Hap returns home from working a gig on an oil rig and is promptly attacked by a rabid squirrel. Thanks to crappy insurance and a grumpy doctor he has Hap returns home from working a gig on an oil rig and is promptly attacked by a rabid squirrel. Thanks to crappy insurance and a grumpy doctor he has to stay in the hospital in order to get his rabies shots paid for. While Hap is left to the mercy of the American health care system his best friend Leonard has been having problems with his boyfriend, Raul. Raul has been two-timing him with a biker, and it’s made Leonard so angry that he’s doing crazy things like beating the biker with a broom handle and shooting up bars and motorcycles. When the biker turns up dead and Raul is missing, Leonard is naturally the prime suspect.
But it isn‘t all bad news. Hap has met a hot foul-mouthed red-headed nurse named Brett, and they’ve taken a shine to each other. Once upon a time, Brett dealt with an abusive ex-husband by hitting him in the head with a shovel and setting his hair on fire. Hap may have found true love.
This was the first book by Lansdale I ever read and with the opening chapter that details the squirrel attack on Hap, I laughed so hard that I thought I did myself permanent injury. I knew then that I was going to a Joe Lansdale fan for life, and he hasn’t let me down since. This is probably still my favorite Hap & Leonard novel. Like the others books, it’s obscene, violent, politically incorrect and one of the funniest things you’ll ever read....more
If you took the ultimate manly-man, tough-as-nails, smart-ass private detective and paired him with a no-nonsense feminist lesbian, would you get a hiIf you took the ultimate manly-man, tough-as-nails, smart-ass private detective and paired him with a no-nonsense feminist lesbian, would you get a hilarious new sitcom or a complete disaster? The title of the book should be a clue that it doesn’t go all that well.
Political activist and author Rachel Wallace has a new book coming out that will expose discriminatory practices by several prominent corporations, and she‘s been getting death threats. Rachel chafes at the idea of being surrounded by bodyguards, and will only agree to having a single person at her publisher’s insistence. Enter Spenser.
The idea of hiring a female bodyguard is briefly discussed and dismissed because the publisher demands that if Rachel will only agree to one protector, than they say that it has to be the biggest toughest guy they can find in case he has to ‘wrestle around’ with someone. Naturally, feminist Rachel is extremely unhappy with the set-up even before she meets Spenser.
Spenser is sympathetic towards Rachel’s cause, but he has an innate distrust and dislike of all forms of political activism because zealots tend to put principle ahead of people, and her lack of humor about the subject quickly tests his patience. Rachel, already resentful that she’s had to agree to be protected by a man with a gun, sees Spenser as little more than a thug who lives by an antiquated macho code.
However, after Spenser gets a first hand look at the daily bullshit that Rachel has to contend with to get her message out, and when Rachel realizes that Spenser is more than just a club-wielding cave man, the two start to grudgingly respect each other. Before their relationship can develop much further, there’s an ugly incident during which Spenser can't put his own pride aside to let Rachel do things her way to score some political points. Furious, Rachel fires him.
Spenser realizes that Rachel was right and feels badly about it, but he moves on to other things. A short time later, Rachel is kidnapped and a note is sent to the police indicating that some kind of right wing fringe group has taken her. Feeling responsible, Spenser sets out on a quest to find Rachel Wallace, and he won’t be deterred by right wing racist thugs, rich blue-blood bigots or a blizzard that shuts down Boston.
For my money, the golden age Spenser begins here in one of my favorite Parker novels. While the earlier novels have been very good to this point, this is the first book where all the pieces of ‘classic’ Spenser are in place, and the story is great. The irony that Parker delivers here is terrific and realistic. Rachel is right about Spenser’s macho code getting in the way of him doing his job correctly, but it’s Spenser’s code that makes him so good at his job and drives him so relentlessly to find her. Spenser and Rachel are both right and they’re both wrong at the same time, and it makes for a great theme in a book about an old school private detective.
On the surface, Matt Scudder would appear to be something of a lowlife.
As a cop in New York in the 1970s, he wasn’t above taking bribes or framing somOn the surface, Matt Scudder would appear to be something of a lowlife.
As a cop in New York in the 1970s, he wasn’t above taking bribes or framing someone. After he accidentally shot and killed a child while trying to break up a robbery, he quit the cops and left his wife and two sons to live in a hotel in Manhattan. He makes his living as an unlicensed private detective who refuses to keep records or file reports, and he gets information by bribing various cops and government workers. He drinks constantly and occasionally engages the services of prostitutes.
Doesn’t sound like the hero of a long running detective series, does he?
What’s great about Scudder is that while someone could get on their high horse and look down their nose at the way he lives, Matt is actually a deeply moral man who broods about the nature of good and evil while trying to figure out where he fits into that battle. He’s also willing to get his hands dirty while trying to do ‘good’.
In this first book of the series, Matt is hired by a man whose estranged daughter, Wendy, was murdered by a man she was living with. The man was immediately caught while covered in her blood and hung himself in his cell. The father thinks that Wendy had become a prostitute and feels guilty that he hadn’t done more for her so he wants Matt to look into her life and give him a sense of what her last years were like.
You can’t really put a label on this series. It’s not action packed although Matt does show flashes of a violent nature and being able to take care of himself. He isn’t an armchair detective sitting back and thinking about clues and figuring out intricate puzzles, although does have a cop’s nose for lies and inconsistencies. Matt isn’t a wise cracking hard-boiled PI with a strong moral code either. He just roams Manhattan talking to everyone from cops to ministers to gay night club owners to get the info he needs. He’s also a realist who does the best he can, and doesn’t see the point of fighting a system that’s inherently corrupt.
Here’s a great scene illustrating that with Scudder advising a rookie patrolmen who has just tried to refuse the twenty-five bucks Matt offered him for telling him about the arrest of the killer:
“Think about it. If you don’t take money when somebody puts it in your hand, you’re going to make a lot of people very nervous. You don’t have to be a crook. Certain kinds of money you can turn down. And you don’t have to walk the streets with your hand out. But you’ve got to play the game with the cards they give you. Take the money.”
Despite being written in first person, we don’t get much introspection into what Scudder is thinking or feeling other than tidbits like this that Block sprinkles throughout the book. The reader often doesn’t realize how much something has effected Scudder until Block gives us a sign like him suddenly gagging while checking out the murder scene. At one point late in the book, Scudder casually tells someone that he would have killed himself years ago if he didn’t think it was a mortal sin. It’s really only at this point that you realize how deeply guilty and weary Matt really feels. Block does a great job of using that without letting Scudder become an angst-ridden bore.
This is one of my favorite characters, and I can’t wait to re-read the rest of these....more
The last ten years have mutated my views on religion. I went from a vague agnostic live-and-let-live attitude to a full blown distrust and dislike of The last ten years have mutated my views on religion. I went from a vague agnostic live-and-let-live attitude to a full blown distrust and dislike of mass worshipping of mysterious deities. When it wasn’t being used as an excuse to murder people who believed different things, then it was being used to deny basic scientific concepts or prevent consenting adults from marriage based on gender. Overall, I’d become convinced that humanity was far too stupid to use religion as anything but yet another system to justify telling someone else how to live.
So naturally, one of my favorite novels of the last ten years is a funny and touching book about the life of Jesus.
Yeah, it was that kind of decade.
The story is told by Jesus’s best friend, Biff. Actually, Biff quickly explains that Jesus was known as Josh back in the days when they were kids in Nazareth. Biff knows there is something special about Josh from the moment they meet, and he adopts a life-long role of dealing with the practical matters that the naive Josh tends to overlook. When teen-aged Josh decides to track down the wise men who attended his birth to see what they can teach him about how he should become the Messiah, Biff knows he has to go along to protect Josh from an evil world.
Together, they travel across Asia, invent sarcasm, learn alchemy, discover coffee and become kung fu experts as Josh prepares himself to one day return home and fulfill his ultimate destiny.
It’s no surprise that Christopher Moore could write a very funny book about the life of Jesus. What is surprising that he’s able to make it so touching that even a cynical non-believer such as myself could be moved by it. By focusing in on the basic love-thy-neighbor concepts that Josh fiercely preaches, Moore wrote a warm reminder of what Christianity is supposed to be about. ...more
I have to write this review without rhythm so that it won’t attract a worm.
In the distant future Arrakis is a hellhole desert planet where anyone who I have to write this review without rhythm so that it won’t attract a worm.
In the distant future Arrakis is a hellhole desert planet where anyone who doesn’t die of thirst will probably be eaten by one of the giant sandworms. It’s also the only place where the precious spice melange can be found so it’s incredibly valuable, and the honorable Duke Leto Atreides has been ordered by the Padishah Emperor to take over control of Arrakis from his mortal enemies, the House Harkonnen. While this seems like a great offer on the surface the Duke and his people realize that it’s actually a cunning trap being set by the Emperor and Baron Harkonnen.
The only hope seems to be allying with the local populace called Fremen whose harsh environment has led them to become an incredibly tough and disciplined people, but they have their own vision of what Arrakis should be. They also have a prophecy about the coming of a messiah figure who will lead them to freedom, and the Duke’s son Paul looks like he may be exactly who they’ve been waiting for.
This is classic sci-fi that really deserves the label. What Frank Herbert accomplished in one novel is stunning because he built a fascinatingly detailed universe in which the politics, religion, economics, espionage, and military strategy are all equally important. He then blended these more grounded concepts with bigger sci-fi ideas like being able to use spice to see through space-time, and the scope of that encompasses trying to pick the proper path through various potential timelines as well as free will vs. fate.
I think one of the factors that helps this story stay timeless is that so much of it is based on what humanity becomes vs. trying to predict what futuristic technology would be like. This is a society that once had a war with machines and has since rejected any type of computers so people have developed to fill the gap with the help of the spice. The Mentats are trained to use data to predict outcomes. The Navigators of the Guild have used so much of the spice to help them move through space that they’re mutating. The all female Bene Gesserit have developed a variety of skills to place their members alongside positions of power to help advance their breeding scheme that spans generations. Herbert also cleverly came up with an excuse that explains why knives and hand-to-hand combat are so important with the idea of the personal body shields.
So even though we still got a good sci-fi’s novel worth of cool gadgets the emphasis is on what the people can do and how that’s developed over a long period of time. It also adds a lot of depth to the political dimensions because all of these groups have different agendas that cause them all to mistrust each other, but because they all fill these various roles none can exist without the others.
There are also parallels to our world that are still in play because the idea of a desert people caught up in the power struggles of various outsiders because of their valuable natural resource is an obvious allegory to the Middle East that still works today. Plus, the classic film Lawrence of Arabia came out a few years before Herbert published this, and you have to think that it had some influence on him because there are elements of the story that seem very much inspired by it.
While the whole concept of a Chosen One has gotten a bit worn over time that’s not Herbert’s fault, and this is still a fantastic sci-fi story with big ideas that also works as space opera as well as being an epic adventure story....more
There’s a story regarding the movie version of The Big Sleep that I love, and if it isn’t true, it should be. Supposedly, while working on adapting thThere’s a story regarding the movie version of The Big Sleep that I love, and if it isn’t true, it should be. Supposedly, while working on adapting the book the screenwriters (William Faulkner & Leigh Brackett) couldn’t figure out who killed one of the characters. So they called Raymond Chandler, and after thinking about it for a while, Chandler admitted that he’d completely forgotten to identify the killer of this person in the book and had no idea who did it. Since no one complained about the flaw in the book, the movie just repeated it and didn’t bother answering the question either.
And that’s the thing about The Big Sleep. The plot is overly complex, and it’s pretty clear that Chandler was making it up as he went. It’s still a crime classic because Philip Marlowe books weren’t about the plot, they were all about the character and the atmosphere.
Marlowe is hired by wealthy and dying General Sternwood to see what he can do about illegal gambling debts that his daughter Carmen has incurred. The general’s other daughter was married to a bootlegger named Rusty Regan that has disappeared, and the old man was fond of Rusty and misses his company. Everyone that Marlowe deals with assumes that he’s been hired to find Rusty, and the detective is soon caught up in a web of blackmail and several murders.
Chandler’s first book is a classic and would help redefine and reinvent the mystery genre. With Philip Marlowe, the prototype to the small time smart-ass private detective with an unbreakable code of honor would be established and it’s influenced countless fictional detectives since. Chandler’s no-nonsense, razor sharp cynical prose is still a delight to read....more
This is one of my favoritest books ever. In fact, put a gun to my head and tell me chose just one, and it’d be better than even money that Lonesome DoThis is one of my favoritest books ever. In fact, put a gun to my head and tell me chose just one, and it’d be better than even money that Lonesome Dove would be what I’d name.
It has the bonus of not only being an incredible book but also having an excellent companion piece in the television mini-series based on it that is one of the great all-time fusions of print and film. I can’t read this without hearing the voices of Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, Anjelica Huston, Chris Cooper, Danny Glover, Diane Lane and all the rest in my head.* So every couple of years, I do a rereading of the book and then I break out the DVD of the miniseries and I immerse myself in the perfection that is this story.
* I didn’t know this until I was looking up some stuff on the net for this review, but Lonesome Dove was virtually snubbed at the Emmy Awards. War & Remembrance beat it out for best mini-series. It only managed to take best director and a few other technical prizes. Worse yet, none of the actors nominated won. It’s a good thing I never got into any bar wagers about this, or I would have bet my house that Robert Duvall won best actor for a mini-series , and when I lost that, I would have bet my car that it had to be Tommy Lee Jones. Nope. Anjelica Huston and Diane Lane and Danny Glover all lost, too.
Hey, Emmy voters of 1990! WTF??
Why do I say the story is perfect? Start with the characters. Augustus McRae and Woodrow Call are two retired Texas Rangers who run a rinky-dink cattle company in a speck of a town called Lonesome Dove on the Texas/Mexico border. Gus and Call couldn’t be more unlikely friends. Call is a dour workaholic who has spent his life trying to be the perfect leader of men while Gus is a good-natured and lazy soul who likes to drink whiskey, play cards and spend time with Lonesome Dove’s beautiful but distant whore, Lorena Wood. Gus also delights in giving Call grief about young Newt, a boy they took in after the death of his mother. Newt’s mom was a whore that Call had visited regularly for a short time, and he may be the boy’s father but refuses to acknowledge it.
Their dull routine is broken when their old friend and fellow ex-Ranger Jake Spoon shows up. Jake, who is another candidate to be Newt's dad, is looking for a hiding place after accidentally shooting a man in Arkansas, and he fears that the sheriff, July Johnson, will be after him. Jake’s idle remark about having been to Montana and that it’s a cattleman’s paradise for the first men to risk the hostile Indians starts a fever in Call. He wants to be the first to drive a herd to the Montana territory and start a ranch there.
Call soon has started hiring men and stealing Mexican cattle for the drive. Gus says that Call is going to get them all killed just to have another adventure in a wild frontier, but he goes along to see his old sweetheart Clara who is living in Nebraska. Jake has taken up with Lorena and decides to travel along with the herd, much to Gus’s amusement and Call’s aggravation. The large cast of characters carry their hopes, fears and limitations with them out onto the vast plains of the American Midwest, and the drive turns out to be dangerous in ways they couldn’t even imagine.
This book has everything that anyone could want in a story. It’s epic in scale, but relatable through it’s shifting point of view through a variety of vivid characters. There’s intense western action and heart breaking love stories. It’s incredibly profound and amazingly simple. It’s hilarious at times but could reduce the toughest man in the world to tears at some points. And all of this is set during those last moments when America was still half-wild and anyone with the gumption to do so could throw together a herd of cattle and go out into the wilderness to make history or lose their scalp....more
This is officially the 1000th review I’ve written on Goodreads, and I wanted to make sure that the book would fit the occasion so that’s why I decidedThis is officially the 1000th review I’ve written on Goodreads, and I wanted to make sure that the book would fit the occasion so that’s why I decided to re-read this one. What better novel could I choose than this heartwarming tale of human kindness from one of the most optimistic men on the planet, Cormac McCarthy?*
* Note - That statement is sarcasm done in the interest of humor. 1000 reviews have taught me that I apparently have to explain that or someone with poor reading comprehension will troll me in the comments.
In 1980 Llewellyn Moss is just a working Texan living in a trailer home with his young wife, Carla Jean. One day Llewellyn goes out hunting and comes home with a lot more than meat for the stew pot after he stumbles across the aftermath of a huge drug deal gone wrong in the desert. Over $2 million in a satchel would be hard for anyone to resist taking with no one around to know better, but giving into temptation unleashes hell in the form of Anton Chigurh, a relentless enforcer who removes any obstacles in his path with a cattle bolt gun and a silenced .12 gauge. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell is also on Llewellyn’s trail, and he has to bear witness to the incredible violence unleashed by Chigurh and others. When Chigurh’s actions grow too much for the men who sent him they hire the savvy Carson Wells to stop him and recover the money.
An unsuspecting reader unfamiliar with the story or McCarthy’s work might expect this to be simply a crime novel, and that’s how a good chunk of the story plays at first. Llewellyn may seem like your average good-ole-boy, but he’s also a Vietnam vet who shows a fair amount of caution and smarts even when he’s forced to go on the run. He’s clear eyed enough to know that once he’s taken the money that there’s no going back, and he’s actually got some good survival instincts for this kind of thing. However, for all the determination and capability he shows, and even knowing that he’s put himself in the crosshairs of very dangerous people by taking the money, Llewellyn doesn’t truly understand what he’s gotten himself into.
The actions of those involved in the drug trade at that level have created an ocean of evil and chaos. The satchel full of money is just a bit of debris that washed up on shore that Llewellyn found like a piece of driftwood that he thinks he can scamper off with, and he’ll be fine as long as he stays off the beaches. However, something else lurks in those depths. Maybe it’s something new or maybe it’s something ancient that was awakened by all the noise around it, but this creature won’t stop at the water’s edge. Anton Chigurh strides out of that ocean on two legs but still fully capable of devouring anything in his path with no more thought than a shark gives any fish it chomps. He can swim or run, it makes no real difference to him as long as he gets to eat.
Sheriff Bell has been aware of existence of men like Chigurh, and he’s not sure how to stop them or even if they can be fought. Take a boat out on the those waters and you’ll probably get dragged down into the depths with them. Battle them on the shores and you’re still likely to get pulled in and chewed up. What really worries Bell is that it seems like water is rising, and a lot of people seem willing to dive in so he's pretty well convinced that the entire world is sliding into hell.
That’s why I consider this a next level book. The idea of a guy finding a bag of money and getting bad people on his trail has been done before. The characters also could be cliches. The regular guy with a tough streak, the bad ass pursuing him, the honest law man, the worried wife, the roguish hustler looking for an angle, etc etc. McCarthy is good and sneaky enough to let that play to the point where you think that you know how the story will end, and that’s when he pulls the rug out from under you. It’s also where the book really shifts from what seems like a straightforward thriller to a brooding contemplation about fate vs. free will as well as good vs. evil.
I could make some complaints about that might ordinarily knock it down from 5 to 4 stars for me. McCarthy’s style of doing a minimum of punctuation so that quotation marks aren’t used and apostrophes are seldom seem can cause confusion and often seems like a distracting affectation, but on the other hand this is a book about the normal rules not applying so it does seem to work in a way. The story also seems to be littered with anachronisms for 1980. There’s a mobile phone capable of fitting in a shirt pocket at a time when a cell phone was essentially a bag, and while ATMs existed I don’t know if they would have been common in south Texas at the time. A Glock pistol is mentioned, but they wouldn’t exist for at least another year or two. Plus, I’m no gun expert, but I don’t think it’s actually possible to silence a shotgun.
Despite that nitpicking this book hits an intersection of things I love. It’s a fusion of genres that draws on crime stories and westerns, but it ultimately becomes Very Serious Lit-A-Chur that’s done in a minimalist way that works very well for me. I’m also a deeply cynical person who agrees with McCarthy’s dim view of the world so I appreciate a story that isn’t blinding rainbows and unicorn farts. It also has the advantage of being turned into the fantastic flm by the Coen brothers which is one of my favorite book-to-screen adaptations. So I’ll stick with the 5 stars and consider it among the best of the best.
Since this #1000, I’ll also provide a little bonus content. The violence associated with the drug trade in Mexico and it’s creep into the US has sparked a lot of great fiction that can be genuinely chilling in it’s depiction of the way it can corrupt and utterly destroy people. If you’re into that sort of thing I also recommend:
- The film The Counselor was also written Cormac McCarthy. It isn’t nearly at the level of this one, but I do think it was unfairly savaged by critics. It’s not great, but it is good and shares similarities. You’ll also never look at Cameron Diaz in quite the same way again.
- Writer Don Winslow has been researching the history of the drug trade on the American/Mexican border for years, and he has two fantastic books that are essentially historical fiction that shine a lot on how US policies helped create that monster in The Power of the Dog and The Cartel. His Savages is also a black action comedy about people who think they can just dip their hands into that flow for profit and not get sucked into it. They are wrong.
- Sicario is a great and criminally overlooked film from last year that features a haunting performance by Benicio del Toro. It should also come with a warning label to abandon all hope before watching.
Thanks to all those who voted and commented without being a trollish asshat on my first 1000 reviews. It's genuinely appreciated, and I hope that you now all know better than to try and keep a bag of drug money you find in the desert....more
This book wrecked me the first time I read it. It was almost like having post traumatic stress syndrome. I found myself stAnd then depression set in….
This book wrecked me the first time I read it. It was almost like having post traumatic stress syndrome. I found myself staring blankly at the walls for days after I finished it the first time. I felt like calling my sister and telling her to keep my young niece locked in the house until she was at least 25. I remember meeting a friend for beers shortly after I finished it, and that he asked me what was wrong. When I tried to explain, he was skeptical. “You’re really this bummed over a book?” And yes, I was that bummed over a book.
Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro have had enough of the crazy-ass violence that has surrounded them for three novels. They still run their detective agency, but they’re strictly doing routine jobs with no chance of anyone getting hurt. They’re also finally relatively happy with their lives.
That changes when they get hired to look for Amanda McCready, a 4 year old girl who has been missing for days. The cops and media are all over it, but Amanda’s aunt and uncle want Patrick and Angie to join the search. The detectives are reluctant, partly because they don’t think that they can do anything that the cops aren’t doing already, and partly because neither of them is anxious to sign on for what is almost surely going to be a case that ends badly. However, the aunt’s desperate request for help gets the better of them. By the end of it all, they’ll really wish they would have just gone on vacation.
At this point, you’re probably thinking, “Kemper, you dumb bastard. You read a book about a child abduction by Dennis Lehane, a guy you knew wasn’t exactly Mr. Giggles. Were you really expecting a happy ending?”
Yes, I knew it was probably going to be a depressing story, but while I had braced myself for all kinds of terrible things happening to kids (and terrible things do happen), I wasn’t ready for the more banal cruelty and neglect that Lehane sprinkled the book with in regards to how some people treat their children.
Amanda’s mother, Helene, is a barfly and small-time doper who doesn’t do anything really bad enough to technically qualify as abuse, but Amanda was usually left to entertain herself in front of the TV. It’s the tiny details that are heartbreaking like when Patrick checks out Amanda’s room and finds a mattress on the floor, few toys, and no books of any kind, not even coloring books. Or when they talk to the people on Amanda’s t-ball team and everyone notes how she’s the quietest kid around who acts like she’s used to being ignored. You’d have to be one cold bastard not to be saddened by it.
This is one of the best crime novels I’ve read. Maybe even the best. But you won’t be skipping down the street and whistling any time soon after you read it.
**A Few Thoughts on the Movie Version**
I was not a fan of Ben Affleck. I thought he was a complete goober, and that Matt Damon must have wrote most of Good Will Hunting because I couldn’t imagine that Ben could read, let alone write anything. When I heard that he was going to be one of the people writing the adapted screenplay and directing the movie version of one of my favorite books, they probably heard my screams of outrage in Hollywood. When he cast his brother Casey as Patrick, I exhausted my extensive vocabulary of profanity and swore I’d never see the movie.
Wow. I was definitely wrong on that one. The movie version is not only one of the best crime novel adaptations I’ve seen, it’s just an incredibly good movie, period. (And Ben Affleck’s recent adaptation of another book The Town is also a very good flick so the guy has some very real skills.)
What surprised me most is that Affleck made a couple of very smart changes from the book to the movie. He revised Patrick and Angie from veteran smart-ass gun fighting private detectives to a couple of kids who mostly track down people skipping out on bills. That allowed him to introduce the audience to them, and really gave weight to the idea that these were two characters in way over their heads.
Affleck also tightened up the story to the point that I’d almost call it an improvement over the book’s plot. That’s incredibly rare. My only complaints are that Angie didn’t come across as Angie-like in the film version (although she still gets one of her best Big Damn Hero moments in the film), and that Bubba has a much smaller role. Plus, Bubba is portrayed more as just a bad-ass street guy rather than the one-man army he is in the book, but again, it works perfectly with the way Affleck chose to tell the story.
Now that he’s adapted two crime novels into top-notch movies, I’m ready to start my own chapter of the Ben Affleck fan club. Just as long as he doesn’t do any more Michael Bay movies. ...more
I bought a hardback copy of Mystic River when it first came out, and I’ve been recommending it to everyone I know who has the slightest interest in crI bought a hardback copy of Mystic River when it first came out, and I’ve been recommending it to everyone I know who has the slightest interest in crime fiction ever since. Oddly enough, it’s been almost 20 years since I first read the book, and I’d never revisited it until now. I love it, but there’s just so much Lehane-style depression that a fella can take.
In a working class Boston neighborhood during the mid-‘70s,three young boys encounter a couple of child molesters pretending to be cops. One of the kids, Dave Boyle, ends up being taken by them and endures several days of abuse before managing to escape. Twenty-five years later Dave still lives in the same old neighborhood with his wife and son. Jimmy Marcus didn’t get in the car with Dave. He went on to become the leader of a crew of thieves, but a stretch in prison and caring for his young daughter, Katie, set Jimmy straight. Now he runs a corner grocery store in the neighborhood. Sean Devine also avoided the pedophiles, and he’s grown up to be a homicide investigator for the state police while trying to cope with his crumbling marriage.
When Jimmy’s daughter Katie is brutally murdered, it’s a shock to the neighborhood. As Sean investigates the crime Jimmy has to deal with his grief. Dave was one of the last people to see Katie alive when she was out at a bar with some girlfriends, and he had no reason to hurt her. Yet, his wife Celeste knows that he came home late that night covered in blood…
A recurring theme that Lehane explores is the damage done by crime and violence, and that’s the thing that lingers over this book and makes it great. Jimmy is convinced that something in his own past was the reason Katie was killed even as he spent years trying to be ‘good’. Sean’s career as a policeman has made him misanthropic, thinking that the world is filled with stupid people killing each for stupid reasons, and it’s soured his personal life. Both of them are also haunted by how close they came to sharing Dave’s fate, and Dave himself refuses to talk about what happened to him even as many who know what happened consider him ‘damaged goods’.
Lehane takes all of these factors and adds a few more like what gentrification was doing to their old neighborhood to create one of the ultimate character driven pieces of crime fiction. The ultimate resolution and what happens both because of Dave getting in that car as a young boy and Katie’s murder seem like tragedies that beget more tragedies in a long string of unintended consequences.
Considering the ending and reading this now, nearly 20 years after it was first published, made me think that there could be another story by now. If Lehane went back now and told us what happened next, I’d want to read that book....more
Someday I’m going to get around to putting together my list of the greatest mystery/crime novels I’ve read. When I do, this one is going to be very neSomeday I’m going to get around to putting together my list of the greatest mystery/crime novels I’ve read. When I do, this one is going to be very near the top.
Matt Scudder is still working as an unlicensed private detective, and he is approached by an upscale prostitute named Kim. She wants to quit the business but is nervous about telling her pimp, Chance. Kim hires Matt to break the news to Chance and gauge his reaction to see if he’ll try to keep her working.
After Matt tracks Chance down, he’s surprised to find that the pimp seems reasonable and doesn’t object to Kim leaving. Matt passes the word along to Kim and thinks his work is done. Days later, he’s shocked to learn that Kim has been brutally murdered.
Matt’s also got a personal crisis going on. His drinking has started taking a big toll on his health, and he’s had enough blackouts to finally admit that he’s got a problem. So he is attending AA meetings and trying to stay sober as he tracks Kim’s killer.
From what I’ve read, Lawrence Block was originally going to end the Scudder series here, and it would have been a natural stopping place by the end of the book. Instead, this became the end of the first phase of Matt’s story. The mystery in this one is good as usual, but what makes this one special is Matt’s battle with the bottle.
The usually steady Matt is jittery and on edge. He attends AA meetings and is often fascinated by the stories of others, but won’t talk himself. He’s constantly aware of his craving for booze, but is also always trying to rationalize that it’s not that big of a deal.
It’s not helping that this was written during the early ‘80s when random murders in New York were reaching record levels. Matt compulsively reads the newspapers and is horrified by the prospect of violent death that seems to lurk around every corner, and his interactions with a cynical cop aren’t doing much for his state of mind.
Block’s depiction of a Matt struggling to come to terms with his alcoholism is one of the best stories about addiction I’ve read, and the backdrop of a decaying New York overrun by crime makes you feel Matt’s desperation. It seems like drinking is the only sane response to the madness he sees all around him, but he’s honest enough to admit that he’s really just trying to find a reason to get drunk. The real mystery in the book isn’t about who killed Kim, it’s whether Matt will ever be able to get sober....more
*sniff* Oh, you surprised me. Is it time for the review? Just a second. What? Crying? Me? Don’t be ridiculous. I was just ….uh…chopping some onions…..*sniff* Oh, you surprised me. Is it time for the review? Just a second. What? Crying? Me? Don’t be ridiculous. I was just ….uh…chopping some onions…..and I’ve got a cold….then somebody broke into my kitchen and pepper sprayed me….I certainly wouldn’t be shedding a few manly tears over a Stephen King novel, would I? Oh, fine. You spend almost twenty years reading this series and tell me you got through the conclusion without a lump in your throat. Liar.
Roland and his posse of gunslingers have to wrap up their business on Earth so they can get back to Mid-World. In our world, they’ll have to safeguard the rose in New York by founding a corporation dedicated to its protection, some of them will have to battle a very nasty nest of vampires and low men, and Susannah has to give birth to something that is supposed to be the end of all of them. The ones who can make it back to Mid-World will have to launch a desperate attack against overwhelming odds to stop the Crimson King’s breakers from destroying one of the last Beams holding the Tower and all of reality in place, and if they survive that, there’s a Very Important Person who still needs saving.
The Dark Tower series was written in fits and starts by King from the time he was in college to wrapping up the whole thing in a three book burst following his close encounter with a minivan. He didn’t always know where it was going, he littered many of his other books with DT tie-in stories, and he famously claimed for years not to know how it would end. So the series as whole isn’t the most tightly plotted thing you’ll ever read, and at the end King focused on delivering on the emotional journey rather than trying to wrap up every loose end he had hanging out there.
He chose wisely.
I consider this King’s flawed masterpiece. Some have focused on the ‘flawed’ part of that. I decided to dwell on the ‘masterpiece’ side of the equation. I’ll go a little more in depth on that in this spoiler section, but for any newbies not reading that, I’ll just say that all the years waiting between books turned out to be worth it.
The biggest let down to me in this was that the whole Modred thing was so anti-climatic. His birth was a huge focus in the final three books, yet in the end all he managed to do was send poor Oy to a grisly death.
In fact, there’s precious little satisfaction to be found in any the endings of the major villains. Modred was dying of food poisoning anyhow. Oy spoils his attack and Roland dispatches him with ease. The Crimson King is just crazy old man on a balcony throwing bombs around, and he gets taken out by a pencil eraser wielded by a kid with no tongue.
Maybe worst of all was the ending of Randall Flagg a/k/a Walter a/k/a Martin. This one was especially galling because not only had he been Roland’s nemesis, he’d been a boogeyman in King’s books for years. Yet he gets eaten by Modred the baby. That sucked.
I’m still not sure about King writing himself into the story either. I don’t think he did it out of ego because he made himself look pretty awful overall, but at some point after his accident, I think he couldn’t separate what he’d gone through from the story it inspired him to finally finish. It didn’t ruin the series for me, but I kind of wish he’d come up with something else.
Having gotten that out of my system, let’s proceed to:
The Masterpiece
I loved the whole concept of the Tet Corporation, and I continue to hope that someday King will give us a book detailing its war against N. Central Positronics and Sombra. I could have read several more chapters regarding that piece.
The character deaths were incredibly well done and still painful the third time through this. We’ve known since Roland let Jake fall into the abyss in The Gunslinger that this quest to find the Dark Tower would cost Roland dearly, but I was not prepared for how high the price turned out to be.
Which brings us to my favorite part, the ending. The idea that Roland has been stuck in an endless cycle of climbing the Tower only to find himself back at the beginning of the series seems kind of obvious in retrospect, but caught me completely by surprise. As King noted in the afterword, it’s not a happy ending, but it’s the right ending. I agree with that. Roland’s ultimate damanation wasn’t that he sacrificed his friends to get to the Tower, it’s that he risked the Tower again by pressing on to satisfy his own obsession to see it after it had already been saved that puts him in his own personal hell.
I also like how that sneaky bastard King made us all complicit with Roland’s fate. By offering us the chance to opt out and leave the book knowing that Roland reached the Tower and that Susannah was reunited with Eddie and Jake in another version of New York, King made us all Roland by proxy. We couldn’t resist. We had to know what was in the Tower. And when we find out, we all share Roland’s fate of going back to the beginning. (hide spoiler)] ...more
You know what’s really scary? Getting sick while you’re reading the first part of The Stand. Just try running a fever, going through a box of tissues You know what’s really scary? Getting sick while you’re reading the first part of The Stand. Just try running a fever, going through a box of tissues and guzzling the better part of a bottle of NyQuil while Stephen King describes the grisly deaths of almost every one on Earth from a superflu. On top of feeling like crap, you'll be terrified. Bonus!
After a bio-engineered virus that acts like a revved up cold escapes from a U.S. government lab, it takes only weeks for almost all of humanity to succumb to the disease. A handful of survivors are mysteriously immune and begin having strange dreams, some of which are about a very old woman called Mother Abigail asking them to come see her. More disturbing are nightmares about a mysterious figure named Randall Flagg also known as the Dark Man or the Walkin’ Dude.
As they make their way through an America almost entirely devoid of people, the survivors begin to unite and realize that the flu was just the beginning of their problems. While some are drawn to the saintly Mother Abigail in Boulder Colorado who tells them that they have been chosen by God, others have flocked to Flagg in Las Vegas who is determined to annihilate all those who refuse to pledge their allegiance to him.
If King would have just written a book about a world destroyed by plague and a small number of people struggling in the aftermath, it probably would have been a compelling story. What sets this one apart is the supernatural element. Flagg is the embodiment of evil and chaos. He's a mysterious figure who has been giving the wrong people the push needed for them to make things worse for everyone, and he sees the plague as his chance to fulfill his own destiny as a wrecker of humanity.
And on the other side, we have God. Yep, that God. The Big Cheese himself. But this isn’t some kindly figure in a white robe with a white beard or George Burns or Morgan Freeman. This is the Old Testament God who demands obedience and worship while usually rewarding his most faithful servants with gruesome deaths.
King calls this a tale of dark Christianity in his forward, and one of the things I love about this book is that it does feel like a Biblical story, complete with contradictions and a moves-in-mysterious-ways factor. Stories don’t get much more epic than this, and King does a great job of depicting the meltdown of the world through the stories of a variety of relateable characters. (Larry Underwood remains among my favorite King creations.)
One of my few complaints is that this features a lot of King’s anti-technology themes that he’d use in several books like Cell or The Dark Tower series. We’re told repeatedly that the ‘old ways’ like trying to get the power back on in Boulder are a ‘death trip’. The good guys gather in the Rocky Mountains, but if they try to get the juice going so they won’t freeze to death in the winter, they’re somehow acting in defiance of God’s will and returning to the bad habits? Not all tech is bad tech, Mr. King. Nature is a bitch and will kill your ass quicker than the superflu.
Here’s another thing I’m not wild about. When this was published in the late ‘70s, the bean counters at King’s publishers had decided that the book as written would be too pricey in hardback and no one would pay a whopping $13 for a Stephen King hardback. So King cut about three hundred pages.
Around 1990 after it had become apparent that King could publish his shopping list as a best seller, he put those pages back in and released the uncut version. Which I’m fine with. The original stuff was cut for a financial reason, not an editorial one, and there’s some very nice bits of story added in. If King would have stopped there, we would have had a great definitive final version as originally created by the author.
Unfortunately, he seemed to catch a case of Lucasitis and decided to update the story a bit and change its original time frame from 1980 to 1990. I’m not sure why that seemed necessary to him. Yes, the book was a bit dated by then, but it was of its time. He didn’t rewrite the text (Which I’m grateful for.), but just stuck in some references to Madonna and Ronald Reagan and Spuds McKenzie.
This led to a whole bunch of anachronisms. Would students in 1990 call soldiers ’war pigs’? Someone in New York picks up a phone book to look up the number to call an ambulance instead of dialing 911? A song called Baby, Can You Dig Your Man is a huge hit? None of it quite fits together. There's also a layer of male chauvinism and lack of diversity that you can overlook in a book written in the late '70s, but seems out of place for a book set and updated for 1990.
The things that irritate me are still far outweighed by one of my favorite stories of an apocalyptic battle between good and evil.
I’m also glad to get a long overdue audio edition of this book. Great narration and 40+ hours of end of the world horror make for a damn fine listening experience....more
James Ellroy has called me a panty sniffer to my face. Granted, he calls everyone at his book signings a variety of colorful names, but I still like tJames Ellroy has called me a panty sniffer to my face. Granted, he calls everyone at his book signings a variety of colorful names, but I still like the idea that I’ve been personally mock-insulted by one of my favorite authors. This is his best novel, and my love for it is pretty much unconditional.
As proof of my devotion: My internet alias is from a character in it, and I’ve got an autographed copy of it sitting on my shelf along with an signed copy of the sequel, The Cold Six Thousand. The trilogy completes with the release of Blood's A Rover next week so I’m going back through the first two books, and it’d been a few years since I’d read American Tabloid. It was even better than I remembered.
This is Ellroy’s freaky take on American history from the late ‘50s through the JFK assassination, and it features Jack and Bobby Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, and Jimmy Hoffa. It’s got the Mafia and the CIA, Cuba and Cuban exiles, the 1960 presidential election, the Bay of Pigs, the civil rights movement, and some heroin trade, just for laughs.
Ellroy uses one of his unholy main character trinities of Bad White Men doing Bad Things, but instead of limiting the action to post-war Los Angeles like he did with the LA Quartet of crime stories, he uses his three fictional characters chasing their own twisted obsessions and ambitions to probe the darker moments of a particularly juicy slice of American history.
Kemper Boyd is ex-FBI, who begins spying on the Kennedy’s for J. Edgar Hoover, and ends up devoted to Jack, even as he is moonlighting for both the CIA and the Mafia. He wants all his masters to unite in a play to oust Castro so that his behind-the-scenes schemes will make him wealthy enough to be just like a Kennedy, but he has to make sure to keep his loyalties compartmentalized.
Ward Littell is Kemper’s former partner and friend, and is still with the FBI. He hates the Mob and wants nothing more to go to work for Bobby Kennedy to get away from J. Edgar Hoover’s obsession with persecuting harmless leftist groups. Even though he’s considered weak and cowardly, he shocks himself and everyone around him with the lengths he goes to fulfill his dream of being a Mob buster for RFK.
Big Pete Bondurant is a former LA cop and works as a criminal handyman for Howard Hughes. He runs blackmail divorce shakedowns and does the odd contract killing for the likes of Jimmy Hoffa in his spare time. Once arrested by Kemper and Ward, he likes Kemper’s style but hates Ward with a passion. Pete thinks he can ride shotgun to history by becoming Kemper’s partner in his various Cuban schemes, and he likes the sound of that rather than being Howard Hughes’s errand boy.
As all three of these men scheme and plot and commit horrible crimes to become more like the powerful men they are beholden to, they keep rubbing up against big events and desperately try to shape them to their will. What they all find out the hard way is that the people they’re dealing with didn’t become who they are by getting fooled by the men they regard as useful but inferior.
One of the things I absolutely love is Ellroy’s complete lack of buy-in to the JFK/Camelot bullshit. The myth goes that JFK was a glorious leader who was cut down because he stood up to the Bad Men in the country who wanted to take us into Vietnam. (An odd story considering that JFK is the one who started committing troops to Vietnam.) Ellroy brilliantly points out that the reality is that JFK was the son of a rich and corrupt man, and in one of the weirdest twists every, probably owed his presidency to the very people that he then let his zealot brother prosecute. (In all likelihood, the Mafia helped JFK take Illinois because of promises from guys like Frank Sinatra that JFK was reasonable.) RFK hated the Mob but turned a blind eye to the CIA recruiting Mafia contacts for trying to kill Fidel Casto. The Cuban exiles felt terribly betrayed when not only did JFK not fully commit to the Bay of Pigs invasion, he turned on them in the aftermath by having the Feds bust their training camps in the South.
If you believe in a conspiracy about JFK’s death, Ellroy points out that the guy might have brought it on himself by betraying so many people. And if there was a conspiracy, it probably wasn’t some Oliver Stone paranoid fantasy about some all-powerful military-industrial complex, it was probably a group of these type of guys, motivated by general JFK hatred that knew that all the embarrassing entanglements of JFK’s legacy would keep a real investigation from ever being done. (I personally don’t think there was a conspiracy, but JFK surely pissed off a lot of dangerous people by having his cake and eating it too and it makes for a great story.)
This is Ellroy at his best. Fully in control of his crazy staccato-brilliant-writer-with-ADD- style, and wildly spinning plots and counter plots with over the top violence and history as the backdrop.
Fair warning for those who haven’t read, there’s a lot of ethnic slurs in Ellroy’s work and he’s taken some heat for this over the years. He defends this by pointing out that he’s writing about evil white guys doing horrible things 50 years ago. They wouldn’t have been politically correct. He’s got a point, but it is pretty jarring reading in this day and age....more
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