Review: "Manifesto for the Dead" by Domenic Stansberry

 

Manifesto for the Dead by Domenic Stansberry Permanent Press, 2000     Manifesto for the Dead hit bookstores the same day Y2K had been forecasted to cripple the modern technological society. The whole world was going to crumble into ruin and this Stansberry guy had a hardboiled and noirish crime novel with a velvety, stark prose scheduled for release that same very damn day. A positive attitude from the writer and the publisher of a bleak as hell tale about the grimmest and perhaps the most luckless of the paperback writers, Jim Thompson. It was January 1, 2000, and the world didn’t end on that first day of the last year of the 20th Century. That wouldn’t happen until 25 years later when too many American voters— Well, okay. We won’t go there… Instead, we’ll go to 1971. When a 64-year-old Jim Thompson is living at the bottom of a bottle and sleeping in the penthouse of the Hollywood Ardmore. He hasn’t been able to write a word in months and his wife, Alberta, is to blame—or so Thompson thinks. The couple’s money is almost gone and with no reasonable way of getting more, Alberta finds a dumpy apartment in the Hillcrest Arms where they can fade away. But Thompson’s luck changes—from shitty to shittier but Thompson’s sure it’s the break he’s been waiting for—when he’s approached by a producer with a bad reputation, Billy Mircale, at the “fashionable gutter joint” of Musso & Frank’s. Miracle is working on a deal with one of Hollywood’s heaviest producers and he thinks a book, especially one written by a guy with Thompson’s reputation, could push the movie into production. Thompson agrees to write the book, without much negotiation about pay—and he’s getting ripped-off, like he always gets ripped-off. But as he writes, Thompson’s real-life begins mixing with his fiction: An Okie hired killer with a dead bombshell in his trunk comes off the page, followed by a fading starlet with her own secrets, and of course Miracle is mixed in everywhere, too. Manifesto for the Dead was a brave novel to write. It was released at the height of Jim Thompson’s popular revival—he had died in 1977 without much fanfare, but by the late-1980s his work was in fashion in a big way with literary critics and academics, readers, and writers. Which meant no matter how good Stansberry’s novel was, there would be criticism from those looking to criticize for no other reason than it was a fiction with Jim Thompson at its center. The poor reviews tended towards snide comments about Stansberry’s inability to capture Thompson’s voice, which from my vantage is unfair at best. I mean, check out the opening paragraph: “This was the end. The final trap. The last flimflam. And for Jim Thompson, this ending—this long plunge into the sweet nothing—was set in motion on the day he first met Billy Miracle, at the Musso & Frank Grill, down on Hollywood Boulevard.” How’s that for a doomed Thompson protagonist? A protagonist that, this time is the tough-luck writer himself. The plot is simple: Murder, betrayal, and blackmail, all fueled by an ill-fated fear and Thompson’s underlying self-destructive behavior. This simplicity gives it a kinship to the best of those 1950s hardboiled novellas published every month in the pulps. The 1970s setting is littered with hippies and druggies, conmen, and z-list celebrities. The Hollywood players are cast with a shadowing of the ludicrous and the starlets, even the fading ladies, are painted as tough and ambitious as everyone else in the City of Angeles. And then there’s Thompson. Unlucky, something of a mark for every unethical bastard in Hollywood, and running for his life. Manifesto for the Dead is my kind of book.

Manifesto for the Dead is out-of-print, but you can find used copies in every corner of the internet. Click here for the hard cover at Amazon

Review: "The Cleveland John Doe Case" by Thibault Raisse

 

The Cleveland John Doe Case by Thibault Raisse Crime Ink, 2025     On the afternoon of July 30, 2002, the body of Joseph Chandler was discovered in the bathroom of his spartan studio apartment in Eastlake, Ohio. It had been an unusually hot summer in Northern Ohio—where Eastlake is a suburb of Cleveland sitting on the shoreline of Lake Erie—and Chandler had been dead for almost a week when a maintenance man discovered his body. The air conditioning in his room had been turned off and the fetid odor of rotting flesh filled the apartment. It was obvious to the investigating detective that Chandler had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, but what he didn’t realize at the time was that Joseph Newton Chandler III had died in Texas as a young boy and the dead man was someone else entirely. The Cleveland John Doe Case adeptly introduces Chandler—he had lived in the Dover Apartments for 17 years and worked at a nearby chemical factory for just as long, but he was like a ghost because no one knew anything about him—and the investigators working the case from when the body was discovered in 2002 until the early-2020s when DNA helped identify Chandler’s birth name. And there were five separate investigators, including a couple private eyes and the U.S. Marshal for the Northern District of Ohio.   The investigative question changing over the years from How did Chandler die?, to Who was Chandler?, to Why did Chandler live under an assumed identity? It is an intriguing case from beginning to end and Raisse wrings the facts out with precise and fluid writing and an obvious high dosage of research gleaned from interviews with the investigators, Chandler’s family, police records, and other documents. The only disappointment, and this is hardly anything at all because it only adds to the mysterious nature of the case, is that the final investigative question, Why did Chandler live under an assumed identity for so long? is yet to be solved. But I tell you, as Raisse details in The Cleveland John Doe Case, there are a bevy of high-profile theories about what made Chandler take a new name. And each, as well The Cleveland John Doe Case in its entirety, are worth your reading time. The Cleveland John Doe Case was translated into English from its original French by Laurie Bennett. It is part of Crime Ink’s 50 States of Crime series where French journalists reevaluate major American crimes; one for each of the 50 states of the U.S.

Check out The Cleveland John Doe Case at Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback.

William Shatner's TekWar

 

William Shatner’s TekWar   Back in the long ago when I was so young I thought William Shatner wrote the books—he didn’t, Ron Goulart did the actual writing—a science fiction novel with a hardboiled edge and criminous plot called TekWar appeared in bookstores under William Shatner’s byline. The year was 1989 and I was an underperforming high schooler—a sophomore, maybe?—with a predilection for reading wonderfully trashy fiction. An ailment that still bothers me, I guess. Anyway, I loved TekWar and anxiously awaited the release of each of the Tek novels. A total of nine were published between 1989 and 1997: TekWar (1989), TekLords (1991), TekLab (1991), Tek Vengeance (1993), Tek Secret (1993), Tek Power (1994), Tek Money (1995), Tek Kill (1996), and Tek Net (1997). I may have missed those last few titles on their original releases but I’m pretty sure I have all of them sitting on a shelf somewhere waiting for me to get back to where I was (or is it where I once belonged?) and read every last one. So you know, the Tek books follow a former cop, Jake Cardigan, turned felon turned private eye as he walks the mean streets of Greater Los Angeles some two hundred years in the future. In 1994, a tv movie was made of the first book, TekWar, starring William Shatner and Greg Evigan, as Cardigan, and while I don’t know if I would still think it was marvelous, wonderful, edgy, cool, I sure did back then. Heck, Sheena Easton had a small role and I thought she was the cat’s meow. TekWar was followed by three more tv movies, all released in 1994—TekLords , TekLab, and TekJustice—and a short-lived tv series (1994-95). Their IMDb ratings range from 5.6 to 6.4; so they may not be quite as good as I remember— This groovy write-up from the January 28, 1994 issue of the Salt Lake Tribune is a fun reminisce of the movies. It was written by Ron Miller, and syndicated by Knight-Ridder. Sorry for the light copy, but it should be readable.

Review: "The Man on the Beach" by Henning Mankell

 

“The Man on the Beach” by Henning Mankell Novellix, 2019     In my waning memory, it was Henning Mankell’s stories about Inspector Kurt Wallander that started the Nordic Noir craze of the early-2000s in the United States. It seemed for a decade or more everything in bookstores centered around Scandinavian detectives working fictional cases as dark as a Norse winter. Of course when Mankell was outselling almost every other crime writer my inner snob recoiled from his work because any writer so popular with readers must be terrible. As it turns out, I was wrong. But back to Wallander—a taciturn and solitary detective working the streets of Ystad, a small city on Sweden’s southern edge, with almost as many ghosts in his head as the villains he chases. Which is a way to say, Wallander is interesting. So all these many years later I tried only my second of Mankell’s tales: the short story, “The Man on the Beach,” which was originally published in 1999 in Sweden and translated into English in 2008. When a tourist from Stockholm, Göran Alexandersson, dies in the back of a taxi, everyone assumes the cause of death was a stroke or a heart attack. Alexandersson appeared healthy when he entered the taxi, and he had no obvious wounds. But Wallander, with the help of the pathologist, quickly determines Alexandersson’s death is more sinister. The tourist’s movements while in Ystad are unusual, too. Every morning Alexandersson took a taxi to nearby Svarte where he disappeared on the windswept beach until another taxi took him back to Ystad in the afternoon.    “The Man on the Beach” is a cool take on the impossible crime: How did someone kill a healthy man in a taxi without anyone noticing until after he was dead? As the story evolves it becomes apparent the how is less important than the why because the tale’s driver is something of a sociological puzzle about what motivates one person to kill another. And it works very, very well. Now I need to get brave and tackle one of Mankell’s novels.

I read “The Man on the Beach” in an out-of-print standalone Novellix paperback edition published in 2019; however, it is included in Henning Mankell’s collection, The Pyramid: The First Wallander Cases (2008)—check out the Kindle edition here and the trade paperback here on Amazon.

Review: "The Long Goodbye" by Raymond Chandler

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler   Reviewed by Mike Baker   “The room was so quiet you could almost hear the temperature drop.” Marlowe’s occasional drinking buddy and lost cause, Terry Lennox, shows up on Marlowe’s doorstep, gun in hand, needing a fast ride to Tijuana, which Marlowe assumes means Lennox did something very bad. He doesn’t want to know, and he says so. Later, Lennox’s wife Sylvia is found naked with her melon smashed, dead as a graveyard, with Lennox discovered in a Mexican motel room, with a self-inflicted fist-sized hole in the back of his head. Next, Marlowe gets hired to watch a dangerous blackout alcoholic named Roger Wade, who also happens to be a bestselling author of historical action novels, bodice rippers, and genre fiction. There’s a connection between Wade, his wife Eileen, and the now-deceased Mrs. Lennox. ’50s LA shenanigans ensue. It took me a solid week to read the first 40 pages of The Long Goodbye. Marlowe describes his on-again, off-again friendship with Terry Lennox, which Chandler needs for the setup and the novel’s turn, but Chandler could have done the same thing in two pages. I almost quit the book but didn’t. And I’m glad for it. Chandler was watching his own wife die as he wrote the book, and, in retrospect, it feels like he was writing the way he might have been living—a little dead inside, punctuated by moments of clarity and pain. I kept thinking it could have been pages shorter, but not being Chandler’s equal as a word mechanic, I was at a loss for exactly how and where it could have happened. “The tragedy of life isn’t that things die young. It’s that they grow old and mean.” Chandler ends certain chapters, not by advancing the plot, but by describing nature—mockingbirds, mostly, living in the bushes and trees of LA. Both as metaphor and warning, they foreshadow the book’s hard, perilous direction but also rope in ideas one might have about a man lamenting his losses. It’s as if Chandler is playing a writing game whose single rule is to see how flat he can go, taking the reader to the edge of irritation and disdain before doing something interesting, thus causing the rubes reading the book to hang in one more time—literary chicken, if you will—a hardboiled1 version of The Aristocrats! Except it isn’t, is it? Something is grinding at Chandler, and thus Marlowe, who was always Chandler’s surrogate—a man of letters becomes a man of action. Except in this book, Marlowe keeps taking beatings. He’s ineffectual as a man and as a detective, seemingly a step behind. Again, this seems right because this isn’t The Big Sleep. Like the vigilantes are fond of telling the soon-to-be-dead, “This isn’t business, it’s personal.” There is the issue of Terry Lennox and Roger Wade. I stayed away from this in my review of The Big Sleep, where Marlowe is massively homophobic, which was common for the time, but to the extent that one wonders what he’s actually uncomfortable with: gay men, or his own secret unspoken love of dick. The Long Goodbye is different in that he consistently describes Terry Lennox as you would describe a crush. Again, it was more common back then, deep male friendship, and maybe more innocent. You either buy it or you don’t. An alternative, for me, has to do with Marlowe’s fundamental loneliness. Lennox is a lost soul like Marlowe. He’s drawn to Lennox because Lennox has standards. He won’t take help from his friends. Marlowe sees himself in Lennox. Lennox is a lost knight in tarnished armor, just like Marlowe.

Somewhere in the middle of the book, he meets historical romance novelist Roger Wade who says of his own books that he writes long books because people equate the length of a book with its quality. Wade is similar—another cynical lost soul, but he’s more than that. He’s an avatar for Chandler. A good writer, critiqued for writing genre, a drunk. Marlowe claims he doesn’t understand him. Chandler claims to not understand himself. This is all armchair psychology bullshit, but it sits steady in my thinking. The fact is, Chandler is the opposite of Wade. He isn’t a hack. He writes crime because it’s what he’s about. Wade is pure whore. One last note about The Long Goodbye, and it’s a spoiler, so, if you haven’t read it or seen the movie, stop reading NOW. I prefer the movie’s ending to the book’s ending2, and not because Altman’s ending is more clever—it’s because Chandler’s ending, is James Bond implausible and pulp magazine corny. Chandler was a better writer than that. Altman’s is the ending I wish Chandler wrote. I would 100% recommend you read this before you read any of the mediocrity most of us paperback original aficionados grind through as we desperately hunt for that absolute gem—but only if you’ve read The Big Sleep first. This is not for amateurs. This is for the die-hard believers, the windmill tilters, and the white knights adrift in a world full of darkness. “Cops never say goodbye. They always hope to see you again in the lineup.”

1.    I read a review of Philip Kerr’s March Violets where the reviewer accused Kerr of trying to out hardboiled the masters. He apparently never read the 2 pages Chandler spends pontificating on the different types of blondes, tragic or otherwise, and how Mrs. Lennox was something wholly never seen before in the blonde department. Chandler regularly out hardboils himself. He spends two pages cataloging the different types of tragic blondes but only four sentences describing the different reasons people become murders. This isn’t a criticism. It’s that he understood tragic blondes were more complicated than murders. 2.    Ironically, it turns out, the book’s long wobbly plot made it perfect for Robert Altman’s wobbly narrative approach, and while I’m not throwing shade on Chandler or the book, for a novel it’s better as a movie even if you think Eliot Gould is too laconic, mumbly, and irreverent to be Marlowe—he has the same cool detachment as Marlowe but seemingly stands back from his anger trying to objectively sort through the clues.

Check out The Long Goodbye on Amazon—click  here for the paperback.

 

Booked (and Printed): March 2025

 

Booked (and Printed) March 2025   Ah, Spring is in the air—wait, it’s snowing? Right now? March’s weather was topsy-turvy with a handful of warm days sprinkled like so many chocolate chips in a mostly chilly month. It was also a month that found my review writing for the blog woefully inadequate to my reading. Of the seven books and two shorts I read during March, I only wrote three reviews—one is for SKIN AND BONES AND OTHER MIKE BOWDITCH STORIES, by Paul Doiron, scheduled for release on May 13. In a phrase, Skin and Bones is great, but you’ll have to wait until May 12, a Monday, to read what I really think about it. Another is for the forthcoming true crime title, THE CLEVELAND JOHN DOE CASE, by Thibault Raisse, about a 2003 suicide that turned into an enigma when it was discovered the dead man had lived under an alias for decades. Scheduled for a Tax Day release, April 15, you’ll find my review on this same bandwidth on Monday, April 14. The final review, and the only one to actually appear at the blog in March, was for Henry Slesar’s terrific mystery story, “THE TIN MAN,” which appeared in the June 1984 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine—read the review here. Now for the other seven titles I neglected to mention even though, for the most part, they were damn good. PALMS, PARADISE, POISON, by John Keyse-Walker (2021), is the third (of four) Constable Teddy Creque mysteries. Set on the tiny Caribbean Island of Anegada, which is part of the Royal Virgin Islands, Teddy is battening down for an approaching hurricane when he receives a message from headquarters about an escaped prisoner named Marianna Orro, or as she calls herself, Queen Ya-Ya. A practitioner of Santeria, Queen Ya-Ya is not only scary, but she is dangerous, too. Teddy is sure Ya-Ya will run for a bigger island, but of course, she ends up on Anegada as the first ever prisoner in the island’s one cell jail. At least until she engineers an escape with what appears to the witnesses as mind control. Teddy chases Ya-Ya from Anegada to rural Cuba. Palms, Paradise, Poison, is as good as Keyse-Walker’s first two Teddy Creque novels; which is saying something because those earlier books were marvelous. The setting, while shifting from Anegada to Cuba, is as vibrant as ever—I could almost feel the sand between my toes—and makes for a nice respite from these cold Northeastern winters. The Santeria infused in the narrative made for some interesting reading, but the real treat is kicking around with Teddy for a few hours.

One of my reading goals for 2025 was to add more variety to my leisure reading. With that purpose in mind, I read Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch’s WW2 young adult novel, THE WAR BELOW (2014). The teenage Luka, a Ukrainian, escaped from a Nazi labor camp and is torn between returning to the camp for his friend Lida or making his way across the Carpathian Mountains to Kyiv where, he hopes, his father will still be alive. Going back to the camp for Lida is hopeless since it will put him back in the hands of the Nazis and so he decides his only choice is to find his father. Luka makes scant progress moving through the mountains in winter, but he does make a new friend and stumbles upon the Ukrainian Insurgent Army fighting the Nazis and then the Soviets as they push in from the east. There are some interesting discussions about Ukraine’s abuse by both the Soviets (both pre- and post-war) and the Nazis, but it was obviously written for younger teenagers because it lacked much of the nastiness of the conflict. The War Below is a good book for your teenage readers, but be ready to help them put it in context with the happenings of the 1930s and 1940s, both Nazi and Communist, because the narrative never goes much beyond Luka’s own story. My quasi-reading challenge with Minotaur Books led me to ONE MAN’S PARADISE, by Douglas Corleone (2010). Paradise won the St. Martin’s Press/MWA First Crime Novel Award and while it is obviously a first novel—the pacing isn’t perfect and the protagonist makes more than a couple wildly immature decisions—it is also a readable distraction. Kevin Corvelli, a New York criminal lawyer, comes to Honolulu to make a fresh start after failing to win an acquittal for an innocent client that was murdered in prison. Covelli vowed he would never work a felony case again, but when his office landlord, also a lawyer, drops a high-dollar murder case in his lap, all Corvelli sees are the dollars. The case is murky with at least three solid suspects, all with motive and opportunity, but what Kevin can’t see shapes the court case. Paradise’s setting is sharp and while the climactic ending is frayed with a where did that come from? feeling, it’s a solid debut and I’ll likely read more of Corleone’s work. I came to Joyce Carol Oates’s marvelous writing late in the game, back in 2015 when I took over Mystery Scene’s “Short and Sweet: Short Stories Considered” column and started seeing her stories in magazines and collections. But since then, I’ve been an advocate for Oates’s often surreal and always meaningful tales. Her 1992 novel, BLACK WATER, is a brilliant fictional retelling of the Chappaquiddick Incident where Senator Ted Kennedy crashed his car into a pond and his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned. The names have been changed—Kopechne is “Kelly Kelleher” and Kennedy is, mostly, referred to as “The Senator”—and it is told from the perspective of the drowned woman. The effect of Oates’s evocative prose, the images of Kelleher’s life in flashback form, and the claustrophobic blackness of her drowning are powerful. Everyone should read Black Water because it is a literary powerhouse and it illuminates the feminine experience in America during the second half of the 20th Century. March also saw me return to Jack M. Bickham’s Brad Smith series, which has become something of a literary comfort food for me. DROPSHOT (1990), the second book in the series, is set on the Caribbean Island of St. Maarten and I enjoyed jumping into Smith’s world as much this time as I had the prior five or six readings I’ve made of Dropshot. Read my old gangster review here. And finally, the other short story I read, “ANYWHERE OUT OF THE WORLD,” by Swedish crime writer, Karin Tidbeck (2018), is a brilliant tale asking if the past ever dies. Four teenagers venture into the woods on a dark Swedish night looking for a mythical supernatural phenomenon, but only two of them return. Years later, the survivors find themselves back at the scene hoping to find something that will relieve their grief and guilt. But as everyone knows, personal tragedy has a long shelf life. Whew. Fin— Now on to next month…