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Underground Reading: The Girl with the Long Green Heart by Lawrence Block

This is the latest installment in our scheme to review each and every Hard Case Crime publication, one every week. You can follow along here. 

Well, one week after my least favourite Hard Case Crime (so far) , I get to review one of my favourites (so far) - Lawrence Block's The Girl with the Long Green Heart.

Originally published as a Gold Medal paperback in 1965, The Girl with the Long Green Heart was reprinted a few times - an Abebooks search finds it in 1985, 1994, 1999, 2005. And, having read it, with good cause. This is a brilliant stand-alone novel of a faded con man, a beautiful woman and one very, very complicated scheme.

Johnny Hayden is out of prison and living a good, clean life. He works at a bowling alley, saves every penny and takes correspondence courses in hotel management. There's a broken down roadhouse at the edge of town, and Hayden's got his eye on it. At the current rate he's saving money, he thinks he could purchase it in the next nine years. Maybe. A man needs a dream, else he can't get out of bed in the morning.

Enter: Doug Rance. Doug, like Johnny, is a con man - just not retired. Doug's particular art is the smile. Whereas Johnny is naturally trustworthy, Doug's unnaturally charming. Together, Doug suggests, they'd make an unstoppable team. And Doug's got the target for them already prpped - a wealthy (and greedy) small town millionaire named Gunderman. Johnny does his best to resist Doug's pitch but Doug uses the dream against him. Johnny could sweat out a decade in a bowling alley... or make thirty grand in one fell swoop.

Underground Reading: The Colorado Kid by Stephen King

This is the latest installment in our scheme to review each and every Hard Case Crime publication, one every week. You can follow along here. After a slight hiatus, we're back with #13 - Stephen King's The Colorado Kid.

This is going to be a very structured review - a bit like a middle school book report. Here's how it'll go:

• What happens in The Colorado Kid
• What I like about it
• What I don't like about it
• The greater significance 

There's a method to my madness (or, to be more accurate, a madness to the method), in that I've got a fairly complicated emotional relationship with it. Not that, like, this book once shot my dog, but that, between the author and publisher, there are a lot of big weighty "brands" here, and it is important to (try to) treat the text itself as a discrete entity.

So, here we go. What happens in The Colorado Kid?

Well, without being funny, not much. The Colorado Kid is a story within a story. A young reporter, Stephanie, fresh out of college, has the unenvious position of intern to a local paper on a tiny island off of Maine. It is now late in the summer and, much to her surprise, she's fallen in love with the town and the two elderly goofballs that run the paper.  

During the course of one day, Dave and Vince (the goofballs) test Stephanie on her powers of observation and deduction. Why don't they tip the waitress more? Why didn't the visitor from Boston trust them? Etc. Stephanie impresses them (she's clearly impressed them the whole summer), so they reward her with a real story - an unsolved mystery that took place on the island in 1980.

Review Round-up: Vintage Classics (and Not-So-Classics)

We've just returned from a long weekend in Lyme Regis, our favourite escape. Dinosaurs and literary landmarks! Bakeries on every corner! We spent most of our stay buying delicious foodstuffs and eating them on the terrace (which had a sea view if you stood on the table). Occasionally inclement weather forced us to nap. It was exhausting. To make things worse, the trip was bracketed by train rides to and from London, during which we could only... read. 

Lyme Regis has an amazing bookshop, and after 4? 5? vaguely-annual visits, I think the owner kind of recognises me. At the very least, he sees me walking out with most of his "Pulps" section every year. This year was the perfect sort of bookish travel: go down with a Kindle and an empty bag, come back with a few dozen new treasures. (A future Post-Scripts, I think.)

Anyway, my travel slides aside ("click-click" Here's us at the pub! "click-click"), a long list of short reviews follows:

This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1920). Before this year, the only Fitzgerald I'd read was The Great Gatsby, and that was high school and I've already forgotten it. Recently, prompted by some book research, I've been plowing through all the Fitzgerald I can find and loving it. Sarcastic, funny, touching, witty, straight-forward language and wonderfully complex eddies under the surface - pretty much made to order for My Taste. Who knew? This Side of Paradise is Fitzgerald's debut which a) bloody hell and b) like the vast proportion of debut novels is b1) a little too much about the author, b2) clearly based on post-event philosophical rendering of the author's own experiences and b3) slightly wanky. That said, back to a) - bloody hell. Astounding book and a fascinating look at an era and class that I don't know anything at all about. An amazing combination with all the Westerns I've been reading lately - hard to think of all this happening in the same country at the same time. 

The Fox by Conrad Williams (2013). A really nice little chapbook from the folks at This is Horror, who, understandably, know their horror. A family go camping and things start to get creepy. There's a long slow build and then the reveal and payoff all hit at the same time - as a mystery, it is a bit clunky. As an atmospheric bit of horror, it is smothering (in a good way). You just know horrible things are happening, pitter-patting around in the background, and the bits of mundane detail only make it worse when it finally kicks off. I'm glad it ends when it does, a bit of a new Scary Story to Read in the Dark, rather than any sort of greater parable. A nice book, and well worth a fiver.

[Seventeen more after the jump!]

Week o' Filler: Noir Recommendations

[Disclaimer: on the road for most of the week plus wrapping up SpecFic. This week's posts are going to be filler cursory discursive.]

Great authors I've appreciated recently – Christa Faust and Megan Abbott – so I figured I'd look for recommendations for more great female contemporary noir authors. 

Fortunately, Twitter had some answers:

Hard Bite by Anonymous9 (@FaustFatale) (er, q.v.)

Hilary Davidson (@GregMcCambley)

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (the Guardian - backed by @SamsykesSwears, @hollierendall, @zola_the_gorgon, @JoLidds and @tudorstuart)

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn (@willhillauthor)

Meg Gardiner (@RobHBedford)

Dope by Sara Gran (@NMamatas, @KatWithSword)

Vicki Hendricks (@NMamatas) 

Camilla Lackberg (@tomhpollock)

Asa Larsson (@tomhpollock)

Donna Leon (@tomhpollock)

Sissel-Jo Gazan (@tomhpollock)

Carol O'Connell (@JonCG_novelist)

Sara Paretsky (@KingElfland2ndCuz)

Nineveh by Henrietta Rose-Innes (er, me - I love this book)

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell (me again, mostly because I was looking for an excuse to get this)

Cathi Unsworth (Google!)

Fred Vargas (@JonCG_novelist, @gavreads)

The Secret Lives of Married Women by Elisa Waid (@FaustFatale) (Not out yet, dammit. But this looks like another brilliant Hard Case Crime) 

Who else?

Underground Reading: Dutch Uncle by Peter Pavia

This is the latest installment in our scheme to review each and every Hard Case Crime publication, one every week. You can follow along here. We're back in the United States this week with #12 - Peter Pavia's Dutch Uncle.

Dutch Uncle (2005) is a Hard Case Crime original, and, appropriately, after the last few books, it fee like we've been flung forward about fifty years. Peter Pavia pulls us out of vintage noir and flings the reader straight into the sprawling neo-noir epics of Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiaasen and Charles Willeford. 

Of course, Dutch Uncle takes place in Florida, which doesn't hurt the comparison...

Weird aside: I've never truly gotten into the Miami crime fiction scene. I mean, I get it - the authors above are certainly at the top of the field, but Florida's never been my favourite. Perhaps, and I'm just throwing this out there, the Miami 'archetype' is a bit... wacky. Authors seem to spend a lot of time establishing Miami's special magic sparkleponiness, how it is the goofy/unique center of the universe. (By contrast: New York pretends its behaviour is normal, LA doesn't actually acknowledge the rest of the universe, Las Vegas is goofy/unique and Texas is whatever Joe Lansdale and Kinky Friedman tell us it is.) Call it a matter of personal preference. An inconsistent one too, given how much I like John D. MacDonald's stories from the rest of the state.

Meanwhile, back to the sprawling neo-noir thing... Dutch Uncle is, indeed, sprawling.

Harry is a (very recently) paroled ex-con. Leo is someone he served time with - a minor drug dealer in the Miami scene, spending his hard-unearned cash on good clothes and gullible women. Manfred Pfiser is a "Euro-wiseguy", a Dutch importer who visits Miami a few times a year to party with beach boys. Beaumond and Fernandez are Leo's goons. Vicki is a fading starlet who keeps them company. Aggie is a 'citizen' (as The Wire puts it) - a hard-working waitress that gets tangled up in the story. Lili Acevedo and Arnie Martinson are cops, trying to figure out why the above cast of dozens keeps dying.

Underground Reading: Branded Woman by Wade Miller

This is the latest installment in our scheme to review each and every Hard Case Crime publication, one every week. You can follow along here. We're still travelling the world this week, in the company of #11, Wade Miller's Branded Woman.

Branded Woman was originally published in 1952. The author, Wade Miller, is actually a writing duo - Robert Wade and H. Bill Miller. The two met as children and wound up collaborating for most of their adult lives, writing over thirty novels under various pen names, including Touch of Evil and the Max Thursday mysteries (also the delightfully named Kitten with a Whip).

Branded Woman features Cay Morgan, a beautiful smuggler on a secret mission. The book opens with Morgan touching down at Mazatlan airport and it quickly establishes the book's tension: she's both huntress and hunted, beautiful and vain, villainess and victim. Her pursuers find her immediately - she's attacked in the airport itself and, were it not for her own henchman (a private eye named George Hodd), Branded Woman would be a very short book.

Still, Hodd is very much a henchman, not a white knight. He's the muscle, obeying Morgan's (often confusing) orders. Hodd's only reticence is the potential illegality of it all. He's a working stiff, after all, and whatever Morgan is after, it seems a bit dodgy.

We soon learn that although Morgan is a dashing thief, she's not in Mexico on business. Five years ago she crossed another smuggler - the mysterious figure known as the Trader. As punishment, the Trader kidnapped her and "branded" her - carving a "T" in her forehead. Morgan's spent the time since then trying to find where he is, for "he had done worse to her than kill her", and she wants revenge (24).

Underground Reading: Plunder of the Sun by David Dodge

This is the latest installment in our scheme to review each and every Hard Case Crime publication, one every week. You can follow along here. This week, we're back to our regular running order with #10 - Plunder of the Sun.

David Dodge's Plunder of the Sun (1949) takes us back out of the United States again, this time to South America. Al Colby, the book's protagonist, was a short-lived series hero. Plunder is the second of his three adventures. (It was filmed in 1953 with Glenn Ford and Patricia Medina. Oooh.)

Colby is a sort of generic adventurer. He's American, we gather he's a roving exile (for some unspecified reason), and has been for some time. He's well-connected, fluent in Spanish and, generally speaking, one tough hombre. At the start of Plunder of the Sun, Colby is hired by an exhausted older man, Berrien. Berrien is an antiques dealer and he needs to get a package from Chile to Peru. Berrien tries to keep the contents secret, but Colby wins the macho standoff between the two men (Colby wins all macho standoffs, take that for granted). The package is some sort of rare artifact. It belongs in Peru (according to Berrien), but the Chilean authorities would confiscate it. Berrien thinks it would be safer discreetly transported by an American.

Berrien agrees to the deal. He's looking to move on, he could use a bit of a money and, perhaps most of all, Berrien's nurse is hawt. Who knows...

Review Round-Up: Three More Novels of Note

Another round-up: Chris Marnewick's The Soldier Who Said No, Gail Carriger's Etiquette and Espionage and Robert Jackson Bennett's American Elsewhere. Three more unequivocal "yes" reviews.

It is hard to believe that Chris Marnewick's The Soldier Who Said No (2010) is only 310 pages. So very, very much happens, but it never seems rushed. Pierre De Villiers is a South African expatriate, living in New Zealand. As the book opens, he's suspended from his job as a policeman for a fit of temper. At exactly the same time, someone makes an attempt is made on the life of the Prime Minister. The assassin uses a Bushman weapon, and, as the coincidences stack up, De Villiers becomes the prime suspect. 

Shockingly, Pierre has even worse things to worry about. His health is rapidly declining and the doctors confirm the worst: cancer. It is hard to find a man with more going wrong in his life.

Yet even this isn't even the low point for Pierre. That came years before, when he was a soldier assigned to do some of the military's more secretive mission. Upon refusing to complete one particularly unpleasant assignment, Pierre became "the solider who said no" - a man hunted down by his own countrymen. 

The Soldier Who Said No cycles between Pierre's past and his present as he works to solve a mystery that spans two continents and time periods. Pierre's a man falsely accused. In the present day, he's hunted by the (hilariously bumbling) New Zealand authorities. In the past, he's pursued by more predatory figures. In both times, he's debilitated - by cancer, starvation or inury. Yet even with all this happening, Mr. Marnewick writes at a surprisingly languorous pace. There's never sense of rush, everything unfolds smoothly and at a natural pace. Despite the action, this isn't a Bourne-style thriller. Pierre's life is certainly packed with drama, but Mr. Marnewick expresses it subtly, and often through the little things: examining street signs, discussions at meals, casual discussions with his radiotherapist...

Mr. Marnewick leaves the reader with the sense that the entire assassination plot was simply a device to explore a fascinating character, and not the other way around.

New Releases: Web of the City by Harlan Ellison

This is the latest installment in our scheme to review each and every Hard Case Crime publication, one every week. You can follow along here. This week, we skip ahead to the publisher's newest release - coming April 2013. 

It is hard to believe that I've gone this long without one review of a book by Harlan Ellison. He's easily one of my favourite authors. According to our long-suffering database, he's our fourth-most collected author [MacDonald, McBain, Sayers, Ellison] - it feels like I spent years on autopilot, heading towards the E's of any used bookstore.

On the other hand, Ellison is so significant to me, the lack of reviews actually makes sense.

I grew up devouring science fiction - and by that, I mean all that I could find. I picked up the doorstop tomes of Ye Olde Hugo Winners at library sales and bought crates of magazines at flea markets. I practically swam through the stuff.

Science Fiction was a genre of problems solved through logic and hard work. Puzzles and games, plots, not people. Rational thought! Strong ideals! Clever solutions derived from first principles! The application of logic-driven labour, leading to conclusions that were both rationally and morally correct! Everything in Science Fiction made sense, something that appealed to me as a child - as well as the overall message that Be Smart + Be Right = Guaranteed Win. 

By the time I hit 14, I knew this to be wrong. And I knew this with the depth and conviction that only a teenager can have - the confused, but determined nihilism that comes part and parcel with the swarming chaos of adolescence. From what I could see, no matter how correct or smart I was (and I was convinced that I was both), I wasn't winning. Nothing made sense. I could work statistics and run numbers and draw things and research and derive solutions from first principles, but, somehow, it wasn't working out in my favour. People were starving and homeless, politicians lied, the authorities were hopelessly corrupt, I had a C- in French, and I didn't have a date. The gross unfairness of it all - it rankled. It burned.

Review Round-Up: Five Novels of Note

Five books I've read recently that I just flat-out liked: Henrietta Rose-Innes' Nineveh, Mary Gentle's Black Opera, Carlos Fuentes' Vlad, Andrew Motion's Silver and Harry Karlinsky's The Evolution of Inanimate Objects. 

These all deserve longer reviews.

Nineveh (2011) by Henrietta Rose-Innes

My big ol’ grab bag of South African fiction has yet to disappoint me, but Nineveh is my favourite so far. Katya Grubbs is an exterminator - more a relocator, actually, as she’s a fundamental believer in vermin’s right to life. A swarm of mysterious beetles infests an idyllic suburb and Katya is hired to do her thing. Her investigation brings her in contact with pests of all shapes and sizes - including the suburb’s sleazy developer and her own wayward father.

Part Gothic, part mystery, all amazing. Despite the lack of any SF/F elements, Nineveh is a contemporary urban fantasy classic, along the lines of Zoo City and King Rat; a tale about a hidden world and the people (and critters) beneath our notice. This is all topped off by a genuinely surprising ending that, although it shocked me, couldn't have been more perfect.

I don't know if Nineveh is available outside of South Africa, but, if you're in any way tempted (and I hope you are) it is worth sending an email to the Book Lounge.

Below the jump... vampires, pirates, opera and forks.