We’ve been raving about Matthew McBride and his book Frank Sinatra In A Blender since December. We can’t wait to introduce him to you all in person at our Noir Night on April 5th. To hold us over, here is his short story, Have Chainsaw, Will Travel, published in Plots With Guns that has a few things in common with his debut novel.
This week three of my favorite books from 2012 are out in affordable paperback editions. They range from humorous mystery to hard core crime novel, showcasing the talents of authors that deserve to be discovered. So now that the financial risk is out of the equation, get hooked on one of these writers.
A Quiet Vendetta by RJ Ellory
If you like historical, mob, or thriller novels this book will please you. When the daughter of the Louisiana governor goes missing, a mysterious elderly man, Ernesto Perez, walks into the police station saying he’ll explain everything if he talks to Ray Hartman, a federal prosecutor in Washington with seemingly no connection to him. Perez then tells his life story which weaves through sixty years of Mafia history as Ray and others try to put the pieces together. This is a smart, sweeping book that only reveals its hand in the final paragraph.
Death Makes the Cut by Janice Hamrick
The second book in the Jocelyn Shore series centers around a murder in the workplace, when the tennis coach is murdered at her high school. A very funny “light” mystery that has a more of an edge than you might expect, with a sharp look at high school politics and human behavior. It also gives you a great tour of Austin, Texas.
Last Call for the Living by Peter Farris
Quite possibly my favorite debut from last year. This story of an Aryan Brotherhood bank robber and the odd bond he develops with the teller he takes hostage has some great action sequences that hold there own with Joe Lansdale and Frank Bill, a wonderful rural noir vibe, and characters you learn to feel for on their own terms. Farris does the best thing an author can do with his first book, have us eagerly awaiting his second.
Freaky Deaky by Elmore Leonard
Post by Scott Montgomery
About ten years ago, when I told Elmore Leonard Freaky Deaky was my favorite book of his, he said “mine too”. It probably contains every thing he’s known for. While very funny, it isn’t defined by it’s quirkiness the way many of his post Get Shorty books are. What he does so deftly is weave a subtle satire on the battle between the 60s and the 80s, within a suspenseful crime novel.
The book begins with one of the best first chapters I have ever read. It could be lifted from the book and be a sharp short story all its own. Chris Mankowski, a cop with one day left on the bomb squad, responds to the call from a Detroit drug dealer. An explosive device has been rigged to the chair he’s sitting in. If he gets up, he blows up. Mankowski steps outside to talk with another cop, and Leonard deals with character exposition tied completely to the situation, literally with a ticking bomb in the background. Not only do we learn that Mankowski is transferring to Sex Crimes, we also realize through his actions that while a descent guy, he’s not necessarily a hero. The chapter concludes with a great twist that can only work in prose form.
We then go to our main “bad guys”, Skip and Robin; two former revolutionaries who have gone underground after bombing a federal buiding. Skip has been working as an explosives expert in film, while Robin writes historical romances under a pen name “with lots of rape and adverbs.” Robin believes they were turned in by Woody Ricks, a rich former collegue who now produces musicals. The two hatch a plan to extort money out of Woody with Skip’s explosive skills.
On Mankowski’s first day at Sex Crimes he takes the complaint of a young actress, Greta Wyatt. She’s had an aggressive casting couch situation. Her attacker, Woody Ricks.
Mankowski’s investigation leads him into Robin and Skips plot, as well as the scheming of Donell Lewis, a fomer Black Panther who now works as Woody’s assistant and bodygaurd. The characters circle one another and switch alliances. In typical Elmore Leonard fashion, we get stand offs that result in negotiation as often as gunfire (or in this case, explosions).
Every major character except Greta, who has to be told who Bobby Seals is, are 60s survivors negotiating the 80s. Mankowski, a Vietnam vet, deals with his past in the Leonard definition of cool (“existing only in the moment”). The only time he mentions it he simply says he served, went to a few protests, then became a cop. Ordell has become jaded and is now out to get his from Woody, who is lost in his decade’s indulgences. Robyn still sees a cause, but uses it as a rationalization for her narcassistic plan. Skip simply looks at that decade as a great excuse to have a lot of sex, do a lot of drugs, and blow shit up. In an odd way his attitude makes him the most likable, albeit the most unstable, character in the book.
Freaky Deaky is Elmore Leonard’s masterpiece. While it has a lot to say, it is said through the characters instead of the author. When talking with the great novelist James Crumley about Leonard, he said, “Dutch is a master of the understatement.”
Freaky Deaky is a great example of that.
Ava Gardner and Lily Moore
By Hilary Davidson
“Hard-partying, foul-mouthed, wisecracking and iconically beautiful, Ava Gardner was one of the biggest stars of the ’50s and ’60s, though most of her films are now forgotten.”
I read that line a few weeks ago, and it left me stunned. That wasn’t so much because of my own admiration for Ava Gardner (though I think she was a great actress, and that anyone who thinks that films like Mogambo, Show Boat, and The Killers have been forgotten is quite the dullard). It was because of Lily Moore, the main character in my three novels, and how she would react to such scorn directed at her idol. Forgotten films? Hardly.
If you’ve read my novels, you know that Lily adores Ava Gardner. Ironically, that wasn’t true when I started writing The Damage Done, the first book in the series. I knew that Lily loved vintage clothing and classic movies, but at that point Ava was interchangeable with Barbara Stanwyck, Lauren Bacall and Ingrid Bergman as part of the pantheon of great actresses who starred in noirish films. But when I pictured Lily, she looked a lot like Ava Gardner in my mind’s eye, and I put a photograph of Ava on my desk to keep her image in my mind as I wrote.
That small connection made me read a little bit about Ava Gardner’s life, and I remember the shock I felt when I found out Ava’s father had died when she was 13. Lily’s father had died when she was 13, and that was a detail that had been part of her story from the very beginning, when I’d written the first draft of the first chapter. There was something eerie about that coincidence, and it made me feel like the connection between Lily and Ava went deeper than pure fandom.
Part of the appeal, I think, is that Ava and Lily are both survivors. More than that, they manage to thrive in spite of adversity. Ava Gardner was a person who loved life (and bullfighters, and drinking, and, well, lots of things), and she was wildly successful as not caring what other people thought of her. Lily isn’t quite there yet, but she’s working on it. In my latest book, Evil in All Its Disguises, she starts to see the difference between the studio version of her heroine, and the real-life one:
I turned on the bedside lamp and stared at an image of Ava Gardner on the wall. It was a studio portrait, one of those perfectly posed and lighted visions that looked beautiful, yet held her personality and vibrancy so tightly in check that it almost seemed shot from inside a cage. In a way, it was: Ava hated the endless photo sessions that were demanded by her studio bosses at MGM. The candid shots of the real-life Ava Gardner from the same era were striking by comparison. So often her hair was mussed or her dress was creased, and often she wasn’t wearing shoes. But her vitality, her voracious appetite for life, and her carefree spirit were in plain view and they were overwhelming.
In the first two books, there was a line of Ava’s that Lily had play through her mind now and then: “Deep down, I’m pretty superficial.” That was something her sister used to chide her with, and it stung. In the third, Lily starts to see her idol’s self-mocking words and determination to enjoy life as something more akin to a virtue. She’s been through hell, so if she wants to let her hair down and kick her shoes off and enjoy herself, she will. She’s earned it.
Hilary Davidson will be reading and signing copies of her new novel Evil In All Its Disguises tonight (March 26th) at 7pm on BookPeople’s third floor. Stop by and tell her how great she is!
As always, here’s what’s new this week in MysteryPeople.
Last Call for the Living by Peter Ferris (paperback release)
For bank teller Charlie Colquitt it was another Saturday. For Hobe Hicklin, an ex-con with nothing to lose, it was another score. For Hobe’s drug-addled, sex-crazed girlfriend, it was more lust, violence, and drugs. But Hicklin’s first mistake was double-crossing his partners in the Aryan Brotherhood. His second was taking a hostage. He and Charlie could hide out for only so long before Hicklin’s past catches up to them. Hot on Hicklin’s trail are a pair of Brotherhood soldiers, ready to burn a path of murder and mayhem to get revenge. GBI Special Agent Sallie Crews and Sheriff Tommy Lang catch the case, and soon Crews is making some dangerous connections. For hard-drinking, despondent Lang, rescuing Charlie might be the key to personal salvation.
Frozen Solid by James Tabor
The South Pole’s Amundsen Scott Research Station is like an outpost on Mars. Winter temperatures average 100 degrees below zero; week-long hurricane-force storms rage; for eight months at a time the station is shrouded in darkness. Under the stress, bodies suffer and minds twist. Panic, paranoia, and hostility prevail. When a South Pole scientist dies mysteriously, CDC microbiologist Hallie Leland arrives to complete crucial research. Before she can begin, three more women inexplicably die. As failing communications and plunging temperatures cut the station off from the outside world, terror rises and tensions soar. Amidst it all, Hallie must crack the mystery of her predecessor’s death.
In Washington, D.C., government agency director Don Barnard and enigmatic operative Wil Bowman detect troubling signs of shadowy behavior at the South Pole and realize that Hallie is at the heart of it. Unless Barnard and Bowman can track down the mastermind, a horrifying act of global terror, launched from the station, will change the planet forever—and Hallie herself will be the unwitting instrument of destruction. As the Antarctic winter sweeps in, severing contact with the outside world, Hallie must trust no one, fear everyone, and fight to keep the frigid prison from becoming her frozen grave.
Death in Breslau by Marek Krajewski
Occupied Breslau, 1933: Two young women are found murdered on a train, scorpions writhing on their bodies, an indecipherable note in an apparently oriental language nearby …Police Inspector Eberhard Mock’s weekly assignation with two ladies of the night is interrupted as he is called to investigate. But uncovering the truth is no straightforward matter in Breslau. The city is in the grip of the Gestapo, and has become a place where spies are everywhere, corrupt ministers torture confessions from Jewish merchants, and Freemasons guard their secrets with blackmail and violence. And as Mock and his young assistant Herbert Anwaldt plunge into the city’s squalid underbelly the case takes on a dark twist of the occult when the mysterious note seems to indicate a ritual killing with roots in the Crusades …
The Bone Man by Wolf Haas
The wry and rueful Columbo of Austria investigates a grisly murder at a beloved restaurant where snooty Viennese gourmands go to eat … fried chicken. At a wildly popular chicken shack in the Austrian countryside, a gruesome discovery is made in the pile of chicken bones waiting to be fed into the basement grinder: human bones. But when former-police detective now private eye Simon Brenner shows up to investigate, the woman who hired him has disappeared …
Brenner likes chicken, though, so he stays, but finds no one will talk. And as he waits for the disappeared manager, there’s one ghastly find after another. Perhaps the most raucous book in the series, The Bone Man manages to make fun of institutions from high cuisine to soccer while nonetheless building relentless suspense based in all-too-real social issues. Smart, tense, and funny, the book makes clear why Carl Hiaasen called Wolf Haas “the real deal.”
Check out this great little video where powerhouse novelist Harlan Coben talks about the importance of independent book stores.
Todd Robinson will be with us twice in the next two weeks. He’ll be calling into our Hard Word book club on March 26th and will be attending our Noir Night April 5th with Jesse Sublett & Matthew McBride. His book, The Hard Bounce, stars Boston bouncers Boo & Junior. Here’s a story Todd sent us with one of their other misadventures.
The Legendary Great Black Cloud of Ralphie O’Malley
“4DC Security,” Junior answered the phone in a falsetto about as feminine as Hulk Hogan. Junior had been answering our office phone like that for a good three years running and the joke never seemed to wear on him. He called the voice “Wendy”.
Wendy was our imaginary receptionist, which was fine since our imaginary office was a desk stuck in the liquor room above The Cellar, Boston’s shittiest rock & roll bar.
I try not to let Junior answer the phone all that much.
I hit the button to turn on the speakerphone just as a weary sigh replied to Wendy’s greeting. I recognized the sigh as belonging to Barry Hardon, Boston’s lowest of the low-end parole officers. “I don’t know why I even call you turkeys.”
“Because we work cheap?” I replied.
“Boo, that you?”
“It’s me,” I answered. Because it was.
“Don’t forget me, sexy,” Junior said, as Wendy again.
“You’re about as sexy as ten-foot catheter.”
“Thanks, Hard-On” Junior said in his natural voice, which was somewhere closer to a Rottweiler chewing on gravel.
Barry sighed at the dig, which he’d probably heard at least three times a day during the fifty years he’d been on the planet.
“What’ve you got for us, Barry?”
Barry sighed again. Seventy to eighty percent of conversation with Barry Hardon consisted of him sighing in various tones and pitches. “I need you guys to go get Ralphie O’Malley again.”
“What now?”
“He had a hearing two days ago. Dummy fell asleep drunk on the train. He got picked up for vagrancy.
“Vagrancy? Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“That still a law? The fuck is this, the Great Depression?”
Barry went on. “Kinda. Probably would have gotten it dismissed, if the fuckwit had actually shown up for court.”
I swear, only Ralphie O’Malley could get arrested for vagrancy. “We’ll have him in by this afternoon. Fee?”
“Two hundred.”
“Deal.” I hung up the phone.
“How much?” Junior asked.
“Two bills.”
“Dammit,” he said as he pulled on his coat. “It’s fuckin’ freezing out. Shoulda got another fifty.” Junior pulled knit mittens over his hands. He saw me smirking. “What?”
“Nice mittens, Mary.” If you can’t see why mittens covering the knuckles of a man with H-A-R-D and C-O-R-E tattooed across them is funny, then I can’t explain it to you.
“Hardy-har. You’re gonna have a good time explaining to the E.M.T’s how these mittens got inside of you.”
Ralphie O’Malley always said that his luck permanentlyRead More »
