections back to WWII—The Consummata—Morgan knows Helaquez will show his head eventually…now he just has to stay out of the CIA’s clutches long enough to get his man.

Compared to Spillane’s more famous protagonist, Mike Hammer, Morgan isn’t quite as prone to violence. But while there might not be any punks bubbling on the floor or brains splattered against walls, Morgan does perform one Spillane/Collins’ most humorous executions: death by toilet swirly. And when it comes to his libido, Morgan also shows a bit more restraint. Overall, Morgan is more moderate than Hammer, which for some readers might be more appealing. Personally, I prefer the extremity of Hammer’s personality. Still, Morgan has that irresistible macho charm—he’s good in a fight, better in bed, and capable of tackling any adversary, whether government, gangster, or your garden variety goon. He’s the male action fantasy writ large—just not quite as large as Hammer.

Morgan’s adventure leads him from Cuban mom & pop grocery stores and seedy, bombed-out hotels to labyrinthine brothels and out-of-this-world sex parties. It’s a doozy of a thriller and a helluva lot of fun to read. Thanks to Max Allan Collins for making sure Spillane’s legacy carries on with such strong volumes.

And I couldn’t end the review without mentioning Robert McGinnis’ exquisite cover. Wowzers! And I don’t just mean the lean limbed babe with the gun, either. The wallpaper, couch, and whole décor is beautifully designed. Just when you think Hard Case has released their best cover, they top themselves yet again.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from The Consummata:

“The Cuban kitten was rising and turning and leaning against the wall with her hands flat against the tile, glancing back at me with sultry insistent invitation, offering the rounded cheeks of the most perfect posterior that fool Castro ever banished form his country.”

“That Muddy was having a piece of pie did not surprise me. That he could eat that way, and carry all that weight around, and still find clothes that looked baggy on him, remained a mystery.”

And this well-crafted gem which almost reads like verse:

“Luck.

“You can’t buy it. And you can’t avoid it. It finds you, and does its capricious thing, a coin flip coming up tails and giving you the bad luck of getting clipped by that coke freak, only to come up heads and let you survive, with just a minor concussion, cuts, abrasions, and a couple broken ribs. No internal injuries at all.

“Luck.”

John D. MacDonald on Words and Writing (2)

2011-10-04T08:34:00.002-04:00

Recently, I came across an in-depth article on John D. MacDonald from around the time of the movie adaptation of Darker Than Amber. "The man who writes those Travis McGee stories: A look at John D. MacDonald" was written by Mike Baxter and was published in The Washington Post Times Herald on Feb 1, 1970. It was a fairly lengthy article, but below are excerpts of some of the most insightful parts:

[Mickey] Spillane visits [John D.] MacDonald's home at intervals, and both write mysteries. As craftsmen, however, they are as close as Eldridge Cleaver and Sam Spade. Even Spillane can recognize the gulf. "I am a writer; you are an author," The Mick once told MacDonald. There is more in that than semantic nonsense.

MacDonald writes on a beige IBM Selectric as if Doom were about to unplug it in the last great denouement…He devotes a business-like seven-to-nine hours a day writing, doing it until the lunch hour, then doing it again until the cocktail hour. Fast subtraction shows that this leaves "too little time, dammit" for other pursuits.

...

MacDonald can pension McGee off without affecting his workload. While completing McGee No. 12, he is working on three other novels in his unorthodox way, moving from one to another at the first outbreak of boredom.

He writes without outlining, weaving intricate plots and large casts into the empty middle separating a known beginning and a known climax.

He writes on expensive 25-pound bond paper. "I think the same situation is involved as with painting and sculpture. If you use the best materials you can afford, somehow you have more respect for what you do to it."

He seldom edits with pencil. "I rewrite by throwing away a page, a chapter, half a book, or go right back to the beginning and start again."

He is also a happy writer, another unorthodoxy. "I enjoy the hell out of writing," he said, "because of the rare times when it really works good. It's like an East egg hunt. Here's 50 pages, and you say, 'Oh, Christ, where is it?' Then on the 51st page, it'll work. Just the way you wanted it to, a little better than anything in that same area ever worked before. You say 'Wow! This is worth the price of admission'."

"Dead Dolls Don't Talk / Hunt the Killer / Too Hot to Hold" by Day Keene (Stark House, 2011)

2011-10-03T08:52:00.005-04:00

Stark House Press returns with one of their strongest collections yet, a triple-header of 1950s noir from the incomparable Day Keene: Dead Dolls Don’t Talk, Hunt the Killer, and Too Hot to Hold. These are sweaty, grimy, relentless thrillers that capture Keene at his zenith—masterfully concocted plots, breakneck pacing, and some of the sleaziest characters you’ll find in 50s paperbacks.

The protagonists in these stories are all “average joes” —Keene’s stock-in-trade—whom fate, or coincidence, has thrown for a deadly loop, but none of them are entirely innocent. Keene’s characters are remarkably mature in their self-awareness. They know they’re philandering dirtbags and no-good heels, and they don’t pretend for a moment they’re any good. But that’s what makes them so sympathetic and, oddly enough, relatable. It’s easy to see how they’re lead down the path, and how they engineered their own doom. Coincidence and bad luck play a big role in each of the plots, but the majority of the blame likes squarely with the protagonists themselves: guys who want sex and booze so bad they’d screw up everything right with their lives just for one wild fling. We’ve all known someone like that, and that’s one of Day Keene’s formulas for success. Everyday people in everyday situations gone massively out-of-hand—our craziest dreams turned into living, breathing nightmares.

Dead Dolls Don’t Talk (Crest, 1959) follows a juror who learns the hard way what it means to find yourself on the wrong side of the law. Hours after returning a verdict of “guilty” in a murder case, Doc Hart wakes up next to the condemned man’s wife…dead wife. On the run and wanted for murder, Hart’s only friend is Gerta, the young woman from his shop whose affections he turned down in the past. Together, the two of them head to Mexico to unravel an increasingly complicated scheme that looks harder and harder to prove.

Hunt the Killer (1951, Avon)—my favorite of the bunch—is about a Florida smuggler, Charlie White, who is released from prison only to walk immediately back into the same trap that put him there. Only this time it’s not smuggling he’s wanted for, it’s murder. If only he could figure out the identity of his mysterious employer, Señor Peso, he’s sure he could prove himself innocent.

Too Hot to Hold (1959, Gold Medal) is about a dissatisfied husband whose dull life takes an unexpectedly exciting turn when he steps into a Manhattan cab one rainy morning. In the back seat is a suitcase filled with more money than he’s ever seen before. There’s no identification tag, so he’s takes it, and soon finds himself a mob target. Meanwhile, back at home things are headed for disaster as his nympho daughter threatens to make a scene if he doesn’t sleep with her, and his spiteful wife is on the warpath about his obtuse behavior.

If you’ve never checked out Keene before, this is the perfect place to start. Not only are all three books top of the line noir, but David Laurence Wilson’s meticulously researched introduction is a must read. Keene, whose real name was Gunard Hjertstedt, is one of those writers who didn’t leave too many clues about his own life behind him, and Wilson’s essay sheds light onto one of the author’s biggest mysteries—himself. Exquisite literary taste and impeccable scholarship make Stark House not only one of my favorite contemporary publishers, but also one of the most reliable out there today.

One thing you can always count on Day Keene for: killer openings. He knows how to hook a reader from line one like nobody else, and the beginning paragraphs to each of these three novels are some of his best. Take a look and if you like what you read, check out Stark House Press’ website for more information.

From Dead Dolls Don’t Talk:
“There was no boy and girl business about it. Both of them knew what they were doing. It was a thoroughly adult and sordid affair involving proven lewd and licentious conduct, resulting, so the State alleged, in murder:

"The man’s name was Harry L. Cotton. He had been a professional aerial crop duster. He was big. He was young. He had a way with women.”

From Hunt the Killer:
“It was hot. It was dark. The cell block smelled of men sleeping with dreams. Men without women for years. Of fear and despair and frustration. Night after night, alone. Three walls, a high window, iron bars. A hard, narrow cot—and you. With disinfectant replacing affection. A small squirrel in a big cage. Staring hot-eyed into the dark. Wanting a drink. Wanting a woman. Trying not to blow your top. Hysteria building up inside you.”

From Too Hot to Hold:
“Although his actual physical death didn’t take place until two days later, Mike Scaffidi began to die the moment he picked up a fare in front of Grand Central Station at exactly 9:25 on the morning of November 3, 1958.”

Jack Taylor's Movie Collection

2011-10-02T09:28:00.000-04:00

Ever wonder what movie you'd watch if Jack Taylor invited you over? One of my favorite parts of Ken Bruen's The Guards was the description of Jack Taylor's video collection. I gotta admit, Jack has pretty impeccable taste when it comes to film. Like Taylor himself, these films are suffused with doom and darkness, but also poetry. They're not all that cheery, but then again, neither is Jack. Still, I could go for any one of these any night of the week.

When I came to, my hangover had abated. Not gone but definitely not howling. After a shower an an oh so careful shave, I headed for my video shelf. It's sparse but has my very essentials:

Paris, Texas
Once Upon a time in the West
Sunset Boulevard
Double Indemnity
Cutter's Way
Dog Soldiers [Who'll Stop the Rain]

"Bad Moon Rising" by Ed Gorman (Pegasus Books, 2011)

2011-10-01T08:54:00.002-04:00

Ed Gorman’s small-town private eye/lawyer Sam McCain makes a welcome return in Bad Moon Rising, the 9th novel in the series. It’s another knockout mystery from Gorman, with the right balance of suspense, characterization, and humor.

For those new to the series, the San McCain saga begins in the late 1950s and is now up to 1968. The books are set in Black River Falls, Iowa, where McCain is a young lawyer and licensed P.I. whose liberal politics, nonconformist spirit, and tendency to represent outcasts, underdogs, and other less-favorable citizens, has marked him as persona non grata in the eyes of the community. But McCain has grown to the point that he doesn’t care much what people think of him. He sees through the phony social and political facades to see what is really happening beneath the surface: injustice, racism, sexism, domestic violence, hypocrisy, oppression, ignorance. But like Bartleby before him, McCain would prefer not to be a part of that society, and would rather read his Gold Medal paperbacks and listen to Buddy Holly. McCain would be bitter before his time if it weren’t for his deep compassion for the imperfect and morally corrupt world around him. He understands the limits of human strength, the depth of suffering, and the horrible things that people do to one another, whether deliberately, accidentally, or just stupidly. That mixture of sympathy, outrage, resignation, and humility is the touchtone of Gorman’s world, and watching those ideas grow in McCain over the past nine books has been one of the great pleasures of the series.

Bad Moon Rising finds McCain coming to the defense of a hippie commune on the outskirts of town. The law has just been waiting for an excuse to kick them out of Black River Falls, and it just might have found the perfect excuse to shut the party down permanently. The body of young Vanessa Mainwaring, daughter of a local and exceedingly wealthy war profiteer, was discovered in the commune’s barn. The fingers point to her ex-boyfriend, a mentally unstable Vietnam vet named Neil Cameron. McCain is ready to come to Cameron’s defense, until Cameron saps him over the head and takes it on the lam. Everyone in town says it is an open-and-shut case, but McCain refuses to give in to popular opinion. But as he gets deeper into the case, McCain doesn’t like the hidden sides of society that he uncovers, and he begins to doubt his own convictions.

One of my favorite parts about the McCain series is Gorman’s cultural insight. The McCain books are some of the best-written portrayals of the complexities of small-town America, like Winesburg, Ohio with a noir twist. This isn’t a nostalgic view of the good old days. Gorman’s 1950s and 1960s are as politically diverse and socially complex as today. Even though it is a small town, the crimes are anything but quaint. Gorman reveals the dark undercurrents, seething anger, and boiled-up oppression of mid-century Middle America. There might not be any fedoras or rain-slicked dark alleys, but Gorman’s world is 100% noir. His work embodies the compromised decisions characters have to make in order to survive in a compromised world. And because the McCain series is grounded so thoroughly in realism, McCain and the rest of Black River Falls have to live with the consequences of their actions. There’s a steady history of regret, pain, embarrassment, and resentment running through the McCain books. I don’t want to downplay how fun they are to read—because they’re compulsively entertaining and endearingly familiar to our own lives, families and communities—but there’s a darkness to the books that haunts one long after the story has ended.

If you haven’t checked out the Sam McCain series yet, Black River Falls is a great place to start, and will be released by Pegasus Books on October 12th both as a hardcover and ebook. If you’d rather start at the beginning—and by all means, the series has a terrific opener—then check out The Day the Music Died, which was recently brought back into print by Ramble House.

"Quarry's Ex" by Max Allan Collins (Hard Case Crime, 2011)

2011-09-30T09:39:00.000-04:00

One of crime fiction lovers’ favorite fictional hitmen returns in Quarry’s Ex. Max Allan Collins’ character first appeared in 1976’s The Broker (now renamed just Quarry), and has since appeared in eight more novels and several short stories.

Quarry’s latest mission finds him in Boot Heel, Nevada, a low-budget version of Las Vegas. He’s on the heels of a Nick Varnos, a fellow hitman whose target is a B-movie director named Art Stockwell who is currently shooting Hard Wheels 2, a Billy Jack-esque biker movie. Selling his services to the director, Quarry poses as a publicist and hangs around the set, looking to stop Vargas, and to figure out who in the crew hired the killer in the first place. Things get more complicated when Quarry runs into someone from his past he never thought he’d see again: his ex-wife, Joni, who is not only appearing in Hard Wheels 2, but is married to Stockwell. Once before, she crossed Quarry, and now he wonders if she’s decided to cross her current husband, too.

Quarry’s Ex was my first step into the series, and it certainly won’t be my last. Between his smart-alecky sense of humor, wry cultural commentary, and sardonic quips, it’s hard not to be won over by his personality. These are two of my favorite lines: “Outside it had been as dry as unbuttered toast, but in here the air conditioning stopped just short of a meat locker” and “He was shaking, like a Hell’s Angel version of Barney Fife. Maybe a touch scarier.”

While he may be a bit of a smartass, there’s a humility—and humanity—to Quarry that makes him a well-rounded character and more than just a one-dimensional archetype. The moment that jumps to mind is when, after the day’s shoot ends, the hot young Production Assistant invites him out, and he has to turn her down to do his own investigating. He narrates, “She looked a little disappointed. It was one of those moments when I wished I was someone else.” The remorse in his tone feels sincere, but so, too, does the more physical longing in his next observation: “I took a few minutes to watch her go, because that well-shaped behind in a pair of jeans was enough to make me believe in God again. For a few seconds, anyway.” In those three sentences, Quarry reveals a few different sides to his personality: the loner who longs for companionship; the suave, macho playboy persona; and the witty, sarcastic observer.

As a film lover, the movie-shoot setting was an added treat. I was reminded of my favorite Richard S. Prather novel, The Cockeyed Corpse, which finds Shell Scott protecting bosomy babes shooting a nudie cutie in the desert. Collins’ book isn’t nearly as farcical as Prather’s—in fact, Collins’ book is a far more accurate portrayal of filmmaking than Prather’s—but they both share a similar fond satire of showbiz.

2011 has turned out to be one hell of a great year for Max Allan Collins and, in turn, for fans of his. This spring saw the release of Kiss Her Goodbye, one of Mickey Spillane’s incomplete Mike Hammer novels that Collins finished, and which turned out to be one of Hammer’s most enjoyable exploits yet. This summer, Collins also released Bye, Baby, Bye, a Nate Heller story set around the death of Marilyn Monroe. Next month, Hard Case is releasing another Collins/Spillane collaboration, The Consummata, and the Nate Heller short stories will be collected in Chicago Lighting. If that wasn’t enough, Collins’ also has another graphic novel, Return to Perdition, in November. The sustained high-quality of Collins’ recent work is impressive, and I’m looking forward to catching up with all the Quarry titles that I’ve missed out on.

"Getting Off" by Lawrence Block (Hard Case Crime, 2011)

2011-09-29T09:38:00.001-04:00

After a year-long hiatus, Hard Case Crime is back, and they’re making up for lost time with one of their most gloriously pulpy and enticing titles yet: Getting Off, by Lawrence Block writing as Jill Emerson. The additional writing credit is a nod to Block’s past, one of the pseudonyms he used for some of the more “steamy” books he wrote back in the 60s. Nearly four decades after Jill’s name last graced a book cover, Block has dusted off the pen name to give her another run. The result: a scandalously fun, thoroughly hardboiled, and genuinely sexy crime thriller. It’s like a sleazy Cornell Woolrich revenge fantasy. Noir has rarely been this titillating before.

The story is about a twenty-three year old girl from Hawley, Minnesota. She’s gone by many names—Kit, Carol, even Lucretia Eagle Feather—but her real name is Katherine Anne Tolliver. She’s young and beautiful, and men would die just to sleep with her. And that’s just fine with her…as long as she gets to do the killing. Her record is nearly perfect, except for those first five men she slept with. So, she makes a list, packs her bags, and sets out on a bloody trip down memory lane.

“Killing was fun, there was no getting around it, and killing men she’d slept with felt appropriate, and that was as much as she had to know.”

The front cover of Getting Off carries the tag line, “A Novel of Sex & Violence”—and it’s no joke. Some readers might not be too amused by the kinky antics to be found within the book. But, if your tastes do run in that direction, then get ready for a wild ride. I have never blushed this much reading a book in public ever before, and I relished every shameless second. Right from the first page, Block seems to be writing with a Cheshire cat’s grin on his face. He’s clearly having a blast. But as sordid as the story gets, Block never loses his sense of humor nor lets his guard down as a writer.

Despite the graphic content of some of the scenes, when you step back and let your cheeks revert to their natural color, you’ll notice how impeccably crafted the prose is, and how much restraint Block shows in his descriptions. There are points when things get pretty over the top...but they never get too over the top, if you get what I’m saying. There’s a fine line between using absurdity for literary effect and just being absurd. Partly it is a matter of taste, and partly it is a matter of intelligence. Longtime readers of the author know that Block has plenty of both, and this is what ultimately makes Getting Off such a satisfying read. Getting Off is not only erotic and suspenseful, but smartly written and cleverly plotted, too, with a fiendishly funny finale waiting for readers in the very last line.

And I can't finish the post without mentioning that great cover art by Gregory Manchess. Hard Case Crime has given readers some of the best cover art of the past few years, and Getting Off stands tall among the best of the best.

"The Killing of the Tinkers" by Ken Bruen (2002)

2011-09-28T10:15:00.000-04:00

“If I had to pinpoint one second when I made the worst judgment of my life, I’d say it began then.” The Killing of the Tinkers, the second of Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor novel, was originally published in 2002. When we last saw Taylor at the end of The Guards, he was contemplating going to London, sobering up, and getting his life back together. As The Killing of the Tinkers begins, it is a year later, and he’s heading home to Galway. He’s drinking heavier than before, picked up a nasty cocaine habit, and brought back a few secrets with him, too. He’s in town only a day before he’s back on the job as a private investigator. Someone is brutally killing young “tinkers”—a nomadic Irish group on the outskirts of society—and the Guards aren’t doing anything about it. Offered a place to live and a nice salary, Jack Taylor signs on to do his best.

Taylor’s best, however, isn’t always good enough. His addictions continue to spiral out of control, his romantic relationships and friendships are pushed to the test, and the killings still continue. Things couldn’t get any lower for Taylor…until he’s asked to catch a crazed swan murderer who is terrorizing local lakes. When even that proves too much for him, Taylor once more has to confront the darkest parts of his soul to try and put himself back together again.

As much as I loved The Guards, I’d have to say The Killing of the Tinkers is even better. Stylistically, Ken Bruen is in a class of his own. Right from the first page, Bruen hits a pitch-perfect perfect noir groove and doesn’t let go until the very last page. Jack Taylor starts off in a bad way and only proceeds to get worse. “Did I feel good? Did I fuck. A sense of desolation engulfed me. Cloud of unknowing? …Not quite. I knew and was not consoled. Emptiness lit my guts like a palpable sense of dread.” It takes a special author to be able to find something beautiful and honest in such unrelenting despair, and Bruen is the guy to do it. While The Killing of the Tinkers does have its moments of humor (especially when mocking Sting and Dire Straits), when it goes for the punches, you feel it in your gut. In the words of Jack Taylor, “Lord knows, feeling bad is the skin I’ve worn almost all my life.”

Within the private eye genre, each detective has his own process for detection that defines his character. Jack Taylor’s process is that he’s often too much of a wreck to do anything. While there’s something darkly humorous about that, it’s also an important part of Bruen’s worldview. The Killing of the Tinkers isn’t overly concerned with detailing the detection process, and the mysteries are actually easily solved, but this only goes to show how prevalent crimes of all sorts—human, swan, or otherwise—are in our daily lives. Scratch the surface, there they are; dig deeper, and you’ve find a treasure trove of despair; or just use your eyes to survey the people around you, and you’ll find gut-wrenching stories just waiting to be told. Noir is all around, that is what Bruen reveals to us. And maybe that’s why Jack Taylor drinks so much—to stop himself from seeing, not only the worst parts of the world around him, but also himself.

Taylor’s increasing self-awareness from The Guards to The Killing of the Tinkers is one of the most fascinating progressions in the series, as well as the most haunting. Even though he knows himself better than in the first book, he seems even more incapable of getting his life back together. Bruen stands alongside Lawrence Block when it comes to writing palpably about the actual pains, and damages, of addiction. There’s nothing romantic about Jack Taylor’s vomiting, his blackouts, and the relationships he’s thrown down the drain. As Taylor tells one of his drinking companions, “I fucked up, Keegan.” Keegan says, “So…put it right.” Taylor’s humble, but heartfelt, reply: “I’ll try.” And that’s one of the differences between The Guards and The Killing of the Tinkers. I’m not sure if Taylor was trying in the first book. He was on the case more often, but it was though he were acting automatically. Even though now he’s struggling to retain control of himself more than ever, he also seems to understand more what the stakes are, and he has more of an investment in setting things straight.

The Killing of the Tinkers is a lonely book. Even though Jack Taylor is surrounded by more friends, and has more female companionship, than in The Guards, his addiction has cut him off from the rest of the world. Everyone recognizes his coked-out eyes, and they call him out on it, but it doesn’t change his ways. Taylor’s own growing sense of futility and failure only add to his alienation. What carries us through all the darkness, however, is Taylor’s sense of drive. He doesn’t know where he’s going, or who is in control, but he’s not standing still. There’s the sense that he wants to see a light at the end of the tunnel, and that he’s going to get there one of these days, but he’s just not there yet. At first he tells himself that he doesn’t feel any real love for either of the women in the story—Kiki and Laura—but eventually he comes to realize that he’s just lying to himself. Whether it is too late to turn either relationship around is another question, and I won’t spoil anything for you, if you haven’t already read the book. But regardless of whether it works out or not, there is still that potential for hope that remains in Jack Taylor. Sure, he’s a likable drunk with an endearing hardboiled exterior and sensitive poetic interior, but what makes me so drawn to Jack Taylor is the way he reaches out to hold onto his own life. He swats and stumbles more than he connects, but I’m rooting for him all the way, and will continue to root as I dig into the third novel in the series, The Magdalen Martyrs.

Patti Abbott's Latest Flash Fiction Challenge

2011-09-27T20:51:00.004-04:00

Patti Abbott is hosting a new Flash Fiction Challenge over on her blog. Her past Challenges have turned out some terrific stories, and one event even spawned a book: Discount Noir. Already for this latest Challenge she's got Heath Lowrance, Chad Eagleton, and Gerald So. David Cranmer even dropped a comment saying he might be involved. I can already tell this is going to be a great lineup. Patti will also be donating money to a charity organization for everyone that joins in. Below is the announcement that Patti made on her blog earlier today:

******************

Reginald Marsh is a painter I am very fond of. He considered his work to be social realism and most of his scenes were from New York in the twenties and thirties.

You can find many examples of his work if you just google-image his name.

Challenge: Write a story in any genre of under 1000 words based on one of Marsh's paintings. If you don't have a blog, I will post it.

End date: Three weeks from today, October 18th.

I will donate $5.00 for every story submitted to Union Settlement, a social service
agency in East Harlem servicing 16, 000 people, with a minimum contribution of $100. This agency is near and dear to our family and badly in need of donations in these times.

Hope someone wants to play. It's my money but your talent I'm buying.

If you're interested in joining in on the fun, let Patti know on her blog.

"The Guards" by Ken Bruen (2001)

2011-09-26T22:15:00.005-04:00

“Without mystery, we are lost!” says the deathbed-wino to Jack Taylor, an alcoholic Irish private eye whose most positive asset is also his biggest drawback: “You have a rare gift, my friend. …You never probe or pry into a person’s affairs.” The poetic irony is not lost on Taylor, who has spent the better part of his adult life in an inebriated stupor trying to avoid probing into even his own life.

Originally published in 2001, The Guards is the first entry in Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor series. A former member of the Irish Guard who was kicked out for insubordination, Taylor now spends his time in the local pub, occasionally doing favors for people. Ann Henderson has heard of his reputation—both as a PI and as a drunk—and wants his help proving her daughter didn’t commit suicide, and that it was murder. Reluctantly, Taylor agrees to help.

One of the novel’s many brilliant touches is the surprising ebb and flow of the plot. Taylor is alternately too busy staying sober—or too busying blacking out while catching up on lost-benders—to do much detecting. There’s no sense of urgency to Taylor’s investigation, no race against time to save another soul, or to stop the killer from striking again. In Taylor’s sober moments, we come to learn of his past sins—the relationships he tanked, the pain he’s inflicted upon loved ones and hated ones alike—and why he so badly wants to blot out the past. As the story progresses, Taylor’s detection is directed more inward than outward, and it becomes clear that the real mystery Jack Taylor is solving is himself.

If you’ve never read Bruen before, this is the place to start. Bruen is one of the most articulate, expressive, and unmistakable stylists in modern fiction. His sentences are as rich as they are compact. At once a model of minimalism and a cascade of feeling, Bruen’s prose is as emotionally attuned as it is aesthetically pleasing. As one character says of Jack Taylor, “You are not a man who gives away a lot…a lot, that is, in the information department. What you do say has the qualities of brevity and clarity.” The same could be said of Bruen. His prose read like poetic verse; and he skillfully uses blank space as though he were painting, and not just writing, on the page. Bruen epitomizes that wonderful contradiction that is noir: his stories are as full of despair as they are full of life’s dark beauty.

Also, it is an exceptional, and all-too-rare, pleasure to read as unabashedly a literate writer as Ken Bruen. His characters swap authors names, and even poems, not as a sign of their schooling, but because literature actually means something to them. Books are a means by which they find clues to their own questions, reasons for their own complexes, and compassion for their own failures. Nor is The Guards without a sense of humor. Taylor’s wry, sarcastic commentary on everything from the state of modern Ireland to Phil Collins, pop music, and literary greats like Derek Raymond, is as crucial to his personality as is his deeply rooted guilt and self-destructive tendencies.

One of the biggest mysteries to The Guards is Jack Taylor’s ultimate motivation. He lives half his live in oblivion, and the other half trying to figure out why he wants to be that way and how to stay there longer. When Ann Henderson approaches him with the case, he confronts her with his own existential dilemma: “How come you want…a drunk…to help you?” Without missing a beat, she provides an answer, something Taylor has never been able to do for himself: “They say you’re good because you’ve nothing else in your life.” Throughout the novel, Taylor struggles to come to terms with how true her words are.

So, why does Jack Taylor take the case? It’s an important question to ask of any private detective, because often their worldview is expressed through their motivation for taking a job, and why else do we read about private detectives except to view life through such penetrating and experienced eyes—the world seen upside-down, inside-out, and right-side-up? In the case of Jack Taylor, it all goes back to those five words spoken by the wino: “Without mystery, we are lost!” The process of working forces Jack to confront his own inner demons. When you look at the whole novel in this light, Ken Bruen doesn’t seem to be using the mystery plot as a means for righting some wrong in the world, for achieving justice, or actualizing revenge. It’s not so much about the world around us so much as what is inside of us. The mystery tells us where and how to look, and what to look for; it provides direction for our own detection, wherever it might lead us, and prepares us for whatever it might reveal.

NoirCon Poetry Contest

2011-09-24T12:02:00.005-04:00

Calling All Noir Poets!

NoirCon 2012 is hosting their first ever poetry contest. All the pertinent details are below.

Good luck to all those who enter!

NoirCon 2012 -- Will You Be There?

2011-09-23T16:16:00.001-04:00

NoirCon 2012
Philadelphia, PA
November 8th through November 11th

Lawrence Block - David L. Goodis Award Winner

Otto Penzler - Jay and Deen Kogan Award Winner for Literary Excellence

Robert Olen Butler - Keynote Speaker

Charles Benoit - Master of Ceremonies

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Pulp Serenade will be there. Hope to see many of you out there, too!

For more info, stay tuned to www.noircon.info

"The Cage" by Talmage Powell (Avon, 1969)

2011-09-23T01:02:00.005-04:00

The Cage marks yet another crossover between Crime and Western writers. Talmage Powell, who got his start in the 1940s writing for pulp magazines like Detective Tales and Dime Detective, is best known for his Ed Rivers series of detective novels. He also wrote for Alfred Hitchcock Presents and contributed several stories to Hitchcock anthologies over the years. And while Powell did write for Western pulps like Ranch Romances, he only published one full-length Western novel, The Cage, which appeared as an Avon paperback original in 1969.

Powell’s West bears traces of predecessors like Harry Whittington and H.A. DeRosso (especially their dogged, devastated protagonists whose heroism is tainted by their natural impulse towards violence) and points the way for the surreal sadism that George G. Gilman would soon bring to the genre. Powell isn’t interested in pastoral traditions. The only purification to be found in The Cage comes through sweat and blood. This is a grimy novel, whose sun-scorched landscapes are as brutal and remorseless as the characters themselves. In the grand tradition of Noir Westerns that stretches from Clifton Adams to Ed Gorman to Edward A. Grainger, Powell is interested in the flipside of the Western fantasy, the dark underbelly and harsh conditions of frontier living.

Webb and Temple Cameron fled poverty-stricken, Reconstruction-era New Orleans for Tacton Flats, a barren land just north of Mexico. They lived there in peace, until one day Webb returned home to find his wife brutally raped and in a catatonic state. Finding the tracks of two horses and one mule, Webb decides to pursue the attackers and exact personal justice. Convinced that seeing her attackers defeated might shock her back into reality, Webb brings along his wife. To prevent her from committing suicide or running away, he converts his wagon into a cage for Temple. With neighbors Ethel and Clyde Tomberlin at their side, the Camerons head towards the border, hell bent on bloody vengeance.

Though the plot is fairly straightforward, it is still effective because Powell conveys both the physical and psychological torment of his characters—their hard living, and their harder punishments. Even though the rape isn’t described in detail, the aftereffect of being brutalized into a near-vegetative state is still shocking. There’s something about the lack of motivation behind the crime, and its extreme violence, that foreshadows the new breed of horror movies to come in the 1970s, such as Last House on the Left and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Like with the shower scene in Psycho, The Cage is at its most shocking early on, and then settles into a more low-key—but still tense—groove. The conventional approach would be to save the big bang for the finale, but Powell chooses to do the opposite. Once the unsettling tenor has been set, Powell relies on the complexity of his characters to carry the story forward. None of them stand for on any obvious moral platforms, and their contradictions create the ethical dialogue that underscores the narrative. Clyde, for instance, once fled a Kansas lynch mob that accused him of raping a girl, but here is giving pursuit with a miniature mob of his own. Ethel is far more strong-willed than her husband, but now she begins to wonder why she forced him to chase down strangers with no evidence against them, just as he was once chased himself. And then there’s Webb, who is as bloodthirsty and merciless as his wife’s attackers.

An unexpected counterpoint to this drama is the character Micco. One of the last of the Seminoles who fled the Oklahoma reservation they were forced onto, Micco is waging a warpath with his group through Texas on their way to Mexico. He’s witnessed firsthand the atrocities that his tribe suffered at the hands of the whites. He’s known starvation, unprovoked violence, and oppression—and so he’s decided to fight fire with fire, and take an eye for an eye, just like Webb. When Webb and Micco eventually cross paths, Powell doesn’t pass any judgment on Micco, who serves as a reminder that the morality of revenge isn’t so cut-and-dried, and that some crimes can never be properly atoned.

Stylistically, Powell kept the momentum going by alternating not just between Webb, Clyde, and Ethel, but also between Micco, as well as the two attackers. It is a whole lot of plot and action crammed into 127 pages, and it makes for a terrific Western thriller. Powell also slips in a couple of great passages. This description of a battered prospector they find on the trail stands out as the best:

“He was a sloppily huge man, pig-gutted and flaccid, clothed in a filthy muslin shirt and homespun britches. He’d taken one hell of a beating. Blood and dust and sweat were caked on his huge, lacerated face. His left eye was almost closed and the color of a rotten egg. Blood had seeped over his temple and ear from a scalp gash in his bald, bullet-shaped head. A lump on his jaw gave his face a lopsided twist, and his lips were like ruptured grapes.”

My eyes popped out when I read, “ruptured grapes”! So much of Powell’s language is as hardened as the Western landscape, and as literal as the violence, that a poetic jab like that caught me off guard in the best possible way. It made the simile all the more effective. Another powerful use of poetic language was this description of Temple in one of her frenzied outbursts: “Her lips moved like pieces of wood breaking.” Comparing human lips to wood isn’t an obvious comparison at all, but its unnaturalness really captures the inhuman quality of Temple’s state. Dried skin, jerky movements, staccato spitting—it’s all right there, compressed into a few expertly chosen words. With similes that good, it is best to space them out, and Powell doesn’t take such poetic licenses for granted.

My favorite line in The Cage, and one of the most telling, is also one of the simplest. It is when Webb says to Temple, “I’m sorry, very sorry, for only one thing. I’m sorry for the necessity of it all.” In a sense, he’s apologizing for the manhunt he took her on, as well as his own outburst of violence. But in another way, he’s also apologizing for this sense of savagery that was inherent in the world at the time. It was present in the Civil War that separated them as newly weds, it was in the Reconstruction that devastated their home, and it was in the dead landscape at the ends of civilization where they eventually settled. They were desperate to get away from humanity—and the people they encountered along the way were just as desperate, too. If there’s any ounce of Noir sensibility in The Cage, it is located in this single line. Those dark places that you flee always follow, no matter where you go. You can feel remorse, and you can feel pity, but the darkness remains inevitable. Webb can say he’s sorry all he wants, but it is that word “necessity” that is the most unsettling word of all. It disturbs the sense of peace that was supposed to have been reached at the end of the journey, and leaves it opened ended as to what further acts of violence might still have to committed in the future.

Rex Stout on Words and Writing

2011-09-22T18:30:00.003-04:00

Rex Stout makes writing novels seem so damn easy.

"I never worked more than three months a year. Thirty-nine or forty days on each novel, and I'd do two a year.

"No, there's nothing much to planning them. Of course, I was lucky on having hit on the name–Nero Wolfe. Simple but odd, people remember it. And Wolfe was born; he wasn't synthetic. I didn't have to sit down and decide: 'What color will his eyes be? Well they'll be blue. How much will he with? How will he walk? What expressions will he use?' He was born.

"I tried another detective later, Tecumseh Fox–because the Saturday Evening Post editors wanted a fresh detective–and he never was born. He was put together piece by piece and wasn't worth a damn.

"As for the story, you take a setting that interests you, think of what might happen in that setting, choose the most entertaining happenings, and then ask yourself" 'Well, why would a man want buy buy that champion bull? Why would some one murder a man because of a bull?' The answers come right along. You have your plot. You write it."

--Rex Stout, excerpted from "An Interview With Mister Rex Stout" by Robert van Gelder, New York Times, Sept 21, 1941

I was also struck by van Gelder's description of Stout's beard, with which he opens the article.

"His beard is not a particularly good beard: it has rather the sparse look of barberry bushes that have been trampled by the house painters. The beard's purpose, probably, is to ambush one's attention from the eyes above it, which are not cataloguing [sic] eyes and seem to reflect open judgments, but are intent and observing to a rare degree."

Leigh Brackett on Words and Writing

2011-09-21T20:31:00.002-04:00

Leigh Brackett on living and writing with her husband, Edmond Hamilton:

You were asking how living and working together affected us. We almost broke up our happy home I think right after we were married. I had an order for a 40,000 word novel from Startling Stories and I said, “I think I've got an idea for an opening.” And he said fine. So we figured if we collaborated we could do the stories twice as fast, write twice as many, and make twice as much money. You know, which we didn't have much of at that time. So I went out in the kitchen and pounded the typewriter and came back in with a couple of chapters and I said, “What do you think of it?” He read it, said it was great, but where do you go from here? I said, “I don't know.” He looked at me, said, “You don't know! This is the so-and-so bleep adjective deleted way to write a story I ever heard of!” (Laughing) He used to write the last line of the story before he'd ever write the first one.

--Leigh Brackett, excerpted from "An Interview with Leigh Brackett & Edmond Hamilton" by Dave Truesdale and Paul McGuire III, from Minicon 11, April 16-18, 1976

"The Criminal Kind" Debuts at The Los Angeles Review of Books

2011-09-20T10:02:00.005-04:00

Over the weekend, my new crime fiction column, "The Criminal Kind," debuted over at The Los Angeles Review of Books. In this first installment, I reviewed five books:

Duane Swierczynski

Fun & Games
Mulholland Books, June 2011. 304 pp.
"Duane Swierczynski is the Wile E. Coyote of crime fiction. His novels are filled with chases, explosions, and, amidst all the mayhem, a dash of philosophy about the absurdity of existence. "

Jason Starr
The Pack
Ace Books, June 2011. 352 pp.
"The Pack is one of Starr’s most realistic and relatable novels yet."

Megan Abbott
The End of Everything
Reagan Arthur Books, July 2011. 256 pp.
"The End of Everything is Abbott’s most refined and rapturous offering yet. "

Sara Gran
Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, June 2011. 288 pp.
"Claire’s journey through New Orleans is thick with atmosphere, and while she herself might be interested in heady concepts, the people she meets have complex problems that are all too recognizable, and that don’t lend themselves to easy solutions."

Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins
Kiss Her Goodbye
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, May 2011. 288 pp.
"Dexterous and dynamic plotting, swift and explosive action, snappy dialogue, graphic metaphors, and energetic characters that come alive: this is action-mystery par excellence."

James M. Cain Discusses "The Cocktail Waitress"

2011-09-19T19:57:00.007-04:00

This morning, Charles Ardai made a dream come true for readers all over the world: a newly discovered James M. Cain novel, The Cocktail Waitress, will be published in Fall 2012 by Hard Case Crime. Cain had been working on the book at the time of his death, and it took Ardai nine years to track down the original manuscript and obtain rights to print it.

Here is a brief sketch of the story, as mentioned in the original press release:

Combining themes from Mildred Pierce and The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Cocktail Waitress tells the story of a beautiful young widow, Joan Medford, whose husband died under suspicious circumstances. Desperate to make ends meet after his death, she takes a job as a waitress in a cocktail lounge, where he meets two new men: a handsome young schemer she falls in love with, and a wealthy older man she marries.

In honor of this historic announcement, I decided to do some research to see if Cain himself spoke of The Cocktail Waitress in any interviews. The book turned up in a couple of places, including the recently released Packed and Loaded: Conversations with James M. Cain, by John McAleer (Nimble Books, 2010), a collection of transcribed discussions that were intended for a biography McAleer was working on when Cain passed away. Cain gives a rambling description of the plot, and mentions how he was disastisfied with the current state of the novel and was then in the midst of rewriting the manuscript.

The other mention I found was in a 1976 issue of Film Comment. Since the interview is currently out-of-print, I am reprinting just the portion that discusses The Cocktail Waitress.

So, without further ado, here is a working view of James M. Cain’s The Cocktail Waitress, as described by the author himself.

James M. Cain: My difficulty in writing a story is not in writing a story, or in thinking of something to write a story about, but in finding a reason this character in the first person would tell it. That's my problem. It doesn't have to be a very important reason, it can be the most special, cockeyed reason in the world that wraps up in a sentence or two. But just the same, I have to have that or I can't tell the story.

In my stories there's usually stuff that you wouldn't think any human being would tell at all. Now I've just finished a book called The Cocktail Waitress, where the girl tells her story, and there's some pretty intimate stuff. This girl, like most women, is very reticent about some things-you know, the sex scenes, where she spent the night with a guy. I had her tell enough so that what happened was clear and, at the same time, not go into details. Once she lingered with a sex scene, as if she wanted to tell it.

The Cocktail Waitress is about the tenth book I've started in the third person and half-wrote in the third person and then realized it wasn't right, and went back and rewrote in the first person.

Film Comment: It is interesting that you are utilizing a female narrator in your new novel. Which of your works do women like best?

James M. Cain: I haven't the faintest idea. I don't know if any of them like my books. I wouldn't say that they are the type that women, above anyone else, would particularity go for.

–excerpted from “Tough Guy” by Peter Brunette and Gerald Peary, Film Comment (May/Jun 1976): 50-57,64.

"Forty Lashes Less One" by Elmore Leonard (Bantam, 1972)

2011-09-19T09:33:00.000-04:00

Elmore Leonard broke the mold when he wrote Forty Lashes Less One. He not only put the “wild” back into the “Wild West,” he made it crazier than ever before. Originally published in 1972, today the book still exudes a rare and precious chaotic energy and uninhibited creativity. When you get right down to it, the book is totally twisted—the humor is surreal, the violence palpable, and the characters are amoral at best. The story doesn’t proceed in any conventional direction, and it’s difficult to predict exactly where Leonard is taking you—and perhaps that’s because even the characters seem to be at a complete loss for control. Leonard leaves the typical Western paradigms in the dust, and instead creates something fresh, daring, and truly innovative.

As Forty Lashes Less One begins, Yuma penitentiary is getting a new superintendent, the ironically named Mr. Everett Manly. A minister by trade, he has no prior prison experience. Arriving at the same time is former soldier named Harold Jackson, Right away, the predominantly white inmates single him out because he’s black, but Harold remains defiant and holds his head high. Frank Shelby, the local kingpin among the inmates, decides to put Harold in his place and engineers a fight between him and another outcast, a Chiricahua Apache named Raymond San Carlos.

After spending time in the hole—“the snake den,” as they call it—Raymond and Harold become friends. Things begin to get strange when Mr. Manly decides to reform the two prisoners in an unconventional way: he wants them to become “warriors” like their ancestors. Raymond and Harold realize Mr. Manly is a little cuckoo, but who are they to argue for getting out of work duty? So, they run in the fields all day, and practice throwing spears. Then comes word that Yuma Penitentiary is shutting down. Everyone knows that Frank Shelby is going to try and make his escape. Meanwhile, Raymond and Harold start to plan their own escape, and how to exact revenge on Shelby and his goons.

That, in a nutshell, is Forty Lashes Less One. But it is a highly condensed nutshell that loses the ferocity of the characters, the spontaneity of the plot, and the unexpected humor and violence of the narrative. Everything unfolds so whimsically that the story feels alternately like a hardboiled prison narrative, a magical realist fantasy, and farcical nightmare. At points, Leonard seems to even be channeling the sardonic, anticlerical humor of Luis Buñuel, particularly in Mr. Manly’s attempts at educating Harold and Jackson about the Bible. Manly’s story about how all men are brothers turns into an unintended defense for incest. And Manly even admits to himself that one of the biggest motivations for him reforming these prisoners is so that, in the eyes of God, he might be redeemed for lusting after the female prisoners. Mr. Manly may be a minister, but his soul is as impure and corrupt as the murderers in his prison.

One of the reasons Forty Lashes Less One feels so unique is that, in many ways, it runs completely antithetical to the traditional Western. The West is supposed to offer endless horizons, heavenly vistas, and opportunities for renewal and purification. Forty Lashes Less One is the exact opposite: almost the entire book takes place within the penitentiary walls, and a significant portion even takes place in solitary confinement. All the characters are filthy, sweaty, and covered in blood or feces or sand. Even the brief glimpses of the landscape don’t inspire hope in the prisoners: “There was nothing out there but sky and rocks and desert growth that looked as if it would never die, but offered a man no hope of life.” The prisoners are confronted with a harsh landscape with little food or water, and few places to hide. An early escape attempt proves almost immediately futile. So much for Manifest Destiny—these characters couldn’t control their lives, let alone the world that surrounds them, no matter how hard they tried.

Another of Elmore Leonard’s masterful touches to Forty Lashes Less One is his choice of protagonists: Harold Jackson and Raymond San Carlos. The traditional Western is populated by cowboys, ranchers, lawyers, homesteaders, and other character-types who are typically white. Here, it is eye-opening and refreshing to see the West through the eyes of non-traditional characters. Not only is it a welcome reminder to how diverse the population of the West was, but also how divergent their experiences were. Brian Garfield’s Tripwire, published two years later, similarly focuses on a black protagonist, and uses his story as a lens for reconsidering what we typically consider the Western experience. Prejudice and racism were still present in the aftermath of the Civil War, and these narratives are useful critiques not only of American society in the past, but also the present. Ed Gorman’s masterful third book in his Guild saga, Blood Game, also examines racial conflicts in the West. More recently, Edward A. Grainger (David Cranmer) has been exploring similar themes in his Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles Western stories.

One of the great legacies of the Western genre is its social commentary. The building of homes, communities, industries, and legal systems are recurring themes in Western novels. While some books choose to idealize the past, others use the stories as an opportunity to deconstruct both historical and modern life, to take apart the pieces and examine them critically before piecing them back together. In Leonard’s book, Yuma Penitentiary becomes a microcosm for society as a whole. He critiques power structures, racial and gender attitudes, legal corruption, and even religion. When looked at in this light, Harold and Raymond’s rebellion becomes heroic not because they embody any righteous moral attitudes, but because of their defiant spirit. They’re non-conformists to the core. They recognize the bullshit and the corruption around them, and they don’t want to correct it so much as get the hell away from it all. There’s more than a bit of Huck Finn in them. In the end, however, they realize that a little revenge goes a long way, and they decide to revel in the pleasure of giving Frank Shelby and Mr. Manly their long-overdue comeuppance. Their final gesture in the novel is an inspiring moment of cultural dissent, a true declaration of independence. Harold and Raymond were freethinkers, counter-cultural idols whose resistance wasn’t at all out of place amidst the political upheaval of 1970s, Vietnam-era America. Elmore Leonard may have set Forty Lashes Less One in the first decade of the 20th century, but in a way he was still writing about contemporary times. Nearly four decades later, Harold and Raymond still have a lot to reveal about the topsy-turvy, politically screwed up world we live in. The Old West may be long gone, but it is still ever-present in the world in which we live.

"The Guns of Retribution" by Icy Sedgwick (Pulp Press, 2011)

2011-09-18T16:47:00.006-04:00

England’s Pulp Press takes a trip back in time and across the ocean for their latest release, Icy Sedgwick’s The Guns of Retribution. It’s a fast-moving, no-holds-barred, hardboiled Western novella.

The story concerns bounty hunter Gray O’Donnell, who left his hometown of Retribution, Arizona six years ago. He wanted to escape his past and build a better future for himself. The search for wanted outlaw Blackjack Bud Hudson, however, has brought Gray and his cohorts--Billy Cole and Mahko—back to his hometown.

Sedgwick opens the novel with an exhilarating action sequence as the bounty hunters jump onto a moving train in order to apprehend Blackjack. But when Gray and his crew get on board, they find more than they bargained for. Gray’s old nemesis, Jasper Roberts, is waiting for them, and he’s not alone. He’s not only got a posse with him, this time he’s also got a sheriff’s badge. Gray O’Donnell and Jasper Roberts have a long, tumultuous history between them. Gray knows about all of the skeletons in Jasper’s closets, and the sheriff will do anything to keep Gray’s mouth shut.

As the opening chapter illustrates, The Guns of Retribution is at its best when the excitement runs high. There’s a visceral, tangible element to Sedgwick’s writing that gives the story added punch. Here’s one of my favorite examples from the book:

I didn't even get the chance to ask what my momma had to do with anything before Jesse's fist connected with my jaw. The force knocked me backwards and I hit the dirt. Pain exploded in my back, and burned in my jaw. My arms splayed out so I couldn't reach m guns. Jesse leaned over me, and hawked a gob of tobacco-stained phlegm into my face. I lifted a hand to wipe it away, and he drove his boot into my exposed side. Knocked the wind right out of me. I doubled over, and fresh spikes of pain erupted in my back. Something cracked in my chest. I couldn't breathe in without feeling like someone was stabbing me.

But even when bullets aren’t flying, Sedgwick keeps the pace driving forward, all the way to a thrilling climax. Smartly, Sedgwick balances the physical violence with the darker elements of Western society: massacres of innocent Native American communities, hypocrisy, sexual abuse, and corrupt law officials. Touches such as these give an emotional weight to the action, and make the story more than just a fun romp through the desert.

I’m excited to see that Pulp Press has ventured into the Western genre for the second time (the first was Charles Jackson's Death of a Dude), and I hope that this will not be their last. I will also keep my fingers crossed that this will not be the last we see of Gray, Mahko, and Billy. Sedgwick has the makings of a strong core trio of a series on her hands, and I for one would like to see an on-going saga, in the same vein of what Edward Grainger (David Cranmer) is doing with Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles.

To learn more about Icy Sedgwick and her other books, visit her website or follow her blog.

"Urban Noir" by Gordon Harries -- Check it out!

2011-09-18T11:04:00.004-04:00

Gordon Harries (Crime Factory, The Rap Sheet, 3AM), one of Pulp Serenade's favorite critics, has been keeping his blog Needle Scratch Static quiet for some time. Now and then, he's dropped hints that something bigger was in the works. This morning, he finally unveiled his new project:

Urban Noir.

So far, he's only posted an introduction and a sampling of things to come, but already I'm looking forward to reading his new critical essays. Here's the rundown of the site, in his own words:

The site with focus on post-vietnam crime fiction and the modern crime fiction that operates in it’s slip stream, featuring reviews of both prose and film (when addressing the fiction of some of today’s best writers, seventies cinema becomes inescapable. Hell, one of the major character beats of Wallace Stroby’s terrific ‘Cold Shot To The Heart’ was inspired by Sam Peckinpah’s ‘The Getaway’) and feature interviews. The odds are you already have a good idea of what I’m talking about, but already written for the site is a critique of Martyn Waites’ ‘Mary’s Prayer’, Sebastian Rotella’s ‘Triple Crossing’ a piece on Christa Faust’s relationship with Hardboiled… you get the idea.

The site will start to dribble out content now and launch properly in conjunction with another site I'm going to be involved in. More on that soon.

Be sure to add the blog to your Bookmarks or Blog Feed and check back often for updates. In the meantime, you can still catch up on some of Gordon's great essays for other publications around the net. His essay on Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest is a must-read for all hardboiled fans, and you can find it in the first issue of Crime Factory. His interview with author Jeremy Duns (Free Agent) over at The Rap Sheet.

Brian Garfield Interview

2011-09-16T23:25:00.008-04:00

Brian Garfield’s first published novel was written when he was just 18 years old. The book was called Range Justice, and it was the start of a long, exciting, and critically acclaimed career. Garfield’s bibliography is impressive not only in its diversity and quantity, but especially its quality. Western, Crime, Adventure, Suspense, Historical, War, Comedy, Biography, Espionage, Political Thrillers, and even a book on Western Cinema—Garfield has tackled them all with the same level of professionalism, attention to craft, and excellence. In 1976, his book Hopscotch won the Edgar Award for Best Novel from the Mystery Writer’s of America. Longtime readers of Garfield know that his is a name to trust.

While it was his suspense novels that first caught my attention—books like What of Terry Conniston? (a gripping caper about a rock band’s kidnapping-gone-wrong)—but it was his Westerns that made me a diehard fan. When Garfield writes about The West, he doesn’t rely on old gimmicks and stale characterizations. The characters feel fresh, and there’s a pulse to the stories, the same sort of driving energy you would find in one of Garfield’s more contemporary-set crime novels. Then there are novels like Relentless, The Threepersons Hunt, and Fear in a Handful of Dust, modern day Western Thrillers that are crackling with action and suspense.

Recently, Brian Garfield was kind enough to take the time to answer some questions for Pulp Serenade.

Pulp Serenade: I read that Luke Short was an early mentor to you. How did you meet him, and what were some of the most important things you learned from him?

Brian Garfield: I met Fred ("Luke Short") Glidden in 1955 or thereabouts. He was mayor of Aspen, Colorado at the time and had a great office above the Post Office. He lived out in the woods on a very steep slope that overhung a river, and he could drop a fishing line from the porch right into the river. He loved to fish, but they had a home in Arizona, too.

He was a big man, kind and gentle. Even though I was a snotty teen-ager, he treated me as a guy rather than as a kid, and he was generous enough to criticize a few short stories I'd written. The most valuable advice he gave me over the next few years was, "Take out all the Western trappings. Your story should depend on characters and behavior. If it still works after you get rid of the clichés, it's a story."

PS: What other writers have influenced you?

BG: Writer influences? Lots of 'em. The usual ones -- Hemingway, O'Hara, Greene... If you want to write you've got to like to read. When I was a small kid, we lived down the road from Rex Stout (whom I met again years later in the Mystery Writers of America). His clean prose was a marvelous example. (Still is.) I liked Ernest Haycox's imagery and choice of words. (Still do.) I liked Hank ("Will Henry" / "Clay Fisher") Allen's energy and accuracy; he later became a friend. Growing up in Arizona, I met Western writers like Nelson Nye who were encouraging.

PS: Your website mentions you sold your first novel at 18. What was the book and how did you manage to sell it at such a young age?

BG: In 1957, at age eighteen, I wrote a Western and then went off to join the army. After I got out of uniform, Avalon Books bought the novel -- Range Justice. It was published in 1960 but had been written earlier. That was my first. Avalon was a publisher of formula-genre titles for the lending library market. It was a good place for me to do an apprenticeship, although the pay was very small. I don't know where a similar market exists today. Wish I could help, but I'm at a loss there.

PS: You published 11 Westerns for Ace in the 1960s, among them, The Night it Rained Bullets (one of my favorites of yours). How did you come to write for Ace, and do you have a favorite of those Westerns?

BG: I wrote the Jeremy Six novels because it seemed like a good idea at the time, although in retrospect the setting was too close to the Dodge City of Gunsmoke. I guess my favorite of them would be Big Country, Big Men, partly because it took Six away from Spanish Flat. I'd learned by then that if you liked to create new characters, you shouldn't write a series. (On the other hand, a series is lucrative.)

PS: Justice at Spanish Flat is an abridged version of Range Justice. Did you or Ace do the abridgement?

BG: The abridgement for the paperback was done by somebody at Ace, possibly Don Wollheim.

PS: How did you come up with the character of Sam Watchman and his two novels (Relentless and The Threepersons Hunt)?

BG: Sam Watchman was sort of based on a Navajo classmate of mine at the University of Arizona. He told stories and I listened. The second novel, The Threepersons Hunt, was triggered by a story he'd told me years earlier about a Navajo cop who'd been sent (as punishment) to solve some crime on the White Mountain Reservation, which of course was Apache -- i.e., enemy country. Soon after that we met Tony Hillerman, who was a lousy poker player but a great gentleman. Any thoughts I might've had about a Watchman series bowed to Tony; in any case I suspect I'd said all I had to say about Sam Watchman. (Meanwhile my college classmate ended up going to law school; last time I saw him he was an Assistant DA in Tucson.)

PS: How did you and Donald Westlake come to collaborate on Gangway and what was it like writing with him?

BG: I settled for a while in New York in 1965, got invited into a weekly poker game, and met some great writers there -- Larry Block and Don Westlake were the first; later came Ross Thomas, Bob Ludlum, Justin Scott, so forth. The agent who represented most of them was Henry Morrison, and he was a player in the game, too. One time, when Don W. and I were a bit bored with the same old same old, we decided to write a Western comedy together for the hell of it. Gangway was the result. It was great fun, but probably four times as much work as either of us would have done on a book of his own, because one of us would write it and then the other would expand it and then the other would fix it, so forth. We collaborated on other things as well -- the movie The Stepfather, for example. I wrote a screenplay for 20th Century Fox based on Don's "Richard Stark" novel Butcher's Moon, but it never got filmed. (That's the fate of most movie projects.)

PS: How did you come to work with the same editor as them?

 BG: My old agent had died. Henry Morrison agreed to take me on, but only if I'd write something other than Westerns -- he felt they had too restricted an audience, no matter how good the books were. In some ways he was right; in others I think there's a lot of room for good fresh Westerns as long as they get away from the formula. It's a big part of our history, and there are aspects that have never been exploited. (Take for just one example the life of Bill Tilghman.) Henry is nearly 80 and not really agenting any more; he's been producing the "Jason Bourne" movies.

PS: What inspired you to create the character of Paul Benjamin for Death Wish and Death Sentence?

BG: The Paul Benjamin character was a sort of everyman to me. Impetus for the Death Wish story came one night in late 1971. At the time, I lived out along the Delaware River, near Lambertville NJ, and I'd driven into New York to go to a party at a publisher friend's. I parked on the street. When I came down I found that somebody had slashed the convertible top of the car to ribbons. It was about a two-hour drive home, and really cold, and I thought about finding the guy who'd slashed the roof. I never did find him, but the novel came out of it so I think I got the better of him.

PS: Did you have any inclination that he would be so enduring and controversial?
 
BG: No, I really didn't foresee that the story or the character would be enduring or controversial. When the movie was made in 1974, my wife and I went with Don Westlake to an advance screening, and we all felt it was just another Bronson action movie. The screenplay by Wendell Mayes (which is excellent) had been written for a different actor and director (Jack Lemmon, Sidney Lumet) and we were disappointed. Then I went off to Africa on a research trip and didn't hear much of anything about it until later in the summer when it hit the fan. It was a surprise.

PS: Of all the movies made of your work, which one do you think is the best and why?

BG: At the moment I think I've had something like 20 movies made. A few are bad, most are routine. I especially like The Stepfather but my real favorite is Hopscotch. By coincidence, perhaps, or purely out of ego, I was one of the writers and producers on both films. Hopscotch works because everybody connected with it was having a very good day. I worked with the crew and I loved the cast, the director, the whole shebang.

PS: How much research do you do when you are writing a Western?

BG: Research? Sometimes. If it's a specific novel about a specific subject (the Wild West Shows and shooting contests for Wild Times, or the early ranch life of Theodore Roosevelt for Manifest Destiny) I enjoy the research, and do a lot of it. If it's one of the older Westerns, mainly I relied on my own background as a chore-boy and teen-age cowhand, and used the Western formula for the rest; that's why their stories are so predictable. A couple of early Western novels (The Vanquished, The Lawbringers) required research, and I always love doing it.

PS: I loved reading about Boag, the main character in Tripwire. Did you ever consider turning him into a series character and continuing his story?

BG: No, I didn't think of Boag as a series character, but he's one of my favorites, too. We're still trying to get things together to make it into a movie.

PS: I was really impressed by all the survival skills in Fear and a Handful of Dust. Did you learn these first-hand, or how did you research them?

BG: Fear in a Handful of Dust does not contain a lot of stunts I actually tried. I heard about them and read about them quite a bit before writing the book. It too became a movie (Fleshburn), not too bad in view of its tiny budget.

PS: There are two collections of your short stories that I know of – Checkpoint Charlie and Suspended Sentences. Is there a plan to release another collection of your stories in the future, or maybe a complete bibliography on your website for collectors to track them down individually?

BG: Those two short story collections you list are the only ones to date. I'm trying to get a collection of Western short stories published. To me, short stories take less time but are often harder to write than novels (there's no room to mess around).

PS: What is the biggest change, positive or negative, that you’ve seen in the publishing industry since you started writing?

BG: Publishing today - what a can of worms. The Internet has changed everything. That's the big change, of course, and publishers of all kinds are still trying to figure out how to deal with it. Therefore so are authors. Wish I had much wisdom to offer, but the field has a lot of gopher holes in it. Your guess may be better than mine.

PS: Do you have a favorite of your own books?

BG: Do I have a favorite of my own books? Several, I suppose; it's like asking "which of your children is your favorite". For different reasons I'd put at the top of the list Kolchak's Gold, The Meinertzhagen Mystery, Hopscotch, Wild Times and The Thousand-Mile War. Two have been filmed (Hopscotch and Wild Times).

PS: What projects are you working on now that readers can look forward to in the near future?

BG: The new novel, which I'm still working on, is a sort of thriller. I hope it'll be out next year but am so ignorant of the publishing situation today that I can't promise a thing. Wish I could (for my own sake as well as yours and others').

PS: What advice would you give to aspiring writers who want to write something in the Western genre?

BG: Advice? Keep writing and keep making and using contacts -- eventually, if it's a good story well told, it'll find its way to readers or an audience or both. The details and the pitfalls keep changing, however. You might be better off consulting a younger writer, since I learned most of my storytelling and marketing skills too long ago. Find someone closer to the current marketplace. It really won't help you to learn how I sold my first "real" novel to a "real" publisher -- he died years ago, and I have no idea who's there now or even if there's a "there" there. Since you live in Brooklyn, I'd suggest you pick the publishers who publish the current books that you like to read. Call that publisher, and ask which literary agents they recommend. This may be a way to find an opening.

"A Venom Beneath the Skin" by Marcos M. Villatoro (2005)

2011-09-10T16:11:00.007-04:00

Last week, Marcos M. Villatoro dropped by my local mystery bookstore, Partners and Crime, for a reading in support of his upcoming Romilia Chacón novel, Blood Daughters. Unfortunately, a prior engagement held me up and I missed the first part of the event. Villatoro was still there, and I was lucky enough to meet him, if only briefly. The store was sold out of the first two books in the series, Home Killings and Minos, but they suggested that I start with book three: A Venom Beneath the Skin. I’m not usually one to start a series in the middle, but the novel looked promising, and the people at Partners and Crime have never steered me in the wrong direction. Once again, their recommendation didn’t disappoint.

A Venom Beneath the Skin is a riveting thriller, the type of book that will keep you up past your bedtime or make you miss your subway stop. There are procedural, action, and political elements to the novel, but Villatoro fuses them all together with a gripping story and strong, three-dimensional characters. Even though this was the third book in the series, it wasn’t difficult to jump right it. Romilia Chacón is an instantly likable character, someone who has the right balance of believability as a single mom and action hero. Romilia is both strong and credible, someone capable of extraordinary heroism but who is recognizably ordinary in her flaws.

A Venom Beneath the Skin begins with the assassination of Chacón’s former partner and lover, Chip Pierce. The FBI is convinced that the killer is the notorious drug dealer Tekún Umán, and that the motivation was his jealousy and obsession over Chacón. She, however, is convinced that it has something to do with the case he had been working on: an unexplained explosion at a homeless flophouse that doubled as a drug depot in Los Angeles. Authorities suspect that the bomb was planted by terrorists, but no one has figured out why the target would be homeless drug addicts?

One of the strongest aspects to this novel is its multi-cultural worldview. A time capsule of current anxieties and politics, Villatoro navigates the complex and sensitive issues affecting America at the moment without becoming preachy or opportunistic. Instead, he works them seamlessly into the plot, which unfolds with the intensity and drive of a Hollywood blockbuster.

Romilia Chacón returns for a fourth novel, Blood Daughters, which is due out Oct 1 from Red Hen Press.

Big Chicken Barn Haul

2011-08-23T09:07:00.005-04:00

Yesterday, I went to one of Maine's biggest landmarks: The Big Chicken Barn in Orland. It is a huge antique and used bookstore housed in--yup, you guessed it--a big chicken barn. It was so big, I couldn't capture it in one photo.

The Big Chicken Barn boasts 21, 600 square feet of floor space, 150,000 books, and 20,000 magazines. Plus, two new indoor restrooms!

Below are some more pictures from inside the bookstore, plus the books that I picked up. All of their paperbacks are 50% off the cover price, with a minimum of $1. They had an extensive collection, with books in every genre, and they were all in terrific shape. Here's my haul:

Clifton Adams, The Badge and Harry Cole.
Benjamin Appel, Fortress in the Rice.
Agatha Christie, Mrs. McGinty's Dead.
Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None.
Agatha Christie, Hickory Dickory Death.
Agatha Christie, Crooked House.
Agatha Christie, Murder With Mirrors.
Brian Garfield, Death Sentence.
Brian Garfield (Brian Wynne), The Bravos.
Ed Gorman, Trouble Man.
Alfred Hitchcock, Death Can Be Beautiful.
Alfred Hitchcock, Once Upon a Dreadful Time.
T.V. Olsen, Ramrod Rider.
Lewis B. Patten, Top Man with a Gun.

Also, the April 12, 1948 issue of Life Magazine with Barbara Bel Geddes on the cover, which I had been searching for for a few years. That was the most expensive item: $10. Everything else was a buck.

"East of Eden" by John Steinbeck (1952)

2011-08-22T16:02:00.001-04:00

John Steinbeck’s East of Eden is about losers. It would be a stretch to call it Noir, but it draws its characters from the same gutter of broken-down lives. Steinbeck’s protagonists resemble David Goodis’ in that they are dreamers who fail to live up to their goals, and whose ambitious drive gives them only enough strength to try and fail again. The only two characters in Steinbeck’s book to find any sort of success in their lives are those without any ideals or goals whatsoever: a Civil War veteran who fabricates his entire military history and robs the government of his money, and a war profiteer who rips off bean farmers and makes a bundle during WWI. The next closest success is the brothel madam Cathy, a femme fatale if there ever was one, who slept and seduced her way across the country and left a trail of corpses in her wake.

The rest of the characters belong to a downtrodden lot who never lived up to their hopes. They aspired to greatness, and fell short because of their own flaws. The story follows two families—the Hamiltons and the Trasks—through three generations. The Hamiltons hail from Ireland, while the Trasks come from Connecticut, but both families wind up in California at the turn of the 20th century. The patriarchs of both families buy land with hopes of making it rich, and both learn the hard way that prosperity is easy to dream of but difficult to realize.

When looked at this way, the motivating forces behind Steinbeck’s characters aren’t so different from those in a traditional Western novel. The character move westward in hopes of leaving their past behind, reinventing themselves, and finding prosperity and success through the land. These same desires can also be found in Steinbeck’s earlier novel, The Grapes of Wrath. But if we are to consider East of Eden as a Western, then we have to pay close attention to its time period. While Samuel Hamilton settles in California sometime after the transcontinental railroad is completed (perhaps mid-1880s?), most of the novel takes place after 1900, when the Wild West was already settled. This time period is crucial: both Adam Trask and Samuel Trask (the respective patriarchs) have missed their historical mark. Samuel was too late to buy fertile land, and he had to settle for an arid plot without access to water, and which never amounted to much. Adam, on the other hand, was rich enough to buy the best land, but personal tragedy left him depressed and deflated all his dreams. Neither Samuel nor Adam lived to be the majestic Western settler they wanted so badly to become. The West was settled before they arrived, only they didn’t know it.

While I do see distinctive parallels between East of Eden and both Western and Noir genres, Steinbeck’s novel doesn’t belong in either category. It is an epic work, spanning multiple generations and a huge cast of characters. The book is not only impressive for its breadth, but for its thoroughness. Steinbeck can introduce a character in a chapter and encapsulate their entire life in a mere few pages. From chapter to chapter, he moves amongst different characters, some of whom appear only for a few pages never to appear again. But with each successive character, the story deepens and the plot thickens. The narrative develops because of the complexity of the characters and their interactions. Impressive is hardly a sufficient word to describe the intricate, delicate, and sublime narrative structure that Steinbeck has created.

In a way, East of Eden is the opposite—or, perhaps, complement—of The Grapes of Wrath. Where Grapes is focused on a single family during a short, specific time period, East of Eden is expansive and ephemeral. But though its tapestry may be large, East of Eden never feels thin or rushed. Steinbeck is patient, and he lets his characters wreck their own lives when they’re ready for it. Part of that patience is his sympathy, and part of it is his wish that, this time, maybe things will work out all right. As all of the characters realize, hope will have to lie with the next generation who, whether they like it or not, might just wind up repeating the mistakes of their elders.

Bangor Book Score!

2011-08-21T12:00:00.000-04:00

This week I've been in Maine visiting my folks. Aside from eating copious amounts of homemade pie, one of my top priorities was to visit the local bookstores in Bangor. I visited both Bookmarc's and Pro Libris, and walked away with an armload of great finds. While certain things have gone up in price around Maine, the price of used books has stayed pretty low. Most of these only cost me about $1.45! The most expensive book was the hardcover of The Death Ship, for $4.95. The best deal–and the best find–was Harry Whittington's Sicilian Woman...for 50 cents! As if my "To Be Read" pile wasn't out of control enough already...but I'm still looking forward to reading all of these in the months (er, years?) to come.

I know that I should be thankful to be back home and hanging out with the family...but, honestly, this afternoon was about as fun as fresh blueberry pie.

The Loot:

Clifton Adams, Tragg's Choice.
Lawrence Block, Introducing Chip Harrison: No Score & Chip Harrison Scores Again.
George G. Gilman: Edge #5: Blood on Silver.
George G. Gilgman, Edge #11: Sioux Uprising.
Elmore Leonard, Forty Lashes Less One.
Elmore Leonard, Valdez is Coming.
Frank Norris, The Octopus.
Bill Pronzini, Panic!
Bill Pronzini, The Snatch (Nameless Detective #1)
B. Traven, The Death Ship.
Harry Whittington, Sicilian Woman.

John Steinbeck on Words and Writing

2011-08-20T10:46:00.003-04:00

"I think the difference between a lie and a story is that a story utilizes the trappings and appearance of truth for the interest of the listener as well as of the teller. A story has in it neither gain nor loss. But a lie is a device for profit or escape. I suppose if that definition is strictly held to, then a writer of stories is a liar–if he is financially fortunate."

--John Steinbeck, East of Eden

"Starlet Sinner" at Pop Sensation

2011-08-17T19:18:00.003-04:00

I'm a big fan of Rex Parker's Pop Sensation blog. His critiques of the best--and worst--paperback cover art never fails to crack me up. Sure, he pokes fun at them, but he does so with a connoisseur's enthusiasm and insight. Also, his "Page 123" test is uncanny! Somehow, that page always turns up some of the most outrageous lines.

Today's book, Starlet Sinner, is one of my favorite posts of his. Check out Pop Sensation for the full write-up.

And if you really, really, really want the book, there's even a contest to win it...

Harry Whittington Slideshow from Bill Crider

2011-08-16T18:24:00.005-04:00

I was going to sit down this evening and compile Harry Whittington's paperback covers...but then I discovered that Bill Crider already did this back in 2006. More impressively (but not surprisingly), they're all from his own collection! I think it might be time to nominate Bill's library as the Eighth Wonder of the World.

Without further ado...here's Bill Crider's Fabulous Harry Whittington Paperback Slideshow!

Thanks, Bill!

"First Blood" by Jack Schaefer (1949)

2011-08-15T10:00:00.000-04:00

Originally published in 1953, First Blood was Jack Schaefer’s follow-up to the immensely successful Shane, which had been published four years prior. 1953 was also the same year that the movie of Shane, with Alan Ladd immortalizing the title role, hit the big screen. Like Schaefer’s earlier book, First Blood is a coming of age story, except this time the young boy is a young man.

Jess Harker has just turned twenty, and he feels that life is passing him by while he drives an empty stagecoach with tired horses along a pointless route, while an old man who rarely speaks sits beside him with a shotgun. Jess wants to drive on the big trails, with his idol right beside him—Race Crim, the best shotgun messenger on the whole line. Jess’ other idol is Tom Davisson, the local sheriff, who is always giving the young driver advice, even when he doesn’t ask for it. Davisson treats Jess like a kid, whereas Race treats Jess like a grown man.

Jess gets his chance to prove himself when he is asked to drive an important shipment of gold. With Race sitting beside him on the box, it seems like a dream come true…until someone ambushes the stage, gets away with the money, and kills some of Jess’ passengers. As the town bands together in search of the outlaws and the money, Jess sees the divide between the lawless Race and the law-abiding Davisson grow further and further apart. Jess knows that soon he will have to pick a side, and he only hopes that he picks the right side and will live to tell the tale.

First Blood is a perfect companion piece to Shane. Even though the characters aren’t the same, both books share similar constructs and themes. They’re both about growing up, and coming to terms with the realization that even our heroes are mortal humans. There are significant differences between the books, too. Bob MacPherson, the young boy who narrates Shane, was mainly on the sidelines, studying his father and Shane. Here, Jess similarly watches and compares his two roles models—Race Crim and Tom Davisson—but the difference is that now he, too, must play a role in the drama. He has to decide which path to follow. When it comes time for the final shootout, this time the gun is in Jess’ hand, and his life depends on the choice he makes.

Another interesting aspect of these two books is the way that Schaefer deals with the archetype of the gunfighter. In Shane, Schaefer humanized the shootist, made him mortal and valiant, and turned him into a mythological icon. In First Blood, however, Schaefer demythologizes the gunfighter. While Race isn’t exactly the same wandering gunhand as Shane, they both make their living pulling the trigger. As the story progresses, Jess comes to realize that living and dying by the gun isn’t as admirable and enviable as he once thought. Perhaps it is a sign of the frontier dying, but Jess is now thinking in terms of longevity and career instead of free roaming excitement.

One of Jack Schaefer’s skills was capturing that youthful moment when one’s ideals are at their pinnacle, and then puncturing the bubble as reality sets in. He renders the moral confusion and ethical uncertainty in all their complexities, without making the dilemma seem stale or contrived. Schaefer understands young protagonists and the difficult, disorienting process of becoming a man. First Blood is a terrific novel that combines stirring Western action with a sincere coming-of-age story. Fans of Shane that haven’t delved deeper into the world of Jack Schaefer would certainly enjoy this short novel.

The Art of the Script: Sweet Smell of Success

2011-08-14T15:39:00.006-04:00

I rewatched Sweet Smell of Success this afternoon. Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman's screenplay, based on a novelette by Lehman, never ceases to amaze me. It's one of the best scripts I've ever seen filmed. The plotting is tight and the characters vivid, but it is the dialog that most impresses me.

Burt Lancaster (as JJ Hunsecker) and Tony Curtis (as Sidney Falco) nail the rhythm and the accents of the dialog. There's such edginess and ferocity to their banter. They manage to be both graceful and violent, just like the big city they stalk by night.

The full script is available online. Here is one of my favorite moments.

CAMERA now SHOOTS down 52nd Street. Hunsecker, back to
CAMERA, studies the evening, hearing the sound of a screech
of female laughter from one of the groups in the distance.
A drunk is being thrown out of one of the strip tease joints.

HUNSECKER
I love this dirty town.

Amused, Hunsecker turns back; he signals across the street
to the car park, indicating that the big black Lincoln
Continental should follow as he strolls with Sidney.

HUNSECKER. SIDNEY FOLLOWING.

HUNSECKER
(after a pause)
Conjugate me a verb, Sidney. For
instance, TO PROMISE!

CAMERA TRACKS with them in a CLOSE TWO SHOT. Sidney is
alert now.

HUNSECKER
(continuing)
You told me you'd break up that
romance - when?

SIDNEY
(hesitantly)
You want something done, J.J., but
I doubt if you yourself know what's
involved.

HUNSECKER
(soft and sardonic)
I'm a schoolboy - teach me, teach me.

SIDNEY
(carefully)
Why not break it up yourself? You
could do it in two minutes flat.

Hunsecker pauses, halts.

HUNSECKER
(harshly)
At this late date you need
explanations...? Susie's all I
got - now that she's growing up, I
want my relationship with her to
stay at least at par! I don't
intend to antagonize her if I don't
have to.

New Black Horse Extra Issue Online!

2011-08-14T09:20:00.002-04:00

Chap O'Keefe has posted the latest issue of Black Horse Extra online. Lots of great news in there for fans of Western literature and culture. Here's a rundown of the contents:

-In "Real Cowboys and Reel Cowboys," Greg Mitchell (Crooked Foot's Gold) looks at how hats, gunbelts, and other cowboy regalia of the Old West is represented in movies. His insight into the practical use of rolled-brim hats, cuffs, chaps, spurs, and other aspects of the cowboy costume is very enlightening. One of my favorite parts was about the iconic bandana:

"The bandanna around the neck was not the sole domain of the cowboy and was worn by many 19th century outdoor workers and sailors. A large percentage of shirts in those days were collarless and the bandanna gave some protection from the sun, specially if the person had a narrow-brimmed hat or was wearing a cap."

-"Hoofprints" keeps readers up to date with Western news, including: BHW authors Colin Bainbridge and Carl Bernard; The Western Fictioneers anthology The Traditional West; a sneak-peak at an upcoming BHW called Fort Revenge by Ralph Hayes; a look at new "flipback" books from the Netherlands,; BHW artist Michael thomas is selling his cover art as posters; AMC has a new TV series called Hell on Wheels; and much more.

-Jack Martin (Gary Dobbs), David Whitehead, Nik (Ross) Morton and Chap O'Keefe discuss "The Rights and Wrongs of eBooks." Speaking of digital books, Chap O'Keefe's early novel, The Sandhills Shooting, is now available as an eBook.

-There's also a list of New Black Horse Western Novels.

-And Chap was also kind enough to reprint my recent review of Misfit Lil Cheats the Hangrope.

“Scream-Proof Paradise” by Harry Whittington (Adam Bedside Reader 26, Dec. 1966)

2011-08-12T16:00:00.002-04:00

Harry Whittington short stories are hard to come by. So, when I saw one advertised in a magazine on eBay, I jumped at the opportunity. “Scream-Proof Paradise” was originally published in Adam Bedside Reader #26 (Dec. 1966).

The setting isn’t a typical one for Whittington. While he was a versatile writer, most of the books I’ve read of his centered around middle- and working-class characters. This story is set amongst the high and mighty of New York’s theatrical community, who have gathered at the grand New England home of director Cecil Hogan. The star of the party is Hogan’s latest writing discovery—a young man named Nick Jones. Jones has secretly been having an affair with the leading lady of the play, Talcie, who also happens to be Cecil’s wife. As the party winds down, Nick has to decide whether or not to go through with his plan to kill Cecil and make Talcie his forever.

Once the story kicks into gear, the style is pure Whittington. That tense mixture of gut-churning anxiety and driving neuroses that can propel a character make extreme decisions—often extremely bad ones. Here’s a short passage where his inimitable voice shines:

“Footsteps rattled behind a closed door. His heart pounded. He swore. If nerves were shot so that sudden sounds almost disemboweled him, he’d better abandon this action right now.

“He could enter Talcie’s bath, wash his hands, relieve the tension twisting his kidneys, return downstairs. No one would ever know what was burning his mind, driving him…and he and Talcie would be sentenced to go on sharing this heaven that opened upon hell.”

Whittington’s prose also has the occasional poetic flourish, such as the repeated phrase at the end of this line: “And then, with desperate irony. ‘Oh, yes – I’m lost, too. I’m lost, too.”

Though the title would indicate something a bit more lurid, the final product is on the tame side, considering the publication in which it appears. Overall, “Scream-Proof Paradise” is a very entertaining suspense story, albeit a tad conventional and predictable. But even with Whittington’s best novels you can sometimes predict the ruinous outcomes. The pleasure isn’t where the story ends, but how the characters wind up there, and the long, twisting, bleak roads they travel along the way.

"Dark Trail" by Ed Gorman (M. Evans and Company, 1990)

2011-08-12T10:00:00.000-04:00

Book 4 of the Guild series.

Dark Trail is the grave conclusion to Ed Gorman’s Guild saga. Gorman not only saved the best for last, he also saved the darkest, most dolorous, too. Originally published by M. Evans and Company in 1990, it was later reprinted in a paperback edition by Forge in 1997.

In Dark Trail, the past finally catches up with lawman-turned-bounty hunter Leo Guild. Years ago, his wife, Sarah, left him for a gunfighter named Frank Cord. Now, she wants Guild’s help to save Frank’s life. Frank has gone and left Sarah for another woman—another gunfighter’s woman, Beth. Unlike Guild, however, this gunfighter—Ben Rittenauer—isn’t going to let his girl go so easily.

As tensions mount between Frank and Ben, a third party begins to show interest in the fight. Tom Adair, a local cattle baron and railroad tycoon, wants to throw a party for the local aristocrats and politicians. The main attraction: a real, live gunfight. The prize: $10,000. Knowing that whomever wins gets both the money and Beth, Frank and Ben quickly agree to a public duel. As the big night draws nearer, Guild struggles to convince the men to call off the fight before it is too late.

With its circular narrative and inevitable, disastrous conclusion, in Dark Trail Gorman elevates the Western to the level of Greek Tragedy. The violently sobering finale shows how little value these people had for human life, whether it was their own or another’s. In previous Guild books, Gorman has remarked about man’s inhumanity to man—“People were just people and sometimes they did terrible things. Everybody did.” (Death Ground) and “Sometimes we treat people we love pretty badly.” (Blood Game)—but nowhere is his lament for humanity lost greater or more affect than here, in Dark Trail.

One of Guild’s struggles in each of the books has been to preserve the sanctity of human life—an ironic goal, considering his job as a bounty hunter. His job, however, positions him to see just how debased and devalued life was in the Old West. People would kill, prostitute their bodies, or sell their souls for a dollar—or less, if they were desperate enough. And there would always be somebody (like Tom Adair in Dark Trail, or John T. Stottard in Blood Game) ready to take advantage of those hopeless people. Try as he might, Guild couldn’t beat the Adairs and the Stottards of the world, and he couldn’t convince the Sarahs, Beths, Franks, or Bens that living and loving was worth more than the price of a new gown or a lead bullet. Guild learned the hard way—by taking an innocent life by accident—and it has been his burden to see history repeat itself over and over again, and to be unable to stop the cycle from continuing. That is what makes Guild a tragic character—he’s as guilty as the rest, but this knowledge doesn’t allow him to enact any change in the world around him, so he just relives the same pains over and over again.

Relationships in Gorman’s novels are never romanticized or idealized—they’re as flawed and wounded as the people are themselves. For that reason, they’re very realistic and relatable. His characters have enough self-knowledge not to believe in happy endings, which allows for very frank and honest discussions about love (or love lost, as is often the case). This dialogue between Guild and Sarah is a classic example:

Guild: “There was a lot of years when I thought that would still be a good idea.”

Sarah: “Us getting back together?”

Guild: “Yes.”

Sarah: “It wouldn’t work, Leo.”

Guild: “I know. But it’s nice to think about sometimes.”

Another hallmark of Gorman’s novels are his morally ambiguous characters. There are no easy heroes and no easy villains—in fact, those “hero” and “villains” labels rarely apply to his stories. Everyone is equally capable of hurting someone else, just as everyone is equally capable of helping someone else (even if they rarely do). Just as much a hallmark is Gorman’s refusal to pass judgment. When Guild tells Sarah, “You really are good. True and honest and loyal,” there’s no irony or resentment in his voice. In a way, Sarah is the person responsible for this whole chain of events—it was her who left Guild for Frank in the first place—yet, in Guild’s eyes, she is still the person most capable of goodness. Guild is sincere because he, like Gorman, doesn’t blame Sarah. Guild knows that perhaps it was himself who drove Sarah away, and that maybe it was his own failings as a husband—and as a fellow human—that started this tragic ball rolling so many years ago. Guild has a rare sense of humility, of perception, and of understanding. He understands people because he understands himself—all the bad things he’s done, and all the good things he could have done but failed to.

Reading all the Guild stories right in a row—Guild, Death Ground, Blood Game, and Dark Trail, plus the short story “Guild and the Indian Woman”—was a moving experience. They’re a mournful, brooding bunch, but they’re all excellently written, and filled with compelling, lifelike characters. Guild is a remarkable protagonist, and it was a pleasure spending time with him. And even though the series is over, I’m sure that I will be visiting Guild again real soon.

"Guild and the Indian Woman" by Ed Gorman (1988)

2011-08-11T20:52:00.003-04:00

Part of the Guild series.

“Guild and the Indian Woman” is the only short story to feature Ed Gorman’s series character, the lawman-turned-bounty hunter Leo Guild. It originally appeared in the 1988 anthology Westeryear, and was later included in Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg’s The Best Western Stories of Ed Gorman.

The short story begins with Guild tracking down a man believed to have died of cholera. While he is checking with the doctor, a sixty-something year old Mesquakie Indian grandmother walks through the door and shoots the doctor in the face. She then asks Guild to accompany her to the sheriff. It seems like a cut-and-dried case, but Guild suspects there is more to it than meets the eye.

“Guild and the Indian Woman” is a terrific companion piece to the four novels that make up the saga. In just a handful of pages (26, in my large-print edition), Gorman gets to the heart of the Guild novels, which is to expose the dark recesses of the Old West. The crimes are as gritty and seamy as in Noir.

The story is also remarkable for how Gorman is able to condense the essence of Guild’s personality into a mere few lines. Guild can not only recognize a man’s potential for causing pain, but also the pains that a man has already suffered, and he’s never judgmental. Take a look at this paragraph below, as it clearly shows Guild’s world-weary insight:

“The door opened and a stubby man with watery eyes and filthy, shapeless clothes emerged. He needed a shave and a bath. With the coast-to-coast railroad tracks and another cycle of bank failures, the territory was home to many men like him. Drifting. Dead in certain spiritual respects. Just drifting. Guild knew he was cleaner and stronger and smarter, but he was probably not very different from this man. So he was careful not to allow himself even the smallest feeling of superiority.”

The Guild saga is one of my favorite Western series. If you like your Westerns unconventional and with shades of Noir, like something that Gold Medal might have published back in the 1950s, then be sure to look into the Guild novels, they might just what you’re looking for.

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Edition pictured: The Best Western Stories of Ed Gorman. Edited by Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg. Large Print Edition, published by Chivers Press (Bath, Avon, England) and G.K. Hall & Co. (Thorndike, Maine, USA), 1995.

"Blood Game" by Ed Gorman (M. Evans, 1989/Forge, 2001)

2011-08-11T10:27:00.003-04:00

Book 3 of the Guild series.

Blood Game is as brutal and bloody as Westerns come. In this third entry in the Guild saga, Ed Gorman gives a gut punch to the whole “man’s inhumanity to man” theme and leaves it bruised and broken, curled up in a fetal position in the corner. It’s a beautiful book, but beauty doesn’t have to be pretty, and it rarely is in Gorman’s novels.

Originally published by M. Evans and Company in 1989 and reprinted by Forge in 2001, Blood Game finds lawman-turned-bounty hunter Leo Guild working for boxing promoter John T. Stottard. Stottard wants Guild to guard the cash box during an upcoming match that involves his star fighter, Victor Sovich. Guild doesn’t like boxing because he finds it savage; but he finds human exploitation even more barbarous, and Stottard and Sovich are two of the worst offenders. Sovich is notorious for fighting black boxers in the ring, several of whom have already been killed by his savage blows. And that’s just what Stottard and the crowds are hoping will happen which Sovich faces off against Rooney, an aging black fighter whose better years are already behind him.

Tensions mount as Guild realizes that more than just money is riding on this match. There’s Stottard’s son, Stephen, who is emotionally attached to his abusive father, and haunted by the absence of his mother who ran away when he was still a child. Then there’s Clarise Watson, the sister of a man whom Rooney killed in the ring. And then there’s John T. Stottard, himself, whom Guild suspects might be up to foul play. As the countdown to the fight draws nearer, Guild witnesses just how low human nature will sink for a taste of blood.

The final boxing match is one of the most despicable presentations of society in all of Gorman’s works. The blood and the violence are matched only by the vileness and desperation of the characters. Like a cataclysmic domino effect, everyone’s plans collapse into disastrous ruin, leaving Guild to try and pick up the pieces. As one doctor tells Guild, “Sometimes we treat people we love pretty badly.” That line could be the epigram for many of Gorman’s novels. It’s simple, but it captures the tragedy of so many of the author’s books, including Blood Game. Neither John T. Stottard, his wife, their son, or even Clarise Watson could comprehend the shockwaves their actions would cause. The effects would linger long after the boxing match ended, and some pains don’t lessen with time, they only grow deeper.

Gorman’s characters frequently take a lot of physical blows. The punishment they endure is on par with some of Dudley Dean’s work that I’ve read. But in Gorman’s work, the characters that receive the most punishment aren’t the ones who get punched or shot—they’re the ones who survive, and live to remember all the pain they’ve caused in others. As Guild tells someone at the end of the book, “Hitting you would be easy. You’re going to have to live the rest of your life with how you treated him. That’s going to be the hard part.” Guild is also a survivor, one burdened with memories, and that’s where his soulfulness comes from.

One of the most prominent themes of Blood Game is control—not only over one’s own life, but also over others. John T. Stottard tries to achieve control through manipulation: he abuses son into submission; he rips off his fighters; and he stokes through crowds through bloodlust. Guild is a man who can’t be bought, which is why Stottard immediately dislikes the bounty hunter. It’s also why he trusts Guild, and looks for new ways to deceive him. The other side of the “control” theme is that of human exploitation. Blood Game explores the deep roots of racism in American society, and how even after slavery was technically over, black people were still exploited, abused, and treated as an inferior class just because of their skin color. By exploring these issues, Gorman reveals the far side of paradise. While many tend to think of the West as a mythological utopia, Gorman reminds how hypocritical, barbaric, and ugly civilization out West really was.

Gorman’s prose style is deceptively simple. His streamlined phrases are powerful without being bombastic, full of emotion without resorting to theatrics. There’s never a wasted word or an excessive adjective. The narrative flows smoothly from first page to last, and reading his books from cover to cover is not only a pleasure for the experience, but it also reinforces just how tightly constructed the book is. The book is also full of strong, poetic imagery, such as when he describes a gunshot in the back of someone’s head as “a terrible purple flower suddenly in bloom.”

Reading the Guild saga, I’ve been struck by how crucial the theme of prolonged guilt runs through all the novels. (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that only one letter differentiates “Guild” and “guilt,” either.) Much like in Clifton Adams’ The Desperado and A Noose for the Desperado, Gorman’s characters can never outrun their history. As one character admits, “I knew that at last my past had found me, the past I wonder about when I can’t sleep at night.” Guild, himself, is no exception. He understands people so well because he’s seen the worst of himself in action, and he’s never forgotten what bad things he is capable of doing with his own two hands. Another character says these words, but they summarize Guild’s own conscience: “I know that no apology can undo what I did. I must accept my blame without any attempt at justifying myself.”

For me, the most moving line was one character’s admission: “I wish I could feel good, Leo. I wish I could feel some satisfaction. I deserve what happens to me, Leo. I shouldn’t have done it. I surely shouldn’t have.” None of the characters had in mind some large scheme, or any grandiose plot. They wanted something they thought was simple—money, sex, love, revenge, happiness—but never realized the heavy cost they would have to pay to achieve it. “I don’t want to hate her anymore, Leo,” one character tells Guild. “I’m tired of hating her. It takes too much out of me after all these years.”

Gorman’s West is not about valor, redemption, or purification. It’s not about Manifest Destiny. It’s about characters who can’t take control of their lives, who can’t rule over the land, who can’t reinvent themselves, who can’t escape the past.