Remo Went Rogue

Plot summary:

Remo is a big-shot lawyer.
Remo is an asshole.
Remo has evil scumbags for clients.
Remo fucks over said scumbags.
Scumbags go looking for said asshole.
Chaos ensues.

Mike McCrary writes with a brisk, jabbing style reminiscent of Ken Bruen, and combines it with a visually-rich descriptive power that makes Remo Went Rogue a hell of a read. My lovely bride and I like to read books out loud to each other, swapping chapters. You find out pretty quickly which writers are suited to the spoken word. Crime fiction, in general, works wonderfully. (I hate to label anything. "Crime" fiction is just another box to to put a writer in--I'd rather just have a "good" box and a "bad" box. Or perhaps "more of this" and "less of that" boxes.) Mr. McCrary sounds great out loud and he sets a blistering pace that keeps you turning the pages. Remo Cobb is a particularly repulsive character, but the degenerate Mashburn Brothers that are his antagonists are even more heinous, and so you find yourself rooting for him despite his panoply of character flaws. A wildcard--one of the Mashburn gang that changes sides, sort of--is also part of the mix and plays a key role in the explosive showdown near the end of the story. Said showdown is written with a clinical precision that makes you feel like you are right in the middle of the hail of lead and spray of blood. Without giving away too much, Remo gets his chance at redemption, like any good noir anti-hero ought to, and the book has a satisfying sense of closure. McCrary doesn't tie up all the loose ends, though, and you are left with a tantalizing bit of unfinished business. Sequel, anyone?

Remo Went Rogue is a new title in the ever-increasing catalog at my favorite publisher, Gutter Books. This one is labeled as an Out of the Gutter release, a new imprint under the GB banner. Everyone talks about the decline of the independent business, and the ever-increasing hegemony of the corporate machine, but nobody does anything about it. Am I right? You want to do something about the hard-working little guys? You want to fight the big guys? Then support independent publishers and authors! I know a great place to start: Gutter Books.

Books on the Doorstep

I think most people like getting packages in the mail, and I'm no exception. I was out most of yesterday and missed the delivery of my latest order from my favorite bookseller, Ziesing Books. This morning I opened the box and took a first look at the goods. All were sale items, I should add, the four books coming in with shipping at about thirty bucks. The most expensive one (ten dollars!) was a trade paperback advance reading copy of William Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive. Despite being from 1988, it's in excellent shape. I've read all of Mr. Gibson's fiction, including his famous Cyberspace or "Sprawl" trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, and the aforementioned MLO), but don't have all of it on the shelves. My notes tell me I read MLO in 1992--it will be nice to revisit that after more than twenty years. I wonder how well it holds up? The next item was a novel from 1996 by one of my all-time favorite writers, John le Carré. It was made into a movie of the same name starring Pierce Brosnan. Guessed yet? It's The Tailor of Panama. I don't own everything by Mr. le Carré, nor have I read everything, but I'm slowly filling in the collection. I see he has a new novel--A Delicate Truth. I'll have to get right on that as soon as I'm done with this one. TTOP is also a trade paperback and an advance reader's copy, and also in excellent shape. Not bad for seven dollars.

The other two are short story collections. One (a new hardback, only five dollars) is by another great British writer, Brian Aldiss, and is called Common Clay. It was a short story--"The Madonna of Futurity"--that originally turned me on to Mr. Aldiss' work, and I discovered later that story was part of a novel called Somewhere East of Life, which is part of a quartet called the "Squire" novels. I bought another in the series, Life in the West, from, of course, Ziesing Books. I still have to get my hands on the other two! The final item was a new $14.95 paperback (on sale for half price!) of mystery stories by the Russian dramatist Anton Chekov. I had no idea that he wrote such things, but he apparently enjoyed the genre and penned many such tales throughout his short but exceptional literary career. It's called A Night in the Cemetery and Other Stories of Crime and Suspense and was put out in 2008 by Pegasus. I love Chekhov's plays, and I'm quite curious about these other works.

So that's it. Four new books for thirty bucks. Do yourself a favor and check out Ziesing Books. It is a true mom-and-pop outfit and is located here in Northern California, in a little burg called Shingletown in Shasta County, just west of Lassen Peak. There's no storefront, just a website and a P.O. Box, but they still produce a print catalog. If you buy from them they keep you on the mailing list and send you their 40-page self-produced tome a couple of times a year. Mark--the pop--writes a letter about his life and the business that makes you feel like part of the family. When you call or email, Cindy--the mom--answers. You get personal service in the old-fashioned sense of the word, and you also get first-rate, professionally-packaged and timely-delivered high-quality eclectic goods for reasonable prices. How can you beat that?

p.s. What's on YOUR bookshelf these days?

The Shark-Infested Custard

Some time ago I picked up a lovely hardcover copy of Charles Willeford's The Shark-Infested Custard from my favorite shop, Ziesing Books, for just a few bucks. Mark and Cindy Zeising are an actual mom-and-pop outfit (one or the other answers the phone when you call) in the tiny burg of Shingletown, here in "true" Northern California. (It's strictly web and mail order, there's no storefront.) I finally got around to reading the book last week, and have had a little time to digest it, and thought I'd try to write a bit of a review.

The novel has four protagonists: Don, Eddie, Hank, and Larry. They are thirty-somethings living in Miami in the late 1970s when the city was at the crest of its population boom. They are obsessed with women, drinking, money, women, drinking, and money. The story is told from each of their points-of-view, two in first person and two in third person. Willeford, being a master, handles the transitions and changes in voice with easy grace. He has a laconic, straightforward style, but is a keen observer and wonderfully concise. The surgical precision of his prose makes even the simplest descriptions interesting, and the dialog has a crisp, realistic feel. The men are not particularly likeable. In fact, they are boorish, sexist, racist, self-centered jerks. And a bit pathetic, too. When they discuss their problems and reveal their attitudes, though, Willeford's lean, hard-boiled style makes what they think and feel seem ordinary and natural, even sympathetic. They are who they are, and Willeford holds them up for scrutiny but not judgment. It's like they are in a fishbowl--everything about their lives is visible even when you want it covered up.

Therein lies the appeal of the book, at least for me. Miami serves as a sort of symbol of American moral and spiritual decadence, the characters merely mouthpieces for all the possible sins of men. They lie, cheat, and steal. They are dishonest at work and unfaithful in their relationships, yet they are loyal friends and help each other out. They have reputable middle-class occupations like airline pilot, security administrator, and sales rep, and are good at their jobs, but have no compunction about scamming their bosses and co-workers. They view women as nothing more than sexual receptacles and connive to stay out of entanglements or get out of the ones they fall into. But Willeford writes with such convincing authority you actually root for the guys to clean up the messes they make, and the messes are pretty ugly and involve murder, manslaughter, kidnapping, and the like.

Charles Willeford is one of the highest-regarded of all crime/noir writers, and The Shark-Infested Custard shows off all his considerable strengths. It's viciously, scathingly funny, a dark, satiric look at The American Dream in all its twisted wretchedness. Few writers can handle such bleak material and turn it into a swift, readable tale, but Willeford is a particular talent. In fact, he should really be lumped in with "literary" writers and not "genre" fiction. His grasp of psychology and motivation, his unflinching look at ordinary, everyday evil, and his fluid, engaging style are light-years above many of the literature crowd's darlings. One of the most corrosive things the publishing world has done to the American novel is separate the MFA-types from the street-types, assuming that a high-falutin' degree from a famous writer's program automatically creates a superior work. I don't mean to say these things are bad--just that they are no guarantee of good. One day, perhaps, Americans will strip the labels off the works of great writers like Willeford, Jim Thompson, David Goodis, John D. MacDonald, Chester Himes, James M. Cain and others of their ilk and recognize their literary creations as substantial contributions to contemporary art and culture. Imagine if we read them in high school alongside F. Scott Fitzgerald or J.D. Salinger! That would make for some interesting discussions, don't you think?

Fatale

Hot off the presses from Image Comics is the latest collection of the Ed Brubaker-Sean Phillips collaboration Fatale: West of Hell, which contains issues 11-14. I'm a huge fan of the Criminal series, which is as good as it gets in the noir/crime fiction  realm. Not only does Mr. Brubaker write tautly-plotted, compelling tales, Mr. Phillips draws the most beautiful pictures, and the combination is hard to beat. They preceded Criminal with Incognito, which mixed in superhero stuff with noir, something that should not have worked but actually did. These guys are that good. Now they are pursuing this strange horror-noir mix they call Fatale, and like Incognito I was not sure it would fly. But fly it does, soars in fact, showing once again that these guys are the real deal. Fatale follows a femme fatale, of course, but this femme spreads around the fatal without ever really getting fatal-ed herself. She's some kind of immortal being, not a real human despite looking like a cross between Ava Gardner in The Killers and Jane Greer in Out of the Past. She lives forever it seems, or when she dies she is reborn in another time and place. It's hard to tell, really. Very horror story-weird with lots of unanswered questions. The first two collections (Death Chases Me and The Devil's Business) were set in various decades of the 20th century and our "heroine" was called "Josephine." In the latest, we find "Mathilda" in both the Middle Ages and the American West. There's even a WWII adventure. It's heady stuff, and hard to tell where it is going, but I'm willing to go for the ride. The idea that the femme fatale is more than just a literary trope or a cultural icon but is instead an actual force of nature is a surprisingly fertile ground for a good writer-artist team. It's the kind of thing that demands re-reading, not just for the unanswered questions, but for the richly detailed art, in which I see something new every time I look at it. Keep up the good work, men. I'm ready for my next collection!

BLITZ

Rummaging through the Wal-Mart blu-ray sale bin recently, I came across a Jason Statham movie called Blitz. We love Jason Statham movies around here. Naturally, we watched it and enjoyed it. Not much in the way of kung-fu, or car chases, the usual Statham staples, but plenty of laconic, tough-guy charm. The character is a sort of Dirty Harry for 21st-century London, a cop who breaks the rules but gets things done, in this case stopping a cop-killer. Even if the plot is a bit hackneyed, the acting throughout is terrific, and the film is brisk, stylish, and lots of fun, despite the graphic violence. Oh, and did I mention the female lead is played by the beautiful and talented Zawe Ashton? Statham plays an Irishman--he goes after his first set of baddies with a hurley--who drinks too much, fights too much, and generally fails to give a shit about anything other than cracking the heads of criminals. When the credits were rolling I noticed the movie was based on a book by none other than Ken Bruen, who happens to be one of my favorite writers. What a combination: Ken Bruen and Jason Statham! Although I've read quite a bit of Bruen's Jack Taylor series, I've never read any of his South East London series featuring Detective Sergeant Tom Brant (Statham in the film) and Chief Inspector James Roberts (Mark Rylance). I suppose I'll have to, now!

Tinieblas

It means "darkness" in Spanish, as in the darkness of Genesis:

Y la tierra estaba desordenada y vacía y las tinieblas estaban sobre la faz del abismo.

(And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. 1:2, KJV)

My dad was always bringing home boxes of books from yard sales and thrift shops. Lots of crap, of course, but enough gems to keep us interested. One of the most memorable was a contemporary paperback novel with a loud red cover and weird art by a guy named R.M. Koster. It was called The Prince, in deference to the famous tome from Sig. Machiavelli, but being a mere lad of thirteen at the time I wasn't too hip on Renaissance literature. It was one of those books that held sway over me--I kept trying to read it but could not. It was too strange, too daunting. My tastes in those days tended to Alistair MacLean, Isaac Asimov, and MAD Magazine. The book began with a listing of all the rulers of the fictional Republic of Tinieblas and their succession of terrible fates, the most benign of which were "deposed." Then there was a dreamy opening sequence, a fantasy of revenge and torture involving a well-lubricated revolver and a hog-tied victim. It was heady stuff for a kid, even if it was the seventies. I was not ready for Mr. Koster and his twisted protagonist Kiki Sancudo. Eventually, when I'd just about finished high school, I decided to read the entire thing. And it blew my underdeveloped Catholic schoolboy mind. After Kafka, in college, I read it again. The book and its two successors (now called The Tinieblas Trilogy) were re-issued in 1989, and I read The Prince again. As well as The Dissertation and Mandragon, the concluding volumes. Both were, to no surprise of mine, brilliant.

Overlook Press is re-issuing the set.  I suggest you get your hands on these books and read them, they are unique, and fittingly, overlooked. Part fantasy, part noir, part political thriller, part fable, part crime caper, The Prince is wildly audacious, searingly funny, achingly sad, and strikingly original. It has swagger, bluster, and machismo aplenty, but it is also chest deep in the terrible tragedy that is Latin American democracy, and you can't help but feel the suffering of the real people that live in real places not much different than Tinieblas. Mr. Koster is 79 years old and says another book is coming. I can't wait. The rest of you have some reading to do.

Earthbound

"He has no place to go, no home but the earth."

Thus concludes Charles F. Park, Jr. in his 1975 book Earthbound: Minerals, Energy, and Man's Future. I'm a big fan of space exploration, manned spaceflight, and science fiction stories, but it is unlikely anyone I will ever know will live on another planet. Visit, sure. But live? Be part of an alien ecosystem? No. That's not going to happen soon. We are stuck here on the earth and have to make the best of it. The Andromedans or Cassiopeians or Alpha Centaurians are not going to suddenly appear and give us free, limitless, non-polluting energy. We'll still have to farm our food and we'll still need all the other stuff we currently grow. And, like always, we'll  have to mine the rest. I'm interested in things and how they get put together. Where does the lead for my car battery actually come from? How is it transported and processed? What does it take to turn rocks into something like a toaster or a hammer? Earthbound may have been dated, but it piqued my abiding interest in economic geology. I suppose growing up surrounded by things like seaports and oil refineries got me thinking along those lines. I wonder about the connections necessary to put an iPad in someone's hand, the actions and events along the way, the myriad of both social and physical structures required. No matter what, when you follow the chain to the end, there's always some guy digging a hole in the ground and pulling out some useful chunk of the earth. I want to know more about that guy, that hole, and the treasures buried there.

An Agent of Deceit

I read a lot of old stuff and don't always stay abreast of contemporary works. Recently, though, I came across Chris Morgan Jones' debut novel The Silent Oligarch (in the UK it is titled An Agent of Deceit). I'm not sure if a writer is complimented by comparison, but Mr. Jones reminded me of one of my all-time favorites, John le Carré. There's enough intrigue and simmering tension in The Silent Oligarch to please the staunchest of le Carré loyalists, but you can get that sort of thing lots of places. What sets le Carré apart from the herd is his ability to create memorable and sympathetic characters. And what made The Silent Oligarch a great read for me was the same thing. The story centers around a Russian gangster and oil tycoon named Konstantin Malin who poses as a mid-level bureaucrat in the Ministry of Natural Resources. His billions are laundered in a byzantine array of offshore holding companies, managed by a small crew of well-paid corporate stooges. Only a handful of people understand Malin's true wealth and stature, and one of them, a middle-aged lawyer named Richard Lock, tries to find his way out of the life of white-collar crime that has ensnared him. A former journalist and now corporate intelligence specialist, Ben Webster, is at the same time investigating Malin and sees an opportunity to bring the big man down with Lock's help. While one man's life unravels, the other is drawn in too deeply and finds himself in a fight against powers much too big to confront. Lock thinks he wants freedom, and a clear conscience, but he discovers that he's driven by much more basic needs like reconciliation with his estranged wife and daughter. Webster thinks he wants justice, but finds out that he likes the spy game too much, that playing with the big boys has its own thrills that pull him in despite the danger. Not to spoil it, but neither man gets what he wants. Despite the dramatic dénouement, Jones keeps the ending somewhat ambiguous, with no simple solutions and neat resolutions, much in the style of le Carré. The Silent Oligarch is timely in its look at corruption, greed, and corporate evil, and paints a scary picture of the high-dollar, well-dressed, well-educated drones that put a seemingly legitimate public face on international criminal networks. Jones makes you feel that there are cadres of these button-down Oxford types (he's British) happily selling their souls to mafia dons, magnates, potentates, and modern-day shoguns all over the globe. They don't kill anyone or even get their fingernails dirty, but they are as crooked as Lombard Street, and their amorality is perhaps even more frightening than the big shots they shill for.



n.b. I changed the title of this post from The Silent Oligarch to An Agent of Deceit.

Hoka-Hoka-HEY! and other tidbits

I'm revisiting Larry Marder's Tales of the Beanworld, a weird yet accessible comic originally published in the late 1980s. Beanworld is hard to describe. It's black-and-white with bold graphics and simple drawings, yet features an oddly compelling story that's part satire and part ecological fable. Hell, I'm not really sure what it is! Beanworld is populated by the likes of Professor Garbanzo, Mr. Spook, Gran'Ma'Pa, the Chow Sol'jers, Beanish, and the Boom'r Band. They live between The Legendary Edge and The Proverbial Sandy Beach, above The Thin Lake and The Four Realities. Below that is the Bone Zone, the Hoi-Polloi Ring Herd, and Der Stinkle. And a bunch of other stuff that makes sense when you are there. Highly recommended--pick it up in digital or hardcover.

We recently watched the excellent 1996 film The Whole Wide World about Robert E. Howard and his ill-fated romance with schoolteacher Novalyne Price.(It's based on her memoirs.) Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, was the biggest thing in the pulps yet lived with his parents in a small town in Texas and was viewed suspiciously by the locals for his eccentricities. It's a sad tale, of course, but an uplifting story, mostly because the actors (Vincent D'Onofrio and Renee Zellweger) are superb and bring the characters to life. Add it to your next batch from Netflix, you won't be disappointed.

I came across a very nice used copy of A.E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad in a Mt. Shasta book shop. His poems are real gems and can be read again and again. His style comes across as quaint and old-fashioned but the insights are deep and thoroughly modern. His images are both dark and playful, and you seem to teeter on the knife edge in every stanza, never knowing which way you will fall. Like all great poets he turns the simple into the sublime with seeming effortlessness. Beautiful stuff--read it out loud during the holidays.

Finally, I just finished Pete Townshend's Who I Am (a birthday present!).  The old rockers are cranking out the tell-alls these days, it seems to be the new thing. I suppose they are all of that age where they can relax and reminisce. I loved The Who and was a big fan of Townshend's music, especially Tommy and Quadrophenia. The first 300 pages (yes, it is a huge book) are interesting, he's a candid and straightforward story-teller. I liked learning about the band and how their sound came together, and about "the scene" that spawned so many great acts. I also liked reading about Pete's musical influences and about some of the things that inspired his work. The final 200 pages are harder going, too much "and then this happened" that many autobiographies suffer from, which is why I generally avoid them. But it is still Pete, and his mates Roger, John, and Keith, and that's all good. I first saw The Who in 1976 when I was still in high school and they made quite an impression on my adolescent mind.

That's not all I'm reading or watching these days, just the highlights, but it's enough to write about. So, tell me, what are YOU reading and watching these days?

LA noir

The late Douglas Anne Munson (who wrote under the pseudonym Mercedes Lambert) worked the mean streets of Los Angeles much like her literary predecessor Raymond Chandler. Her heroine, Whitney Logan, does not have Philip Marlowe's wise-cracking self-assurance, and she's an attorney, not an investigator. But in the great pulp tradition of amateur sleuths she nonetheless gets involved in solving mysteries, and much mayhem occurs along the way. Dogtown, and its sequel, Soultown, are both set in the aftermath of the 1992 riots and have been re-issued as a double by Stark House. I recently enjoyed both. One of my favorites, Ken Bruen, wrote the introduction. Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, and Marcia Muller get much of the credit for re-imagining the crime and detective novel with female protagonists. They weren't the first--Agatha Christie, for one, pre-dates them all--and there were occasional heroines in the early pulps. But noir, historically, is a man's world, unless you're a femme fatale or a victim. Fortunately douchebags like Norman Mailer are no longer around to say stupid shit like "you have to have balls to write" (he was the president of PEN for a while, believe it or not). He meant that literally, not figuratively, and clearly had never read anything written by females. Ms. Lambert surely has the necessary chops. Here are samples of her literary cojones:

This is a town of pathological liars. Everyone is making a deal.The boulevard is paved with stars and percentage points. Box Office Boffo. Even my gynecologist has Variety in her office.

. . . 

The palm trees wept in the moonlight. There were no new jobs. No new schools had been built. I am a member of the National Lawyers Guild. I had believed in equality, fraternity, and the Bill of Rights. What had the Rebellion changed? Now the city was a burned-out Stonehenge of bricks and asbestos.

Whitney Logan is an insecure loner and a recent law school grad still clinging to her liberal ideals who barely manages to pay the bills working the bottom of the legal food chain. She pumps iron, studies tae kwon do, and keeps a bottle of Southern Comfort in her desk. Her landlord is a former big shot lawyer now a hopeless pothead ("Harvey Kaplan looked like he'd been dead for twenty years. At least since Woodstock."), her father an alcoholic, and her reluctant sidekick a hostile, foul-mouthed ex-hooker. All the right ingredients for noir. Lambert's writing is crisp and engaging, both funny and somber, and the adventures are gritty and evoke the bizarre, shifting landscape that is the City of Angels. It is unfortunate that cancer took her at age 55, just before her work enjoyed a renaissance.

Death by beer

You don't usually see Death personified as a woman. Neil Gaiman's The Sandman series is a notable exception. Death, in those lovely comic books, is a scrawny-but-sexy goth with punk overtones. Very cool. Sierra Nevada Brewing has added another Lady Death with the label on their new Ruthless Rye IPA. She's in cape and cowl and is carrying a scythe, but she's dressed in dark brown, like a monk. And the hood is pulled back enough to show shiny black hair and a beautiful profile. High thunderclouds are behind her, with a farm house and sown field in the background. In the foreground are stalks of rye and what appear to be sunflowers. It looks like an Ingmar Bergman film, only in sepia tones and set somewhere in the Great Plains. It's a tasty beer, too. Full and sweet at first, then dry and hoppy on the tongue, finishing with a spicy rye flavor reminiscent of Canadian whisky. I've often said that the wonderful brews from Chico are like mother's milk to me. I've been drinking them since they hit the shelves way back in the day, and they are still great. The new Ruthless Rye IPA is killer!

The Last of the Innocent

I'm a huge fan of the work of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, the writer-artist team responsible for Criminal. The latest installment (the sixth graphic novel collection) is called The Last of the Innocent and manages to continue the impossibly high standard of the previous releases. These guys really understand that noir is so much more than a two-fisted alcoholic P.I. beating people up while pursuing his twisted sense of justice. Not that that can't work--Ken Bruen pulls it off marvelously with his Jack Taylor books. But too many hard-boiled stories fall into the trap of a standard mystery camouflaged with lots of f-bombs and bar fights. That is not a bad thing, mind you, just a little tiresome. Messrs. Brubaker and Phillips are more interested in characters and the web of complications that life brings. Sure, there are hit men, mobsters, gamblers, tycoons, whores, junkies, thieves, crooked cops, and femme fatales aplenty in Criminal. But what makes the whole thing work is the humanity of the protagonists. They all have a "regular joe" side of their characters that gives the reader empathy for them and their various plights, even if they do (and they will) something stupid or evil. Moreover, their entanglements are entirely believable. They are motivated by their hopes, fears, and dreams, just like all of us. And when they get sucked into the maelstrom of violence and death the stories morph into tragedies. And I love a good tragedy. Genre fiction rarely gets the attention of the serious literary critic, and comic books hardly ever get the notice they deserve. But Criminal is the real deal--serious, poetic, profound, and thoroughly entertaining. Val Staples continues with his beautiful colors (ably assisted by Dave Stewart). Check out The Last of the Innocent and the rest of the Criminal series. You might find yourself hooked.

Somewhere West of Life

It's an allusion. Brian Aldiss' 1994 novel Somewhere East of Life is a strange and terrifying book, and its images still haunt me. My notes (I've kept a log of my reading since 1990) tell me I finished it in 2000. I recently added Mr. Aldiss' Forgotten Life (1988) to my pile, I suppose I'll have to tackle that next. But this is not about his excellent work, but rather that of another writer, an American named Nathanael West. In the 1930s he wrote two short novels, Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust, that were ultimately made into Hollywood movies. I salvaged a Nathanael West anthology from a discard pile (he published only two other short novels) and powered my way through both dark and twisted stories. I suppose they aren't stories so much as plots. Weird guy hangs around other weird people who all go crazy and shit happens and it's all fucked up at the end. I don't mean that as a criticism, just an observation. You read these stories because these crazy people are all real and recognizable. They lie beneath our surfaces, lurking, ready to burst out when the veil of middle class respectability finally splits from the tension of accumulated injustices. None of us like to believe we have the savage beast within our breasts, but Mr. West says emphatically that we do, and we'd be fools not to accept that fact. Mostly the two tales are about the failed American Dream. Everywhere West looked he saw phonies, hucksters, con artists, bullshitters, and storytellers. And he saw the Great Depression, which shattered a lot of dreams and surely influenced a generation of writers and artists. He died in a car accident three years short of forty.

Choke Hold

The hard-boiled field is mostly a man's racket. The heroes and anti-heroes are tough guys. The writers are overwhelmingly male. Women are usually victims, femme fatales, or side stories. Thankfully things have changed in the 21st century and no one exemplifies that more than Christa Faust and her heroine Angel Dare. I posted about both of these ladies a few years back when I received Money Shot from Hard Case Crime. Well written, tightly plotted, and action-packed, Money Shot was one of the best of the entire line. I was quite enthusiastic when Choke Hold, the sequel, hit the bookshelves earlier this year. Angel Dare is a sort of male fantasy dream woman: an ex-porn star with all the requisite looks, bravado, and skills one expects from such a character. In the first book, Angel's life is turned upside down by Croatian gangsters running a sex slave operation. Taken captive, she fights her adversaries with a courage and relentlessness she did not know she possessed, eventually killing most of them and ultimately testifying against others. At the end she has to leave everything behind and join a witness protection program. The new book starts with the vengeance-mad criminals managing to track her down and she has to go on the run. She hooks up with a young MMA fighter and his trainer out in the southwestern desert and they do their best to fend off the mobsters, a Mexican drug lord, and a crazed, jealous dojo owner and her coke-addled teenage minions. Choke Hold is a fast and furious ride where once again Angel has to call on all her considerable talent and warrior spirit to stay alive. Suffice to say the ending screams for a sequel. Ms. Faust has done it again. Money Shot featured a brilliant Glenn Orbik cover and Choke Hold, as you can see, is equally spectacular. Mr. Orbik is my favorite of all the Hard Case illustrators. I can't wait for the next one!

The Veil

The ancient Celts believed that the Samhain marked the time between summer and winter. This "cross-quarter" day (half-way from the Autumnal Equinox to the Winter Solstice) actually makes more sense as a seasonal dividing line for those of us living in the temperate zones. After all, it has been below freezing at my house--just south of the 42nd parallel--for the last week. The Celts also believed that this time of year was when the veil between the material and the spirit worlds was the thinnest. Thus you made masks and carved scary faces in vegetables (probably turnips, pumpkins are from the New World) to keep the ghosts of the dead away. I love the fall, and the approach of winter is always exciting because I like to ski. This last week I've been reading a book called The Meaning of Quantum Theory by a UK writer named Jim Baggott. This remarkable theory is at the heart of contemporary physics and is wildly successful at predicting the outcomes of experiments. The problem is that no one is quite sure what it means. The results of quantum theory are spooky and give a picture of "reality" far at odds with that of the classical mechanics of Newton. Quantum mechanics probes the veil between physics and metaphysics. What the theory tells us is unequivocal: particles behave like waves some of the time and like particles some of the time, measuring the position of a particle makes it impossible to also measure its momentum, and the properties of two separated particles appear to be dependent on each other. Quantum mechanics may possibly violate the postulates of special relativity (another wildly successful theory) and might entirely upend our notions of causality and the flow of time. Or not. No one is quite sure even though the leading minds of the world have been working on it since the 1920s. I'll finish the book tonight if I don't get interrupted too often by trick-or-treaters. It's good stuff. I'll admit that I have to skip most of the math parts as calculus was over thirty years ago. There's like this veil between the squiggles on the pages and my brain!

Game of My Life

In the wake of the wonderful 2010 World Series, a plethora of books about the San Francisco Giants have been newly-written or re-issued with updates for that memorable season. One of the latter is Matt Johanson's Game of My Life: San Francisco Giants. Originally published in 2007, the new edition now includes vignettes from the championship club. Each chapter focuses on a particular player and their most memorable game in orange-and-black. It starts with Orlando Cepeda's debut in 1958--which was also the first Giants game in San Francisco--and ends with Brian Wilson's save in Game Five of the 2010 World Series. Along the way the reader is treated to terrific stories from the likes of "Dirty Al" Gallagher, Tito Fuentes (a childhood favorite of mine), Dan Gladden, Robby Thompson, Darren Lewis, Kirk Rueter, Rich Aurilia, and many other fan favorites and interesting characters. I particularly enjoyed reliving Bob Brenly's "greatest Humm-Baby performance of all time" game since I was in attendance with much of my regular Candlestick posse. My friend Frank actually caught Brenly's game-winning homer when it bounced up to our seats in Section 30 in the LF bleachers. I will also never forget Mike Krukow's complete game victory over the St. Louis Cardinals in Game Four of the 1987 NLCS. We were lucky enough to have scored tickets in Section 2, right behind home plate. After Jeffrey Leonard's improbable, wind-aided home run that gave the Giants the lead my buddy Ron was so excited he started beating on me and I collapsed to the concrete in a fetal position. Never was getting the wind knocked out of me so worth it! Giants fans will recognize many of the great moments: Will Clark's big hit off Mitch Williams to win the pennant in 1989, Brian Johnson's homer in extras to beat the Dodgers in 1997 (and Rod Beck's miraculous pitching in the same game!), Kenny Lofton's hit in 2002 to send the team to the Series, and Jonathan Sanchez' no-hitter against the Padres in 2009. Players from the obscure Brian Dallimore to all-time great Willie Mays share their anecdotes, making Game of My Life a must-read for Giants fans. Mr. Johanson has done an excellent job assembling all the stories and adding his own take on the colorful history of the many who've worn the Giants uniform. He's also--like me--a California public high school teacher! That's extra credit, for sure.

Many thanks to the nice folks at Skyhorse Publishing for sending me a review copy.

New books!

Ziesing's is my favorite place to get books. Just got a shipment today, in fact, and I've got them stacked on my desk by thickness. The thinnest one on top is The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon--only 152 pages! I think I can make my way through that one. Then a Stark House reprint of Mercedes Lambert's Dogtown and Soultown. The new edition has a foreword by Ken Bruen, which is how I got interested in the books. I like everything he writes, so I figure I'll like everyone he writes about. Next is a novel from the great Charles Willeford, The Shark-infested Custard. Apparently he couldn't find a publisher for it in the 1970s and it languished until after his death in 1988. Brian Aldiss follows with his novel of that same year, Forgotten Life. I was captivated by Somewhere East of Life (1994) and this one is supposed to be part of the same loose tetralogy ("The Squire Quartet") with that one. I imagine I'll track down the other two at some point. Something new (2010) called Stories caught my fancy because one of the editors is superstar fantasist Neil Gaiman. People like Walter Mosley, Lawrence Block, Joe R. Lansdale, Chuck Palahniuk, Tim Powers, and Gene Wolfe contributed to the collection. I always enjoy good short stories and this looks like a great anthology. One writer who seems terribly under-appreciated to me is the late Thomas M. Disch. His The M.D. is next on the pile and calls itself "a horror story." Last but not least is the massive Nightmares & Dreamscapes collection by Stephen King. I've been reading him for a long time and I've come to really appreciate his short works. This one has more than twenty stories and is over 800 pages long!

What's on your book pile these days?

L.A. Noire

Video games are wasted on me. I spent far too much of my youth avoiding them to have any real skills with buttons and joysticks. I "walk" like a drunken sailor and "drive" like a crackhead. I usually shoot one of the good guys or pump 12 shots into the wall next to the bad guy while he sneers at my incompetence. I got vertigo when I was lost in a Bioshock maze and had to quit the game. I always have the instruction sheet on my lap so I can remember how to play, I never turn off the help screens, and I keep it set in "beginner" mode. "Getting to the next level" means handing the controls to someone else. Suffice to say that 99% of the time my PS3 is used as a blu-ray player. Oh, I take batting practice in MLB 2K9. That's not too tough.

But I had to have L.A. Noire. I had to. A game that looks and feels like a Raymond Chandler story on steroids is my kind of thing. I love the so-called film noir period in Hollywood--nothing gets me more excited than men in grey suits and fedoras chasing unattainable women and hopeless dreams. L.A. Noire works the cops-and-corruption side of the street, a distinct subset of the noir milieu. I usually prefer the stories of sympathetic chumps like Robert Mitchum and Burt Lancaster led astray by fabulous femme fatales. (Who among us wouldn't follow Jane Greer or Lizabeth Scott to their doom?) But Los Angeles in 1947 is great place to be, and Cole Phelps' journey into the heart of the city's power structure is a compelling one.

I can't speak intelligently about "game play." It would be like asking me how an F1 race car handles--did I prefer the McLaren or the Ferrari on the first chicane at Monaco? But I can tell you that L.A. Noire is gorgeous. The film-making, if you can call it that, is first-rate. The soundtrack is perfect, combining the likes of Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington with original scores. I'm blown away by the depth and richness of the scenery and characterizations. It almost doesn't matter that I can't play the thing worth a shit--it's just plain cool. There's even a tie-in e-book from an outfit appropriately named Mulholland Books. This seems to be the new trend--I understand one of my all-time favorite authors (John Shirley) has a Bioshock tie-in novel. Guess I'll have to dust that one off and try again.

America Noir

Academic language is a subset of American English. I'm a Berkeley grad, and deciphering the argot of professors was de rigueur during my time there. I imagine most college students have had similar experiences with scholarly obfuscation. Check this out:

As the dominant strain of modernism increasingly assumed quasi-official status in the postwar period, artists working in popular forms, who were beneath the notice of serious intellectuals (except as they fell under the general heading of mass culture), found themselves freer to maintain a critical stance vis-à-vis the Cold War state. (p221)

I love it! It's from a book called America Noir: underground writers and filmmakers of the Postwar Era, by, you guessed it, a college professor. His name is David Cochran. I realize the above passage isn't too difficult, no big words and only one foreign phrase, but in tone and style it is wholly academic. You certainly couldn't say "popular American artists began to criticize American culture during the Cold War." That would lack the flair and polish the audience for such a book expects. I don't mean to pick on Prof. Cochran, after all, he's a noir-man like me. And it's a good book--the stories of the various artists (from Jim Thompson to Rod Serling) are interesting and enjoyable. And Cochran is capable of some real gems--here's his take on the brilliant Charles Willeford:

In a string of pulp paperbacks published in the fifties and sixties, Willeford created a world in which the predatory cannibalism of American capitalism provides the model for all human relations, in which the American success ethic mercilessly casts aside all who are unable or unwilling to compete, and in which the innate human appreciation of artistic beauty is cruelly distorted by the exigencies of mass culture. (p40)

I like that. Academic study of noir is a little dry for everyday reading, I know, but I've a passion for the subject. Nothing comes close to Eddie Muller's magnificent Dark City: the lost world of film noir, but that's an unfair comparison. Mr. Muller's book is strictly about movies, is for a popular audience, and is filled with vintage photos. And it is as intelligent as it is entertaining. But Prof. Cochran's book has its place on the shelf--I certainly learned a lot and was pointed in some new directions.

Z-books

Some folks like e-books. Others like iBooks. But I'm a Z-books man. As in Ziesing Books. Mark and Cindy Ziesing have been peddling books for a long time out of their home in Shingletown, California. That's State of Jefferson country in case you don't know. Shingletown is an unincorporated little burg in Shasta County just east of Redding on State Route 44 on the way to Lassen Park. The Ziesings have a print catalog and a website jam-packed with lots and lots of weird and wonderful stuff. They used to publish books as well, and I have maybe a half-dozen lovely hardcovers with the Ziesing imprint--John Shirley, Tim Powers, Iain Banks, Lucius Shepard and the like. I've been shopping at Ziesing for about twenty years and in all that time have never talked to an employee, salesman, or customer-service rep. When you call on the phone either Cindy or Mark will answer. Same when you email. You get hand-written notes from them in your packages. This is a real, live, mom-and-pop operation. I once had a shipment of Z-books stolen from my post office box. When I called Ziesing, Mark sent me replacements without hesitation and charged me only the shipping! (There were, if I remember, a few one-of-kind items that I'd ordered that were lost forever, but the bulk of it was indeed replaceable.) He certainly did not have to do that, and I certainly did not ask him to, but he made me a customer for life nonetheless. Those low-lifes who stole from me (and them, by extension) would obviously never appreciate the literary bonanza they stumbled upon or the grace and class of the Ziesing operation.

I just received my latest order. It was preceded, of course, by an email from Cindy letting me know it was in the mail. All four books were individually paper-wrapped before boxing--you think Amazon does that? I got two hardcovers, The Right Madness by the late James Crumley and Leather Maiden by Joe R. Lansdale. Mr. Crumley is considered by many as a modern noir master and this is my first foray into his oeuvre. The book was listed as "Fine in Fine dust jacket." That means it is a new book that has sat on a shelf for a while (it's from 2005). That one set me back five bucks. Mr. Lansdale is a well-known and accomplished horror and crime fiction writer, and I've read several of his excellent short stories. This is my first Lansdale novel. The book is new, a 2nd printing from 2008, and it cost four bucks. I'm cheap--I scour the "sale" section. I challenge anyone in bookstore meccas like Berkeley or Portland to find better deals with less hassle than that. I also picked up a vintage paperback from Ballantine (it looks like a 70s edition) of Theodore Sturgeon short stories (E Pluribus Unicorn) for two bucks, and a new mass-market paperback from Joe McKinney called Flesh Eaters. The new book was $6.99, the most expensive item on the list! I interviewed Mr. McKinney a few months ago for the Gutter Books website--another small, local, independent venture. Flesh Eaters is one of his apocalyptic zombie books. The Sturgeon was a real find as he is one of the all-time SF greats.

When you are weary of shopping at soul-less box stores and giving your Visa number to mega-corps, check out Ziesing Books. In fact, don't wait until you are weary. Shop there now. Besides, they are also Giants fans.