Dead Street (Mickey Spillane & Max Allan Collins, 2007)

I used to read lots of Spillane when I was a kid, but got quickly bored with his cartoonish Mike Hammer (and instead endlessly re-read Chandler). Revived some interest when they were showing TV series, and a few years ago, I was actually stupid enough to buy a DVD box-set of the second season, but put the damn thing on the back of the shelf after watching a couple of episodes. Yes, it’s that bad (+Shannon Whirry is no Tanya Roberts). After that, I lost even that little interest I’d had in Spillane and was quite surprised last year when I ran into his recent book, Consummata (also co-written by Max Allan Collins), while browsing my local bookstore. I had no idea he was still alive and decided to give it a try, for old times’ sake. And to be honest, I was probably lured a bit by another of those great Hard Case Crime covers (She consumed man like fire – but what a way to burn). Anyway, I’m glad I did because it is pretty good.

So this brings me to Dead Street, his final novel. This one was not written in collaboration with Collins; he just finished it. As he writes in the afterword, Spillane wrote 8 of 11 chapters, and he only made “some minor editions and continuity corrections”. I think he’s just being modest and trying not to stain his late friend's reputation, because this thing is just a total mess. I’m really sorry to say that, and I was trying hard to like it, but it is just plain bad.

Our hero, retired NYC cop Jack “The Shooter” Stang, is basically the twin brother of would-be-retired Mike Hammer, with the same simplistic black-and-white view of life and “I, the Jury” sense of justice. Only times have changed, and instead of communism, this patriot’s homeland is threatened by Arabs (still with an A-Bomb of course). And we are living in a digital age now with computers and mobile phones, but he – needless to say - still prefers old school methods. Macho and slightly misogynistic (or slightly infantile if you ask me) attitude towards tender gender is now replaced by an almost senile one. Check this:

“Jack, are you in love with me?”

“Incredibly so,” I said. “Now, may I ask you something?”

I didn’t have to repeat her question at all.

She simply said, “Incredibly so.”

We both had our eyes closed when I kissed her. We were blind but all-seeing and now we had the world in our hands.

But all of the above is okay and something you really expect from (ageing) Spillane. What’s wrong with the Dead Street is the total lack of rhythm, narrative and plot. For the first five chapters, it just doesn’t move anywhere. We are following some ridiculous entanglement about a girl who supposedly died 20 years ago, now miraculously found, but blind and with amnesia and definitely with some sinister background. I guess there will be people who would praise this as a superb foundation for events to unfold and plot to tighten, but to me, it was just boring. Not much suspense there. Felt like reading some drama about a middle-aged guy reconnecting with his old love (and her dog, to make matters even worse).

The fifth chapter ends with “Nuclear devastation. And only a retired cop and a blind beauty to stop it.” And at this point, the story explodes and quickly falls apart. We are driven into an old sub-plot, new characters are introduced, a bunch of indices turn up, and our hero starts flying between Florida and NYC. Really confusing, and I guess these are “continuity corrections” where Max Allan stepped in. So in short, a couple of shoot-outs later and one retired dirty cop less, New York is saved from an atomic bomb and the Florida coast is cleaned of South American drug dealers. And my Spillane history is closed for at least a few more years.

2/5

Facts

Hero:
Jack “The Shooter” Stang (probably because he stings, but you have already figured out that, right?), retired NYC cop

Location:
starts on the “Dead Street”, NYC and unfolds in Sunset Lodge, Florida

Dames: 
Bettie, Shooter’s lost and found love. Now blind and with amnesia, but it doesn’t take long to fall again for our hero.

Body count: 
9 – shootout (4), home invasion (4), final “I the Jury” (1)

Cool lines:  

“I saved your life six times today.”
He squinted at me. “Six?” “Once in that cellar, and five times in this room when I talked myself out of killing you.” [The Coolest!]

Richard S. Prather: The Peddler (1963)

Published for the first time in 1952 under the pseudonym "Douglas Ring")

Unusual one because our main hero is totally and completely unlikable. He’s a peddler driven purely by greed and has zero respect for women. And it only gets worse. Which means something if you know that already pretty much at the beginning, “He thought hungrily about the huge, steady flow of dollars. In his mind grew an obscene image of a great fleshy whore lying on a bed, her legs parted and a constant stream of dollars spurting from her: dollar bills, ten-dollar bills, hundred and thousand-dollar bills, filling the room, smothering her, flowing out of the doors and windows, a cascade, a flood of money rushing day and night from the woman’s thighs.”

What a misogynistic fucker, right!? Even his mentor later realises he’s “a self-centered, individualistic, smart, cocky bastard”.

So, can a book with such a negative main protagonist be any good? Probably, if there’s a good plot built around some criminal behaviour (robbery, murder, blackmail, insurance scam, anything) involving interesting characters and quick dialogue and action. But that would be, of course, a crime novel, which Peddler is not. It’s a character-driven, moralistic drama about a small-time crook rising from the gutter. And in his world, there is no grey and certainly no white. Everyone’s crooked, damaged and basically just no good.

Which is not really a problem. The problem is that there’s not a lot of action or happening (we get our first corpse on page 117), and I also found the pace a bit problematic. Events are taking place in real time, but there are gaps of 1 year or even longer, so the reader can never really settle into it. I think the narration might turn out better if the story were told in flashbacks (like memories of the dying man or the man waiting on the dead row, or some shit like that).

But writing is excellent, and I totally loved and enjoyed the use of language and slang. When was the last time you read something like “That trigger-happy yentzer tossed a pill on me. I’m supposed to catch it in my teeth?” There’s a lot of hard-boiled shit like that, and it makes the book somehow really authentic. Maybe the author himself was a peddler before he discovered his writing talents?

Nah, of course he wasn’t. I just checked him out on Wikipedia, and it turned out he was huge after WW2 and had created PI Shell Scott in a really long (40 or so) series of novels. Will put one of those on my to-do list. Maybe this Scott guy was such a sissy guy that Prather got tired of him and wrote Peddler as an outlet for his frustrations.

2.5/5

Facts

Hero: 
Tony Romero, the Peddler. At nineteen was five feet ten inches tall, with much of his weight in strong well-muscled arms and legs and heavy shoulders.

Dames: 
Maria, hooker with a golden heart + Betty, virgin (almost) with a golden heart. Tony also fucks Ginny, wife of his boss.

Body count: 
6 (all peddlers, all more than deserved it)

Location: 
San Francisco, early 50s

Cool lines:
I feel as broken up as if I’d just heard somebody chipped a piece off the rock of Gibraltar. (Ginny’s receiving the news about her husband’s death)

I came back to report on a club. Needs some alterations. Couple dead bodies got to be moved out. And one out of here, maybe.

361 (Donald E. Westlake, 1962)

It starts with quoting Roget’s Thesaurus of Words and Phrases, explaining that .361 stands for “(Destruction of life; violent death) Killing”. Promising! And it delivers on that tone, as the beginning is quite violent indeed, because after only two chapters, our hero is left without one eye and half his family! He is an ex-marine who had just checked out of Uncle Sam’s services and gets immediately drawn into this “clueless ordinary guy in a wrong place at the wrong time” type of plot. Pretty soon, he finds a sidekick (his brother) by his side, and together they head to the big city to solve the mystery and get revenge. So far, excellent - a real page-turner; I really enjoyed it and hoped the plot wouldn’t get too complicated. This might have happened when the hero visits the public library and suddenly gets a bunch of information about people involved in events that occurred a few years back.

But sadly, it goes in the entirely opposite way. From a hard-boiled whodunit/revenge crime story, it becomes a drama about a lost young man searching for himself and his father. I do exaggerate a bit, and there is a good twist to the story that gives a glimmer of tension and suspense, but the second part was still a major disappointment.

It has qualities. Donald Westlake is a master, and his writing has just the right amount of slang, darkish mood (lots of boozing in hotel rooms!), good descriptions and interesting enough characters. Unfortunately, I find the plot very weak, and the novel feels like it was written by half and then the author just wasn’t quite sure how to take it further.

And there’s one thing in 361 that’s totally amazing and probably unique in the world of crime fiction, at least as far as I know - there are no women characters. I repeat: no women!?!? No femme fatales, mysterious blonde dames, ex-girlfriends, voluptuous secretaries, unhappily married horny beauties, greedy widows, hookers with golden hearts, no provincial girls wanting to become actresses/models, no nothing. Really unusual, especially considering it begins with a guy being discharged from the military!? So I think I’m going to remember 361 by this little peculiarity rather than its plot.

3.5/5

Facts 

Hero:
Ray Kelly, ex-marine

Body count: 
2 immediately, 5 or so later

Locations: 
New York, 200 miles upstate and back to the big apple for the final conclusion

Cool lines:
“You won’t get away with this”, he said. But he was gabbling. It was just a sentence you say when people push you around and get away with it.

I looked pale and young and unready. The gun barrel was cold against my hairless belly. I was a son of a bitch and a bad son.

Losers live longer (Russell Atwood, 2009)

Similar to Little Girl Lost, but not as good. Again, we are in the present time in NYC with a lonesome PI on the case. His name is Payton Sherwood, and he’s a washed-up investigator waiting in his shabby office without furniture and a slow dial-up internet connection, waiting for the clients that never come. He used to work for some big detective agency under the mentorship of his friend Matt, but was fired a few years ago after fucking up a simple surveillance job. The number of detectives involved rises to three immediately in the first chapter, because there is also legendary old school sleuth George “The Owl” Rowell, who wants to employ our hero for the simple job of “flushing a tail out into the open”. But the detective count is quickly restored to two because Owl is killed (as he is no loser, it is probably from here that the title comes), even before he can fully brief Payton about the job. But he smells big money and has no other work anyway, so fun can begin.

We find ourselves in the usual hard-boiled underworld of film stars, drugs, corporate crime, child trafficking and femme fatales. And it’s all happening rapidly, as everything takes place in one day. The story gets quite complicated quickly, and there are some plot holes, but they are not too big, and the whole impression is still okay at the end. 

There are some other flaws. The biggest one is the total absence of police. At the end, the body count rises to nearly 10, and in all this time, there’s no sight of the NYPD, which seems a bit odd, doesn’t it? The second one, maybe even more important, is the lack of motive that drives our hero so hard. He wasn’t even a friend of the dead detective, hadn’t received any money for the investigation, and yet he let himself be beaten, chased and so on.

Another thing I’ve found a bit annoying is authors' near obsession with New York. There are just too many of those “I went to street X along venue Y crossing park Z,” and there’s even a short paragraph about 9/11 (fortunately not related to our story; the war on terror doesn’t take place here). It probably makes reading more interesting for residents of the Big Apple, but I’m certainly not intrigued enough to search these places on Google Maps.

3/5

Facts:

Hero: 

Payton Sherwood, PI

Location: 

New York

Body count: 

8

Quarry in the Middle (Max Allan Collins, 2009)

I’m not big fan of Max Allan Collins but I admit he’s a good writer and his stuff is easy to follow and entertaining enough to pick up every once in a while. And as prolific as he is, maybe I just missed his better stuff somehow. Anyway, I wasn’t in the mood for experimenting with some new authors and decided to finally check out one of his Quarry books. 

I picked this one up in the bookstore because it has a cool opening line (I had a body in the trunk of my car). I think it’s at least the fourth novel in the series, and it has a really original premise. Our hitman Quarry has in possession some kind of register of his fellow trade colleagues obtained from his former (before he killed him) employer, a guy named Broker. So he uses these files in a very clever way – he randomly picks an assassin and follows them (maintaining surveillance) to find out who the next target is. Quarry then contacts the target, offering discreet elimination of the original killer and an eventual bonus if he finds out who has ordered the hit (and yes, of course, killing the bastard too). 

So this setup brings him to a little town run (and divided) by two criminal branches of Chicago organised crime. And according to the book title, you would expect some sort of “Yojimbo – Fistful of Dollars – Last Man Standing” type of shit, which just doesn’t happen. Sure, there is a bit of scheming, double-play, and such, but far too little to make it outstanding. Which is disappointing enough, but even worse is that there’s hardly any mystery or suspense. The final twist is soooo predictable, and I’ve seen it happen so many times: the author falls into this trap of neglecting to introduce more characters and subplots, so by the end of the book, there’s just one of them who can actually be guilty. What makes this ending especially funny is that our hero himself knows that, and he cracks the case simply by:

Culprit: “What makes you think that I took out the contract?”

Quarry: “No other candidate makes sense”

Bravo, Sherlock! 

But I’m probably being a bit nasty because the book isn’t bad at all. It’s just not a crime novel; I would classify it more as a thriller. I liked the style of writing; it’s tight and precise, with little ballast, and it includes some cool, well-conveyed passages between past and present that explain Quarry’s story. I’ve found some lines hilarious, which, strangely enough, may even damage the wholesome impression, because sometimes I thought the author had trouble deciding whether he was writing a hard-boiled hitman story or a script for Hollywood thriller/comedy-type crap that needs to feed Bruce Willis with quirky dialogue. It also relies too much on descriptions and not enough dialogue, and lacks a little bit of higher pace, but that is probably because there’s really not much going on – guy comes into town, kills some bad guys, has sex, gets beaten, plays poker, has some more sex, a few more bad guys are dead. Then he collects his fee and goes home.

All in all, it’s good stuff. I think I’ll check Quarry again.

3/5

Facts

Hero: 
Ex-hitman Quarry, using the name Jack Gibson

Location: 
Little town Haydee’s Port, Illinois, mostly in clubs/joints/casinos Paddlewheel and Lucky Devil, probably mid 80s (as Disco is dead)

Dames: 
One good (kind of), one bad and one absolute angel. Teaser, not spoiler: Quarry fucks two and gets a blow job from one.

Body count: 
5 (they all deserved it)

Cool lines:

Disco was dead, which was fine by me, only I wish somebody had paid me to kill a fucker.

Kind of girls you don’t take home to mother…unless mother is a doctor specializing in the clap.

Little blackjack dealer. Redhead. She likes you, Jack. I could fix you up. Kid can suck the chrome off a ’71 Caddy.

“Shut up,” I told her. “I’d rather kill you than fuck you.” (he tells this twice to the same girl!)

Little Girl Lost (Richard Aleas, 2004)

I’m glad to start my blog with this little pulp. It’s a debut novel from Richard Aleas, and it seems he put lots of love and knowledge of classic hard-boiled crime novels into this one. We have our lonely hero wandering around the big asphalt jungle trying to find out how his old flame from 10 years ago ended up as a newspaper's headline titled “Stripper found murdered”. The more he finds out, the less he likes it as he sinks deeper and deeper into the big city's depravity and the corruption of the human soul. The big twist and the ending are a bit obvious, but the story is still believable, easy to follow, hard-boiled enough, fast-paced, and there are plenty of intelligently placed clues and unusual characters to make it a real page-turner.

What raises this novel above average is our main protagonist. He’s a modern version of old school type private dick (at the end, you cannot help but think about Sam Spade in Maltese Falcon), but he is not some sort of old guy who can’t keep up with progress and still holds on to old methods. John Blake is in his late twenties, and he’s kind of an inexperienced apprentice to his boss/friend, ex-cop Leo, because he doesn’t really know what to do with his life. He uses the internet (thank god, he is far from some stereotypical genius geek type), isn’t much of a ladies' man (although he does score once!), not very muscular (like his “role models”, he gets beaten a lot) and very capable and resourceful (I liked the way he gets himself from the prison). In short: an excellent merge of classical PI into modern noir. 

As mentioned, the twist is predictable. I mean, you have two beautiful blonde strippers and one of them gets her face blown off to the point where she is unrecognisable. It’s so obvious that I kept thinking the author would use this formula to create some sort of double twist. It doesn’t really happen, which is a shame, but it also doesn’t damage the overall good impression. The ending is still a bit shocking, and more importantly, like in all good books, the journey towards the truth, revelation, and the main protagonist's self-discovery is at least as important as the classical whodunit itself.

I encourage you to go find the little girl lost.

4/5

Facts

Hero: 

John Blake, PI

Location: 

New York

Dames: 

Strippers Miranda aka Randy, Jocelyn aka Jessie, Susan.