Night Train (Martin Amis, 1997)

I was having my Saturday morning newspaper & coffee ritual last week and came across a review of Amis's last book. Glanced through it (it didn't make much of an impression btw) and then took a walk to the city centre to check out the flea market. So, when I saw Night Train selling for 3 euros at the very first stall, it wasn't a coincidence - it was a sign from above demanding that I check it out. And why not? In general, I don't often go for the "serious" authors disguising their stuff into pulpy crime novels. Still, lately, I've been fortunate to pick up lots of great and interesting books from the likes of Sallis, Raymond, Manchette, Garnier, and a few others.

Night Train starts pretty cool and, as much as it's trying not to be, somehow formulaic. Jennifer, the daughter of the local police chief, had committed suicide, and our hero, Detective Mike, is asked by her heartbroken father to investigate the matter. And we can categorise this "matter" as murder since there were three bullets found in Jennifer's brain. For some reason (that I still can't get), the investigation must not be official, so we have a nice police procedural mixed with the classic PI type of story. There's also some personal crap thrown into the mix; as a kid, Jennifer read stories to Mike when she (yep, Mike is a female) went through the alcohol detox.

So far, so good. It's a bit wild (jumping from past to present tense, mixing dialogues with narration), but still pretty straightforward, and it seemed to me it had some purpose and goal. The language used is a little weird and definitely over artificial; there's no way in hell that a tough police cop like Mike, who had solved over 100 murders and is about to retire, would talk and contemplate like she does. But still, it's cool, and some of the lines are actually pretty fucking funny (see 'dames' section of the facts).

But quite early came a "Wait a minute, this is bullshit!" moment. The whole thing doesn't move anywhere, makes less and less sense as it goes on and becomes dull, pretentious babbling about the meaning of life. "Witty" jokes and "profound" observations became way too repetitive and distracting, and it seemed to me that they were simply used to hide the author's inability to express himself concisely. And at the same time, the story steadily falls apart. I was sure that the main twist would be some pathetic mind fuck about having no twist at all. It doesn't exactly turn out like that, but close enough: the big twist is that whodunnit is not actually revealed. Or maybe it was (Trader would be my guess); to be honest, I wasn't paying much attention towards the end and just wanted to finish it off.

Written for the reading clubs and dinner parties. Probably not bad, but definitely not for me...

2.5/5 (adding an extra half point for that "fuck him, give him five bucks" mailman story)

Facts:

Hero: 
I'm a police. I'm a police and my name is Detective Mike Hoolihan.

A fourty-four-year-old police with coarse blonde hair, bruiser's tits and broad shoulders, and pale blue eyes in her head that have seen everything.

Location: 
Second-echelon  American city, mildly famed for its Jap-financed Babel Tower, its harbors and marinas, its university, its futuristically enlightened corporations (computer software, aerospace, pharmaceuticals), its high unemployment, and its catastrophic inner-city taxpayer flight.

You are probably as confused as I was...

Body count: 1

Dames: 
Jennifer - Man, what a bod: At twenty, she looked like a model in an ad for those cereals that taste great but also make you shit right.  [Fatale]

Unconscious moment: /

Title: 
Night train keeps getting mentioned repeatedly in various contexts, symbolising all kinds of shit. The first time we come across it, it is actually pretty funny. Our hero's apartment is located near the railway line, so because of the noise it causes, the night train is "something that keeps my rent down". But pretty soon, the good old night train starts to symbolise everything and nothing, and eventually, I got bored with trying to decipher all that crap. Judge it for yourself:

Suicide is the night train, speeding your way to darkness. You won't get there so quick, not by natural means. You buy your ticket and you climb on board. That ticket costs everything you have. But it's just a one-way. This train takes you into the night, and leaves you there. It's the night train.
 
Cover: 
X-ray of a gun. Somehow related to the story (gun definitely is), but the whole concept is another one of those metaphorical nonsense. You know, like seeing the truth through things, etc. 

Notable cover blurbs: 

This one, quoting Sunday Independent, deserves to be mentioned because it's so totally ridiculous and misleading: 

Tough, noir, Chandleresque...

Come on, guys, what the fuck!?!??

Cool lines:   
Not even Italian police are sentimental about full moons. You're looking at a workload increase twenty-five to thirty-five per cent. A full moon on Friday night and you're talking a two-hour backup in the emergency room and long lines trailing in and out of Trauma.

The Switch (Elmore Leonard, 1978)

Last Wednesday marked the first anniversary of Elmore Leonard's death, and what better way to pay the maestro respect than reading one of his novels? Had this one sitting on my shelf for several weeks, and it was the perfect time to check it out.

It's a story about the kidnapping that goes wrong (as all abductions eventually do). This time, the fuck-up happens because the husband doesn't really want his wife back (furthermore, he prefers her dead) and also because, to be honest, Louis and Ordell are hardly some hard-core professional bad-ass criminal types.

A bit crazy, full of weird black humour that fluctuates between thriller and (almost) comedy. At times, pretty unreal and even unbelievable, but the story somehow holds water. At least I couldn't find any major plot holes or inconsistencies.

It's, of course, all about the characters. Nobody (except Willeford) does them better than Elmore Leonard. Once again, it was such a joy to follow their introductions (or audition as Leonard used to call this stage) and further developments. It felt like the author really enjoyed them and had a lot of fun moving them around like figures on a chessboard, disposing of them (Marshall) or introducing some new ones (Melanie). My only minor criticism would be regarding Frank because he really is a bit too cartoonish and stereotyped asshole yuppie.

Not Leonard's best work, but still immensely enjoyable.

4/5

Facts:

Hero: 
No central hero in this one. At first, I liked Ordell (probably because Samuel L. Jackson was so cool in Jackie Brown), then I started to cheer for Mickey (she liked George Carlin btw), but in the end, I think Melanie won over them all.

Location: 
Detroit. Shortly the Bahamas

Body count: 

1 + one critically wounded police officer

Dames: 
Mickey, the tennis wife and double-crossing Melanie

Blackouts: 

/

Title: 
Kidnappers Louis and Ordell refer to the exchange of Mickey for the money as "The Switch". But it could also mean the switch inside Mickey because once she was kidnapped, "She felt alive. Excited but calm."

Cover: 
Dark and sinister photo showing kidnapped Mickey. Pretty accurate with her wearing the white blouse and black tape over her eyes. It depicts a scene in which kidnappers first contact Frank with the ransom demand.

Cool lines: 

/

The Cockeyed Corpse (Richard S. Prather, 1964)

Private detective Shell Scott gets an assignment to investigate whether the death of an actress on the set of an obscure nudie flick was an accident or a murder. Being bored in the hot L.A., our hero doesn't waste any time to depart for the filming location in Arizona, expecting to have a weekend of paid vacation in the company of the remaining female cast. This, of course, won't happen because we know in advance some hoods are hanging around the ranch where the production takes place. And to make things clear to Shell (plus to make action go), two cowboys attempt to shoot him upon his arrival.

So we have a plot, but unfortunately, it doesn't thicken much from here on. There's almost no mystery or suspense: bad guys try to kill Shell, and beautiful women try to seduce Shell while he tries to prevent them from being killed. Initially, this setup of hard-boiled city gangsters and sexploitation movie-makers confined in a rural background is both interesting and unusual, but it soon starts to fade out.

Weak, hard to swallow plot and pretty unbelievable twist aside, that book's style was what annoyed me the most about this one. It's only 140 pages long, but it doesn't move anywhere. Everything takes ages (that fucking rodeo needs ten pages to complete), and Prather spends more effort on describing trivial stuff than letting the story breathe and develop with any kind of decent pace. I also had a bit of a problem with the dialogues. They are pretty lame and without some cool slang and/or cynical one-liners that one would expect from the hard-boiled PI and city hoodlums (Shell at one stage calls them sub-humans, which I found pretty funny).

Also, I didn't care much about our hero. He's a kind of Mike Hammer wannabe - maybe tough enough (he kicks the shit out of the three assholes quite efficiently!) but definitely pretty pathetic at his attempts to be witty or street-wise and failing miserably as a womaniser. Check out his thoughts on four girls who were trying to seduce him:

They stuck closer together than was normal, certainly than was fair. They were going to barbecue together, to the dance together, and - I got the impression - to bed together, which was certainly a sickening impression.

Huh?

I don't know. It's an unusual blend of cosy and hard-boiled crime that was written for a younger audience and hasn't aged very well. I'm sure some people love this kind of stuff, but I'm not one of them.

2.5/5

Facts:

Hero: 
Shell Scott, PI

Location:
"Sun and Sage" Dude Ranch, Arizona.

Body count: 

8 plus "one only half live".

Dames: 
April, blonde Delise, redheaded Choo Choo, black-haired and black-eyed Zia.

Blackouts: 
Two of them. This is not bad for such a short novel, but it's not great for a guy who calls himself the unconscious detective. The first one is more than decent:

I don't know how it is that you can know that you've been sapped, when the fact of the matter is that a split second after being sapped you're unconscious. I guess it's just that my mind works with lightning speed - because I knew I'd been sapped.

But then (as usual) it goes on for another hefty paragraph and spoils everything. Coming out is described pretty well, too, in a classic Marlowe-ish manner:

I was climbing out of a dark, slippery hole, and soft tentacles of blackness wrapped themselves around me, holding me back.

But here, too, it just continues to go on and on. 

The second one is not as good. He simply falls off the wild horse.
 

Title: 
The main villain stages his fake death by killing some unfortunate dude and later refers to him as the "cockeyed corpse" because his face was smashed after falling from a height of seventeen stories. When Shell finishes off this villain asshole, he uses the same expression to describe his final state.

Cover: 
Surviving girls (see 'dames' section) of "The Wild West" movie cast who are running for cover when an attempt on April's life was being made. So it's pretty accurate, except for those tree branches covering their boobs.

Cool lines:  
I knew him. I also knew the gun in his left hand, an unusual gun, a Beretta Brigadier, 9 mm. Luger.
The Brigadier is an automatic pistol which fires nine shots. In the right place, one would be enough. And he had it aimed at one of the right places.

Daddy Cool (Donald Goines, 1974)

I was a bit disappointed with this one. I expected our hit-man hero to be a cool, Shaft-like badass, but he's more like an ageing guy having many problems with his family while running his pool hall. He is not very cool either - he loses his coolness when returning home from one of his "jobs" and finds his 16-year-old spoiled daughter Janet making out in a car with a young and "thoroughly unlikable" pimp, Ronald. Daddy Cool gets mad, slaps her, and as a result, she's so pissed at him that she packs her shit and runs away with the unlikable one. Soon, she ends up whoring on the streets of Motor City, and daddy is not too happy about it.

But he's not too upset about it either, because he's still unable to locate her two weeks later. Is he simply not streetwise anymore? Hard to say, but one thing is sure. Instead of looking for her, he takes another job in LA because it pays so well (25 grand). Greedy bastard! And an asshole too. When he finally returns, he releases his frustrations and rage on his two step-sons, who were given the ultimatum to either find her or move out of his house. I'm not saying that two of them aren't good-for-nothing assholes, but I think he was a bit unfair to them.

It gets better and more dynamic towards the end with a somewhat Shakespearean, tragic, bloody family drama climax.

It's a quick and entertaining read, but I didn't notice any particular style in it. It does not have much of the ghetto noir feeling I had expected, plain dialogues lacking street slang, a sloppy and pretty unbelievable story, hardly any characterisation (especially Janet, which is done poorly), and a bit too exploitative (five pages of sex scene). The whole thing just feels like it was put together hastily. Which,  after reading Goines' biography, can very well be the case. Apparently, he wrote mainly to support his heroin addiction and published 9 books in 1974 alone. Amazing, big fucking respect!

3/5

Facts:

Hero:
Larry Jackson, aka Daddy Cool, "one of the deadliest killers the earth had ever spawned".

Location:
Detroit mostly, except for the two jobs that Daddy Cool takes in Michigan and LA

Body count: 

7 + one German police dog

Dames: 
Daddy Cool's daughter Janet. She is an innocent 16-year-old girl when we first meet her, but two weeks later, she celebrates her 17th birthday street-walking and "doing tricks".

Blackouts: 
None. This is strange because he's savagely beaten when a gang of six mugs him. 

Title: 

See 'hero'

Cover: 

Pretty standard 

Cool lines:  
Pimping was his game, and no good pimp would allow some bitch's daddy to blow his game.[The Coolest!]

Yes, there would be hell to pay, and some crying. But casket buying would be the order of the day in the near future.

Moth (James Sallis, 1993)

I'm not sure why, but I expected the second Lew Griffin book to be more classically structured than the first one. Don't get me wrong: I loved The Long-Legged Fly, and all I'm saying is that strictly speaking, it isn't exactly a crime/mystery novel; it's more about putting Lew Griffin and his ugly yet poetic New Orleans on the map of crime novels. I was also hoping that LaVerne would be involved in some way in the next one. I usually don't fall for the "hooker with a heart of gold" cliche, but she was such a great character.

Nope. Moth simply continues where Fly had ended. Chronologically as well as stylishly. A pretty fragmented and wild storyline that frequently (especially at the beginning) jumps back and forth in time and digresses from the main plot to Griffin's private life. And since the main plot (can we even call it a "case"?) involves a personal matter of finding LaVern's junkie daughter, these flashbacks and episodes aren't distracting and complement the main story nicely. And btw - my heroine died sometime between Fly and Moth. Damn, I raise this pint of Guinness to her memory.

Great and enjoyable read, masterfully written. Maybe a bit repetitive at times (I could do without a few book references for sure) and definitely too fucking depressing. I have nothing whatsoever against the realism (everyone should read Pedro Juan Gutiérrez btw!), but stuff like a guy fucking his one-year-old daughter and afterwards slamming her head against the wall "so she wouldn't tell"... is a bit too much, even for me.

So I need some time for this one to sink in, and then I'm definitely resuming with following Lew Griffin's fascinating life story.

4.5/5

Facts:

Hero:
Lew Griffin, (ex? part-time?) detective, writer and college professor these days

"He told me if he sent you out to the corner for a paper, chances would be about fifty-fifty of his actually getting one, but that he'd trust you with his life. One of your stranger character references."

Location: 
New Orleans, Clarksville, Memphis

Body count: 
Hard to measure it this time. There were quite a few dead people, from a crack baby to some anonymous girl gang-raped and left dead in a dark alley. But none of them is really connected to the case. Because there really is no case...

Dames:
Alouette, LaVerne's daughter.

Blackouts: 
He's shot in the arm and passes out.

Title: 
Another poetic one, this time from the verses of  James Wright:
Further, the dark moths
Crouch at the sills of the earth, waiting.

Not sure how to decipher it.  A simple explanation would be that the moth symbolises a lost person (Lew or Alouette) that is irresistibly drawn to something they cannot escape and which will eventually burn them to death. 

Cover: 
Why do women look so incredibly cool when smoking in b&w photos? This one reminds me a lot of Anna Karina from Vivre Sa Vie.

Cool lines:  
"Ain't here," he said after a moment.
"Thank you. But allow me to make an assumption; possibly unwarranted, from that. To wit: that she was, at some unspecified point in the past, been here, though she is not presently."
"Say what?"

I stepped back into the living room and discovered that the .38 was no longer under the cushion. It was now in someone's hand, and pointed at me.

Copp For Hire (Don Pendleton, 1987)

She stepped into his office. Beautiful. Hot!... and dead two pages later. Sleazy, dirty cops. Another corpse. His office and the victim's apartment ransacked (still only on page 25!). Strip club. Strippers (obviously). Sex. Car chase. More corpses. Dirty politician (it runs all the way to Washington) and his psychopathic henchman (worse than that he's a psycho with a license). Even more corpses and another car chase. Local Chinese mafia, white slavery, pornography, S&M, blackmail...

So it's a formulaic thriller featuring an ex-cop becoming a PI with his own moral and justice code. His client is killed before he even starts the investigation, but he somehow feels obliged to her in a good ol' Marlowe-ish manner ("Came to me for help. Didn't give her any - should have. I am upset about that. Very upset."). But similarities with the classical detective figure end at this point because his modus operandi is to basically (and usually violently) just stir shit and see what comes floating on the water. And he does that in some style indeed! He's such a bad-ass that Pendleton doesn't even bother to describe the fight with six (!!) bouncers in any detail. He simply "puts them down gently". The fight with three cops is more detailed, and it takes up one whole page. It's well worth it since it's extremely brutal with stuff like "bones protruding from the sleeve of his jacket".

Very hard-boiled and a bit noir-ish, which is always a winning combination. Lightning pace (five corpses and a sixth near miss in 12 hours), but still easy to follow. Pretty much non-stop action is nicely complemented with somehow crazy narration. It's told in the first person (as all good PI mysteries should be, btw), but every now and then, it switches from the past to present time, and on a few occasions, our hero even addresses readers directly. I found that a bit annoying at first, but got used to it.

I liked it, but unfortunately, it all goes to shit in the last act. Like Pendleton simply got bored with this whole thing and decided to quickly wrap it up instead of adding a twist or two. The deal that Copp makes with the local authorities (being the catalyst, maybe, to shake this thing off center) doesn't make much sense, the agreement with the local mobster is kind of silly, and the final shootout... well, it's not exactly a shootout at all.

But cool stuff anyway. I'll definitely pick up some other Copp stuff.

3/5

Facts:

Hero: 
Joe Copp, PI

"No, I - you see... you are a private detective, aren't you?"
The lettering on the door says that. Well, what it says is Copp For Hire, which is also what my business cards say and what the godawful expensive yellow pages ad says. A small conceit. I was a public cop for eighteen years. Still think of myself that way except that now I have private sponsors.

Location: 
L.A. and Honolulu

Body count: 
7, including an innocent old night watchman but excluding (at least) "four brutal killings in the last 12 months"

Dames: 
Belinda Buckaroo aka Bewitching Belinda aka Linda Shelton - Age twenty-five, blond all over and beautiful all over the full five feet and ten inches... Bright, sharp, well-spoken and poised. Working on a PhD in behavioural psychology. Also, the madame of the high-class hookers 'club.

Blackouts: 

None. This is pretty amazing considering some fights Copp is involved in and his lack of sleep. In the first 24 hours of the case, he sleeps only two hours, and his next (and last) rest is during the five-hour flight from LA to Hawaii.

Title: 
See 'Hero' section

Cover: 
Standard (and dull) thriller pocketbook paperback two-section type cover. The upper one displays the author's name in giant letters and the title. Below is a beautiful lady and Dirt Harry kind of Magnum. Can't see much relevance to the story.

Cool lines: 
"Joe. When are you going to give up those goddamned cigarettes? They cause heart disease, emphysema, cancer - they'll even make you impotent.
I said, "I never heard that."
"Heard what?"
"Impotent."
"Oh yeah. Anything that needs good blood circulation to function properly. Nicotine constricts the blood vessels. Been having trouble lately getting it up?"
"Getting it down," I said.

"You will be the second to die. Right after him. Understand that? It's not a threat; it's a commitment."[The Coolest!]

I told her, "I'm expensive."
"How expensive?"
"Just like a hooker," I replied. "Hundred dollars an hour plus expenses."
She said, "Jesus," and bit her lip. Then I got the first smile out of her. Not much, but a wry little twist of the lips. "Cheap hooker," she said.
I smiled back, "Well, I don't give as much. What do you want me to do for you?"

A Bullet for Cinderella (John D. MacDonald, 1955)

The disc jockey stopped and whistled softly. "How about that, folks? They give me this stuff to read and sometimes I read it and don't even listen. But that's a hot one. That one can grab you. Bodies under concrete. Cars in lakes. Suicides that aren't suicides. A red-headed gal and an ex-Marine. Man, that's a crazy mixed-up deal they've got down there in Hillston."

I'm not the biggest fan of urban noir. To be honest, I cannot even remember anything of that genre - not written by masters like Cain, Thompson and Woolrich - that I haven't read recently. But I do have one memorable now, it's MacDonald's Cinderella.

It starts phenomenally and continues steadily, building up suspense and mystery as it gradually adds characters and events from the past. Everything works, from the tight and smartly evolving plot to superior characterisation. Our guy is not a typical anti-hero driven by greed. He's just another messed-up kid trying to get his shit together after spending some rather unpleasant time in a Korean war prisoners' camp. Written beautifully, using pretty poetic yet straightforward language (see 'Unconscious' section).

Excellent stuff, but just when it was supposed to switch into the final gear, I was a bit disappointed. When our hero unravels the mystery, I was sure there was another twist coming (like Toni and Fitz scheming some shit together), but it turns out that Tal's conclusions were, in fact, correct, so the last third of the novel turns into a more or less standard thriller.

4/5

Facts:

Hero:
Tal Howard, an ex-soldier returning from the Korean War and trying to find himself again.

Location: 
Hillston - "It's more town than city. There isn't much of a transient population. Everybody seems to know everybody. It's a pretty good place." Probably fictitious since I cannot find it on Google Maps.

Body count: 

6

Dames: 
Our titular heroine Antoinette Rasi, aka Toni Raselle, aka Cindy, aka Cinderella - Feral look. Gypsy look. A mature woman so alive she made the others in the room look two dimensional. [Fatale]

Ruth is Toni's opposite -  "This was a for-keeps girl... This was a girl you could hurt, a girl who would demand and deserve utter loyalty." So, obviously, she's a pretty dull and single-dimensional character. I'd guess MacDonald used her to exemplify Tal's divided and messed-up psyche. Or something.

There's another one from the past, but we don't get a chance to know her better. Which is unfortunate because Eloise apparently used to be a "lush, petulant, amoral and discontented wife".

Blackouts: 
He gets ambushed and knocked off: "Pain blossomed red behind my eyes, a skyrocket roaring was in my ears and I felt myself fall into darkness. A few pages later, he faints again when being interrogated.
 

Title: 
Cool sounding but not very accurate. Also, a pretty big fucking spoiler.
 
Cover: 
Unusual because it doesn't depict a specific scene from the book. Instead, it portrays an imaginary one from the past with young Toni sitting in front of the miserable river shack where she grew up. Cute and already sexy in an innocent way, but already hinting at the "feral, gipsy" look. Although not taking place in the present, it makes a lot of sense because it explains why Toni became a "fancy whore" later (see the 'cool lines' section below). 

The Sniper mark over it spoils everything. It's just ridiculous. Stuff like this belongs to spy thrillers... But I need to give credit to the publisher for deciding to keep the original cover art (made by George Gross) and not using some generic one.

When searching for the cover picture to post here, I came across this amazing blog that posts exclusively covers of MacDonald books. Great idea, fantastic content and really cool and interesting comments. Highly recommended! And I just couldn't resist borrowing one for Cinderella - it's one of the coolest I've ever seen, and it really does capture the mood (and actual scene) of the book.

Cool lines:  
"Maybe you admitted too fast that it was money, Tal. I am noted for my fondness for money. It pleases me. I like the feel of it and the smell of it and the look of it. I'm nuts about it. I like all I can get, maybe because I spent so much time without any of it. A psychiatrist friend told me it was my basic drive. I can't ever have too much." [Fatale]