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Underground Reading: The Gutter and the Grave by Ed McBain

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. Last week was one of the best so far, Lawrence Block's The Girl with the Long Green Heart. The tough task of following Block falls to Ed McBain. Can he handle the pressure?

The Gutter and the Grave (2005) was first published in 1958 as I'm Cannon - For Hire, a Gold Medal paperback written by no other than "Curt Cannon". The rough and tumble Cannon appeared in a few short stories, but was one of McBain's shorter-lived experiments - his handful of appearances falls far short of the 344 books in the 87th Precinct, for example. For the Hard Case Crime edition, the Cannoning was excised entirely: McBain's own name went on the cover and the protagonist was renamed "Matt Cordell". [Side note: I'd love to know why.]

I really like Ed McBain. My handy catalog says that we've got 112 McBain books around the house, which is probably selling my fandom short as I'm sure I haven't tagged every pseudonym. This collection even includes a copy of I'm Cannon - For Hire, I'm proud to say. However, the thing is about McBain, I'd never say I loved him. He is invariably a high-quality reading experience (I'm making him sound like a car), but only extremely rarely does his work go so far as to knock my socks off.

John D. MacDonald, by contrast (198 books - eep!), is of infinitely more variable quality - pig's ear to silk purse and everything in-between. Yet the two share more similarities than just being my two most obsessed-about authors: both MacDonald and McBain had careers that spanned genres and, perhaps more importantly, decades. They both wrote populist fiction that reflected the trends, themes and concerns of the time(s). McBain and MacDonald both specialised, if you'll pardon the apparent contradiction, at being flexible. If they weren't literary chameleons, they were certainly commercial ones.

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!]

Underground Reading: Dragonlance Chronicles by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

Dragonlance. 

I'm afraid this isn't going to be a conventional review, more a series of, er, discursive notes, all rather indelicately glomming together to form one of my more specious arguments.

As far as an actual review: 

I think the Dragonlance Chronicles - Dragons of Autumn Twilight (1984), Dragons of Winter Night (1985) and Dragons of Spring Dawning (1985) - is of a time and a (hand-wavey, theoretical) place. I've reread the three books recently, and that's not really an experience I'd recommend to anyone else. 

For the sake of this blog post/ramble, I'm more interested in the Chronicles influence, which I believe has been criminally downplayed.

So... what makes a book an influential fantasy - and by that, not just having an impact on one author, but across the entire genre? For the sake of some sort of structure, I'd argue that the answer is a combination of both innovation and ubiquity.

The former is pretty straightforward. Unless there's something innovative or new involved, there's no change to measure. Reiterating the status quo may be a type of influence, but we can't measure a negative. A book needs to do something different for us to track how those changes promulgate.

Similarly, without ubiquity - not just presence, but omnipresence - we can't assume that a book had the opportunity to make an impact. Arguably, for something to be an influence on this scale (genre-wide), it needs to be so large that it doesn't even matter if another author has read it. We can assume that someone in the publishing chain (from the rights team to the commissioning editor to the sales director to the copy editor to the agent) has read it and we can assume its presence is so vast that, even subconsciously or indirectly, its innovative presence has been somehow communicated.¹

One example - just to set a benchmark. George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire is a major influence. It is the best-selling series in fantasy, and its presence on HBO has brought more new readers to genre fiction than anything since Harry Potter. Martin's work is a mainstream success, it has recognisable reference points that can be found in the fantasy books that followed and it is very, very good (that latter point isn't actually relevant in this context, but still a Nice to Have). It is hard to make any sort of claim that Martin's books aren't influential on modern fantasy.² 

Ground rules established.³ 

Which brings us back to another series, predating Martin's by ten years, that possesses the same critical combination of ubiquity and innovation: Dragonlance.

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...

Underground Reading: 361 by Donald Westlake

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

Donald Westlake's 361 was originally published in 1962 and reprinted as a Hard Case crime in 2005. Unlike, say, Memory (or even The Comedy is Finished), 361 feels more a product of its time. It is a solid thriller, and a few exceptional moments, but, overall, it is rather let down by the politics and sensibilities of the era. Still, as noted in the past, even ordinary Westlake is still very good indeed.

Ray Kelly is back from the Air Force. He's young, footloose and fancy-free, but saddled with a rather pessimistic view of the latter. Rather than seeing a world of possibility, he's a little worried about what he's going to do with his life. He's got no friends, no job, no nothing - only his family to keep him grounded.

But his family is definitely there for him. Ray's dad, a lawyer, is there to greet him in New York, and despite being three years since their last meeting, the two hit it off right away. Although his dad is weirdly nervous about it, Ray even convinces him to take in the town - the pair fuss about in the city and leer at the sights for a day or two. The whole time, Ray's father behaves oddly. But it isn't until they're on their way out of the city that disaster strikes.

Two gunmen mow down Ray and his father. Ray's dad is killed on the spot and Ray himself loses an eye and a month of his life, recovering in the hospital. His brother, Bill, isn't there when he wakes up - his wife's been killed as well.

When the two brothers reunite, they immediately agree to seek out justice. The hard way.

Underground Reading: Kiss Her Goodbye by Allan Guthrie

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

Kiss Her Goodbye (2005) moves the Hard Case action outside of the United States. Joe Hope is a leg-breaker for an Edinburgh loan shark. When you need money, and fast, you go to Cooper. If you don't pay it back, and fast, Cooper pays you a visit - with Joe and his trusty baseball bat in tow.

Cooper's a relatively simple man. He's got a ditzy young girlfriend, a lot of expensive whisky, a superiority complex and a nasty attitude. Joe's a more interesting proposition. Initially, he wanted to be a teacher - he fell in with Cooper more out of inertia than anything else. Joe wanted to support his wife and lazily made all the wrong decisions. Or, more accurately, he never made the right ones.

Now, Joe hates his wife (and vice versa) and spends most of his time swilling drinks with Cooper and seeking solace (and only that) with Edinburgh's dazzling array of prostitutes. He bets on horses, he's almost always drunk and, without realising it, he hates his life. The only thing Hope genuinely cares about is his daughter, Gemma. 

So, naturally (this isn't a cheerful book), Gemma dies. Suicide - or so he's told.

Joe flips out. Gemma was staying with a slightly worthless cousin, an obese "writer" named Adam who runs a retreat for other talent-challenged examples of the breed. As far as Joe was concerned, Gemma was Adam's responsibility. He hops on a plane, flies north, buys a baseball bat and tracks the man down...