Booked (and Printed): February 2025

Booked (and Printed) February 2025     February zipped by with a whisper. Valentine’s Day, cold weather, and all. Did I mention it was cold? The temperature peaked a ten or more degrees below freezing every damn day until February 25th (when it smiled with a toasty 32-degrees), and there were more than a few days with subzero lows. March, at least in the weather department, is bound to be better. My reading quantity came out mediocre with five novels and three short stories, and the quality of what I read was uneven. Uneven because two of those tales—a novel and a short story—were…as Toad likes to say, blah. I started the month on a high note with David Housewright’s first Rushmore McKenzie, A HARD TICKET HOME (2004). For the last year I’ve been raiding my library’s impressive McKenzie collection—it has 18 of the 21 titles (so far)—and all of those missing are from the first half of the series, including the debut. So my lovely and thoughtful wife gave me A Hard Ticket Home for Christmas and I waited as long as I could before reading it—which was about a month. It was fun to see how McKenzie evolved in the two decades since his introduction and how much he had stayed the same. Read my detailed review here. Up next was Ken Bruen’s impressive new Jack Taylor, GALWAY’S EDGE (2025). Taylor is a disgraced former Guardia, read that policeman, turned private eye in Galway, Ireland. He lives by his own ethical standards, which are often at odds with those of society. In Galway’s Edge, Jack is hired by The Vatican to look into a vigilante group roaming Galway’s dark corners. Of course everything turns to s—, but Jack takes it all in stride. Read my detailed review here. BAD MOON, by Todd Ritter (2011)—who is better known under his pseudonym Riley Sager—was the dark horse of the month. I pulled this one from the library shelf for no other reason than it had been published by Minotaur Books; see my reasoning why here.  And wow did it fill a reading need I didn’t know I had. Bad Moon leans into the psychological thriller subgenre with its twisty and surprising plot but it does so without the jolts and the “oh come on” plot twists that often dampen the genre. I liked it a bunch and I’m certain I’ll find my way back to Ritter’s writing again. Read my detailed review here. February’s bum read is an old paperback original I’ve been carrying around for two decades, give or take a year or three. Jack D. Hunter’s THE TERROR ALLIANCE (1980) is a cold war spy thriller that began promising enough with a little humor, some action, and a cool take on the late-1970s CIA. It even has some relevance in today’s post-truth MAGA world—only one example is a US president exiting NATO and abandoning Europe. But this tantalizing opening was defeated by an overly complicated plot and a bunch of talk-talk filler that made reading a chore rather than a relief. Which is a shame because I’ve read a handful of Hunter’s thrillers with good results. The last book of February returned me to the same world as the first. THEM BONES, by David Housewright (2025), is the latest entry in the McKenzie series and well… it doesn’t come out until June 24 and so I won’t go into detail now. But rest assured I’ll have a review on the street before it hits the bookstores. My favorite book of the month? It must be Bruen’s Galway’s Edge.

As for short stories, my intake was limited. I read three and of those, two were damn good and the third was odd and ultimately disappointing. The first, Judy Alter’s “SWEET REVENGE” (1994), is a treacherous, and most excellent, tale about an abused woman in the Old West. It highlights the misery many women suffered on the frontier and its open ending is perfectly perfect. I liked it a bunch. I read “Sweet Revenge” in Ed Gorman’s fine anthology The Best of the American West (1998). “HOW I SPEND MY DAYS AND MY NIGHTS,” by Håkan Nesser (2006), is the first of two tales I read from a cool Swedish Crime boxed set I picked up at a library sale—I wrote about the set here. This brilliant crime story has a Hitchcockian flare with an ironic ending that I’ve been thinking about ever since I read it. Read my detailed review here. The other Swedish Crime tale was Arne Dahl’s “MIGRAINE” (2012). This wacky sorta existentialist tale is just good enough to finish, but its weirdness and lack of any action or even an interesting conclusion made it frustrating. Only part of the frustration is when, in the last few paragraphs, the reader realizes the whole exercise is nothing more than an advertisement for Dahl’s novels. It had the same buzz as Ralph’s Little Orphan Annie’s decoder ring, from A Christmas Story, when it spelled out: “Drink More Ovaltine.” Fin— Now on to next month…

"The March Violets / Ulysses in San Juan" by Mike Baker

The March of Violets / Ulysses in San Juan by Mike Baker   Phillip Kerr’s THE MARCH VIOLETS, a derogatory reference to people who joined the Nazi Party in Germany after Hitler became dictator in 1933, opens in 1938 Germany, a week before the Summer Olympics in Berlin. The authorities are busy scrubbing the city clean of criminals, vagrants, and any sign of the city’s rabid antisemitism. Bernie Gunther is a former Berlin cop now working as a private detective when he’s hired by a rich German industrialist to find a necklace stolen from his daughter’s apartment—but not the person who burned her and her husband’s bodies after their apartment was robbed and they were murdered.       Bernie isn’t alone in his search, because the son-in-law was in the Gestapo. The SS also wants the killers, and because the son-in-law’s job was rooting out corruption and sending the guilty to concentration camps, assorted other sordid types want the papers that are coincidentally also missing from his safe. Post-Weimar Republic, pre-World War II shenanigans ensue. That’s a mouthful.       This is a complicated book to like. Phillip Kerr was a solid writer of muscular prose, but all the characters are loyal Germans, half of whom are Nazis. To quote the existential philosopher Jake Blues, I hate Illinois Nazis. Kerr uses a device called “saving the cat” in cinema. You take an obvious villain and have him do something kind or selfless, and voila! You have a sympathetic villain.       It’s clear that Bernie will die for his country, but fuck the Nazis. They’re morons and thugs—very dangerous morons and thugs. He’s tough as nails, healthy as barbed wire, etc., but it’s their pillow fight, so like a good servant of the Reich, he knows when to bow and scrape. Kerr wrote a bunch of Bernie Gunther books before his untimely death, each moving Bernie through history, German and otherwise. I’ve not read them, but this one is almost as good as Chandler in its hardboiled toughness, as Bernie navigates a post-Weimar Nazi underworld that is one thin thread apart from the Nazi power machine.       One reviewer, a former cop, had two criticisms* of the book, and one was that Kerr was trying to out-hardboil the masters, which made me wonder if he’d read much hardboiled detective fiction, as Kerr never goes to the places with action or dialogue that those guys did—ever. He does work in lots of German slang, and Bernie is a wise-ass, but never to the levels of Ed Noon or Philip Marlowe. As I said, he’s a bit cowed by the current regime’s willingness to kill and torture, or torture and kill, the poor souls who mistakenly step out of line—a line sometimes impossible to predict.       The way Kerr approached writing the Bernie Gunther books over 40 years reminds me of Barry Sadler’s Casca books, without the supernatural twist, throwing Bernie into the world’s historical and espionage timeline. Considering the Allies’ willingness to utilize Nazi “talent” post-atrocities, this is actually closer to believable than we might be comfortable admitting.

I also read ULYSSES IN SAN JUAN by Robert Friedman, which concerns itself with Wolf, a Holocaust survivor who moved from the 1972 Bronx in New York City to San Juan, Puerto Rico, where he now runs a jewelry store for tourists in the Old City. He collects strays, giving them jobs in his store—botched and broken Nuyorican refugees returning to Puerto Rico to escape New York City’s cold streets for something else. I’m not sure what. I’m not 100% sure Friedman knows either.      That probably reads like criticism, but really, Friedman understands the unexplainable nature of the human soul, and while he sheds some light on the terrain, he leaves much murky and unexplained. There’s Stevie, a young man desperately trying to avoid the fomenting revolution, Puerto Ricans who want the Yaquis out, as he writes a novel about a Puerto Rican cabin boy on an English sailing ship, constantly weaving his strange life in broken San Juan into a Conradian naval adventure. There’s Doris, who is drinking herself to death, tormented by her broken stateside marriage to a sociopathic lawyer whose abuse she found sexually arousing until it nearly killed her.       But the main action is the Holocaust survivor Wolf, still haunted by his wife being dragged away to a Nazi pleasure camp and his 8-year-old daughter murdered right before his eyes by Nazi train guards. He takes up with a Puerto Rican junkie whore named Carmen, who he helps get off smack. She becomes a surrogate for his lost wife, his lover, and somehow also his murdered child. Carmen’s cousin Manny, who’s also her drug dealer, wants her back in his stable, and mucho hardboiled shenanigans ensue. It’s book three in the Puerto Rico Trilogy, but the other two books tell independent stories, so they can be read out of order.       It reminded me of those 50s paperback originals whose action sat on the cusp of being action novels but never seemed to get there, yet remain hardboiled to the core. This book has action and darkness, and is definitely hardboiled—but don’t come to it expecting Executioner-style vengeance or a Whittington protagonist-crushing twist plot. Friedman is a realist, so the book bends toward noir**, with an ending as subtle as it is inevitable, but still surprising. ____________________ *   The other criticism was that Bernie does some detection, but mostly uses the time-honored private detective method of being a really good guesser. **  A reader of a review I wrote about William Burroughs’ Junkie said I was wrong in calling it a noir, because his definition included a level of toughness that Burroughs’ effeminate protagonist lacked. ____________________ BONUS: Hardboiled vs. Noir   I used to love the “what is hardboiled and what is noir” discussion until I discovered that the term hardboiled refers to the grammar from a speech by Mark Twain: “...a hundred million tons of A-number-one fourth-proof, hard-boiled, hide-bound grammar...” Scholars claim this was a reference to a period joke, something like, “a hardboiled egg is hard to beat.” After much overuse, the term came to mean whatever the writer wanted it to mean, regardless of what any dictionary had to say.       Noir is worse. It comes from the Gallimard imprint Serie Noire, named for the black card stock Gallimard used for cheap efficiency. They had previously used yellow covers until they ran out of that paper. While some of the authors they published, like Jim Thompson and Charles Williams, were truly noir, they also published James Hadley Chase and Peter Cheyney, who weren’t noir or hardboiled at all. Noir has suffered the same fate as hardboiled, becoming whatever the writer wants it to mean.       More interesting to me is that many of the “translators” who wrote the translations of these books for Gallimard had a poor handle on English—or none at all—like Boris Vian, who translated Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep by having his wife read a section, describe it to him, and then old Boris would just riff, like the Norwegian guy who read Dracula, hated the ending, and re-wrote it to his satisfaction, creating the first known fan fiction ever.

Check out The March Violets at Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback. Check out Ulysses in San Juan  at Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback.

 

Review: "Galway's Edge" by Ken Bruen

 

Galway’s Edge by Ken Bruen Mysterious Press, 2025   Galway’s Edge (scheduled for release Mar. 4) is a wild-eyed and far-ranging crime novel written as only Ken Bruen can: a splash of poetry; a dash of morality, or the absence of morality, perhaps; a pinch of madness; and a dollop of justice. This is the eighteenth book featuring Galway, located on the western shore of Ireland, private eye Jack Taylor. Jack is hired by the rotund Father Richard, a papal troubleshooter from Rome, to clean up a local vigilante group called Edge. Edge is comprised of five of Galway’s leading citizens, including the Church’s own Father Kevin Whelan. Father Richard’s masters in the Vatican are concerned about the potential for bad press if Whelan’s involvement becomes widely known. But before Taylor can do anything about Whelan, the priest is found in his own backyard dangling from a rope. Soon after, another member of Edge is stabbed to death, and it becomes obvious Edge’s leading citizens are being targeted by a multi-millionaire with a grudge against the group. As Taylor investigates Edge and the millionaire, he does side jobs for a nun hoping to retrieve a stolen crucifix, a battered wife looking for breathing room from her husband, and a terminally ill man hoping Jack will kill him. Happily, one or two of the subplots tie-in nicely with Edge, the millionaire, and Father Richard. Galway’s Edge is a sparkling examination of the steaming rot of humanity’s underbelly—a rot that, as you read, you realize affects us all. The tale spans parts of eight months, November 2022 to June 2023, and many of the chapters are introduced with real life events. A cover-up of an Irish cervical cancer test that gave false negatives. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Donald Trump’s avoidance of consequences in the United States…and so and so on. These real-world events underscore the absurdity of our shared morality—is it any more or less moral for Taylor to kill a man dying of cancer than it is for a government to wage war, a criminal to be elected as the president of the U.S.? Which gives Galway’s Edge a dour expression, but Bruen’s sly wit rescues it from utter darkness. And while Taylor is a hard man with his own distinct sense of morality, which usually conflicts with society’s expectations, his reasoning is never abstract and always understandable. Galway’s Edge is, as is Ken Bruen, the real deal—interesting, thought-provoking, and in equal parts ugly and redemptive.

Check out Galway’s Edge at Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the hardcover.

The Pulp Time Machine: Column Advertising

 

The Pulp Time Machine Column Advertising   I may be alone in this, although I doubt it, but the only thing better than the column advertisements in pulp magazines (usually for sketchy products) are the stories and the illustrations. But if I think about, that’s about all there was… Check out these groovy ads in the last several pages of the October 1950 issue of Thrilling Detective. I’m thinking of sending away for the “Sensational Device Enables Anyone to Test Own Eyes” gizmo and those “Nervous Stomach” garlic tablets. And don't get me started on “Be a Detective” gig because that’s all I’ve ever wanted to be. I hope the addresses still work.         The cover artist is unknown (to me at least).

Review: "Bad Moon" by Todd Ritter

 

Bad Moon by Todd Ritter Minotaur Books, 2011   Bad Moon—which is the second of three mysteries featuring Perry Hollow, Pennsylvania, police chief, Kat Campbell—is a white-knuckle ride loaded with twists and thrills and unsuspected revelations. When Nick Donnelly, a homicide investigator for the State Police before being drummed out after an injury, calls Kat hoping for her help on a cold case his Foundation was hired to solve. On July 20, 1969, the same day Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, ten-year-old Charlie Olmstead went missing from his home. Charlie’s bicycle was found in the water just above Sunset Falls and the police, led by Kat’s father, Jim, ruled his death an accident. But Charlie’s body was never found and his mother, Maggie, believed her son was kidnapped and may still be alive. While on her death bed, Maggie made her only other child, the bestselling novelist Eric Olmstead, promise to find Charlie. So Eric, back in Perry Hollow to bury his mother, hired Nick and with Kat’s unofficial help—after all, the case was closed more than 40-years ago—the trio follow the scant clues into a shocking web of murder. Bad Moon is lightning paced and teeters on the edge of psychological thriller; which makes sense because Todd Ritter has since gained fame for the twisty psychological thrillers he writes as Riley Sager. Ritter litters, in a good way, the narrative with conflicting personal motivations and shades of character compromise. Kat is compromised by her deceased father’s involvement in the case and a relationship she had with Eric as a teenager. Nick’s conflict is with his injury and a grudge he holds against the State Police for his ignominious termination. And Eric is crippled with guilt for leaving his mother alone for so many decades. But it is the plot that matters most because everything else is subterfuge to keep the climactic reveals hidden until they pop onto the page. And oh boy, does it work.

Bad Moon is currently out-of-print, which is a shame because I had a really good time reading it—and if you enjoy an occasional twisted and surprising thriller, where the plot surpasses everything, you likely will too. And don’t worry about reading the series in order because I didn’t have any trouble following Bad Moon, which was my first experience with Kat Campbell and Todd Ritter.

Review: "How I Spend My Days and My Nights" by Håkan Nesser

“How I Spend My Days and My Nights” by Håkan Nesser Novellix, 2019   Swedish crime writer, Håkan Nesser’s “How I Spend My Days and My Nights”—originally published in the Swedish magazine Allas in 2006—is a splendid, if blisteringly dark, psychological chiller that haunts the reader long after the last page. On a rainy November evening, Marteen, a successful novelist, stops on his way home at Harry’s Bar for a quiet drink. His wife, Marlene, is away on business and a quick drink is excuse enough to escape the rain and postpone his arrival to their empty apartment.       Harry’s Bar is empty except for the bartender and a man drinking alone at the bar. After Marteen orders a double scotch, a pitcher of water, and a towel (to dry himself from the rain), and before he can find a table, the lone drinker introduces himself as David Perowne. And while Marteen has never heard of Perowne, the stranger tells him a nasty and unbelievable story about Marlene. But it’s a story that could change everything in Marteen’s life.       “How I Spend My Days and My Nights” is astonishingly good. With a deceptively simple narrative, Nesser seamlessly builds the mystery around the question, is Perowne’s tale about Marlene true? And just as relevant, does it matter if it is true? The Hitchcockian premise is jazzed by a hint of wobbling character reliability, tension, and potential betrayal. Then there are those last few sentences that change everything with an ironic and gut-wrenching twist.

I read “How I Spend My Days and My Nights” in a cool standalone paperback edition from Swedish publisher, Novellix. It was part of a four-book boxed-set called Swedish Crime, which includes stories by Arne Dahl, Karin Tidbeck, and Henning Mankell.       “How I Spend My Days and My Nights” was obviously translated from its original Swedish, but no translator is noted in the Novellix edition.

 

What's New Pussycat?: February 2025

What’s New Pussycat? February 2025   Since we—my lovely family and I—moved from Salt Lake City to Southern Vermont a few years ago the number of used books that follow me home has slackened somewhat; which isn’t saying I’ve become chaste with my book acquisitions but rather small-town Vermont has fewer books sitting around waiting for me than the city had. One of my favorite places for used books is the Rutland City Free Library’s Friends of the Library book sale held on the second Friday and Saturday of each month. The stock turns over nicely—there is always something new in the rotation—and in the more than two years I’ve been going, I have never been turned out empty handed. And I’ve found more than a few treasures. February’s sale was held this past weekend, the 14th and 15th, and (of course) I attended both days because that’s how I roll. My take was five books; well, four books and a box filled with four small paperbacks with each featuring a short story by a Swedish crime writer: Håkan Nesser, Arne Dahl, Karin Tidbeck, and Henning Mankell. I’ll be sure to let you know how I like these shorts since I’m planning to read at least one of them after I finish the novel I’m reading now. But until then, I thought it would be fun to share my latest house-cluttering treasures….
THE BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFÉ, by Carson McCullers (© 1951). The edition I picked up is from Mariner Books, 2005. This collection of seven stories fits one of my reading goals for the year: read more literature! I haven’t read McCullers since my misspent college days and I’m excited to dip my toes into her writing again. The stories included are: The Ballad of the Sad Café, Wunderkind, The Jockey, Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland, The Sojourner, A Domestic Dilemma, and A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud.
BLACK WATER, by Joyce Carol Oates (© 1992). This copy appears to be a first edition, published by Dutton, but the title page / copyright page has been torn out and—good thing I’m a reader rather than a collector—the dust jacket has been clipped. In Black Water, Oates tells a fictional story about Ted Kennedy, Mary Jo Kopechne, and the Chappaquiddick Island incident. The names have been changed from real-life to the fictional one, and the tale is told from the perspective of Kopechne, called Kelly Kelleher here. If it is like everything I’ve read from Oates, it is going to be dazzling. I’ll keep you posted since this is already near the top of my reading list.
HUNTING GAME, by Helene Tursten (© 2014). This is the 2019 edition from Soho Crime, translated from the Swedish by Paul Norlen. I’ve read only short stories by Helene Tursten—her shorts featuring the lovable elderly serial killer, Maud, are to die for—and I’m hoping this first mystery in the Detective Inspector Embla Nyström series is just as good. I’ll let you know what I think when I get to it.
THE LOST, by Jeffrey B. Burton (© 2022). This first edition was published by the mystery line, Minotaur Books, and is the third entry in the Mace Reid series. I’ve never read Burton, but this book has three things going for it: 1) it is set in Chicago; 2) it features a cadaver dog named Vira; and 3) I struggle passing up a book from Minotaur. And yeah, there is home invasion, kidnapping, and a billionaire involved.
SWEDISH CRIME: SHORT STORIES, by Håkan Nesser, Arne Dahl, Karin Tidbeck, and Henning Mankell (2019). This snappy little boxed set was produced by Novellix, which according to the copyright page is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden. Each story is published in its own paperback (4-1/8” x 5-3/4”) and translated into English. I don’t have much experience reading so-called Nordic Noir, but I’m hoping these tales provide a thrill. I’m also wondering if the same person donated this to the library as Tursten’s Hunting Game.   The stories are: How I Spend My Days and Nights, by Håkan Nesser, Migraine, by Arne Dahl, Anywhere Out of the World, by Karin Tidbeck, and The Man on the Beach, by Henning Mankell.