Review: "Playback" by Raymond Chandler

 

Playback by Raymond Chandler Houghton Mifflin, 1958 Reviewed by Mike Baker Playback is the last book Raymond Chandler published in his lifetime and, while I haven’t read everything he wrote, I can say categorically this is the weakest entry to date. The novel opens and closes with Clyde Umney, a lawyer representing some nebulous East Coast concern, stogeying Marlowe into taking a job tailing a young woman for reasons he refuses to explain—but he pays well enough, and that’s apparently enough for Marlowe. So our detective heads down to Central Station in L.A., where the woman is supposed to arrive, and brings along a grip full of clothes, cash, and a gun. There, we meet the story’s villain, Larry Mitchell. He’s well-connected but broke, seedy, and clinging to charm like it might still work. Mitchell meets with the young woman—who wants nothing to do with him—and then vanishes. Marlowe follows her to some small southern California town, and the job should be simple: observe, report, collect. But it isn’t. Mitchell complicates things. Marlowe can’t stand a bully, and Mitchell fits the part too well. The woman complicates things more. Marlowe still carries the instincts of a knight, even if the armor’s corroded and the lance is blunt. He delays calling Umney, digging instead into what Mitchell might have had on her. Then Mitchell turns up dead—or doesn’t. There’s no body. In true Chandler fashion, the mystery becomes metaphysical as much as procedural. Maybe there was a murder. Maybe there wasn’t. But Marlowe, ever the stubborn moralist, is now in it, tangled up with a woman he barely knows and a story that doesn’t want to be told. And here’s where Playback loses itself. What begins with promise descends into a slow unraveling: a string of aimless NPCs saying things, doing little, contributing less. A fog of narrative confusion settles in. There are murky shenanigans, unresolved threads, and long stretches of pontificating—much of it Chandler, or Marlowe, or some hybrid of the two, meditating on life and death and what it all means. It took me until page 119 to feel even a flicker of investment. Chandler can still craft a surgical sentence—his style is as crisp as ever—but he no longer seems interested in building anything with them. Reading Playback is like calling a friend while cleaning the kitchen: they’re rambling about a trip to the library, and you’re only half-listening, more focused on the stubborn stain you’ve been scrubbing for fifteen minutes. There are, as always, moments of delight—those sharp quips that cut air and page alike—but they’re fewer and farther between. In between, we’re left with a kind of exhausted melancholy. Chandler, who once lit noir on fire with his wit and moral clarity, now seems lost in the haze. There’s no irony in his musings, just the raw blurting of worn-down truisms. Mortality isn’t just a theme here—it’s the undercurrent pulling everything under. What’s striking is the fear behind it. Chandler, the ultimate stylist, seems overwhelmed by the vision he’s spent his life perfecting. The white knight has become a disenchanted ghost, mumbling at the hollow praise still echoing around him. He’s no longer getting it right, and he knows it. Playback isn’t just a detective story. It’s a last letter, written to no one in particular. A man staring into the final dark, trying to summon meaning from the habits of a lifetime. In the end, there’s no great twist, no satisfying conclusion. Just a tired hero and the man who created him, both running out the clock. And maybe that’s the most honest ending Chandler could have written. Not with a bang, not even with a whisper—but with the slow, sinking realization that the world doesn’t need saving, and the knight doesn’t need to ride again*. *               *               * *  There’s a single chapter near the end where Marlowe is searching for a waiter and tracks him to the tiny shack he calls home—only to find him hanging in the outhouse. The story is so messy by this point that I wasn’t sure whether it was suicide or murder. Either way, Marlowe is gob-smacked by the horror of it, and maybe even shaken by the thought that he played some part in the man’s death. It’s a moment that feels like Chandler reckoning with something personal. Maybe even entertaining the idea of doing himself in. But history would prove he didn’t have the heart to go out that way. Instead, he chose the long, slow exit: alcohol and maudlin self-indulgence. Still, the chapter is striking—arguably the best in the book. The thing is, I love to read well-written books, but even the writers I admire most stumble sometimes. This might be one of those moments. But if you love Chandler, it’s like blues harp—you play all the notes between where you are and where you’re headed. And Playback, for all its flaws, is one of those notes. If you want to understand Chandler, really understand him, this is part of the journey.

Check out Playback at Amazon—click here for the paperback.

Review: "Buffalo Wagons" by Elmer Kelton

 

Buffalo Wagons by Elmer Kelton Ballantine Books, 1956   Reviewed by Mike Baker   Buffalo hunter Gage Jameson is watching the end of the Kansas buffalo and decides to partner with King Ransom, another buffalo hunter, and head down into Texas and the Llano Estacado—Comanchería—with an oversized crew of skinners. Half are there for skinning the plentiful buff, and half to avoid slaughter should the Comanche decide they ought to leave. Regardless, they’re mostly King’s men—and predictably, this will matter a lot later on. Meanwhile, they discover a Comanche camp and a pretty white girl the Comanche have taken as a slave. This book was written in 1956 by a white male Texan, so Kelton goes on a bit about how you might not want to stir that hornet’s nest—except she’s a white woman, which, in 1956 Texas, is pretty much… well, let me just say, during the discussion of whether or not to save her, they refer to her as a white woman seven times. Anyhoo, we’ll step over the giant elephant in the room and keep reading, because they save her from the filthy, depredating red savagesI and the peaceful skinning camps slowly descend into the bad-news party Kelton has been planning all along. Back-shooting shenanigans ensue. Buffalo Wagons wasn’t groundbreaking. It isn’t top-tier. It is, blessedly, solid. Look—traditional westerns are bodice rippers with horses and six-guns. We can crowd the analysis with American archetypes and the heroic loner. Blah fucking blah. They’re formulaic and generally predictable. Every now and then, Lewis Patten would kill the hero, or someone would go really dark like .44 or Hano’s Last Notch, but on balance, it’s the bad guy who turns out to be a good guy, gets the girl and plugs the bad guy—or plugs the girl, and the bad guy takes care of his own needs. I’m not saying pleasant twists and surprises don’t happen, but the basic formula never really falters. You might offer up Blood Meridian, or The Revenant, or Little Big Man—but that’s capital-L Literature, and those cranky bastards play by their own rules. Cormac McCarthy wouldn’t have known a good time if she dropped her drawers right in front of him. Traditional westerns exist—maybe just for me—to affirm my misguided belief that there is any justice in this life. Blood Meridian is for the young, who can afford to have their king-sized hope pie snuffled to shit. Traditional westerns go best with a beer and a cigar, a dusty porch, and a steak dinner. I saw a gaggle of Black ladies shuffle, exhausted and beaten, into a Primitive Baptist church one Sunday in 1994—only to leave, after a hellfire sermon full of God’s blessings to the steadfast and righteous, backs up and ready to eat giants for breakfast and nut-punch the Devil himself. That’s what a traditional western brings to my table. Your boss is a bully and a moron, traffic ate your lunch, your wife wants to say—fucking anything—to you first thing when you get home from the above-mentioned shitty job? No problem, son. Crack open Buffalo Wagons and ease into one man making his way across the merciless Llano Estacado like a motherfucking boss. You’ll see the end coming like a buffalo stampede—and thank God for that. It’s at least one goddamn thing that’ll work out today. *                *                * I A brief note to the self-righteous: the Indian Wars were a 200-year genocidal campaign against the First Nations by the American government, and a war of survival for settlers trying to make something better than what they had. The history is complicated and, generally, awful. My comment was meant ironically—except for the “depredating” part. See Josiah Wilbarger’s  Indians Depredations in Texas if you doubt me.

Check out Buffalo Wagons at Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback.

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.

 

"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: "The Friends of Eddie Coyle" by George V. Higgins

The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins     reviewed by Mike Baker     Eddie Coyle is a low-level Boston criminal, and he has a problem. After getting arrested for driving a hijacked truck through Vermont, he was convicted and is now out on bail, awaiting sentencing. His solution to the prospect of going to jail? He’s willing to snitch on a fellow criminal. But the police want more from Coyle—they want him to roll on even more associates, which creates a whole new problem for him. Meanwhile, Phil Scalisi is in the bank-robbing business with three other mob-connected hoods, and business is good. Eddie knows about Phil’s bank job, so you can probably see how this might develop into a problem for both Phil and especially for Eddie. And you can already guess how things might unfold. The cops and robbers dynamic heats up, and shenanigans ensue. This book gets a lot of praise—Best Crime Novel Ever. Best Dialogue Ever. I won’t go 100% on either of those claims, but it’s pretty goddamn good. The dialogue never feels stilted or expository. It never gets cumbersome.  Also, it has a loose narrative structure, shifting from character to character without getting bogged down in unnecessary details. George V. Higgins leaves a lot of the work up to the reader. He doesn’t say much explicitly, and pieces of the story are intentionally left out. It’s enough to keep the plot moving, but an engaged reader will start to make assumptions. These gaps—these moments of narrative uncertainty—create a sense of wobbling momentum as things start to unravel. The reader is taken on a perilous ride, with the plot hurtling forward, sometimes faster than you can keep up. If you’ve seen the movie Killing Them Softly, you might get a sense of what I’m talking about. That film is based on Cogan’s Trade, another Higgins classic, and sticks closely to his narrative style. Friends of Eddie Coyle is, in my view, the best example of lessons learned from Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Is this book the best? I don’t know. But what I do know is that every word rings true, every sentence flows into the next*. It feels like the end of the night at a bar, and some guy is telling you a story that you’re sure is bullshit—right up until the end, when he hits you with the twist and you realize you just spent the evening getting drunk with Elvis. *            *            * *There’s a phenomenon where, when reading a text, if you come across a word you don’t know and can’t figure out from context or don’t bother to look up, your understanding of everything else becomes slightly diminished. Every unknown word in the text that you can’t decipher or don’t take the time to understand compounds this effect. I believe there’s a similar concept in fiction. False notes, off-putting inconsistencies, or unintentional character flaws—these things pull us out of the narrative and create a kind of psychic drag that slows us down. Look, I read Cormac McCarthy slowly because his writing is dense and complicated. But I read Nick Carter slowly because every other sentence feels fake and hollow.

Check out The Friends of Eddie Coyle at Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback.

 

"A Darktide of Westerns" by Mike Baker

 

A Darktide of Westerns by Mike Baker     I stopped writing monthly reports on my reading about the time my wife asked me for a divorce in February of 2024. Having momentarily forestalled the situation, I kept reading books and writing reviews but by November, she’d come back undeterred and even more certain that after 36 years of what I took for wedded bliss, she needed to move on and that, young readers, finally threw me so hard that most of what I’ve “read” in December has been on Audible because concentration became a limited commodity used up by my job and trying to avoid driving my car into oncoming traffic. That said, I did read a few books in December. A Wile E. Young book called For a Few Souls More that sucked and is reviewed elsewhere. Shotgun Marshal by Wade Everett which also sucked. Ditto the review. I read a couple of Tom Clavin American West histories, the Audibles I spoke of, that I bought because their 7-hour reading length matched the out and back I had to drive, heading to how it seems is the only way for my extended family to reunite: A funeral. A friend described Clavin’s books as having been researched off of Wikipedia and the History Channel’s website. That’s being generous. Regardless of his weak scholarship though, the boy can write and if you don’t mind shallow reportage, they’re fine introductions to subjects the interested will discover are significantly more complicated.

This brings me to the books worth discussing here: The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt and Red Rabbit by Alex Grecian. I’ve already reviewed the DeWitt book but I need to describe it for comparison. The Brothers of the title are infamous killers in the hire of the Commodore, an Oregon Territory boss, sent to dispatch the Commodore’s enemies into the hereafter. They have been sent to find a prospector named Hermann Kermit Warm who the Commodore claims stole from him. They haphazardly wander east towards California having strange experiences with odd souls and oftentimes, killing or severely abusing their hapless victims. They are themselves beset by stupidity, hubris, and cruelty. They are barely loyal to each other. These adventures occur without building toward the finale which itself feels haphazard and empty of purpose. The book moves along like a mindless puppy bounding and stupid or a ball bouncing wherever physics decides. It is like a medieval journey story—Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or Homer’s Odyssey—with less in the way of specific goals. Definitely more like the Canterbury Tales. Or, as monologuist Jerome Sterne said about lesser journey stories his students had brought him for his appraisal, the Brothers are “clowns in space” as they meander from one tragically comic, and seemingly random event, to the next with the whole of it summing with “What a strange night” or the more nebulous “wow, dude” whose simple mindedness defeats the history of art with one ignorant swoosh. You might say, this how life works, things just happen Baker—you can’t order art with a theory but that is why we have art. Life is meaningless. The best art orders it, if only slightly, giving our own real lost moments some kind of perspective that applies a tiny bit of sense to just some of it. The other fundamental problem with the book is that it betrays the one rule that sits at the heart of every good western—there’s someone for whom you want to live. Someone who stands against the shits and screwheads. An f’ing hero. This book is replete with villains, scoundrels, and louts—whores, assassins, and fools. These misbegotten mongrels are all the reasons God made gravity, heart attacks, and auto-erotica asphyxiation. There is no one rising above their failings to lead us. There is no one for whom I gave one good goddamn. The writing is fine. DeWitt is a stylist and for so many pages of me begging for the end, the ending (after the action’s crescendo) is peculiar in how it satisfies. Saying more would ruin its fine and gentle catharsis. I’ll likely re-read it at some point. Alex Grecian’s Red Rabbit is a meatier proposition. Sadie Grace is the Witch of Burden County and a few local knuckleheads have put a bounty on her pretty scalp for reasons best unraveled in the reading. Meanwhile, Rose Nettles—now called Mullins—is burying her recently deceased husband Joe Mullins under a sycamore tree. She’s stranded on a farmstead that she can’t maintain and is without prospects. Grecian delivers upon her two saddle tramps—Ned Hemingway and Moses Burke—a witch Master named Old Tom and his charge, a child of uncertain gender that Tom calls Rabbit. Tom’s headed to kill Sadie so Grace and the cowboys tag along. They are followed by the ghost of Grace’s husband Joe who doesn’t know much but is pretty certain this is a bad idea. I am a western traditionalist preferring square jawed, honest, and quiet tough guys, bitter struggles and godless terrain. And I like both flavors. Patten and Kelton. Sometimes Castle and occasionally, Elmore Leonard. I’ll read a Piccadilly Cowboy book but I won’t be excited about having to do it. I do not think Blood Meridian is God’s gift or even McCarthy’s fifth best book. My point is that I came to weird or horror westerns accidentally. It’s like that cookbook, Come for Drinks – Stay for Dinner. I bought Ed Erdelac’s High Planes Drifter expecting to hate it and came away believing in Erdelac’s talent and the idea that weaving in the strange and terrible might be the only way my beloved genre survives. Red Rabbit has all the gore and violence you expect in a splatter western but with something else. Grecian loves every character in that book so that even the villain, who is an awful son of a bitch, invites you into empathizing with his wretched plight. The story meanders but instead of building toward the meaninglessness that The Sisters Brothers says is at the root of life, each twist and misadventure drives the motley crew toward an uncertain but devastating conclusion. And this is where the book falters slightly. I am one of those rare souls who does not enjoy how some movies end with tiny “what happens to the character” synopses. I would much prefer my own imaginings than the author’s well intended slatherings of hope and resolution. I would say skip it but you might like that sort of thing. The funny in this cosmic joke is that I’d recommend both books. It is possible that DeWitt’s Waiting for Godot like outlook on the why of our lives, sits too uncomfortably in my heart as I contemplate what a 55 year old man does for his second act. And Grecian’s book has flaws I have not discussed because they’re academic and have to do with my own writerly ambitions, my particular tastes in literature and perhaps, like I just said, I really needed a pat and happy ending to settle the constant rumbling in my gut these days. It would be without an understanding of the awfulness of human history that I might say things couldn’t possibly get worse in 2025 so let’s just say it is my fondest hope that the tides turn in all our favors as we put December behind us.

Check out The Sisters Brothers on Amazon—Kindle edition here and paperback here. Check out Red Rabbit on Amazon—Kindle edition here and paperback here.

Shorts: "Dicky and the Hat" by Mike Baker

Dicky and the Hat by Mike Baker   *     *     *     *   RICHARD’S FATHER SILENTLY MOUTHED the words “Please kill me” into the unstable air between them. Richard blinked, mentally stumbling his way back into the diner’s chaos and thrum. Richard had trust issues—especially with his own imagination. He sat across from his dad Arturo watching the old man meticulously cut up his fried eggs and then eat them, one piece at a time. He met his dad at the State Street Diner every morning for breakfast even though Richard never ate breakfast and the idea of his dad, knee deep in the beginning stages of senility, navigating there from eight city blocks away—gave Richard the yips. His dad insisted. Richard was a soldier for Ducky Fiumara, a capo in the Genovese Family, and did a number of things for walking around money but his main job was killing people which you’d never say out loud. You definitely wouldn’t say “wack” either, unless you were an asshole who spent his time pimping or doing hold ups. Mostly, he and Ducky didn’t say anything, there wasn’t even a nod. Sometimes it felt like telepathy. Richard had coffee with Ducky and the way Ducky sugared his espresso let Richard know who needed to go. Richard took care of it and that, as they say, was that. Richard’s dad had never had to do that kind of work. He’d been an accountant for Ducky’s father and then for Ducky after Ducky’s dad retired. The senility didn’t start until after Richard’s dad retired. Thank god. They didn’t talk about the senility either because as rotten a dad as Richard’s dad had been, he was still his dad and he couldn’t bear to think of the man as less than he’s been, let alone say the words to his dad or make dad acknowledge it. “You don’t eat enough Dicky and your eyes look tired. You’re wacking off too much at night. You never could stop doing that when you were a boy. Filthy goddamn habit.” Richard clenched up. He knew, or he believed, his dad couldn’t help it but Richard was a made guy unlike his dad and even his dad busting his balls was almost too much. “How’s the garden these days Pop?” His dad took a bite of eggs. They dribbled a little down his mouth. “What did you say?” “The garden, how is it?” “Have you called you sister?” “What Pop?” “Your sister, are you deaf, have you called her?” “No Pop.” He hadn’t talked to his sister in two years. Not since she moved to Connecticut, and she’d moved to Connecticut to get away from Richard, who she hated. She hated the old man but like Richard, she couldn’t admit it. Not really. “Pop, we’re having Christmas dinner at Aunt Johnny’s this year, you gonna come?” Aunt Johnny was his mom’s sister and she hated Arturo and his dad hated her but Richard had to ask. “No, I’m going to the VFW, they got a thing for veterans. Bring a cake for me from the bakery by the house.” He meant Richard’s childhood home, his dad lived in a home for poor old people and that place, the bakery, had been gone for 20 years. His dad spit a piece of eggshell on his plate. “fuck’n greaser in the kitchen did that on purpose because we’re Italian.” Richard cringed. This had been a neighborhood diner when he was a kid but the neighborhood had changed as family’s moved in with the steep increase in rents and upscale real estate. Guys like Richard learned to navigate. His dad’s generation, not so much. Richard needed to leave. Ducky wanted to see him in there early. Ducky didn’t have many rules but one of the few was not ever being late for a meeting with Ducky, not ever. You could feel safer fucking up a piece of work than being late. Shit happened on jobs but being late for a meeting was disrespect and that did not fly with Ducky. He watched his dad dip toast in his eggs and crunching down on the greasy yellow toast, bits and crumbs blew out of his mouth. The way his dad ate breakfast disgusted Richard. His dad disgusted Richard. Doing the kind of work he did, self-control was how you stayed out of jail. It was how you stayed alive. You took your time; you were under control. His dad had never been 100% under control. His dad worked long hours, tracking someone else’s money and he couldn’t make mistakes because these people only had one answer for mistakes but afterward, when he came home, he got sloppy. His dad had had an assistant once. The assistant was young with three kids at home. One day Ducky called Richard’s dad into the Office and asked him point blank about a ledger. It was one of the assistant’s ledgers and Richard’s dad said he’d rather not say. Ducky said someone was in trouble, the assistant or Richard’s dad. That meant exactly one thing. His dad said the assistant had either been sloppy or he was stealing. And considering the size of the assistant’s family, Richard’s dad said it was probably stealing and maybe it was the assistant. You make choices in this life but it’s really only one choice. You chose to live or you chose to die. Whoever did it, and only the old man knew, the old man chose his own ass. Fuck the assistant. All Ducky said was thanks and Richard’s dad went back to work, sitting right next to his assistant. The assistant’s entire family got murdered that night. The police, people around the neighborhood, all said it was Puerto Ricans robbing them because they were all cut up but who knows? Richard knew, even then, who did it. Everybody knew who did it. Richard’s dad came home drunk and before Richard could even get a word out, his dad laid into him with his belt and its buckle, and then went to work on his mom and sister. You’d think Richard would have gotten him back when he grew up, when he started working for Ducky but even now, if his dad pulled a punch as a joke, Richard flinched a little. Watching the old man eat, he made up his mind. The old man needed to die. He wasn’t sure when but this had to stop. He couldn’t do it though, kill his own dad. He probably would hire some Puerto Ricans and then kill them afterwards. “I got to go Pop. I got to go see our boy.” That meant Ducky. His dad always called Ducky “Boy” since he had worked for Ducky’s dad and what grown man would allow himself to be called Ducky? “Whatever Dicky. See you tomorrow.” Richard got up, paid for him and his dad, looking back at his dad sitting crumpled and old. Richard decided to let it all go, let the old man die natural, and headed out the front door, the door’s tiny bell jingling as it opened and closed. Richard’s dad watched Richard leave and then nodded at a man sitting a few booths down. The man got up, left a couple a bucks on the table, and headed out the door after Richard, the tiny bell jingling, a newspaper covering the throwaway gun palmed underneath it. Fin

Mike Baker lives in North Florida with three feral cats, a couple of asshole racoons, a possum named the Colonel and a chihuahua named Chloe. He is, most days, catholic whether he wants to be or not.

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