MAFIYA By Charlie Stella

Pegasus Books, $25, 978-1933648651

In tems of tone, Stella’s previous novels have been mostly described as darkly humorous, bearing particular comparison to the works of Elmore Leonard. The exception to this was Stella’s dark second outing, Jimmy Bench Press, a novel which attempted to probe the inherent darkness in Stella’s world more deeply than his other works.

Like Leonard, Stella refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed and with his sixth novel, Mafiya, he abandons some of the lighter aspects from novels such as Cheapskates and Charlie Opera, doing so this time with a ferocity and complexity that not only takes the reader by surprise but also drags them willingly into the dark world Stella creates. Like, for example, Elmore Leonard’s novel, Killshot, the shift in tone from what the reader might expect is marked and surprisingly effective.

The banter with which Stella has made his name is not missing, but is pushed more into the background, creating a decidedly more sombre tone. Not that his ear for dialogue has gone – he’s still the best in the business – but he knows instinctively the kind of tone he’s shooting for and as such his characters are more introspective here, less prone to cracking wise than they were before. Not that the novel is entirely devoid of humour. His cast of prostitutes, Russian Mafioso and police detectives have a particularly grim sense of humour that serves as a release from the dark subject matter both for them and for us. And while his Russian dialogue at times threatens to teeter over into a kind of strange stereotyping (but thankfully stays the right side of believable, the comic relief never overtaking the character), it’s a testament that he makes these characters come so completely to life through their interaction and dialogue.

The plot itself is not for the squeamish, delving into the world of prostitution, snuff movies and various other nasty pieces of business. As ever Stella does not paint simple morality tales, but lets his characters tell their own tale without pushing his own agenda too hard.

In fact, it’s a testament to Stella’s artistry that he makes Agnes Lynn – an ex-hooker trying to turn her life around – into such a compelling and empathetic character. She’s not quite the “hooker with a heart of gold”, thank God, but she is intriguing and alluring. It’s not hard to see why her on-off lover is at once attracted and repelled by parts of her personality.

In fact, the novel does a very good job of making the darker aspects of Lynn’s life – specifically her involvement in the sex trade – less sensationalised than a lesser writer may have attempted. There is tragedy in her story, sure, but ultimately her motivations and her attitude to the world come from a very human place and are rarely melodramatically presented to the reader. She’s a grounded character, takes everything in her stride as best she can and this is what ultimately creates our empathy and connection with her. Her own “crimes” are simply very human mistakes, one which anyone could make given the right set of circumstances.

Agnes’s world is thrown into turmoil when one of her friends is used for a movie and then thrown into the ocean. The crime is graphic and disturbing, and yet Stella uses as much implication as he does explication, making the sequence more disturbing than out and out gruesome. Psychological rather than physical pain makes the scene ultimately unsettling to read and yet fully justified in light of the feelings it evokes.

Mafiya is a fast, dark and compelling novel from an author whose work, if there is any justice, will be being read years from now as one of the classic authors of modern crime fiction. It’s already been said that Stella deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the greats of the genre, but as he proves his versatility and ability with this, his sixth novel, such statements become superfluous: Stella may just be the best crime writer you have yet to discover. His novels are imbued with an essential humanity, and an understanding that sometimes the world just throws us a curveball and all we can do is try our best to survive.

Like Agnes Lynn.

Russel McLean for Crime Scene Scotland, 05/04/08

Buy Mafiya: A Novel of Crime from Amazon.co.uk

Found on the Internet, 05/04/08

In an attempt to keep more regular content, we're going to occasionally present crime fiction related videos and findings from the internet. Promotional material, interviews, whatever we can find.

All copyright for videos remains with the creators.

In this edition, we present:

An online chat with Steven Torres, author of the incredible noir tale, The Concrete Maze:



And promotional material for Allan Guthrie's brilliantly dark Savage Night (review forthcoming) which, it should be said, contains reference to unsettling violence right from the start:

THE CLEANER by Brett Battles

Preface Publishing, £6.99, ISBN 978-1848090071

Jonathan Quinn is a cleaner. The guy you never see. The guy who comes in, makes sure that you never know the truth. He’s not there when the action goes down. But he makes sure the action never happened. He’s cool. Confident. Always in control.

Until now.

Brett Battles’ debut novel is a superb example of thriller writing. And it surprises with a unique protagonist, something quite unusual in the genre. This isn’t the story of the master spy or the expert soldier, but the guy who cleans up after the work is done. The clandestine nature of Jonathan Quinn’s work makes for an instantly unusual premise even if you’re aware from the word go that this particular clean up is going to be anything but smooth.

But smooth is what Quinn likes. He’s a very buttoned up character. He’s procedure and method and control. As events spin inevitably into chaos, he is plucked up and out of his comfort zone, forced to make snap decisions and judgements. One suspects its precisely the kind of thrills his protégé signed on board for, but Quinn knows that thrills are short lived and that real danger is not something to be anticipated or savoured.

Quinn is a fascinating character in this way. Battles does an excellent job of keeping him all business and yet subtly revealing a more personal and human side to his character. More than a great deal of characters in the genre, Quinn feels flawed and human in a great many respects even if he tries to pretend that he isn’t.

Like Lee Child, Zoe Sharp and Simon Kernick, Brett Battles deals with fast prose, fast action and the kind of scenarios that wouldn’t feel out of place in the best action movies. His protagonist is morally dubious, but ultimately righteous, and his bad guys are truly bad. Of course, there are shades of grey thrown expertly into the mix, but while there is a depth to the characters here, the moral philosophising is kept to a minimum. Although Battles doesn’t shy away from the impact of violence, he rarely dwells on its nature or lingers too long on the long-term psychological impact. This is not a psycho-drama; it is pure action-adventure. A definite thriller. We are in no doubt as to who we are rooting for. And in the end, there’s a great satisfaction in seeing the good guys kick some ass.

Not that Battles makes things easy for his protagonists. There is, thank goodness, a genuine sense of danger here – one that escalates as the novel progresses. And although much of the plot becomes personal, Battles does his best to ensure it never becomes overly hokey or coincidental. A lot of this is down to solid character work and superior pacing. Very little here rings false and it’s a testament to Battles’ skill as a writer how fast the pages are turned.

As with, say, the Bond novels, much of the appeal of The Cleaner lies in its globe-trotting storyline. From the US to Vietnam to Belgium, Battles makes the most of his locations and gives the novel an epic sweep that feels incredibly filmic in its nature.

Indeed, it is clear that this is a novel based on the language of film. This is a blockbuster, no doubt about it. And it is to Battles’ credit that when the action does hot up, his smooth, clinically efficient prose is up to the challenge.

Is there a problem in that Quinn falls very neatly into the range of characters who come under the shadow of the mighty Jack Reacher juggernaut? Although Quinn is a separate and distinct creation, there is a feeling that comparisons may be made either fairly or unfairly. For this reader’s money, Quinn seems a more interesting character than Reacher, one who may perhaps have the potential to undergo a multi-book arc and perhaps adjust his attitude, perceptions and lifestyle as the series progresses rather than essentially resetting after every book. Also, Quinn feels more human than a character like Reacher ever could. By giving the man obvious flaws, making him more ordinary – just a guy doing his job – Battles grants Quinn a kind of empathy that more superheroic characters struggle with. He has the potential to be much more than a simple archetype.

The Cleaner is a brilliantly paced, expertly realised thriller. And Battles – with pitch-perfect prose and a real feel for the pulse-pounding, globe-trotting thriller – is an author who doesn’t simply show promise, but feels like he’s going to be around for a long time to come.

Russel McLean for Crime Scene Scotland, 05/04/08

Buy The Cleaner from Amazon.co.uk

NO MORE HEROES by Ray Banks

Polygon, February 2007, £9.99, ISBN 978-1846970139

It seems almost like a tradition that each year we write a near love letter to the work of Ray Banks. His Cal Innes series had an incredible start with Saturday's Child, and somehow expanded and improved upon itself with Donkey Punch and with the third installment, No More Heroes, Banks continues to prove his worth not simply as a crime author, but a novellist with something to say about the dark heart of modern Britain. So let's get the punchline out of the way: No More Heroes is likely to be among the best British Crime Novels of this year. In fact, scratch the likely. This is crime writing at its most powerful, the way we wish it could be all the time.

What marks this series out from many others is the willingness of the author to not only create a fairly selfish and asborbed lead character - despite his protestations to the contrary, Cal Innes isn't any kind of traditional hero - but to allow him to grow (and not neccasarily up) as a character. This doesn't mean he learns any lessons, conciously or otherwise, but rather that you feel he is not quite the same by the end of the novel as he was at the beginning and, even more surprisingly, he carries that into the next book of the series. Cal Innes makes mistakes, changes his mind, acts unreasonably, frequently does the wrong thing when the right thing is staring him in the face... this isn't the action of your typical British lead. Its not the action of your typical crime lead. Its the action of a character who's had the strait-jacket of dramatic convention removed. Oh, this isn't your granny's crime fiction.

Cal Innes's scars are not simply physical - although he could take the prize for most abused character in crime fiction history, making even Ken Bruen's creation Jack Taylor seem like a man whose life is all happiness and sunshine - but also mentally. He reacts to bad situations by building up his psychological armour, by subscribing further to his own deluded fantasies about his own self. He rebuilds and recreates himself. He lies. And worse, believes these lies himself.

His addiction to prescription medication should take the blame for much of this, but that's only one facet of Cal's self-harming policy. He seems to throw himself deeper and deeper into bad situations, mixing with bad people because he then has an excuse for thinking, I'm better than this. Working for a slum landlord is a step down from his ofty ambitions to be a PI at the beginning of Saturday's Child, but its easier for Cal to cope with, making someone else's fuck-ups rather than his own. The fact that he doesn't even like his employer - sleazy dodgy-dealer, Mr Plummer - is only one more symptom of Cal's search for a hard-luck story. He deliberately seeks out the bad work, the dodgy work, the down-at-heel life because then he doesn't have to blame himself. He can maintain his personal fantasies about being a good guy in a bad situation.

But Banks throws Cal a real curveball here, turning him into an accidental hero when he saves a bunch of students - and Cal can't even stand the bastards - from a house fire. He briefly becomes something of a local celebrity, even starts up his PI business again, albeit due to his running off at the mouth when interviewed by the local paper rather than through any real sense of ambition. But he doesn't become a hero. Oh no, that would be pat and simple. And Banks doesn't like to offer such neat turn arounds or developments. To do so would be a betrayal of everything that has made this series - even in such a short time - one of the most complex and intriguing sequences of novels that modern British crime writing has had to offer.

Instead he offers hard questions about choice and responsibility, a running theme through his work. Cal's new status brings with it a responsibility that he simply can't face up to. Its a responsibility other characters - very specifically Paulo, who runs the local lad's club - seem to recognise and encourage Cal to embrace, but its clear he doesn't fully understand the opportunity that's been thrown his way. He's still - as in Saturday's Child - confusing a kind of play-acting (as a PI, as a local hero) with real responsibility and accountability. He can say all the right words when he wants, but its rare that he has the follow through and you soon realise this is because he doesn't want to face the truth of his situation.

Banks's work - like the best kind of crime novels - is focussed very strongly on character. But more than most, these characters feel very real and conflicted. Many writers use weaknesses in their characters to highlight strengths, or to simply provide a degree of dramatic tension where Banks uses character as far more than plot device, allowing his cast to create an absolute illusion of reality and the sense that - quite literally - anything could happen to them.

And it helps that he uses them to disguise his themes rather than bring them directly to the surface. Part of the novel deals explicitly with right wing movements, but does so without ever once feeling like an "issue led" plot line. While Cal feels disgust at the attitude of certain characters - particularly the appallingly middle class woman who asks him to sign her petition in the supermarket - it is more an extension of the character than a substitute for the author. Banks is an expert at subtext, allowing his concerns to bubble gently beneath the surface so that when you start discussing character and action in the novel you suddenly realise that - without ever intending to - you're talking about far larger issues.

Indeed, there are few writers who truly capture modern, urban Britain with the authenticity and sobriety of Ray Banks. Nothing about the setting feels hysterical or reactionary. More, it feels solid and recognisable; a portrait of the UK as seen from the street level. The move away from this setting in Donkey Punch only highlights the grim nature of urban life in Britain as seen here, and the contrast between the near dreamlike City of Angels seen during Cal's excursion and the gritty, shitty concrete world in which he finds himself working for a slum landlord is startling and affecting.

This is a crime novel grounded in the real world. We've praised Banks before for shying away from serial killers and grand schemes and No More Heroes continues this tradition of showing us a world that feels concretely real. The far right "villains" aren't scheming, manipulative geniuses so much as they are fools who try to justify their anger against others. The coppers aren't out trying to solve that one big crime so much as they are part of the background, probably taken up more with paperwork than law and order. Drug dealers aren't neccasarily evil so much as businessmen, and thugs aren't always evil as much as daft - perhaps even coming close to "lovable" (or as close as one can in a Banks novel) with the brilliant supporting character of Daft Frank, who complements Innes perfectly in their work together for Plummer. The fact is that Banks, rather than writing a crime novel, is actually chronicling the street level society of modern Britain with a brutal honesty that sets up questions about the world without ever offering pat answers.

There are no moral absolutes. There are merely people, their hopes, fears and delusions.

This is noir.

This is No More More Heroes.

Russel D McLean for crimescenescotland, 6/03/08

BURIAL GROUND by John Rickards

Penguin Books, £7.99, ISBN 978-0141021171

With each installment of his series featuring ex-FBI agent Alex Rourke, John Rickards seems to be attempting a different feel while keeping the same characters in believable circumstances. 2005's The Touch of Ghosts was a well written PI story with a personal angle and a couple of intriguing scenes - specifically the single gunshot and the possibility of Rourke being able to say goodbye to someone he loved - that marked it out from the crowd. 2007's The Darkness Inside slipped gears to become a Cobenesque thriller of a man caught up in increasingly insane circumstances that seem wildly beyond his control and in his latest novel, Burial Ground, Rickards plays with the "survival horror" genre that has often been used in movies and video games, but rarely in novels.

There are noteable exceptions, of course. David Morrell attempted to put a group of character in an isolated situation with his highly succesful Creepers and Scavengers, but even if these books went over well with readers, this reviewer was left somewhat cold by characters who seemed to service the plot more often than they engaged as people, and specifically in Scavengers there was a sense that the author knew a great deal about the genre and the subject matter but didn't particularly have the kind of heartfelt enthusiasm that convinces a reader to believe in a novel.

The setup here is intriguing: Rourke recieves a note asking him to find "the crosses" or more people will die. It sounds like the kind of mad quest a James Patterson serial killer might construct, and Rourke isn't so dumb as to ignore the possibility of a madman behind the note, so sets off to find the person who wrote the note in an isolated midwestern community. Trapped in a bar with a group of disparate individuals, a storm blowing the roads to hell and preventing any contact with the outside world, Rourke soon realises there may be a killer in their midst. The question is who? And are they the same person who wrote the note?

In this kind of story - where a group of people are isolated from the rest of the world in a dangerous situation - character should be vitally important. The stakes should be high and personal. Video games get away with using the player as a central character, creating a false sense of idetification. Movies use THX and impressive light shows to distract from concerns and pull in the viewer. Novels must use the psychological nature of these situations to their advantage.

Its a trick that, for the most part, Rickards manages well. Alex Rourke has been previously established as a man of convictions and morality who sometimes walks in shadows. We can identify with his good intentions and the ways in which he sometimes strays from these. At the start of this novel, we have some indication that he is troubled by some of his past choices, particularly those he made in The Darkness Inside. These come mostly from strange momentary hallucinations where he seems to envision himself in a world rotted from the inside out, trying desperately to save an innocent girl from some threat he cannot comprehend. The doctors - and the readers - know exactly what symbolism to take from this and its a pity that Rickards swiftly seems to forget this aspect of ourke's psychology at the novels midway point where no real resolution is reached.

Luckily, while this intriguing aspect of the character is swiftly dropped it does nothing to diminish the rapport we have built with him across the course of the novel and by the time we realise that these "hallucinations" or dreams, whatever they are, have become non-existent we are invested in Rourke's fate as well as those trapped with him.

Rickards is a relatively young novelist (in fact not much older than your reviewer), and as such provides a degree of easy pop-culture cool that drop convincingly into the narrative. Given the nature of the story, there are horror references a plenty including an appearance from the bridge out of the Evil Dead movies, while Rourke's visions are clearly a reference to the survival horror video game series, Silent Hill. The MacBride clan (named for fellow crime writer, Stuart MacBride, a joke that is wisely not overplayed) seem to reference any number of backwoods horror movies, and made this particular reviewer think specifically of the Jack Ketchum novel, Off Season. Although for every cliche he throws in, Rickards is smart enough to throw an extra curve ball that is especially surprising and welcome with the MacBride subplot.

Burial Ground is a smart thriller with some surprising elements thrown into the mix. At times, Rickards seems to let go of ideas just when they become intriguing, but he succeeds in crafting a page-turner of a book with a protagonist just the right side of moral and a cast of supporting characters who can surprise the reader as much as they do Alex Rourke. It whips along at a snappy pace, and the sense of isolation is effectively unnerving. Rickards is a writer with some serious chops, who adapts and grows with each book. And as to the blurb on the back about this being an update of Christie's And Then There Were None? No. Its much, much better than that.

Russel McLean for crimescenescotland, 05/03/08

Get Burial Ground at Amazon.co.uk

THE FEVER KILL By Tom Picirilli

Creeping Hemlock Press, 2007, 978-0976921745, $16.95,

Hands up, straight out of the box, let me admit I have more than a soft spot for Piccirilli’s work. In 2006, I first read Headstone City which was not only a perfectly formed chiller, but also an excellent story about organised crime. I went back to read A Choir of Ill Children, which is one of the most insane horror novels – and its real horror, horrors of the mind rather than simple ghoulish grotesquery (although there is plenty of grotesquery, albeit much of it oddly beautiful and touching compared to the terrors of the everyday; something that only Southern gothic seems to able to achieve).

The Fever Kill is probably the first “straight” crime novel from Piccirilli, a tale of an undercover cop who’s finally snapped. A man who must face up not only to the mistakes he’s made on the job, but the mistakes he’s made his whole life. And the mistakes his own father may have made.

It’s a doom laden tale, with a galloping sense of the inevitable; from the moment we meet Crease, we know that his tale can’t end well. He’s a man who’s seen and done things that would have killed anyone else long ago. And maybe that would have been a mercy.

In the best noir tradition, The Fever Kill has a nightmare intensity. Emotions are ramped, and guilt seeps through the soul of every character we encounter. Of course, it is Crease’s guilt that pervades the novel most, and is finally personified in the undeniably creepy form of Teddy. This is a theme that runs through Piccirilli’s work – the idea of the man haunted by something from his past that is personified either on some higher plane or in his own mind. In many of his other books we are uncertain whether these hauntings are real or not; in The Fever Kill, we can be fairly certain that is a purely sign of Crease’s gradual unravelling. This guilt is, of course, natural to noir, as is the eventual confrontation with both its root cause and its effects. It is in these confrontations – often bloody and terrifying – that The Fever Kill truly grabs the reader by the throat.

But what the novel covers most effectively – and perhaps unexpectedly – is the relationship between father and son; what we hope to pass on to our offspring versus what we really give them.

Crease’s own father seems a natural jumping on point for Piccirilli’s exploration of this relationship. After all this was a seemingly good man who was eventually implicated not only in corruption but in the death of a young girl. Did he kill her? Did he take the money intended for her ransom? Is it the guilt over this that eventually leads to his blood and vomit soaked death on a street of the town of Hangtree?

But it is not the father who carries this guilt throughout the years so much as it is Crease himself who does so on the old man’s behalf. This guilt for his father’s actions explains Crease’s need to leave his old town and try to establish another kind of identity far away; the kind of identity that brings him back full circle to face the truth about his father, and about himself.

Crease’s relationship with his own son – a bullying eight year old with a bubbling anger he could only have inherited from his father - mirrors something of this. Crease wants to pass only the best of humanity on to his son, but with his own guilt and the very nature of the life he leads (that of an undercover agent in an organised crime family) as well as the raging fever that burns inside him, it seems he’s doomed to failure. In this relationship – one conducted long distance, awkwardly and painfully – we truly understand the messed up nature of Crease’s existence.

In his introduction, Ken Bruen claims that Piccirilli can jump genres on the spin of a dime, writing like he’s been doing this kind of thing all his life. And he has, in one sense or another, been working towards this kind of tale. A pulp paperback for the modern world. A noir novel with bite, imbued with the raging fever of the title. It’s not just a simple tale of revenge, although you can read it that way if you want. Piccirilli is an author with style and smarts to spare, and he’s jumped easily from being one of this reviewer’s favourite horror writers to one of his favourite noir writers.

The Fever Kill is one hell of punch to the gut. A smart, literate and terrifying noir nightmare, it confirms Piccirilli as among one of the best modern genre writers; an author who takes chances with his theme, character and style to deliver intriguingly complex and thrilling novels that can be read on multiple levels.

Russel D McLean for crimescenescotland.com, 17/12/2007

Buy The Fever Kill from Amazon.com

Buy The Fever Kill from Amazon.co.uk

THE BLONDE By Duane Swierczynski (featuring the original novella, REDHEAD)

St Martin's Press, ISBN 978-0312374594, $13.95

Who is Duane Swierczynski? In a relatively short space of time he’s hopped from subgenre to subgenre, barely breaking a sweat. His debut, Secret Dead Men blurred several genre lines. His second novel, The Wheelman had a pace and style that recalled Richard Stark at his finest.

And, now, with The Blonde, Swierczynski changes tack again, giving us a techno-thriller with the bite and pacing of an honest-to-God action movie. It has the thrill and speed of Wheel Man with the genre-bending aspects of Secret Dead Men.

And it doesn’t waste time with pre-amble.

The opening scene of The Blonde sets the tone perfectly, with our hero being told by the attractive lady opposite that his drink has been poisoned. That if he wants the cure, he needs to do what his new companion says.

Of course he doesn’t believe her.

But soon enough he finds she wasn’t lying. And the poison isn’t the worst thing about his new friend…

Without giving too much away, there’s a near SF aspect to The Blonde that, upon reflection, seems almost ridiculous, but which is handled so skilfully you simply accept it as part of the world that Swierczynski creates. A lot of this is down to the pacing of the novel. The Blonde starts in high gear and just keeps going. The technobabble required to set up the MacgGuffin of the story is brief, convincingly straightforward and treated with respect. A lot of writers would spend time apologising or over-explaining the more apparently insane aspects of the story, but Swierczynski lays them out, says, just accept it.

And we do. Even the unlikely use of the word, “fook” that only Ken Bruen seems to ever be able to employ in prose without seeming foolish. In fact, if there are any niggles I had reading The Blonde, it was probably the Irish connection that seems a little superfluous, but doesn’t dampen the pace and mood.

There’s a joy to The Blonde that spills straight off the page. The reason we go so willingly with Swierczynski in his novels is because he’s having a ball with his stories, and this transfers directly to the reader. The best thriller writers don’t need complex plots or end-of-the-world stakes (even if The Blonde does have some extremely high stakes involved) to pull in the reader. They need pacing. Energy. They need the kind of crackling energy that can’t be faked.

The Blonde is a damned entertaining novel, reads at a hell of a speed and refuses to take itself too seriously, delighting in the kind of gloriously over the top action that leaves the reader grinning like a lunatic. And among all that, there’s an unexpected tenderness to some of the characters and their relationships that adds an extra dimension to this fast-paced thriller. Kowalski – a hitman with a past, and a served head in a gym-bag – is noteable for surprising the reader with extra dimensions and wrinkles to his character that a writer more concerned with theatrics may have ignored.

But what makes this paperback edition special is the addition of an original short story, Redhead, which will only make sense (as the author urges in his introduction to the new story) if you’ve read The Blonde.

Redhead picks up threads left hanging in the original novel and runs with them, creating its own kind of frenzied energy and serving as a satisfying and often witty coda to the action in the original novel. To be honest, it’s easy to move onto this final story with skipping a beat. Insert your own fade out and fade in, and you have an extended epilogue that adds something to the original story, but takes nothing away.

You don’t have to read Readhead to get full satisfaction from The Blonde, but it’s a helluva story and adds a more satisfying kick to the package in the paperback edition, along with the kind of joy that’s more often associated with DVD extras to enhance film.

So my advice to you is that you spend time with the kickass Blonde and her righteous Redhead sister. These two girls, they’re gonna slay you…

Russel McLean for crimescenescotland, 11/12/07

Lady's Night

Featuring

SECOND SHOT By Zoe Sharp
Allison & Busby, £10.99, ISBN 978-0749080167

HELL OF A WOMAN Edited by Megan Abbot
Busted Flush Press, $18, ISBN 978-0976715733

DEADLY BELOVED By Max Allan Collins
Hard Case Crime, $6.99, ISBN 978-0843957785

Charlie Fox, the protagonist of Zoe Sharp’s popular series, is what a Scottish mother might call a “tough cookie”. But even this kick-ass heroine’s mortality may be in doubt as Sharp’s latest novel opens, finding Charlie shot and bleeding out in the bleak wilderness.

It’s a dramatic start for a series, and makes an immediate impact, even for a reader who’s never read this particular series before.

Like Lee Child, Barry Eisler and Brett Battles, Sharp is shooting for fast-paced heroics in her books. Her protagonist is tough and capable, but in contrast to Reacher or Rains, she seems believably vulnerable. Perhaps because her profession is more accessible than those of her male counterparts. Charlie Fox is a working bodyguard, and this status adds a touch of realism to her character that helps cement her world. She has to balance a real life with her more outlandish exploits, unlike the other characters whose status is often closer to archetypal than fully rounded individual.

The contrast Sharp draws between keeping Charlie professional and maintaining her humanity is evident in the tortured relationship she has with her boss. It is a small cliché, the romantic relationship with the boss, but is used here to illuminate Fox’s character and add some much needed tension to her professional outlook. Toeing the line between caring for someone and keeping them in line is tough, and Sharp piles the pressure perfectly, especially in one confrontational scene where Charlie is having doubts about accepting her latest assignment.

That’s not to say that Charlie is a hand-wringing heroine by any means. Unlike the more “chick lit” protagonists of certain current crime series, she is believably female without resorting to typically “girly” clichés. Her bloody-mindedness and dedication to her own professionalism are intense enough to both intrigue and unnerve the reader. Push this girl the wrong way, and you could end up in hospital or worse.

But a character like Charlie needs a plot to use her full potential. And Sharp provides a nicely twisting narrative that manages to use both the personal – there’s a great “family” theme running through the novel, especially the relationship between fathers and daughters – and the visceral to excellent effect.

Second Shot is, simply, a brilliantly executed (if you’ll pardon the pun) action thriller. More than that, its great to see a female protagonist who can kick ass equal to – if maybe better than – her male counterparts.

Charlie Fox, of course, also makes an brief (blink and you’ll miss her in the excellent Served Cold) appearance in Megan Abbot’s brilliant anthology, A Hell of a Woman (Busted Flush Press). This tightly themed collection of stories sets out to prove that female characters are more than the stereotypes they often get lumbered with in crime fiction.

While Val McDermid’s introduction focuses primarily on Chandler’s misconceptions of female characters and forgets to add that even today certain characters cheapen their characters – even those who serve as protagonists – to one-note chick-lit archetypes (equally as dull as the scheming femme-fatale) she sets the tone of the anthology nicely. These stories serve to show many facets of the female protagonist in crime fiction. From the ass kicking Charlie, to the less obviously proactive lead of Sara Gran’s brilliant The Token Booth Clerk, the anthology presents the reader with a variety of female characters who serve as the driving force behind the fiction.

Even those stories narrated from the male point of view (Ken Bruen’s Nora B springs instantly to mind) show the effect of women on those around them, and make even absent characters seem strong and… real.

The problem with many anthologies is that certain stories feel like they’re coasting. Usually, these stories come from the biggest names in the anthology. But here, everyone’s on form from the names you know down to the names you don’t. They’re all on board and running with the idea of femininity as a concept, an actuality, a myth… something to embrace and something to be terrified of. In fact, what makes this anthology stand out is the fact that the crime elements of the stories are incidental to the theme. This is a showcase of what crime fiction can do when it becomes about more than “solving mysteries” or “restoring order”. More often than not these stories are more about social commentary (Libby Fischer Hellman’s High Yellow) or psychology (Charlie Huston’ s Interrogation B) or what it means to be a woman in a desperate world (Lisa Resper France’s School Girl) than they are merely about “the crime”. But they use the trappings of crime fiction to push forward strong stories that support the basic themes.

Abott herself is a name I’ve been hearing about for a long time. On the strength of her assembling this anthology, it looks like I’m going to finally have to cave and pick up one of her own books. And based on the strength of stories here, I’ve got a whole new lot of authors I want to investigate further.

No question, this is one of the strongest anthologies I’ve read in a long time. In fact, the first I’ve digested in one sitting. But with the incredible array of writers and the sheer variety of stories involved, I can heartily recommend picking up A Hell of a Woman.

I’ve already mentioned the idea of men writing about female characters, which brings us neatly to Hard Case Crime’s newest release, Deadly Beloved, by Max Allan Collins. Collins, who seems to write at least ten books a year, is the kind of pulp writer you thought had disspeared decades earlier. He can turn his hand from original novels (the Nate Heller series) to tie-ins (he has written CSI tie-ins and Bones novels) to polishing off the final manuscripts by respected masters of pulp fiction (he was the one who guided Mickey Spillane’s final novel, Dead Street, to completion following the author’s death last year).

Deadly Beloved is based on Collins’ comic-book series, Ms Tree, which concerns itself with a female private eye. Once secretary to a respected investigator, she takes the business on when he is killed. She’s a tough, no nonsense kind of lady, who isn’t afraid to flaunt a gun or her own sexuality.

Collins himself admits in the afterword that Ms Tree is based very firmly in the old four colour comics tradition. Like Dick Tracy, but it’s the girl kicking ass. This is the kind of thing Collins does very well indeed.

Tree is missing the depth of emotion that runs through many of the shorts in Hell of A Woman and the natural empathy of Sharp’s Charlie Fox, but within the confines of her no-nonsense, high octane world she becomes compelling. Like the Tracy strips that were a direct influence on the novel, things seem a little tidy and perhaps even unbelievable, but there’s an energy to Collins’s writing and a love for the character and world he has created that shines through.

As with the Nate Heller series, and Collins recent polishing of one of Mickey Spillane’s final books, he seems extremely comfortable – as a writer – in a truly pulp world. For all the modernity of its attitude towards a female protagonist, Deadly Beloved remains cheerfully old fashioned in its ass-kicking approach to crime solving, its choice of antagonist and even in the way the story itself is structured. Take out the modern aspects of Tree’s investigations, and we could be back in the good old days of pulp. Collins puts forward the idea in his afterward that Ms Tree came out of the idea of spitballing around the concept that Mike Hammer’s devoted secretary might have taken on the agency following his death.

You think it’s a coincidence that her late, lamented shamus husband was called Michael?

So, yeah, Deadly Beloved is unashamed, ass-kicking, old fashioned fun. And as for Ms Tree herself, well, she’s something of a fantasy in many ways. But that doesn’t change the fact she’s one hell of a dame in her own right…

Russel D McLean for Crime Scene Scotland, 12 November 2007

Buy SECOND SHOT (Charlie Fox Series) from Amazon.co.uk
Buy Second Shot: A Charlie Fox Thriller (Charlie Fox Mysteries) from Amazon.com

Buy A Hell of a Woman: An Anthology of Female Noir from amazon.co.uk
Buy A Hell of a Woman: An Anthology of Female Noir from amazon.com

Buy Deadly Beloved (Hard Case Crime) from amazon.co.uk
Buy Deadly Beloved (Hard Case Crime) from amazon.com

OLD SCHOOLS OF HARD KNOCKS

THE BLUE CHEER By Ed Lynskey

Point Blank Press, 2007, ISBN: 9780809556670, $12.95

DEAD STREET By Mickey Spillane

Hard Case Crime, Oct. 30 2007, ISBN 0843957778

And

DAMN NEAR DEAD Edited by Duane Swierczynski

Busted Flush Press, 2006, ISBN 0976715759, $18

Lynskey’s second novel featuring PI Frank Johnson starts with a quite literal bang as the investigators quiet country home is attacked by a stinger rocket. Frank may be looking for the good life, but it seems that the bad just follows him around.

And from bad it gets worse. The rocket is only the start of Frank’s troubles, and soon he finds himself caught up in the affairs of a local hate group known as the Blue Cheer. A group that may have a stronger local support than Frank could begin to guess at.

There’s something endearing about Johnson that we’ve mentioned before; how he seems a kind of strange anachronism at times: an old school PI – replete with a hardass dry-wit and a distinctly Chandleresque dialect – who’s been thrown into the modern world quite unwillingly. Although Lynskey has calmed this down somewhat since The Dirt Brown Derby, that old school charm hangs around the narrative, keeping Frank a compelling character and adding a kind of odd interest that .

Its an approach that works, and decidedly more than it did in Lynskey’s first novel. Part of this seems to be the more active role that Johnson has in this tale. He’s not just a PI for hire, he’s taking his case personally. He’s more willing to push himself for not only the common good, but that of the people around him. His relationships with the townfolks and his closest neighbour (whose past is more than a little murky) make Johnson more than just another hardboiled PI, adding a more human dimension beyond the tough clichés. Lynskey is bringing the old-school hardboiled books bang up to date in an exciting, compelling fashion, and more than that is continuing to evolve as a writer with each new book.

So its interesting to move from a writer homaging pulp influences at the start of his career, comparatively speaking, to a writer whose final crime novel (if not necessarily his last novel overall) has recently been released by Hard Case Crime, a brand whose very existence is predicated on the appeal of the old pulp novel lines.

If you want the real deal old-school hardboiled, you don’t need to look much further than Mickey Spillane. Love his works or loathe them – and he always provokes a reaction, even now – Spillane followed his own particular code when it came to walking those mean streets.

His characters were often tougher than Chandler’s or even Hammet’s, unapologetically violent and hard-headed in their attitudes. They were imperfect people, populating streets where the shadows often provided the most light. In his final crime novel, Dead Street, Spillane takes his mean streets and makes them even darker with the spin of old age. In this novel, the protagonists are battling their age as much as each other.

It shows most in the way the tale is spun. As with Lynskey’s novel, Spillane works in a recognisable modern setting but uses an old fashioned hard boiled voice to breathe life into it. There is talk of terrorism, nuclear weaponry and even the occasional cellphone, but the characters seem ill at ease to use these terms. Put it down to their age. These are the old ass kicking heroes who refused to lay down and die. Who are still walking the streets, even if the streets have changed over the years, become alien to the men who knew them so well. Unlike Lynskey, this is not an homage to the golden age of pulp, so much as a product. Spillane knows his voice, knows his audience, and his voice rings through with a period authenticity that both alienates his character from the modern world and cements his place in it.

It’s a fantastically hardboiled premise that Spillane employs – an old cop finds out the woman he loved is still alive. A woman he thought dead for decades, who once seemed his only reason to find joy in the world. And for all the life that her re-appearance brings back to him (even if she no longer remembers him, even if she’s become someone else) it draws him closer to the end of his own as well. Spillane doesn’t write about anything so simple as love here. It becomes about rebirth, about rediscovery. This old washed out cop rediscovers his younger self. As the book goes on, the prose becomes more obliquely pulp.

Your enjoyment probably varies depending on your opinion of Spillane and his particular approach. If you like his work, you’ll get a kick out of Dead Street. If you never got it, you won’t be converted. But it’s a read that does exactly what it sets out to do, and that’s Spillane’s signature. Its probably worth noting that the manuscript was prepared for release by Max Allan Collins, a productive crime writer who owes Spillane a massive debt of influence for his own series, and who manages to sensitively insert his work into the manuscript so that most people should have a hard time knowing where the editing work was done. Just the way it should be.

Ultimately, Spillane’s final novel is a twisting tale told with his typically snarling attitude. Like its character, it feels a little awkward in the modern world, but that only adds to its charm, making it a nod back to those days and a tip of the hat forward to a new way of writing the old pulps.

It’s the idea of an old man in a new world that formed the central theme of Duane Swierczynski’s anthology, Damn Near Dead, a book I’ve been dipping in and out of (the way you do with the best anthologies) since its release last year, but now seems the ideal time to mention it, tying in as it does with the old and new guard theme of this multi-book review.

“Geezer Noir” is the term coined, and it seems that Swierczynski managed to pip Spillane to the post in this regard. The novel deals with hardboiled characters – thugs, killers and criminals – in their silver years. In worlds that have changed and become alien to them. Like the protagonist of Dead Street, they still have this need to behave like they’re young, to maintain their own power and anger.

There is a breadth of style and content here, and its fascinating to observe the ways in which writers of various ages (the youngest author here, Dave White, is 28 while the oldest, John Harvey is… well, he has a few years on Dave White at least) approach the subject of growing old in a hardboiled world. There’s regret, recrimination and, in Simon Kernick’s snappy and clever Funeral for a Friend even a kind of rebirth. There’s deathly serious approaches to the subject, and there’s the more… unusual stylistic flourishes (Stuart MacBride gets to have some fun with Daphne McAndrews and the Smackhead Junkies, even daring to fly in the hardboiled face of the anthology and throw in a cookie recipe), which serve to highlight the many facets of the talent Swierczynski has assembled. From big names like Mark Billingham and John Harvey to up and comers like Dave White, Sarah Weinman and Ray Banks. Some of the authors have only published short stories. Some have huge backlists. Others are only now debuting. But all of them bring a unique voice to the twilight world of geezer noir making Damn Near Dead a fine introduction to a crew of writers who represent the old and new guard and whose insights into old age present it as anything but the expected dotage society might expect.

Russel McLean for Crime Scene Scotland, 15/09/07

BuyThe Blue Cheer from Amazon.com
Buy The Blue Cheer from Amazon.co.uk
Buy Dead Street (Hard Case Crime) from Amazon.co.uk
Buy Dead Street (Hard Case Crime)
Buy Damn Near Dead: An Anthology of Geezer Noir from Amazon.com
Buy Damn Near Dead: An Anthology of Geezer Noir from Amazon.co.uk

WHO IS CONRAD HIRST? by Kevin Wignall

Simon and Schuster US, November 2007, ISBN 9781416540724

It’s a pity Wignall isn’t better known in the UK. His third novel, Among the Dead was an economical, highly effective psychological thriller concerning three friends who accidentally kill a girl at university and end up paying the price years later. While we haven’t his read his other novels at Crime Scene Scotland, his latest, Who Is Conrad Hirst?, confirms that this wasn’t just a fluke.

Comparisons to the Bourne series are inevitable in this tale of a hitman who discovers that nothing he knows is necessarily true, but Hirst is less about oblique, barnstorming action, concerning itself more with the psychological journey that shakes its protagonist’s world. The espionage backdrop is convincingly rendered, as Hirst discovers that his crime-lord masters may be more influential than he ever realised. The massive info-dump that often plagues such novels (including – and especially in – the Bourne books) is neatly sidestepped in a story that gives us all the information we need without delving into dull and complex expository sequences. We, as an audience, are treated as being intelligent enough to figure just how much of Hirst’s story is true and how much he really isn’t telling us.

Wignall’s prose is clear and crisp, the third person narrative keeping us distant enough from the character to keep his mystery, but close enough to empathise with him as he sets out to leave the life that has defined him for so long. All it takes is one specific hit to make Hirst desperate to leave this life that he fell into following a period in a war zone. And the reason that hit affects him so much always seems just within reach, but only becomes clear as Wignall effectively blindsides the reader with an affectingly human moment. Enough to bring a small shudder of emotion even to this jaded reviewer. To say much more would be to ruin a brilliantly designed and executed moment, but when it comes, you can’t miss it.

It’s this human dimension that makes the novel work so well. Like all the best hitmen, Hirst is distanced from his targets, but there’s a gradual thawing of his character that makes him seem utterly human. He never becomes mushy, but the slow revelation of the humanity that exists side by side with his professional existence creates an impressively empathetic protagonist.

Unusually for an espionage piece, there is little in the way of explosive set pieces, but the novel uses its backdrop as a way of further exploring its character and psychological dynamics, which become more intriguing than a variety of explosions and deaths. Thankfully, though, when Hirst is “on the job” he is utterly believable. There is a cold clinical aspect to the way he goes about his work. The only way out of the life of a professional killer, after all, is for Hirst to kill those people who have direct contact with him. These set pieces – including the one that opens the novel – are compelling and convincing: up-close, personal and chilling. Exactly as they should be.

Who Killed Conrad Hirst? is a sharp, compelling novel about identity, guilt and loss. It deals with its themes in an intensely human fashion, with a central mystery that neatly encapsulates its protagonist. Hirst is as much of a mystery to himself as he is to us, and the slow unravelling of the web of lies that surrounds him – perpetuated, it seems, not only by his employers, but by himself – provide a personal kind of intrigue that goes right for the heart. It’s a perfect antidote to the world-at-stake, Bondian image of the spy/mercenary that pop culture often uses for shorthand.

An unexpected and excellent novel from an author who deserves more recognition not just within the genre, but outside of it as well.

Russel McLean for Crime Scene Scotland 15/09/07

Buy Who Is Conrad Hirst? from Amazon.co.uk

Buy Who is Conrad Hirst?: A Novel from Amazon.com