REVIEW: WALTZ INTO DARKNESS

By Cornell Woolrich

Cornell Woolrich is closely linked with the roman noir of ‘40s America. The archetypal noir takes place in a big city, a sooty Northern town, or a sun-lit California dreamscape. In Waltz into Darkness, Woolrich winds back to the South of the late 19th century. It’s a world of rigid social codes, a bit archaic, tradition-bound, and old-fashioned. Woolrich dives into it, but doesn’t shed his bleak outlook along they way.

Louis Durand is a successful man, but one who has missed the true meaning of success, love. But someone has stepped into his life, Julia, and their waltz begins. In true Woolrich style, happiness is elusive. Woolrich’s castles are all built on foundations of air. Reality is elusive too, but love and fear are mankind’s constant companions, the mainsprings of action.

Durand discovers that the love he thought he’d found is not what he had imagined. The reader follows him on a journey of self-discovery, fraught with suspense and  terror. Who is the Julia that Durand loves, and if she is not that person, does he still lover her. The reader is left guessing until the very end, just as much as Durand is.

-Dave Hardy

REVIEW : BLACK ALIBI

By Cornell Woolrich

Cornell Woolrich was the undisputed master of noir. His tales were less about crime than explorations of the human heart, the twisting byways of trust, betrayal, and the deeply irrational side of fear. Black Alibi fits squarely in that tradition. The mcguffin is an escaped black panther, a dangerous “pet” belonging to an American movie star, on the loose in a South American city. The actress’s manger is honor bound to retrieve the creature. What Woolrich tells is only partly the tale of the pursuit of the panther, but a series of sketches of prospective victims, with the reader never knowing if they will pass through safe, or die under the fangs of the beast.

It’s not your usual crime novel.

Woolrich lived for part of  his youth in Mexico City. Black Alibi is infused with the poetry and rhythm of life in Latin America, the joys and sorrows heightened. No Black Alibi isn’t a crime novel, it’s a romance, a love story, a story about life in its glory and misery. It’s a fantasy, an idyll, it’s noir.

-Dave Hardy

WOMAN IN THE DARK

by Dashiell Hammett

This novella appeared as a serial in Liberty in 1933. It is Hammett’s next to last work of long fiction, The Thin Man followed it, and a long terrible writer’s block followed that.

Woman in the Dark is a good, well paced tale of crime and pursuit. Instead of a PI pursing outlaws, the outlaws are unjustly persecuted by corrupt law. The tale opens with a woman, fleeing in the dark, by chance seeking refuge in the cabin of an ex-con named Brazil. One might say Brazil is the Continental Op’s bastard brother, homely, cynical and detached, but with a powerful sense of right and wrong. But chance, a roadhouse brawl that ended in death, put Brazil on the other side of the law.

He meets his match in Luise Fischer. She’s a Euro-trash drifter who knows the rules of the game but insists on breaking them. Luise Fischer (always both names, just as Brazil has one and the Continental Op has none) understands that a woman has to bend without breaking, that a gal without money has to trade what she has to get by. But she only gives so much and only as much as she has to.

The story is a departure from the often cynical view of Hammett’s detective fiction. It is truly a story about love and the heroism that love can call forth. While not as blazing as the manic grandeur of Red Harvest or as tightly plotted as The Maltese Falcon, Woman in the Dark is a story that can grow in a reader’s mind.

-Dave Hardy

 

 

WHERE MURDER WAITS

By E. Howard Hunt

This is a decent little thriller by E. Howard Hunt. Hunt is much better known for his role as a CIA agent and Watergate conspirator. In fact that seems to be the selling point the publisher banked on in this 1973 Fawcett re-print.

The yarn is about a suave ex-CIA agent and dedicated patriot named Tnuh Drawoh E, sorry, Conroy, who just wants to mind his own business but keeps getting yanked into other people’s wacky conspiracies. Ain’t life like that. Anyway, Conroy has to sort out moles and back-stabbers inside the moribund world of anti-Castro Cubans. It’s a pretty good yarn and kept my interest up to the end. Rather than dedicated freedom-fighters the Cubans are rather seedy and a trifle whacked. There are no Commie super-spies, just guys out to get what they can. Idealism takes a beating. Where Murder Waits is worth a look.

-Dave Hardy

STRAIGHT TIME

Dir. by Ulu Grosbard

Back in the ‘70s, before his apotheosis, Dustin Hoffman was just a damn good actor. In Straight Time he plays Max Dembo, an ex-con just out of prison. He tries to obey the rules, but he’s a stiff-necked and proud man. The bureaucratically bland arrogance of his parole officer (played by M. Emmet Walsh) leads him straight into a violent explosion and the life of crime he thought he could leave behind.

The film is based on No Beast So Fierce, by Eddie Bunker, an ex-con who took to writing to get out of his life as a criminal and ward of the state. Bunker also co-wrote the screenplay and tutored Hoffman in the life of parolees. It’s a gritty film, with taut and suspenseful robberies that have the feel of something you might see on a security camera, not Hollywood’s lens. Viewers of Reservoir Dogs will remember Bunker as Mr. Blue (he has a part in Straight Time as well). Quentin Tarantino has made no secret of his admiration of Bunker’s work and many little touches in Straight Time are echoed in Reservoir Dogs.

Ultimately viewers will have to decide to what degree they sympathize with Max Dembo. It would be easy to see him as just a victim. But that is to entirely miss the point. Dembo’s character creates his surroundings as much as his surroundings create him. The tragdy is that he is man who has deeply internalized the jailhouse world he has grown up in. Bunker’s and Hoffman’s genius was to show Dembo from both angles.

 

-Dave Hardy

 

 

THE BIG GOLD DREAM

By Chester Himes

Chester Himes’ Harlem is always full of dreamers, but where there are dreamers there are those who prey on dreams.

Sister Alberta has announced her dreams of money in the temple of Sweet Prophet Brown. There’s reason to believe that her dreams may be reality. Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed are soon investigating the theft of the contents of a ghetto apartment and sundry acts of violence related to same.

As in many Himes’ novels, the detectives are secondary to the assorted street characters that populate the story. There is Sugar Stonewall, street-smart hustler, Dummy, the deaf-mute pimp, and Rufus, the guy who knows how to live off a woman who works as a maid for white people among others. Unraveling the mystery is entertaining enough. Following the characters from one ludicrously funny encounter to the next makes Himes’ writing a true treat. 

-Dave Hardy

RED HARVEST

By Dashiell Hammett

Red Harvest is to detective novels as Jaws is to Finding Nemo, they are both about a fish. Dashiell Hammett didn’t invent the hard-boiled PI genre, but by God he perfected it!

This is a tale of a town called Personville, aka Poisonville. In true Hammett style the essence of the place is revealed in a parable. The narrator, Hammett’s nameless Continental Op, tells of a Duke in Renaissance Italy who promised his mercenaries a free hand if only they would subdue the Duke’s rebellious subjects in his city. Thus the Duke put down the rebels and lost his city just the same. The Continental Op moves in to clean up a Montana town with a bloody history of labor strife and gangsterism. In the process he nearly loses his tenuous grip on humanity in the bloody maelstrom of all out gang war. It is a dark tale with no clues in locked rooms to be picked up by elderly spinsters. Just people killing each other for greed or revenge and one man determined to wash a place clean in its own blood.

If you read this novel and find it overstated, just stroll on down to your library and pick up Bloody Williamson or A Knight of Another Sort for the true history of all-out war between strikers and strikebreakers, Klansmen and bootleggers in the small towns of Southern Illinois. You’ll find fiction was more restrained than fact.

-Dave Hardy

 

 

NO GOOD FROM A CORPSE

By Leigh Brackett

This is the novel that caused director Howard Hawks to tell his assistant he wanted that “Lee Brackett” guy to work on the screenplay for The Big Sleep. As a matter of fact Leigh Brackett and William Faulkner did that script, touching off a forty-year career of writing novels, short stories and screenplays.

It’s not too hard to see why Hawks thought Brackett was the perfect choice for The Big Sleep. Although better known as a science fiction writer, Leigh Brackett started with hard-boiled detective fiction like No Good from a Corpse. Arguably, Corpse is very much in the Chandler train. The PI hero, Ed Clive is a self-willed and ruggedly independent street warrior with his own code of conduct. He finds himself mixed up, quite unwillingly but as certainly as a samurai in a kabuki tale, in the affairs of Mike Hammond and his twisted in-laws. Some might even say the plot here is a bit derivative of The Big Sleep. Perhaps, though Brackett certainly made her own way in tough-guy fiction. Her prose lacks the poetic flights of fancy that adorned Chandler’s best work, but her plots are more tightly woven and, to be bluntly honest, more coherent (Chandler recycled his short stories into novels, not always with the strictest attention to detail).

An inkling of the varied roads that Leigh Brackett’s fiction would wander comes from the title of this novel. It is not a bit of LA tough guy slang, but a reference to some of the original tough guys of the Western World: the Vikings. Brackett quotes the Havamal, the poetic sayings of Odin, that it is better to be crippled than dead, for there is no good to be had from a corpse.  

Leigh Brackett’s career in film began with the landmarks of mid-century American writing, Faulkner and Chandler, and ended with the colossus of late-20th century film: George Lucas. Her last screenwriting credit was for Star Wars V: The Empire Strikes Back.

-Dave Hardy

 

 

HIGH SIERRA

By W.R. Burnett

WR Burnett was a young guy from a pleasant corner of rural America who moved to Chicago back when it was wicked. Judging from High Sierra, Burnett always carried that bit of rural Americana with him, even when describing Chicago gangsters.

Published in 1940, High Sierra tells the tale of Roy Earle, a bank robber newly released from prison. An old gang associate trying to pull off one last big score calls him out to California. Roy must lead a pair of would-be tough guys in a heist on a mountain resort town where LA’s glitterati play. Naturally it’s not that simple. The hoods have brought along a girlfriend, who complicates what should be strictly business. Roy is caught in a desperate yearning for the lost innocence of his boyhood in rural Indiana. He complicates things by getting involved with a family of Ohio farmers starting over in LA. And there’s a dog who may or may not be cursed.

Believe it or not Burnett handles this all with some finesse. Just when I was getting annoyed with the overly sentimental aspect of Roy’s character, Burnett twists the plot to call into question the basis of Roy’s melodramatic yearnings. Burnett doesn’t mind playing a bit (more than I expected!) to the public’s longing for Robin Hoods (this was the Depression) yet he also undermines it by showing us Roy’s willingness to use violence. Burnett may seem like he buys a simplistic worldview, but to my eye he plays with the polarities of rich and poor, crooked and straight, the face we show the world and our inner selves.

Burnett also plays with the omniscient 3rd person view, changing point-of-view character faster than some folks change their socks. It lets us see the world from many eyes, not always in harmony. Even the dog’s POV helps illuminate the situation. Burnett also loves name-dropping, both of the famous (John Dillinger) and the forgotten (Lou Blonger, the king of the Denver underworld).

High Sierra was also made into a film starring Humphrey Bogart in 1941 (John Huston co-wrote the screenplay with Burnett).

This novel is a bit hard to pin down. About halfway through I was seriously wondering if Burnett had grossly over-romanticized his anti-hero, but I found that Burnett knew what he was doing all along. Which is perhaps the secret of his enduring reputation as a hard-boiled writer.
 

-Dave Hardy

 

REVIEW: FAST ONE

By Paul Cain

Fast One is Paul Cain’s novel of corruption and underworld warfare. Like other hard-boiled novels of the era it is set in the grit and glory of LA, but instead of a PI dedicated to bringing a criminal to justice, this is a tale of an outlaw’s struggle to survive. Gerry Kells is a war-hero, junkie, gambler, and gangster who just wants to leave the rackets behind for a little peace and quiet. But it doesn’t work that way in LA. He is drawn into a spiral of violence as rival underworld factions use him as a pawn. Unfortunately for them Kells is nobody’s fool and mayhem ensues.

Cain had a good grasp of the loose structure of the LA syndicate. As in the real LA-LA land the cops and the crooks are mostly indistinguishable (look up LAPD Lt. Guy “Whistler” McAfee sometime). Gamblers skirt the law by putting their casinos on freighters anchored just off-shore (again a fact the LA scene). Rivals use scandal-sheet newspapers as weapons in the war for City Hall and control of the rackets (much like “Gray-Wolf” Charlie Crawford did until he was shot by a candidate for judgeship).

This is a dark tale, more in the spirit of Cornell Woolrich’s noir than some of the more obvious comparisons to Cain's fellow Black Mask writers Hammett and Chandler. Fast One is a hard-boiled gangster story that deserves to be better known.

-Dave Hardy

 

 

A COFFIN FOR DIMITRIOS

By Eric Ambler

This is one of Eric Ambler’s best novels from his early days, back when he was an anti-Fascist idealist in the ‘30s. While that led to some odd effects in other novels, A Coffin for Dimitrios shows ideology in action, rather than telling about it. The story tells of Latimer, an English journalist, who follows the life history of Dimitrios Makropoulos, a Greek exile who is by turns a gangster, spy, and terrorist for hire. While it’s definitely not a blood-spilling shoot-‘em-up, there is plenty of tension. The novel is really a set of short stories, each telling of some phase of Dimitrios’ career while Latimer gets closer to the truth about Dimitrios’ ultimate fate. Made into a film in 1944 (as The Mask of Dimitrios), A Coffin for Dimitrios is a good old-time thriller. Don’t look for super-weapons, acrobatics, villains in underground fortresses, or heroes jumping into bed with lots of spy-chicks, just good characterization, suspense and an acute eye for the European underworld of the 1930s.

 

-Dave Hardy

 

 

CAPTAINS OUTRAGEOUS

By Joe Lansdale

This is the latest novel in the Hap Collins and Leonard Pine series, by Texas author Joe Lansdale. Hap and his buddy Leonard are security guards at a chicken processing plant in East Texas. If you aren’t familiar with these guys, Hap is an easy-going redneck who drifts from one loony predicament to another. His pal Leonard is a tough-as-nails black war vet who happens to be one of the very few openly gay guys in the hick town where they live.

When Hap saves a girl’s life he and Leonard are rewarded with a vacation. After a series of confrontations with pushy waiters and Mexican cops Hap and Leonard end up befriending an old fisherman and his beautiful daughter. Hap actually gets very friendly with her, Leonard less so. Of course it doesn’t end there and our heroes end up on the wrong side of a sadistic Mexican gang boss who happens to practice nudism.

It’s a good novel, but not as weird as its predecessor, Rumble Tumble (really bizarre and bloody, funny as all get out too). Still the smart aleck humor of Hap and Leonard is in full force along with Hap’s attempts to make sense of why his life is so aimless and why someone always wants to kill him.

Strangely enough the British edition is what ended up on my bookshelf, which is what happens when you buy all your books at used bookstores.

-Dave Hardy

 

 

THE BLACK MASS OF BROTHER SPRINGER

By Charles Willeford

Charles Willeford was the king of Florida noir. He wrote taut novels of odd loners who just couldn’t stay alone and draw others to their ruin.

Sam Springer is a dry-as-dust accountant who decides he’s a writer because he sold a novel. Broke and in search of new material to write about he visits a monastery in the Florida backwoods. The abbot and sole occupant is a career soldier who’s forgotten more about doing nothing while getting paid than most men ever learn. He helps Springer skip out on his wife and life by dispatching him to be pastor of an all-Black church in Jacksonville. But preaching actually takes some work and Jax is in the throes of a civil rights conflict. Rev. Deuteronomy Springer is a long way from a saint and so is Merita, the very beautiful wife of one of his deacons.

Black Mass is a sardonic send-up of bigots, zealots, preachers, and believers. Even more than that it is a story about how wanting is quite different from having. If you like good, dark comedy, you should want to read this one. Having done so will be satisfying.

-Dave Hardy

ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS

ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS: MORE STORIES MY MOTHER NEVER TOLD ME
ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS: STORIES TO BE READ WITH THE DOOR LOCKED
ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S BEHIND THE DEATH BALL

Back when magazines contained stories and not just 893 pages of ads, they used to collect them and publish them in book format. Stories, not ads, that is.

One of the old reliables was the “Alfred Hitchcock” sets. Not that the great director actually selected the stories for these books (or maybe he did), but it tied in with Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and the Alfred Hitchcock Presents tv show.

Don’t look for “locked door” puzzlers or accounts of how Mrs. Gillysquid the elderly librarian showed up Scotland Yard (except maybe as parodies). These collections focus on crime stories, stories told from the point of view of a criminal, a victim, a bystander. The emphasis is less on detecting than the motivation and effects of crime. Mostly the effect on the reader, the more outlandish the better.

Straight up fantasy is not neglected either. Theodore Sturgeon’s classic tale "Shottle Bop" is featured in Stories to be Read with the Door Locked, and there is a fine homage to Lord Dunsany in More Stories My Mother Never Told Me, titled "The Man Who sold Rope to the Gnoles" by Idris Seabright. And of course one must read John Keefauver’s How Henry J. Littlefinger Licked the Hippies’ Scheme to Take Over the Country by Tossing Pot in Postage Stamp Glue because it has such a cool title, if nothing else.

Should you come across an Alfred Hitchcock collection, it’s worthwhile to take some time to peruse. 

-Dave Hardy

 

 

THE BIG SLEEP

By Raymond Chandler

“I was neat, clean, shaved and sober and I didn’t care who knew it.”

Raymond Chandler could make his words stalk off the page and into your life like a gimlet-eyed dame with a .45 in her purse and too many white nights in her past.

Anyway, before I start to sound like Robert Parker writing a pastiche with a WAY too short deadline, let me just say that The Big Sleep is deservedly one of Chandler’s best known works. He paints LA red with a lurid tale of high society, low company, depraved kicks, and noble intentions gone wrong.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the story, it is narrated by Philip Marlowe, Chandler’s fictional PI. Marlowe’s job, taken as much for a loopy sense of honor as for green semolians, is to look into the disappearance of Rusty Regan, General Sternwood’s son-in-law. Chaos abounds as the General’s daughters, Vivian and Carmen, do their best to muddy the waters.

The plot is a complex one, pulled together from short stories Chandler had sold to Black Mask. Honestly, sometimes the stitching shows. But the characters just pull you into their loony world and hold on until the tale is done. Along the way you find gems like “Dead men are heavier than broken hearts,” and, “using his strength like an out-of-work show-girl uses her last good pair of stockings.” Above all it’s Marlowe, the dogged PI, going back again to uncover, or bury, the truth as he must in the service of his odd sense of duty.

-Dave Hardy

Strange reviews of the recent past

Since the old Fire & Sword website is defunct (well not defunct, just redirecting to the Fire & Sword blog), I've decied to revive a few reviews from there, because they were so good. OK, because I'm to lazy to write new reviews. In perfect candor, I always intended it to be an archive of reviews and commentary on books that I liked. I still like 'em, so why no post them here. Without further ado, here's my review of All shot Up by Chester Himes.

ALL SHOT UP
By Chester Himes

So you think Shaft was the baddest cat in Harlem? Well long before Richard Roundtree ever donned a black vinyl driving coat, Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson were keeping it cool when things got hot.

Chester Himes was an ex-con who took to writing. He penned some well-regarded but very uncomfortable (for honkies) novels about crime and race. Eventually he moved to France in 1953 (except perhaps for Muslims, it seemed relatively less racist than America) and started writing for the local market for romans noir . The French didn’t know that all detectives were white guys who spoke entirely in snappy comebacks so they went for it.

Himes mixed deadpan absurdity with deadpan brutality. All Shot Up opens with a tire thief watching a solid-gold Cadillac driven by a guy in a coonskin cap run over an old lady. She gets up and is promptly sent flying by a coal-black sedan with three cops in it. The thief drops the tire and it keeps on rolling with the novel.

Himes follows up on that opening. The crime here is a pretty complex one, but that’s perhaps of less importance than Grave Digger and Coffin Ed’s rather ruthless methods of getting to the bottom of things.

This is excellent Harlem hard-boiled fiction, not a classical detective story or a police procedural, but an urban adventure tale. If you like tough-guy tales, you should have some of Chester Himes work in your library.

-Dave Hardy

STRAIGHT TIME

Directed by Ulu Gosbard

Back in the ‘70s, before his apotheosis, Dustin Hoffman was just a damn good actor. In Straight Time he plays the lead role of Max Dembo, an ex-con just out of prison. He tries to obey the rules, but he’s a stiff-necked and proud man. The bureaucratically bland arrogance of his parole officer (M. Emmet Walsh) leads him straight into a violent explosion and the life of crime he thought he could leave behind.

The film is based on No Beast So Fierce, by Eddie Bunker, an ex-con who took to writing to get out of his life as a criminal and ward of the state. Bunker also co-wrote the screenplay and tutored Hoffman in the life of parolees. It’s a gritty film, with taut and suspenseful robberies that have the feel of something you might see on a security camera, not Hollywood’s lens. Viewers of Reservoir Dogs will remember Bunker as Mr. Blue (he has a part in Straight Time as well). Quentin Tarantino has made no secret of his admiration of Bunker’s work and many little touches in Straight Time are echoed in Reservoir Dogs.

Ultimately viewers will have to decide to what degree they sympathize with Max Dembo. It would be easy to see him as just a victim. But that is to entirely miss the point. Dembo’s character creates his surroundings as much as his surroundings create him. Bunker’s and Hoffman’s genius was to show Dembo from both angles.

-Dave Hardy

NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES

By Cornell Woolrich

When you think of dark, Urban Fantasy, you might think of China Mieville, Neil Gaiman, or Charles de Lint. I would chose Cornell Woolrich as the creator of a unique form that blended elements of crime fiction, horror, noir, and fantasy. H.P. Lovecraft might not have known it, but Woolrich wove tales of cosmic horror.

The premise to Night Has a Thousand Eyes is pure Woolrich: the race to save a doomed man. A policeman hears a young woman’s story. To save this woman, he must save her father from certain doom. Only the doom is not so much physical, as spiritual. A psychic has predicted a wealthy industrialist will die. The psychic’s astonishing record of true predictions seems to confirm his powers of prophecy. But the NYPD doesn’t believe in ESP. As the protagonist’s colleagues race to prove the psychic to be false, the protagonist must battle the malignant forces of the unknown that are driving the marked man into lethal despair. Night is Woolrich at his best, creepy, suspenseful, and utterly unpredictable.

-Dave Hardy

THE KILLER INSIDE ME

By Jim Thompson

Deputy Lou Ford is the kind of man who exemplifies the best in small town law enforcement. He doesn’t carry a gun. He prefers to reason with people. He prefers to keep the peace. Except that inside Lou Ford is a raging nut case, a time bomb whose first person narration ticks off the seconds to a horrific explosion.

Jim Thompson’s novel is perhaps slow, not unlike Lou, but it builds steam. The idyllic world of small town life is riven by hidden currents, secret hates that fester until they break into the open. Lou is simply the corruption and madness of his surroundings embodied.

-Dave Hardy

THE LADY IN THE CAR WITH GLASSES AND A GUN

By Sebastien Japrisot

Despite the cumbersome title, this is a taut little Euro-thriller. Dany Longo is a self-contained urban isolate. She is the child of WWII-era misery, hiding behind a cool exterior and sexy-librarian glasses. When her boss asks her to do a bit of overtime work at his luxurious Paris home, Dany finds it opportune to borrow his car and take a joyride to the coast.

The trip gets bizarre when people begin to recognize Dany even though she has never met them. A fling with a drifter complicates Dany’s road trip. Soon things occur without rational explanation. Suddenly she finds herself lost in a mental maze where reality has become unreal.

Japisrot is part fantastist (much as Cornell Woolrich, spinning a plot so intricate that it creates its own reality), there is a compelling realism to Dany. She’s a marvelous serie noir heroine.

-Dave Hardy