May's Best Reads

I started a program to be sure favorite authors don’t fall through the cracks a couple of months ago and it’s already started to pay dividends. Not that I’m no longer looking for new stuff, but I have a tendency to try to keep up which leads to some favorites slipping unintentionally off the radar. This sometimes calls for a re-reading of old favorites, but there.s nothing wrong with that, either.

All the Dead Voices, Declan Hughes. The best of the Ed Loy books. Hughes remains true to his Ross Macdonald roots, as the solution to Loy’s cold case lies far in the past, though this time not just a family’s past; the Irish Troubles are in play. Few can pull off shifting time perspectives of a book written primarily through the main character’s first-person POV. Hughes not only pulls it off but makes it a strength of the storytelling with all of the linguistic poetry one comes to expect from Hughes, but a plot a little more complex but less complicated than some of his other books. This is the one to read if you’re looking for an entry point in the Loy series, as you’re definitely going to want more.

Crime Song, David Swinson. Swinson wasted no time climbing to the top of my list of “must read” authors and to the even more elite circle of those whose books I’ll read as soon as they’re available. Crime Song follows onto the acclaimed The Second Girl without missing a beat. This time we get a little more backstory into grossly flawed antihero Frank Marr with a peek into his family life. Swinson knows police procedure and attitudes as well as one would expect from a retired cop, and is as familiar with DC’s drug trade as one would expect from a cop who worked narcotics for as long as he did. Those are assumed from reading his background. What’s surprising is the writing talent that allows neither of the above to ever sound perfunctory or formulaic, and creates prose that is worth reading for its own sake while never getting in the way of the story. The ending would do Ray Donovan proud. Another brilliant book by Swinson. If only he wrote faster.

Jimmy the Wags: Street Stories of a Private Eye, James Wagner (with Patrick Picciarelli). A laugh-out-loud cautionary tale of a retired police officer’s life as a PI. Wagner is as tough as one expects an NYPD lifer to be, gradually falling prey to increased expectations and the lifestyles of those around him. It’s both apologetic and unsparing and worth the time of anyone interested in PI stories. Or character studies. Or just entertaining stories well-told. I’ve read this book multiple times and hope to be around long enough for many more.

The Walkaway, Scott Phillips. Possibly Phillips’s best book; certainly the most affecting to me personally. A sequel of sorts to The Ice Harvest, this is the story of Gunther Fahnstiel, retired Wichita cop who walks away from his assisted living community looking for…well, he’s not exactly sure. A lot of people looking for Gunther aren’t exactly sure, either, but a critical mass of them come together through the intersection of two cold cases that might lead to the old man’s whereabouts. All the delightful turns of phrase and perverse side stories one looks for in Phillips tied together with a plot that begins as disparate threads yet pulls together neatly in the end.

                 

Psycho Sidekicks

Benoit Lelieve, writing in Dead End Follies on March 14, took aim at “Ten Non-Racial Bullshit Stereotypes [He’s] Tired of Seeing.” (Editor’s Note: If you aren’t reading Dead End Follies, well, I don’t know what to tell you. Putz.) I agree in general with the list, the differences not so motivating I feel the need to write up one of my own.

I am inclined to comment at length on one of them. Number Six, to be precise: Friendly Psychopaths, or, as they are so often depicted, the psycho sidekick.

We all know who they are. Mouse. Hawk. Bubba Rogowski. Joe Pike, though Robert Crais has taken some of the edge off Pike in more recent novels. These are the guys who’ll do the stuff the author (or publisher, or, more likely, the marketing department) is afraid to have the protagonist do, lest the readers think less of him. They also serve a valuable role in providing information the protagonist can’t get on his own, sauntering into scenes with a key piece of evidence at just the right time.

The concept is a cheat when done badly, which is too often the case. Hence Benoit’s fatigue with the archetype. When done well these characters can serve a purpose beyond authorial convenience by giving the protagonist a peer to play off of. Yes, Spenser has Susan and Patrick Kenzie has Angie, but there are things they can say and do with Hawk and Bubba they’d rather not discuss elsewhere. Topics such as, “How are we gonna kill this guy?” Angie’s okay for discussing “Should we kill this guy?” and Susan…well, Susan’s mostly a pain in the ass. I never was able to figure out why Spenser discussed anything with her.

Another type of psycho sidekick has sprung up relatively recently, those that are not inherently violent. My favorite example is Sean Chercover’s Gravedigger Peace, sounding board for private eye Ray Dudgeon. (Another Editor’s Note: I know Sean is doing well with his thrillers and I couldn’t be happier for him, but I hope he hasn’t given up on Ray and Gravedigger. That’s a kick-ass combination.) I’m also a big fan of Tommy Owens from Declan Hughes’s Ed Loy series, but Tommy is more of a fuck-up than a psycho. He serves the role of providing information more than does Gravedigger, but both play valuable roles as off-kilter sounding boards for their protagonists.

 

It’s been a while since I first started writing Nick Forte stories, and the only one of these sidekicks I knew at the time was Hawk, which is fine. He’s the gold standard. I wanted Forte to have a sidekick but wanted the sidekick to be more of an homage to Hawk than a rip-off. Timothy Alston Satterwhite is a man who makes his living by hurting people, yet has a unique affection for Forte and those close to him. The nickname of “Goose” wraps up the homage aspects of his character.

I was always careful not to have Goose do Forte’s dirty work. In the first book, A Small Sacrifice, Goose offers to kill a man who has to die if Forte is to live. They’re not planning a showdown; an execution is in the works. Goose talks to Forte, tells him how it will change him, and how there might not be any going back. Forte can’t bring himself to ask his friend, and then finds he lacks what he needs himself to seal the deal.

Forte’s life and moods become darker as the series progresses. Goose remains the constant, always trying to reel his friend in. It’s been a conscious decision, hoping to do something different with a character who could easily be a stereotype.

I’ve even tried to move the classic relationship in the opposite direction. In Grind Joint, Forte appears as a “guest star,” who happens to be visiting his parents when things break bad in his old home town, assuming the role of psycho sidekick to his cousin, Penns River detective Ben “Doc” Dougherty. My favorite scene between them, in which Nick escalates a confrontation his cousin had under control, ends like this:

“I’m sorry, cuz,” Nick said. Doc knew from his tone he meant it more for him than for himself. “You called the meeting. I should’ve let you run it.”

“It’s okay, Nick. You’re right about shaking their tree. I just didn’t want to put you on the line. There are things about Volkov you don’t know.”

Nick still looked to where Yuri’s car had gone. Some of the light that shone from his eyes, made him a friend to children and dogs everywhere, had disappeared. Doc couldn’t identify what replaced it, and didn’t want to.

“It’s okay, Benny,” Nick said. “There are things about me you don’t know.”

I understand Benoit’s distaste. It’s too easy to use the Friendly Psycho as a crutch. It’s also a valuable archetype in crime fiction. We just have to continue to find ways to keep it vital. I hope I’m succeeding.

Greater Empathy Through Fiction?

I’ve heard it said that those who read fiction develop a greater sense of empathy. Maybe. It could also be an example of my favorite Latin logic fallacy, which I trot out at the drop of a hat because I love how it sounds: post hoc ergo propter hoc. (After this, therefore because of this.) It could be people with greater senses of empathy are attracted to novels, and those with less of that quality read non-fiction. I’ll leave that for greater minds to debate. There is no shortage of them in the world.

What I do know is that I have far more empathy for those whose situations vary from my own than I did as a younger man. There is no single date or occurrence that prompted it. I can say when the tide began to turn: The Wire. I came late to the show (as usual), picking up Season One with Season Four already in progress. I’d already read Homicide, so I was primed. Around this time I read The Corner and I started to to look past the superficial dissimilarities between my rural upbringing and what happens in the inner city of Baltimore.

My reading remained focused on crime, but crime with more diversity. While reviewing books for the New Mystery Reader web site I became sort of the unofficial Irish crime fiction reviewer, routinely assigned books by Declan Burke, Declan Hughes, Adrian McKinty, and Ken Bruen. NMR also exposed me to Tim Hallinan’s Poke Rafferty thrillers, set in Bangkok. Charlie Stella’s looks at mob life from the underside. Arnaldur Indriðason’s Iceland novels and Leighton Gage’s Chief Inspector Silva series. J. D. Rhoades’s unique brand of redneck noir. Friends steered me toward Daniel Woodrell

I learned that once one gets past the superficial differences in language, culture, justice systems, availability of weapons, and which side of the road to drive on, people are pretty much the same. With outliers on either side, the great majority of people pretty much want to be left alone to live their lives as happily as they can, and for their children to have it better than they do. The only thing that made me special was having the foresight to be born in a country that allowed me to do those things.

It’s now easier for me to imagine—and I am grateful beyond words that I only have to imagine—what it must be like to live in a place where those things are denied to people. Even worse, a place where your life—and the lives of your family—is in danger because of things you have no control over. Gender. Sexual orientation. Race or ethnicity. I include religion, too, as the major organized religions all preach peace. (I’ll not hold it against any religion if some of its followers defame the faith by their very existence. These people are apostates, and they exist in every religion.) How would I feel if I lost everything I owned and faced the option of death or flight that took me to a place where I didn’t speak the language and my customs seemed as strange to the current inhabitants as theirs do to me.

It has become fashionable to declare at great length and volume against immigrants and refugees, and every nation certainly has the right to set its own polices for both. When doing so, let’s not forget that the only thing that allows us to pass judgment on who is worthy to cross our borders is an accident of birth. I served in the military, pay my taxes, vote, and comply with summonses for jury duty without complaint. I view them as debts owed that I can never fully repay, but do the best I can.

Let’s remember how we all got to where we are during this holiday season. Some work harder than others, but it’s a sin of hubris for anyone in this country to believe for an instant that he or she has earned what we have. We’ve done our part, but we also started ahead of the game by being born into a situation that allowed—and often encouraged—us to become everything our gifts and efforts warranted. Any “earning” we did came after the fact. With that in mind, let’s take a minute this holiday season to reflect on our great and largely undeserved good fortune and learn a little fucking humility.

October's Reads

October was an up and down month for reading, but the ups were so far up, it was a good month.

The Getaway Car: ADonald Westlake Non-Fiction Miscellany, edited by Levi Stahl. I came late to Westlake, and the more I learn of him, the better I like him, both as a writer and as a man. This potpourri of non-fiction—letters, essays, book introductions—is sometimes serious, more often funny, but always well crafted. Lawrence Block’s introduction takes editor Stahl to task for referring to Westlake’s “jokes,” and is right to do so. There’s not a joke in the book, though there are lot of laughs. Westlake’s strength was his wit, which showed itself in his ability to phrase what would have seemed commonplace coming from anyone else in such a way the corner of your mouth can’t help but turn up. Read this, even if you’re not a Westlake fan. Not only will it be great fun, but you’ll likely become a fan.

The Color of Blood, Declan Hughes. Hughes’s Ed Loy books are the synthesis of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald. Having heard Hughes speak on the primacy of the PI story in crime fiction, it’s easy to see that passion on every page here. Ed Loy gets hired to do a task, follows through to the end because he needs to know. This may not be the way of a real-life PI with bills to pay and a license to maintain, but it makes for intoxicating fiction. In The Color of Blood, Loy finds the motivations for murder in events over twenty years’ past, and describes them with a kind of prose few other than Chandler have managed. Things get a little convoluted at times and have to be explained in the classic, “I supposed you wonder I called you all together” scene, but even that is less a resolution than the spring that will launch the resolution when it comes.

Gaelic Karma

My life has a tendency to balance out, for which I am more often grateful than frustrated. During my tenure at Castle Voldemort, I once received a nice bonus at work. Several years later, during a stint playing in a community band, I decided it was time to buy a new trumpet. Within a few weeks another windfall came to me, almost exactly what the horn would cost. That’s how I roll.

I should have expected as much when The Beloved Spouse and I failed to score any autographs for our copy of Books To Die For at Bouchercon. With thirty-plus authors ready to sign, we waited for the line to thin before queuing up. Little did we know demand for signatures would be so great most of the authors had to leave for other commitments by the time we got within hailing distance of the signing area, and we bailed ourselves. So it goes.

The Sole Heir has somewhat better karma. Things tend to drop right for her. Today’s tale shows how her good fortune balanced things out for me, without her even knowing about it.

Last week was my birthday. (I’m now in what I call my Ketchup Year: 57.) She bought me a book from my Amazon wish list (Down These Green Streets, so there’s a Declan Burke angle here, too), but, as she told me during the unwrapping, there was a story behind it.

She had the choice of buying the book new, or used. Daughter of a fledgling author, she opted for new, thinking new is better for a gift, and the authors get paid. When it arrived, she noticed it lacked the sheen a new trade paperback has, and the edges were less than crisp. The pages had obviously been turned. This was not a new book, and she was not amused. Short on time before my birthday, she was about to send it back, but thumbed through it first.

Turns out someone at Amazon made a mistake: she’d scored an autographed copy. Ten contributors had signed, including Declan Hughes, Colin Bateman, and Ian Ross. (We’re still decoding the others.) She gave it to me as is, with the offer to swap it for a new one if I preferred.

Like hell. They’ll pry this copy from my cold, dead fingers.

This was better than balancing out. Books To Die For is just as good, signed or not. Having the unexpected signed copy of Green Streets, and a story to go with it, puts me well ahead.

And the kid’s only half as Irish as I am. Go figure.

Best Reads For 2011

I didn’t read quite as much this year as I had in the past, for several reasons, all of which have been documented elsewhere. That doesn’t mean I didn’t find plenty of books worthy of recommendation. I meant to have a list of ten, then twelve, the fifteen, but I could draw a bright line until I was into the twenties.

So here you go with the books I read last year and would be willing to read again, time permitting. They’re listed in alphabetical order; no preference should be inferred.

Absolute Zero Cool, Declan Burke. Publishing is more farked up than even I thought if this doesn’t establish Burke as someone to keep an eye on. Meta-fiction at its best, as the author argues with a character and himself to spin a tale no one else could have thought of, let along written.

Big Money and Big Numbers, Jack Getze. Getze’s trick is to show you the climax at the beginning, then work back toward it, a la Michael Clayton. Not only does Getze pull it off both times, he’s a lot funnier.

City of Lost Girls, Declan Hughes. Not Hughes’s best Ed Loy novel, and I still couldn’t bear to leave it off the list. There’s no one better working today.

Crashed and Little Elvises, Timothy Hallinan. Hallinan took a break from his Poke Rafferty thrillers to start an e-book series about a master burglar who works as sort of a PI for the underworld. The plots are witty and Hallinan hits a perfect balance of humor and action both times.

The Creative Writer’s Survival Guide, John McNally. Does for how to be a writer what Stephen King’s On Writing does for how to write. Young writers in particular should pay attention to what McNally has to say.

Eddie’s World, Charlie Stella. Stella first. The influence of George V. Higgins is writ large, but this is no knock-off. No one captures peripheral mob figures as well as Stella.

Generation Kill, Evan Wright. The book on which David Simon based his HBO series. Things have more perspective in the book. Must reading for anyone who wants a first hand look of what war is like without actually having to go.

Gun, Ray Banks. A novella that describes one day in the life of a just-released convict. Unforgettable.

The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, Bill James. Even more detailed than the original. Maybe too much to read straight through, though James’s writing wears better than a lot of people who are supposed to be writers.

In Defense of Flogging, Peter Moskos. Thoughtful and thought-provoking look into how criminals are punished in America.

Joe Puma, PI, William Campbell Gault. I honest to God don’t remember why I bought this collection of five stories from the Fifties, but I sure am glad I did. First rate PI writing.

Lawyers, Guns, and Money, J.D. Rhoades. Crime and corruption in a small southern town described in perfect balance and style for the setting and material.

Maximum Bob, Elmore Leonard. I’d read it before, and I suspect I’ll read it again.

Pocket 47, Jude Hardin. A deft combination of complexity and readability. Hardin keeps this up and he’ll be the obscure no longer.

Road Rules, Jim Winter. More fun than anyone has ever had in Cleveland. Either Elmore Leonard or Carl Hiaasen would have been happy to write this.

Rut, Scott Phillips. Scariest post-apocalypse scenario yet: what happens if we keep doing what we’ve been doing. Phillips’s wit ensure nothing drags or becomes predictable.

Samaritan, Richard Price. Good intentions with questionable motivations. Not as gripping as Clockers, but a marvelous book.

Setup on Front Street, Mike Dennis. Don’t let the setting (Florida Keys) fool you. As hard-boiled as they come while still using the setting to maximum advantage. The first of a series; the second is already on my Kindle.

Shadow of the Dahlia, Jack Bludis. Maybe my favorite book of the year. Bludis has a reputation, but this was the first book of his I’d read. He captures the period perfectly with a riveting story.

Shit My Dad Says, Justin Halpern. Not just a compilation of tweets, Halpern provides some family history to place the quotes in perspective. He’s a good and funny writer himself, and the old man’s quotes are priceless, though some do seem a little prickish when you realize they were delivered to a twelve-year-old kid. (Sorry, I’m not going to go with the politically correct * when we all know it’s the I in shit.")

True Grit, Charles Portis. I’d seen both movies, finally got around to reading the book. Sometimes I wonder how the hell I can hold a job, waiting as long as I do for good stuff.

Two-Way Split, Allan Guthrie. Hard to say too much without giving away a key plot element. Pay close attention and you’ll not be disappointed.

A Vine in the Blood, Leighton Gage. This newest in the Chief Inspector Mario Silva series may be the best.

September's Best Reads

My best reads from September, in the order in which they were read:

Silent Edge, by Michael Koryta. A cold case heats up in a hurry for Cleveland PI Lincoln Perry after he’s hired by an ex-con to find the woman who rehabilitated him. Koryta is a master at treading the line between just enough and too much in plot, characterization, dialog, and whatever other aspects of novels appeal to you. One of the top five I’ve read this year.

All the Dead Voices, by Declan Hughes. Ed Loy’s fourth adventure may be the best yet, as he grapples with a case that has roots in the Irish Troubles that no one really wants him to deal with. Hughes is the Irish mix of Chandler and Macdonald, a beautiful wordsmith with a knack for writing stories about how previously unknown histories can destroy the present. I would loved to have seen a little more of sidekick Tommy Owens, but that’s a personal problem. Another Top Five for the year to date.

Cottonwood, by Scott Phillips. About as different from Phillips’s better-known The Ice Harvest as you can get stylistically, but just as good, maybe better. Bill Ogden marches to his own drummer, and the beat takes him from the fictional town of Cottonwood, Kansas to Colorado and back, An epic story told on a small scale, Phillips’s writing keeps the reader so well in the scene you can just about smell the horseshit in the streets. The Top Five swells and may have to be adjusted to the Top Ten. It’s late enough in the year.

No More Heroes, by Ray Banks. My first Banks novel, and once again I wonder what took me so long. Callum Innes the ex-con PI is in his fourth adventure, and he gets beat up even worse than Ed Loy, which takes some doing. Banks is the master of the flawed protagonist, showing both sides of Inness’s character without sympathy or exaltation; he’s just getting through the day. Immigrants, neo-Nazis, students, and the media combine in a story calculated to make the reader question the truth of anything he hears or reads.

Are You Going to Believe Me, or Your Private Eyes?

I’ve been lucky over the past few weeks to have read three books that reminded me why I got interested in crime fiction and writing in the first place: first person private investigator stories.

Libby Fischer Hellmann’s Easy Innocence takes the attitudes of an affluent suburb and shows consequences not often considered. Her detective, Georgia Davis, avoids the pitfalls of many female protagonists. She is not a man in a skirt, ready and willing to kick ass as necessary; neither is she dependent on either a big, strong man or divine intervention to get her out of tough spots. Best of all, she’s smart enough to know the difference and act accordingly.

The Silent Hour, by Michael Koryta, is a cold-case story. Lincoln Perry has many of the characteristics of a stereotypical PI—former cop who left under a cloud, bends and breaks his own rules, trouble maintaining relationships—though Koryta never lets him fall off that edge. His problems are the problems anyone in his situation could have, and he’s anything but omnipotent. Perry takes a beating and keeps on ticking, learning about himself as the books progress.

Declan Hughes’s detective, Ed Loy, takes beatings that make what Perry endures seem like air kisses from a friendly but distant aunt. In All the Dead Voices, Ed inadvertently finds himself cleaning up leftovers from the Irish Troubles, caught between republican terror groups, drug gangs, and government agencies whose interests do not include what most would call a classic sense of justice.

What all three have in common—aside from tight plots and uniformly exceptional writing—is what makes the PI series the highest form of crime fiction; they’re primarily character studies of the hero. (Or heroine, in Georgia’s case.) A good series—as all of these are—works even better, allowing the character to evolve. Attitudes change, as do relationships. Physical and emotional trauma accumulates. The character may grow emotionally, or become embittered. What he deems worthy of description, and how it is described, matures.

For all the talk of the decline of PI fiction, the quantity of expert practitioners isn’t hurting. James Lee Burke and Robert Crais still have hop on their fastballs after twenty years. (Burke’s Dave Robicheaux is actually a cop, but the length of leash he is provided in New Iberia and his personal journey through the series make his stories read more like PI fiction than police procedurals.) Relative newcomers like Sean Chercover and Reed Farrell Coleman prove the talent pool is deep as ever. Dennis Lehane’s upcoming Kenzie-Gennaro novel is much anticipated.

The fictional PI can look into things the average cop never touches. Could Ross Macdonald have explored the rotting foundations of crumbling families with a cop, or did Lew Archer have to be a PI? A cop concerns himself with who and what; why is nice, but is primarily important as a way to get to what, or to help to convince a jury as to who. His caseload is too great to do otherwise. Private eyes are paid to find out why, which often compels some worthy introspection. Cops are about closing cases; PIs are about closure.

PI stories are also better suited for ambivalent endings. A cop’s job is to catch the bad guy. The PI can appreciate the bittersweet nature of all cases, balancing the satisfaction of solving the mystery with the knowledge of his pre-ordained failure: no matter what he discovers, things can never be put right. The dead are still gone. The cop can catch the killer and exact a measure of justice; the PI may be brought in to clean up the mess that doesn’t quite meet the necessary standard of illegality.

It’s no surprise so many of the “genre” writers who receive acclaim from the “literary” community come from detective fiction. Chandler, Hammett, Macdonald, and Burke are all accepted as great writers, not subject to the backhanded acclaim of “great genre writer.” No one thought Lehane presumptuous when The Given Day looked into issues well beyond crime; he’d been doing it for years. Gone, Baby, Gone is as thought-provoking a book as one is likely to read.

Declan Hughes may be the foremost advocate of the virtues of detective fiction, not just in his novels, but in his public statements. If I had a transcript of his comments from Bouchercon 2008, I would have printed them here and saved you the trouble of reading my interpretation; his is clearer and more impassioned. Few books—of any genre, or of no genre—are more likely to make you wonder, “What would I do here?” or, more hauntingly, “What would I have done differently?” When done well, what more can anyone ask from a book?