"The Plunge" by David Goodis

I recently read Dark Passage by David Goodis and really enjoyed it.  It is a novel where everything works.  It is plot controlled, but the characters are given just enough room to be interesting, and the atmosphere vibrates between something close to despair and almost, but not quite, hope.  When I finished I had the sharp desire to flip back to page one and start again.  Instead I dug out a David Goodis’ short story I read a few years ago titled “The Plunge” and reread it.  It was better this time than the last, and rather than satisfy my urge to reread Dark Passage, it made the itch more demanding.   

The following review originally appeared in 2009, and be warned it is a spoiler.

David Goodis is a writer that every hardboiled reader should know.  His work is dark—about as dark as you will ever read—heavy and literate.  It is often difficult to differentiate between the good and the bad, and the tales are drenched with a self-loathing that gives the stories a deep and sinister glimpse into the darkness of the human condition.

His short story “The Plunge” is one of his best, and a perfect example of what Goodis did well—create men who are, for the most part, good and then twist their world just enough to push them out of bounds into waiting darkness.

Roy Childers is a clean cop in a corrupt department.  He has risen through the ranks quickly; he is a homicide lieutenant with a bright future.  He has four children and another on the way.  His wife loves him and he seemingly loves his wife, but that isn’t enough for Roy.  He doesn’t consciously understand that he wants more, but he does.

His world begins its slow descent when a warehouse is taken down for $15,000.  The robber killed one security guard and blinded the other. It is a trademark Dice Nolan score.  Dice is a man whom Childers has a special connection; they grew up on the same street and Roy has put him behind bars more than once.  Now Childers wants to take Nolan down one last time, but he isn’t ready for what happens.  Nolan has something Roy wants and it will be his undoing.

“The Plunge” is a brutal story.  It chronicles the unwinding of a man.  A man who seemingly has everything.  A man who is better than his end.  And a man who should know better. It is literate and the prose is pitch-perfect:

“Seven out of ten are slobs; he was thinking.  There was no malice or disdain in the thought.  It was more a mixture of pity and regret.  And that made it somewhat sickening, for he was referring specifically to the other men who wore badges, he fellow-policemen.  More specifically he was thinking of the nine plainclothesmen attached to the Vice Squad.  Only yesterday they’d been caught with their palms out, hauled in before the Commissioner, and called all sorts of names before they were suspended.”

The story opens in normal enough fashion.  The protagonist is a cop who wants to find a murderer.  There is even something special and personal about this particular criminal, but Mr Goodis takes the premise and smudges it with his own recipe.  He marks it with weakness and greed.  He takes a good and strong man and chops him down with life, fear, and hunger.

The best part is, he does it all without ever losing his grip on the story or its impact on the reader.  He makes it interesting and entertaining from beginning to end.  He builds a path into darkness and then shows the reader the way out—a cleansing, but a rather messy and permanent one.

“The Plunge” originally appeared in Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine October 1958. I read it in A Century of Noir edited by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins.

An Interesting BBC Interview with Jack Higgins

I found a television interview aired on BBC in 2010 for the publication of The Judas Gate.  It runs nearly six minutes and it is really an interesting short piece.  It touches on his early years in Belfast, his love of writing (he describes it as a compulsion), and he said, regarding books and his writing, “books are everything.”

He named The Great Gatsby as one of the books that influenced him the most as writer: “The sheer grace of the writing, absolutely.  The wit of it.  The use of words. The haunting descriptions.” 

The video is here.

Good News for Ed Gorman Readers

I have good news for fans of Ed Gorman and his series character Dev Conrad.  Severn House has scheduled the release of the fourth novel in the Dev Conrad series.  It is titled Flashpoint, and the release date is August 1, 2013.  The cover art looks great and the description at Amazon is even better:

“Political Consultant Devlin Conrad had the feeling that his very married client Senator Robert Logan was a lot more involved with the beautiful and mysterious Tracy Cabot than he wanted to admit. But he learned too late that the Cabot woman was a spy working for a shadowy right-wing organization – too late because by then she'd been found murdered in Senator Logan’s fishing cabin, and the police are certain that he killed her. But Conrad finds numerous suspects in the Senator's mansion and in the somewhat comic but dangerous figure of political saboteur Howie Ruskin. He must find the real killer if he is to win the election for a client whose vanity and arrogance make him right at home in the United States Senate.”

The Conrad novels are really quite good, and each of the first three is better than its predecessor.  And judging by the description of Flashpoint I suspect this trend will continue.  The first three titles are: Sleeping Dogs, Stranglehold, and Blindside.

I reviewed Sleeping Dogs in 2008 here, and Stranglehold more recently here.  

"Revenge is Bitter-Sweet" by H. A. DeRosso

H. A. DeRosso is best known for his dark Westerns. His better work is unusual—it tends toward dark, but it has vibrant and visceral settings and descriptions. His protagonists tend to be indecisive and lost. His work is frequently, and correctly, compared with Cornell Woolrich’s bleak and violent noir.

His Westerns are amazing. They were original in an era when the genre was cluttered with stereotypes and cheese, but he was also an accomplished writer of pulp crime. His crime stories vary from readable to damn good; an example of the later is his 1960 story “The Hired Man”. I recently found a crime story he wrote in the collection Alfred Hitchcock’s Death Bag. It is titled “Revenge is Bitter-Sweet” and, while it isn’t as good as “The Hired Man,” it is an entertaining and well developed story.

Will Owen is bitter and angry. Another man caused his father’s death and the woman he loves is lost to him. The story opens with a late night appointment in the woods. Will is anxious, and nervous. He is waiting in the dark night to get a long awaited revenge for his father’s death.

“Revenge is Bitter-Sweet” is a twisty story with a surprise ending—it opens rushing down one avenue and quickly turns down another. The climax, and the twist, is planted early in the story.  The author didn’t cheat. I guessed the surprise before it was revealed, but it didn’t bother me. The writing was good enough to make it work.

The protagonist is a believable character that displays emotions relevant to us all—sorrow, anger and guilt in shifting shades. The setting is brilliantly conceived and executed to support the thematic emotions of the story. It is a dark and gloomy rural wilderness that matches the internal sufferings of the protagonist. A place that is likely very much like Mr DeRosso’s native Wisconsin.

The prose isn’t exactly hardboiled, but it is far from delicate. There are passages that feel like a dark and masculine poetry—

“The car stopped. The lights winked out. The night shadows dwelt in unruffled peace again.”

THE MIDNIGHT ROOM by Ed Gorman

Ed Gorman posted on his blog yesterday that his terrific novel The Midnight Room is available as an eBook for a very reasonable $3.99.  I read The Midnight Room when it was released in mass market by Leisure back in 2009; 18 or so months before Leisure's very sordid demise.  The Midnight Room is in my top five favorite list of of Ed Gorman's work, which makes it a damn fine novel.  It is currently only available for the Kindle, but I hope it will follow as a Nook Book.  Do yourself a favor, and buy this one.  The review below originally went live June 24, 2009.

Cindy Baines is a cute girl. She is the daughter of less than accomplished parents—her mother is a drinker, and her dad is a fundamentalist whack. They live in a trailer on the wrong side of town, but despite everything she seems to have a bright future. She is intelligent, beautiful, and very well liked. Unfortunately she is also the target of a demented serial killer.

When Cindy disappears the community is in near panic; Cindy isn’t the first girl to disappear and everyone is afraid she won’t be the last. There is a heavy load of pressure placed on the police department—particularly its small detective bureau—to find the girl and stop the killer. The detectives assigned to the case all have their own problems. Two of them are former lovers, and the third drinks too much and is a little crazy.

The Midnight Room isn’t a typical serial killer novel. The killer is revealed early in the story—the second chapter—and its focus is less on the killer and more on the drama that plays between the detectives, their work, and their families. It’s important to stress that it isn’t a drama. It’s very much in the crime noir form and Mr Gorman uses the tropes and expectations to develop the dark, sharp and poignant struggle of good and evil that rages in his characters, just as it rages in us all.

The characters are varied and well created—none are completely good and none are completely bad. Two of the detectives are brothers—Steve and Michael Scanlon. The older is their father’s favorite, but he has never been quite right. He wants everything fast and easy, while the younger is the more dependable, but underappreciated, son and detective. The story whirls around the two in a frenzy of misfortune, bad choices, and plain bad luck.

There is also a street tough ex-con named Leo Rice who is out for revenge. Steve Scanlon killed his brother while on the beat a few years back and now Leo wants his pound. Rice is the perfect street tough. He is hard, violent and stupid, all in one pure mixture. Add to that the serial killer, an aging father, a tough female detective and a missing girl who are all starkly vivid in Gorman’s deceptively simple prose, and you have a story that is vibrant and true.

The Midnight Room is a terrific lean and hard crime thriller. Its roots are deep in the hardboiled and noir genres, but it is nothing less than original. The characters and its dark vision of an unfair world raise it well beyond the expected, and in the end it’s the very bitter dark that offers redemption for both the characters and the reader.

Best of GT: "Terrorists" by Stephen Marlowe

A week or so ago I was cruising through the back posts on Gravetapping, and there were several I found to be really quite good. More than I ever would have thought. In a moment of extrement vanity I decided, and I am now executing that decision, to repost a few of the posts I thought were particularly interesting. This is the first. It is a little story I have read once or twice since I wrote this article, and my opinion of it hasn't changed, except I think even more of it now than I did when I wrote this. I hope you enjoy reading this little flash from the past as much as I did.

I recently read a short story by the late Stephen Marlowe titled “Terrorists”. It was published in the January 1956 issue of Accused; I read it in the 1997 anthology American Pulp. It is a hardboiled private eye story.

Chester Drum is a Washington D.C. private detective, and on a late and warm August night as he walks past his office he notices a light inside. He makes a routine check with the elevator operator who tells him the cleaning staff should be done. Drum then takes the elevator to his floor and quietly approaches his office; inside he finds a cleaning woman with a very cold war tale.

Her son is involved with a Puerto Rican youth group and they plan to assassinate the Secretary of State. The group is concerned with an independent Puerto Rico, but the mother tells Drum the boys are being used by a socialite Red—a communist—who cares nothing for Puerto Rico or the youth group, but is using them to further her own cause; the embarrassment of the United States and the advancement of Soviet-style communism.

The story is swift and, as expected from Marlowe, exciting. The plotline is sleek and straight and there really aren’t any surprises to a twenty-first century reader. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a good story, because it is a terrific story, but rather it means it is a story of its time. A small capsule filled with the popular fear and turmoil of the 1950s.

The plot can easily be traced to two events that occurred in 1950. The era of extreme paranoia brought on by McCarthy with his wild accusations of communist spies everywhere, and the failed assassination attempt on President Truman by three Puerto Rican terrorists.

I make this point not to weaken“Terrorists,” but rather to make the point that fiction, including popular fiction, is a mirror of the culture that creates it. Go into any used bookstore or library and take a novel from the shelf and you will find a nugget of truth about the time and place it was written; not the whole truth, but rather an image that represents the truth and atmosphere of the era. The fiction of the 1950s was saturated with communism and paranoia, just as the fiction of the 1980s was ripe with greed, drugs and Vietnam.

“Terrorists” is a brilliant example of both entertainment and place. When it is read it grabs the reader by the ear and jerks him into a past that only exists in memory and archive; it is a capsule that helps the reader’s understanding of where he came and, hopefully, where he can go or, at least, avoid returning. It also allows the reader to understand how little civilization has changed over the past fifty years; the enemies have changed (maybe), but the fear is very much alive.

And it does it all in a brilliantly entertaining fashion. Can it get any better? Maybe it can, because Chester Drum can be found plying his trade in no less than 20 novels.

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.       

STRANGLEHOLD by Ed Gorman

Dev Conrad—the cynical yet hopeful political consultant from Ed Gorman’s 2008 novel Sleeping Dogs—returns in Stranglehold.  Conrad is a Chicago-based political consultant who has one serious flaw; he has a conscience.  He plays to win, but he has an antiquated sense of fairness and honor.  A trait that isn’t in high demand in American politics.

Susan Cooper is an ideal candidate—she is attractive, intelligent, well spoken and personable—but as the election nears she becomes erratic and secretive.  Dev Conrad is called in as a trouble-shooter to find out the problem and put a leash on the candidate.  It’s not a quick fix however—Cooper is unmoved in her strange behavior and the clues Conrad finds lead him both to and away from his target.

Stranglehold is everything a mystery should be: dark, witty, plot driven, but populated by characters that matter, and it is never generic.  Mr Gorman takes a standard plot—murder, blackmail, lust—and breaths new life into it with twists that surprise the reader and invigorate the story.  It is a murder mystery, but its cock-eyed slant tracks the story into unexpected territory.

The opening line reads: “All roads lead to motels.” A standard theme in detective fiction—the seedy motel where unspeakable madness occurs—but Ed Gorman uses it as a kind of foil.  Not a trick by any standard, but he turns the trope against itself as well as the reader.

Ed Gorman is the most reliable writer of suspense currently working.  His plots—see above—are always clever and tight, his prose is smooth and hard at once, his narrative is steady and his dialogue is crystal.  But his real power is with the people that populate his stories.  His work has a dark cynicism about it, but that cynicism is rarely projected onto his characters.  There is hope in the behavior of his characters—they tend to be kind, solid, melancholy and very real; i. e. flawed.  The hero is as flawed as the antagonist, but it is the flaws, and how the character manages them, that generate compassion and interest from the reader.

Stranglehold is different from the first Dev Conrad novel: Sleeping Dogs.  It is darker.  There is less humor, although there is plenty if you enjoy your humor dry and subtle.  The differences between the two novels is interesting only on an intellectual level because both are entertaining.  The bottom line is, Stranglehold is the real deal.  It is another example of just how good Ed Gorman is at his craft.  It is also a reminder of the injustice that his name isn’t on the same lists as Stephen King, Dean Koontz and the rest of the high quality bestsellers.

ONE FOR HELL by Jada M. Davis

Stark House Press released a reprint of a 1952 Fawcett Red Seal original titled One for Hell written by Jada M. Davis back in 2010.  Davis is a writer I wasn’t familiar with and after reading it, I really don’t know why.  It is terrific and one of the best hardboiled noir tales I’ve read.  It resembles the work of two pulp writers, W. L. Heath—particularly Violent Saturday—and Jim Thompson.  It has the violence and dark shadows of Thompson and the sociology of secrets that Heath did so well.

Willa Ree is a drifter and a petty criminal.  The novel opens with Ree riding the rails toward a small Texas boomtown. His plan is simple: fleece the town and move on.  What happens is beyond Ree’s expectations and the town looks better to him by the minute.

One for Hell is pure entertainment.  There isn’t a protagonist.  The supporting cast, Willa Ree is the main player, come and go like visitors to an amusement park.  One by one they ratchet the pressure on Ree until he is ready to break.  And one by one Ree pushes them aside until he no longer has the ability.

The plot is tight and woven with a sophistication of character, morality and corruption.  The town has secrets—everyone has something to hide and Ree uses this underlying human weakness to his advantage.  He culls his enemies, the weaker ones first, from the herd and eliminates them. He has a girlfriend who is an arch-type, flawed at that, of woman.  She has all the strengths and the weaknesses and most are both—a desire to trust, to love and believe.  She is the light of the story and the hope.

The action is developed with a solidity and audacity that separates this novel from so many others of its type.  There is a scene in the middle part of the novel that covers 18 pages that changed my view of what can be done with both violence and action in a prose story.  It rolled like a freight train in the dark hard night.  It changed Ree from a smalltime hoodlum to a big time psychopath. It was the crux of the story, the beginning of the end for Willa Ree, and the push that leads the reader into his twisted mind.

There really isn’t anything flat in One for Hell.  Everything works.  From the plot to the characters to the psychology to the prose and it wraps itself together without the reader really knowing that it is happening.  Willa Ree spends much of his time trying to guess the actions and motives of other people and the internal dialogue is simple and interesting:

“Maybe the old woman knew. Or maybe she found it, though not likely. Baldy wasn’t a trusting sort of person, and she wouldn’t have guessed he had money in the first place. He sat on the trunk and surveyed the room. Pictures? Too simple.”

One for Hell is proof that Stark House is one of the best publishers of classic crime fiction.  This, like all of its releases, is still fresh and vibrant all these years later and it is going to be on my bookshelf for a very long time.

Stark House Press Super Christmas Sale

I received this nice piece of good news from Stark House.  Take my advice and buy a few of the titles. 

 

Happy Holidays from Stark House Press!

Earlier in the season we offered our first ever Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale to our newsletter subscribers. In an effort to reach out to all our readers, however, we're now making a similar buy 2 get 1 free sale on all in-stock titles from now until midnight on Christmas Day, 2012. And did we mention the FREE SHIPPING?

Details and a complete book listing are available here. Happy Holidays, everyone!

WHEN OLD MEN DIE by Bill Crider

Crossroad Press Ebook Edition

Bill Crider is best known for his Sheriff Dan Rhodes mystery novels, but his work is not limited to any one genre or style.  His Dan Rhodes mysteries tend to be a mixture of hardboiled and whodunit with a touch of humor to keep it fresh.  Mr Crider also wrote a series of novels featuring part-time and usually unwilling private investigator Truman Smith.  

The third Truman Smith novel, When Old Men Die, finds Truman putting the disappearance and murder of his sister behind him.  He has a steady job with a bail bondsman in Galveston, Texas, and as the novel opens he is approached by Dino, one of his oldest pals, to find a homeless man called Outside Harry.

Outside Harry is a fixture around town.  One of a group of homeless that are there, but rarely seen and Truman is a little dubious of the whole setup.  He can’t figure why Dino wants to find Outside Harry and Dino’s explanation that Harry was his friend doesn’t wash.  But Smith owes Dino and he commits to look for Harry over the weekend.  It only takes a few hours for Truman to find trouble followed by more until he has to either solve the case or get out of Galveston.

When Old Men Die is an entertaining story with all of Bill Crider’s trademarks—the mystery is tightly and superbly plotted, the characters are eccentric with muddy motives, and the humor is good natured and funny.  The style and theme, or maybe the attitude, is more hardboiled than much of Mr Crider’s current writing, but it works and works well.  The setting is pitch-perfect—Galveston is described, both past and present, with nuanced detail by a writer who obviously knows and likes the city.  The prose is lucid and smooth with enough bite to make it interesting—

“There were three quick shots, two of them scoring the floor; the third one glanced of the flashlight and sent it spinning crazily.”

And one of my favorite details of the Truman Smith novels is his cat Nameless.  A name, or lack thereof, that is conspicuously similar to Bill Pronzini’s long running Nameless Detective series.  The best part, Nameless is a cat in every detail—

“He’s big and yellowish orange, with gray-green eyes.  He took his time about entering.  He looked up at me as if to ask where I’d been all evening, then stretched and gawked and looked behind him before stepping daintily through the door.”

When Old Men Die was originally published in hardcover by Walker & Company in November 1994.  It is currently available in ebook format from Crossroad Press at both Barnes & Noble and Amazon.

This is a reworked version of a review originally published at Dark City Underground  in 2010.

Hubble Image: The Eagle Has Risen

This spectacular image of a stellar spire in the Eagle Nebula was taken by Hubble.  Its beauty is stunning; the flagrant use of color, shadow and light creates an image that is more question than answer.  It lingers on the screen in a splatter of uneasy form.  It speaks to the wonder that is the universe, and somehow, it brings a connection of both time and distance.  It relates both near and far, the universe and humanity in a mosaic of pixels.  It is real and unreal at once.  It truly is beauty.

The NASA website states the following:

“Appearing like a winged fairy-tale creature poised on a pedestal, this object is actually a billowing tower of cold gas and dust rising from a stellar nursery called the Eagle Nebula. The soaring tower is 9.5 light-years or about 57 trillion miles high, about twice the distance from our Sun to the next nearest star.

“Stars in the Eagle Nebula are born in clouds of cold hydrogen gas that reside in chaotic neighborhoods, where energy from young stars sculpts fantasy-like landscapes in the gas. The tower may be a giant incubator for those newborn stars. A torrent of ultraviolet light from a band of massive, hot, young stars [off the top of the image] is eroding the pillar.”

For the rest of the story click here.