Zero-Sum World

I Say This As A Friend

2011-08-13T19:00:00.004-04:00

If you review fiction, as a professional or as a hobbyist, and the word "implausible" turns up frequently in your writing...you might consider finding a more worthwhile use of your time, please.

***

Been Away. Back Now.

2011-04-04T18:22:00.001-04:00

Spent most of March in Florida, Costa Rica and Panama.

Very little non-guidebook/phrasebook/magazine reading, but here's the box scores:

Read:
Djibouti, Elmore Leonard

Re-Read:
Pagan Babies, Elmore Leonard

Reading:
Zeitoun, Dave Eggers

Re-Reading:
Gringos, Charles Portis

Bought:
The Wordy Shipmates, Sarah Vowell
The Buck Passes Flynn, Gregory McDonald

***

Mosley Again

2011-03-02T08:56:00.000-05:00

The Long Fall, Walter Mosley

This is the first book in a new series by Walter Mosley. His Easy Rawlins is a complex character; Leonid McGill, the new guy here, leads a complex life—too complex: I kept expecting his back story or his unsettled domestic arrangement or even the story threads involving his children to double back into the case he was working on. Nope; he just leads a very complex life.

There’s already a second book in this series. Maybe Mosley settles in a little there…

*

Last Car

2011-02-18T12:22:00.001-05:00

Last Car To Elysian Fields, James Lee Burke

James Lee Burke’s admirable Dave Robicheaux series, set in and around New Orleans, always does a convincing job with those moments when Southern charm reaches its limit and the natural temperament of crooked folk living in extreme humidity comes to the fore.

As with many genre series, though, the impact has been lessened, I think, as publishers have insisted on higher word counts. Read an early book in any long-running series of the past couple decades and you will find a tighter, tenser piece of work than a more-recent entry.

There’s often an almost-Biblical quality to the violence threatened in a Robicheaux story, but as altercation after altercation ends in a draw (because we have hundreds of pages to go!), a reader can begin to feel like an onlooker at a schoolyard fight -- one of the jerks (speaking for myself) egging on the combatants when it looks like both are, sensibly, going to back down.

***

A Time Out

2011-02-15T10:41:00.000-05:00

He left the hotel and walked to a cinema where She Wore A Yellow Ribbon was playing. He had already seen it but that made no difference – he had probably seen every Western ever made. The afternoon was the worst part of the day and a movie swallowed up a good part of it in one gulp. At the same time he didn’t want to spend the afternoon in the dark watching movies set at night, gangster movies or horror films. In Westerns it was always afternoon, so he was able to avoid the afternoon and get a nice helping of it at the same time. He liked to get high and let the images float before his eyes like the nonsense they were…He couldn’t have made it through the day without Westerns but all the time he was watching them he was eager for them to end, impatient for the whole charade of settled scores to be over with so that he could emerge into the fading daylight.

(from But Beautiful: a book about jazz, by Geoff Dyer)

****

The Heckler

2011-02-14T13:12:00.002-05:00

The Heckler, Ed McBain

I’ve enjoyed a couple 87th Precinct novels, but more often I don’t finish them.

This entry in the series, which introduces the arch-nemesis The Deaf Man, purported criminal genius, felt like one of the odder books I’ve read lately, with a couple of very diffuse storylines and way too much badly-aged (Borscht Belt?) humor. Both these elements are pretty standard in the series, and largely the reason I seldom finish one of the books.

I have a banker’s box filled with 87th Precinct novels, though, so odds are I’ll keep trying ‘em....

****

The Night Gardener

2011-02-12T10:46:00.002-05:00

I read all my George Pelecanos a decade ago, in one binge, from The Big Blowdown through Hell To Pay. In recent years, I tried his earliest books, the Nick Stefanos series, but couldn’t get into them: All the weaknesses of the later books I had read -- the cataloguing of music played and substances abused; character revealed through preference for this or that vintage soul tune (which the reader might or might not have knowledge of/access to); the strain to be hip, I think, when what he was really writing, urban westerns, could not help but be, at heart, pretty square -- were too much out in front of any story he had to tell in his youth.

He’s all grown up in The Night Gardener, and if I confess to missing a certain energy that may have come from the same place as the worries over hipness, he has nevertheless embraced his own squareness, which makes for a better novel.

Still, when I want to turn a friend on to his stuff, I’ve got to admit: I’ll hand over a copy of The Sweet Forever, or Right As Rain.

****

Evidence

2011-02-10T14:18:00.001-05:00

E Is For Evidence, Sue Grafton

I’ve meant to try a female private eye novel for a long time now, and I decided far in advance that when I did I’d try Sue Grafton first, because I’ve read such good notices for her work all these years.

(I have no solid reasoning for passing on the female private eye novel all this time-- I’ve often been attracted, in life, to women who were hard-bitten, hard-drinking loners – but I suspect the last decade-plus of Janet Evanovich might have caused me some additional hesitation, even though I would not mistake those novels for the work of Grafton or any other of the female PI originators of the ‘80s.)

I enjoyed E Is For Evidence. Kinsey Millhone works in the oceanside southern California hamlet where she grew up, not one of the rich inhabitants, before becoming a cop for a time. Well-acquainted with local mores and local family histories, she has something of the small-town sheriff about her, and leverages her life-long knowledge of the people in the course of her investigation.

This is the type of mystery novel where milieu and character dominate, and Grafton does a very good job on both counts; I’ll have to try another book in the series….

***

Life's Work

2011-02-03T16:04:00.001-05:00

Life’s Work, Jonathan Valin

I read one or two of Valin’s mysteries featuring Cincinnati PI Harry Stoner back in the eighties. Stoner wasn’t enough of a wiseass for me, at the time, and I settled on Amos Walker and Thomas Kyd for my contemporary-PI fix (and on Travis McGee, for escape from the Michigan winters.)

I’m glad I second-guessed myself decades later and picked up Life’s Work. The only thing wrong with Valin was this twenty-something reader.

First thing about Stoner: He’s on the job from Page One, meaning there’s no time for any nonsense about his office locale, or his wacky uncle, or his colorful friends. Whatever the reader will divine about the character will come from Stoner’s interactions with the people he meets on the case.

Second thing about Stoner, and this is one I really like: He’s in it for the trouble. He likes trouble. In Life’s Work he binge drinks with professional football players and sleeps with a prostitute and drives a Pinto.

Trouble diverts the mind from thoughts of failure, and failure haunts this story and its characters.(The plot involves steroid abuse in professional sports…in 1986, the year the book was published. Nothing has changed.)

***

A Little Yellow Dog

2011-01-31T12:25:00.005-05:00

Walter Mosley came to the bookstore where I worked for a reading and signing in the mid-‘90s. It was an unusual event, beginning with the scheduling: It took place, as best I can remember, at one o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon. There’ll be no one here, I remember thinking, but I was wrong.

Mosley is always dressed to the nines in photographs, and, on that Wednesday afternoon, dozens and dozens of fans arrived at the bookstore, every black man and woman and child among them also dressed to the nines. Mosley at the time was the favorite writer of record of our country’s President, and as they waited for his appearance, everyone’s pride in his work and accomplishment was plain.

It was quite an unusual sight and an impressive showing in the middle of a weekday afternoon, on a midwestern college campus, where casual and ironic was the typical style.

Then Mosley took the podium and read the raunchiest pages of his current hardcover with great relish, while the crowd sucked in its breath and giggled and shouted approval.

***

I'm not positive now, but I think he may have read the first chapter of A Little Yellow Dog -- the material fits the bill, and the pub date (1996) sounds about right.

I'm embarassed to admit that this is only my second Easy Rawlins novel (after Devil in a Blue Dress)and only my third Walter Mosley (afterFearless Jones)but I plan to make up for lost time.

My two small complaints remain the same. First, there's that Mouse; every series character of the last couple decades has a "Mouse" (or "Hawk" or "Bubba")to handle the real dirty work. These characters feel(to me) more like a work-around for the writer -- so that their protagonist can remain sympathetic to the (apparently) increasingly-genteel readers out there -- than full-fledged characters.

Second, Mosley has a tendency to barnstorm -- once the end of the novel is in sight, his prose can sometimes read more like itinerary, as Easy crisscrosses L.A. wrapping up plot points while the period detail and sociohistorical insight that inform the earlier portion of the tale drops from sight.

These amount to only small complaints, though, because the writing on a whole is rich and textured and extremely enjoyable. I'm eager now to try out his newest, contemporary series as well, but the Easy Rawlins books are a singular take on the private eye genre; after reading one, the next private eye you read, when he complains of being behind the eight ball and unable to trust the police, may just strike you as a crybaby.

****

Reading 2011

2011-01-31T12:20:00.003-05:00

Previously, I’ve posted lists of books I’ve purchased and/or read, with little or no comment; this year, I’ll try to write something about most of the books I read.

But first – a list! 2011, joined in-progress:

A Little Yellow Dog, Walter Mosley
Life’s Work, Jonathan Valin
E Is For Evidence, Sue Grafton
The Night Gardener, George Pelecanos
The Heckler, Ed McBain
Last Car To Elysian Fields, James Lee Burke

…and the stack of mass markets on-deck:

Little Scarlet, Walter Mosley
Hollywood Nocturnes, James Ellroy
A Shoot in Cleveland, Les Roberts
Darkness, Take My Hand, Dennis Lehane
Think Fast, Mr. Peters, Stuart Kaminsky
The Murderer Vine, Shepard Rifkin
The Case of the Borrowed Brunette, Erle Stanley Gardner
The Trail To Buddha’s Mirror, Don Winslow
The Deceived, Brett Battles

****

Reading, 2010, Part 1

2011-01-26T12:49:00.010-05:00

I was given an entire shelf of Michael Connelly novels back around 2003. I'd never read anything by him. I chose to try Chasing The Dime. I judged it a bad book by a good writer, and boxed all his books up until this past year, when I decided to finally try the Harry Bosch novels, beginning (arbitrarily) with Angels Flight.

Is anyone reading this still awake?

I found Angels Flight ridiculously well-made and exciting, and went on to read another 7 or 8 Michael Connelly novels in 2010. Void Moon, a standalone thriller like Chasing The Dime, is marginally better than that book. The earliest books in the Bosch series are a bit clumsy; Trunk Music, of the ones I've read so far, comes closest to replicating the quality of Angels Flight.

I haven't been able to bring myself to try one of the books narrated in the first-person by Bosch, nor any of the books wherein Bosch meets up with the heroes of other Connelly novels: That last gambit never lived up to the front-cover hype in my Marvel Comics years, and I distrust it and resent it a little, even now.

****

Another writer I've meant to read for years, and finally read in 2010, is Alan Furst, who has already produced a shelf of WWII-era espionage novels. As with Connelly, I felt compelled to break a usual rule, and read a handful of his books nearly back-to-back.

I'm reminded of Ross McDonald's Lew Archer novels, in that McDonald and Furst both seem to be writing the same novel over and over again -- not so much working to a formula (although they are) as trying to perfect a single work, to get that perfect version of the novel in their head down on the page.

I'm also reminded again, by comparison, of how little feels at stake in most thrillers....

*****

Nice Paragraph

2011-01-05T13:50:00.002-05:00

Granville Oliver sat at the defense table, wearing an expensive blue suit. He wore non-prescription eyeglasses, a nice touch suggested by (his attorney) Ives, to give him a look of thoughtfulness and intelligence. Underneath the suit he wore a stun-belt, by decree of the court.

---George Pelecanos, Soul Circus

Last-Minute

2010-12-16T11:59:00.003-05:00

Snagged off a bookstore shelf yesterday: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard has begun reprinting non-Lew Archer titles by Ross MacDonald for the first time.

A perfect last-minute gift or two for the fan with a complete shelf of Lew Archer...

It's not listed at the publisher's site yet,

but hopefully they'll get around to The Dark Tunnel, his first novel, written while MacDonald was a teaching assistant at the University of Michigan in the forties. The setting is a fictionalized Ann Arbor, the hero a professor battling Nazi agents on campus!

A reprint of this title would make happy at last several U of M grad students and PhD candidates I've known, who confessed, after a few pints, to an obsession with the novels of Ross MacDonald of such a degree that they could no longer, in good conscience, write him off as a guilty pleasure; this book would seem to be their lodestone...

And yes, that's all I have, after these many months...for now...

****

Double Feature

2010-08-20T13:07:00.002-04:00

Bong Joon-Ho’s latest film, Mother, begins with a lovely medium shot of the title character dancing a strange dance by herself in an empty field. Given what follows, I was grateful to him for allowing the character a reprieve right up front. The writer/director was also behind Memories of Murder and The Host, and all three films pull off a neat trick: the characters are a constant surprise but do not derail the story. See all three. They are among the best movies of the past decade.

I used to find the private lives and public misdeeds of artists fascinating. Then, I grew up. A lot of the writers, musicians and filmmakers whose work I admired were miserable jerks who ruined the lives of people around them. Who cares? I can still enjoy the work. The private lives and public misdeeds of people with genuine power, on the other hand, are far more pertinent to the quality of innumerable lives, and fairer game. To get to the point: Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer is fantastic, and if you stay away, the loss is yours.

***

McBain Successor Found!

2010-08-10T12:29:00.001-04:00

No word yet on whether they'll only be available as e-books...

The author Richard Price (“Clockers,” “Lush Life”) has signed a deal with Henry Holt & Company for a new series of detective thrillers set in New York, according to the blog Galleycat at Mediabistro.com. The first book in the series, as yet untitled, about a 40-year-old New York City police detective turned night-watch sergeant whose career was ruined after a controversial shooting, will be released in the fall of 2011 under Mr. Price’s pen name Jay Morris.

....

Cold

2010-07-19T14:14:00.002-04:00

Here's a passage from Kahawa, by Donald Westlake, to chill your blood in the middle of this nationwide heatwave:

Juba and the major were dumped by the first two (corpses). Then Chase said, “Give me your coat, Captain.”
“Oh, sir,” the captain said. “I did what you wished. Let me go home now. Far away from here, not even Uganda. Near Adi, sir,” he said, naming a Zairian town just a few miles from both the Ugandan and Sudanese borders. “I go there, sir, I never come back.”
“Give me your coat.”
“All my family is there, sir. I go live with them, I never bother you again, sir.”
In the end, Chase had to strip the coat off the body himself.

....

Double Feature: Unfilmable Edition

2010-07-08T16:14:00.002-04:00

Once the clues have begun to accumulate, and you understand that a novel’s narrator is unreliable, you have to combine your readerly pleasures with other, more writerly duties: You have to pick through the details he offers (“All women find me attractive”) and decide which ones to believe (um, not that one.)

When a film gets made of this type of narrative, though, a genre that’s pretty nimble on the page gets hamstrung in the visual medium, and James Mason or Jeremy Irons wind up cast as Humbert Humbert -- a narrator who, three separate times, tells the reader that he is considered quite handsome; striking, even.

I’ve never believed him, and I never believed Lou Ford, narrator of Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me, when he insists that the women he beats up enjoy it, but the new film version (which gets the setting and the bit players just right) takes him at his word, and so trips right out of the gate.

Patricia Highsmith’s sociopaths are more childlike than Jim Thompson’s, more likely to kill someone and then pretend it didn’t happen, until they’ve convinced themselves it didn’t and move on to other things, if the world will let them, which it won’t.

Given that description, you can guess that her novels depend on a lot of interior monologue, but the recent film of The Cry of the Owl works pretty well without any voiceover narrative. It veers close to a Lifetime Network production at times, but the inherent strangeness of the material, and a good, weird performance by Julia Stiles, keeps it on track. Best of all, nobody pounds Jessica Alba’s face into hamburger.

***

Bought | Reading

2010-05-27T14:22:00.003-04:00

BOUGHT:

Memory, Donald E. Westlake
I Was Looking For A Street, Charles Willeford
A Long Line of Dead Men, Lawrence Block
Eye of the Beholder, Marc Behm
Safer, Sean Doolittle
The Spies of Warsaw, Alan Furst
The Given Day, Dennis Lehane
The Turnaround, George Pelecanos

READING: Safer

I wondered -- briefly, long ago -- what one’s life would be like if John Walsh were one’s neighbor. And here it is.

A Quick Nod

2010-05-11T16:11:00.001-04:00

Begin your tale with your hero being dragooned into a job -- one for which he, at first glance, appears perilously outmatched -- and this reader is on your side, if not already won over.

The narrator’s voice in Roger Zelazney’s The Dead Man’s Brother is kinda florid for my taste, but it doesn’t matter: Thirty pages in, the confident pull of the narrative completed the job of winning me over.

Double Feature: Adaptations

2010-04-27T12:39:00.007-04:00

I’m no great fan of voice-over narration, but how else to adapt a novel for the screen if its greatest strengths are ruminative? If you’re Jason Reitman, you add a new character, or two, and have the protagonist hector them with his formerly-interior monologues. In Thank You for Smoking, he conjured up a child to travel with the hero, so the hero could explain the job of a lobbyist to (by extension) us dumb hick moviegoers, and he conjures up another youth to tag after George Clooney in Up in the Air.
In the novel, our hero is in deep denial, and fashions a weirdly-enticing alternate reality out of his business-travel existence as he heads for a breakdown; in the film, Clooney plays a cool guy whose priorities are out of whack. His job is firing people, and the painful scenes of people being terminated from their jobs arrive with the regularity of the murders in a slasher flick, but to what end? So that Clooney and his apprentice can learn some small thing about themselves, yawn. If you don’t want the camera to follow J.K. Simmons when he leaves that office, and stick with him for at least five minutes, if not the remainder of the movie, I don’t know what to tell you. As it stands, Reitman has no idea how to end the movie. I wonder if he knows why he made it.

Watching Edmond, on the other hand, it’s easy to feel that everyone involved knew exactly what they were doing, why they were doing it, and why they wanted to. Directed by Stuart Gordon (maker of some of the most entertaining horror films of the past thirty years, and of the recent Zero-Sum World favorite, Stuck) from a script by David Mamet (adapting his own play) and featuring Mamet players Bill Macy, Rebecca Pidgeon, and Joe Mantegna, Edmond is simply the best Mamet on film thus far. More importantly, for readers of this blog, it is a very pure example of the One-Way Ticket to Hell story, bracingly fearless, with as devastating an ending as any film I can remember recommending wholeheartedly to my loved ones! Seek it out! (Currently offered as a Free Movie on Comcast OnDemand in the Detroit area.)

Read | Re-read | Reading

2010-04-15T10:21:00.001-04:00

Read:
The Hot Kid, Elmore Leonard
Echo Park, Michael Connelly
The Ask, Sam Lipsyte

Re-Read:
If You Can’t Be Good, Ross Thomas

Reading:
When The Sacred Ginmill Closes, Lawrence Block
Dark Age Ahead, Jane Jacobs

The Follow-up | The Letdown

2010-04-05T14:40:00.004-04:00

Criminal Paradise, Michael Connelly, Justified

I stand by my assessment of Criminal Paradise, but want to note I wrote it before I finished the book -- before the author throws his careful build-up out the window, and resolves things in pedestrian ‘80s -action-movie fashion. (One late chapter even ends with someone racking a shotgun and saying, “It’s showtime.”)

I read a second Harry Bosch novel, Trunk Music, directly after finishing Angels Flight. (Reverse chronological order. Unintentional, but I do have a problem with series.) It was also fantastic. Then I decided to try a non-series book by Connelly. Chose Void Moon. A thriller, a cat-and-mouse story, well-drawn Vegas setting, interesting villain. Also, unfortunately, “surprising” twists created by withholding information from the reader for an unconscionable amount of time. I think I’ll stick to the Bosch novels.

The drop-off in quality between the pilot of Justified and the first episode was stunning. Did the producers throw some work to hard-up friends they met back on “Jake and the Fatman”? Raylan Givens deserves better.

....

Akashic Noir Event!

2010-03-31T11:30:00.004-04:00

This Friday Afternoon in Ann Arbor, on the University of Michigan Campus:

Hirsh Sawhney
A Reading and Conversation
Friday, April 2, 4:00pm
1636 School of Social Work Building
Free and Open to the Public

Hirsh Sawhney is an editor and contributor to Delhi Noir, a critically-acclaimed anthology of brand-new fiction published by Akashic Books and HarperCollins India.
While based in Delhi, Sawhney wrote for publications such as the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian, the Financial Times, Outlook, the Indian Express, and Helsinki's Vihrea Lanka. Sawhney currently lives in New York, where he is working on his first novel. He is an Associate Editor at Wasafiri Magazine, a Contributing Editor for The Brooklyn Rail, and an adjunct professor at the City University of New York.

Praise for Delhi Noir:
"For those whose view of India is shaped by The Jewel in the Crown, conversations with a call-in center or even Slumdog Millionaire, this anthology in Akashic's noir series will register simultaneously as a shock, an education and entertainment. All 14 stories are briskly paced, beautifully written and populated by vivid, original characters... Few books can alter one's perception about the state of society, but this does, while delivering noir that's first class in any light." -- Publishers Weekly

Kitabmandal (South Asia Reading Group) is an interdisciplinary group open to faculty, students, and members of the public that meets for critical discussions of work that furthers our understanding of South Asian cultures and societies in the past and present. Please visit our website at http://kitabmandal.weebly.com/ for more information.

...

Justified

2010-03-25T14:42:00.001-04:00

Favorite scene in the premier of Justified: a lowlife halfwit in short pants, sporting the worst mullet to ever appear on television, walks through the front door of the house of a woman he means to kidnap: he calls out her name, then notices U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant, excellent) standing in the front hall. You don’t walk into a person’s house uninvited, Raylan tells him. Now go back out on the porch and knock. If Ava wants to see you, I’ll let you in.

I’ll go out, the halfwit says. But I’m comin’ back in.

He runs the length of the long front walk to his car. Raylan follows, watches him fumble a pistol-grip shotgun out of the car and start pushing in shells. Raylan continues to walk straight at him.

What are you doin? I got a scattergun pointed straight at you!

Think you can rack it before I put a hole in you? Raylan asks.

And we see the halfwit try to think about it. He’s still frozen there when Raylan grabs the barrel of the shotgun and pushes, popping him in the nose with the stock. Bloodied and thrown up against the car, the halfwit protests, his voice breaking and betraying a lifetime worth of frustration and humiliation: “I don’t git you!”

....

Long Island Sound, 1962

2010-03-19T15:15:00.001-04:00

Hard Case Crime publishes Memory, a trunk novel from Donald E.Westlake, in a few short days. It’s likely the last “new” Westlake book we’ll see in a bookstore.

Much as I enjoy and admire the Parker books, I wish he had published more hardboiled stuff under the Westlake name. I’m re-reading 361, first published in 1962; here’s a place and a time, in a few short sentences:

The last mile and a half was private road, blacktop. McArdle shared it with two other millionaires, and his place was last of the three, where the road made a hangman’s knot. There was a birdbath inside the loop, and a Negro with a power mower....He never quite looked at us, and he never quite looked away.

....

Last One In

2010-03-03T16:11:00.002-05:00

Michael Connelly’s books were first recommended to me in 1996, when The Poet was published, but I didn’t read him for years because a) in 1996 I was a bookseller, and the recommendations all came from customers, and I’d decided by that point that customers were always wrong about everything; b) I couldn’t even keep up with recommendations from my co-workers, and they knew what they were talking about when they recommended a book; c) no co-worker ever recommended Michael Connelly to me; d) The Poet was about a serial killer, and I didn’t care if I never read another serial killer novel; e) the rest of his books were about some cop, and I tended to agree with Hitchcock’s dismissal of policemen as “dull”; and f) there was something off-putting about several customer’s insistence that this guy was the only mystery writer worth reading at the moment -- an understandable sentiment, in a way, what with Patricia Cornwell and Tom Clancy dominating the bestseller lists, but still: Pronouncements like that grabbed me when I was sixteen, and The Clash was The Only Band That Matters, but I was older now, and more than a little embarrassed to hear middle-aged men (the customer was always a middle-aged man) carrying on so.

It only took me, um, fourteen years to overcome this poor first impression, but I finally read one of the Harry Bosch series, Angels Flight. It’s a terrific book.

I started Angels Flight just after finishing The Watchman, by Robert Crais. It was a great relief to open the Connelly book and see paragraphs longer than one sentence.

(I haven’t read much Robert Crais, either; I read The Two-Minute Rule a couple years ago and found it to be just about everything I could ask for from what I think of as a commercial thriller. I don’t know what happened between that book and The Watchman, but Crais seems to have fallen under the spell of Business Management English, never using a plain-old verb when he can stretch for (or invent) one that sounds more Action-y --- a practice that perhaps reaches its nadir with this sentence, during an interrogation scene: “Cole worked to relax the young man.” Um, what’s wrong with “tried”?)

Connelly’s prose has a one-foot-in-front-of-the-other quality that’s pleasing, comforting, and eventually thrilling, and that only rarely coughs up a sentence like this one: “It was locked and he knocked.” The reader is sometimes tempted to skip ahead; the reader won’t, because the writer won’t. That’s called suspense.

Or the reader might: It’s a reader’s right to barnstorm. When the writer barnstorms, it just seems lazy. Excite me -- or work to excite me, if you must. Don’t get excited on my behalf.

I've owned the first dozen or so of Michael Connelly's books for six or seven years now, and I think it might be a little while before I read anything by anyone else. My apologies to my customers of 1996.

.....

Strands

2010-02-26T12:43:00.002-05:00

I went through the banker’s boxes that hold most of my personal library, these past few years, picked out a few books that caught my eye, and stacked them on an end table. A few days later, I looked through them, deciding what to read next.

I re-read Francine Prose’s forward to the NYRB edition of A High Wind in Jamaica, then set the book aside, without re-reading it, in favor of Ross MacDonald’s The Instant Enemy -- and A High Wind in Jamaica shows up in the early pages of that book, when Archer notices a copy in the bedroom of a missing teenage girl.

I finished The Instant Enemy a few days later, and picked up the next book in the stack: The Watchman by Robert Crais -- and the author note identifies Crais as a winner of the Ross MacDonald Literary Award.

Signs and portents everywhere. I was beginning to feel like the protagonist of a Paul Auster novel -- and the next book in the stack?

The Brooklyn Follies.

......

Criminal Paradise

2010-02-09T16:12:00.000-05:00

A blurb from Ken Bruen cites Elmore Leonard, but I think Steven M. Thomas’s Criminal Paradise has a greater resemblance to, and many of the virtues of, John D. MacDonald’s writing, particularly in the way the action is fixed to its setting: in this case, the sunny, palmy, moneyed neighborhoods along the coast of southern California.

The narrator is one of the rats that live in the palms -- a smart, but hardly ruthless, career criminal. As the story commences, he sees his careful existence quickly unravel, thanks, in equal measures, to his own basic decency and his impulsive lust for swag.

More of the old virtues: the book starts with a robbery in progress -- you have to start in the middle of the action these days; that’s the rule -- but the real menace builds slowly, at the periphery, in a manner similar to what John D. used to do: fix the scoundrel Travis McGee was chasing in the reader’s mind as the Devil in Flesh, before he even made an appearance.

It’s a real pleasure to choose a book off the bookstore shelf, with no knowledge of it beforehand, and find you’ve chosen a solid, immersive read. I’m glad to know, at the start of a new decade, that it’s still possible.

...

RIP Robert B. Parker

2010-01-26T11:32:00.001-05:00

I can’t think of many books that've meant as much to me as “Mortal Stakes” did the summer I read and re-read it, when I was 11 or 12 years old.

Same goes for “A Catskill Eagle,” read a decade or so later, during three days in bed with the flu.

I’ve only read half a dozen of the Spenser books, so I can’t say I’ve kept up with Robert B. Parker. But, Christ, who did?

And I was never as fond of Spenser as Parker kept nudging me to be -- but I can say the same thing about John D. MacDonald and Travis McGee, and I’ve never let Travis McGee stand in the way of my enjoyment in reading John D. MacDonald.

I started reading “The Judas Goat” last night. I’ve got to cut this short, so I can get back to it. You know that feeling.

Godspeed, man.

…………..

Reread/Reading (Auld Lang Syne Edition)

2010-01-13T16:10:00.000-05:00

I used to like to start a new year with a doorstop.

It’s comforting, during a cold snap, to know there’s 600 pages of story remaining, and I’ve spent some fine Januarys in the company of Nazis, Cold War spies, and vampires.

Currently, though, I have less time to read than ever before, and I’m trying to put a bad year, during which I wrote nothing whatsoever, behind me.

Reading a doorstop makes me want to keep reading that doorstop; reading a potboiler makes me want to write a potboiler.

And so, even though the likes of Mason & Dixon and The Count of Monte Cristo glare at me from the shelf, their still-uncreased spines a reproach, I said goodbye to 2009 and hello to 2010 like so:

Reread:
Split Images, Elmore Leonard
Cat Chaser, Elmore Leonard
Out On The Rim, Ross Thomas

Reading:
The Bounty Hunters, Elmore Leonard

...

Favorites of 2009

2010-01-06T11:54:00.000-05:00

BOOKS:
Bury Me Deep, by Megan Abbott;
Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers;
Honey In His Mouth, by Lester Dent

MOVIES:
Inglorious Basterds,
The House of the Devil,
A Perfect Getaway

ALBUMS:
Tell ‘Em What Your Name Is! -- Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears;
Brain Cycles -- Radio Moscow;
This Brings Us To, Vol. 1 -- Henry Threadgill & Zooid

THREE MEMORABLE PERFORMANCES:
Cliff Lee, in Game 1 of the World Series;
Tilda Swinton, in the movie Julia;
Dick Cheney, ongoing

......

Where've you been?

2009-12-10T11:55:00.004-05:00

1.Watching the Yankees win another World Series.
Congratulations to Derek Jeter. Nuts to the rest of ya.

2.Dealing with matters not germane to this blog.

3.Barely reading.
This is just the pits, man.

4.Watching horror movies.
I misspent most of my adolescence at the drive-in, watching DePalma and Cronenberg and John Carpenter flicks, and all the god-awful slasher-trash on the bottom half of those double features, and I still favor horror movies over any other genre; I do.

Quick, which do you remember: Jane Fonda’s lauded performance in Coming Home, or Sissy Spacek (or Piper Laurie!) in Carrie?

I watched twenty-odd recent horror flicks over the past couple months, and I’d re-watch the least of them before subjecting myself to Funny People again.

Here’s two I can recommend without much qualification:

The House of the Devil would have fit right in at the Drive-In Algiers in 1979. Pretty girl wanders alone through creepy house. Perfect, right through the end credits.

Also features a nice turn by Greta Gerwig, the star of many of the films from the oft-reviled "Mumblecore" scene (i.e. Hannah Takes The Stairs, Baghead). She has the P.J. Soles role here, and makes the line "I had to, like, look at a map" a lot funnier than it has any right to be. (She co-stars with Ben Stiller in Noah Baumbach's (The Squid and The Whale, Margot At The Wedding) next movie.)

The online review that convinced me to watch Grace assured readers that, whatever they believed in, the movie was against it.

I have nothing to add.

Honey In His Mouth

2009-11-18T16:01:00.003-05:00

One of the first stories I can remember being crazy for -- reading over and over -- was in an issue of a ‘70s Marvel Comics horror/suspense/EC Comics knock-off anthology comic book (to come up with the title, I’d have to go digging through the boxes of comics in my mom’s basement to find it, and that way lies madness).

Set on Devil’s Island, it was the story of one prisoner’s single-minded determination to escape. None of Papillon’s nobility for this guy: he screws over everyone to have his chance. In the end, justice is served, to put it mildly.

I hadn’t realized I’d been looking high and low for a final wallop with the same distinct flavor as that one until I ran across Honey In His Mouth, the Lester Dent novel that Hard Case Crime prized from oblivion this summer.

This book -- especially its ending -- made the seven-year old in me very, very happy.

Double Feature

2009-08-28T13:47:00.003-04:00

The ad campaign for Body of Lies made it look like a technothriller, but it’s not. The failure of technology to deliver on its promises in the War on Terror is one of the movie’s themes: “They’ve figured out they’re fighting an enemy from the future,” as a character nicely puts it. The interrogation methods of the CIA are treated glancingly as well --just enough to leave a chill --and the interagency rivalries, and then the story quickly gets down to the real business of espionage: the care and feeding of cat’s paws. This is a good one.

Blindness is a zombie story without the zombies. If you’ve ever doubted the need for zombies, for the distance they allow, watch this film. It is slightly easier to take than Spike Lee’s When The Levees Broke.

Dragons On The Cover

2009-08-26T16:00:00.003-04:00

I haven’t read Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, but I’ve read a lot about it, most written by people who’ve never before stooped to write a word about a private eye novel.

Once stooped, they figure, why not add some heavy lifting to the enterprise, and cut loose on the meanings of genre fiction?

This is all fine and well. I enjoy highbrow mucking-about in popular culture as much as any middlebrow does -- maybe more.

However, at the risk of sounding like a teenaged hard-SF fan whose aunt buys him books with dragons on the cover…I say, friends, please: I wouldn’t come to your party and throw around “allusion” and “metaphor” as if they were one and the same.

You’ve guessed it. I’m on about this again.

A Relationship in Three Lines: Motherly-Love Edition

2009-08-03T11:28:00.003-04:00

"Ruby still cared very much about Richard. But she cared for Richard the way she would have cared for a mangled toe. She had no high expectations for what it could do, but it still hurt like crazy, so there was no question that it belonged to her."

--from Runner by Thomas Perry

Summer Reading

2009-07-21T13:29:00.005-04:00

READ (Hard Case Crime catch-up edition):

Casino Moon, Peter Blauner;
Passport To Peril, Robert B. Parker;
Straight Cut, Madison Smartt Bell;
Say It With Bullets, Richard Powell;
No House Limit, Steve Fisher

JUST PURCHASED (Nightmare-Inducing Edition):

A Swell-Looking Babe, Jim Thompson (Creative Arts/Black Lizard);
Delay, Tim Krabbe’;
The Widow, Georges Simenon;
Pariah, Dave Zeltserman;
Bury Me Deep, Megan Abbott

(all purchased at the great Magers & Quinn Booksellers in uptown Minneapolis)

1 2 3

2009-06-10T14:28:00.001-04:00

I will see the remake of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 when it hits theaters, but only because I have little choice in the matter:

I love American movies, and I’m an adult: therefore, Denzel Washington is my movie star.

(Name another American movie star for adults…Clint Eastwood; George Clooney; possibly, some year soon, with a little more practice, Angelina Jolie.)

I fully expect that, with the exception of Denzel Washington’s performance, everything about this remake will stink.

What I am excited about, though, is that the movie landed a brand new edition of the John Godey novel in paperback racks nationwide. I’ve probably seen the original, Walter Matthau/Robert Shaw movie a dozen times, but I’ve never read the book.

I expect the novel will read much as the first movie played, as a sterling example of the sort of storytelling -- brisk and efficient, but filled with character -- that Americans, in particular, excelled at, right up into the 1970s: stories that could be moved from page to screen to radio play to stage, without losing a step.

Easy as…well, you know.

I'm Not Alone, I'm Not Alone

2009-05-11T15:02:00.000-04:00

“Here, in other words, is a long-range backstory—a device that, in…recent times, has grown from an option to a fetish…In all narratives, there is a beauty to the merely given, as the narrator does us the honor of trusting that we will take it for granted. Conversely, there is something offensive in the implication that we might resent that pact, and, like plaintive children, demand to have everything explained.”

---Anthony Lane (in this week’s New Yorker)

Read, etc.

2009-05-06T13:44:00.002-04:00

Never finished: Bandits, Elmore Leonard

If I take a book on vacation and don’t finish it during the trip, I’m never gonna finish it. Don’t know why. Sorry, Elmore.

Read: Lush Life, Richard Price

I hadn’t read Price in decades. This was great. No heroes, no villains, apt title.

Bought: the first six Richard Stark reissues from University of Chicago Press

--but only five shipped. Where’s The Jugger? Don’t make me ask again.

Reading: Casino Moon, Peter Blauner

You know how I always complain about writers changing-up between first- and third-person in the course of a book, and how much I hate it? Blauner does that here, but -- this is crucial -- he’s good enough to get away with it. Better than good enough. Recommended.

The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit

2009-04-24T11:33:00.005-04:00

Well, this is just ridiculous:

Detroit Noir contributor Michael Zadoorian, who just last month slapped the world around with his second novel, The Leisure Seeker, has a short-story collection, The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit, available today from Wayne State University Press.

Apparently, Zadoorian has decided to challenge fellow Detroit Noir contributor Joyce Carol Oates in some kind of Sheer Output Competition, or something...

(Michael wrote a new short story while I was typing the previous sentence.)

But, seriously...

Detroit's in the news much of late, but it's the same old story, snippets of Barry Gordy hits over footage of shuttered factories. Get the real news from Michael, a fine writer worthy of your attention.

"A Visit From The Footbinder," Emily Prager

2009-04-10T14:50:00.005-04:00

The hideous cover of this short story collection really stood out when I first saw it in the paperback rack of a small-town pharmacy in 1984. No fourth-rate Carver wannabe stories in here, it fairly screamed. Emily Prager’s cv -- fashion model and National Lampoon staffer -- closed the sale.

The short stories and novella collected herein are mostly along the lines of what I’d been hoping for when I bought the book: the kind of anti-authoritarian comedy and tone the best Lampoon short stories offered, but more expansive and lyrical, on a more personal level. And genuinely transgressive where the lesser Lampoon stuff was merely gross.

Nothing prepared me for the title story, though, and I’ve never gotten over it.

“A Visit From The Footbinder” has the power and menace and simplicity of style of a great folk tale. As far as I know, it hasn’t been anthologized and taught in college. It should be. If you haven’t read it, track it down.

Beauty Products

2009-03-31T08:46:00.000-04:00

When the guy on the next barstool tells you a story, he starts at the beginning, hits stride in the middle, and has a big finish waiting at the end. If he started in the middle and backtracked to the beginning, you’d drift away and start counting the swizzlesticks, or something. He understands this: Why have professional storytellers forgotten it? Or has it become irredeemably square to tell a story in a linear fashion? I’m not arguing that every story needs to be linear, but I find it annoying that so many books and films are now burdened with flashbacks and fractured time frames that add nothing to the story. Today’s filmmaker, handed the script for “Gunga Din,” would no doubt turn in something resembling “Rashomon.”

Last year, I enjoyed and admired “Michael Clayton,” but questioned the need to open the film with a scene replayed near the end. Did writer/director Tony Gilroy fear he’d lose the audience if something didn’t blow up real good right after the opening credits? As it turns out, Gilroy was just getting warmed up. His new film, “Duplicity,” keeps interrupting itself for flashbacks that are meant to deepen the intrigue, but serve only to push the movie’s running time past the two-hour mark. (My dismay increased every time some variation of LISBON: 6 MONTHS AGO flashed on screen.) At ninety minutes, you might’ve enjoyed a timely update of screwball comedy; at two hours plus, this strange mash-up of “Last Year At Marienbad” and a caper film exhausts the audience’s good will.

Then again, perhaps I’m too focused on a pet peeve, and being too hard on Gilroy, and the real problem with “Duplicity” is that the genre setting it shares with “Michael Clayton” -- the world of corporate espionage -- simply feels inconsequential when the stakes are less than mortal. The whole sub-genre of the corporate-espionage tale may well be played out, frankly. Seeing Cold War tradecraft employed in this manner has begun to seem (to me, anyway) reductive and banal. In the novels of John LeCarre, for instance, when Smiley and Karla spar, it’s thrilling and awful, and there is the spectre of a mushroom cloud in the air. Gilroy is smart and skillful, and he can get you just as excited about beauty products -- but he lets the film drag on long enough that you have time to remind yourself: They’re beauty products.

Been Away.

2009-03-23T16:04:00.001-04:00

Back now. Post soon.

Logrolling In Our Time

2009-02-17T11:49:00.002-05:00

Fellow Detroit Noir contributor Michael Zadoorian is getting a lot of ink for his new novel, The Leisure Seeker. I haven't read it yet -- the subject matter is too close to my current life -- but you should pick it up immediately. The most recent rave is from the L.A. Times.

El Wah *

2009-01-28T15:19:00.002-05:00

The last time it was so cold for so long here in the Detroit area had to be winter ’93-’94. I was living in a tiny second-floor room above a hair salon in a house in downtown Ann Arbor. I’d just moved to town and had no money, few friends, and a research lab job with no fixed schedule. The week the deep freeze really hit, I did what I only wish I could do this year: I did not leave home.

It was the only thing to do. Going to work meant a twenty-minute walk, and the mean temperature during that week was below zero Fahrenheit. Not life-threatening for a block-long jaunt to, say, the party store (cigarettes, beer, cold cuts, canned soup) or the library (getting to this in a second) -- but obviously lethal, I was certain, for any greater distances.

I used the time well. I hauled James Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet home from the library. The Black Dahlia. The Big Nowhere. L.A. Confidential. White Jazz. And read All of it.

If you’ve read any Ellroy, you might question the wisdom of attempting to read over a thousand pages of his machine-gun prose over five days’ time while snowbound. Well, good call, neighbor. (I hasten to add that I’d never read anything by him before.) I read all day every day. I read most of the night. I read while sober, while half-bombed, while hung over. I slept fitfully. The trapped odor from the permanents being administered downstairs crept up through the vents. I upset furniture. I stopped using articles when I spoke. I jolted awake from catnaps and re-read entire chapters, convinced I’d been hallucinating.

It was great.

As I neared the final pages of White Jazz, we had a freak thaw -- a day in the mid fifties. All that ice became water, rushed through the streets with nowhere to go. Knee-high geysers over the gutter drains.

It was beautiful.

Now I’m finally reading American Tabloid. I’ve put off reading this book since it was published, in 1995, and put off reading The Cold Six Thousand since it was published, in 2001, because they are the first two books of Ellroy’s Underworld USA Trilogy, and I’ve heard over and over, through the years, that the final volume was nowhere on the horizon, and I finally tired of making due with one of his earlier potboilers or later miscellanies once a year or so, holding out hope that I could someday read all three books of his Magnum Opus on a bender, as I’d done with the L.A. Quartet.

I’m not even reading my own copy. I was, once again, in a library, during a cold snap, saw Ellroy on display, and pounced. My iced-in nostalgia was running high; Ellroy’s not getting any younger; neither am I. “If the trilogy is never finished,” I thought, “at least I'll have read the first two books.”

Kizmet. What I discovered yesterday is that the final book, Blood’s A Rover, has a publication date of September 15th, 2009.

Is this old news? At least now I can read American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand without the nagging fear -- and at a normal, middle-aged-human pace....

Eh. We’ll see about that.

*"El Wah” is a joke from that Ann Arbor cold snap/L.A. Quartet week, and probably only funny if you’re housebound in or near Canada, living on Campbell’s and Old Milwaukee, and reading so much your eyes feel like they’re bleeding.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Lucky Bastard

2009-01-09T10:23:00.004-05:00

Charles McCarry’s Lucky Bastard never made it into paperback, and it’s yet to be reprinted by Overlook Press, the house that’s brought most of his earlier books back into print. The Random House first edition (from 1998) is an ugly-looking book: the wrap is an inch undersized, revealing the topmost of a series of Kennedy half-dollars tumbling down the front and back of the boards. (It’s like a hardcover version of those hideous peek-a-boo mass market covers.)

Loathsome appearance aside, the novel had the misfortune of being pegged in reviews as a satire of the Clinton journey to the White House, and one that appeared a full two years after Joe Klein’s Primary Colors -- a reductive assessment that no doubt played a part in the book now qualifying as forgotten.

Klein’s roman à clef is knowing and funny; McCarry’s novel is a brazen fantasia, but one grounded, nevertheless, in what feel like political realities that any sane American would wish to be able to dismiss as pure fantasy. Difficult as it may be, even now, not to view the story of James Fitzgerald Adams and his wife, Morgan -- chosen during their college years by a rogue KGB mastermind to be future residents of the White House -- through the prism of the Clintons, it’s worth the effort. The story is bigger than that. As narrated by their soulful Russian handler, it’s a beautiful piece of writing, and reading it may leave you giddy.

for all of Friday's Forgotten Books, see Patti Abbott's blog.

Donald E. Westlake (1933-2008)

2009-01-02T11:11:00.000-05:00

Westlake made my other favorite writers look like oafs.
RIP

Go Twist

2008-12-22T16:20:00.001-05:00

Another site that’s sprung up to lessen the sting of Muzzle Flash’s demise is A Twist of Noir, helmed by Christopher Grant.

He’s roped in a lot of Muzzle Flash contributors, so a visit to Twist is time well spent.

My favorite flash there so far is THIS PIECE by Jake Hinkson, which reads like a page from one of the recent Hard Case Crime Lawrence Block reprints. Damn!

And with that, Zero Sum World quietly turns 100 posts old.
Glad tidings to all.

Easiest Thing In The World

2008-12-09T15:06:00.005-05:00

This is the last of the flash fiction I've written that originally appeared at the late, lamented Muzzle Flash.

Clay got the idea from a stand-up comedian: People spend thousands on home security systems, but they’ll hand their expensive camera to a total stranger and ask him to take their picture.

Easiest thing in the world.

All month he’d gone to the places vacationers went, and every evening he ended up with a camera or two. The simple fact he was alone was all the hook he needed. No parent seemed to want to trouble a fellow parent, trying to corral a brood of their own, and ask to have their picture taken.

Clay was starting to believe he’d been the only person watching Letterman that night.

He never had to run very far: If someone gave chase, they gave up when their confused, frightened children called after them. Getting away wasn’t a problem for Clay. He always had a lot of nervous energy in the hours his jones began to build.

Auntwan had taken all the cameras off his hands, though not without complaining. Digital! I need 35mm! If he kept coming to Auntwan, the price was going to go down. He was walking the midway of the fair, brooding over this, when the couple waved him down.

“Excuse me. Sir?”

The man was taller than Clay, fifty pounds heavier – easy to get away from. The woman seemed bleary and happy. Clay guessed they’d come from the beer tent.

“Would you mind?”

It was a high-end digital camera. Clay nodded through the man’s brief instructions, sneaking glances at his cornflower-blue eyes.

They were standing in front of a carny game. Clay motioned them back, then held up a finger to indicate he meant to wait until a clump of old people had passed. The couple relaxed their pose as the crowd moved between them, and Clay ran.

He ran further than usual, expecting pursuit: No children, pricey camera. Near the main entrance he ducked into a tent of 4-H Club exhibits and watched for the couple or the monkeys working security to go past. He removed his jacket, turned it inside out, wrapped it around the camera, wedged the bundle under his arm, and walked to his car.

He joined the long line of cars waiting to exit the fairgrounds, playing with figures in his head. Fifty bucks? From Auntwan? He left the parking lot and pulled onto the service drive, where he was dozens of cars back from a red traffic light. It was the nicest camera Clay had stolen. He set it in his lap, monitor up, and thumbed the review button.

He’d taken a picture of the couple. Bad luck. He thumbed to the previous photograph: A close-up of a woman’s face. Not the woman from the fair: This woman had black hair, set off by a red flower nestled above her ear.

Something was wrong with her eyes.

Clay looked closer.

The red bloom in her hair was no flower.

Clay went to the previous photo: the man from the fair and the black-haired woman, standing in a park, smiling, arms around each other.

Previous photo: close-up, pale woman – her skin looked blue – staring out from the wet, orange-red hair that hung in her eyes.

Again: the man from the fair and the pale woman, seated at a wrought iron table, traffic blurring by in the background.

Clay’s jones crept up. His hands were shaking as he thumbed the button again.

A black woman, on her back, eyes closed, streak of dried blood on her neck.

The black woman standing under an umbrella held by the man from the fair.

There were more.

A horn blasted behind him, and Clay looked in the rearview mirror.

****

James smiled at the thief in the car in front of him.

He had pointed the thief out to Debbie in the parking lot. She’d been staring after the man, drunkenly transfixed, while James popped open the trunk of her car.

James enjoyed his dates. Bringing them to a close was always difficult.

The thief was small. James had fifty pounds on him.

It was going to be difficult, bringing this to a close, too, but James was looking forward to it.

Taking the pictures was usually the hardest thing.

Taking the thief’s picture was going to be the easiest thing in the world.

Note: I promise to never write another serial killer story.

A Quick Three

2008-11-20T11:41:00.004-05:00

Someone once wrote that Patricia Highsmith’s books made you realize how predictably characters in most thrillers behaved; Brad Anderson’s film Transsiberian accomplishes much the same thing. Emily Mortimer is fantastic (and, well, unpredictable) in the lead. The spell is perhaps broken in the last act, when it becomes an action movie, but I didn’t mind.

I’ve abandoned books by Frederick Forsyth and Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum before my flight started boarding. In Gun Work, David J. Schow gets right the thing they most often get wrong: When he interrupts a gunfight to tell you that an Uzi on full auto tends to recoil up and to the right, it’s germane to the action at hand -- not just a clump of research to trip over.

Man, it’s been weeks since I put anything up here, but that’s the way it goes. Today I couldn’t find time to shave. If you like your blogs updated daily, you should check out David Cranmer’s very engaging The Education of a Pulp Writer. Today David announces the launch of a new e-zine he calls Beat to a Pulp. How could it not be good? (Dec. 15th )

Writers On The River

2008-11-07T11:42:00.003-05:00

Detroit Noir editors E.J. Olsen & John C. Hocking are taking part this Sunday in the 10th Annual Writers On The River Book Fair in Monroe, MI.

Check it out, won't you? I cannot attend, and my heart flutters at the thought of those two wandering unsupervised near a body of water.

The relevant details are here.

Double Feature: Degenerate Gamblers

2008-10-30T12:32:00.002-04:00

I could not stand Matthew Broderick when he was young; after Election, I’m cheered whenever he waddles onto the screen. Since bulking up and slowing down, he’s become ridiculously smooth and low-key, a great comic actor. His boyish face, changing slowly from one bland expression to the next, makes for a perfect mask for the degenerate gambler he plays in Finding Amanda. There are some comedy set pieces in the film, but that’s when the film is least funny (with the exception of Steve Coogan’s first scene). The real laughs are kind of painful, but it’s funny nevertheless to watch the matter-of-fact way Broderick lies to everyone. When he develops an interest in his runaway niece Brittany Snow, a twenty-year old prostitute, it is also seems natural that there’s nothing sexual about it: Being interested in anyone is a new experience for him. The small-group swing and light tone is a perfect mask for a lonely and cutting little movie. Lose the scenes with the wacky dealer and the funny pimp and you’d have a minor gem.

In Cassandra’s Dream, the indispensible Tom Wilkinson has a small role which haunts the entire film, much as he did in Michael Clayton. Here, it’s the moment of rage his character allows himself (directed at Colin Ferrell; the audience sympathizes) that stays in the mind, and keeps the movie from drifting away. It’s noir, all right, but held at a distance, with pretty surfaces and a soundtrack by Phillip Glass and characters theatrically declaiming what’s eating them, and Woody Allen just doesn’t have the stomach for this high-style low-life stuff the way David Mamet does. Oh, listen, it’s better than I’m making it sound. Recommended.

Former Detroit Mayor Reports To Jail Today

2008-10-28T11:57:00.005-04:00

I’m tempted to say that I will miss him…

How could I not? In some ways, the last six years in Detroit have been like living inside a really good James Ellroy novel.

…but he won’t be gone that long.

Upon his release: Talk radio show? Pulpit? Both?

(Wikipedia has the Kwame Kilpatrick story well-covered.)

Thurston Ray

2008-10-27T15:47:00.004-04:00

This is the first of two stories that appeared on the Muzzle Flash site, which is No More.

The ground above, the sky below.

Lloyd looked through the spiderweb crack in the windshield and the dead branches and ditchwater that crowded it and thought the horizon was the strangest thing he had ever seen.

He fell back to sleep for a minute.

He woke up still behind the wheel of the overturned Lincoln, suspended a few inches below the seat by the seatbelt and shoulder harness.

Lloyd thought of cars flipping over in movies, how they burst into flame, annihilating everything.

He braced himself and wrestled with the seatbelt release and fell onto the roof of his company car.

***

Out of habit, Lloyd reached for his business cards, which were somewhere else, with his belt and his shoes.

He wiped his palm on his pant leg before extending his hand and saying his name.

“Thurston Ray,” his cellmate said. His hand was a dead fish.

***

Thurston Ray was Drunk and Disorderly. He was a gangly local kid with hair that hung in his eyes, jeans gone in the knees, and dirty fingernails.

“How’dya get soaked?”

“I ran,” Lloyd said. Thurston Ray beamed at him. “I ran into a field, but the moon was behind me, and I ran into a fucking swamp.”

“Pond,” Thurston Ray said, and laughed.

***

After Lloyd vomited, he began to worry. He worried for his job with Sunblessed Seed. He needed to get out of the lockup, see to the car repair himself, phone in excuses to his regional manager and to the farmers and greenhouse owners expecting him the next few days.

He could be released on his own recognizance if he paid the bail, Thurston told him; but Lloyd was cash poor, thanks to the titty club his last customer had insisted on visiting.

Thurston Ray had a proposition, which began, “Let me call my mother.”

***

Thurston Ray’s mother was nineteen at the outside. She had short-cropped hair the color of beets, and a wide mouth. She wore capri pants that could have been a tattoo.

The desk cop knew her, Lloyd thought, but he couldn’t say for certain.

In the parking lot all she said was “That’s eight-fifty.”

Lloyd climbed in the aging Camaro and gave the name of his bank.

***

“Fuck!” Thurston Ray’s mother said, shaking the gun at him.

Lloyd explained about his credit limit, slowly, carefully, but she did not want to hear about it.

He had been able to extract enough cash to pay his own bail and Thurston’s – twice over – but fell short of the sum Thurston had, in his phone call from the police station, instructed her to extort.Her bitterness over this shortfall seemed heartfelt. Lloyd guessed the kids planned to blow town on their profit from his misery, and he felt a tremor of the empathy that had led him to discuss his circumstances with Thurston Ray in the first place: for he was also a drunk trying to get down the road.

“What about tomorrow?” she said.

“Tomorrow?”

“Can you get more money out of the ATM tomorrow?”

***

Her name, she said, was Kimberley.

It started when, not wanting to let him out of her sight, she followed him into the motel bathroom.

They were drinking heavily and he could not say how he got the gun away from her.

At 4 AM, he moved her to the trunk of the Camaro.

He parked in the woods, vomited, walked to the other motel in town, and took a room.

***

He drank more and used the phone. He had the Lincoln towed from the impound to the town’s sole garage. He called missed appointments and was mellifluous and cajoling. He was on his game, on the phone.

***

He drank more and used the phone. The garage said their man was devoting all his time to the Lincoln . He called his office, forgot to mute the violent movie on HBO, slurred on “Good morning”, and hung up.

***

On the fourth day he walked to the garage. “Still waiting on a part,” he was told by the mechanic, a gangly local kid with hair that hung in his eyes, jeans gone in the knees, and dirty fingernails.

Muzzle Flash RIP

2008-10-27T11:42:00.004-04:00

Muzzle Flash has followed Murdaland and Demolition and Hard Luck Stories (and Flashing in the Gutters, and...) to the netherworld.

Hopefully Plots With Guns and Thug Lit will soldier on.

Thanks and best of luck to MF editor DZ Allen.

The two stories of mine that DZ was kind enough to accept for Muzzle Flash will turn up here soon.

Hardboiled v. Noir

2008-10-21T13:47:00.004-04:00

Hardboiled: "Somebody's going to pay for this."
Noir: "I am going to pay for this."

EVENT: Wednesday, Temperance, MI

2008-10-20T12:28:00.004-04:00

I thought the Detroit Noir editors were kidding when they asked me to join them in temperance.

After a few moments of ugly confusion, though, we got things straightened out:

Detroit Noir editors John C. Hocking and E.J. Olsen, along with contributor Joe Boland, will be speaking at the Bedford Branch of the Monroe County Library.

The event takes place on Wednesday, October 22nd, and starts at 7 p.m.
We’ll talk about the book, Joe will read from his work, and we’ll take questions afterward.

We’ll also have books for sale, so please join us!

The Bedford Branch is located at 8575 Jackman Rd. in Temperance, MI.
Call the branch for more details at (734) 847-6747.

The Nightstand

2008-10-17T12:37:00.001-04:00

Read:
The Moving Target, Ross MacDonald
Devil in a Blue Dress, Walter Mosley
A Diet of Treacle, Lawrence Block
Shooters, Terrill Lankford
Slide, Jason Starr & Ken Bruen
Fright, Cornell Woolrich
Consider The Lobster, David Foster Wallace
Protocol For A Kidnapping, Oliver Bleeck

Reading:
Human Smoke, Nicholson Baker
Born Standing Up, Steve Martin

Re-Read:
Put A Lid On It, Donald Westlake

Re-Reading:
Deadly Honeymoon, Lawrence Block

On-Deck:
The First Quarry, Max Allan Collins
The World in Six Songs, Daniel J. Levitin

A Character in Two Sentences

2008-10-15T08:59:00.001-04:00

Joanie settled in with her face in her palms and her eyes shining and for a while I said whatever came to mind. Joanie loved stories –- she probably lived her life the way she did because she loved stories –- but she didn’t necessarily listen to them that closely.

--Max Phillips, Fade To Blonde (p.149)

RIP Eddie Brinkman, 1941-2008

2008-10-07T12:05:00.001-04:00

Nobody Home

2008-10-06T12:18:00.003-04:00

I wrote this flash fiction in July and sent it to Muzzle Flash. I didn’t hear back from editor DZ Allen and, in fact, the Muzzle Flash site went dormant for a month or more. (DZ recently resurfaced there, explaining -- possibly tongue-in-cheek, possibly not -- that he’d been locked up.) Long and short of it, the story is probably not Muzzle Flash material anyway, and I don’t know of anywhere else to send it -- so I’m putting it up here, because I need some action.

NOBODY HOME

Devin was supposed to be looking for a job, but Rachel wasn’t convinced. He never got out of bed before she left for work, and when she came home, to an empty apartment, the TV was warm to the touch, the game controller in a different spot. When he returned in the evening, after she’d eaten dinner alone, there was always beer on his breath and smoke in his clothes.

The promise to look for work was ripped out of him on Valentine’s Day, and now Mother’s Day was around the corner. Rachel tried once again to convince him to work at the florist, just for the holiday.

“We always need delivery help for Mother’s Day. It’s something. They pay cash!”

“Cash?”

“I told you last time. Five, six bucks a signature.”

“Five bucks,” Devin said.

“You know your way around,” Rachel said. “You could make ten, twelve deliveries an hour, sixty, seventy bucks.”

“What happens if there’s nobody home?”

“You try next door, on either side, across the street. Get someone to sign for it. We have these red tags for the front door that say, Flowers for you, you weren’t home, we left them with – and there’s a space where you write the address.”

“What if nobody’ll sign for ‘em?”

“Yellow tag for the door that says, Call us, we’ll bring your flowers back when you’re home.” She could see Devin was losing interest.

“Then you gotta make a second trip for five bucks,” he said.

Rachel and the other floral designers usually ran those deliveries back out on their way home, for no extra money, but she didn’t say anything more to Devin. She knew he wouldn’t understand: People working together, busy times, pulling more weight than usual.

Ann, one of the designers, was the first person to guess Rachel was pregnant. They were greening the stupid FTD Mother’s Day baskets, production-line style, and she caught Rachel sobbing.

“I am,” Rachel said. It was the first time she’d told anyone at all.

Ann told her to go home.

Go: That much sounded good to Rachel. She washed her face in the restroom and walked out to the garage, where the temp drivers shuffled around with maps and clipboards and boxed roses. They were drinkers and deadbeats, and she admitted to herself that Devin wouldn’t have looked out of place among them.

A funeral spray she’d made before starting on the FTD crap was still here. Hard to get a five-dollar signature from a dead man, she guessed. She carried it to the company’s panel van.

At the funeral home, the name of the deceased didn’t appear on the blackboard in the delivery room. It was late in the day, visitations in progress, but she pushed through the door that opened into the main hallway off the parlors, to double check.

The first parlor on the left was unoccupied, and Rachel ducked in, sat on a couch. The empty stillness promised quiet, but she could hear a constant low murmur of voices from the other rooms. It was not that different from sitting alone in the apartment.

What kind of home did she have?

It was night when the designers finished stocking the cooler with arrangements. The deadbeats had cashed out, left behind the usual half-dozen soggy-looking packages. Rachel took two with addresses on streets she recognized, said something reassuring to Ann, and carried the flowers to her car.

The people at her first stop had seen the door tag and phoned, expected her; the second stop was a stab in the dark. The house was in a neighborhood where friends had lived when she was little: Shingle Victorians and Tudors on large lots along the curving streets, separated from the city grid on three sides by a shaded creek. She’d daydreamed about living here when she grew up.

There were lights on inside the house as she pulled up to the detached garage. When she got out of the car, the lights on the ground floor went out, and lights came on upstairs. She hurried to the side door to the house, hoping to catch them before they went to bed, when she saw the yellow tag hanging from the doorknob, bright as day.

So they returned home and walked fifteen yards out of their way to use the front door… Odd, but there were many other explanations, and it was the end of a long day. She rang the doorbell.

A floodlight on the garage clicked on, showing her car to the people in the house. Long minutes passed before the room behind the door filled with light. Then a silhouette loomed behind yellow half-length curtains no hand reached to part.

Rachel forced a smile and gave the package a meager hoist, a gesture she hoped looked friendly, even as cold sweat glued her blouse to her spine.

Devin opened the door, stood there with a weighted-down bag in his hand.

He was listening to me, Rachel thought. Yellow tags. He was paying attention.

Rachel still wore her florist apron. Blade in the pocket.

Devin never let go of the doorknob. When he finally dropped the bag, heavy crystal shattered and spilled at her feet

Friday's Forgotten Book: Protocol For A Kidnapping

2008-10-03T12:25:00.003-04:00

Oliver Bleeck is the pseudonym Ross Thomas used to publish four books of the adventures of professional go-between Philip St. Ives. Ah, Ross Thomas and his names. (Bleeck, Oliver=bleak all over, anyone?) Given the nature of the books, I like to imagine he chose the name thinking of the nursery rhyme/riddle:

As I was going to St Ives
I met a man with seven wives
And every wife had seven sacks
And every sack had seven cats
And every cat had seven kits
Kits, cats, sacks, wives
How many were going to St Ives?

In general, the books he published under his own name are more character-driven and the books published as Bleeck are more plot-driven. Anything by Ross Thomas is highly recommended (well, you may want to save The Money Harvest and The Seersucker Whipsaw for emergency use only) but since his non-Bleeck books have already had some representation here I thought I’d shill for St. Ives. (When St. Martin’s Minotaur launched QP reprints of Thomas earlier this decade – they stalled out after five or six – the Bleeck titles were missing from the ad card. Come on, Hard Case Crime!)

Like Travis McGee, if somewhat less so, St. Ives is a male fantasy of the late-60s early-70s. He doesn’t bed every woman he meets, I don’t think, and he doesn’t belittle women in asides to the reader as McGee does. He lives in a New York townhouse rather than a moored houseboat. But he does share with McGee 1) a preference for working only a few weeks every year and 2) a rather high-flown wit (and St. Ives’ has aged better.)

As his job title suggests, St. Ives is a professional ransom-dropper, but of course none of the jobs he accepts (or is coerced into doing) turn out to be anything so simple as a plain-old kidnapping.

All four of Oliver Bleeck’s books are worth tracking down; I chose Protocol For A Kidnapping because I’m reading it right now, and whichever Ross Thomas you’ve read most recently is your favorite Ross Thomas.

For all of Friday's Forgotten Books, see Patti Abbott's blog.

Double Feature

2008-10-02T11:33:00.003-04:00

The Bedroom Window has the kind of premise that’s hard to resist: Our naïve hero tries to do good by telling a lie, and quickly finds himself on the Road to Hell. I saw this in a theater 21 years ago (?!) and thought it was like an American version of one of Truffaut’s Hitchcock homages –- an impression obviously fostered by the presence of Isabelle Huppert, but supported by the film itself and by a second viewing on DVD this week. As with Truffaut, the movie goes limp somewhere after the halfway mark, even though the story remains involving. It would be easy to blame this failure on the star, Steve Guttenberg, unless you have happened to see him in the movie Diner and thus realize that he gets a Lifetime Pass. No, it’s his character –- he’s an Architect, which in movies means Underwritten –- that lets some of the tension dribble away. Director Curtis Hanson, who would go on to adapt and direct the sublime L.A. Confidential, doesn’t fix the character into the story the way that Hitchcock or DePalma or David Lynch did in films with similar premises. Even when the guy is sitting up all night in an alley, staking out a killer’s house, there’s no sense of what’s driving him; when, late in the film, he tells Elizabeth McGovern that he has a “crush” on Huppert, it sounds about right -– and completely wrong. It’s just a lark? Don’t tell that to the villain! (It’s a master stroke by Hanson that the villain has only one line in the movie. He makes the most of it. You laugh, realizing -- “Hey! He spoke!” -- and then your blood runs cold.)

The much-lauded second-person voiceover narration in Blast of Silence left me feeling churlish. The style is so hardboiled you could crack a floor tile with it, and it has more than a touch of Nietzche -– the Nietzche who so impresses undergraduates. That aside, the film’s a gem, a terrific specimen of the lonely-stunted-life-of-the-contract killer sub-genre. You could draw a straight line from Blast of Silence through The Prone Gunman through Grosse Point Blank to Who Is Conrad Hirst? and come out with a pretty good essay. I’ll expect it on my desk next week.

The Boogey Man

2008-10-02T11:29:00.002-04:00

I was watching baseball and trying to read during the commercial breaks, looking up whenever a campaign spot ran.

During one break, I heard the ominous music and superior, threatening narration I’ve come to associate with Republican ads, and thought, Wonder if I've seen this one yet? and looked up from my book:

Saw V is in theaters later this month.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Budding Prospects

2008-09-26T15:27:00.004-04:00

T. Coraghessan Boyle is probably my favorite living short story writer. The archetypal Boyle narrator/protagonist –- a too-intellectual sad sack, half-clinging to hippie ideals he no longer believes in or lives by, easily led around by the pecker, battered by whatever societal or natural disaster catches the author’s fancy this time -– is a surprisingly hardy fellow, a regular Buster Keaton figure. You welcome him turning up in story after story, surviving all sorts of out-there scenarios.

In the novels, though, that same character can come to seem like a bit of a straw man.

Not so in Budding Prospects, his second novel.

Lighter than anything else I’ve read by him, this is a pretty straightforward comic novel -- a marriage of the traditions of the “fuck-up” novel and the heist novel -- about a simple plan to grow and sell some marijuana in northern California.

The novel begins:

I've always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth-century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of horn-rims, and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams. I got married, separated, divorced. Quit smoking, quit jogging, quit eating red meat. I quit jobs: digging graves, pumping gas, selling insurance, showing pornographic films in an art theater in Boston. When I was nineteen I made frantic love to a pinch-faced, sack-bosomed girl I'd known from high school. She got pregnant. I quit town. About the only thing I didn't give up on was the summer camp.

Let me tell you about it.

If you need more convincing, and you’ve never read T.C. Boyle before, check out one of those story collections first.

Burn After Reading

2008-09-15T15:23:00.002-04:00

A lot of movies huff and puff to feel up to the minute; Burn After Reading, with great stealth, makes it look easy.

The value of “intelligence” misjudged, resulting in carnage? Check.
Bureaucrats sitting on their hands, waiting to see how matters of life-and-death play out? Check.
Isolation, paranoia, and self-interest verging on solipsism? All on full display.
An audience that wouldn’t have been certain how to take this stuff eight years ago, erupting into bitter, knowing laughter? Yep.

Recommended.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Trace

2008-09-12T12:54:00.008-04:00

Reading this week of Gregory McDonald’s death, I remembered how startling the first sighting of Fletch on the paperback rack at the supermarket or drugstore, in the late ‘70s, was. What the hell is this? I thought. Dialogue on the cover? I was 10 or 11 at the time, but I knew that covers were for sexy illustrations or for photo still-lifes of handguns & drug paraphernalia.

But those Fletch covers had the immediacy of a great newspaper headline. There was no need to pick the book up and thumb through it. You knew you were going to buy the book before you ever touched it. Probably the only pure true case of a book you could judge by its cover.

Of course, when the Fletch books became best-sellers, the text of other books began leaking out onto covers, but years went by before the design was applied to anything I considered reading. And then the Trace books started showing up.

The dialogue on the covers of the Trace books was nowhere near as good as Gregory McDonald’s, but I was all caught up with Fletch and wanted something similar, and these books were doing back flips to look like McDonald’s stuff. On some level, too, I think I wanted to see how you might go about ripping off work you admired and tweaking it enough to make it your own, and something told me the Trace books accomplished this.

The author Warren Murphy is best known as the author or co-author of the three thousand books in the Destroyer series, but I haven’t read any of them. I don't know if the emulation of Fletch stretches far beyond the cover; at any rate, the Trace books are quite different.

Here is what I remember: Devlin Tracy is an investigator for an insurance company. He hates the company he works for, and is tired of doing investigative work for a living; he constantly daydreams of making a big score by inventing something, but his only real skills seem to be 1) the ability to tell when someone is lying, and 2) the ability to drink astonishing quantities of alcohol.

The cases he works on bring him into contact with wealthy families right out of Lew Archer Land, and he alienates nearly everyone he meets (with the exception of his faithful girlfriend -- who, if I remember correctly, solves the mystery in a couple of the later books, while Trace nurses a hangover somewhere.)

Darker (or more depressive) than the Fletch books, lighter than Charles Willeford’s Hoke Mosley, the Trace books would probably appeal to a fan of either. Find one and save it for next summer: Trace’s drink is gin, I believe.

for all of Friday's Forgotten Books, see Patti Abbott's blog.

Friday's Forgotten Book: A Stranger In This World

2008-09-05T07:49:00.002-04:00

A Stranger In This World by Kevin Canty, published in 1994, doesn’t seem to enjoy the afterlife it deserves. It’s both a first book and a short story collection, and, as in a lot of literary short fiction, many of the tales here end with an epiphany. The difference here is, the epiphanies always arrive too late. The characters are captured at the exact moment they fall through the cracks. (One story begins: “Let’s say things stop working out for you.” By paragraph’s end, it’s no longer hypothetical. And it's a short paragraph.) Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son was published a few years earlier, and I think that, for a time (as with Raymond Carver the previous decade), any fiction with protagonists on the margins of society was measured by the Jesus’ Son yardstick and found wanting. Compared to these stories, though, the characters in Jesus’ Son are playing in a sandbox. There’s real hurt in A Stranger In This World, and the characters in “Pretty Judy” and “Junk” and “Blue Boy” aren’t headed to a better place, but Canty’s tough, elegant prose makes their journeys rewarding.

for all of Friday's Forgotten Books, see Patti Abbott's blog.

EVENT: Kerrytown Bookfest

2008-08-26T16:06:00.004-04:00

The 6th Annual Kerrytown Bookfest is Sunday, September 7th in Ann Arbor, and a number of Detroit Noir contributors will be on hand.

Here’s the Detroit Noir-centric schedule of events:

1 PM, Kerrytown Concert House
The Art of the Short Story

Moderator: E.J. Olsen
Panel: Peter Ho Davies, Dorene O’Brien, Joe Borri & Lolita Hernandez

2 PM, Main Speakers Tent
Four Guys and a Doll (Mystery Fiction)

Moderator: Jamie Agnew of Aunt Agatha's
Panel: Loren D. Estleman, Theresa Schwegel, Peter Leonard, Chris Grabenstein & Rob Kantner

4PM, Main Speakers Tent
Fresh Faces in Historical Crime Fiction

Moderator: Jo Ellyn Clarey
Panel: Megan Abbott, Cordelia Frances Biddle, Suzanne Arruda & Kathryn Miller Haines

The full official schedule is here.

Don’t miss out!

Read | Bought | Reading | On Deck

2008-08-25T11:51:00.001-04:00

Read:
Small Crimes, Dave Zeltserman
Baby Moll, John Farris
Severance Package, Duane Swierczynski
A Dance At The Slaughterhouse, Lawrence Block

Bought:
Keeper, Greg Rucka
The Max, Ken Bruen & Jason Starr
Nothing To Lose, Lee Child
Body Rides, Richard Laymon
Devil In A Blue Dress, Walter Mosley
Gold Coast, Elmore Leonard

Reading:
Leather Maiden, Joe R. Lansdale

On Deck:
The Moving Target, Ross MacDonald

A Local Production

2008-08-22T14:03:00.007-04:00

Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm recently offered a number of tax incentives to film productions and brought Clint Eastwood, among others, to the Detroit area for shooting, as it were.

So the hour is nigh.

This is the consensus in Detroit, anyway: The film version of the Kwame Kilpatrick story cannot be far off.

My casting suggestion -- Anthony Anderson as the Mayor. Terrific actor. He can be charming, he can be threatening.

Reassemble the creative team from L.A. Confidential and I think you've got a winner.

Friday's Forgotten Book: The Sophomore

2008-08-21T11:47:00.004-04:00

Detroit's own Patti Abbott recently started Friday's Forgotten Book, a boon to readers -- and content-stumped bloggers -- everywhere.

Thanks to Patti.

The Sophomore, Barry Spacks (1969)

I read the Fawcett paperback twenty-five years ago, probably the same week I read Richard Farina’s Been Down So Long It Looks like Up To Me – the summer before I started college. When my subsequent college experience didn’t include daytripping through revolution in Cuba (Farina) or barricading myself inside the campus radio station to play “Night in Tunisia” continuously during an all-request program (Spacks), I just knew I’d missed out on the salad days of American higher education.

The book is still readily available via ABE; one seller offers this synopsis: “A fast paced and amusing lyrical novel telling of a few days in the life and crisis of a 23 year old aging college sophomore, neither square nor hippy, but caught between and confused.”

I remember wondering, while reading the book, if it wasn’t a product of the success of The Graduate – if the book wasn’t an assignment the publisher had handed to a writer who’d been producing house-name series paperbacks for them, and he’d taken this shot to produce something a little more literary, or at least closer to his own experience. That was how it felt to me at the time - a real professional writer's novel, compared to the loopy prose and plotting of Pynchon-classmate Farina.

I do not know if the Barry Spacks who wrote The Sophomore went on to become Barry Spacks, the American poet and teacher(thanks, internet), but I suspect it is so. Nevertheless, I prefer my original backstory --"Kid, I got something for ya! Put Nick Carter #238 on hold for a couple weeks!"

At any rate, I enjoyed the book every bit as much as I enjoyed the hipper, more celebrated Farina novel.

Double Feature

2008-08-20T16:12:00.001-04:00

Is there anything more played-out in the mystery genre than the serial killer? Five minutes spent with any of the current most-watched cop shows and I’m beyond tired. I feel like I’ve been running from a knife-wielding maniac – who’s smarter than you or me – since about 1988. So why look at Mr. Brooks? I like Kevin Costner, and at this point in this season, I’ll do practically anything to avoid watching the Detroit Tigers. If you like this sort of thing, Mr. Brooks is smart (or what passes for smart) about it.

Déjà Vu is the first Tony Scott film in a decade or more, maybe ever, that won’t induce a petite mal seizure in anyone born before 1980. We start out with some 9/11 and Katrina imagery before veering off into a high-tech remake of Laura slash apologia for the Bush Administration Surveillance Program. (So, The Dark Knight was actually the second action-film Bush-apologia...) The writer/physicist Brian Greene is listed as a technical advisor, but they must have hustled him out of the room quickly, because the filmmakers and the cast don’t even bother to pretend they understand the weird science they’re spouting. Denzel Washington, God love him, has never turned his back on junk, but not all junk is created equal. Zero-Sum World sez: Rent Out Of Time instead.

Elsewhere

2008-08-19T12:25:00.002-04:00

An evocative piece from Luc Sante;

sick brilliance courtesy of Muzzle Flash;

and the world's greatest music festival (buy tickets now for 2009.)

Double Feature

2008-08-11T10:07:00.000-04:00

Played is a British underworld revenge thriller that stars writer/producer Mick Rossi, who looks like a sullen, sleep-deprived Dudley Moore. For long stretches, the movie, which is mostly improvised, looks like it was shot on cell-phone video. Sounds terrible, right? But the movie has narrative drive to burn, and inventive editing that is never merely distracting; any number of real actors (Gabriel Byrne, Val Kilmer, Patrick Bergin, Anthony LaPaglia, Bruno Kirby) popping up to slap our protagonist around; the lovely Patsy Kensit and the always-mysterious Joanne Whalley; a genuine tough guy for a villain (Vinnie Jones); a fine score, and a great sense of story. (I only know that the movie was largely improvised because I watched the extras on the DVD.) If you’re interested in making a movie with no money, this is how you do it; if you’re merely interested in seeing a good crime story, you could do far, far worse.

I’ve started but never finished a couple of Dennis Lehane’s PI novels, but after watching Gone Baby Gone I’ll give them another try. As with Played, narrative drive is the key here: It keeps the material – a missing-child case – from becoming manipulative or maudlin. The performances are all terrific, and the ending tough, with the wrong thing done for the right reasons and the right thing done for (perhaps) the wrong reasons. Couples everywhere, no doubt, start bitter arguments (of substance) as the credits roll.

First Lines

2008-08-05T12:04:00.002-04:00

Favorite first lines by decade (my decades):

‘70s: “Call me Jonah.” Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle – Brevity really is the soul of wit. And important to a teenager.

‘80s: “A screaming comes across the sky.” Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow – I can’t recall why I ever admired this sentence. Wait, I do: It was the drugs I took.

‘90s: “Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing.” Martin Amis, The Information – The Clinton Administration let me feel free to prize melancholy above all else.

‘00s: “Keller flew United to Portland.” Lawrence Block, Hit Man – With so many contemporary writers – apparently not trusting their readers’ attention spans – stocking their opening sentences with pulled triggers and decapitated heads, it’s more than a relief to come across this: Five words that say, “No, really, just keep reading, I trust you, enjoy the story, I know you’ll like it. I’ll attend to the sentences.”

Friday's Forgotten Book: Meeting Evil

2008-07-31T14:55:00.003-04:00

I’m the only fan of Thomas Berger’s Meeting Evil (from 1992) that I know of. Everyone who has read the book on my recommendation has reported disliking it. I sympathize. The book is an uneasy marriage of the thriller, serial killer division (think Charlie Starkweather, not John Wayne Gacy) and classic farce (hero attempting to continue to play by the rules of polite society in the face of utter chaos). If you come for the thriller, the hero’s dilemmas will probably seem like unconscionable dithering; if you come for the farce, the villain’s mad cruelty may be too much to take. I remember loving every word of it.

Scenes From A Re-Education

2008-07-31T09:42:00.001-04:00

Fourteen years ago, while reading The Adventures of Augie March in the break room of the bookstore where I worked, I was brought up short when Saul Bellow used a word I didn’t know – lepidopterous – to describe a chair.

What’s lepidopterous mean? I said.

A co-worker eating lunch looked up from the sports page and said: Butterfly-like.

Thanks, I said, and re-read the passage.

And thought:

Ah, I see it. What a brilliant image. What a wordsmith.

And then thought:

Wait a minute…

So…it’s a wing chair?

Bought | Read | Reading

2008-07-28T15:51:00.001-04:00

Bought:

LaBrava, Elmore Leonard
Up In Honey’s Room, Elmore Leonard
Bandits, Elmore Leonard
No House Limit, Steve Fisher
Small Crimes, Dave Zeltserman
Baby Moll, John Farris

Read:

(Five Elmore Leonard novels)
Stick
LaBrava
Valdez Is Coming
52 Pickup
Riding The Rap

Reading:

Small Crimes, Dave Zeltserman

Friday's Forgotten Book: Quick Change

2008-07-25T15:31:00.002-04:00

Newspaperman Jay Cronley wrote a handful of funny novels that were made it into fitfully-amusing movies. Quick Change is the best of the lot in a walk. A brilliant bank heist is followed by a spectacularly-botched getaway. Everyone’s nastier than in the Bill Murray film, and they all have ulterior motives the movie barely hints at, especially the cab driver. The plot begs comparison to Donald Westlake’s Dortmunder books, but I think of Cronley as more the poor man’s Charles Portis.

Double Feature

2008-07-24T15:47:00.002-04:00

(Back from vacation)

Early in The Dark Knight, The Joker and his henchmen crash a party in Bruce Wayne’s penthouse, terrorize his guests – Gotham City’s elite. When Batman intervenes, The Joker throws our hero’s girlfriend out the window. Batman dives after her, breaks both their falls with his cape or something: They crash onto the roof of a cab but are apparently unharmed, and his girlfriend says her “I’m-too-old-for-this-shit” line, and………scene.
What’s happening back in the penthouse? What becomes of the rest of the partygoers? (Joker has been killing most everyone he meets.) If the villain and his cohorts simply flee the party at this point…how? Nothing is shown or even mentioned. Somehow, it’s just not important. Reviews are lauding the film’s narrative strengths.

Lack of interest in consequences firmly established, the filmmakers proceed(quickly) to make the battle for Gotham City resemble the War On Terror, but never decide whether they are for or against winning at any cost. In Wanted, the filmmakers set their sights lower – it’s the old high-school-freshman late-night-debate: “If you could go back in time and kill Hitler, would you do it?” – and they still muff the answer.

Double Feature

2008-06-30T16:07:00.005-04:00

1) The new film The Strangers must be a remake of the Romanian film Them, which I saw last night. I haven’t seen The Strangers, but it could not improve on the original. One of the most heartening developments at the movies in the last couple years has been a small surge of short, no-frills suspense films that are all suspense. Films like Vacancy and 13 Tzameti establish character, setting and situation handily, and then drop you right in the protagonist’s shoes for an hour of real-time menace. A film like P2…tries but fails to do the same. Them falls into the former camp, and gets extra points for its ending, not easily forgotten.

2) What I tend to forget, on some level, is how crappy movies starring Will Smith or auteured by M. Night Shyamalan invariably are. Why is that?

It was easy to resist Will Smith for years, when his movies were made for children (Men In Black) or for no one (Wild Wild West), but recently he defiled a couple of classic genre novels in a way that made for good-looking trailers. The kind of trailers that make you go to a movie. His new film Hancock has the best-looking Will Smith trailers yet. Bastard.

My weakness for Shyamalan is easier to explain: Like the DePalma of my teenaged years, the man knows where to put the camera. He always manages to put together at least one or two sequences of eerie beauty before the wheels fall off.

Both these guys bring out the degenerate gambler in me. Odds are against Hancock or The Happening being any good, but odds are even worse that I’ll miss either one.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Up in the Air

2008-06-26T12:30:00.003-04:00

Detroit's own Patti Abbott recently started Friday's Forgotten Book, a boon to readers -- and content-stumped bloggers -- everywhere.

Thanks, Patti.

I thought Up in the Air by Walter Kirn would make a good Forgotten Book. I read the hardcover after reading the NYT review and before the book, still new, disappeared from the front table of bookstores on 9/11 (or days afterward), due to this jacket art:

A quick Internet search for the above image, however, yields the news that the book is being adapted into a film by Jason Reitman, director of the recent Juno and, previously, of a (middling, I thought) adaptation of Christopher Buckley’s Thank You For Smoking.

Anyway, there’s still time for a crack at the book, before the story hits the big screen.

Here is what I remember: our narrator, employed by some mega-corp, circles the globe, firing people for a living. He is, by his own testimony, both contented participant in and delighted observer of this seemingly-numbing hamster-wheel of airport lounges, hotel rooms, USA Today and glass office towers. (His discursions on the beauty of different facets of this world are like a comedic antidote to Don DeLillo.)

This façade begins to show some cracks, though. Why is our man so distant with his family? Why is he interviewing with another firm? And where are his air miles disappearing to?

Kirn makes a lot of comedy out of the character’s insistence that homogenization creates kinship – and makes the guy such good-natured company that you might catch yourself nodding along, right up until Kirn pulls the rug out.

Currently Available in paperback, with this cover:

Detroit Noir: The Anniversary Tour

2008-06-25T15:46:00.002-04:00

If you're the sort that likes to plan things out welllll in advance, mark your calendars now:

Detroit Noir event
Wed., October 22, 2008 7 pm
Monroe County Library - Bedford Branch
8575 Jackman Rd.
Temperance, MI
*Featuring editors E.J. Olsen and John C. Hocking, with other contributors TBD.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Island

2008-06-20T13:20:00.002-04:00

As with last Friday’s Forgotten Book, I read Thomas Perry’s Island twenty years ago, don’t currently own a copy, and apologize for any errors in fact.

Husband-and-wife con artists, on the lam from Miami mobsters after the brush-off phase of a successful long con goes awry, run aground on an unmapped sandbar somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle.

A few chapters later, after spreading around some of the ill-gotten green, they’ve established their own country.

Before long, their man-made island nation has been turned into a well-appointed paradise, and some of the world’s older nations begin to take notice -- and the real trouble begins…

Island (1987) is long out-of-print, and seems to have redheaded-stepchild status among Thomas Perry’s books (there’s no mention of it on the author’s website); his books since have been leaner -- paragons of the means-business thriller -- but I also enjoyed his earlier, shaggier novels, and especially this forgotten one, immensely.

I think it’d make a good summer reading material suggestion for the reading-averse, too. Fans of the television series Lost, or of the Sims, might take to the story.

Hell, there’s a little something for everyone: a long-con caper, angry mobsters, angrier banana-republic strongmen, the CIA, mercenaries good and bad, and the screwball-comedy chemistry of the couple/protagonists. And it all ends up somewhere unexpected…well, I never expected the ending, which takes “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel” and twists it into a balloon animal.

Double Feature

2008-06-19T11:39:00.003-04:00

First Snow is a really good little movie –- the world’s first lazy-valve thriller. Like The Aura, it’s a quiet film that takes its time setting the mood and giving us a good feel for the characters, their ordinary life and milieu; when the tension begins to ratchet up, you can really feel it. With Guy Pearce (above), William Fichtner, J.K. Simmons (all terrific); Piper Perabo (lovely); and Jackie Burroughs (heartbreaking).

I cannot express how relieved I was to learn that the upcoming Nicolas Cage/Wim Wenders project The Bad Lieutenant is not a remake of the 1992 Harvey Keitel/Abel Ferrara film. I saw Bad Lieutenant in 1992, and I watched it a second time last year, and I look forward (with dread) to watching it again in another fifteen years -- the experience unmarred by memories of some diluted remake. A thing of ugly beauty is a joy forever.

Read | Abandoned | Re-Read

2008-06-18T16:16:00.001-04:00

Read:

Interface, Joe Gores
The Procane Chronicle, Oliver Bleeck

Abandoned:

The Finder, Colin Harrison

Re-Read:

Twisted City, Jason Starr

Reading:

Savage Night, Allan Guthrie

Friday's Forgotten Book: Freaks' Amour

2008-06-13T07:59:00.002-04:00

Detroit's own Patti Abbott recently started Friday's Forgotten Book, a boon to readers -- and content-stumped bloggers -- everywhere.

Thanks, Patti.

Tom de Haven's Freaks' Amour: Twenty-some years ago, someone loaned me their copy, I read it in two sittings, then looked for a copy in every used bookstore I set foot in, for many years, never finding one.

Then I went to work in a bookstore, and anyone I described the novel to said, angrily: "Oh, that sounds just like Geek Love," which was inevitably their favorite book of all time. (Apart from the title, they sound nothing alike.)

Consequently I stopped talking or thinking about Freaks' Amour, even neglecting to look for it when ABE arrived on the scene.

Here is what I remember: The book is a first novel, published in 1979. The male narrator has a twin brother; they were conceived on their parents' wedding night, during a nuclear incident in New Jersey. The boys, and eventually most of their generation, have been born deformed due to the fallout.

[1979 was, of course, the year of the Three Mile Island incident. Did that hurt the book's chances for finding readers? (It didn't hurt the box office of The China Syndrome.)]

The freaks and the normals live in a segregated society. The narrator yearns to be Normal; his twin brother is a leader of an underground Freak movement pushing for a revolution. Intrigue ensues.

And then there's the goldfish eggs.

And the live sex shows.

Tom de Haven went on to write the 'Derby Dugan' books, among others. I've picked up his stuff, but nothing has ever really grabbed me the way Freaks' Amour did. He spoke a bit about the genesis of the book in an online interview of recent vintage:

After getting my master’s degree in 1973, I went to work in New York City as an editor for a number of men’s magazines (Sir!, Mr. and Man to Man) owned by Adrien Lopez, father of naturalist/novelist Barry Lopez. This was that deliciously cockeyed era when “porn” briefly had a lot of cachet (the era of Deep Throat, Devil in Miss Jones, etc.) and I was assigned to write articles about “the industry.” I met most of the directors and “stars” of X-rated films and from that experience (weirdly enough) sprang my first novel, Freaks’ Amour, a fantasy about a group of mutants living in Jersey City, two of whom make their living by performing live sex shows for “normal” people.

That book, published in 1979, enjoyed a fairly long life as a “cult novel,” to the extent that as late as the early 1990s it was regularly optioned for a film. (The last time it was, it was optioned by Alex Proyas, director of The Crow, Dark City and I, Robot, and I spent two years working with him on a screenplay, which of course was never produced.)

There are copies available on ABE, if your local library doesn't have one, and if you are curious. I'm going to look for a copy right now, to see if it's as endlessly inventive as I remember it to be, and you should find out for yourself.

Unless you're one of those Geek-Love-won't-listen-to-reason types...

Parker Reprints

2008-06-12T08:38:00.006-04:00

The University of Chicago Press recently announced plans to reprint Richard Stark's (Donald Westlake's) Parker series.

The first three novels are in their Fall Catalog; there's no cover art at the publisher website, but here are the covers according to Amazon.

Friday's Forgotten Book: The Art of Losing

2008-06-06T01:00:00.002-04:00

Keith Dixon’s The Art of Losing was published just a year ago, but since I can easily foresee a reader making it their pick for Patti Abbott’s Forgotten Books project sometime in, say, 2021, I thought I’d strike first -- while the book is still readily available.

I’m still bewildered that the book never received any mention in any of the places I look for news of books in the mystery/crime genre. It’s slim, swift, criminally-minded, and as dark as they come.

Degenerate gamblers hatch a harebrained scheme to take some money from some bad, bad men; the plan fails, but too late to do anyone any good, and one of the plotters turns out to be a weak sister.

Sounds familiar, but it's not.

The characters buy into the scheme with the same confidence they would have betting their rent--it probably won't work, but it might. The bookmaker's disgust for their clientele has never been so well captured. And that weak sister? I can't think of another character in a noir who cracks the way this guy cracks--leading to the finale, which left me with the deep Catholic jitters.

I've read a lot of books in the year since I read this, but none better.

Parade Tomorrow

2008-06-05T11:02:00.006-04:00

(Detroit Free Press photo)

Zero-Sum World generally steers clear of discussion of Detroit -- taking a page from our mayor’s playbook, we concentrate on the business at hand, keep mum on the scandal -- but when a piece of good news presents itself, it’s hard to resist giving notice.

Coming on the heels of the Pistons’ shameful post-season (sic) effort -- not to mention the grisly end to the grisly American Axle strike -- the Red Wings’ Stanley Cup victory is all the more welcome.

Zero-Sum World sez: Way to go.

(Decorum does not permit discussion of my beloved Tigers at this time.)

Started, Finished

2008-06-03T11:44:00.002-04:00

Started…
Bleeders, Bill Pronzini
Against Happiness, Eric G. Wilson
The Drop Edge of Yonder, Rudolph Wurlitzer

Finished
Dirty Money, Richard Stark
Bag Men, Mark Costello
Fidelity, Thomas Perry
Your Movie Sucks, Roger Ebert
Somebody Owes Me Money, Donald Westlake

Reading
Interface, Joe Gores

On Deck
The Murderer Vine, Shepard Rifkin
Severance Package, Duane Swierczynski

Friday's Forgotten Book: Lightning On The Sun

2008-05-30T00:22:00.001-04:00

Detroit's own Patti Abbott recently started Friday's Forgotten Book, a boon to readers -- and content-stumped bloggers -- everywhere.

Thanks, Patti.

The aptly-titled, first-and-last novel Lightning On The Sun was published less than ten years ago, got some attention due more to author Robert Bingham’s fatal heroin overdose months earlier than to the novel’s considerable merit, and faded from view. I think it a fine, overlooked novel.

Bingham drew on his literary idols Graham Greene and Robert Stone, and on his time as a journalist in Cambodia (and, yes, as a heroin user), for this tale of nihilistic young Americans making an ill-conceived bid to cut themselves in on the drug trade.

The story is a bit loose to really work as a thriller, but it is thrilling. The live-wire narrative voice and the sense of doom are what stay with you: it’s like listening to that friend who’s sharper than you’ll ever be but will never profit from it, because all that his intellect can do is find the bitter joke, and the corruption, in everything.

Double Feature

2008-05-28T16:20:00.001-04:00

Eastern Promises is a much better movie than A History of Violence, but they both have the same major flaw: Cronenberg builds up a lot of tension and mystery surrounding the identity of the character played by Viggo Mortensen and then, perversely, lets it all leak away in a single, pedestrian scene.

“Jiu Jitsu?” someone asks Chiwetal Ejiofor early in David Mamet’s Redbelt. “Isn’t that where you use a guy’s strength against him?” Not really, our hero replies…but that’s exactly what happens to him for the next ninety minutes. The great Ricky Jay was MIA in Spartan; he’s back here, with a vengeance.

The Return of Jane Whitefield

2008-05-14T15:20:00.003-04:00

Speaking of Thomas Perry: Earlier today, while reading his new novel, Fidelity, I took a moment to check out his website and found the notice below, posted this very day:

I also have a second announcement to make. After her long vacation, Jane Whitefield will be making a return in a new book called Runner, scheduled for January, 2009. I'm talking about this here and now because the visitors to this web site are partly responsible. In the years since I decided to give Jane Whitefield a rest, about half of the email I've received from readers has included the question, "Will there ever be another Jane Whitefield book?"

I always responded that I did intend to write another one at some point, but didn't know when. I had intentionally left Jane alive and well in Amherst, New York, living with her surgeon husband as Mrs. Jane McKinnon. She's been nearly indistinguishable from many of the women around her. She's perhaps a bit more watchful than some of her neighbors, and the survival kit she keeps in case of disasters isn't just bottled water and batteries, but those differences have been subtle and unnoticed. But trouble never leaves anyone alone forever, and Jane's time of rest is up. During Jane's absence, a whole new industry with new methods and technology has grown up to prevent people from moving around the country under false identities. Now, in spite of the fact that she's acutely aware of the danger, there's no way Jane can avoid coming back to transform one more victim into a runner.

I've always been aware that the loyal readers who have given me a writing career deserved to have their wishes considered. But I was also aware that I owed it to them to wait until I had a story that was significant enough to make it worth a reader's time. I think Runner is the story I was waiting for.

Read, Reading, On Deck

2008-05-06T12:42:00.002-04:00

Read:

Lawless: A Criminal Edition, Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips

Kill All Your Darlings, Luc Sante
(Skip the longish essay on the bygone era of America as a smoking culture if you’re trying to quit [smoking], but do read the piece on the Mekons whether the name means anything to you or not.)

Matala, Craig Holden

Delusion, Peter Abrahams
(Abrahams’ thrillers are the books Harlan Coben thinks he writes. If Hitchcock were still alive, he’d be bringing Abrahams to the screen.)

Zero Cool, John Lange

Reading:

Yellow-Dog Contract, Ross Thomas

On Deck:

Dirty Money, Richard Stark

A Special Providence, Richard Yates

Fidelity, Thomas Perry

The appearance of a new Thomas Perry novel signals that this blog is nearly one year old.

Is this when the money starts pouring in?

Edgars

2008-05-02T12:59:00.005-04:00

Detroit Noir contributor Megan Abbott has won the Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original for her novel Queenpin, and deservedly so.

Her story “Our Eyes Couldn’t Stop Opening” directly follows my story in Detroit Noir and makes me look silly.

Also: Susan Straight won the Edgar for Best Short Story for "The Golden Gopher" in Akashic Books' Los Angeles Noir.

Wit In Action

2008-04-18T16:07:00.001-04:00

I did see The Bank Job – terrific movie; 111 minutes of story, story, story – and a few nights earlier (as it happened) I saw Crank, another film starring Jason Statham. In the former, he folds seamlessly into an ensemble of pretty decent actors; in the latter, he defies all of God’s laws without ever losing the facial expression of a man out for the morning paper. But the man knows what he’s doing: watch Crank and then suffer through as much as you can handle of Shoot ‘Em Up, two movies after exactly the same heart, and then tell me that wit doesn’t matter in action.

Here’s a prose example: Ross Thomas, in Missionary Stew, tackles a scene we all know by heart, saw nightly on television in the 1970s:

Replogle never finished the secondhand story because the big blue Dodge pickup honked and pulled up on the left. Haere looked over. There were two persons in the pickup. Both wore ski masks. The pickup and the station wagon had reached a sharp curve in the deep canyon. On the station wagon’s right, some fifty or sixty feet below, was a frozen creek.
The pickup swerved, and its right front fender slammed into the station wagon, which went into a skid on a patch of ice. Haere later thought they must have been counting on that – the ice. Replogle did everything he was supposed to do. He kept his foot off the brake. He steered into the skid. He swore.
The station wagon plunged over the side. On either the first or second roll the right-hand door popped open and Draper Haere popped out. He landed in a snowbank. The station wagon somersaulted two more times, end over end, and smashed against some immense boulders at the creek’s edge. Two seconds later the gas tank exploded.
Haere got up and made himself stumble through the snow down to the burning car. He tried to open its front left door, but it was either jammed or locked. Haere burned his hands trying to get the door open. He finally could stand neither the heat nor the pain, so he moved backward, tripped over something, and sat back down in a snowbank. He jammed his scorched hands down deep into the snow and sat there watching Jack Replogle burn to death if, indeed, he wasn’t already dead. In either event, there was nothing Draper Haere could do about it.

I love the thin joke of “everything he was supposed to do…He swore” and the intrusive reality of “made himself stumble…to the burning car” and the rueful “In either event”.

It’s unfair to stand most writers next to Thomas, and especially the sophomore effort of a writer whose first book was pretty damn good, but here’s Marcus Sakey, in At The City’s Edge, with another familiar scene: a couple of heavies are trying to take our man for a ride:

Then, for the first time, Soul Patch made a mistake. He stood still.
It was as much of a window as Jason could hope for. Continuing his forward motion, he stepped into Soul Patch like they were dancing, right hand closing on the guy’s wrist to lock the gun in place. But instead of grappling for the weapon, he spun, planting his back against the man’s chest, the gun arm now in front of both of them. The wrestler startled awake with a snort. Soul Patch gave a surprised yelp, struggled to free his hand. Jason continued his spin, remembering this fucker talking about Michael, threatening his brother. He yanked, and as he felt the man come off balance, he kept turning, transforming the fall into a throw that hurled the gangbanger against the half-closed car door. It flew open and slammed into the wrestler, the frame catching him square in the face with a meaty thump. The double impact knocked the wind out of Soul Patch, and the gun clattered from his hand.
The moment it did, Jason shoved away. Two awkward steps and he had his balance. His heart screamed to run, but his head was cool. They were enemy combatants. He didn’t want to leave them armed. The grip of the pistol was warm and slightly sweaty as he snatched it from the concrete.
Then he took off in a sprint, knowing that he hadn’t incapacitated either man. His legs pumped clean and strong. He crossed the open asphalt to the next row, then planted his left foot and lunged behind a car. A window exploded with a sharp crack. All the old energy came back. He jerked to the side again and broke from the row, then poured it on in a straightaway to the boundary of the lot. Leapt for the concrete abutment, planted one foot, and sprang off the second-story parking deck.
In the endless instant he floated through the air, Jason Palmer realized he was smiling.

Really? Well, we do live in a new century. (Each of these passages is the first blast of violence in the book. Thomas’s comes on page 44 or so, Sakey’s on page 6 or 7.) But with the author and the author’s sentences and the author’s hero all so jacked up, I feel like they’re getting excited for me, and there’s nothing left for me to do. I’ll just be sitting over here, with my hands in the snowbank.