A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Where is Janice Gantry? - John D. MacDonald

It takes me a long time to read a book these days, a combination of being really busy, not having much time to read, and a rather scattershot attention span. But even though it took me about a week, I read John D. MacDonald’s novel WHERE IS JANICE GANTRY? and enjoyed it quite a bit.

I liked the narrator/hero in this one, Sam Brice, a former pro football player and insurance appraiser who lives in a small town on the west coast of Florida. Trouble comes into his life in the form of a young acquaintance of his who has escaped from prison and needs his help. Somewhat against his better judgment, Sam goes along with the request, and that sets in motion a series of violent events that include the disappearance of his former girlfriend, the Janice Gantry of the title.

The plot’s a little thin and probably won’t surprise many readers, but MacDonald’s ability as a pure storyteller is clearly in evidence here, pulling the reader along. I don’t doubt that under normal circumstances I would have finished this book a lot faster than I did, because when I did get a chance to read I got caught up in it and was really flipping the pages. The last fifty pages or so are very suspenseful. Well worth reading, I say.

(Wait a minute. This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on February 18, 2008, so that means I've been complaining about how long it takes me to read a book for at least 18 years now. Dang! I think I just need to get used to it. I'm a long-time fan of John D. MacDonald, and I plan to read the books of his that I've never gotten around to. Problem is, many of them I don't recall if I've read them or not. Oh, well, even rereads are worthwhile with JDM. This one is still in print and is available in e-book and paperback editions on Amazon.)

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Wounded and the Slain - David Goodis

Some critics have said that David Goodis’s novels read like book-length suicide notes. That’s certainly an apt description of THE WOUNDED AND THE SLAIN, originally published by Gold Medal in 1955 and recently reprinted by Hard Case Crime [in 2007]. This one even opens with the protagonist, James Bevan, contemplating doing away with himself, even though he’s on vacation at a luxurious Jamaican resort with his beautiful young wife. Bevan’s wife is his problem, though, since their marriage is one of the most corrosive you’re likely to encounter in fiction. Like other Goodis characters, Bevan seeks refuge from that unhappiness in booze, which leads him into an encounter with violence and death.

Then, yep, you guessed it, Things Get Worse.

THE WOUNDED AND THE SLAIN is somewhat unusual among Goodis’s novels, in that it takes place in Jamaica rather than Philadelphia or some other large American city. It veers away from the noir stereotype in another way as well, with many of the scenes taking place in hot, bright sunshine rather than dark alleyways. The interior of James Bevan’s mind is plenty dark on its own, though, and ultimately the streets of Kingston, Jamaica, are just as mean as those of Philadelphia or New York. The motivations of some of the characters may seem a little clichéd today, but Goodis’s writing still makes them ring true. The headlong pace carries the reader along to a very satisfying conclusion. All in all, and not surprisingly, this is an excellent novel and comes with a high recommendation from me.

(This post originally appeared on June 20, 2007. The Hard Case Crime reprint mentioned above is out of print, and you can actually find copies of the original Gold Medal edition for about half the price of the HCC edition. Either way, this book is well worth reading. Goodis, however, remains one of those authors I like a lot and want to read more of, but I don't seem to get around to it.)

Review: Run, Killer, Run - Lionel White

Before there was Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake) and his famous protagonist Parker, there was Lionel White, the first real master of the heist novel. White didn’t write about a series character, but many of the protagonists of his novels bear a resemblance to Parker, including Rand Coleman, the lead character in White’s first novel, RUN, KILLER, RUN. The original version of this novel was published as a digest novel by Rainbow Books in 1952 under the title SEVEN HUNGRY MEN. White revised it and Avon published it as a paperback original in 1959 under its current title. Then Black Gat Books reprinted that version in a very nice paperback edition that comes out today. (You can see the covers of the two previous editions below. I don't know who did the art on the Avon edition of RUN, KILLER, RUN, but the cover on the Rainbow Books edition of SEVEN HUNGRY MEN is by the great George Gross.)

Rand Coleman is a professional criminal serving time for robbery when a corrupt lawyer manages to secure his release and recruits him to pull off a big job: an armored car robbery that will net a cool two million dollars. In telling his story, White employs the classic structure of the heist novel. Coleman assembles his team and we get to know them: a couple of veteran mobsters, a hotheaded young punk, a washed-up boat skipper, a sullen first mate. A couple of beautiful girls wind up involved in the proceedings. The plan for the robbery is laid out, and then we get the execution of it.

Do things go wrong? Of course, they do! But Coleman and his team get their hands on the loot, and now all they have to do is make their getaway to Florida, and from there, who knows? Cuba? South America? Unfortunately, treachery, greed, lust, and violence are along for the ride, too.

RUN, KILLER, RUN may not have much in it that we haven’t seen before, but this is a very early example of this sort of noir crime novel. And White spins the yarn with such skill that I was totally caught up in it, eagerly turning the pages to find out what was going to happen. The twists and turns that White introduces in his plot never disappointed me, either. RUN, KILLER, RUN is a terrific novel, fast-paced and well-written and very entertaining. If you enjoy heist novels, I give it a very high recommendation.

Review: Crown Vic 2: If I Were a Rich Man - Lee Goldberg

CROWN VIC 2: IF I WERE A RICH MAN is the second volume in Lee Goldberg’s new series featuring ex-con and former professional car thief Ray Boyd. Ray wanders the country driving an old Crown Victoria interceptor that’s been decommissioned as a police car, making money when and how he can—often, but not always, illegally—and looking for just enough adventure and excitement to keep life interesting.

In this novella, Ray is on the hunt for a fortune in diamonds stolen in a robbery years earlier. He was in prison with one of the men who pulled off the heist. Legend has it that the guy hid the gems somewhere, and they’ve never been found. The problem is that the thief is an older man, he’s been released from prison, and he’s now in an assisted living center, suffering from dementia, so he may not even remember where he cached the diamonds. But if he does, Ray is going to find them and get his hands on them himself.

However, Ray’s plans are complicated by a beautiful young woman and a little matter of blackmail that ultimately may endanger his life.

Goldberg really keeps things racing along in this yarn. There are a couple of twists I should have seen coming but didn’t, and that’s a tribute to Goldberg’s skill in maintaining a breakneck pace. And Ray Boyd continues to be a fascinating character. He’s not a nice guy, at all. He reminds me a little of Donald E. Westlake’s Parker, except that Parker has some sort of moral compass that Ray seems to lack completely. In fact, this guy is so terrible you have to ask yourself how anybody could make him the protagonist of a series. But despite that, in the end you find yourself rooting for Ray to succeed, or at least I do. And that’s a tribute to Goldberg’s talent, too.

I don’t know if there are more Ray Boyd stories in the works, but I hope so. For now, CROWN VIC 2: IF I WERE A RICH MAN is available in e-book and paperback editions. I really enjoyed it, and if you like hardboiled crime yarns, I give it a high recommendation.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Roadside Night - Erwin N. Nistler and Gerry P. Broderick

In forty-plus years of reading and collecting books like this, I’d never heard of this novel or its authors, Erwin N. Nistler and Gerry P. Broderick. As far as I’ve been able to discover, this is the only book they ever published.

When you see the phrase “strange love” on a paperback from this era (1951), it’s usually code for a lesbian novel. Not in this case. The relationships here are strictly heterosexual. The narrator, Buck Randall, is an ex-G.I., a World War II vet who fought on Guadalcanal. He owns a tavern and a small motel on the Pacific coast in California. He’s having a minor romance with the beautiful teenage daughter of the man who owns a restaurant down the coast highway from the motel. He’s not particularly ambitious.

Then a gorgeous blonde in an expensive car stops at the tavern for a drink as she’s passing through the area, and Buck falls hard for her. He pines away until she comes back by. They start getting to know each other. She’s interested in him, too, and after they begin sleeping together, he finds out that she’s not as well-to-do as he thought at first. In fact, she’s in sort of a desperate situation, but she knows a way out, if only she can find somebody to help her . . .

Yep, you’ve read it before, starting with James M. Cain and going right on through the Fifties in the work of dozens of paperbackers like Charles Williams, Day Keene, Gil Brewer, and Orrie Hitt. The femme fatale, the likable but not-too-bright hero, the scheme that will make them both rich if only nothing goes wrong . . . but it always does. The first half of ROADSIDE NIGHT doesn’t blaze any new ground, but at least it’s a fairly early example of that standard plot. What makes it worth reading is the prose, which is bleak and fast-paced, and the sweaty air of doom and desperation that hangs over the book like fog rolling in from the sea.

Then the second half of the novel throws in just enough plot twists so that everything doesn’t work out quite the way you might expect it, and ROADSIDE NIGHT turns into a really nice little noir novel. I think the ending could have been stronger – Nistler and Broderick pull back just a little when maybe they shouldn’t have – but it’s still very effective. This isn’t some lost masterpiece of crime fiction, but it’s well worth reading and would make a good candidate for reprinting. It’s too short for Hard Case Crime, probably not much more than 35,000 words, but it would work just fine in, say, a Stark House collection with a couple of other short novels. I’m really glad I ran across it, and if you happen to do likewise, I think you should grab it and read it.

(As far as I know, this book still hasn't been reprinted since this post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on December 4, 2009, but used copies are available on Amazon that are reasonably inexpensive. More than likely, you can find some at other on-line booksellers, too.)

Freakshow Fallout

Last week I reviewed FREAKSHOW, the novel by Jacquin Sanders recently reprinted by Black Gat Books. As I sometimes do when I remember, I copied the review over onto Amazon and submitted it. It didn’t show up on FREAKSHOW’s page, which came as no surprise. About half the time when I submit a review to Amazon, it never appears, as if I had sent it into a black hole.

However, this time I actually got a response from Amazon, saying that they couldn’t publish my review because it didn’t meet their guidelines for one or more of these reasons:

Profanity

Harassment

Hate speech

Sexual content

Illegal activity

Private information

Of course, they didn’t tell me which of those things they found in the review. Personally, I don’t think the review contains any of those things, but you can read it for yourself, if you haven’t already, and see what you think.

Amazon also invited me to edit my review and resubmit it. I don’t think I’ll be doing that. If you’d like to pick up a copy of FREAKSHOW (it’s a very good novel), you can buy it directly from the good folks at Stark House Press/Black Gat Books.

The Trailer Park Girls - Glenn Canary

Like many of the soft-core novels of the mid-Sixties, THE TRAILER PARK GIRLS is very much a crime novel in disguise. Three young army veterans who met while in the service, Burton Stone, Jack Cannon, and Al Leeds, move in together in a trailer and decide, for various reasons, that they’re going to rob a department store in nearby Cleveland. But then they meet three young women who also live in the same trailer park, Sally Talent, Marianne Nirvell, and Fran Novak. Of course, each of the guys falls for one of the girls, and that winds up greatly complicating their holdup plan. Will they be able to carry out the robbery, or will love derail their criminal scheme?

Author Glenn Canary gives us a fairly simple plot in THE TRAILER PARK GIRLS, although there are a few twists and turns along the way. The first half of the book consists mostly of Canary filling in the backgrounds of his six main characters. He does an excellent job of it, too, but the book picks up steam as the robbery comes closer and closer. The last 40 or 50 pages of this novel are really suspenseful. I was going to put it aside and go to bed, but I couldn’t. Had to keep turning the pages to find out what was going to happen.

THE TRAILER PARK GIRLS was published originally in 1963 by Monarch Books, ostensibly a step up from Beacon, Nightstand, etc., even though the sort of books they all published was very similar. Glenn Canary had written two novels for Monarch before this one, and later, in the Seventies, he wrote two suspense novels for Pinnacle Books, plus some short stories for various mystery and men’s magazines during the Sixties. Not a prolific career, but based on THE TRAILER PARK GIRLS, he was a pretty darned good writer. I enjoyed it quite a bit. Black Gat Books has reprinted it in paperback and e-book editions, and if you like a good slice of life/crime novel, you definitely need to give this one a try. Recommended.

A Mystery, Crime & Noir Notebook - Gary Lovisi

I’ve known Gary Lovisi for more years than I like to think about and have been a fan of his work, both fiction and non-fiction, for all that time. His magazine PAPERBACK PARADE has been an indispensable resource for fans of genre fiction for decades, and his Gryphon Books imprint has published a lot of top-notch novels and collections in the mystery and science fiction fields.

His latest collection from Stark House, A MYSTERY, CRIME & NOIR NOTEBOOK, brings together approximately 50 articles and essays covering those title subjects. Originally published in a variety of magazines, anthologies, and collections, they concentrate mostly on vintage hardboiled paperbacks but discuss some newer books, too. (In this case, newer generally means 20 years old, instead of 50 or 60.) There are articles about specific publishers and many about particular authors. And lots and lots of beautiful cover reproductions, of course.

This is a wonderful book, perfect for dipping in and out of, although to be honest, I was so engrossed I went through most of it pretty quickly. It’s the sort of book where as I read it, I kept saying to myself “I have that one!” or “I read that one when I was a kid!” or “Oh, I have to find a copy of that one and read it!” I have a hunch most of you know exactly what I mean and would really enjoy A MYSTERY, CRIME & NOIR NOTEBOOK. It’s available on Amazon now. I give it a very high recommendation. It’s really a lot of fun.

The Complete Torpedo, Volume One - Enrique Sanchez Abuli and Jordi Bernet

I remember reading a few issues of an independent comic book called TORPEDO 1936 back in the Eighties, but I hadn’t thought about it for years until one of this blog’s readers mentioned it in a comment on a recent post. After doing some checking, I was a little surprised to see that the book’s entire run has been reprinted and is available in digital form, so I picked up the first volume to revisit it.

The protagonist (you can’t call him the hero) of TORPEDO 1936 is Luca Torelli, a killer for hire who plies his deadly trade in New York during the Depression. He works for the mob but also takes on private commissions, and he’ll kill just about anybody as long as the price is right. Unlike other hitman characters such as Lawrence Block’s Keller and Max Allan Collins’ Quarry, Torelli has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. He’s every bit the despicable character you’d expect a professional killer to be. The only other continuing character is his sidekick/assistant/comedy relief, an oafish gangster known as Rascal.

Originally this series was supposed to be written by Will Eisner, creator of The Spirit and other acclaimed comics. How much input he might have had, I don’t know, but he never wrote any of the stories. The scripts are all by a Spanish comic book writer, Enrique Sanchez Abuli. Legendary comics artist Alex Toth drew the first two stories, then left the series, supposedly because he didn’t like the violent, nihilistic bent of Abuli’s scripts. Jordi Bernet took over the art, and his work on this series is fantastic. His style reminds me very much of Joe Kubert’s artwork.

THE COMPLETE TORPEDO, VOLUME ONE is very episodic, with each tale serving as a separate short story, another killing that Torelli sets out to accomplish. Some have clever plot twists. Torelli isn’t infallible, and sometimes he gets outwitted. Some are darkly humorous, but most are just bleak. A couple are flashbacks to Torelli’s life as a young Italian immigrant, maybe designed to give him at least a semblance of humanity, but if that was the goal, I’m not sure they succeed. He still comes across as extremely unlikable.

Which is not to say the stories are bad. The plots are repetitive enough that it’s best to read them spaced out, but they’re pretty effective when you tackle them that way. The ones where Torelli is up against low-lifes who are equally bad or even worse than he is are the ones that work the best. Overall, I enjoyed the book. Whether or not I’ll continue reading the collections, I just don’t know yet. Bernet’s art is gorgeous, and I’m curious to see if Abuli ever gives Torelli any real character development. So I’ll probably revisit TORPEDO 1936 again in the future. We’ll see.

Coming Soon: The Manhunt Companion - Peter Enfantino and Jeff Vorzimmer

Following the success of their great anthologies THE BEST OF MANHUNT and THE BEST OF MANHUNT, VOLUME 2, Stark House soon will be publishing THE MANHUNT COMPANION by Peter Enfantino and Jeff Vorzimmer. This book contains a history of the magazine, indexes of authors and stories that MANHUNT published, plus reviews of every story from every issue. I'm not sure anything like this has ever been attempted before, let alone pulled off in such great style. I may not agree with every review, but they're all entertaining and informative and present a compelling picture of what's regarded (rightly so) as the top crime fiction digest of the Fifties. But MANHUNT lasted well into the Sixties, and Enfantino and Vorzimmer don't shy away from its slow decline, either, although there were still some very good stories to be found in those later years. Overall, if you're interested in crime fiction and/or digest magazines, there's plenty here that you'll find enjoyable and enthralling. I give THE MANHUNT COMPANION a very high recommendation. (And while you're at it, if you haven't read the two BEST OF MANHUNT volumes, I can't recommend them highly enough, either. They're great books.)

Dead Girl Blues - Lawrence Block

Lawrence Block has been writing and selling novels since 1958, and he’s still at it. I can’t think of any living author who’s been producing at such a high level for so long. His latest novel is DEAD GIRL BLUES, which is something of a departure for him but also shares some of the strengths that have run through his entire career.

It starts out as the story of a young man calling himself Buddy (because that’s the name stitched onto the work shirt he was given when he took his current job), who, on a whim, commits a terrible crime, including murder, and gets away with it. Buddy feels the need to repeat the experience, so what it looks like we’re going to get is a deep dive into the mind of a sociopathic serial killer, since Buddy is also the narrator of this tale.

But then, with no warning, DEAD GIRL BLUES turns out to be something completely different. It’s still a deep dive, because this is novel driven almost solely by characterization rather than plot, but it’s not what I was expecting. And I certainly didn’t expect to feel about the characters like I did by the time I finished the book. Everything is just off-kilter enough that by the later stages of the book, I didn’t know what to expect. That’s not bad, because usually, even in the best books, I have some idea what’s going to happen.

I believe it was Ed Gorman who said that Block writes the best sentences in the business. That’s still true. His style isn’t flashy, but it sure makes you want to keep reading. That’s certainly true of DEAD GIRL BLUES. This is a book that may not be for everybody, since it’s a little squirm-inducing in places, but it’s also heartwarming at times, in its own oddball way. I really liked it, and if you’re a Lawrence Block fan, you’ll want to read it.

The Bitch - Les Edgerton

You'd think that in a noir novel called THE BITCH, the title character would be a woman, but that's not the case in Les Edgerton's compelling novel from New Pulp Press. As it turns out, "The Bitch" is prison slang for getting a life sentence as a habitual criminal.

That's the threat that two-time ex-con and master burglar Jake Bishop faces as he tries to live a normal life with his pregnant wife. Jake has a decent job and is about to open his own business, when his former cellmate shows up to blackmail him into taking part in a jewel robbery. In a book like this, when one of the characters starts talking about "one last job" and "a sure thing", you know it's going to turn out to be anything but.

Boy, does it.

In fact, just about everything goes wrong for Jake that possibly can, and the choices he makes in response are, you guessed it, also wrong and just drag him deeper into trouble. Any time Jake—and the reader—thinks that things couldn't possibly get any worse, they do.

Edgerton's tough prose and sure hand with the plot twists make this novel race along at a very satisfying pace. He proves to be a master at making the reader care about and almost sympathize with Jake, even when he does terrible things. Ultimately, Edgerton goes places you don't think he'll go, but he drags you along so that you have no choice but to go with him.

THE BITCH is an excellent crime novel. Not what you'd call a fun read, by any means, but to use a cliché, it's a book you can't put down.

THE BITCH e-book at Amazon.

THE BITCH trade paperback at Amazon.