JAKE HINKSON'S THE BLIND ALLEY

Jake Hinkson's new book on film noir, THE BLIND ALLEY, is terrific.  It's a collection of essays on cinematic noir, and it's compulsive reading.  I wrote a review of it for the new great crime website The Life Sentence. Take a look here.

The Mongolian Conspiracy

And what about Mexican crime fiction?  I'm starting to read more crime novels set in Latin America, and one I read recently that stands out is The Mongolian Conspiracy, by Rafael Bernal. It's set in Mexico City, and even though it was written in 1969 and takes place during the height of the Cold War, its view of Mexican politics remains as relevant as ever.  It's also mordantly funny. A great read overall. 

I wrote a piece about it for Criminal Element, which is right here: The Mongolian Conspiracy.

Brothers on the Road

When a writer really knows his characters and their world, when he knows his people and their milieu inside and out, a novel can’t help but be a strong one.  Assuming the writer has talent and craft.  Mike Miner has both, and in Prodigal Sons he has put his skill, experience, and imagination to use to write a calm, nuanced book about a family in crisis.

           

The book centers around the Flanagans, from Connecticut.  There are three brothers, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and their parents.   Matthew, the oldest and the wild child of the family, has moved to Los Angeles.  Mark works in the family store.   Luke, the youngest, lives in Boston where he battles with mental illness.  In L.A., Matthew writes scripts, makes a lot of money working on commercials, and has a beautiful, loving wife and a large home.  Everything should be ideal for him. He has ostensibly made it.   Except that he drinks too much. Way way too much.  When his wife leaves him and his boss places him on leave from his job, Matthew responds by taking to the road and going on an epic bender, accompanied by a teenage girl he has met named Tomiko.  (Their relationship is sweetly conveyed and not a sexual one).  Where else do you go when you want to cut loose and immerse yourself in debauchery?  Las Vegas.  Matthew and Tomiko drive there from Los Angeles, while back in Connecticut, the Flanagan family meets to decide what to do about Matthew.  He’s gone missing from his LA house, and nobody knows where he is.  When Mark and Luke agree to go out west to find him, everything is set in motion, and you wonder what Mark and Luke will do if and when they get to their brother.  Will they give him a few brotherly punches in the mouth, tie him up and drag him to rehab, bring him back home?

Prodigal Sons is a fluid, fast-moving read about excess, the lure of darkness, family ties, and the difficulty of grappling with the question of stability.  Matthew is the unfettered one and has brought chaos upon himself.  Mark is the family straight arrow, but he sometimes wonders what life is like on the other side, where Matthew is.  Luke doesn’t need an intoxicant to get out of himself; with him, the chaos and the demons are within, always about to swallow him.  Miner gets deep inside the head of each brother and renders the cares and concerns of the Flanagan parents wonderfully.  This is a very real family, parents and siblings who love each other, irritate each other, grouse a lot, joke among themselves, carry resentments, have both happy and sad memories of one another – in a word, complex.  Matthew drinks too much, but there is no moralizing in this book (a great thing), and it’s clear that everyone in the family, when the need arises, likes to pop open a beer and chug one or two.  Miner has a sharp observant eye for the physical world as well; the book contains some lovely descriptions of snowy Connecticut and the flat dusty land abutting the roads in Nevada and Utah.  With the possible exception of a plot development at the very end, nothing in this book feels strained or forced.  It unfolds with ease. Again, I think it’s a testament to a writer working in full command of his material, and because of that command, I found Prodigal Sons an engaging read, start to finish.  

Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Did the great Gabriel Garcia Marquez ever write a mystery novel?  Sort off, though of course, being Marquez, he wrote a story that's rich and strange and that does some peculiar things with the mystery form.  It's his short but remarkable book Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and I wrote a piece about it, looking at it as crime fiction, for the Criminal Element website.

You can check the piece out here: Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

Guest Blog: Dana King on How a Character Can Evolve

By Dana King

    

I want to start by thanking Scott for this opportunity to talk about my series protagonist, private investigator Nick Forte. Among the things Scott suggested I might write about was how Forte changes over time. This was in my wheelhouse, as he’s changed quite a bit over the course of the series. What’s interesting—to me, at least—is that it wasn’t planned.

                                                                   

First, it should be pointed out that, while I’m here today to promote The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of, which is the second Forte story, there are two more on my hard drive that have been ready for several years and will be released over the coming months. He also has an important “guest starring” role in one of my Penns River novels, Grind Joint. More people know him as the badass in Grind Joint than as someone who needs intervention to be saved in his original story, A Small Sacrifice. What happened to him?

Family issues and the relationships between parents and children are a common thread in all the Forte books. A divorced father who adores his daughter, Forte believes he can never be as good a father as one who lives at home. This makes him prone to transferring his protective nature to some of his clients, who tend to have a great deal of violence done to them, physical and otherwise, often with few, if any, consequences. This is a problem for Forte, who finds himself much more willing to meet violence with violence as the series progresses, until he eventually crosses the line into what I think of as prophylactic violence, violence as a preventive measure.

This was never the plan—I always thought of Forte as an Everyman with skills—even after the first four books were written. Then, preparing for his role in Grind Joint, I looked back and saw how he had become darker and less bothered by violence, both done to him and by him. This presented some delicious options to ponder. For instance, in Forte’s books, he has his own version of Spenser’s Hawk, named Goose, to fill what has been called by many as the “psycho sidekick” role. (I don’t think of Goose—or Hawk—as psychos, but that’s the term, and I can live with it. Mouse and Bubba Rogowski, now those are psychos.) Given Forte’s evolution—or devolution, depending on your point of view—the hero of the Nick Forte series is able to serve as the psycho sidekick when he travels to Penns River for Grind Joint, taking the case places his cousin, the cop, can’t or won’t go.

This change also allows the character to have more layers in the upcoming fifth Forte story, tentatively titled Bad Samaritan, where Goose is more engaged in reining in Forte than the other way around. The series will have flipped from a hero with a violent sidekick to a violent hero with the same sidekick trying to act as a governor. It’s Goose who remains the constant.

Looking back, I see now that The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of is a turning point for Forte. He’s still somewhat reactive at this point, trying to fill the role of Hippocratic detective by doing no harm, and learns that sometimes doing less can be more harmful than doing more. This will stay with him and color many of his future decisions, not always for the better.

The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of is available now at AMAZON.

Bio Info:

Dana King’s new release, The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of, follows the Shamus-nominated A Small Sacrifice, featuring Chicago private investigator Nick Forte. He also writes a series of police procedurals set in the economically depressed Western Pennsylvania town of Penns River. Classically trained, he has worked as a free-lance musician, public school teacher, computer network engineer, software sales consultant, and systems administrator. He lives in Maryland with his wife, Corky, and daughter, Rachel.

The Mind is a Razor Blade

Kudos to Max Booth.  In The Mind is a Razor Blade, his second novel, he could have written a follow up to his debut novel Toxicity by doing more of what he did so well in the first book.  Toxicity is a dark but raucously funny crime novel with three or four intersecting plot lines, and as its story jumps from character to character, it gets inside the heads of several people.  It is told in the third person throughout.  By contrast, The Mind is a Razor Blade is a first person narrative, a novel that locks you from its opening line inside the brain of one man. That he's a man utterly confused, lost, is clear from the get-go.  He's disoriented because of memory loss, and since everything in the book is told through his perspective, we're as limited in our understanding of the events happening to him as he is.  We look for clues and search for meaning as he does; we try to make sense of the world he inhabits. It's a violent nightmare world that he moves through - a world Hieronymus Bosch would be proud of - and the whirlwind of bizarre incidents has some particular significance for him.  What is that significance, though?  That's the question the narrator and the reader need answered.

The trope of the amnesiac struggling to find out who he is and why he's so capable of certain actions (killing, for example, like our guy in this book can do easily) is an old and familiar one.  But Max Booth gives it fresh life.  The Mind is a Razor Blade opens in media res, with the narrator coming to consciousness naked in the woods, lying in the mud, near a corpse marked with bullet holes.  Within moments of realizing that he must've killed the dead man, the narrator shoots and kills a cop.  All this while he's trying to get his most basic bearings about himself and why he is in such a tense predicament.  In its immediacy and noirish mood, the feeling of a mind bursting awake but still befogged,  this opening reminded me of the film Memento. But where the author takes his story from this dramatic start goes well beyond mere noir or any one specific genre.  Our narrator, later called Bobby, is living in a world that's somewhat futuristic (in a post-industrial, anarchic, dystopian kind of way), but it's a world that also has soul-takers, demons, telekinesis, and spiders that live in people's necks.  All sense of civil, organized society seems to have collapsed; every conceivable type of degenerate has full access to the streets. The police may exist, as the first scene showed, but chaos and violence predominate.  Destruction, fear, and rottenness are everywhere. And over the entire insane spectacle hovers a chilling and mysterious word, carried by bums on cardboard signs, spoken by others to the narrator, a word that rings in our narrator's head - Conundrae.  What is Conundrae? Who is Conundrae?  And why do people refer to that name in tones of awe and terror, like the haunted people in a Lovecraft story whispering of the entity Chulthu?

In The Mind is a Razor Blade, Max Booth concocts a tale that is part crime story, part horror novel, part science fiction, part psychological thriller. He fuses these genres effortlessly into a coherent whole, an energetic and engaging work.  The pace is brisk; horrific and revolting imagery mix with black humor and moments of surprising tenderness.  And through it all, Booth takes a big risk.  It's extraordinarily difficult to craft a novel that for most of its length provides few answers to the myriad questions posed.  The reader really is in the dark as to the overall shape and meaning of what is happening, though the characters around the narrator all seem to have an inkling, or definite knowledge, of the general pattern.  At times, you feel as frustrated as the bewildered protagonist. When will we get some clear answers? you wonder.  Why do all those people know something, while I know virtually nothing?  Is the narrator in a half-dead, half-alive state, a twilight state like the hanged man's in Ambrose Bierce's "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"?  Or maybe he's merely getting closer to death and everything is happening in his mind like we saw happened to the woman Mary in the horror film classic Carnival of Souls.  These were among my thoughts as I read, and to be honest, I don't think I've read such a sustained exercise in hallucinatory mysteriousness since reading Iain Banks' great book The Bridge.  Razor Blade has a mood and feeling similar to that Scottish masterpiece.  It is both visceral and intellectual, and you never get the sense that the author doesn't know where he's taking us.  He is the true master of this universe. He's got the chops and the confidence to pull off the prolonged mysteriousness, and he trusts the reader to go along for the ride.  

The Mind is a Razor Blade is not as reader friendly as Toxicity.  It makes you work harder.  Its payoff, ultimately, is bleaker.  But what comes across is a person writing what he wants to write, what he feels he must write come hell or high water.  And no matter how harsh things get in the world depicted, Booth never slips into despair. His narrator and the small band the narrator connects with have too much energy for that.  Friendship is always possible, even love.  A joke made in a difficult moment can work wonders.  The struggle here, at bottom, is existential: the question is how to survive in a world so degraded, and how to retain some humanity.  Fantastical as Booth's world is, it feels oddly enough like our own.  All that pain, suffering, and torture, all that madness...How to deal with it?  Through his narrator's actions, Booth ventures a tentative answer that seems to be akin to Italo Calvino's in Invisible Cities: "seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space." 

Pick up The Mind is a Razor Blade here.

Troubled Narrators, Troubled Times

What do these novels have in common?

Ernesto Sabato's The Tunnel
Albert Camus' The Stranger
James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice
Les Edgerton's The Rapist

They are all first person narratives told by men in prison for murder.  Each book has a distinctly existential tone to it, and in each case, the narrator is self-serving and unreliable.  Fascinating novels, each one, great examples of prison noir.

I wrote a piece about these books, focusing on Sabato's novel, for the Los Angeles Review of Books. You can read the piece in its entirety here:
TROUBLED NARRATORS, TROUBLED TIMES