They say you can’t go home again, but that’s not true. However, when you do go back you may find something new there, like a meth lab.
Emily has droppeThey say you can’t go home again, but that’s not true. However, when you do go back you may find something new there, like a meth lab.
Emily has dropped out of college and been forced to return to her former Arkansas hometown and live with her parents. Feeling like a failure and with student loan debt now hanging over her, Emily tries to find a decent job, but the best that she can do is working at a fast-food joint. She’s shocked to learn that her former best friend/secret crush, Jody, has also returned to town and now has a baby. Emily has never gotten over her romantic feelings for Jody, and she tries to reconnect with her even when it becomes clear that Jody is involved in something shady. Unable to resist her attraction to Jody even when she sees plenty of warning signs, Emily gets steadily more involved even as she tries to rationalize what’s happening.
This is a rural crime story that really gets the small-town character vibe right. You really feel Emily’s sense of being trapped with no money and no opportunities as well as her embarrassment at having to return home and dealing with people she’d thought she’d left behind. She resents her mother’s judgements even as she also hates feeling like she isn’t living up to her standards.
Emily’s also struggling in dealing with her sexuality because she realized she was infatuated with Jody long ago but by failing to come to terms with who she is she’s never been able to move on and get past that high school first-love thing. She’s at the point where she knows the truth about herself but can’t bear to admit it even if most of those around her already know. Jody is certainly aware of it, and the question is whether she cares for Emily or just uses her feelings to manipulate her.
Another interesting aspect here is how the crime part of the novel is handled. There’s a heart-breaking realism to it all in which running a meth lab isn’t a glamorous life of drug kingpins, stacks of cash, and wars with biker gangs or cartels. Instead there’s a kind of slow inevitable slide towards tragedy with a bunch of poor, desperate people feeling like they don’t have other options making a series of bad choices that keep leading them deeper into trouble.
Kelly Ford is one of the authors I learned about why attending Bouchercon last year when she was on a panel about modern noir, and I’d been meaning to read this for a while. The book lived up to what I was hoping for after hearing her talk about it a bit, and she’s written a bleak portrait of small-town despair and broken hearts....more
I received a free advance copy from the publisher for review.
Lee Crowe is the kind of private investigator who isn’t above taking a shady job from a dI received a free advance copy from the publisher for review.
Lee Crowe is the kind of private investigator who isn’t above taking a shady job from a defense attorney as part of an effort to intimidate a federal witness. While working on that project he comes across the body of a wealthy young Claire Gravesend who fell from a roof and smashed into a Rolls Royce.
Damn, but the rich even get to die in luxury.
Claire had been acting oddly before dropping out of sight. The police are calling it a suicide, but her mother isn’t convinced and hires Lee to find out the truth. Investigating Claire quickly proves to be dangerous business, and when Lee makes a shocking discovery things really start getting weird.
One of the things I loved about this one is that we start with what seems to be a gritty neo-noir tale about a morally ambiguous private detective, and that’s the thread that’s maintained even when the story starts shifting into other territory. While there are elements of other genres brought in, the style and themes are constant throughout the book.
That really works because the main draw here is the character of Crowe who we eventually learn is a disgraced former lawyer who was once on the doorstep of real wealth and power, but he lost it all once his well-connected wife got bored with him. Now Crowe seems to have few lines he won’t cross like after discovering Claire’s body he takes a picture and sells it to a tabloid for a nice payday.
Despite apparently having no moral code we see throughout the book that Crowe is more complex than a guy willing to do any dirty job for money. Having once had a glimpse behind the curtain of privilege to see how rigged the game is he has no compunction about cheating himself. Even as he’s willing to work for the benefit of the wealthy there’s also resentment simmering in the background, and once he starts learning the truth about Claire Gravesend he’s capable of outrage and wanting to see some justice done.
Jonathan Moore has very quickly become one of my favorite writers, and I think this is his best one yet. There’s some very slick genre fusion going on here along with good character work, and the plot makes it a compulsive page turner. But I think the most impressive thing is how he creates an almost dreamlike atmosphere at times, and yet also blend that with much more grounded elements. This is most definitely a hard boiled crime novel in tone, but there are also scenes that would be right at home in a David Lynch or Stanley Kubrick movie. It’s an intriguing mix.
This is one of the best books I’ve read this year, and I’d also highly recommend all these other ones by Moore:
Lee Scarborough is a former football star who has been failing as a salesman. When he meets a woman by chance he gets embroiled in a scheme to recoverLee Scarborough is a former football star who has been failing as a salesman. When he meets a woman by chance he gets embroiled in a scheme to recover $120,000 of stolen money.
Guess how that goes?
This is a tasty slice of pulp fiction that has a unique hook and provides plenty of twists and turns. The book doesn’t end anywhere near where you think it will based on the early chapters, and there’s plenty of paranoia fueling the plot by the end of it. I hadn’t read any of Charles Williams’ work before this, but now I’d like to check out more. ...more
Literary agent Josh Blake is having a bad day at the office. He’s hungover, one of his secretaries is late, and a very pushy aspiring writer won’t takLiterary agent Josh Blake is having a bad day at the office. He’s hungover, one of his secretaries is late, and a very pushy aspiring writer won’t take no for an answer. Oh, and he also finds his partner murdered in his office and their most valuable contract that’s about to be worth a fortune in movie rights is missing.
Sounds like somebody has a case of the Mondays!
This is a hard boiled mystery novel that has everything you’d expect from this kind of thing written in the ‘50s. Ed McBain created a solid noir character in the jerkish Blake who is more concerned with the missing contract than the dead partner. There’s a suspicious cop, some surprisingly polite thugs, and several gorgeous dames thrown into the mix, and it works well enough as an entertaining story. Good, but not inspired would be my usual judgement on it.
Yet there’s a surprising little bit right at the end that puts a whole new light on everything, and lifts it up a notch. I won’t quite go 4 stars on it, but it’d be an easy 3.5 if Goodreads would let us do that....more
Kit Owens is a bright high school girl didn’t think much about her future until she met Diane Fleming when Diane’s dreams She blinded me with science!
Kit Owens is a bright high school girl didn’t think much about her future until she met Diane Fleming when Diane’s dreams of a career in chemistry rub off on her. The two young women become both study buddies and rivals that push each other to excel until Diane confides a dark secret that shatters their friendship. Years later Kit is working in a lab and hoping to score one of the few slots available in a prestigious project when Diane is hired by her boss. Kit struggles to deal with the return of Diane to her life, and the fallout from that has unintended consequences.
Mighty Megan Abbott takes on a lot in this one and delivers on almost all of. What’s most impressive to me is how well she establishes the tone for each aspect. Whether it’s detailing Kit’s life with limited prospects as an underachieving kid in a dead-end town or getting into the nuances of the cutthroat politics hidden under a thin veneer of civility in the lab you completely understand and buy into every bit of it. When Abbott has Kit realizing how close she is to either achieving a critical next step in her career resulting in a vastly improved lifestyle or is about to come up short after all her hard work to get there you know exactly what’s driving her.
At the heart of all it is this complex relationship between Kit and Diane, and that’s where the noir part comes into it. I especially liked the revelations at the end that explain so much of what occurred throughout the rest of the novel....more
Two strangers meet at a small town bar. One is a sexy and mysterious redhead. The other is a handsome man who says he’s just passing through. That’s eTwo strangers meet at a small town bar. One is a sexy and mysterious redhead. The other is a handsome man who says he’s just passing through. That’s either the set-up to a dirty joke or the start of a noir novel.
I’ve been meaning to read Laura Lippman for a while now, and this one was right up my alley. I don’t want to say too much about the story because I think it’s one of those that the less you know the better going in. Suffice it to say that there’s plenty of twists and turns with both the main characters, Polly and Adam, hiding their own secrets and spending a lot of time wondering if they can trust the other even as neither of them can resist the attraction they have.
The plot is exceedingly clever with a James Cain feel to it, and that’s obviously deliberate since he’s even referenced. It’s one of those books where even the reader feels unsure of their footing as you’re constantly reevaluating each of them as new revelations come out. It’s also interesting that there’s actually very little action within the book. Most of what would be considered ‘the exciting parts’ happen before the book begins, and the biggest event that occurs essentially takes place between chapters. We don’t even know the truth about that until the end. In fact, a great deal of this just takes place in the heads of the people as they think about their secrets and suspicions even as they go about the routines they fall into over the course of the story.
That’s where the character work shines, and Lippmann shows a real flair at walking the line of leaving a reader unsure of what to think of both of them. Is one the victim and one the villain? Are they both villains? Both victims? What’s great is that the more you learn the less sure you’ll be about making any judgments about either one of them....more
Down these mean streets a man must go. Or to be more accurate in the case of Sammy ‘Two Toes’ Tiffin – down these mean streets a man must limp.
It’s 19Down these mean streets a man must go. Or to be more accurate in the case of Sammy ‘Two Toes’ Tiffin – down these mean streets a man must limp.
It’s 1947 in San Francisco where Sammy is a good guy with some skeletons in his closet who works as a bartender which is how he meets a beautiful blonde named Stilton, a/k/a the Cheese. As far as Sammy is concerned the Cheese stands alone, and he falls for her instantly. Unfortunately, his attempts at romance are hindered by his sleazy boss insisting that he procure some women for an Air Force general who wants to take them into the woods to provide entertainment for an elite club made up of influential men. Sammy is also working on get-rich-quick scheme that involves selling a deadly snake, there’s a racist cop causing trouble, and the news has reports about a strange incident in Roswell, New Mexico.
Since this was Christopher Moore writing a book called Noir I wasn’t expecting it to be James Cain or Jim Thompson. However, I was kind of hoping that he might stretch himself a little and be a bit less Christopher Moore. That's why I ultimately found this kind of disappointing because he gives it a try at first, but quickly throws it out the window to just write what he always does.
That’s the shame of it because the first couple of chapters do come across as Moore actually satirizing a noir novel with overblown pulpy language and a bunch of really solid jokes based on the concept. If he’d have stuck with that and resisted the urge to just do his usual thing of introducing the weird and/or supernatural he might have really had something. But then we get to the stuff about the aliens, and while it’s still got some laughs, it’s also a formula that Moore has done in pretty much every book.
I also found the shifting POV to be problematic. We start off with Sammy in the first person which lets him do the parody of the classic hard boiled crime novel which I wanted more of. But then Moore shifts to a third person narration which we later find out is coming from a very unlikely source. So the book starts off with this distinct voice which I was into, but when it shifts into something else which is when it becomes standard Moore. Then he tries to go back to first person Sammy telling the story, but he’d lost the tone of what he started with. Which was what I liked best and wanted more of.
It’s not a complete waste of time. Moore is just inherently funny and there are a lot of solid gags and lines that made me chuckle. But I wish he’d managed to actually write a noir parody instead of just doing the thing that comes easiest to him. If he wanted to write something in this time period and have aliens in it then why not do a pulpy '50s sci-fi kind of thing rather than claiming in the title that it's going to be a genre that it has almost nothing to do with?...more
I received a free advance copy of this for review from the publisher.
Gary and Beth Foster are a nice couple who truly love each other, and their idea I received a free advance copy of this for review from the publisher.
Gary and Beth Foster are a nice couple who truly love each other, and their idea of a good time is playing Scrabble or watching Netflix. They don’t have a lot of money, but they’re happy just being together. Now that Beth has finally gotten pregnant after years of trying they feel like things couldn’t get any better. Which is exactly the point when life tends to kick nice people in the junk.
After Beth collapses while out shopping she’s quickly diagnosed with a particularly nasty brain tumor that will barely allow her to give birth before dying, but there’s a new procedure in Europe that might extend her life for years. Unfortunately, it will cost them $200,000 to try it, and they don’t have anywhere near that kind of cash. As hope begins to fade Gary receives a phone call with an offer for him to earn all the money they need. The catch is that he’ll have to murder someone to get it.
This debut novel from Tom Hunt is the kind of high concept hook that has put many a book on the best seller list and sold a lot of tickets to movies, and there’s a reason for that – it works. Or at least it works when there’s some talent behind the idea, and there’s definitely talent here. Hunt’s got a way of laying it all out in the straight forward fashion that many a crime writer has, and he’s also got the knack of making that style compelling.
There’s two things that really stood out for me. First, is that there’s a good amount of time spent on the efforts that are done by Beth and Gary with the help of their friends and family to come up with the money. They put pleas on the internet, hold events like hot dog dinners, and tell their story to the media all as part of the desperate fundraising only to realize that after all that it's not even close to being enough. It’s a bleak portrait of how Americans often have to resort to glorified begging to get medical treatment.
The other part is the story of Otto, the man asking Gary to commit a murder for hire. Otto is a ex-con who runs a pawn shop as a front for his real business of dealing drugs, and he’s got a huge problem that has made him desperate enough to try and use an average guy as a killer. We get Otto’s story told in parallel, and his criminal underworld couldn’t be more different than Gary’s suburban life. The contrast between the two is well done and underlines the desperate measures that both men feel driven to even if they have nothing else in common. On the downside Gary’s bland niceness is too much at times, and his hand wringing about the morality of murder does get a little old after a while. It was never enough to completely take me out of the story though.
What seems like an airplane read on the surface takes turns that ultimately make me think of this of outright noir. It’s solid crime story, and I’ll certainly check out what Tom Hunt does next....more
I received a free copy of this for review from NetGalley.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Some seemingly law-abiding citizens stumble across sI received a free copy of this for review from NetGalley.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Some seemingly law-abiding citizens stumble across something valuable and decide to keep it even though they know it will be dangerous to do so. Oh, you have heard it? Yeah, it’s been around a while.
Zach is a former NFL player turned television announcer, and Steve is his old friend and investment manager. They take an annual hunting trip to Montana where their buddy Curt acts as their guide while they camp in the woods. The guys are having trouble enjoying their vacation since Zach has run up huge gambling debts in Vegas and needs cash quickly while Wall Street shenanigans have wiped out the savings Steve was managing for him. This has also put Steve into a very deep hole that might ruin his family.
Zach comes across the crash of a small plane with hundreds of kilos of cocaine in it, and Steve immediately seizes on the idea of taking drugs and selling them as a way of getting out of their mutual financial crisis. Because there’s no chance that an organization capable of filling a plane with millions of dollars of drugs will ever come looking for it, right?
Despite Zach’s reservations they haphazardly start a scheme that involves keeping the secret from Curt. Things escalate quickly. Mistake piles upon mistake. And just like that Zach and Steve are in deep trouble and soon realize that they can’t even trust each other anymore.
The trope of an ordinary person finding a bag of money or drugs which takes them straight down the path to hell is one I generally appreciate. However, this one seemed pretty clichéd. It starts out with a very similar set-up to Scott Smith’s A Simple Plan and then quickly morphs into an attempt at doing something like Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. (And those are two way better books I’d recommend if you’re in the mood for this kind of thing.) From there we cycle through all the checkpoints you’d expect to cross. You’ve got your ruthless enforcer from the drug cartel, a dedicated cop, some innocent people getting screwed over, etc. etc.
There’s also the odd way that it veers into social commentary and existential angst. Many a good crime novel includes these elements, but the writing here just seems to swing wildly from following the plot to going off on tangents about the environment, the perils of capitalism, and the way everyday life can chip at the soul. Those are all subjects that can easily and naturally pop up in a book like this, but the way they’re presented here often seems clumsy and ill-timed.
The most original aspect are the characters of Zach and Steve. The set-up leans in the direction of treating the football hero Zach as the good guy led astray by the fast talking Steve, but we get a more interesting perspective as we learn more about them. Zach is actually more of a hypocrite and selfish guy then he first appears while Steve isn’t quite the Wall Street d-bag you’d assume from the beginning. The way they almost accidently create an escalating mess is a great depiction of how quickly things can fall apart for someone once they decide to cross the line.
Despite its shortcomings I’m still a sucker for these kind of crime stories, and there was some very good character work done as well as some nicely atmospheric stuff that takes us from the snowy woods to the streets of Las Vegas. It’s not bad, but I can think of several better ones....more
If this book actually were a cocktail you’d probably find it was pretty smooth going down, but think that it’s not all that strong while drinking. TheIf this book actually were a cocktail you’d probably find it was pretty smooth going down, but think that it’s not all that strong while drinking. Then you’d be surprised by the twist you found at the bottom of the glass, and when you tried to stand up you’d fall over and realize that you were completely shitfaced after all.
Joan Medford is burying her husband, but since he was an abusive drunk she isn’t exactly upset that he crashed and burned in a drunk driving accident. However, he’s left her stone broke, and his sister is using Joan’s inability to provide for her small son Tad as an excuse to have the kid stay with her as the first step towards claiming custody of him. Desperate for cash Joan takes a gig as a scantily clad cocktail waitress in a lounge where her looks draw the attention of plenty of male customers including the rich but sickly Earl K. White who starts dropping huge tips on her. Joan quickly sees an opportunity to help her get her son back if she can make White fall for her, but she’s torn between working towards that goal and her attraction to a handsome rogue named Tom Barclay. She’s also got a problem with a pesky policeman who thinks that she was somehow responsible for his husband’s death.
This is one of those Hard Case Crime offerings where they’ve dug up some unpublished treasure, and this time it’s from noir master James Cain. Cain wrote and rewrote multiple versions of the novel until his death, and it’s a helluva interesting and tricky read. You can see elements of his best known books like Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Mildred Pierce, but what’s interesting here is how he’s almost subverting his previous work by heading down similar paths yet still making The Cocktail Waitress something different.
It’s a subtle thing, and a good portion of the book just seems to be this hard luck woman struggling to overcome her circumstances and people’s perceptions of her. The police and her husband’s family think she might be a killer. Many people assume that she’s willing to flirt and flash some cleavage for tips, and maybe even do more than that. When she gets into the relationship with White it seems like a classic gold digger scenario. And yet the first person narration that Joan gives us make it seem like she’s just a decent practical woman trying to do her best to improve her situation enough to make sure she gets her son back.
The great thing about the writing here is that by the end you’re still sympathizing with Joan until the point where you look back and realize that there’s a whole lot of fishy stuff in her story. Is she an unreliable narrator who has been feeding the reader a line the entire time? Are we just as big of suckers as the rubes that Joan works for tips? Or is it really just a string of bad luck that is making Joan look bad, and she is just trying to set the record straight as she claims?
Those are the kind of questions you’ll find yourself asking, and it’s the way that Cain made Joan come alive as a character so that you’re not entire sure that makes this a fresh approach to a classic noir story....more
Because of its format some might say that this is fantastic crime comic. That’s true, but I’m going to take it a step further and say that it’s some oBecause of its format some might say that this is fantastic crime comic. That’s true, but I’m going to take it a step further and say that it’s some of the best noir I’ve ever read which I’d rate right up there with the likes of James Cain or Jim Thompson.
Seriously, it’s that good.
It’s got the ultimate noir setting of post-war Los Angeles, and the plot involves a screenwriter with a drinking problem knowing about the cover up of the murder of an actress that the studio fixer has made look like a suicide. With that as a starting point we meet a variety of characters from despicable producers, publicists who put a glossy coat of paint over ugly truths, movie stars with secrets, blacklisted writers, commie hunting Feds, and even appearances from real people like Clark Gable and Dashiell Hammett.
There’s been no shortage of wannabe James Ellroys who try to do the old school Hollywood thing, and very often it feels just like bad actors putting on fedoras and trench coats so they can mouth clichéd tough-guy dialogue with a cigarette in the corner of their mouths. What really impressed me about this is that Ed Brubaker didn't fall into that trap but instead wrote an ACTUAL noir in which everyone is compromised, nobody is interested in the truth, and seeking justice is a fool’s errand.
Brubaker’s regular partner Sean Phillips does his usual brilliant job of making the art be a perfect marriage to what the story needs, and colorist Elizabeth Breitweiser adds a richness to it that is way more interesting than just a black-and-white comic which is what lesser talents might have done for something like this. This collected edition of the entire run of the title also has some great extras including high quality reproductions of the amazing covers as well as some interesting behind-the-scenes features of how it was all put together from the researching stage to the writing and artwork.
I got this as a present last Christmas, and I’m ashamed that I let it set in a stack of unread stuff for almost a year before getting to it since it’s one of the best things I’ve read in 2017....more
If you were a single gal living in post-war Los Angeles you’d probably find Dix Steele absolutely dreamy. After all, he’s a big handsome fella who dreIf you were a single gal living in post-war Los Angeles you’d probably find Dix Steele absolutely dreamy. After all, he’s a big handsome fella who dresses well and likes to dine out in swell places. He was a fighter pilot in the war, and now he’s working on writing a mystery novel so he’s certainly leading a colorful and interesting life. Just one problem. About once a month he feels a compulsion to strangle a strange woman to death.
Oh, well. Nobody’s perfect, right?
We spend the entire book in Dix’s head starting with him on the prowl for his next victim on a foggy night in the hills, and then he visits his old war buddy Brub. Dix is such a cool customer that he doesn’t flinch when he learns that Brub is one of the police detectives working on the strangler murders, but Brub’s wife Sylvia seems a bit cool to him. As we follow Dix through this daily life we learn that he’s a man filled with anger and resentments as well as wild mood swings that intensify when he starts dating a beautiful neighbor lady.
I was only dimly aware of Dorothy B. Hughes until the recent re-release of this novel made a bunch of the crime writers I follow on social media start gushing about the book and film loosely based on it. That caught my attention, and I can see why they were excited about it. The main thing about it is that it seems way ahead of it’s a time in its depiction of the mindset of a serial killer.
Coincidentally, it also made a good companion piece to be reading while in the middle of watching Netflix’s new series Mindhunter, and Dix seems to exactly fit the pattern of a certain type of woman hating killer. And Dorothy Hughes was creating this character long before the psychology and terminology referring to them would become mainstream thanks to serial killers becoming a profitable true crime industry as well as a staple of thrillers in print and on screen.
Overall, it was a solid piece of work that I would have rated as a strong 3 stars, but then I read the afterword by Megan Abbott which made me think even more highly of it. Mighty Megan makes a lot of great points about how Hughes had tapped in a strain of misogyny that the genre often used, and that she then cleverly subverts it in places in ways that crime fiction hadn’t seen. That hadn’t occurred to me while reading, and it made me realize that there was another layer to the book that I hadn’t quite wrapped my arms around so I bumped it up to 4 stars....more
If you’re an adult who reads comics then you probably know at least one person who gives you grief about it. “Oh, you still read funny books? How old If you’re an adult who reads comics then you probably know at least one person who gives you grief about it. “Oh, you still read funny books? How old are you? Ten?” This still happens even after Hollywood is dominated by superheroes, and there have been about thirty years worth of feature articles about how comics aren’t just for kids anymore. If you’ve got one of those people in your life just hand them a copy of Peepland, and then watch with satisfaction as their goddamn heads explode.
The story revolves around the Times Square sex trade in 1986 when a porn producer is on the run because he has a video tape that implicates a rich kid in a shocking crime. The producer stashes the tape in the peep show booth where Roxy is working, and after he’s murdered she retrieves it. This kicks off a chain of events that impacts a variety of people like sex workers, crooked cops, thugs, a punk rocker, an innocent kid accused of a crime, and a shitbag real estate developer with a ridiculous hairstyle.
This is one the new series of comics that Hard Case Crime has started doing, and the results are exactly what you’d expect from a company with that name. It’s a gritty noir tale that doesn’t skimp on bloody violence, and of course with a story set in this world there’s plenty of sex and nudity, too. What’s refreshing is that this doesn’t veer into the territory of a cartoon blood bath with tough guy dialogue like a Sin City. This reads like a story happening in a real time and place with characters that you can legitimately sympathize with or hate.
There’s also a very matter-of-fact nature to the portrayal of the sex trade that comes from co-writer Christa Faust’s background as a peep show worker, and her afterward makes it clear that this was in part a love letter to a sleazy Times Square that doesn’t exist anymore. The artwork fits the tone of the story and gives you the vibe of it in the same way that a great ‘70s crime movie like The French Connection can make you feel like you’re walking the streets of New York back then.
A brief personal story about how I met the authors Christa Faust and Gary Phillips: (I’ve recounted this once before in review of Choke Hold.) Back in 2011 at Bouchercon in St. Louis I was talking to Mr. Phillips when Ms. Faust walked up and asked him if he was going to come to her next panel on sports in crime fiction. She said that they were going to talk a lot about boxing, mixed martial arts, and wrestling in particular, and being a smart ass I asked if there would be any actual wrestling going on. Without missing a beat she launched into an extended pro wrestler style spiel about how she was gonna get Gary Phillips in the ring and hurt him bad.
It was a very funny moment, but I wish I’d known then that the two of them would partner up to write a crime comic this good so that I could have thanked them for it in advance....more
We’ve all heard of the Good-Cop/Bad-Cop routine, but when you read a James Ellroy novel it’s more like Bad-Cop/Worse-Cop/Crimes-Against-Humanity-Cop.
TWe’ve all heard of the Good-Cop/Bad-Cop routine, but when you read a James Ellroy novel it’s more like Bad-Cop/Worse-Cop/Crimes-Against-Humanity-Cop.
This third installment in the L.A. Quartet introduces us to another trio of police officers who wouldn't last ten minutes on the job if there were smart phones in the 1950s which could have recorded their many misdeeds. Ed Exley is a brilliant detective, but his physical cowardice is exceeded only by his ruthless ambition. Bud White is a thug who never met a suspect he couldn’t beat into talking, and he’s got a special hatred reserved for men who hurt women. Jack Vincennes has gone Hollywood with a side gig as the technical advisor for a TV cop show, and his reputation as a relentless narco officer is mainly due to him taking payoffs from a scandal rag to arrest movie stars to create juicy stories.
The three cops end up involved in a police brutality scandal dubbed Bloody Christmas which leads to drastic changes of fortune for each of them. Then a shocking mass murder in a coffee shop in an apparent robbery gone wrong draws all of them into the orbit of the investigation. Driven by their obsessions and haunted by secrets all of them will follow separate trails through a tangled web of pornography, drugs, prostitution, rape, and murder.
Ellroy had used similar elements of historical fiction that combines the seedy history of L.A. with his own epic crime stories in previous books, but I think this is where he perfected the idea and really soared with it. It’s the first time he fully deployed a unique style that is essentially a stream of consciousness that shifts among the three leads that uses clipped sentences to form a patter that makes everything feel more as if it’s being experienced instead of a narrative you’re reading.
The main appeal for me is the three main characters. These are not nice guys. They are utterly amoral and unrepentant racists who cause an enormous amount of damage in pursuit of their own agendas. What saves them (And this is what usually redeems Ellroy’s characters.) is their ultimate realizations that they’re pawns being used by a system that is far more criminal and corrupt than anything they’ve done, and that they’re willing to destroy themselves and everything around them in bids for redemption.
This is a brutal, vicious crime novel filled with shocking acts of violence and offensive language. It’s also an extremely complex and dense book with multiple confusing sub-plots spinning off the main Nite Owl story. I’ve read it multiple times, and I’d still be hard pressed to explain everything that happens and why. Despite all of that it remains among my favorite novels because it is such a bold attempt to do something different that is mostly successful.
I also credit the movie as being one of the best adaptations of a book I’ve seen. There’s only about 40% of the plot from the page on the screen, but they did a masterful job of combining and condensing elements while preserving the essential feel of the book and smartly keeping the focus on its three flawed main characters....more
Ah, the post-war years. America’s golden age when things were so much better than they are today. When no injustice ever occurred, and no one was unfaAh, the post-war years. America’s golden age when things were so much better than they are today. When no injustice ever occurred, and no one was unfairly treated. Every pay check was a fortune, every meal a banquet, and the worst crime was the odd rapscallion stealing a pie off a window sill. Or maybe sometimes the bisected body of a woman who had been brutally tortured would be left in an empty lot which would put a wildly corrupt police force in a frenzied media spotlight as the cops fruitlessly tried to solve the murder.
It really was a simpler time…
This was the book where James Ellroy stepped his game up from promising mystery writer to a creator of epic historical fiction by mixing a famous unsolved murder with seedy LA history via flawed fictional characters. Our narrator is Dwight ‘Bucky’ Bleichart, a former boxer turned LAPD officer just after World War II. Bucky agrees to fight another cop named Lee Blanchard as part of a departmental publicity stunt. The boxing match makes them partners, but it’s Lee’s girlfriend Kay who unites all three of them into a family. It’s a dead woman that eventually starts to tear them all to pieces.
In reality Elizabeth Short was just another young woman who came to LA with stars in her eyes, but her unsolved murder became one of those crimes that stuck in the public consciousness. Ellroy has talked and written a great deal about how he poured a lot of his unresolved feelings about his mother’s unsolved murder into the Dahlia case, and if there’s one thing you’re sure of by the time you’re done reading it’s that he knows what it’s like to be obsessed and haunted by dead women.
Ellroy is also fascinated by the shady history of LA and its police department, and he uses that knowledge to craft a fantastically violent and corrupt world where the cops are often worse than the criminals they’re arresting. Almost everyone involved the investigation has their own agendas, and the methods used to get what they want are brutal. Nobody gets out clean when it comes to the Dahlia, least of all those who give the most while trying to learn who killed her.
This is a great crime story with a hard boiled edge that was one of the books that made me a huge fan of James Ellroy....more
Megan Abbott’s first novel is a nifty little noir set in post-war LA. School teacher Lora King is extremely close to her brother Bill who is a police Megan Abbott’s first novel is a nifty little noir set in post-war LA. School teacher Lora King is extremely close to her brother Bill who is a police detective. When Bill meets Alice Steele he falls head over heels for her, and the two are soon married. Alice shows a tireless energy and enthusiasm for life as a homemaker that would make Martha Stewart feel like a lazy slob, but Lora finds herself becoming suspicious of her new sister-in-law after getting clues indicating that she had a shady past before meeting Bill.
It’s a great turn to have a cop in a mystery novel set during this time frame since it's a genre and era dominated by men but mainly used as a supporting character that two woman revolve around. It’s also interesting how Lora finds herself becoming intrigued with what she learns about Alice’s seedy history and starts indulging in her own wild side. The writing shows the Mighty Megan knack for getting inside the head of a conflicted person as well as making both the suburbs and seedy nightclubs come alive with a variety of characters. This is a solid start to a great writer’s career, and I particularly liked the ending.
I’m calling it 3.5 stars just because I think she did it even better in her later books....more
I received a free advanced copy of this from the author. I also broke one of my own reviewing rules in doing so because if you’ve ever sent me a messaI received a free advanced copy of this from the author. I also broke one of my own reviewing rules in doing so because if you’ve ever sent me a message or a friend request asking me to read your self-published book then you probably can’t actually see this right now because I’ve already blocked you. (Hey, I warned you. Try reading someone’s profile before you spam them next time.) However, I really liked Jack Clark’s Nobody's Angel so this wasn’t uncharted waters, and it turned out to be one of those times where I don’t regret making an exception.
Eddie Miles is a Chicago cab driver with an 18 year old daughter, Laura, he hasn’t seen in years after he gave up any custody rights during the divorce with her mother, and they moved to California. When Laura shows up unexpectedly Eddie is so delighted that he brushes off hints that she might be in some kind of trouble. Suddenly Laura vanishes in a very troubling way, and Eddie fears that her step-father, a shady ex-cop from LA, might have been involved. When the Chicago police don’t think there’s enough evidence to warrant an investigation Eddie starts hunting for Laura which means talking to his ex-wife and dealing with their unresolved issues.
This is technically a sequel to Nobody’s Angel although you don’t need to have read it to enjoy this, and like that one it’s kind of hard to pin down the appeal of the book. This has elements of a thriller with a missing daughter, but Eddie Miles doesn’t have the very particular set of skills of someone like Liam Neeson in Taken so this isn’t a revenge driven action novel. Eddie’s also not a good detective because he has to hire a private investigator to find information and give him advice so this isn’t really a traditional mystery either.
To be frank, Eddie is a loser. He’s a guy who lost his wife and kid to self-pity and booze, and then he was content to spend almost every waking moment behind the wheel of a cab. He lives in a dump even though he’s made a small fortune by working constantly, and he has no other interests or hobbies and seems to spend most of his time brooding about how the steady decline of the working class has transformed Chicago into a city of only the rich and desperately poor. Eddie is also so willfully oblivious to modern technology that he doesn’t have a computer and tries to do things like rent a car or book a flight over the phone rather than on-line.
But losers make for great noir characters, and that’s what Eddie is. He’s a guy built for earlier times when he could have gone to work with a lunch pail and thermos, and while he’s not stupid, just kind of simple and blunt, he’s cursed with enough self-awareness to realize that he’s bumping his head against his own limitations. That’s what makes him quietly tragic, and it makes the story of him trying to save the one thing in his life he created pretty compelling.
Clark, a cab driver himself, also fills both books about the job, and the interactions with passengers provide the opportunity to develop Eddie’s world view which, of course, is seen through a windshield. One minor thing had me scratching my head because although the book is filled with details about being a cab driver in Chicago there is never once a mention of how Uber or other ride-sharing services which seems odd considering how much of Eddie’s thoughts are about comparing the way things used to be against the world today.*
* Update - I heard from the author about this point, and he explained that he'd actually written this book a few years back before Uber became a thing which explains why it's never addressed.
This is a solid shot of noir told in a tight 250 pages that I liked so much that I’ve got an urge to track down more of Jack Clark’s work as well as re-read Nobody’s Angel....more
The 2016 Summer Olympics are getting ready to start this week, and after reading this I’ll be leery of any heartwarming features about athletes and thThe 2016 Summer Olympics are getting ready to start this week, and after reading this I’ll be leery of any heartwarming features about athletes and their families because it seems like they won’t scratch the surface of the toll it probably took on all of them to get there.
Devon Knox is an extraordinary young gymnast with a real chance to become an Olympian, and her parents, Katie and Eric, have made this goal the focus of their entire lives. However, the shocking death of someone connected to their gym causes a disruption that unveils secrets, lies, jealousies, and manipulations that threaten to undo everything.
As with her other recent novels Megan Abbott once again uses a backdrop dominated by adolescent girls as the basis for the story, but this one has a more decidedly adult point of view with most of the story told to us via Katie’s third party perceptions. As a mother who has sacrificed enormous amounts of time, effort, and money to support Devon no one could question her dedication, but Katie sometimes worries about what their relentless pursuit of this single dream has cost their family including the often overlooked younger brother Drew.
The book digs deeply into the whole sub-culture of gymnastics and creates the environment and characters so vividly that the reader is completely immersed in it. Whether it’s explaining how a minor misstep can hurt a score or describing the various injuries common to the girls it all feels incredibly authentic. Explaining that world to us is probably the easiest challenge Mighty Megan had in this one because once again it’s her incredible knack for putting us in the head of a conflicted character who has to face up to some ugly truths where the book really shines because that’s where it asks how much you can know someone else even if they’re the ones closest to you.
I especially like the theme about greatness requiring sacrifice and the questions that get explored regarding that idea. Devon might be able to do something that very few can, but does that mean she should have had to give up a normal childhood and teenage experiences? Is she doing this because it’s her dream or because so many adults around her have their own reasons for wanting her to succeed? Should the Knoxes have dedicated so much of themselves towards a single goal of one child, or does a parent of a kid with an extraordinary talent have a responsibility to do anything to see it fulfilled?
This might be the best book that Megan Abbott has done, and it’s because of the way that she weaves all that together in a story that is crime story, family drama, and reflections on the real cost of the pursuit of excellence in almost any endeavor. ...more
This is a great example of one of the things I love about e-books. Back in days of yore I could have only read the paperbacks that Lawrence Block wrotThis is a great example of one of the things I love about e-books. Back in days of yore I could have only read the paperbacks that Lawrence Block wrote at the start of his career under pen names if I happened across one in a used book store or a garage sale. However, now that Block has the rights to most of his old works he can e-publish them so that his fans can get them cheaply, and he makes some money on the deal. It’s win-win.
Ted Lindsay was a crime reporter who is trying to forget his recent personal problems by moving to New York. Working in a diner and living modestly are starting to get boring when Ted sees a knockout of a woman who lives near him with the unlikely name of Cinderella Simms, and he instantly falls head over heels in love with her. Ted soon learns that Cinderella has a bag of cash and some very bad men on her trail, and he is determined to help her so they can escape with the loot.
This was originally published as a softcore porn paperback in 1961 under the title $20 Lust, and there’s no shortage of sex scenes written to be as graphic as possible back then although it probably wouldn’t earn a PG-13 rating in a movie theater today. What makes this fun is the crime story that Block spins out. The setup of a femme fatale with a bag of money and a shaky story sounds like typical noir, but the plot zig-zags around in some surprising directions and ends up being fairly dark and gritty.
The sex scenes get a little repetitive, and there’s some general story goofiness like the idea that Ted and Cinderella would instantly fall into bed and become partners in crime, but it’s not overly distracting. As a Lawrence Block fan it was a good sample of his early work, and well worth a modest e-book price....more
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