Yesterday, I ordered a Black Lizard paperback edition of Dan J. Marlowe's Vengeance Man, as well as a Vintage Black Lizard paperback edition of Charles Willeford Burnt Orange Heresy from Abebooks.com. Hopefully, these books should reach me before the holidays and I will review them once I receive them. I'm curious about Vengeance Man, to see how it stacks up next to Strongarm and I've long been interested in the Willeford book, with its captivating title and its unusual plot about a murderous art collector.
I also visited a used book store yesterday and picked up two Ross MacDonald Lew Archer mysteries, The Doomsters and Marked for Death aka Ivory Grin.
Also on tap for future review will be Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister and Brian Gifford's experimental noir book, Port Tropique.
I'll also be posting more samples of my writing, so keep coming back. There will be lots to see here in the coming weeks.
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Quarry's Ex by Max Allan Collins
First off, this Hard Case Crime title from legendary hard boiled scribe Collins, released in September, is a great book.
Next off, this is a great book.
Did I say this was a great book?
This is far and away the best book in Collin's Hard Case-exclusive series of thrillers about Quarry, the badass and wiseass contract killer. I admit that I haven't read Quarry in the Middle, in spite of its salacious and tantalizing retro-toned cover promising three-way, guy/girl/girl action, but I have read The First Quarry and The Last Quarry and Quarry's Ex is far more entertaining than either of them.
In a previous post where I reviewed Collins' re-build of the unfinished Mickey Spillane book The Comsummata, I mentioned that Collins had an annoying and distracting habit of throwing anachronisms into his books. In Quarry's Ex, that stylistic tic is thankfully absent and the book is all the better for it. The book is set in 1980, with a second chapter which contains a flashback extending from the mid-Sixties through the Seventies that tells you all Quarry is willing to say about his early history. All the period references are dead on and you get a good feeling for time and place in the novel.
And a hell of a fine novel it is. We learn how Quarry ended up in the nasty business of killing people for a living. He was a Vietnam vet who came home to find his wife Joni screwing another man. He kills the interloper, and because he was a vet of an unpopular war, the local DA's office looks the other way and decides not to bother with a trial, speculating that the other man died in an "accident."
Quarry goes into hiding in a crappy apartment somewhere in the bowels of LA, where he is found by The Broker, a contractor with heavy underworld connections who talks him into going into business with him for some "jobs".
Quarry ends up killing The Broker for "betraying" him. He doesn't explain why, in much the same way he doesn't give his or the Broker's real names - much like Dan J. Marlowe's Pete Karma in Strongarm who deals exclusively in pseudonyms. Quarry gets a list of all the people who work for The Broker and goes into business airing them out for a steep price, as a special fee for hire service for the people the Broker's killers have targeted.
At the start of the book, Quarry is in some miserable, sun baked hell hole of a Nevada casino town, keeping an eye on one of the Broker's paid killers, a loser named Jerry who is gathering surveillance information on Stockwell, a bottom drawer B-movie director whose checkered career is on the fadeout and who is shooting a cheap action movie just outside of town. Quarry figures out that Jerry is the passive half, the information gatherer and fact checker side of a two-member hit squad. Who is the active half, the killer who will put the all time fade out and final credits on Stockwell's life?
Quarry needs to find this out and fast. He meets up with Stockwell to offer his services and along the way learns that Stockwell is married to...Joni!
Lots of fun and plot complications ensue, involving Joni of course, and a mob-connected executive producer. There's also a malodorous climax at a movie set diner with more bathroom humor than can be found in all the other Hard Case books combined. All in all, a funny and fun read with lots of action, intrigue and some fine erotic writing involving the beautiful but treacherous Joni.
Check out Quarry's Ex. It's worth it.
Next off, this is a great book.
Did I say this was a great book?
This is far and away the best book in Collin's Hard Case-exclusive series of thrillers about Quarry, the badass and wiseass contract killer. I admit that I haven't read Quarry in the Middle, in spite of its salacious and tantalizing retro-toned cover promising three-way, guy/girl/girl action, but I have read The First Quarry and The Last Quarry and Quarry's Ex is far more entertaining than either of them.
In a previous post where I reviewed Collins' re-build of the unfinished Mickey Spillane book The Comsummata, I mentioned that Collins had an annoying and distracting habit of throwing anachronisms into his books. In Quarry's Ex, that stylistic tic is thankfully absent and the book is all the better for it. The book is set in 1980, with a second chapter which contains a flashback extending from the mid-Sixties through the Seventies that tells you all Quarry is willing to say about his early history. All the period references are dead on and you get a good feeling for time and place in the novel.
And a hell of a fine novel it is. We learn how Quarry ended up in the nasty business of killing people for a living. He was a Vietnam vet who came home to find his wife Joni screwing another man. He kills the interloper, and because he was a vet of an unpopular war, the local DA's office looks the other way and decides not to bother with a trial, speculating that the other man died in an "accident."
Quarry goes into hiding in a crappy apartment somewhere in the bowels of LA, where he is found by The Broker, a contractor with heavy underworld connections who talks him into going into business with him for some "jobs".
Quarry ends up killing The Broker for "betraying" him. He doesn't explain why, in much the same way he doesn't give his or the Broker's real names - much like Dan J. Marlowe's Pete Karma in Strongarm who deals exclusively in pseudonyms. Quarry gets a list of all the people who work for The Broker and goes into business airing them out for a steep price, as a special fee for hire service for the people the Broker's killers have targeted.
At the start of the book, Quarry is in some miserable, sun baked hell hole of a Nevada casino town, keeping an eye on one of the Broker's paid killers, a loser named Jerry who is gathering surveillance information on Stockwell, a bottom drawer B-movie director whose checkered career is on the fadeout and who is shooting a cheap action movie just outside of town. Quarry figures out that Jerry is the passive half, the information gatherer and fact checker side of a two-member hit squad. Who is the active half, the killer who will put the all time fade out and final credits on Stockwell's life?
Quarry needs to find this out and fast. He meets up with Stockwell to offer his services and along the way learns that Stockwell is married to...Joni!
Lots of fun and plot complications ensue, involving Joni of course, and a mob-connected executive producer. There's also a malodorous climax at a movie set diner with more bathroom humor than can be found in all the other Hard Case books combined. All in all, a funny and fun read with lots of action, intrigue and some fine erotic writing involving the beautiful but treacherous Joni.
Check out Quarry's Ex. It's worth it.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Dan J. Marlowe: Strongarm
Dan. J Marlowe was a prolific author of hardboiled and noir fiction throughout the late 1950s until the 1970s. Like Raymond Chandler, he got into the writing game relatively late in life, publishing his first novel at age 45. He wrote tough, hard prose and packed a lot of intense action into his relatively brief novels.
His most famous novels were Strongarm, Vengeance Man and The Name of the Game is Death, all paperback originals written for Fawcett's Gold Medal series in the early Sixties.
I recently read Marlowe's 1963 novel Strongarm in a Black Lizard paperback edition from 1988 and it's pretty powerful stuff. It's also densely packed stuff, a novel about ready to explode with its multiple plot twists and frenetic energy. Yet the book is compelling reading and entertaining, even though in the end all the plot tangles sort themselves out in a denouement just a little too pat for my taste.
Strongarm is the tale of Pete Karma, which isn't really the protagonist's name. This narrator, in a prodigious showcase of unreliability, uses two pseudonyms that are known to the reader and many more that aren't revealed and never does give out his "real name" - a storytelling conceit from Marlowe that sounds great in theory but in reality only adds an extra layer of complexity to an already dangerously overloaded fuse box of a book.
Karma is a hard man, already bitter from harsh war service in Korea and even more bitter from being double crossed by a sleazebag lawyer working for Steve Risko, a heavy weight political fixer and all time classic SOB who hijacked a state politics machine once ran by Karma's father. Risko, through the scuzzy lawyer, sees that Karma takes a fall for a murder he didn't commit.
Karma is thrown into prison, and with the aid of some fellow inmates involved with the syndicate that he meets while inside, breaks out.
He goes into hiding and takes a job as a bartender at a Mob-operated night club in Detroit. Here, he works under the name Pete Karma and falls in lust with the beautiful and curvaceous Lynn, a hostess at the club.
At the outset of the book, Karma finds out that one of Risko's men will be passing through town with a big stash of money and he decides to take some payback for the trouble Risko has caused him. He drives out on the turnpike, tailing the car driven by the money courier. Suddenly, the car collides with another car that has gone out of control. A fiery crash ensues, yet Karma is able to extricate a briefcase from the wreckage, albeit with a severed arm handcuffed to it - a brilliantly macabre touch that at least puts the opening of the novel well into the disturbing gray zone territory only mapped by that most hardboiled of the hardboiled writers: Jim Thompson.
Unfortunately for Karma, there were witnesses to the crash and when a fuzzy yet all too easily identifiable picture of him turns up in the papers, he has to take the briefcase full of money and run. Lynn, who only knows the tiniest fragment of Karma's complicated history, insists on joining him. In a strange and redundant plot twist, Karma is also later joined by Gussie, Lynn's cousin. But in the strangest and most redundant of all plot twists in this novel of filigreed and serpentine convolutions and involutions, Karma learns the briefcase also contains oilskin envelopes containing "plans" for some kind of atomic device. It turns out the briefcase wasn't from Risko's man at all, but was from the car that had gone out of control and collided with him. The car had been driven by a Soviet agent who had been on a run delivering the money and plans to his fellow travelers.
I've tried to lay out the plot in a straight line, as the opening chapters unfold in a series of flashbacks that bit by bit reveal the past of this mystery man who will only call himself Pete Karma. These early chapters, especially the ones dealing with the car crash, Karma's retrieving of the brief case crammed with money and atomic secrets and his disposal of the severed arm - one of the many strong arms alluded to in the book's title - are brilliant and contain many passages of great hardboiled writing. But then, the book goes off the rails when the Cold War plot is ramped up - a completely needless distraction when Marlowe's thirst for revenge against Risko would have been enough to carry a whole series of novels, never mind just one. I also found Karma's relationship with Lynn tedious and I'm never entirely sure why cousin Gussie had to be involved at all.
Yet, as I said, there are brilliant passages of writing here all the same and more than enough action scenes and convincing hardboiled dialogue to make Strongarm a powerful novel and well worth reading if you are a student of hardboiled crime fiction. I'm curious about Marlowe's other books and hope that some day I'll be able to track a few of them down.
His most famous novels were Strongarm, Vengeance Man and The Name of the Game is Death, all paperback originals written for Fawcett's Gold Medal series in the early Sixties.
I recently read Marlowe's 1963 novel Strongarm in a Black Lizard paperback edition from 1988 and it's pretty powerful stuff. It's also densely packed stuff, a novel about ready to explode with its multiple plot twists and frenetic energy. Yet the book is compelling reading and entertaining, even though in the end all the plot tangles sort themselves out in a denouement just a little too pat for my taste.
Strongarm is the tale of Pete Karma, which isn't really the protagonist's name. This narrator, in a prodigious showcase of unreliability, uses two pseudonyms that are known to the reader and many more that aren't revealed and never does give out his "real name" - a storytelling conceit from Marlowe that sounds great in theory but in reality only adds an extra layer of complexity to an already dangerously overloaded fuse box of a book.
Karma is a hard man, already bitter from harsh war service in Korea and even more bitter from being double crossed by a sleazebag lawyer working for Steve Risko, a heavy weight political fixer and all time classic SOB who hijacked a state politics machine once ran by Karma's father. Risko, through the scuzzy lawyer, sees that Karma takes a fall for a murder he didn't commit.
Karma is thrown into prison, and with the aid of some fellow inmates involved with the syndicate that he meets while inside, breaks out.
He goes into hiding and takes a job as a bartender at a Mob-operated night club in Detroit. Here, he works under the name Pete Karma and falls in lust with the beautiful and curvaceous Lynn, a hostess at the club.
At the outset of the book, Karma finds out that one of Risko's men will be passing through town with a big stash of money and he decides to take some payback for the trouble Risko has caused him. He drives out on the turnpike, tailing the car driven by the money courier. Suddenly, the car collides with another car that has gone out of control. A fiery crash ensues, yet Karma is able to extricate a briefcase from the wreckage, albeit with a severed arm handcuffed to it - a brilliantly macabre touch that at least puts the opening of the novel well into the disturbing gray zone territory only mapped by that most hardboiled of the hardboiled writers: Jim Thompson.
Unfortunately for Karma, there were witnesses to the crash and when a fuzzy yet all too easily identifiable picture of him turns up in the papers, he has to take the briefcase full of money and run. Lynn, who only knows the tiniest fragment of Karma's complicated history, insists on joining him. In a strange and redundant plot twist, Karma is also later joined by Gussie, Lynn's cousin. But in the strangest and most redundant of all plot twists in this novel of filigreed and serpentine convolutions and involutions, Karma learns the briefcase also contains oilskin envelopes containing "plans" for some kind of atomic device. It turns out the briefcase wasn't from Risko's man at all, but was from the car that had gone out of control and collided with him. The car had been driven by a Soviet agent who had been on a run delivering the money and plans to his fellow travelers.
I've tried to lay out the plot in a straight line, as the opening chapters unfold in a series of flashbacks that bit by bit reveal the past of this mystery man who will only call himself Pete Karma. These early chapters, especially the ones dealing with the car crash, Karma's retrieving of the brief case crammed with money and atomic secrets and his disposal of the severed arm - one of the many strong arms alluded to in the book's title - are brilliant and contain many passages of great hardboiled writing. But then, the book goes off the rails when the Cold War plot is ramped up - a completely needless distraction when Marlowe's thirst for revenge against Risko would have been enough to carry a whole series of novels, never mind just one. I also found Karma's relationship with Lynn tedious and I'm never entirely sure why cousin Gussie had to be involved at all.
Yet, as I said, there are brilliant passages of writing here all the same and more than enough action scenes and convincing hardboiled dialogue to make Strongarm a powerful novel and well worth reading if you are a student of hardboiled crime fiction. I'm curious about Marlowe's other books and hope that some day I'll be able to track a few of them down.
Monday, November 7, 2011
Raymond Chandler: The Simple Art of Murder and Pickup on Noon Street
Raymond Chandler's 1944 essay, The Simple Art of Murder is pretty much the only statement of the credo of hardoiled, noir fiction. The only other one that comes to mind is perhaps George Orwell's Raffles and Miss Blandish, but that was written as a condemnation of hard boiled story telling which Orwell loathed for what he considered to be its trivialization of violence.
Chandler doesn't have much use for violence as fantasy either. In the essay, he vents his spleen at the cozily genteel and thoroughly unreal world conjured up in the early detective yarns of Agatha Christie, A.A. Milne. and even Arthur Conan Doyle - he is especially harsh on Doyle saying that many of his plots were rendered pointless by their errors in logic, or scientific or legal fact. He only lets Doyle off by saying that he at least was an originator of the genre and had to find his way around and couldn't always be successful.
Chandler is frustrated and disgusted by fake mystery tales in which murder was committed to provide a corpse for the detective to find and the murder itself was achieved, not with plausible weapons, but with such clever plot contrivances as "hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish."
Chandler praises Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon for bringing realism to mystery fiction and for writing about people with "a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there." He then writes memorably and eloquently of the true role of the mystery writer, "The realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities...It is not a fragrant world, but it is the world you live in."
Chandler certainly lived by this credo and this was amply demonstrated in one of his most effective works of fiction, "Pickup On Noon Street." Frankly, I've always found Chandler to be an acquired taste. Although I enjoyed The Long Goodbye, his classic novel starring his famous private eye creation Philip Marlowe, I've always been baffled by the appeal of Chandler's best known Marlowe tale, "The Big Sleep" with its almost incoherent multiple plots and numerous red herrings.
This is certainly not the case with Pickup on Noon Street, a novella Chandler wrote for the pulp detective magazines of the 1930s. The limited word count he would have been allowed as well as the story requirements of the various magazine editors he would have been dealing with forced Chandler to rein in his weakness for rambling and concentrate on telling a tightly constructed tale. Yet this is no piece of mechanical hack work but a carefully contrived tale of extortion, murder and corruption that takes place in an all too believable America of mean streets, fist fights and people who see no problem in settling quarrels with a gun.
Pete Anglich is a small time private eye, a seedy man who lives in cheap motels, sleeping most of his days away in a drunken stupor. At the outset of the story, he is approached in his motel room by a man who tries to hit him up for some money. Anglich shoots and kills him. Afterward, he pays a bribe to the motel's front desk clerk to keep him quiet, saying, "I'm a man who likes to pay my way."
The sordidness continues as Anglich walks down Noon Street and picks up for a young woman standing on the sidewalk a package that has been tossed out on to the road for her from a passing car. It turns out the package is extortion money being paid out from a Hollywood actor eager to keep a lid on some not so publicity-friendly goings on (Remember, this was before the present era of Charlie Sheen and Paris Hilton!). Anglich quite literally gets caught like a deer in the headlights as the police pounce on him, thinking he is the extortionist:
He stiffened, whirled and the light caught him between the eyes. It came from the dark window across the street, a blinding white shaft that impaled him against the billboard.
His face leered into it, his eyes blinked. He didn't move any more.
The story is filled with brilliantly described sequences such as this which put you right into the scene and that even after almost eighty years, still ring horrifically true.
If you would like a small slice of Chandler's writing that gives you a good taste of his outlook, and his style, but without the complex plot excesses of some of his novels, Pickup on Noon Street is a good story to try out.
Chandler doesn't have much use for violence as fantasy either. In the essay, he vents his spleen at the cozily genteel and thoroughly unreal world conjured up in the early detective yarns of Agatha Christie, A.A. Milne. and even Arthur Conan Doyle - he is especially harsh on Doyle saying that many of his plots were rendered pointless by their errors in logic, or scientific or legal fact. He only lets Doyle off by saying that he at least was an originator of the genre and had to find his way around and couldn't always be successful.
Chandler is frustrated and disgusted by fake mystery tales in which murder was committed to provide a corpse for the detective to find and the murder itself was achieved, not with plausible weapons, but with such clever plot contrivances as "hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish."
Chandler praises Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon for bringing realism to mystery fiction and for writing about people with "a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there." He then writes memorably and eloquently of the true role of the mystery writer, "The realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities...It is not a fragrant world, but it is the world you live in."
Chandler certainly lived by this credo and this was amply demonstrated in one of his most effective works of fiction, "Pickup On Noon Street." Frankly, I've always found Chandler to be an acquired taste. Although I enjoyed The Long Goodbye, his classic novel starring his famous private eye creation Philip Marlowe, I've always been baffled by the appeal of Chandler's best known Marlowe tale, "The Big Sleep" with its almost incoherent multiple plots and numerous red herrings.
This is certainly not the case with Pickup on Noon Street, a novella Chandler wrote for the pulp detective magazines of the 1930s. The limited word count he would have been allowed as well as the story requirements of the various magazine editors he would have been dealing with forced Chandler to rein in his weakness for rambling and concentrate on telling a tightly constructed tale. Yet this is no piece of mechanical hack work but a carefully contrived tale of extortion, murder and corruption that takes place in an all too believable America of mean streets, fist fights and people who see no problem in settling quarrels with a gun.
Pete Anglich is a small time private eye, a seedy man who lives in cheap motels, sleeping most of his days away in a drunken stupor. At the outset of the story, he is approached in his motel room by a man who tries to hit him up for some money. Anglich shoots and kills him. Afterward, he pays a bribe to the motel's front desk clerk to keep him quiet, saying, "I'm a man who likes to pay my way."
The sordidness continues as Anglich walks down Noon Street and picks up for a young woman standing on the sidewalk a package that has been tossed out on to the road for her from a passing car. It turns out the package is extortion money being paid out from a Hollywood actor eager to keep a lid on some not so publicity-friendly goings on (Remember, this was before the present era of Charlie Sheen and Paris Hilton!). Anglich quite literally gets caught like a deer in the headlights as the police pounce on him, thinking he is the extortionist:
He stiffened, whirled and the light caught him between the eyes. It came from the dark window across the street, a blinding white shaft that impaled him against the billboard.
His face leered into it, his eyes blinked. He didn't move any more.
The story is filled with brilliantly described sequences such as this which put you right into the scene and that even after almost eighty years, still ring horrifically true.
If you would like a small slice of Chandler's writing that gives you a good taste of his outlook, and his style, but without the complex plot excesses of some of his novels, Pickup on Noon Street is a good story to try out.
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Mickey Spillane's The Consummata as Completed by Max Allan Collins
One of the first releases from the newly revived Hard Case Crime series was The Consummata, a novel first started by hard boiled originator Mickey Spillane in the Sixties and finished in the twenty-first century by fellow noir scribe and close friend Max Allan Collins.
Spillane was the legendary author of numerous best selling hard boiled detective and action novels from the 1940s through to the 1970s. His most infamous creation was the tough talking, pistol packing and pugilistic private eye, Mike Hammer, immortalized in the classic 1947 novel, I, The Jury, memorable for its brilliant finale with its unforgettable blending of Eros and Thanatos:
Her thumbs hooked the fragile silk of the panties and pulled them down. She stepped out of them as delicately as one coming from a bathtub. She was completely naked now. A suntanned goddess giving herself to her lover. With arms outstretched, she walked toward me...She leaned forward to kiss me, her arms going out to encircle my neck...
The roar of the .45 shook the room. Charlotte staggered back a step...
"How c-could you?" she gasped.
I only had a moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in.
"It was easy," I said.
Spillane was both admired and reviled for his tough, unflinching prose, his tight plotting and the graphic sex and violence of his novels. Film director Stanley Kubrick, whose movie classic The Killing, adapted from the novel Clean Break by noted hardboiled scribe Lionel White and co-scripted by Kubrick and Jim Thompson of The Killer Inside Me infamy, is a masterpiece of noir in itself, once said, "Spillane knows all there is to know about reaching audiences."
There is no doubt that vintage Spillane novels, whatever their faults, are classic page turners that grip your attention.
The Comsummata, however, is an awkward final contribution to the Spillane canon. It is the unfinished and thus previously unpublished sequel to the 1967 Spillane offering, The Delta Factor, which was to kick off a series featuring a new Spillane hero, Morgan the Raider. The series fizzled out, however, after a botched attempt to turn The Delta Factor into a movie embittered Spillane. In frustration, he gave the unfinished novel to Collins, telling him that some day they would finish it. Collins eventually finished the novel and the end result is in stores now.
Ostensibly, the novel is set in 1967 Miami, where Morgan is being pursued by the Feds. He is the lead suspect in a $40 million armored car heist and very much a wanted man. He is given refuge by a group of anti-Castro Cuban exiles and they offer him the job of finding seventy-five thousand dollars that has been stolen from their war chest. Grateful to his hosts and moved by their sincerity and sympathetic to their cause, Morgan takes the job.
He soon learns the man most likely responsible for the theft is Halaquez, a member of the group since exposed as a double dealer who collaborated with Castro. He was a regular customer at the Mandor Club, an extremely secret brothel for politicians, businessmen and other notable VIPs - a regular, but extremely unwelcome customer, due to his rarefied tastes in sadomasochism. Morgan is granted entree to the club and meets Gaita, a courtesan of the establishment who gives him some leads on Halaquez.
Morgan learns that Halaquez stole the seventy-five thousand to fund a crackpot scheme by a fellow Mandor Club customer, an inventor developing a device for detecting atomic weaponry. The dots soon connect and an elaborate tower of cards collapses all around Morgan, leaving behind a tattered network of duplicity implicating just about all of the novel's characters, a pile of corpses worthy of an Elizabethan revenge tragedy, and the surprise - or maybe not so surprising for more astute readers - identity of The Consummata, a half legendary dominatrix whose mysterious presence hangs tantalizingly over the novel and lends the story its name.
I said earlier that the novel was ostensibly set in 1967 Miami. What I mean is that the novel never really feels like anything from the 1960s. "Chippy" a long and deservedly lost slang word for prostitute is uttered by the characters at one point and just a few paragraphs later, those same characters use the present-day euphemism, "sex worker." Early in the novel, Morgan describes the armored car heist he was involved in as a "template" for such robberies - a term that would never have been used in the 1960s. Yet, at around the same point, Morgan talks about "the threads" worn by the federal agents pursuing him, very much a specimen of 1960s slang. Yet there are no references to movies or music from the time, nothing that really places the story in 1967. Even with its creaky Cold War-era nuclear conspiracy plot, the novel seems to exist in its own time continuum, in its own space of meta-narrative.
This seems to be a strange quirk of Collins, whose The First Quarry, a novel featuring the first adventure of the contract killer Quarry - Collins's version of Morgan the Raider - was supposedly set in 1970, yet featured such bizarre anachronisms as karaoke bars. The untimely intrusions into an otherwise naturalistic story are never explained and in the end, they bothered me and turned me off the novel. This is definitely a distracting aesthetic conceit that he should have left out of Spillane's The Comsummata. Collins did a much better job with Dead Street, the final Mickey Spillane novel published by Hard Case Crime in 2008, for which he wrote the concluding chapters. Collins' contributions fit seamlessly into the novel, his vocabulary and style totally blended with Spillane's and resulted in a very strong and entertaining book.
Now, I'm not saying The Consummata is a total write off, pardon the pun. There are some skillfully described action sequences and some beautiful erotic writing involving Gaita that are highly entertaining. If you are a fan of either Spillane or Collins, the book is a must-read.
It's just too bad that the book leaves you with a strong feeling of reverse deja vu, a feeling of loss at what might have been made at one time out of a brilliant idea for a great story.
Spillane was the legendary author of numerous best selling hard boiled detective and action novels from the 1940s through to the 1970s. His most infamous creation was the tough talking, pistol packing and pugilistic private eye, Mike Hammer, immortalized in the classic 1947 novel, I, The Jury, memorable for its brilliant finale with its unforgettable blending of Eros and Thanatos:
Her thumbs hooked the fragile silk of the panties and pulled them down. She stepped out of them as delicately as one coming from a bathtub. She was completely naked now. A suntanned goddess giving herself to her lover. With arms outstretched, she walked toward me...She leaned forward to kiss me, her arms going out to encircle my neck...
The roar of the .45 shook the room. Charlotte staggered back a step...
"How c-could you?" she gasped.
I only had a moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in.
"It was easy," I said.
Spillane was both admired and reviled for his tough, unflinching prose, his tight plotting and the graphic sex and violence of his novels. Film director Stanley Kubrick, whose movie classic The Killing, adapted from the novel Clean Break by noted hardboiled scribe Lionel White and co-scripted by Kubrick and Jim Thompson of The Killer Inside Me infamy, is a masterpiece of noir in itself, once said, "Spillane knows all there is to know about reaching audiences."
There is no doubt that vintage Spillane novels, whatever their faults, are classic page turners that grip your attention.
The Comsummata, however, is an awkward final contribution to the Spillane canon. It is the unfinished and thus previously unpublished sequel to the 1967 Spillane offering, The Delta Factor, which was to kick off a series featuring a new Spillane hero, Morgan the Raider. The series fizzled out, however, after a botched attempt to turn The Delta Factor into a movie embittered Spillane. In frustration, he gave the unfinished novel to Collins, telling him that some day they would finish it. Collins eventually finished the novel and the end result is in stores now.
Ostensibly, the novel is set in 1967 Miami, where Morgan is being pursued by the Feds. He is the lead suspect in a $40 million armored car heist and very much a wanted man. He is given refuge by a group of anti-Castro Cuban exiles and they offer him the job of finding seventy-five thousand dollars that has been stolen from their war chest. Grateful to his hosts and moved by their sincerity and sympathetic to their cause, Morgan takes the job.
He soon learns the man most likely responsible for the theft is Halaquez, a member of the group since exposed as a double dealer who collaborated with Castro. He was a regular customer at the Mandor Club, an extremely secret brothel for politicians, businessmen and other notable VIPs - a regular, but extremely unwelcome customer, due to his rarefied tastes in sadomasochism. Morgan is granted entree to the club and meets Gaita, a courtesan of the establishment who gives him some leads on Halaquez.
Morgan learns that Halaquez stole the seventy-five thousand to fund a crackpot scheme by a fellow Mandor Club customer, an inventor developing a device for detecting atomic weaponry. The dots soon connect and an elaborate tower of cards collapses all around Morgan, leaving behind a tattered network of duplicity implicating just about all of the novel's characters, a pile of corpses worthy of an Elizabethan revenge tragedy, and the surprise - or maybe not so surprising for more astute readers - identity of The Consummata, a half legendary dominatrix whose mysterious presence hangs tantalizingly over the novel and lends the story its name.
I said earlier that the novel was ostensibly set in 1967 Miami. What I mean is that the novel never really feels like anything from the 1960s. "Chippy" a long and deservedly lost slang word for prostitute is uttered by the characters at one point and just a few paragraphs later, those same characters use the present-day euphemism, "sex worker." Early in the novel, Morgan describes the armored car heist he was involved in as a "template" for such robberies - a term that would never have been used in the 1960s. Yet, at around the same point, Morgan talks about "the threads" worn by the federal agents pursuing him, very much a specimen of 1960s slang. Yet there are no references to movies or music from the time, nothing that really places the story in 1967. Even with its creaky Cold War-era nuclear conspiracy plot, the novel seems to exist in its own time continuum, in its own space of meta-narrative.
This seems to be a strange quirk of Collins, whose The First Quarry, a novel featuring the first adventure of the contract killer Quarry - Collins's version of Morgan the Raider - was supposedly set in 1970, yet featured such bizarre anachronisms as karaoke bars. The untimely intrusions into an otherwise naturalistic story are never explained and in the end, they bothered me and turned me off the novel. This is definitely a distracting aesthetic conceit that he should have left out of Spillane's The Comsummata. Collins did a much better job with Dead Street, the final Mickey Spillane novel published by Hard Case Crime in 2008, for which he wrote the concluding chapters. Collins' contributions fit seamlessly into the novel, his vocabulary and style totally blended with Spillane's and resulted in a very strong and entertaining book.
Now, I'm not saying The Consummata is a total write off, pardon the pun. There are some skillfully described action sequences and some beautiful erotic writing involving Gaita that are highly entertaining. If you are a fan of either Spillane or Collins, the book is a must-read.
It's just too bad that the book leaves you with a strong feeling of reverse deja vu, a feeling of loss at what might have been made at one time out of a brilliant idea for a great story.
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