Review: "The Longest December" by Richard Chizmar

 

“The Longest December” by Richard Chizmar Cemetery Dance, 2023   Richard Chizmar’s crime novella, “The Longest December”—which is a revised and expanded version of Chizmar’s 2016 story, “A Long December”—is an original and inventive take on the serial killer tale. Bob Howard is a middle-aged sales rep living the suburban dream with a son in college and his marriage, to the beautiful Katy, comfortable and rewarding. But his carefully curated life is shattered when a detective knocks on his door on an early December morning asking about Bob’s best friend and next-door neighbor, James Wilkinson. Wilkinson, a part-time history lecturer at a local University, is suspected in a series of killings dating back years. Bob and Katy insist the police have made a mistake. Wilkinson has been their neighbor for eight years and he is their son’s honorary godfather. And he, Wilkinson, has never shown any behavior to suggest he may be a killer. Of course, Wilkinson has disappeared—which makes him look guilty—and the news media pick up the story with frenzied zeal. “The Longest December” is a bullet of a crime thriller with a psychological element—could Wilkinson have played Bob and Katy for so long, and would he come back and hurt them now?—wrapped in a tense and atmospheric narrative. Chizmar’s sense of pacing is alarmingly perfect but the tale’s essence is the intrinsic suspense as the reader watches Bob circle the truth of what James Wilkinson truly is, on both an emotional and intellectual level, moving from denial to fear and then to something altogether different. “The Longest December” is a thrilling tale with a little Alfred Hitchcock and the film Seven blended into Chizmar’s own secret sauce. And it really works! “The Longest December” was published as one-half of a “double” with Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan’s story, “A Face in the Crowd.”

Check out A Face in the Crowd / The Longest December at Amazon—click here for the hardcover.

Books You Should Read: "Backshot" by Ed Gorman and Tom Piccirilli

Cemetery Dance has two signed, limited edition hardcovers, with interconnected storylines available. The titles: Backshot: 1902 by Ed Gorman, and Backshot: 2012 by Tom Piccirilli. The stories are connected across one hundred years by Marshal Delmar Royce. Royce is a character in 1902, and the grandfather of the anti-hero protagonist in 2012.

1902 is a hardboiled, noirish—ish because there is always a touch of hope in Ed Gorman’s work no matter how dark—Western. In my review earlier this year I wrote:

“It is very much like an old Gold Medal crime novel—a man trapped in a situation far out of his control, his downfall brought by a beautiful woman, and his redemption in the arms of another. It is developed with Ed Gorman’s masterful colors of humanity. The most egregious, nasty villains are painted with the light brush of understanding, creating a moral ambiguity that is more horrifying than straight evil. It is an understated masterpiece, an apt description of many of Ed Gorman’s works, and well worth the price of admission.” [Read the review]

2012 is a richly textured crime novel with betrayal and revenge at its core. It is dark, splendid, and written with a style that very few writers are capable of. In my review earlier this year I wrote:

“It is thematically complex with a heaviness of the past’s influence on the present. Royce is haunted by the image of a man he will never meet, Delmar Royce, and Quill is tormented by the shadow of his abusive father. The story never strays into predictability, and Royce is, if not exactly likable, understandable and even familiar.” [Read the review]

Both of these titles can be purchased directly from Cemetery Dance (click the titles below to see the webpage for each book):

Backshot: 1902 by Ed Gorman

Backshot: 2012 by Tom Piccirilli 

BACKSHOT: 2012 by Tom Piccirilli

Backshot: 2012 is the second of two related novellas. 2012 was written by Tom Piccirilli and Backshot:1902 was written by Ed Gorman. The connection between the two is Marshal Delmar Royce who is a minor, but key, player in the latter parts of 1902 and the great³-grandfather of 2012’s antihero, Royce.

Royce is a professional thief lying in a hospital bed with a broken back and useless legs. His lifelong friend and partner, Quill, punched a bullet in his back after their last job and now Royce is looking at a painful future and a five-year prison stretch. The doctor tells him he won’t walk for a year, but Royce is on his feet in six months; it’s another three years before his release from prison and his planned revenge against Quill.

2012 is a touch Richard Stark, but wholly Tom Piccirilli. The plotline is Stark—Royce is betrayed by his partner and spends the rest of the story getting even—but it is stylistically and thematically Piccirilli. Mr. Piccirilli’s literate, smooth, stark style is, perhaps, the finest in modern crime fiction—

“DeKooning sighed. It was the sigh that said you couldn’t believe people were so clichéd, so obvious, so average. You heard the story a thousand times before and here it was again, and you just couldn’t believe you were going to have to sit through it one more time. DeKooning frowned. It said more about him than anything before.”  

It is thematically complex with a heaviness of the past’s influence on the present. Royce is haunted by the image of a man he will never meet, Delmar Royce, and Quill is tormented by the shadow of his abusive father. The story never strays into predictability, and Royce is, if not exactly likable, understandable and even familiar.

Tom Piccirilli died in July 2015 from brain cancer. He was a talented writer who started his career in horror and then migrated to crime. He won multiple Bram Stoker awards for his horror fiction, including best novel for The Night Class, and he won the Thriller Award for best paperback original for his crime novels The Midnight Road and The Coldest Mile. Backshot: 2012 was published posthumously, and as I read it, I wondered if it is the last of Mr. Piccirilli’s original work.   

Purchase a copy of Backshot:2012 at Cemetery Dance’s website.

BACKSHOT: 1902 by Ed Gorman

Backshot: 1902 is the first of two related short novels. 1902 is written by Ed Gorman and Backshot: 2012 is written by Tom Piccirilli. The connection is familial. Marshal Royce, who appears in the later parts of 1902, is the grandfather of the protagonist in 2012. I haven’t read 2012 yet—my copy is still wending its way across the United States, last check put it in North Carolina—but 1902 is damn good.

Declan Parnell is a young, relatively harmless, man working in the finest restaurant in Granite Bend. He has two weaknesses, the tables in the local casinos, and Jancey. Jancey is the beautiful, manipulative, self-serving girlfriend of Declan’s boss. She gives Declan a taste whenever she wants her beau in a jealous huff. Declan’s other vice destroyed his relationship with his only real friend, a middle-aged woman named Burl, which makes him vulnerable to a supporting role in the robbery of a local judge. The robbery goes bad, and Declan’s prospects get bleaker when Marshal Royce, who is in town investigating the local Sheriff for corruption, starts sniffing around.

Backshot: 1902 is a marvelously executed western noir. Declan is likable, maddening in his foolishness, and hopelessly inadequate to Jancey’s powers—

“She was right. I didn’t know much about women and the little I did know scared the hell out of me.”

It is very much like an old Gold Medal crime novel—a man trapped in a situation far out of his control, his downfall brought by a beautiful woman, and his redemption in the arms of another. It is developed with Ed Gorman’s masterful colors of humanity. The most egregious, nasty villains are painted with the light brush of understanding, creating a moral ambiguity that is more horrifying than straight evil. It is an understated masterpiece, an apt description of many of Ed Gorman’s works, and well worth the price of admission.  

       

Purchase a copy of Backshot:1902 at Cemetery Dance.

Bill Pronzini's Nameless Detective

I stumbled across two Nameless titles by Bill Pronzini recently published by Cemetery Dance in hardcover.  They are advertised as novellas, and one is a reprint and the other is an original.  The cover art is beautiful.  The titles are: Kinsmen, and Femme.

Kinsmen.  This is the reprint.  The cover art is by Glen Orbik. It is listed as "in stock" with a publishing date of December 28, 2012 at Cemetery Dance's website, but is listed for pre-order at Amazon.  The page count is 192.  The CD description reads:

"Allison Shay was traveling home from the University of Oregon with her new boyfriend, Rob Compton, when their car broke down near the tiny rural town of Creekside, California. Soon after, Allison and Rob went missing without a trace

"Whatever happened, it felt like something bad to the Nameless Detective. Five days without a whisper of contact with the outside world. Long past the inconsiderate-kids stage; long past the silly and the harmless."

Femme.  This is an original.  It has a page count of 176.  The cover art is by Glen Orbik.  Similar to Kinsmen, it is listed as "in stock" at the publisher's website, but is still a pre-order at Amazon.   The CD description reads:

"You hear the term a lot these days, usually in connection with noir fiction and film noir. But they're not just products of literature or film, the folklore of nearly every culture. They exist in modern society, too. The genuine femme fatales you hear about now and then are every bit as evil as the fictional variety. Yet what sets them apart is that they're the failures, the ones who for one reason or another got caught. For every one of those, there must be several times as many who get away with their destructive crimes...

"In the thirty years the Nameless Detective has been a private investigator, he has never once had the misfortune to cross paths with this type of seductress... but in Femme he'll meet Cory Beckett, a deadly woman who has brought some new angles to the species. New—and terrible."  

These novellas seem to be a departure from CD's usual fare, along with its recent release of The Interregator and Other Criminally Good Fiction anthology, of horror and dark suspense.  A departure maybe, but these are both titles I am very interested in, and I hope they do well for both Pronzini and CD so we can look forward to more like these.