Here is an excerpt from a short story I'm working on, tentatively entitled "The Rescue."
Noon and the sun's glare burned through me while I walked through the parking lot on my way into Smile's Donuts. Sweat dripped off my head and my t-shirt stuck to my overheated body. I always hated muggy August days like this and I cursed not having the money to get out of town to someplace cooler.
I stumbled as a foot cut in front of me. I crumpled as a knee slammed into my groin and a fist hit my jaw.
I didn't even see the pavement as my vision went supernova with stars and fireworks exploding in my head.
I squeezed my eyes shut and the fireworks just got brighter, so I just lay there face down on the pavement, the kicks and the punches crashing down on me.
This really was it. Nothing to do now.
Sweat poured off me, yet I shivered. Cold numbness spread itself over me like that blanket they threw over Dad after the car had hit him that morning in January years ago when the roads were so icy and nobody could stop...
"What the hell's going on here?"
That old guy who owned the big house out on the lake road was here. I knew his voice. He came around the doughnut shop a lot. But he must've been close to sixty. How the hell could he stand up to creeps like Kevin and his idiot friends?
The cold receded and pinpricks of warmth stuck into my arms and legs. I was coming back. Maybe.
Shouts and screams. Was that a thunderclap? Or a gunshot?
The fireworks went off and the blows and explosions of red spiked agony all over my body stopped.
The cold blanket lifted. Warmth was returning to me. Within minutes, I would be boiling again.
I didn't complain. At least that meant I was still alive.
"What the hell did those guys want with you?" a voice asked.
The old guy was speaking to me.
I couldn't answer. Hands reached under my arms and my feet dragged on the pavement.
He was taking me somewhere.
Blurred shapes spun around. I told myself to focus, try to see what's going on.
My stomach churned. Puke rose up in my throat.
The blurred shapes loomed larger again and I had to close my eyes. My God, my whole body ached now. I just wanted to get out of there.
Then all the pain went away and everything was quiet.
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Charles Willeford's The Burnt Orange Heresy
Hardboiled legend Charles Willeford was a Miami journalist and author whose 1990 novel, Miami Blues, was a big hit and was made into a movie starring Alec Baldwin.
But long before that, Willeford's career as a painter and an art history teacher, brilliantly positioned him to write his 1970 novel, The Burnt Orange Heresy.
James Figueras is a prominent south Florida art critic. He is brilliant at his work. So brilliant, in fact, that he is one of the few people in the US who makes a living exclusively writing art critiques for academic journals, magazines and encyclopedias.
His renown draws the attention of Cassidy, a high rolling millionaire art collector who lets him in on a secret. Cassidy has assisted the reclusive French surrealist artist Jacques Debierue in settling down in Florida. In fact, he's now living only thirty miles away. Cassidy lets James have the reclusive and secretive artist's address on one condition: he must bring back one of the artist's current art works.
James leaps at the offer. He has to. After all, Debierue was one of the most important of the Surrealists, legendary for his No. One installation, a wooden picture frame placed on a cracked plaster wall. Now, the legend was literally in his backyard. He has to meet him.
With his girlfriend Berenice in tow, James meets the surrealist, who turns out to be a harmless, even charming old man who wants nothing more from life than to sip orange juice and to wander off to a nearby drive-in to watch old Bowery Boys movies. He also wants to be left alone. And he wants no one to see his current work. No one. Not even the great James Figueras, whose criticism Debierue admires very much.
His considerable ego and hubris piqued by the rebuff, James hatches a plot to see the artist's current work. When Debierue leaves his house for the drive-in one night, James goes to the house and is able to get into the artist's workshop. He finds...nothing. Many canvases and frames, many painting supplies and implements, but no art work. Nothing. Debierue has not painted anything since his arrival in Florida. Perhaps, James fears, he hasn't painted anything in many years.
At first horrified, James suddenly realizes that he now has a real opportunity to boost his own career, and, almost as an afterthought, Debierue's. He snaps up the artist's gear, sets fire to the studio and then meets up with Berenice and they get away. All the while, James's mind is convulsed by a scheme to unleash on the art world The Burnt Orange Heresy, Debierue's last major art work. James will make the painting and write an article celebrating it. Then, Cassidy and other collectors can move in and fight over it, driving up its already immense value.
One problem though. Berenice uncovers James's scheme and James goes into murderous overdrive.
The Burnt Orange Heresy is a slim novel, but it is jammed with ideas about art and money, art and the perception of reality, art and the criminal impulse. It is also a meticulous depiction of how one man's arrogance and professional pride turn into murderous psychosis. A chilling and profound and original hard boiled read.
But long before that, Willeford's career as a painter and an art history teacher, brilliantly positioned him to write his 1970 novel, The Burnt Orange Heresy.
James Figueras is a prominent south Florida art critic. He is brilliant at his work. So brilliant, in fact, that he is one of the few people in the US who makes a living exclusively writing art critiques for academic journals, magazines and encyclopedias.
His renown draws the attention of Cassidy, a high rolling millionaire art collector who lets him in on a secret. Cassidy has assisted the reclusive French surrealist artist Jacques Debierue in settling down in Florida. In fact, he's now living only thirty miles away. Cassidy lets James have the reclusive and secretive artist's address on one condition: he must bring back one of the artist's current art works.
James leaps at the offer. He has to. After all, Debierue was one of the most important of the Surrealists, legendary for his No. One installation, a wooden picture frame placed on a cracked plaster wall. Now, the legend was literally in his backyard. He has to meet him.
With his girlfriend Berenice in tow, James meets the surrealist, who turns out to be a harmless, even charming old man who wants nothing more from life than to sip orange juice and to wander off to a nearby drive-in to watch old Bowery Boys movies. He also wants to be left alone. And he wants no one to see his current work. No one. Not even the great James Figueras, whose criticism Debierue admires very much.
His considerable ego and hubris piqued by the rebuff, James hatches a plot to see the artist's current work. When Debierue leaves his house for the drive-in one night, James goes to the house and is able to get into the artist's workshop. He finds...nothing. Many canvases and frames, many painting supplies and implements, but no art work. Nothing. Debierue has not painted anything since his arrival in Florida. Perhaps, James fears, he hasn't painted anything in many years.
At first horrified, James suddenly realizes that he now has a real opportunity to boost his own career, and, almost as an afterthought, Debierue's. He snaps up the artist's gear, sets fire to the studio and then meets up with Berenice and they get away. All the while, James's mind is convulsed by a scheme to unleash on the art world The Burnt Orange Heresy, Debierue's last major art work. James will make the painting and write an article celebrating it. Then, Cassidy and other collectors can move in and fight over it, driving up its already immense value.
One problem though. Berenice uncovers James's scheme and James goes into murderous overdrive.
The Burnt Orange Heresy is a slim novel, but it is jammed with ideas about art and money, art and the perception of reality, art and the criminal impulse. It is also a meticulous depiction of how one man's arrogance and professional pride turn into murderous psychosis. A chilling and profound and original hard boiled read.
Brian Gifford's Port Tropique
Brian Gifford is a US novelist best known for his association with cult film maker David Lynch. His fourth novel, Wild at Heart, was memorably, if repulsively, adapted for the screen by Lynch, from a screenplay co-written by him and Lynch. Gifford also co-scripted the 1997 Lynch cult favorite Lost Highway.
In 1980, long before his collaboration with Lynch, Gifford wrote the distinctive noir thriller, Port Tropique.
Through a series of brief snapshot chapters, most of which are flashbacks ranging through the protagonist's memories with relatively few carrying forward the story, such as it is, we learn about the life of Franz Hull, a writer living in the fictional Latin American nation of Port Tropique. He's there, as he tells a journalist visiting the country to cover an impending Communist revolution, to write a biography of Benjamin Franklin. When the journalist asks why he'd be writing about Franklin in Port Tropique, Frans gives a revealing answer:
"Gore Vidal wrote Burr in Rome. Robert Graves wrote I, Claudius in Majorca. Mary Renault wrote The Persian Boy in Cape Town. Sometimes the proper perspective is more easily attained from a distance."
This answer reveals Franz's major problem. He sees life through the funhouse mirror reflection of fiction. All the writers he mentions are historical fiction writers, using real events to weave compelling narratives that may not entirely be "real" or "true." For instance, I Claudius contains a plot where Livia conspires to poison Augustus, her husband and the first Emperor of Rome. No such plot really existed, in fact, little is known of the historical Livia. Yet, Graves invented the conspiracy to make the novel more compelling and to give the Livia character more of a presence in the story. Graves' storytelling was so believable that many believe the poisoning plot actually happened.
This is the curious half-real, half-imagined world that Franz Hull moves, or is it dreams? through, in Port Tropique. A world convincingly evoked with vivid, concrete descriptions of street life, as well as knowing descriptions of the country's political crisis. Although I'm reading a novel, the tone and feel of it remind me of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuczinski's books about revolutions in the developing world in the way that concrete fact is mixed with strong story telling.
All of this is very clever and witty, of course, but what does it have to do with a hardboiled story? Well, in the midst of all of this post modern game playing with narrative, there is a smuggling plot. Every few nights, Franz ventures to the dangerous Port Tropique water front with a suitcase. Various mysterious and disreputable characters pull into the harbor and fill the suitcase with bundles and bundles of money. Soon, he has more than two hundred thousand dollars in the suitcase. With the revolution waiting to explode, should he sit tight and wait for his criminal contacts to claim the money he's been holding for them, or should he simply run away with it?
A hard and all too real choice is to be made. A choice with deadly consequences. A choice that perhaps shouldn't be left with a person so distracted by narratives,a choice that would be better made by someone with a clear headed view of the crisis exploding around him.
Franz makes his choice and the consequences of this constitute the story that Port Tropique has to tell.
An interesting novel, as well as a puzzle. With many red herrings with the slightest hint of the shaggy dog tale thrown in. If nothing else, Port Tropique is one of the most memorable and radical of the hardboiled books.
In 1980, long before his collaboration with Lynch, Gifford wrote the distinctive noir thriller, Port Tropique.
Through a series of brief snapshot chapters, most of which are flashbacks ranging through the protagonist's memories with relatively few carrying forward the story, such as it is, we learn about the life of Franz Hull, a writer living in the fictional Latin American nation of Port Tropique. He's there, as he tells a journalist visiting the country to cover an impending Communist revolution, to write a biography of Benjamin Franklin. When the journalist asks why he'd be writing about Franklin in Port Tropique, Frans gives a revealing answer:
"Gore Vidal wrote Burr in Rome. Robert Graves wrote I, Claudius in Majorca. Mary Renault wrote The Persian Boy in Cape Town. Sometimes the proper perspective is more easily attained from a distance."
This answer reveals Franz's major problem. He sees life through the funhouse mirror reflection of fiction. All the writers he mentions are historical fiction writers, using real events to weave compelling narratives that may not entirely be "real" or "true." For instance, I Claudius contains a plot where Livia conspires to poison Augustus, her husband and the first Emperor of Rome. No such plot really existed, in fact, little is known of the historical Livia. Yet, Graves invented the conspiracy to make the novel more compelling and to give the Livia character more of a presence in the story. Graves' storytelling was so believable that many believe the poisoning plot actually happened.
This is the curious half-real, half-imagined world that Franz Hull moves, or is it dreams? through, in Port Tropique. A world convincingly evoked with vivid, concrete descriptions of street life, as well as knowing descriptions of the country's political crisis. Although I'm reading a novel, the tone and feel of it remind me of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuczinski's books about revolutions in the developing world in the way that concrete fact is mixed with strong story telling.
All of this is very clever and witty, of course, but what does it have to do with a hardboiled story? Well, in the midst of all of this post modern game playing with narrative, there is a smuggling plot. Every few nights, Franz ventures to the dangerous Port Tropique water front with a suitcase. Various mysterious and disreputable characters pull into the harbor and fill the suitcase with bundles and bundles of money. Soon, he has more than two hundred thousand dollars in the suitcase. With the revolution waiting to explode, should he sit tight and wait for his criminal contacts to claim the money he's been holding for them, or should he simply run away with it?
A hard and all too real choice is to be made. A choice with deadly consequences. A choice that perhaps shouldn't be left with a person so distracted by narratives,a choice that would be better made by someone with a clear headed view of the crisis exploding around him.
Franz makes his choice and the consequences of this constitute the story that Port Tropique has to tell.
An interesting novel, as well as a puzzle. With many red herrings with the slightest hint of the shaggy dog tale thrown in. If nothing else, Port Tropique is one of the most memorable and radical of the hardboiled books.
Sunday, December 11, 2011
The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler
A few posts back, I mentioned Raymond Chandler's taste for complex, labyrinthine, and for some people, incoherent plots.
This taste is very much on display in The Little Sister, a novel first published in 1949 and considered by some to be Chandler's finest.
It's a novel starring legendary Chandler gumshoe Phillip Marlowe. At first, the story seems pretty cut and dried. Orfamey Quest, a young lady from Manhattan, Kansas, drops by his dusty and faded hole in the wall office and tells him about the disappearance of her brother Orrin. It seems he has been swallowed up in the big bad maw of Los Angeles. Orfamey is a very prim and proper smalltown girl who at once repels and captivates Marlowe. He teases her and plays games with her, but in the end, he accepts the case.
All Marlowe has to go on is the address given him by Orfamey of the boarding house Orrin was last known to be staying at. When he gets there, he finds the place to be rundown and stuffy and choked with the stink of cigarette smoke and marijuana. He also finds the landlord, a hard and suspicious man, counting rent money. Thinking Marlowe is a robber, he lets him have the run of the place. Marlowe pokes around in Orrin's old room and finds nothing. When he returns to the front room, he finds the landlord has been stabbed with an ice pick.
After this, things get complicated. Very complicated.
Many factors come into play. It seems Orrin had stumbled onto extortion photographs of a rising young Hollywood starlet having lunch with a known gangster who was up on murder charges. The pictures themselves are harmless, just a couple having lunch, but it's the company the starlet is keeping that could cause problems for her. Where did he get the pictures from? Did he stab the landlord, or was it someone else? Who exactly is involved in this conspiracy to extort this young starlet?
Of course, extortion pictures are a well-traveled plot line in hardboiled. In Chandler's own The Big Sleep, extortion pictures of the amorous exploits of a general's daughter and a lending library for pornographic pictures are the hinges of the plot. What makes this novel interesting isn't so much the plot as Chandler's telling of it; Marlowe's persistent, hunch and happenstance unraveling of the conspiracy, the peeling away of false exteriors to reveal an ever widening circle of human duplicity, lust and greed.
And along the way, we are treated to some find noir atmosphere and Chandler's often caustic and pungent observations of human nature as presented through Phillip Marlowe.
Some examples:
I left him to his thoughts, which were probably as small, ugly and frightened as the man himself.
I smelled Los Angeles before I got to it. It smelled stale and old like a living room that's been closed too long. But the colored lights fooled you. The lights were wonderful.
On the terrace of The Dancers, a few early birds were getting ready to drink their lunch.
It's specimens of acerbic writing like this that make Chandler worth reading, regardless of how convoluted or implausible some of his plots may be. The man had a real flair for the telling detail, the apt observation made with sharp, economical and witty language. If nothing else, Chandler should be turned to as a guide of how to knowingly and keenly describe your surroundings.
I highly recommend The Little Sister. If you've never read it, you should maybe read it before The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye. Yes, the plot does get complicated, but there are so many facets of brilliance in this novel that they more than overcome any frustration you may have in trying to figure out who is stabbing whom in the back and why.
This taste is very much on display in The Little Sister, a novel first published in 1949 and considered by some to be Chandler's finest.
It's a novel starring legendary Chandler gumshoe Phillip Marlowe. At first, the story seems pretty cut and dried. Orfamey Quest, a young lady from Manhattan, Kansas, drops by his dusty and faded hole in the wall office and tells him about the disappearance of her brother Orrin. It seems he has been swallowed up in the big bad maw of Los Angeles. Orfamey is a very prim and proper smalltown girl who at once repels and captivates Marlowe. He teases her and plays games with her, but in the end, he accepts the case.
All Marlowe has to go on is the address given him by Orfamey of the boarding house Orrin was last known to be staying at. When he gets there, he finds the place to be rundown and stuffy and choked with the stink of cigarette smoke and marijuana. He also finds the landlord, a hard and suspicious man, counting rent money. Thinking Marlowe is a robber, he lets him have the run of the place. Marlowe pokes around in Orrin's old room and finds nothing. When he returns to the front room, he finds the landlord has been stabbed with an ice pick.
After this, things get complicated. Very complicated.
Many factors come into play. It seems Orrin had stumbled onto extortion photographs of a rising young Hollywood starlet having lunch with a known gangster who was up on murder charges. The pictures themselves are harmless, just a couple having lunch, but it's the company the starlet is keeping that could cause problems for her. Where did he get the pictures from? Did he stab the landlord, or was it someone else? Who exactly is involved in this conspiracy to extort this young starlet?
Of course, extortion pictures are a well-traveled plot line in hardboiled. In Chandler's own The Big Sleep, extortion pictures of the amorous exploits of a general's daughter and a lending library for pornographic pictures are the hinges of the plot. What makes this novel interesting isn't so much the plot as Chandler's telling of it; Marlowe's persistent, hunch and happenstance unraveling of the conspiracy, the peeling away of false exteriors to reveal an ever widening circle of human duplicity, lust and greed.
And along the way, we are treated to some find noir atmosphere and Chandler's often caustic and pungent observations of human nature as presented through Phillip Marlowe.
Some examples:
I left him to his thoughts, which were probably as small, ugly and frightened as the man himself.
I smelled Los Angeles before I got to it. It smelled stale and old like a living room that's been closed too long. But the colored lights fooled you. The lights were wonderful.
On the terrace of The Dancers, a few early birds were getting ready to drink their lunch.
It's specimens of acerbic writing like this that make Chandler worth reading, regardless of how convoluted or implausible some of his plots may be. The man had a real flair for the telling detail, the apt observation made with sharp, economical and witty language. If nothing else, Chandler should be turned to as a guide of how to knowingly and keenly describe your surroundings.
I highly recommend The Little Sister. If you've never read it, you should maybe read it before The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye. Yes, the plot does get complicated, but there are so many facets of brilliance in this novel that they more than overcome any frustration you may have in trying to figure out who is stabbing whom in the back and why.
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Upcoming Reviews on Hard Boiled Reads II
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.
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.
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.
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