Tomorrow's Another Day (W.R. Burnett, 1946)

Once upon a time (after WW2), in a land far away (Lake City, Minnesota), there was this guy, Lonnie Drew. He was a good lad, but cruel life and war had forced him to become a gambler. In a unusual turn of events (game of poker) he had acquired his castle (restaurant) from which he now rules over the land together with his faithful courtiers (Ray Cooper, Pinky the chef, Willy the driver). Lonnie meets a princess, Mary. They fall in love and get married. End of book one (70! pages).

Book two. Evil forces (Gus Borgia, ex-mafioso kind of guy) arrive on the scene from another distant land (Chicago) and join forces with the local subversive character, Jack Pool, aka The Greek. You see, poor Jack is also in love with our princess, and he's pissed off at Lonnie for stealing her away from him. So he comes up with a plan to throw our hero from his throne. Plot starts to thicken (about fucking time!) and finally we get the first violent act. It's just a robbery, but still, during it, our hero's friend gets so scared he actually faints!? And with that, our illusions and hopes for a hard-boiled novel also die.

Book three. Our prince charming manages to save the day! He outsmarts bad guys, gets the money and keeps his bride. And they do live happily ever after!

And once again I was pissed off at myself for buying a book based on its cool cover (yes, I know...) and inner notes which stated that its author also wrote High Sierra and Asphalt Jungle. Can still remember how disappointing The Wounded and the Slain was, but I guess I thought that I simply couldn't be that unlucky twice in a row. And besides that, Asphalt Jungle is, of course, in a league of its own when compared to Dark Passage.

And that's it basically. Except that this one is the first corpse-less entry of this blog, so it does have some sort of honour. In all fairness, it needs to be said that Gus is such a badass and so pissed off at Greek that I somehow don't think the poor, jealous bastard would make it to a potential sequel. I'll never know for sure because even in case there's a sequel to this melodrama crap, I'm not touching it. No matter how cool a cover is...

2/5

Facts:

Hero:
Lonnie Drew, (ex?) gambler

Location:
Lake City, Minnesota

Body count: 

0

Dames: 
Maureen O'Donnell aka Mary Donnell (This dame was too good looking!)

Blackouts: 
"Good God!" cried Ray, deathly pale, and fainted and fell sideways before Lonnie could catch him.

Title: 
Hm, obviously, tomorrow will be another day. Am I missing something here?

Cover: 
Good, old school illustration of a shady guy with a gun and a horse race in the background. Not credited.

Cool lines:

/

Honey in His Mouth (Lester Dent, 1956)

This one is about greed. There is a strange motley crew band that tries to steal money from a certain South American dictator known as El Presidente. They are his close associates: a brother, a mistress, his personal doctor, and a guy who handles his finances. They somehow (pretty unbelievably btw) manage to find his identical double - our hero Walter Harsh - and persuade/force him (much more convincingly) to impersonate this asshole Presidente. Walter himself is a small-time con artist, pulling tricks with his girlfriend, Vera, who is also a grifter. 

We have seven shady characters and a big pot of gold worth $ 65 million. Let the game begin...

The story is good and, for the most part, relatively consistent and believable. The best thing about it is that it doesn't devolve into a predictable action thriller set in South America. Pretty much everything happens in a secluded house near Miami, where Walter is kept. This confined setting evokes a novel, cool, claustrophobic feeling, which functions perfectly as a backdrop for all the scheming, plotting, and double-crossings. Walter's arm is broken, so his role as a patient was somewhat reminiscent of David Young in Night Walker.

It's story-driven, and it works great for the first two parts. Very fast paced (starts with a car chase!) and plot keeps tightening, but then in the last part just completely loses its steam and more or less falls apart. Very disappointing! We get a pretty pathetic surprise twist and a shootout in which most of our protagonists just simply...  well, die. Not to mention some pretty obvious logical flaws, like a man not realising he had killed his dead ringer look-alike!? Mr Dent complicated the storyline too much and just gave up unwrapping it reasonably and logically. Fuck it, let them just kill each other!

It's not that bad to be honest, and anti-climax certainly is not its biggest flaw. What I resented most was a poor characterisation of "supporting" protagonists. They are such a colourful bunch, and they deserve better. First one to bitch about is Vera, greedy and not very smart, but still (or maybe because of this) very likeable girlfriend of Walters. I wasn't even sure why she was in the book, as she was totally neglected and used just to emphasise what an asshole our hero was. Mr Brother gets a few more lines, but still not nearly enough. Just think of all the possibilities that a castrated, paranoid (mentally handicapped) dictator's brother offers!

So most of the time is spent with Walter and inside his head. Here, Dent did a great job because the guy really is totally despicable, greedy, cowardly, dumb (half-literate) sociopath. He's 100% different from what would be expected from a main hero. So instead of witty, smart, tough, etc, we are left with this fuckhead. Unconventional and somewhat brave, the author's decision (reminded me a bit of The Peddler) makes everything a bit more unusual and unpredictable.

3/5

Facts:

Hero: 
Walter Harsh

Location:
Begins in Missouri, then moves to Miami for the most part.

Body count: 
7 (including the guy waiting on the death row)

Dames: 
Vera Sue Crosby - sexy, naive and with a soft spot for a bottle of Benedictine:
"She's Harsh's sillero." Brother's lips curled with contempt."A nothing".  

 Also sexy, and mysterious Miss Muirz:
"She was a sharp one, Harsh thought, and a fast one when chips began to fall."

Blackouts: 
Yes, one. Nothing spectacular though - it happens when he tries to escape from the hospital but is to weak to do so: 
"He stood and took two steps and went down on the floor with a crash that shook the building and put out his lights."
 

Title: 
Must be some idiom; there's undoubtedly no honey involved in this novel. It probably has something to do with 50k dollars locked in the safe and Walter's obsession with it. One night, he even sleeps with a key to the safe in his mouth!

Cover: 
By Ron Lesser, and really, really good and sexy! One of Hard Case Crime's best and statement like that truly means something. It's not very accurate, though, as there's no scene with a dead man lying and a woman smoking beside him. But still, I would like to think she's Miss Muirz; she looks too classy to be Vera Sue.

Cool lines:  
"Mr. Harsh, the only way I will deal with you is to buy you. I do not care to work with you on any other basis. I buy you or nothing. You are a cheap man, so buying you will not be expensive. Get it straight - I buy you, or I have nothing to do with you."

The Dead are Discreet (Arthur Lyons, 1974)

It starts very promising, in the best tradition of the old school hard-boiled tradition: Los Angeles, movie stars, porn business, occultism, phoney religious leaders... Our hero, too, is (stereo)typical P.I. - he is a bit hungover when he gets hired by some hot-shot lawyer. We soon learn that he used to be a reporter, but was not only fired but had actually served time for not revealing his sources. So we know that he's an honourable man, a man of integrity. There's a nice episode, a bit Marlowe-esque, when some asshole tries to bribe him with 5 grand. He's tempted but instead chooses to drink it away: "By the time I was down to the bottom of the cup, the check had stopped glowing... I repeated the sequence ... and the check was gone."

Excellent start, written with lots of skill and style. Not forcing or overdoing it at all, just taking its time to introduce the characters and lay the foundation for the plot. A real page-turner; I was definitely hooked!

But then came chapter 11 (of 21), which starts with: "By the following Wednesday, I had checked out most of my leads and come up with a big, fat zero."

Okay, it's not exactly the end of the world, and our Jake is certainly not the first detective to be stuck in the case, but still - WTF!? And then it deteriorates from not very good to bad to even worse. His detective skills are pathetic and almost non-existent. For example, for no apparent reason, he tails a guy who was together with a victim when she had a car accident some time ago (not even related to the case). This dude meets another guy, and our lost hero just decides to start tailing him.

Shit like this becomes obvious even to Jake. At the start of the 17th chapter, he is so confused that he tries to summarise the situation, but fails to do so and simply concludes that "There was something else, some unconscious, instinctual force that had a ring in my nose and was pulling me along, and that was what bothered me. I never did believe in playing hunches, but that was what I was doing."

To conclude, it just turns from a first-rate mystery into a third-rate thriller. The only thrill I felt was to finish this damn book as soon as possible. The ending is pretty okay, though; I didn't see it coming.

4.5 for the first 10 chapters and 1.5 for the remaining 11 results in 2.92, but I'll round it up because of the good ending.

3/5

Facts:

Hero: 
Jacob 'Jake' Asch, P.I.

Location: 
L.A.

Body count: 
2 at the start and only one more later

Dames: 
Sheila Warren, the victim. Gloria Pilsen, her sister. Sasha, "more of a bitch than a witch". Allison Shaw, the actress.

Blackouts: 
Two. And both of them happen in the same chapter! First one is pretty standard: "There was a lot of pain and a lot of light flooding in my head all at once - too much to think about, so my brain decided to go to sleep for a while." Second one is nastier as he gets kicked in the balls: "My body convulsed and the pain instantly filled my intestines, then my stomach. I vomited and passed out." Ouch!!!

Title:
Cool, but its meaning escapes me.

Cover:
The photo of the old car is cool, but its relation to the story, once again, escapes me.

Cool lines:  
When she turned and smiled, her eyes said things. One of the things they said was that the martini in her hand was not the first one she had had today.

Recollections moved across his face swiftly, like steel balls in a pinball machine trying to hit 500-point pocket.

He looked at me as if I were a blood-rare steak he had ordered well done and had already sent back twice.[The Coolest!]

Too Many Women (Rex Stout, 1948)

Nero Wolfe, obese NYC detective, is hired by some big ass company to investigate shady circumstances surrounding the accidental hit-and-run death of one of their employees. His assistant, Archie Goodwin, is at first reluctant and doesn't really take the case seriously (it wasn't a lead pencil leak, it was murder), but eventually he's persuaded by the big fat paycheck (Naylor-Kerr is good for anything up to twenty million). Archie then 'infiltrates' this company and ends up among 500 women (clean, young, healthy, friendly, spirited, beautiful and ready - it was an ocean of opportunity) who are all suspects. Kind of. Throw into the pot the scheming of top executives and their family ties, and we have a mystery. 

This is definitely my least hard-boiled, non-noir of the year. It's kind of Agatha fucking Christie written for housewives so they can be amused by witty dialogues and naughty gags (slightly sexist if you ask me). Don't get me wrong - style is okay, but I got fed up with it after a few chapters. Especially because the story doesn't move anywhere (a corpse per 100 pages), and more than once, I had the feeling that the writer was more concerned about his characters than with the plot. Which gets totally stuck after one week, and then the great detective forces its development by simply:

"We have no clues at all. Literally none.  ... "
"What do we do when we have no clues? Do you know?" 
"No sir" 
"We make one"

Truly brilliant. So they fake some evidence, and the case is solved. I just wish they would do so some 50 pages sooner...

Apparently, 33 Nero Wolfe novels were published, but this is definitely my last one. It's not bad, but it's just not my style. And by glancing through reviews on Amazon I was a bit surprised to find out I'm the only one who dislikes this.

2/5

Facts:

Hero:
Archie Goodwin (brilliant lieutenant according to the Gazette), Nero Wolfe

Location:
New York

Body count: 

3 (also counting one suicide)

Dames: 
Miss Hester Livsey - "...she was in some kind of trouble, real trouble that no one but you would understand and no one but you could help her out of."

Rosa Bendini, who "knew her way about."

Blackouts: 

/

Cover:
Pretty cool; it was the reason I bought this in the first place.

Cool lines:  
Receptionist was away past the deadline, having reached the age when it is more blessed to receive than to give.

"I ought to warn you that his charges have not joined in the post-war inflation because they were already so high that a boost would have been vulgar."

[when identifying a corpse run over by the car] 
It was unquestionably him, when you had made the mental adjustment required by the transformation of a sphere into a disc.[The Coolest!]

"You must be aware that she is completely devoid of intellect, and therefore that her opinion on any subject whatever is without value. She is not a moron, but the quality of her brain is distinctly inferior."[The Coolest!]

Miami Blues (Charles Willeford, 1984)

Needs to be said that the start was not the most promising. It begins with this psychopathic asshole killing a Hare Krishna guy by breaking his finger. I kid you not, this sissy actually dies from the shock of getting his fucking finger broken!? So we have one less airport beggar in this world and one not very convincing prologue to a crime novel. Which right away becomes even less plausible because this same psycho asshole hires a hooker who turns out to be a deceased guy's sister. Later on (pg. 42 to be precise), there's information that Miami has 1.5 million residents, so you can calculate for yourself the odds of this actually happening.

It sounds like a mess, but it's anything but that. Quite opposite, actually - we are dealing with a masterfully constructed thriller. When homicide detective Hoke Moseley starts to investigate this unusual murder, he himself becomes the chased party in a cat-and-mouse game. So, this is not a classical whodunit, but much more a WTF is going to happen next. Taut and suspenseful story, told in 3rd person in alternating chapters from the perspectives of (mostly) our two main protagonists.

But still, as great as the story and narrative, this novel is foremost character-driven. Central one is, of course, Hoke, a rather washed-up detective. And I truly can't remember the last time I've come across such a likeable protagonist. He's just the coolest! 42 years of age, divorced with two little daughters. And he's not moaning and bitching about missing them or (usual) shit like that. His only problem with this is that every other one of his paychecks goes to them, leaving him more or less broke and forcing him to live in a cheap hotel where he's performing duties of a house dick. There's a delightful episode when he unexpectedly gets some (pretty obviously) dirty money, and he doesn't hesitate one second about it - he goes straight to a local bar to settle his 100$ tab. "Fuck where it came from. I need it, and I can use it." Great stuff, no moral dilemmas there! He's also not the best detective in the world, and he's actually somehow scared of his unpredictable and violent opponent. But he can be tough as his new partner has experienced. The part where he explains to unfortunate Ellita Sanchez her position in their relationship (hierarchy) is simply hilarious, I've reread it three times!

I could go on and on about our main man Hoke (didn't even mention his false teeth!), but I mustn't neglect others. Susan is great as a simple, greedy and stupid whore living in a "platonic-marriage" with Junior. And he himself is some piece of work, indeed. It's astonishing how Willeford manages to picture him as a total sociopath in the first two pages of the book. Later scenes, such as buying Frisbees and tossing them to himself, are brilliant, and I wouldn't be surprised if they were taken from a psychological study. And it's equally amazing that somehow this really mean motherfucker is sympathetic throughout the book.

Writing is in a league of its own. Hot and sweaty Miami makes a great background and adds something special to the atmosphere. And while one would easily expect that this kind of stuff would be full of some macho language and/or wisecracking, it's surprisingly tight and almost dull. And as such, it perfectly aligned with Hoke's character, his mechanical and emotionless police work, and his personal problems. And speaking about police work - the way they crack that family slaughter case is just - once more - brilliant, isn't it?

Authentic, funny, at times brutal and ... simply just really cool. I'm totally hooked on Hoke!

5/5

Facts:

Hero: 
Detective Hoke Moseley

Location:
Miami - where "It wasn't enough that Carter had destroyed the city by sending in all the refugees, Reagan was importing ex-cons from California."

Body count: 
4 + another 4 in unrelated massacre + 1 child murder in another unrelated case + 1 at the end. Maybe unrelated, or maybe a prologue to the next book in the series?

Dames: 
Susan Waggoner - "Is she really that dumb, or is it an act of some kind?"

Blackouts: 
Yes, Junior beats the living shit out of him: "The jaw cracked audibly, and blood poured from Hoke's nose and mouth."

Title: 
Pretty fitting. Miami plays a major role in building up a "blues" atmosphere.

Cover:
Nice, colourful illustration of Miami. Author not credited.

Cool lines:  
There was no way that Mendez could be his real name. With that bronze tan, he looked like an Afrika Corps Nazi, and it was definitely a tan, not dark skin.

The mentholated smoke tasted wonderful. A man would be a fool to give up smoking altogether.[The Coolest!]

But any way Hoke looked at it, the quality of life in Miami would be improved immeasurably now that Freddy Frenger was no longer out on the streets...

Retribution (Van Lacey, 1959)

Brad Connor, a no-name and nobody kind of guy, is minding his own business when someone tries to kill him. He survives the attempt, but his good friend Matt is not so lucky. They both have just one enemy in common, but he's supposed to be dead - Henri Rheims, sadistic asshole and devil himself reincarnated, was a prison warden in a Japanese camp where they were held captives, and he had died in a fire when the camp was liberated. Is it possible that he had survived and is now looking for revenge? And for a retribution!

The answer is, of course, yes. Not only has he survived the fire, but he has also come to the States to expand his criminal activities. He is now  Jonathan Byrd, host of sinister parties where he is drugging prominent scientists (with marijuana!, sic) to reveal their findings about H-bomb developments that he can sell to Russians. The only obstacle on his path is potential witnesses who could recognise him. So they must die.

This is a basic premise, and as you can probably figure out for yourself, it presents quite a problem. I somehow still cannot understand why someone would go through all the trouble of killing two guys (plus framing another one for murder!) who are convinced that he's dead in the first place!?? Especially, we learn that later, because he had completely changed his appearance in the meantime.

I think a more skilful writer could still pull something better out of this. But everything else is also so fucking sloppy and amateurish. There's no real reason (or need) for Marie's character and development of their relationship, which is at best unnecessary and at worst ridiculous. Something similar could be said for Hagen, the GI man who gets involved in the case. Detective skills of two combined are pretty pathetic (I suspect something, yes. I don't know what. I wish i did.) and I cannot see why they needed to fly to LA to just interview a guy. Surely there were phones in America in the late 50s?

It has some bright points worth mentioning, though. A brilliant touch is that Matt's body is found in the morgue. Now, how cool and original is that!? It really gave me high hopes at the beginning of an intriguing mystery. Another thing I enjoyed was the heavy use of slang, as we get more than a decent dosage of dames and reefers and coppers. Bad guys are heeled (armed), and so on. I think my favourite one was: "She fished a mirror out of her white leather bag and okayed herself".

But dialogues are far too scarce. And so it is action (app 100 pages between corpses), so reading this was a struggle at times.

2/5

Facts:

Hero:
Brad Connor

Location:
New York, briefly also L.A. and Chicago

Body count: 

4

Dames: 
Evie the nurse. Marie, the reporter. But "Dames'll be bad medicine kid, because the case is hot."

Cover:
Cool, comic book style art. But not too accurate - Brad gets a shot at through the window, but he is not actually hit.

Blackouts: 
Three of them - in fact, the book starts with one. On second occasion "ammunition truck exploded up above my left eye. I was out." and last one "I node-dived headlong into the cellar of limp oblivion."

Cool lines: 
I smelt trouble. I was right. Trouble hit me. Hard. The slug would have paid me off if Matt hadn't yelled. 

I was by that time as jumpy as a virgin entering the Tunnel of Love with an all-in wrestler.[The Coolest!]

The Guns of Heaven (Pete Hamill, 1983)

This novel has three parts. At the beginning, we join NYC reporter Sam Briscoe landing at Belfast airport. He's an old-school, disillusioned man of the world. Divorced (his wife - of course - couldn't and wouldn't keep up with his lifestyle) with a daughter in some Swiss private boarding school. He is also an IRA supporter and had come to Northern Ireland to do the "annual" St.Patrick's day article. His uncle, a big IRA shot, arranges for him an exclusive interview with the new leader, Steel. During this interview, Steel gives Sam a mysterious envelope and asks him to deliver it to America. Things begin to accelerate now: we get a first corpse, Sam goes to Switzerland to visit his daughter, but he's followed and his life is threatened, so he takes his brat to her mother in Spain, and then he returns home.

So the plot had thickened a lot, and we are now in mighty NYC, and we expect (at least I did) that Sam will do some ass kicking journalistic investigation. Unfortunately, he doesn't. He's so streetwise that he doesn't really need to. He knows everyone: from well-informed ex-junkies, bartenders, cops, fellow reporters, lawyers and even a biology professor at Columbia University. So, he wanders around asking questions, and in the meantime, the story becomes more and more convoluted and difficult to follow. Pace drops noticeably; we need to wait for a second corpse until page 109. Oh yeah, he also gets laid three times with a woman he had just picked up in the bar, so there can be no doubt about his coolness.

The third part begins when all this shit becomes just too incomprehensible to follow. It shifts from a mystery into an against-the-clock thriller. Besides IRA, we also get UVF thrown into the pot, plus another fanatical Christian faction, plus the FBI, plus some arms dealer, plus an assassination conspiracy, and so on. Needless to say, his kid gets kidnapped. There's actually a moment when Sam does a Hercule Poirot-type of shit, explaining whodunit and what the fuck is going on. I read that paragraph twice and still wasn't sure.

Plotting is disastrous, but Hamill gets away with it because it's written brilliantly. I mean, really, really good! So good that it sometimes even hurts the novel, as it is so far above the simple language and cheap gags usually used in pulp novels (which this still is, make no mistake). Little objection I had was once again this fucking New York fascination/near obsession thing. In every book that takes place in this city, we need to endure all that crap about its history, endless descriptions of the streets, subway stations, jazz, boxing...

But the thing I'll remember Guns of Heaven the most for is the total bluntness of the author's sympathies for the IRA. This was probably a bit unusual in the early 80s, but it's pretty remarkable to read it in the post-9/11 world, given that those guys were undeniably terrorists. And Hamill does try to be objective (and probably succeeds I think) but at the same time there's no doubt he's not neutral.

So when I checked this guy, it came as no surprise that he is a reporter with Irish roots, so this explains both the quality of his writing and his feelings about all that shit that happened in Northern Ireland. His life and career seemed interesting enough to warrant checking out something else from him. But not a crime novel this time and definitely not stuff about New York! Drinking Life sounds interesting :)

A bit unusual, still enjoyable, personal, thought-provoking, entertaining, still relevant.

3.5/5

Facts:

Hero: 
Sam Briscoe, reporter

Location:
Starts briefly in Belfast, moves to Switzerland and then concludes in "...that capital of Satan, Sodom-by-the-Sea, New York City"

Body count: 

6

Dames: 
Sheila Rafferty, "A good woman, for a Yank". Marta Torres, with whom he has an ambiguous relationship. Try to figure it out yourself: "I liked her more than anyone I knew. But I didn't know what to do about it." And there's also his whining wife, and maybe we can count Red Emma (Sam's Jaguar) too.

Blackouts: 
Once, briefly, when an explosion occurred near a pub. The second one is pretty standard and unoriginal: "A Jagged red scribble went through my eyes, and then there was blackness."

Title: 
Not sure. The main sub-plot is about one group of fanatics trying to steal a large arms shipment from another. Have no idea where/how heaven came into the picture. 

Cover:
Good as expected from Hard Case Crime. But not very accurate - I guess the chick is Sheila, but the only time she's outside the McDaid's is when the pub is blown to pieces by a planted bomb. Her description of that evening matches, though: she does have red hair, a green blouse, and large breasts (for a thin girl).

Cool lines:  
The thin, moustached bartender wore a Pioneer pin on his shirt, a sign that he had taken the pledge never to drink. Such Irishman are prized bartenders on the Irish saloon circuit, but I never trusted them to fix me a drink more complicated than a beer.

I slipped into the scalding hot bath. I jumped, moaned, then settled. The womb.

Deadly Beloved (Max Allan Collins, 2007)

Mrs Tree runs a detective agency, which she inherited after her husband was killed on their wedding night. She used to employ two assistants, but one had left to conduct some private investigation. So she gets an assignment by her lawyer associate to help some rich guy's wife who had killed the cheating bastard when she caught him with a hooker. A cop-friend of hers hints that this might look like a job of the mysterious Event Fixer - a highly skilled and professional hit-man who specialises in fixing "accidents". He's usually employed by the sinister mob family Muertas, who is also responsible for the premature demise of Mr Tree. What else? Oh, yeah - Mrs Tree got over her hubby's death and she is now fucking his friend Chic Steel. She also has to attend psychiatric sessions to recover from the stress she had suffered when she killed some bad guys...

So lots of stuff is going on in this little, less than 200-page pulp. So much, in fact, that sometimes I got the impression that Collins was in such a hurry to complete it that he forgot to develop his characters and, even more importantly, build some decent atmosphere. Its pace is too fast, maybe because Mrs Tree is a comic book character, and Collins tried to preserve the spirit of a graphic novel. Whatever that's supposed to be...

A few things stand out, both good and not so good. The ending should be better, more developed. The final twist is truly surprising; there's no way to see it coming. But that's simply because it is so far-fetched and totally unbelievable. It seems like Collins wanted to wrap everything up and get it over with. And the thing I liked was the narration. The story is told partly in real time and partly in flashbacks while she's on the shrink's couch. These passages are executed very elegantly and help build suspense. Very skillfully and very comic book-ish indeed.

Nice and entertaining, but - will all due respect to MAC - a bit too childish for my taste.

2.5/5

Facts:

Hero:
Mrs Tree

Location:
Chicago

Body count: 
7 (one guy is actually killed twice; first time just in dreams!)

Dames:
Besides our hero, there's also a victim, Marcy Addwater, and a beautiful and dangerous leader of the mob, Dominique Muertas. She's definitely underused!!

Cover:
Pretty cool. Her facial expression could be better, but I like those dark blue colours - very noir-ish! Illustrated by Terry Beatty, an artist who collaborated with Collins on comic book serials. Although it needs to be said that it is not very accurate: Mrs Tree does indeed wear her signature trench coat most of the time, but not at the end when she confronts the bad guy with a pistol in her bed. At that particular point, she wore "the top of a pair of black silk men's pajamas".

Cool lines: 
Lots and lots of pretty stupid but still hilarious dialogues. Another proof that this would make it a better comic book than a novel. I can just imagine these wisecracks lettered in balloons!

"You must be the little woman." 
"You must be the dead whore"  [The Coolest!]

"My client is an innocent woman." 
"Aren't all your clients innocent? Until proven broke?" 
"That's unkind."
Notice he didn't say "unfair."

"I was hoping." I said slowly, politely, "to talk to Mrs. Hazen."
He grunted a laugh. "I was hopin' for a ten-inch dick."
I smiled pleasantly. "Aren't we all? You're...?"

That's what I like about being 21st Century P.I. Ten years ago, shoe leather. Today - Google.

The Silencers (Donald Hamilton, 1962)

The Silencers starts at the American-Mexican border, where agent Matt Helm has been sent to bring back his fellow agent, who is suspected of being a double agent. She's a stripper in a sleazy Mexican joint and gets killed when Helm is about to get her. But just before dying, she whispers some mysterious final words into her sister's ear. Classic stuff, the plot thickens!

So Helm, like it or not, must cooperate with her sister to find out what the fuck is going on. The story soon moves on the road and concludes in some god-forsaken mountains where the military is conducting nuclear tests. It gets pretty complicated and, at times, even hard to follow, but let me assure you that Helm saves the day in the end. And that, along the way, leaves a corpse or two behind him.

Better than plotting are the characterisations and development of the two main protagonists. Helm is as tough as nails, not at all the sissy James Bond stereotype of the agent. For example, when he gets an assistant operator, he's pretty indifferent towards him because "Why bother to get fond of a guy, when you may have to sacrifice him ruthlessly within an hour?" And Gail is cool too; she has lots of style (Helm nicknames her "Glamour Girl"), and I just loved those "My dear man!" exclamations.

Their relationship is intriguing and, in a way, more interesting than the pursuit of government secrets. They keep playing a cat and mouse game and exploiting/deceiving each other, we pretty soon learn that the only reason she's taken on this ride is because she's a part of a diabolical plan: "They were counting on this woman to hate, despise, and, given the opportunity, betray me". Even their having sex doesn't clear things much because "In this business, there's a maxim that goes: suspect everyone once except a woman you've slept with; suspect her twice." You can judge for yourself how their affections progress:

• "You bastard,", she said. "You lousy, calculating bastard." I grinned at her. "You bitch," I said. "You dirt, double-crossing bitch."
• "You are dreadful cold-blooded, ruthless person..."
• "You are unreliable and treacherous and arrogant and selfish...You are mean and vengeful, and the only reason I love you is that I can't hurt you"

Writing is good and tight, and Helm is just cynical enough. Secret service operations are described with a great deal of detail and accuracy (I suppose), and it seems like Mr Hamilton has done his homework. Good tense spy thriller mystery from the Cold War era. Maybe a bit outdated, but still very enjoyable.

3.5/5

Facts:

Hero:
Matt Helm, an undercover agent

Dames:
Secret agent Sarah a.k.a. Lia the stripper. However, she's out of the picture very soon, and then her sister, Gail Hendricks, takes over.

Body count:
Starts slowly with a shootout in a stripper club, but reaches 10+ at the end.

Location: 
Starts in El Paso, Texas, at the Mexican border and then moves to the mountains of New Mexico.

Cover: 
Cool and pretty accurate. There is a mean-looking Latino badass playing with his knife and a stripper dancing in the foreground.

Cool lines: 
Old, bold days when hotels were hotels instead of investments and cattlemen were cattlemen instead of oil magnates.

 
The gentleman who preceded me at the desk wore a big white hat and yellow cowboy boots. His silver belt buckle was the size of a TV screen. I was in Texas.[The Coolest!]

 
Her meekness was as phony as a drunk's New Year's resolution.

The Big Bang (Mickey Spillane & Max Allan Collins, written in mid 60s, finished and published 2010)

Ok, I know I’ve bitched about Spillane, but still, I couldn’t resist buying The Big Bang. At the local bookstore, they were selling it for next to nothing, and I decided to try it out since this is a Mike Hammer novel and not some sissy old-aged Jack Stang crap.

Big Bang starts with some big fucking bangs, alright! Hammer springs into action no sooner than in the second paragraph (!!!) by smashing the guy “into a bloody mess“! His buddy gets it even worse: “I broke billy boy’s arm between the wrist and elbow, took half his teeth out, snapped his jaw loose from its hinges, and send the bastard’s balls on a trip…” And all he could think of was “..what the hell these chintzy little shits thought … taking on an old tiger.“

So, in case we have forgotten about Mike Hammer by some miracle, we are immediately back on track. Pace of course steadies a bit (could it possibly go faster and more violent after such an opening!?) and leaves space for the story to develop. In this one, we are dealing with drugs. There’s some big fuck-up happening in New York, and the streets are bone dry. Junkies are climbing walls, and for the last six months, supplies have been provided in small quantities. Mafia (Evello family, also Syndicate) is puzzled and pissed off about their shipments getting intercepted by police, and there’s a new gang led by the guy named Snowbird trying to take over their turf. And in the meantime, they are all just waiting for the Big Bang - super shipment coming from Europe.

Hammer has just returned to the city, and all he wants is to chill (cool his heels) and smoke his Luckies when he gets pulled into this mess. To understand his actions (and reactions), we need to examine his attitude towards drugs. I think the best way to do that is to let the main man explain it himself:

• Human garbage – these fucking drug-heads are all the same, scumbags, all of ‘em, and the gutter’s too good for them.
• It’s the plague – and the best way to deal with a plague is to wipe out as many rats as possible.

So it’s no surprise that he starts a war against anyone and everyone. And bloody war this will be, by the time he’s finished, the body count will rise into two-digit numbers. In the process, he’ll avoid police (“Fuck them!”) and get an unlikely ally in a colleague professor whose personal loss made his attitude towards drugs even less tolerable (!!!?) than his. Plus, of course, he’ll fuck a girl or two because – to use his words again – “I was just a human”.

This stuff leaves you speechless; it’s too brutal even for Spillane. It’s probably the best possible cheap pulp fiction on the market, and once I got over the initial shock, I had actually started to enjoy this insanity. I mean, the plot is tight and the writing is good, but there’s just nothing holding it back in its political incorrectness. Okay, we were used to Hammers contempt of law, his macho misogynistic persona, mocking of homosexuals, vegetarians, pacifists, communists, hippies, etc, but here everything goes into the tenth degree. Novel is too (or should I say still) extreme even in this day and age, and I doubt very much that any of the contemporary writers would go that far in creating such a conservative asshole main protagonist. I wonder whether Spillane (or his publisher) was aware of all that in the 60s when he wrote it, and had maybe abandoned it for these reasons.

Unique stuff. Was and still is.

3/5

Facts:

Hero: 
Mike Hammer, PI

Location: 
New York

Body count: 
Thousands! Hammer lets the poisoned heroin be distributed on the streets so “Thousands would die. And their friends and families would be so consumed by rage that they would rise up as one and they would take down the Maffia. Hit the Maffia, kill them all.” 

There are 14 "individual" killings (only two of them not committed by our Mikey boy). Let’s see a few of the more graphic ones:

•  His Colt left one eyeball plastered to his cheek to  dangle there
•  .45 slug entered his right temple, splattering blood and brains onto the dead driver
• .45 slug angled through his open, yelling mouth and up through the roof of his bald head, bursting it in bloody chunks like a target-range melon
• Shotgun blast, which took her head off her shoulders and some of her shoulders too
• Shotgun went off, shearing off the front of his face and leaving him a ghastly wet mask and still alive enough to scream until I leaned out and shattered his skull with a .45 slug and put him out of his misery. 

Yep, it is indeed - like his pal Pat Chambers has concluded - worst mob bloodbath since St. Valentine’s Day!

Dames:
His secretary/lover, Velda Sterling, of course, is holding down the fort while he’s out chasing Indians. Shirley Vought, a society girl who has chosen to associate with the wrong crowd.

Cover: 
Pretty generic but still cool.

Blackouts: 
Surprisingly, there are two of them. The first one is described just briefly, “I was clawing for the .45 when the chloroform found my face, and my last memory was them dragging me.” The second is much better. He’s drugged by LSD, and the description is much better. Hammer sees some collage pictures of Buster Keaton, Guadalcanal, Woody Woodpecker, Lana Turner and Adolf Hitler. 

Cool lines:
She had a tuna salad sandwich. She didn’t eat meat, she said. That would be news to the tuna.[The Coolest!]

She nodded and gave me a look that made the need-anything-just-whistle one Bacall gave Bogie seem like kid stuff. 

She began by falling to her knees to worship the part of me that seemed to be in charge.

“What kind of condition is he in?” 
“Cold,” Pat said. 
“The kind of cold you get when they file you away in a drawer at the morgue.”

I’ll start with re-breaking your goddamn leg, then see where inspiration takes me.[The Coolest!]