All Due Respect Issue #2

by Owen Laukkanen

  Stories are a kind of currency when you’re out on the water. There’s not much else to do but talk. You struggle with the gear and sweat the catch and live and die with each haul. You hurt and you stink and you don’t sleep and when you do sleep, you dream about fish. You tell your loved ones your stories from a payphone at the end of a dock, but the connection is bad and anyway, they don’t get it, and at the end of the season you walk away with a paycheck and a notebook full of half-remembered tall tales.

  And if you have any sense, you’ll keep that notebook close to you, even after the money’s gone. You’re going to want to remember those stories, someday.

  Reviews

  The Gutter and the Grave

  by Ed McBain

  A Hard Case Crime novel

  reviewed by David Bishop

  I’ve long been a McBain fan (I’m currently working my way through his 87th precinct series, in order), but I hadn’t realised how much he’d published early on under pen names. When it first came out in 1958, Gutter was originally titled I’m Cannon—For Hire, and authored by “Curt Cannon.” This also meant that McBain’s protagonist had his name changed to match that of the author, but thankfully the more recent Hard Case reprint goes with McBain’s original (and preferred) choice of Matt Cordell.

  Cordell is a drunk, which we know right from the beginning because he tells us. He’s spending a quiet afternoon with a bottle, on a bench close to the Cooper Union in Lower Manhattan (a college that McBain attended), when an old friend finds him and asks for help. Reluctantly, Cordell accompanies him back to his tailor’s shop, where they find the body of his business partner—at which point, it all kicks off.

  When his friend is arrested, Cordell agrees to try and find the murderer, returning again to the life of a private eye, which ended when his marriage broke up and he began crawling into a bottle for a living. Cordell’s investigations lead him to the heart of a complex, sordid family, as well as reuniting him with a much-hated fellow PI. Needless to say, in the finest noir traditions, Cordell takes both a physical and emotional beating before the book is finished; it ends exactly where we found him, a drunk on a park bench, waiting for a cop to move him along.

  I liked Gutter a lot, largely because Cordell is such a fine protagonist—painfully self-aware, guilt-ridden, and afraid of doing the right thing because of what it cost him in his past. In spite of his faults, he’s also determined to get to the bottom of this case, even though he’s only acting on it as a favour to a friend. There are glimmers of the 87th precinct squadroom here; McBain’s police detectives are no fools, but ordinary men trying their best to do a decent job while everyone else seems intent on lying to them. Gutter is an efficient noir thriller, which also points toward some of the preoccupations that McBain would revisit in his other work.

  Plunder of the Sun

  by David Dodge

  A Hard Case Crime novel

  reviewed by Lawrence Maddox

  Gringo PI Al Colby, cooling his heels in Chile, is offered one-thousand dollars to smuggle a mysterious package into Peru, no questions asked. The money interests Al almost as much as his sickly employer’s beautiful nurse, Ana Luz. When Al discovers the package holds the key to an ancient Incan treasure, he plunges into a trek across the Andes to the ruins of a fabled fortress. This is a Hard Case Crime reissue, so you know Plunder’s Incan lore takes a back seat to greed, double-crosses and bloodshed in what could be called “adventure noir.”

  David Dodge’s Plunder of the Sun, originally published by Random House, 1949, reissued by Hard Case Crime, 2005, is the second of three crime novels featuring expat adventurer Al Colby. Al is a decent guy and his style is laid-back; he’ll let the other guy strike first, but like a cunning counter puncher, Al will turn things around to his advantage. Al’s adversary is Jeff, a fellow expat and antiquities expert who wants in on the lost Incan treasure. Like the gringos hunting for Mexican gold in B. Traven’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (which reminds me a lot of Plunder), the promise of quick wealth brings out suspicion and violence. Part of Al’s quest for the gold is his desire to buy the freedom of the beautiful Ana Luz, a criatura, or indentured servant, who is being forced into an unwanted marriage.

  All three Al Colby books take place in Latin America, and Dodge paints his landscape like a local. In Plunder, Dodge puts his treasure hunters through their paces, trekking Al and his unfaithful companions across the Andes by train, mule, and foot, and finally, to the deadly denouement at Lake Titicaca. Dodge really brings Peru to life, and it’s no wonder; Dodge was a very successful writer of travelogues. Like Ian Fleming, Dodge came up with his detailed descriptions of his exotic locales by visiting them. His first two travel books, How Green Was My Father and How Lost Was My Weekend, are both detailed family excursions into Latin America, and were both published before Plunder. The heat, the dust, the lice-ridden huts of the poor cocoa-leaf chewing Cuzco Indians—Dodge makes you feel like you’re right there, digging for golden Incan statues while nervously watching your back.

  Warner Bros made a so-so movie out of Plunder starring Glenn Ford in 1953. Dodge didn’t like it. He was much happier with Hitchcock’s adaption of his 1952 novel To Catch A Thief. Successful in his day, Dodge is largely forgotten by crime fiction readers. He deserves better. Randal Brandt is rectifying that with his excellent website A David Dodge Companion (www.david-dodge.com). It’s comprehensive, and Dodge’s daughter Kendal assisted his research.

  Joyland

  by Stephen King

  A Hard Case Crime novel

  reviewed by Steven Belanger

  Joyland is another first-person account by Stephen King, tinged with nostalgia and a healthy dose of regret, which succeeds because the narrator’s voice is so everyday that it’s like you’re listening to one of your good friends.

  King has specialized in this sort of first-person narration for a long time—in 1922, Bag of Bones, 11/22/63, Insomnia, “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,” and “The Body,” to name a few. Joyland is a toned-down and muffled version of The Shining, of Bag of Bones, and of the nostalgia—tinged with getting-old sadness—of The Green Mile, Insomnia, and others.

  How successful is it? If you’re only looking for some staples of Hard Case Crime—very harsh characters, nasty stuff done by nasty people, fast-talking men and faster-moving women—then not so much. King’s style is not hard-hitting, punch-in-the-stomach crime noir. But I read Joyland’s 283 pages in one sitting, and I liked it in a way that surprised me.

  There’s nothing here you haven’t seen before, and the identity of the killer shouldn’t come as a surprise. It’s got to be one of two characters, really, especially after another finds his way to a hospital. I don’t think King thought this book’s fate rested upon its mystery.

  Or its supernatural horror. Because, frankly, there isn’t any. The ghosts appear behind the scenes to the minor characters. You won’t see them.

  What you will see is a broken-hearted University of New Hampshire student, Devin Jones, taking a job at Joyland to forget his woes. A fortune teller—whose fortunes are often Joyland babble, but sometimes not—tells Devin his life will be changed by two children, one a girl with a red hat, one a boy with a dog. One of them has The Sight. (That’s The Shining reference.) Devin later saves the girl and meets the boy.

  You will also see that a young woman had been murdered decades ago in Joyland’s Haunted House. Devin and his friends (Tom Kennedy and Erin Cook; Erin is the scantily-dressed redhead on the cover) discover a series of murders, never connected by the police. Tom sees the ghost of the murdered woman—in an effectively creepy scene—and the summer ends. Though his friends go back to school, Devin stays, and befriends the boy and his young mother. (There’s Bag Of Bones.)

  Finally, you’ll see that a beloved park employee dies, and his ghost is seen, though not by Devin or by the reader. Devin figures out who the serial killer is; the murderer knows he will, and tells Devin to meet with him or he’ll kill the mother
and child. They meet, and Devin is saved in the nick of time, and soon the novel ends, and then ends again—a tactic King does well. (Remember how The Green Mile ended, then ended again?) It struck me as a little sad. Charles Ardai, the editor of Hard Case Crime, said the ending made him cry.

  I’m a tougher, hard-boiled kind of guy, so I just got the sniffles and became wistful.

  But this is a Hard Case Crime book by Stephen King, so there is a terror here. The real horror in life, King said in a recent interview, is the cancer that kills the main character’s—and King’s own—mother. It’s growing old. Going senile. Losing loved ones. These things are the horror of Joyland as well.

  And the joy of Joyland for me is in its recreation of another time—a time we’ll never see again. It’s an evocation of our innocent past that maybe wasn’t so innocent—but it sure felt that way, didn’t it? King said Joyland was a revisiting of his love for the small carnivals during his own teenage summers. (Think of Joyland as Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, minus the lyrical prose.) By remembering his summer freedoms, King invites us to remember ours, and to do so with, if not love, then at least a wistful appreciation.

  Joyland helped me remember the summers of my past with a smile, and it’ll probably do the same for you.

  What else can you ask for as you grow older—as your hair thins and grays, and your bones get brittle? I’d rather look back and smile, than look ahead and frown.

  The Twenty-Year Death

  by Ariel S. Winter

  A Hard Case Crime novel

  reviewed by David Bishop

  What’s more difficult than writing a crime novel? How about writing three of them, each in the style of a different master of the genre? This is the challenge that Ariel S. Winter set himself in The Twenty-Year Death, and the literary ventriloquism he displays is astounding. This 600-pager is split into three linked sections, which stand equally well on their own. The first, Malniveau Prison, is a Simenon/Maigret pastiche set in rural France of 1931. This is followed by the Chandler-esque The Falling Star, set ten years later and with a Hollywood backdrop. Finally, there’s Police at the Funeral, a spectacular riff on the ’50s noir world of Jim Thompson.

  It’s to Winter’s credit that he keeps the author’s voices consistent throughout, and The Twenty-Year Death is a novel that strengthens as it progresses. Malniveau Prison is perhaps the least successful of the three sections, albeit only marginally—in places, the language feels slightly off-key, detracting from an otherwise evocative picture of rural France. Winter is on firmer ground in The Falling Star, and the mean streets of San Angelo, down which he sends his detective Dennis Foster. Winter’s everyman protagonist encounters corruption at every turn, in a satisfyingly complex plot reminiscent of James Ellroy’s LA, and one with a twisted family at its centre.

  I’d reserve my highest praise for the final section, Police at the Funeral. Right from the beginning, there’s an extraordinary, inevitable feeling of dread hanging over the narrative, which you know won’t end well. Winter’s portrait of his protagonist, an alcoholic writer in hock to the mob, is pitch perfect—you can almost smell the desperation pouring off him, and the readiness with which he crawls back into a bottle at any given opportunity is genuinely unnerving. You want to shake him out of his stupor, while also knowing that it’s already too late. In the best noir traditions, his fate is sealed, and all the reader can do is watch.

  Despite the unusual structure, The Twenty-Year Death is never a tricksy book. Winter is utterly respectful of his source material; and in putting these three very different writers side by side to tell the same, over-arching story, he also pushes at the boundaries of the genre, and demonstrates—in the right hands—just how incisive and devastatingly memorable it can be.

  The Cutie

  by Donald Westlake

  A Hard Case Crime novel

  reviewed by Mike Monson

  The thing I most love about this Donald Westlake book is what I love about all Donald Westlake books: It comes off as completely unself-conscious and unpretentious.

  Westlake wrote a fascinating, compelling story about criminals and crime and that is all that’s on the page. I never feel like he’s trying to impress us with his language and writing skills, with his plotting, with his worldview, with his characterization. He has figured out a great tale with interesting characters and great settings and he just freaking tells it. I was grabbed from the opening pages and could not stop reading until I was done. When the book was over the only thing I felt I’d learned about Donald Westlake was that he was a great writer, a great story-teller—that’s it. I like that very much in a book.

  The book covers most of my favorite fictional territories. It’s the story of Clay, a combination fixer, muscle, and hit man for a major New York gangster right around 1960, or maybe just before then (that is the year the book was first published). In his daily life, Clay mixes with people in an urban criminal world from the lowliest junkie to the fanciest mob lawyers and the bosses—and everyone in between. Clay narrates, and he describes his life and the life of his fellow criminals with a refreshing, bare-bones, non-judgmental point-of-view similar to the Parker books Westlake wrote under the name Richard Stark.

  At page one, paragraph one, Clay is about to make love to his sexy girlfriend Ella. It’s two thirty in the morning. Just as Clay and Ella turn off the lights and reach for each other, the doorbell rings. Much more interested in the lovely Ella than anything that could possibly be behind the door, Clay at first ignores the bell in the hope that the person will go away. But he finally does answer and finds Billy-Billy Cantell, a stuttering junkie who’s part of that same criminal enterprise as Clay, except that he’s so much less important that the two rarely run in the same circles.

  Billy-Billy is in trouble—the kind that involves dead bodies and frame-ups and a potentially nasty and profit-threatening police presence in the lives of Clay and his boss. To help his boss, to whom Clay is utterly loyal, Clay must help Billy-Billy out of his jam and, at the same time, find and eliminate whoever is framing the drug addict for murder and jeopardizing the organization—the so-called “Cutie.” To that end, Clay acts as an investigator for the remainder of the book, and his efforts to find and neutralize this Cutie take him all over town and all over New York society. Along the way, the reader learns more about Clay’s background and how he ended up in his job. By the end of the book, he has to make many hard decisions about the kind of life he wants to lead, decisions that affect his relationship with Ella.

  His ultimate decision both shocks and makes perfect sense, and brings the story to complete and very cold, dark end. Again, just what I like in a novel.

  The Malfeasance Occasional: Girl Trouble

  ed. by Clare Toohey

  Reviewed by Chris Rhatigan

  Modern crime fiction tends to be a mostly male affair. (Just look at the table of contents of this magazine.)

  Not only are there few female writers in the genre, but there are far fewer stories about women.

  Enter Girl Trouble, an anthology from the people behind Criminal Element. Fourteen stories based on an interesting, open-ended prompt by a formidable cast of authors.

  My favorite of the bunch is “Mad Women” by Patti Abbott. It has all the hallmarks of an Abbott story—the lyrical voice, the fluid dialogue, the thoroughly imagined characters. She also excels at crafting detailed period pieces and demonstrating subtle, destructive sexism—both of which are on display here. This story is about Eve Moran, a compulsive shoplifter, and Abbott does a fine job creating Eve’s interior life.

  Here’s just one of many excellent passages: “There were always grim-faced men in charge of her, she thought again. Men who guided her around by the elbow, steering her like an unwieldy ship into port. Men who were ashamed of what she’d done—at their association with her.”

  Hilary Davidson has a strong entry with “The Barnacle.” Jess is involved with criminal Bobby Torres. When the police come knocking
, Jess dutifully covers for him. But it doesn’t take much for Jess to figure out that he’s an all-around shit stain. This one struck me as a mini-novel—I wanted to find out more about Jess and her association with the underworld.

  Brendan DuBois is a veteran of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. His story, “Her Haunted House,” is about a writer who unearths some skeletons from her past. DuBois is a pro’s pro—this is a finely tuned, perfectly paced piece that offers a complete view of a complicated character. I would expect nothing less from him.

  Compared to the Beat to a Pulp or Thuglit anthologies, Girl Trouble is lighter fare in terms of content. That said, the introduction of mystery, speculative, and horror elements only serve to make the collection stronger. Each of these stories is well developed and highly enjoyable.