Grifter's Game (Lawrence Block, 1961)

At first, I thought this one would be memorable for the main hero's simply incredible naiveness bordering sheer stupidity. It takes 146 pages and an old Hitchcock movie for our poor sucker Joe to realise that  things are not exactly what they appear to be:

Later, lying in bed and trying to sleep, I realized something. I tried to imagine a movie in which the hero steals two pieces of luggage, one of which is loaded with a fortune in raw heroin. Then the same hero happens to pick up or get picked up by a girl who subsequently turns out to be the wife of the guy who owns the luggage and the heroin.
Coincidental?
More than that. Almost incredible. 

However, I'm glad to say that, instead, it will stay in my memory for its excellent ending, which I didn't see coming at all. Needless to say, Joe gets screwed over by the girl, but his payback is really something. Without giving away too much, let's just say that there's a reason why Mr Block brought that (initially a bit nonsensical) heroin stuff into the story. Original conclusion, indeed. Nasty, grim, disturbing and fatalistic. The way I like them.

All in all, it is a nice take on the ever-inspiring theme of "old rich husband, young unsatisfied/greedy wife".

3.5/5

Facts:

Hero: 
Joe Marlin, a con man. However, he comes across more like a gigolo who specialises in skipping luxury hotels without paying the bills.

Location:
Philadelphia, New York, Atlantic City, Miami, Tahoe, Las Vegas

Body count: 

1

The object of desire: 
The usual: girl for the boy and money for the girl.

Dames: 
She told me her name was Mona and I told her my name was Lennie. She was a lot of fun, besides being a sex symbol.

Title: 
A bit misleading. Like I said, Joe is more like a gigolo; he's certainly nothing like the Paul Newman/Robert Redford kind of grifter, and his "game" is simply killing some old dude from a point-blank distance. But I guess "Grifter's Game" sounds much better than "Gigolo's Assassination".

Edition:  
Hard Case Crime #1. Yes, the first HCC edition!

Cover: 
A nice illustration by Chuck Pyle. It's pretty accurate, too, as it depicts the killing of Mona's husband in a drive-by shooting. I like the way her eyes seemed to oversee the whole scene from the background.

Cool lines: 
“You’re sweet,” she said. “Very sweet.”
“Isn’t your husband sweet?”
“Forget him.”
“How can I? He’s married to the most beautiful girl in the world.”
Another smile.
“Well?”
“He’s not sweet. He’s old and he’s fat and he’s ugly. Also stupid. Also revolting.”
It was quite a list.
“So why did you marry him?”
“He’s also rich,” she said. “Very rich. Very very very rich.”

The Thief Who Couldn't Sleep (Lawrence Block, 1966)

Unusual globetrotting espionage/adventure. Not the biggest fan of those genres myself, so at least I'm assuming it's a bit unusual to have a protagonist who cannot sleep (so he learns languages and manically reads) and writes other people's master thesis for a living.

On one of these job assignments, he comes across an old Armenian woman and over a few cups of coffee (Armenian coffee: hot as hell, black as sin, and sweet as love), she unveils to him the long-lost secret of gold that Armenian people had stashed away during the Turkish massacre during the WWI. In no time at all, Tanner decides that many of the freakish societies across the world (whose member he is) could benefit from some big ass donations. So he promptly applies for the passport and sets out for the treasure hunt.

Sounds much more conventional than it actually is. You see, our hero starts six international incidents, is hunted by several states' secret police and a few sinister organisations ("I know you're hotter than a grenade with the pin out") in a chase that begins in Ireland, goes all the way southeast through Europe to Bulgaria and ends in Lebanon. Along the way, Tanner fucks a couple of hot girls, runs into a bunch of odd (even by his high standard of oddness) characters, sparks a minor revolution attempt in Macedonia and somehow obtains complete dossier of the British air and coastal defenses (which btw cannot be very strong since the whole thing is pretty thin). When taking into account that this paperback is 200 pages long, it actually feels like it was written by some madman on amphetamines (who couldn't sleep?)

But it's not bad at all. It's funny and I liked the fact that it didn't take itself seriously at all. Tanner in no way tries to emulate the James Bond type of agent. Cold war doesn't play no role here (I don't think this term was ever mentioned) and his goals are pretty modest as he certainly doesn't try to prevent some shit like nuclear attack or WW3 - turns out that his loot was worth mere $371,520 (according to this website this would amount to 2.6 million today). Also worth mentioning is that Block doesn't mock exotic (by American standards, I guess) countries and bore us (and maybe himself too) with American patriotism. He actually did his research pretty thoroughly, and we learn an interesting fact or two about those "exotic" places (though I think he exaggerated a bit about Irish hospitality).

Silly, charming nonsense. I guess it still qualifies as a cosy crime, but I liked it better than Block's silly Bernie Rhodenbarr crap. But I don't think I'll check anything else from the Tanner series. Unless you can recommend a good one?

3/5

Facts:

Hero:
Evan Michael Tanner or Ivan Mikhail Tanner, according to Radio Moscow

Location:
Turkey, Ireland (from Shannon airport to Limerick to a nearby village Croon to Dublin), Madrid, Grenoble, Italy (Venice, Udine), Yugoslavia (Ljubljana, Zagreb, Belgrade, Tetovo), Sofia, Balikesir and then 800 miles two day drive to the southeast town of Antakya, crossing Syria and finishing in Lebanon and then flying (finally!) back to Washington.

Body count: 
One secret agent + many casualties of the Macedonian revolution

Dames:
Nora, an Irish gal + Annalya, a Macedonian woman. Tanner fucks them both. Nora is simply lonely (who wouldn't be in Croom?) and horny, but Annalya has deeper reasons for seducing our hero. When she comes, she ecstatically yells: "A son! Give me a son for Macedonia!" Hilarious stuff, we need more horny revolutionaries!

Blackouts: 
Nope, not even sure if a guy who cannot sleep can black out. But there was a scene where Tanner pretended to be unconscious when a double-crossing bastard of the Society of the Left Hand struck him with a tire wrench.

Title: 
No nuclear physics required to decipher this one: Tanner is a thief, and he cannot sleep.

Cover: 
Pretty standard and not very imaginative one. Cannot figure out what that green shit in the background is.

First time on this blog: 
My hometown, Ljubljana in Slovenia, is mentioned. Which is cool, but even cooler is that it also takes place in Dublin, where I live these days.

Cool lines:
Some pretty bizarre (and funny?) insults from the prison guard, Mustafa. Looks like this asshole has some sort of animalistic Oedipus complex:

- Your mother loves to perform fellatio upon syphilitic dogs.[The Coolest!]

- Your mother spreads herself for camels.
- Your mother was blinded by gonorrhea.

Getting Off: A Novel of Sex and Violence (Lawrence Block, 2011)

Kitty used to be regularly molested by her father when she was in her early teens. Maybe not really molested because she did enjoy this "education" a lot. In fact, she enjoyed it so much that she killed the old pervert after he had decided to end their "relationship". And while she was at it, she also killed her mother since she was turning a blind eye to this whole affair.

Now she is wandering around the country, getting off on fucking guys and killing them afterwards like a true American serial killer should. No motives or explanations are needed because "This is what I do. This is who I am." Then, out of the blue, approximately around the first third of this 330-page piece of shit, she gets (even more) disturbed when she realises that she has actually left five of her former playmates alive. And we finally get at least something resembling the plot - she feels the urge to find them and fuck them and kill them so "she can be a virgin all over again".

Halfway through this excruciating mess, Rita comes into the picture, and our ladies start some sort of bizarre sexless phone-sex affair. No worries, there will be a happy ending, and our heroine will finally get psychoanalytical revelation that she was just "Fucking and killing her daddy, over and over."  However, I doubt that 'Getting Off' will be part of any Freudian course curriculum anytime soon.

It has a frantic pace as Kitty travels the entire USA killing (and of course fucking) 20+ people, but it never truly takes off. It's just repetitive stuff that doesn't move anywhere. Bodies are piling at a minimum rate of one corpse/chapter. There are a few corpse-less chapters, but they mostly contain just some blabbing about sex (Rita's story). Desperately trying to be shocking and visceral by using language that is too vulgar and "dick jokes" humour.

A notable exception is an episode featuring the unfortunate Graham, who had joined the SLA after having an affair with our Lady of Death. So he cannot be seduced, and this is something that Kitty is most definitely not getting off on. Instead, she's pretty pissed off (see 'cool lines' section of the facts). At least until she realises that she doesn't have to fuck the guy to kill him. She's a bit slow. I was wondering about the necessity of that "rule" from the very beginning.

There are other attempts to spice this thing up. While the episode with a Mormon moron is mildly amusing, one with the veteran soldier doesn't work and is more or less pathetic. Also, introducing three additional serial killers crossing paths with Kitty (on two separate occasions) just makes everything even more confusing and boring.

So let's just finish this. Obviously, the main question here is why? Or why the fuck? To me, Getting Off seems like a result of some sort of joke or bet between Hard Case editor Charles Ardai and Lawrence Block. Something like "let's publish some trash published previously as short stories and see if people will actually go for it". Not sexy, not funny and not violent (except for the scalping scene). Even crap like Money Shot is a masterpiece compared to this.

1.5/5

Facts:

Hero:
Katherine Ann Tolliver, daddy's little soldier. Now at age 23, Kitty the serial fucker and killer

Location:
Criss-crossing the whole USA

Body count: 
A bit hard to sum them all up. Twenty-one are confirmed kills, and I doubt that last guy made it, so let's officially make it 22. There's also a carton of poisoned Marlboros that Kitty smuggles into a prison, and since cigarettes are used for trading, I speculate that a few packs did their intended job for sure. And let us not forget this curious thing called proxy baptism (see facts section 'title'), meaning that Kitty could also be responsible for killing an additional 151 souls!

Dames: 
Kitty aka Kimmie aka Gloria aka Marsha aka Lindsay aka Pamela aka Gloria etc etc etc + Rita aka Ree + Angelica

Blackouts: 
One, resulting from a car crash.

Title: 
Kitty is getting off on fucking and killing people.

And funny enough, on page 212, I've found clarification of the term "New Hope for the Dead", which is, of course, the title of one of Charles Willeford's masterpieces whose meaning escaped me. In fact, I'm still not sure if I got it, as it has to do with Mormons and a thing called proxy baptism (see 'cool lines' below).
 
Cover: 

Nice and sexploitative as the title suggests, but not very accurate. Indeed, there is a scene where she kills a couple, but not with a knife. Gary is done with an icepick, and Angelica is strangled with a scarf. Hermes scarf! By Gregory Manchess.

Cool lines: 
Forget it. Fucking thing was locked up tighter than an SCA member's asshole. 

Did the SCA people know about the GPS? Like, were they okay with him having an authoritative female voice telling him where to go and what to do? Like, couldn't he have a male voice, just to remove another possible occasion of sin?
Fucking moron.

"He was baptized a hundred and fifty-two times."
"He was? Why, for God's sake?"
"Exactly."
"Huh?"
"For God's sake, and for the sake of a hundred and fifty-one poor souls who went through life without being baptized. It's a Mormon thing, Kimmie. It's called proxy baptism."

[From Kitty's marriage vows that she wrote herself under the influence of too much and too strong coffee:]
"...to have and to hold, to love and to cherish, to suck and to swallow, to admit and to welcome into all the openings of my body..."[The Coolest!]

A Dance at the Slaughterhouse (Lawrence Block, 1991)

I liked Matt Scudder's introductory book and decided to give another one a try. After a quick googling, I  got the impression that Dance at the Slaughterhouse is the best of the series. But now, after reading it, I just wonder if my research techniques suck, or maybe the rest of them are so bad. I certainly hope that latter is not true.

Scudder is now 15 years older (I suppose; the first one was published in 1976), and he's no longer drinking. Which is fine (good for him, definitely), but the problem with this sobriety shit is that every few pages, he needs to go to an AA meeting. I'm not sure what purpose this habit serves narrative-wise, but it certainly doesn't help with suspense building. And if you think he had replaced church visits with these AA meetings, you are wrong. But more about that later.

It starts with another of his unofficial employments or favours, as he calls them. He's asked to do one for a young gay man dying of AIDS who's troubled by the death of his sister. It's a kind of perfect murder because even the police know that her husband did it, but they cannot prove it. So far, so good, we are all ready for Matthew to do some kick ass unorthodox investigating.

Not quite. Because, you see, in his spare time, he gets involved in another mystery that includes - please, not again one of those - infamous snuff movies. In our (his) case, these are even more disgusting because the victims are young kids. But still, let's not be too hasty in our judgments and wait for plot(s) to start rolling.

They eventually do, and - surprise, surprise! big fucking spoiler coming up - it turns out they are connected indeed. But they are linked in some totally far-fetched way that doesn't really make any sense when you think about it. But even that is not the biggest flaw.

The biggest flaw is that it simply doesn't move anywhere. Mr Block seems to have some literary complex because he's trying to write next Nobel prize kind of shit and not focusing at all on its "mystery/crime" aspect. He's working much more on dark and depressing atmosphere (which is awesome, btw) and his characters' relationships than on decent plotting. While stuff with Elaine is at least bearable, the whole thing with his buddy Mick is ridiculous. We have this stereotypical, cartoonish Irish hard-drinking gangster with (of course) a big, golden heart, and our AA hero faces these childish moral dilemmas, whether it's cool to hang out with him or not. And at the end, they both go to the church to repent for their sins. Pleeeeese...

Little advice to finish this ranting - just skip the entire 13th chapter (22 pages) because it contains nothing but some buddy-buddy babbling and it's got nothing to do with the plot.

Big disappointment!

2/5

Facts:

Hero:
Matt Scudder, ex-cop, now P.I. freelancer. Unorthodox, even eccentric.

Location: 
New York

Body count: 
Hard to count. 7 definitely (2 good, 5 bad) + one kid most probably + one pimp (but it's not clear whether his killing is related to our story)

AA meetings: 
~25

Dames:
None really, certainly no femme fatales. There's a mysterious leather SM madam, Olga and his call-girl/friend/fuck-buddy Elaine

Cover: 
Dull and not too accurate. It features a celluloid film roll, which is wrong because our snuff movie was found taped on a VHS copy of Dirty Dozen.

Blackouts: 
None. He's not drinking anymore and is too cautious to get beaten.

Cool lines: 
Pete's All-American has been there for generations but remains an unlikely candidate for the National Register of Historical Places. It has never been anything but a bucket of blood.

After we crossed the bridge the silence was only rarely interrupted. Maybe a locker room's like that in the minutes before a championship game. Or maybe not; in sports they don't shoot the losers.

The Burglar in the Closet (Lawrence Block, 1978)

Got this one at the flea market for a couple of Euros. I’m not Block’s biggest fan, but I was totally persuaded by this weird cover. Which, amazingly enough, I cannot find on the internet, so I took a shot of it myself for your viewing pleasure. Its author is a guy named Alan Forster, and after a bit of googling, this could be him.

Back cover quotes Robert Ludlum saying that this is “Light-hearted crime at its very best”. I’m not sure if this light-hearted crap was an actual category back in those days, but I’m positive that nowadays this novel would end up in the so-called “young adults” section of the bookstore instead of “crime”. It’s not bad, and I’ll probably give it to my nephew when he’s 15, but it’s just not my cup of tea. 

It’s centred on this amateurish detective whose day job's a burglar. He gets involved in some far-fetched story of burglary/murder mystery involving his dentist (!), and to make things worse, he gets help from another amateur in the dentist’s secretary (!!). And yes, of course, he scores. 

The main problem is a lack of classical detective work based on logic. Our hero basically cracks the case by getting drunk with a victim's good friend, who supplies him with a list of three men who used to fuck unfortunate Crystal (the victim). They are The Legal Beagle (a lawyer), Grabow the Artist (a painter) and Knobby the Bartender (yes, you’ve guessed it – he’s a bartender), and they become the centre of his investigation and his only suspects (remember Cutie?). He cannot trace one of them, but breaks into the homes of the other two... and, true enough, they are both involved. In the meantime, just to fill in the gaps, I imagine, he must also deal with some good cops, some corrupt cops, and some lawyers (they are all bastards, anyhow). He’s so ridiculously incompetent that he digs himself a hole too deep to get out of, and he even considers hiring a real PI to get him off the hook. I shit you not, here’s a quote: “Maybe I can hire a private detective to investigate this thing professionally. I’m not having much luck as an amateur”. I know, of course, this was meant to be ironic, but to me it’s just pathetic…

I also had a problem with the writing style, which keeps trying to be amusing and witty. It’s not as annoying as Jonny Porkpie’s (nothing is), but I still struggled to finish this without much yawning. At least it is not very long.

2/5

Facts

Hero: 
My name is Bernie Rhodenbarr and I’m a thief and I love to steal. I just plain love it.

Body count: 
4, all pretty uninspiring. For one of them, it’s not even clear if it was murder, an accident, or maybe even suicide.

Dames: 
An ex-wife and a secretary

Location: 

NYC, 70s

Cool lines:

The problem, of course, derived from an offshoot of Parkinson’s Law. A person, be he bureaucrat or burglar, tends to take for a task as much time as is available for it.

The sins of the Fathers (Lawrence Block, 1967)

This is the first one in the still ongoing (approaching 20 books) series of Matt Scudder mysteries, and it’s a bit boring, to be honest. I think it tries too hard to be unusual and original. It builds on this weird premise that it isn’t really a crime novel since there is no crime to start with!? The thing is that our hero has just been hired to uncover the secret past life of a murdered girl, so her stepfather can cope with her death. And our hero is not really a detective, but as he puts it himself: “Private detectives are licensed. They tap telephones and follow people. They fill out forms, they keep records, all of that. I don’t do those things. Sometimes I do favors for people. They give me gifts.”

So he’s not stereotypical by-the-book kind of tough guy (although he kicks one mugger’s ass big time, takes his money and – check this! – breaks four of his fingers one at a time. What a bad ass!). Not much of a ladies' man either, once he cannot even get it up (probably because he’s too involved in the “case”). He’s divorced and has left the police department because he had incidentally killed a little girl, and this still haunts him, so he’s drinking too much and lighting candles in churches and shit like that.

As far as mystery is concerned, things are, of course, not as simple as they appear (they never are in crime books). We get a pretty strong hint somewhere in the middle (as the title wasn’t a big enough spoiler), and the final revelation is anything but shocking.

All in all, I kind of liked it, but there’s simply not enough happening, and it spends far too much time on this guy and not enough on the story. I don’t know, maybe because it’s the first one with Block’s new hero, and he needs a more detailed introduction. Writing is superb, and it really has a bleak, sometimes depressive tone and feel. I’ll definitely check another of Scudder's cases.

3/5

Facts

Hero: 
Matt Scudder, an ex-cop who is now doing favours for people and gets gifts in return.

Location: 
New York, early 70s

Dames: 
Wendy (victim), Marcia (her ex roommate), Trina (Matt’s friend/fuck buddy, I’m not really sure), Elaine (prostitute, also kind of Matt’s friend), Anita (Matt’s ex-wife, but we don’t really get to know her)

Body count: 

3

Cool lines:
Sex – evil, unscrupulous sex – gives certain woman an extraordinary hold upon susceptible men. Man is weakling, Mr Scudder, and he is so often powerless to cope with the awful of an evil woman’s sexuality.

He sat few minutes in silence. I took out my flask and had another drink. Drinking was against his religion. Well, murder was against mine.