As I mentioned yesterday, it was another month where I ended up doing a lot of reading, so I broke the book log for the month into two parts. As I not-so-subtly hinted at in the title, it was a noir-focused month, with a lot of heavy hitters from the genre getting represented.
It won’t take any noir fan long to see that Joe Lansdale’s More Better Deals is Lansdale’s homage to James M. Cain; within a few pages of our used car salesman Ed Edwards meeting femme fatale Nancy Craig and learning about her abusive husband, you know things are going to escalate into violence and murder – the question is simply how bad it’s going to be. And the answer, it turns out, is “very”; yes, there are bodies (plural) here, but more than that, Lansdale embraces the messiness and unpredictability of violence, bringing something of the Coens (Blood Simple & Fargo, especially) to every act of killing and intimidation. All of which may make More Better Deals sound derivative, but rest assured, for all of its influences, the book is pure Lansdale, through and through, from its crass but lived-in dialogue, its dark sense of humor, its willingness to push boundaries and refuse to be hemmed in by expectations, and its desire to create a plot that’s hard to predict and yet completely gripping. It also means that the book revolves around race in a way that neither Cain nor the Coens are interested in – Edwards is a light-skinned man born of a mixed-race relationship, and the fact that he’s “passing” in the 1960s isn’t just colorful subtext here; it’s a large part of the plotting and who Ed is as a person, as is his service in Korea. The result is pretty much classic Lansdale in every way, scratching the same itches as any of those classic hard-boiled noir novels but with its own off-kilter, utterly original sensibility, brutal (and sometimes darkly comic) violence, immersive narration, and a plot that constantly surprised me even as it delivered every beat you need for a noir novel. If you’re a hard-boiled noir fan, it’s a no-brainer. Rating: **** ½
I realized about halfway through Desert Star that I’ve been reading books about Harry Bosch for more than 25 years at this point, and it’s to Michael Connelly’s credit that I still enjoy the newest ones as much as ever, and that somehow, he’s largely avoided falling into the kind of ruts that you would think would be an issue with that. No small part of that boils down to the way that Connelly has let Bosch age and the world evolve, to the point that, when Desert Star begins, Harry has been enlisted to help with a cold cases unit run by Renée Ballard, Bosch’s friend (and sort of protege, though neither might admit that). In theory, Desert Star is the story of Bosch’s efforts to get justice for a murdered family whose case stalled out, but that’s almost a bait and switch, as the politically necessary case of discovering the murderer of a councilman’s young sister comes to take up the majority of the book. This is now the fourth book where Bosch and Ballard have been allowed to co-star, so to speak, and Connelly has found the necessary rhythms pretty nicely, letting the two trade beats back and forth, allowing Bosch to still be the prickly loner that he always has been while finding in Ballard someone who marries Bosch’s desire to find justice with someone who also knows how to live within the system. That doesn’t keep Bosch from still being Connelly’s real love here, and that’s okay; while the plot of the book makes it clear that Connelly knows that Bosch’s time needs to come to a close soon, it’s hard to begrudge him spending time with a character who we’ve known for this long (more than a quarter century!). If all of this sounds like I’m talking a bit more about the big structure of the book than the plotting, don’t let that sound like I’m dodging the subject; suffice to say, Desert Star is typically interesting and well-paced Connelly plotting, with a couple of great reveals and some nice beats that allow the characters to breathe and the world to still spin outside them. (There’s a brief moment with Bosch in a bar towards the end of the book that’s about as good of a chapter as Connelly ever wrote, all the more because of how simple it is.) Connelly still sometimes has a tendency to go for the big theatrical showdown and climax, but heck, that’s part of what makes the books fun. I haven’t read a bad Connelly in many years, and Desert Star keeps that streak alive, giving you an enjoyable mystery and, more importantly, a chance to hang out in Connelly’s rich, observed world. Rating: ****
For the longest time, Elmore Leonard was one of the biggest gaps in my reading; despite the fact that I loved so many movies and shows based off of his work, I really hadn’t read more than a book or two of his since high school. Gradually, though, I’ve been working my way through some of his work, and Fire in the Hole (originally titled When the Women Come Out to Dance) is my first exposure to his short stories – and it’s in reading those that I’ve started to see just what all Leonard is capable of. Oh, I’ve seen his knack for dialogue and rich characterization, and the way he can spin a story out of idiocy and simple crime, but it’s also remarkable the economy he can bring to a tale and just how efficiently he can give you memorable characters, create a solid arc, fill it all with great writing, and end it all at just the right moment. The draw for a lot of people will be the (new) title tale, which finds US Marshal Raylan Givens returning to Kentucky to deal with Boyd Crowder, a man who Raylan once dug coal with. It is, of course, the story that became the pilot episode of Justified, but it’s a treat to see how much of both characters was already here on the page, coming to life as Leonard sketched them in perfectly. (Admittedly, you will not read either man’s dialogue in any voice other than Olyphant and Goggins, though.) It’s a great story, but really, there are so many good ones here: “Sparks,” in which an insurance investigator finds himself dealing with a nasty little femme fatale; “When the Women Come Out to Dance,” with its wife who hires a new housekeeper with a pretty blunt secondary motivation; “Tenkiller,” the story of a Hollywood stuntman who comes home to find his property commandeered by some less than reputable characters; and the unexpectedly sweet “Hanging Out at the Buena Vista,” which is little more – and little less – than the beginning of a late in life relationship. What all of them have in common is Leonard’s sharp ear but also his sense of human beings and their odd, predictably unpredictable natures, whether it’s how hitting someone can get you a job or why you might hate to shoot a virulently racist murderer because he’s what you might have been. It’s the strongest sense I’ve gotten of what makes Leonard so beloved, and it’s made me all the more excited to see what else he has in store. Rating: *****
One of my favorite small pleasures about reading primarily ebooks is that, without a book jacket or back cover to look at, I often forget what a book is about – or don’t even know – when I go to pick it up, which allows for an experience that’s a lot more fresh and unshaped by expectations. Such was the case with Laura Lippman’s Dream Girl, the story of a writer who ends up confined to a bed in his house and starts finding himself besieged by a character from one of his own novels. Lippman is playing a lot of games here, with a little Diabolique, a little Rear Window, a little Misery, and a lot of metafiction about authors and their influences, but the result never feels derivative and never feels predictable – and that’s especially true in the final act, when things start taking some very unexpected turns that start turning the book’s subtext into rich text. Lippman says in the afterword that Dream Girl is her first horror novel, and I can see where she’s coming from; there is some excellent psychological tension in how she keeps making Gerry feel like he can’t trust his own senses and memories, and some of the images here are wholly wild ones. More than any of that, though, it’s a mystery/thriller written by someone who loves mysteries, loves thrillers, and also loves the art of writing, and the result is a richly literate genre novel that’s willing to wrestle with heady ideas while never turning up its nose at the genre trappings it so nicely delivers on. Add to that a compelling narrator who feels just slightly out of step with the modern world in generally, but not completely sympathetic ways, and you have a great read on pretty much every level. Rating: **** ½
Due to the vagaries of rights and whatnot, I had to jump ahead a few books in Chester Himes’s Harlem Detective series to book seven, Cotton Comes to Harlem. So I can’t say for sure whether Cotton represents a change for the series or the natural evolution; what I can tell you is that it’s by fat my favorite of the series so far, marrying Himes’s usual anarchic and sprawling plotting and dark humor with an undercurrent of anger, cynicism, and righteous fury that really help the book to sing. It doesn’t hurt things that, more than any other book in the series, this is a Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones story; while there’s the usual cast of colorful supporting characters, including a racist white colonel, a con man turned Back-to-Africa movement leader, a sexpot femme fatale, a junkman, and more, this feels like Coffin and Grave Digger’s show, even if the plot finds them often one step behind the action. (And that’s fair, because the case here – involving the theft of money which was itself conned from people, and the bizarre but seemingly related hunt for a bale of cotton – is a wild one.) And with the two detectives come a compelling set of perspectives, one filled with equal parts love and frustration for their community, awareness of their own power and acknowledgment of the racist attitudes of the men around them, affection for the colorful characters and fury for the victimizers, and overriding all of that, a desire to take care of those who cannot take care of themselves. Cotton is the most unflinching of any of the books so far, with journeys into shooting dens and strip clubs falling alongside church services and police interrogation rooms, but it all feels vibrant and alive and wholly immersive in a way that sucks you into the book and brings 1960s Harlem to vivid life. I’ve enjoyed all of these, but Cotton is by far my favorite of any of them; if you’ve never read any of Himes before, you can start here and get a stone cold classic off the bat. Rating: *****
I’ve read a couple of books by J.A. Konrath over the years, and always found them fun in a very B-movie sort of way; Konrath knows how to deliver the goods in a pulpy horror style (I’m thinking especially here of his work in the gleefully sick Draculas), and if his stories are a little familiar or more about the thrills than plausibility, hey, it’s all in fun. And honestly, that’s mostly how I felt about Rusty Nail, which is the third book in Konrath’s Jacqueline “Jack” Daniels series, which (at this point, anyway), is about a police detective who starts finding clues that someone is trying to follow in the footsteps of a serial killer she just dealt with. Rusty Nail delivers everything you want from a pulpy serial killer thriller – master plans that the cops unravel, nightmarish methodology, haunting imagery that lets the killer feel truly demented (here, motivated by a religious fervor), and a protagonist whose life is reeling as she has to keep looking into the abyss. The plotting here is functional enough; there’s a big twist that I cottoned onto fairly early (ah, grammar pedantry), and waiting for that shoe to drop took a little bit of wind out of the sails of the book. But even with that issue, I had fun with Rusty Nail, and that’s mainly to a good cast of characters who anchor the book in stakes that feel like they matter. I haven’t read the earlier books in the series, but even here I rapidly got attached to Jack and her supporting crew, from her snarky partner to a private eye that no one likes but also finds everyone in his corner. Rusty Nail ultimately is one of those James Patterson-ish “serial killer beach reads,’ for lack of a better term, although one that has some nasty teeth and is willing to give you some brutal violence; nevertheless, it’s a fun read and an enjoyable time, even if you won’t really find a lot of its empty calories sticking in your head after you’re done. Rating: ****
I haven’t kept up with Laird Barron’s Isaiah Coleridge series since reading Blood Standard about five years back, but based on the novella The Wind Began to Howl, I have been neglecting these books to my own detriment. While Blood Standard, which introduced half-Maori former mob enforcer Coleridge as he attempted to find a new path in life, stayed within the boundaries of hard-boiled crime, it’s evident that the series has come to embrace Barron’s penchant for unsettling and nightmarish horror, all anchored by his beautiful, careful prose. The Wind Began to Howl is – in theory, at least – about Coleridge’s search for a pair of idiosyncratic, cult favorite musicians, and how that path drives him into increasingly unreal and paranoid territory, filled with conspiracies, ex-pat government agents, drug abuse aplenty, and an underlying sense that all is not normal in the world. The result is wonderfully, beautifully hard to classify; it’s darkly funny and deeply unsettling, action-packed but character-driven, a typical “missing person” tale but paranoid delusional conspiracy saga – and it’s all filtered through Coleridge’s cynical, jaded (but less skeptical than he once was) view, which in turn is crafted by Barron’s usual beautiful, literate prose that avoids pretension but never feels less than exquisitely crafted. It’s a little bit backwoods horror, a little bit trippy mindmelt, a little bit Philip Marlowe, and just a touch of cosmic horror – and somehow, it’s more than the sum of those parts. The only minor knock I have is that I wanted more, but if that’s my complaint, that’s a small one to have. Rating: **** ½
I’m really glad that Jim Thompson’s The Nothing Man wasn’t my starting place for Thompson’s work, because in so many ways, what I love about this book is the way it subverts so many of the man’s tropes and usual methods, creating a story with a pitch-black comedic tone that’s still an undeniable piece of noir fiction. Eschewing his usual corrupt and criminal narrators, The Nothing Man centers on newspaper man Clint Brown, who maintains a pretty solid BAC level probably as a compensation for the loss of his male member during the war. Brown is hyperverbal and looks down on pretty much everyone around him, using them all as his punching bags, but it’s clear that there’s way more trauma and emotional scar tissue (to say nothing of the physical ones) that he doesn’t want to let on. And so, when Brown’s ex-wife comes back into the picture, things start to escalate, and pretty soon, the bodies start piling up. But whereas a typical Thompson finds our narrator able to justify each new crime, each new step into hell, Brown is a wholly unusual character, one who blacks out during key events, sometimes forgets his own actions to the point of denial, can’t reckon with his own motivations, and ultimately just can’t feel like he’s the master of his own life – a nice metaphor, obviously, for the physical injuries he’s suffered. It all comes together in a bitterly cynical and ironic ending that’s both abrupt but works for the themes of the story, but I’d be lying if I said that this was the most satisfying of all the Thompsons out there – it’s a wild and interesting variation on his work, and Brown is a wholly compelling and different character in his bibliography, but I have to concede that I love his nastier work a little more than I loved this one. That being said, I have yet to read a bad Thompson book, and that streak certainly isn’t broken here. Rating: ****
Here’s what I can say about Jonathan Lethem’s The Feral Detective: I didn’t dislike it as much as I disliked You Don’t Love Me Yet – and if that sounds like damning with faint praise, it should. I was excited to see Lethem get back to his weird, genre-bending roots, and in a broad description, The Feral Detective sounds like it should be that, as it follows a detective who specializes in missing persons and runaways, and follows that all into a wild, surreal group of hippies and wilderness survivalists living away from civilization and battling for supremacy. That sounds like it should be a fun time, but that doesn’t take into account two things: first, The Feral Detective is set directly after the 2016 election, which is not just flavor for the book but painfully hammered home “sub”text throughout; second, the book is not narrated by the detective, but by a solipsistic, annoying, sheltered young woman from New York whose whining, condescending perspective, and complete inability to understand anything outside of her bubble goes from frustrating to actively grating pretty quickly. I understand that those last two points are, to some degree, by design – this is a book that pretty clearly works as an allegory for the moment when a lot of us realized that some of our assumptions about the world weren’t accurate, and about what happened when we’re forced into confrontation with the world outside of our bubbles. But Lethem’s commitment to an unlikable narrator who refuses to grow and never learns to make even the slightest efforts toward empathy for anyone who’s not her and her New York friends makes the book pretty intolerable for anyone who’s not in that crowd already and is pretty tired of being looked down on by that social strata. I was really struggling to like The Feral Detective by about the halfway point, and as I write this review, I find myself liking it less and less for so many reasons – its condescending attitude, its intolerable narrator, its privilege and bubble that it never seems to want to interrogate, but more than anything, because I miss the Lethem of Gun with Occasional Music, Amnesia Moon, and really everything up through Men and Cartoons), and I dislike the “quirky,” narcissistic, New Yorker-esque writer he seems to have become. Rating: **
Umney's Alley 