Book Review: DEATH COMES TOO LATE

TITLE: Death Comes Too Late

AUTHOR: Charles Ardai

397 pages, Hard Case Crime, ISBN 9781803366265 (paperback, e-book)

MY RATING:  5 stars out of 5

MY THOUGHTS: In celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Hard Case Crime imprint, the publishers have released Death Comes Too Late, a collection of 20 mostly noir short stories from across the career of imprint founder Charles Ardai. The author admits the choice of title is a bit cheeky for a collection of stories in which death seems to arrive in a timely manner, if not early and unexpectedly. Regardless, it is a phenomenal collection by an author who I think is truly underrated. I say this as someone who is mostly familiar with Ardai as founder/editor/publisher and who had previously read only one of the stories contained herein.

That story, “Mother of Pearl,” blew me away when I first read it in From Sea to Stormy Sea (edited by the great Lawrence Block), and it blew me away again here. It is one of the few non-noir stories in the collection, if noir must include a crime or double-cross of some kind. There is a mystery at its core – who is this nameless, seemingly genderless, narrator telling us this tale of a young woman’s search for the truth of her father’s death and the mother who put her up for adoption? As I said back in 2020, the story is “a rumination on success, failure, identity, and the search for where we come from,” and upon multiple rereads I continue to find some moment or bit of phrasing or twist in the story that didn’t stand out to me on previous reads. As with most of the stories in Death Comes Too Late, “Mother of Pearl” has layers upon layers, twists to the twists, that keep you wondering where Ardai is leading you right up to the last paragraph.

I think it is safe to say that the whole collection is a rumination on success, failure, identity, and the search for where we come from (sometimes to embrace it, sometimes to understand it, sometimes to leave it behind). And equally safe to say that most of the time, those ruminations take some long, complicated routes to get to that moment of embracing, understanding, or leave-taking.

The book starts strong with “The Home Front,” in which a private investigator hired by the United States government to suss out black marketeers during World War Two is responsible for the accidental death of a young man he’s just arrested – which is just the start of a journey that turns brutal and bloody by the end while our protagonist tries to decide who he is after the tragedy. This is followed by “Game Over,” which starts with a boy’s simple wish to treat his less-well-off best friend to a free afternoon of video games at the local pizza place but whose plan to do so results in wounded pride, misunderstanding, harsh accusations, and yes tragedy. Two quite different time frames with characters of very different ages, both dealing with expectations of who they are based on something someone else has done (or not done). “The Fall of Man” is another heartbreaking story with a teen at the center, a startlingly honest look at suicide and its aftermath.

Charles Ardai is an expert at making sure his stories don’t end where they start – those long, complicated routes mentioned earlier – even when obeying genre dictates. “The Case” starts out as a standard “missing luggage” story but neatly twists through two characters’ points-of-view into something that would be at home on Alfred Hitchcock Presents. “Goin’ West” starts with a classic “Hollywood casting couch” scene (only in New York) that doesn’t quite go where you’d expect but with a conclusion that feels inevitable. “The Shadow Line” opens with our narrator waking up in a room in Mexico with a sex worker, intent on hunting down a man he’s been sent to locate – but not for the reasons that seem apparent. “Jonas and the Frail” is a “bodyguard loses his teenage charge, chaos ensues” tale with a killer reveal and ending; “Sleep! Sleep! Beauty Bright” is a revenge tale writ large; “My Husband’s Wife” is a riff on “disaffected corporate wife has affair” type stories. But they all take surprising turns, and each protagonist faces challenges that reveal something about where they came from or who they really are.

Ardai is also not above twisting his genres. “The Deadly Embrace,” one of my favorites in the collection, is a neat bit of super-hero noir that takes the real-world fierce competition between comics publishers in the 1950s (think the famous DC vs. Fawcett lawsuit over the original Captain Marvel) and combines it with a twist on the Hollywood Studio System in a world where super-heroes are real but under contract to the comics companies, which some of them find stifling. “Don’t Be Cruel” plays with conspiracy theories (particularly around Elvis’s supposed survival) in a noir light. “The Day After Tomorrow” is another tale that is not really noir at all, but more horror.

The collection ends with another decidedly non-noir tale, the mystery “The Investigation of Things.” If any story in the book can be called “Sherlockian,” it is this one. Two brothers in 11th century China, both detectives with decidedly different investigatory styles, are called to solve the murder of a Buddhist monk and stumble upon the invention of something we are all too familiar with as a weapon of murder in our modern era. There are twists upon twists, with one brother looking at minute and seemingly unimportant minute details while the other systematically interviews reluctant peers of the deceased (said brother even utters a variation on Detective Columbo’s famous “oh, just one more question” line, which brought a smile to this reader’s face).

If you love short stories in the mystery/crime genre that are more than just a recitation of the facts of the case or the reveal of the mystery, stories that explore the breadth of human interactions and passions, then Charles Ardai is your man, and Death Comes Too Late is your next must-read short story collection.

I received an advance reading copy of this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Those interested can find my review of From Sea to Stormy Sea, where Charles Ardai’s story “Mother of Pearl” first appeared, HERE.

Book Review: LATER

TITLE: Later

AUTHOR: Stephen King

272 pages, Hard Case Crime, ISBN 9781789096491 (paperback, also available in e-book and audio)

DESCRIPTION: (from Goodreads): SOMETIMES GROWING UP MEANS FACING YOUR DEMONS.
The son of a struggling single mother, Jamie Conklin just wants an ordinary childhood. But Jamie is no ordinary child. Born with an unnatural ability his mom urges him to keep secret, Jamie can see what no one else can see and learn what no one else can learn. But the cost of using this ability is higher than Jamie can imagine - as he discovers when an NYPD detective draws him into the pursuit of a killer who has threatened to strike from beyond the grave.

MY RATING: 4 out of 5 stars

MY THOUGHTS: In Later, Stephen King’s upcoming (March 2, 2021) release from Hard Case Crime, the author returns to that fertile ground he tills so well: a narrator telling us, with more than a little nostalgia, of a horror-touched childhood or adolescence. Jamie Conklin shares a lot of emotional territory with Gordie LaChance and Bill Denbrough, although the landscape of Jamie’s childhood in the not-so-distant-2000’s rather than the 1950s or 60s. Jamie still fills his story with nostalgic nods at television shows, television shows, and New York City neighborhoods. At 22 years old, Jamie is not the published, well-regarded author that LaChance and Denbrough are when we catch them reminiscing about their childhood traumas (and yes, I know, Bill Denbrough doesn’t narrate IT; we’re still closely privy to his thoughts as an adult, as memories come back to him). But even Jamie notices (and this reader did as well) that his writing improves over the course of telling his story, so there’s hope for him yet, especially as the child of a literary agent. And I don’t believe King is done with Jamie Conklin after this book, not by a long shot.

Like Gordie and Bill, Jamie’s life is altered the first time he sees a dead body. Unfortunately, unlike them, he’s only six years old at the time, and he not only sees the body but also the dead man’s mutilated ghost. This is traumatic and formative and when Jamie finally tells us the full details of the event his childhood terror, even through the tinge of reverie, is palpable. Of course, it’s not Jamie’s last encounter with ghosts. Most of the encounters are quick and benign, but it wouldn’t be a King novel if things didn’t get dangerous.

The character acknowledges how like The Sixth Sense this whole set-up is; King has never been shy about wearing his literary and cinematic antecedents on his sleeve and giving inspirational credit where it’s due. But of course, King’s take on “kid seeing dead people” is much darker than Shyamalan’s. For one thing, the ghosts Jamie sees know they are dead, and most of them don’t tend to linger among humanity more than a few days, whether they have unfinished business or not. Which is both good for Jamie and bad, when one spirit decides to stick around longer than the norm.

Unlike the childhood trials of Gordie and Bill, Jamie doesn’t have a cadre of intrepid friends to share the emotional journey and physical dangers with. Classmates are mentioned enough that Jamie isn’t painted as an awkward loner with no social life, but they’re also all off-screen and unimportant to the narrative, grace notes to the main theme. King heavily leans into the stereotype that Gen Z kids would be more likely to record their friend’s “hallucinations” and post them to social media than join in a quest to save the day under the noses of unsuspecting adults. I don’t think this is a completely accurate assessment of that generation, but it works well enough as a plot point keeping other kids off-stage and leaving Jamie only the adults in his life to rely on – adults who, as much as they love him, are unreliable at best and in one case untrustworthy as well. This is yet another thing Jamie has in common with the boys of “The Body” and the Losers’ Club. They couldn’t rely on the adults in their lives either; the key difference being that Jamie is more fully alone in his moments of crisis.

If I have any complaints about the book, they’re minor. I think King really sticks the ending of the book – but then he adds a final reveal that feels a bit tacked on and which I don’t think really adds anything to the overall story or to our understanding of Jamie’s character. I’ll be interested to see if I’m in the minority on this once I get a chance to look at other reviews (which I’ve avoided doing while writing this). I also think this book would have been a better fit with a publisher like Cemetery Dance; the supernatural element is so important and prevalent that it doesn’t really feel like a Hard Case Crime title, which normally lean more towards “regular” crime and psychological horror. This might be the most supernatural book HCC has published (feel free to correct me in the comments if I’m wrong; I haven’t read all 100-ish HCC books yet). Interestingly, when King released his ostensibly “final” Richard Bachman book, Blaze, he said in the foreword that he’d considered placing it with Hard Case Crime but ultimately thought it wouldn’t be a good fit, whereas I think it would have been a perfect HCC title. So what do I know?

Bottom line: Later is a wonderful addition to the “kid sees ghosts, bad shit happens” oeuvre. The kid is endearing, the supernatural threat strong and scary, and the human threats even more so.

I reviewed an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.

Review of BLOOD SUGAR

TITLE: Blood Sugar

AUTHOR: Daniel Kraus

224 pages, Hard Case Crime, ISBN 9781789091939 (paperback)

DESCRIPTION: (from the back cover): In a ruined house at the end of Yellow Street, an angry outcast hatches a scheme to take revenge for all the wrongs he has suffered. With the help of three alienated kids, he plans to hide razor blades, poison, and broken glass in Halloween candy, maiming or killing dozens of innocent children. But as the clock ticks closer to sundown, will one of his helpers – an innocent himself, in his own streetwise way – carry out or defeat the plan?

MY RATING: four out of five stars

MY THOUGHTS: While the Paul Mann cover art of a beautiful, scantily-clad witch on a broomstick surrounded by candy (which reminded me of a Dave Stevens poster I had back in the 80s) seems almost light-hearted at first glance (until you notice the razor-blades, that is), be assured that Daniel Kraus’ BLOOD SUGAR is not light-hearted in the least. This is a dark, dark book, ranking with Joyce Carol Oates’ The Triumph of the Spider-Monkey and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange as books that disturbed me so much I almost couldn’t finish them. Almost couldn’t … but did, because in each of these books there’s a narrative voice that pulls you in despite how much you might want to walk away.

Like the Oates and Burgess books, BLOOD SUGAR is a deep descent into the mind of a killer. But where the Oates and Burgess books are largely a single monologue by the main character, Kraus gives us a look into the minds and motivations of three of the four main characters: Jody, the streetwise helper; Dag, the suburban girl slumming for a thrill; and Robbie, the gang-leader.

Most of the story is told from Jody’s point-of-view, a kid trying to make himself out to be cooler, more street-smart, than he really is. There are shades of Holden Caulfield in Jody’s inflated self-defense mechanism as much as there are shades of Burgess’s Alex. Like both of those characters, Jody’s insecurities are illuminated by his choice of targets for ridicule and actual physical violence. This is a kid who has been mistreated by the system and the adults in his life, who has had to fend for himself from an early age. He’s learned when to lash out and when to be subservient, as illustrated by the way he replaces curses with language deemed “more appropriate” by gang-leader Robbie. Jody uses phrases like “mightyducker” and “sharkweek” throughout most of the book, which can take a little getting used  to (much like Alex’s slang in A Clockwork Orange) but when he finally lets the actual curse words fly, it’s a stunning moment of catharsis for him, as well as insight into how much he’s been holding back for the reader.

Jody’s narration is interrupted occasionally by Robbie and Dag. The differences in presentation and character voice provide the reader a respite from Jody’s stream-of-consciousness tumble of linguistic glitches and substitute curse words, and provide insight into his “friends” that Jody would never be aware of on his own. What Jody knows of their backstories allows him to ridicule one and somewhat idolize the other; what we see in the few chapters that show us letters written by Robbie and Dag give us a good view of why Jody is wrong on both counts.

Robbie’s chapters are letters he’s written to various authority figures who have let him down in the aftermath of a violent crime he perpetrated years before the book’s main events. The details of that event, and what led up to it, are teased out through these letters, providing clarity as to what has brought Robbie to his current state (on the verge of homelessness, squatting in his parents’ abandoned house, sharing drugs with young teenagers). The style of these chapters is still very stream-of-consciousness, but Robbie’s mind works in a completely different way from Jody’s, and these letters help us understand why.

Dag’s chapters are also letters, to a sister ensconced in a mental health facility post-suicide attempt. They start out very organized and formal; Dag is the least “if I think it, I’ll write it” of the three narrators, even towards the end of the book. She is also perhaps the coldest and most calculating of the three. But she has her own set of psychoses that propel her, just as much as Jody’s and Robbie’s propel them.

The only main character we don’t hear from directly is Jody’s foster sister Midge, who plays a pivotal role at several moments. She’s the youngest of the characters and, as presented, the most divorced from reality because of her experiences. Perhaps it’s good that we never see anything from her point-of-view; it would either be too disturbing or too heart-breaking.

There are enough twists and turns in the narrative that you’re never really sure how the story is going to play out – will Jody stop the plan or follow through on it; will some innocent secondary characters become victims of the violence or will they somehow skate past it; will the characters’ dark pasts only provide background to their present or will things somehow come full circle? Kraus keeps the tension high by changing narrators at pivotal moments, reverting to back-story to forestall the denouement just a little bit longer. And the shifting narrators also call into question exactly who is running this particular show. Each one thinks they are in control of themselves and manipulating the others. I really had no idea how it was all going to play out.

Daniel Kraus’s BLOOD SUGAR is a disturbing, dark read. Perfect for a series of late October nights for fans of first-person psychological horror. But definitely not for the squeamish.

Review of A BLOODY BUSINESS

TITLE: A Bloody Business: The Rise of Organized Crime in America

AUTHOR: Dylan Struzan

640 pages, Hard Case Crime, ISBN 9781785657702 (hardcover)

DESCRIPTION: (from the back cover): On the 100th anniversary of Prohibition, learn what really happened. In 1919, the National Prohibition Act was passed, making it illegal across America to produce, distribute, or sell liquor. With this act, the U.S. Congress also created organized crime as we know it. Italian, Jewish, and Irish mobs sprang up to supply the suddenly illegal commodity to the millions of people still eager to drink it. Men like Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, Dutch Schultz and Bugsy Siegel, Al Capone in Chicago and Nucky Johnson in Atlantic City, waged a brutal war for power in the streets and on the waterfronts. But if you think you already know this story… think again, since you’ve never seen it through the eyes of one of the mobsters who lived it.

Called “one of the most significant organized crime figures in the United States” by the U.S. District Attorney, Vincent “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo was just fifteen years old when Prohibition became law. Over the next decade, Alo would work side by side with Lansky and Luciano as they navigated the brutal underworld of bootlegging, thievery and murder. Alo’s later career included jail time and the ultimate Mob tribute: being immortalized as “Johnny Ola” in The Godfather, Part II.

Introduced to the 91-year-old Alo living in retirement in Florida, Dylan Struzan based this book on more than 50 hours of recorded testimony – stories Alo had never shared, and that he forbid her to publish until “after I’m gone.” Alo died, peacefully, two months short of his 97th birthday. And now his stories – bracing and violent, full of intrigue and betrayal, hunger and hubris – can finally be told.

MY RATING: four out of five stars

MY THOUGHTS: The only appropriate word to describe Dylan Struzan’s A Bloody Business is “epic.” Dozens of major characters, court intrigue, romance, god-like manipulations, massive bloodshed, a decade-plus time-span in which characters are born, age, and die … change the names and the time period and you’ve got Homer, add mythological creatures and you’ve got Tolkien or Martin. The story of Prohibition, as told here, is every bit the compelling story The Iliad and The Lord of the Rings are.

Struzan’s style, from first page to last, is clipped, staccato, like the tommy-guns the protagonists wield (although not as frequently as gangster movies would have us believe). She keeps the pace fast even in the quieter moments, squeezing 13 years of machinations and scheming into 640 pages in a combination of history text and novel. It’s “creative non-fiction” and Struzan makes it work; the dialogue (mostly, I’m sure, invented from Jimmy Alo’s memories and hearsay) mingled with non-mob-related historical data (mostly confirmable pop culture and government changes) keep the story from feeling stale. The sensory details of city life are used sparingly, but when they pop up they add verisimilitude. There were a few moments when I really felt the cold of NYC winters, the salt tang of Coney Island and Atlantic City boardwalks, thanks to a few well-placed phrases. Interestingly, I don’t recall now the same level of sensory detail used in the Chicago, Cleveland, or Florida scenes.

Struzan resists the twin temptations of setting Lansky, Luciano and company on a pedestal or demonizing them. Meyer Lansky, Benny Siegel and Charlie Luciano are the protagonists of the story, but Struzan doesn’t pretend they were heroes or perfect. All of their flaws and foibles are well on display, alongside the character traits that made them men other men wanted to follow. Al Capone doesn’t come off quite as well-rounded: Struzan concentrates on his unpredictability both before and after the Valentine’s Day Massacre took such a toll on his mental well-being. The antagonists of the story are the Sicilian-Italian “old guard” (Joe the Boss, Salvatore Maranzano, and others) who are waging all-out gang war. Struzan tries to get into their heads as well, but it doesn’t feel as successful. Of the men named in the back-cover copy, I had to feel a little bad for Nucky Johnson. Even the scenes set in Atlantic City barely featured him. Irish mobsters like Legs Diamond and Eddie McGrath get more screen-time, being in New York City and northeast New Jersey, than the more southerly-located Johnson does. The implication is that while Johnson’s control of AC was integral to the movement of booze during Prohibition, he wasn’t as important to the actual growth of organized crime as his peers were.

The author also doesn’t shy away from the violence that was part and parcel of these men’s lives. The gun-play, the beatings, the bombings, are all spelled out – as are the details of who made the decisions and how they felt about it. The Valentine’s Day Massacre isn’t the only big event spelled out in bloody detail. Some scenes are definitely not an easy read.

If there’s any disappointment I felt with the book, it’s that Jimmy Alo – whose fifty hours of recorded stories the book is based on – gets short shrift in his own story. Granted, he came into the picture later than Lansky, Luciano and Siegel. But I expected, once he did join the story, to see more of what he was doing even when it was tangential to the story of the “big three.” Maybe Struzan has another book in the works specifically about Jimmy Blue Eyes. I’d like to read it.

The cover and copious interior illustrations by Drew Struzan enhance the story. They’re almost photo-realistic, a bit Norman Rockwell, a bit art deco, often with an interesting balance between innocence and violence.

Review of BROTHERS KEEPERS

TITLE: Brothers Keepers

AUTHOR: Donald E. Westlake

304 pages, Hard Case Crime, ISBN 9781785657153 (paperback)

DESCRIPTION: (from the back cover) “Bless Me Father, For I Have Rented.”  What will a group of monks do when their two-century-old monastery in New York City is threatened with demolition to make room for a new high-rise? Anything they have to. “Thou Shalt Not Steal” is only the first of the Commandments to be broken as the saintly face off against the unscrupulous over that most sacred of relics, a Park Avenue address.

MY RATING: four out of five stars (check this on Goodreads to be sure)

MY THOUGHTS:

While the cover art by Paul Mann makes the novel look like a Bondian spy adventure, Brothers Keepers is yet another fun caper novel from the great Donald E. Westlake (and seriously, I know I say this every time I review a Hard Case Crime Westlake re-release, but … how did I make it so long without reading any Westlake at all? Every title of his HCC has released, I’ve loved).  It’s almost a Shakespearean comedy: there’s manipulation, mistaken identities, sexual innuendo and actual sex (on the beach and near it), cunning wordplay, and (spoiler alert) a happy ending, of course. It’s light, frothy, funny – but also a bit philosophical.

The monks in question are of the Crispinite Order of the Novum Mundum – dedicated to the contemplation of Travel, but not to Traveling itself, unless absolutely necessary. Yes. An order founded by an immigrant who was visited by the patron saints of Travel wherein the members actually dislike the very idea of Travel and do their best to stay safely walled off from the world. So of course, some of them end up having to leave the monastery for more than just the time it takes to go buy the Sunday paper at a nearby newsstand, and hilarity ensues. But in among the humorous stuff, Westlake allows us to think about the nature of Travel, of how it’s changed over the past few centuries as technology has made it easier for us to work farther from home and to get from point A to point B, and of how the increased ability to Travel has changed the way people relate and react to each other. That he accomplishes this without browbeating the reader is a testament to his ability as a storyteller.

Our narrator is Brother Benedict, who came to the monastery on the rebound from a failed relationship. If that’s not a trope, I don’t know what is – but Westlake tweaks it in subtle ways, giving Benedict depth and a compelling character voice. He’s a simple man and the life, and lack of temptation, suits him. Of course, temptation gets thrown in his lap, in the form of the daughter of the landlord selling the property.  For me, Eileen Flattery was the weak point in the novel. She never quite rises above being a spoiled, disaffected rich girl, just as the rest of her family and close circle of friends never rise about being selfish (at worst) or self-absorbed (at best). Benedict’s interest in her catches her attention, but it’s more the novelty of getting a monk to renege on his vows, and how her parents will react, than love of Benedict himself that motivates her.

It turns out that while the monastery itself can’t be sold, the land it was built on certainly can be, and the transfer of ownership is virtually complete. There’s a clause in the lease that would give the monks options to fight, but the original lease can’t be found, even though it should rightly be in the monastery office. The shenanigans involved in attempting to find the lease and other primary documents that would support court action are probably the funniest in the novel. Dusty attics, illuminated manuscripts made from mundane documents, art projects left behind by previous Abbots of the monastery … all are props the author uses to shine a light on the personalities, and previous life experiences, of Benedict’s fellow monks. The monks aren’t treated as one-note jokes or as a uniform species; all of their backstories are explored in small moments and bits of dialogue that give them real dimension. There’s a former banker, a former lawyer, a former conman, a former political activist, and more. Each of their knowledge bases comes to play, but it’s Brother Benedict who ends up having to Travel further than any to convince Eileen to help them.

It’s no surprise that our narrator turns out to be the least worldly man among his peers, and this sets up an interesting counterpoint: the monk most willing to Travel on the monastery’s behalf is the one with the least experience in navigating the world outside the monastery. Benedict’s travails and temptations make up the middle of the book and his wide-eyed innocence makes them funnier than they’d be if told in any voice but his own.

I don’t want to give away too much about how that previously-mentioned happy ending comes about, because Westlake slyly tweaks the typical “third act reversal and reveal” model. Suffice to say, the last third of the book is as fun and tongue-in-cheek as the rest of the book.

If you’re looking for a fun romp, this is definitely a book worth picking up.

Review of Scott Von Doviak's CHARLESGATE CONFIDENTIAL

TITLE: Charlesgate Confidential

AUTHOR: Scott Von Doviak

383 pages, Hard Case Crime, ISBN 9781785657177 (Hardcover and e-book)

DESCRIPTION: A group of criminals in 1946 pull off the heist of the century, stealing a dozen priceless works of art from a Boston museum. Burt while the thieves get caught, the art is never found. Forty years later, the last surviving thief gets out of jail and goes hunting for the loot, involving some innocent college students in his dangerous plans. Thirty years after that, in the present day, the former college kids, now all grown up, are drawn back in to danger as the still-missing art tempts a deadly new generation of treasure hunters. A twist-filled narrative that moves from 1946 to 1988 to 2014 and back again.

MY RATING: 5 stars out of 5

MY THOUGHTS:

(Disclaimer: although this review is very late in being posted, I did receive a print Advanced Reading Copy from Hard Case Crime / Titan Books in return for an honest review)

In Charlesgate Confidential, Scott Von Doviak expertly weaves three crime novellas with a common location into one narrative whole. Von Doviak could have taken the easy route in telling the story, presenting each novella in chronological order as a separate whole; by interweaving them, alternating chapters between the three time periods and sprinkling in newspaper articles, Von Doviak made his own work harder but made the story as a whole infinitely more interesting and tense.

The 1946 section of the story is a classic heist tale with a dozen twists, dead-ends and reversals. The 1986 section blends a college marijuana comedy with investigative journalism and “The Big Job.” The present-day section weaves a very NYPD Blue vibe with a possible serial killer thread. The tone of each totally captures the feel of the crime fiction of the decade in which it takes place, down to the ’86 section being told in first person and the 2014 detective being rumbled and unhappy in his personal life.

Cast-wise, the 1946 section’s POV is more of an ensemble noir with several disreputable main characters sharing the spotlight as the story moves from illicit gambling den to bars to the heist itself and the job’s repercussions; the 1986 POV is entirely first person with a lot of typical college-guy male-gaze asides; the 2014 section straddles the line with a limited third person POV that sticks mostly, but not entirely, with our disgruntled detective. The shifting styles of POV took only a few chapters for this reader to become comfortable with, but your mileage may vary.

While the POVs are almost entirely male, it’s the female characters who really propel the plot towards every key moment (whether the reader realizes it in the moment or discovers it later). Von Doviak subtly subverts the tropes of the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold, the unattainable-college-crush, and the hot-lonely-crime-victim-who-might-know-more-than-she’s-letting-on. The men make mistakes out of hubris or ignorance; the women get the real work done methodically if not always legally.

There are several scenes of striking violence, thankfully not all perpetrated against the women in the cast (although the 2014 section does start with a brutal murder of a woman we barely get to know). Von Doviak doesn’t shy away from showing the physical/emotional costs of being involved with these crimes.

Through it all, the Charlesgate itself looms larger than life, its unique architectural design and varied history (from crime den to flop house to college dorm to gentrified condos) calling to mind equally impressive fictional edifices like the Bramford and the Overlook. It may seem odd to name-check two classis horror novel locations in a noir novel review. Charlesgate Confidential is not a supernatural novel, but the author repeatedly mentions the building’s possible occult history and the feel of the building is the same I felt reading the Levin and King novels.

Charlesgate Confidential is an excellent addition to the Hard Case Crime line, and a great example of how the genre can be reimagined for modern audiences, renovated like the titular building to accommodate new voices and styles while retaining what makes it classic and dependable.

Review of Mickey Spillane's THE LAST STAND

TITLE: The Last Stand

AUTHOR: Mickey Spillane

285 pages, Hard Case Crime, ISBN 9781785656869 (Print)

Publication Date: March 20, 2018 (I received an uncorrected proof ARC in exchange for an honest review), hardcover, $22.99

PREMISE: (back cover copy)  On Mickey Spillane’s birthday – a brand-new novel from the master.  A tarnished former cop goes on a crusade to find a politician’s killer and avoid the .45-caliber slug with his name on it. A pilot forced to make an emergency landing in the desert finds himself at the center of a struggle between FBI agents, unsavory fortune hunters, and the local Indian tribe to control a mysterious find that could mean wealth and power – or death. Two substantial new works filled with Spillane’s muscular prose and the gorgeous women and two-fisted action the author was famous for, topped off by an introduction from Max Allan Collins describing the history of these lost manuscripts and his long relationship with the writer who was his mentor, his hero, and for much of the last century the bestselling author in the world.

MY RATING: 4 out of 5 stars

MY THOUGHTS: As indicated in the back cover copy, this is not one new Spillane novel, but two. The first, A Bullet For Satisfaction, is an unpublished piece from early in his career, while the titular novel is the last full novel Spillane completed before his death. He also left plenty of unfinished stories and novels for Max Allan Collins to complete and publish over the last few years, but Collins (wisely, I think) decided to save The Last Stand for an auspicious occasion: the great author’s 100th birthday.

Collins’ introduction traces Spillane’s life history, concentrating on his writing and how it changed from the early bloody days of the first Mike Hammer novel to the later, more circumspect tales written after he’d converted to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. That difference is pretty apparent when one compares the two short novels in this collection.

A Bullet for Satisfaction is classic noir: rough-and-tumble guys and not one, not two, but three femme fatales. There’s plenty of violence and double-crosses to go around; the violence especially may have been the reason that Spillane chose not to release this after his conversion, as Collins suggests in the introduction. The novel hits all the noir beats: Upright police captain Dexter quickly becomes unfairly disgraced former-captain Dexter, who decides to take a murder investigation into his own hands even though it will shake up city politics and might cause him to become real dead real fast. He falls quickly and deeply in love with a woman who may or may not ultimately do him wrong, falls in lust with another woman from the opposite end of the social scale, and survives more double-crosses and near-death experiences than the reader can count. Still, he carries on, his mind on a combination of justice and vengeance, no matter how many people have to die for him to accomplish it. The descriptive language is dark, dreary, with a lurking undercurrent of menace. The dialogue is snappy, tight, almost violent without being excessively vulgar. The entire story, in fact, is tightly told. There are no padded scenes, no wasted moments. Everything propels plot and sets up character. Each reveal is perfectly timed, leading to the next, leading to the final reveal – and they all make sense, the clues are all right there to pick up as you go along.

The Last Stand, by comparison, is almost laconic. It clocks in at about 70 pages longer than A Bullet for Satisfaction, and Spillane not only takes his time getting to the big pay-off, he takes his time even clueing us in to what the real story is. There’s lots of set-up before the requisite twists and potential double-crosses. Despite some trappings, the story isn’t noir but rather “men’s pulp adventure via Clive Cussler.” As fits Spillane’s religion-based change of heart, there’s far less violence to be seen, and what is there is more damage to vehicles than to people (other than a well-placed sucker-punch or two). The setting is present day, on an unnamed Indian reservation in the southwest. The main characters are the tropes of a different kind of genre lit: the lonely white man who has everything except love, the Indian loner with a secret, the Indian’s lovely but unsurprisingly capable and headstrong sister. This is pulp adventure fiction writ modern and a bit bright and large compared to the dark intimacy of the noir story. Spillane still makes the desolate desert environment as much a character here as the dark small city streets and darker swampy outlands are in the previous story. But while the plot feels like classic Spillane, the longer story length works against the author. There’s a lag in the middle, several scenes that feel like their only purpose is to drag out the tension, and two subplots (the FBI’s hunt for a mysterious arrowhead and the local bruiser looking to rough up the main character over a woman) feel shoe-horned in. I think The Last Stand could have been forty pages shorter, with at least one less sub-plot, and been a much tighter and more exciting story. The dialogue attempts the usual Spillane snap but feels lifeless and repetitive compared to that of the story preceding. We get to know the three main characters well enough by the end thanks to the amount of time they spend together, but I’m not sure how well they get to know each other; the connections seem superficial at best. The potential and perceived bad-guys (gangsters and FBI agents and that big ol’ bruiser of a local who wants the lovely sister to be his own true love) remain personality-less cyphers until the last pages, more place-holders than actual threats. And the end, when it comes, feels a bit too abrupt after the twists and turns Spillane has put us through. The Last Stand is still a solid story, with a couple of riveting action scenes and some really cool ideas embedded along with some great descriptions of the desert. But ultimately, for me it’s just not as exciting as the older story (although your mileage may vary).

Spillane completists of course will flock to the book when it comes out, as they should. People who have read a bit of Spillane before, like me, may enjoy one story or the other even if they don’t enjoy both, and consider the cover price worth it either way.  At the very least, in pairing these two stories under one cover Hard Case Crime and Max Allan Collins have given readers a chance to see how Spillane’s storytelling changed over the long span of his career. And to me, that alone is worth the cover price.

Review of Donald E. Westlake's Help I Am Being Held Prisoner

TITLE: Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner

AUTHOR: Donald Westlake

255 pages, Hard Case Crime, ISBN 9781785656828

Publication Date: February 13, 2018 (I received an uncorrected proof ARC in exchange for an honest review), trade paperback, $9.95

DESCRIPTION: (from the back cover): JAILED FOR A JOKE

It isn't easy going to jail for a practical joke. Of course, this particular joke left 20 cars wrecked on the highway and two politicians' careers in tatters - so jail is where Harold Künt landed. Now he's just trying to keep a low profile in the Big House. He wants no part of his fellow inmates' plan to use an escape tunnel to rob two banks. But it's too late; he's in it up to his neck. And that neck may just wind up in a noose...

HELP I AM BEING HELD PRISONER is Donald E. Westlake at his funniest and his most ingenious, a rediscovered crime classic from the MWA Grand Master returning to stores for the first time in three decades.

MY RATING: Five out of five stars

MY THOUGHTS: I admit I haven’t read a lot of Donald E. Westlake. Some short stories, maybe a Parker novel back in my ill-remembered high school days at the behest of a friend, and last year’s Hard Case Crime release of Westlake’s previously-unpublished novel Forever And A Death. Despite multiple people telling me how comedic Westlake could be, everything I’ve read by him has been on the more serious/adventure side of things. Those books had funny scenes interspersed, but weren’t wholly comedic tales.

I’ve now experienced Westlake’s full comedic prowess, and I’m hooked. Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner is a fast, funny romp of a story, virtually “unputdownable.” There’s a catchy turn of phrase, or a crackling bit of dialogue, or a tongue-in-cheek wink at the reader, on almost every page that should bring a chuckle, if not an outright laugh (and I did actually laugh out loud at least four times), to any reader with at least a moderate sense of humor. I suspect there are people who will not find Westlake’s wordplay or the main character’s antics funny – those people are the real life versions of characters Warden Gadmore and guard Fred Stoon – but I really enjoyed the book.

It can be hard to make humor based on mispronunciations work in print, but Westlake pulls it off on the first page. Our narrator has a name people have been saying wrong his entire life: Harry Künt (“with an umlaut,” he repeatedly tells people). He never quiet spells out exactly how people are mispronouncing his name, but the reader can guess pretty easily. This becomes a running joke throughout the book, and serves as character motivation for why Harry became a practical joker early in life. (Okay, it might be thin character motivation, but it works as a launching point.)

The entire book really is a comedy of errors, as Harry gets further and further in over his head. But it’s a comedy of errors that never quite veers into farce despite some of the stock characters Harry finds himself surrounded by (the officious and humorless warden; the threatening gang leader who just won’t give up the plan; the fellow in-mate who gets a little too lost in the character he’s playing outside the jail walls). In a way, it reminds me of classic episodes of The Simpsons or the Dick Van Dyke show: just when you think you know where the story is heading and what the punchline is going to be, Westlake adds a new complication to poor Harry’s life. And this includes the titular sub-plot: someone else in the prison is pranking the warden by having the title phrase pop up in unusual places; we know from the start this is one practical joke Harry is innocent of, but of course the warden, head-guard and other officials think it must be him because that’s what he got sent in for.

The author also seamlessly blends in the other genres he’s famous for (and some he's not): it’s a jail-break caper, a bank robbery caper, a feel-good prison-buddy story (Harry bonds with a fellow prisoner who is in charge of all the gardening), a military-base escapade, a romance. The comedy works because Westlake knows the tropes of all of these genres and tweaks them just enough to make each scene funny without losing the tension (the military-base scene in particular is equal parts Lee Marvin movie and M*A*S*H). I have no doubt that, had he wanted to, Westlake could have written this as a straight-up thriller and the story would have hung together just as well.

(Side-note: I’m actually surprised this has never been adapted to film. It’s an ideal vehicle for someone with an everyman look and solid comic timing, surrounded by character actors with the right mixture of menace and buffoonery.)

As seen above, Hard Case Crime’s re-release of this 30 year old long out-of-print Westlake classic comes with an equally humorous cover painting by Paul Mann that simply and expertly captures the mood of the book without being cartoony or too cutesy. This is the eighth Westlake novel HCC has released, following 361, The Comedy Is Finished, The Cutie, Memory, Somebody Owes Me Money, Forever and A Death, and Lemons Never Lie, (under Westlake’s Richard Stark pseudonym).

Fans of loving send-ups of classic genres, written by authors who know those genres well, really should check out Help I Am Being Held A Prisoner. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER'S "TURN ON THE HEAT" - BOOK REVIEW

TITLE: Turn On the Heat

AUTHOR: Erle Stanley Gardner

292 pages, Hard Case Crime, ISBN 9781785656170 (Print)

PREMISE: (back cover copy)   Erle Stanley Gardner was not just the creator of PERRY MASON – at the time of his death, he was the best-selling American author of all time, with hundreds of millions of books in print. Among those books were the 29 cases of the brash, irresistible detective team of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. Last year, Hard Case Crime brought out the first new Cool and Lam novel in decades, THE KNIFE SLIPPED, lost for 77 years after Gardner’s publisher refused it. Now, we’re bringing you the book Gardner wrote to replace it, often considered the best in the series: TURN ON THE HEAT.

Hired by a mysterious “Mr. Smith” to find a woman who vanished 21 years earlier, Donald Lam finds himself facing a sadistic cop, a desperate showgirl, a duplicitous client, and one very dogged (and beautiful) newspaper reporter – while Bertha Cool’s attempts to cut herself in on this lucrative opportunity land them both hip-deep in murder…

MY RATING: 4 out of 5 stars

MY THOUGHTS: As familiar as I am with the name Erle Stanley Gardner thanks to the television version of his famous creation Perry Mason, I have to confess this is the first Gardner novel I’ve ever read, and my first introduction to his long-running investigative team of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. I can safely say it won’t be the last Gardner, or the last Cool & Lam, book I read. If you’re looking for a fun, twisty-turny noir book, Turn On the Heat is a great choice.

The story starts as a straight-up missing persons case: Cool and Lam are hired to track down a divorcee missing for 21 years. Lam quickly discovers there’s a lot more going on: bitter divorce cases, changed identities, political machinations, coercion by crooked cops, all leading eventually to at least one murder if not more. This turns the book into a rollercoaster ride of rising and falling fortunes for Lam, his money-hungry employer Bertha Cool, and for the beautiful small-town reporter Marion Dutton who has staked her big-city dreams on Lam’s connections. It’s a fun ride. While one or two of the twists felt predictable, there were plenty I didn’t see coming.

The character interactions are an equally fun part of the novel. Donald Lam is obviously a more top-notch investigator than his employer gives him credit for. Anything that goes right with this case, any leads that break, are strictly Lam’s doing – although he also gets equal blame for the things that go wrong. Lam may be smart and savvy, but he’s also fallible, which makes him a really enjoyable lead character. Bertha Cool, on the other hand, is thoroughly unlikeable but a compelling presence nonetheless. Almost anything that goes wrong in the second half of the book is because Bertha puts the idea of a big payoff ahead of any real consequences. It’s a character flaw that is far from endearing in a series lead, but does create added tension and mounting stakes. Where in the first half of the book I found Bertha overblown and annoying, in the second half I relished finding out what blunder she would commit next to make matters worse for everyone involved. Marion Dutton, by contrast, makes her mistakes out of an innocent earnestness to leave small town life behind, and in the end proves to be just as talented a manipulator as Lam and Cool. They’re an interesting trio to watch circle each other trying to solve the multi-layered case they’ve become entangled in.

The title itself is multi-layered. “Turn on the heat” could be referring to the pressure the blackmailers are putting on “Mr. Smith,” or the mounting pressure on Lam to solve the case before he gets arrested for things he didn’t do, or to the building romantic/sexual tension between Lam and Marion. I’m sure Gardner, or whoever titled the book, did that on purpose.

Gardner published 29 Cool & Lam novels in his lifetime. According to various sites, Turn on the Heat was the second and has been out of print for 50 years. This re-release continues Hard Case Crime’s fine tradition of bringing out of print noir and crime classics back to print. It’s the third Cool & Lam book they’ve published, following 2011’s re-release of Top of the Heap and last year’s release of The Knife Slipped (the lost Cool & Lam case). I enjoyed Turn on the Heat so much I’m moving those previous releases up on the “to be read” pile, and hope that HCC will bring more of Gardner’s Cool & Lam books back into print in the near future.

Note: I did receive an advanced reading copy courtesy of the publisher in exchange for an honest review. Website problems prevented me from posting the review before the novel’s publication date, which was this week.