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.