Money Shot (Christa Faust, 2008)

This is just a pathetic piece-of-shit cheap pulp. Cannot really find a good way to categorise it; maybe calling it something like “hard-boiled sexploitation wanna be” isn’t far from the truth. The story is straightforward – money gets stolen, and a bunch of bad guys chase an innocent girl to get it back. It’s all pretty silly and predictable, but this is (still) not a problem, as we are used to those, and sometimes they do turn out to be okay or at least bearable.

The problematic aspect of Money Shot comes from its sexploitation angle. Its background is the porn industry, and everything in the book is linked to it. Not only the characters, but every single observation, dialogue, situation … The Author assumes that we are all totally fascinated with the dark side of the porn industry, and she portrays it as hell on earth, full of white slavers, where human life isn’t worth a dime. This would probably make sense back in the 70s when porn took off, but I find it hard to believe that these days someone would kill 10+ people for just 100 grand.

It starts as a kind of “innocent and clueless guy gets into a mess” mystery, but it soon completely loses its plot. Our poor heroine is beaten to a pulp, raped, shot and left for dead and yet for some reason she doesn’t contact the police!? And besides such obvious nonsense, we need to accept gaps in our narrator’s story like these: “I have no idea how I got away from the phone, but I did. I also had no idea how Malloy found me, but he did.” So – in short – it quickly turns into a ridiculous thriller where bodies just keep piling up, accompanied by the narrator’s “witty” comments about the porn industry. It ends with another cliché as our Angel manages to save a bunch of women from white slavery…

Characterisation is next to non-existent; we can tell who the good guys (and girls) and bad guys are the moment they are introduced. Writing is simplified to a maximum; I would say that the whole vocabulary consists of a few hundred words. I also had some trouble with its style. It is too masculine, as if Christa Faust is trying to prove that she can write even tougher crime prose than her male colleagues.

I like pulp trash in general, but this one is just too much, really. While reading it, I just couldn’t shake off the feeling that the author wrote it just to sell it to Hollywood and make another one of those Tarantino-esque extravaganzas. Just put together lots of action, sex, violence, killings, snappy dialogues, cheap humour, shady Eastern European characters and … and that’s it really. Story, what story!? A simple revenge plot will do just fine, and there’s no need for a solid story as long as you’ll be able to cast Angelina Jolie for the Angel’s role. 

2/5

Facts:

Hero:
Angel Dare, ex porn star. Now running a "modelling" agency.

Location: 
L.A., pornography capital

Body count: 

14

Dames:
There are a few other porn stars (victims), but our hero is so absorbed in herself that they are hardly relevant.

Cover: 
Completely off target, but this is probably because the book itself is titled totally inappropriately. We all know what a money shot is, and there aren't many of them here. Also, Angel cuts and bleaches her hair right at the beginning... By Glen Orbik.

Blackouts:
She gets knocked out twice and stuffed into a car's trunk.

Cool lines:
I hate malls. They're like strip clubs for women. All tease and sparkle and the empty promise that if you just drop enough cash, somehow you'll be fulfilled. 

Beard. Ponytail. Beer gut. Tattoos. He looked like one of the first three guys the hero has to fight before he can get to the real bad guy.[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.

Black Money (Ross Macdonald, 1966)

It starts slowly, in a classic style. Archer is hired by a jealous high society youngster to dig up some dirt on a mysterious French aristocrat, to whose charms and influence his former fiancée had succumbed. But of course, things are not simple, and the sinister past soon starts to catch up with the present in the idyllic Southern California. Skeletons crawl out of the closets and all the usual ingredients will come to life: fucked up families, sexual repressions, greed, Las Vegas gangsters (btw Black Money is a term for money laundering in casinos), messed-up academics types and so on.

The story soon gets pretty convoluted (as it's supposed to) with some cool twists, but at the same time, it is really easy to follow. And there's just enough of the action that the intriguing mystery is perfectly balanced with thriller. Ending is cool, filled with emotions and some moral dilemmas. Far from a simple matter of whodunit.

Characters are never simple black/white, good/bad, and they are described to perfection, especially in the introductions, which are hilarious. I really liked the old man and our villain/main suspect, but the star here is undoubtedly our favourite P.I. This was his 13th appearance, and by now his persona is shaped and polished to perfection. He's tough, smart, witty, cynical and not too sentimental. Just tired of all the dirt he'd dug out: "It was moral hardship for me to walk away from an unclosed case. … I think in my nighttime loneliness I’d fathered imaginary son, a poor fat foolish son who ate his sorrow instead of drinking it."

It's a total masterpiece. Not so much for the complex and clever plotting but mostly for its execution. So elegant, natural and effortless. Stuff like this separates crime novels from simple mystery pulps and masters from mediocre authors. Simply flawless and mandatory re-reading!

5/5

Facts:

Hero: 
Lew Archer, P.I.

Location: 
Montevista, Southern California, where "Almost anything can happen here. Almost everything has.It's partly the champagne climate and partly, to be frank, the presence of inordinate amount of money."

Body count: 

3

Dames: 
Virginia Fablon. She is the reason for the whole thing to start, although she's not playing a major role once she's introduced.

Cover: 
Nice, although maybe a bit too arty for my taste.Got nothing really to do with the plot.

Blackouts: 
None, he's too cool and capable to get knocked out.

Cool lines: 
I could easily quote half of the novel; these are just a few of the really cool ones:

I caught the housekeeper glaring at the highball and the bottle as if they represented everything she hated. She had violent black eyes, and she looked like a good hater.

She didn’t believe me. She looked like a woman who had stopped believing almost everything except the numbers on bills, the price tags on clothes and people.

Home is the Sailor (Day Keene, 1953)

This is quality, really good stuff. Maybe because its style belongs to some different times, or maybe because writing is so good, but I just couldn’t put it down. Or maybe it is because it is just weird and totally predictable, but at the same time, you have no idea what the next chapter will bring.

It starts conventionally with Swede Nelson just coming off the ship, finishing his last job, and planning to settle down on some farm in Minnesota with a girl he’s going to marry. So, of course, he goes to a gambling joint, gets drunk and gets into a fight. So far so good, it does get a bit strange when some dame saves him and his money without apparent reason (they don’t have sex). And then things go really weird and wild because in just three days our couple gets madly in love and decides to get married. And, oh yes, in the process, they do kill one guy.

So we have classical set-up with widow femme fatale + sucker + corpse that need to disappear. What is really great and original is that our hero knows all that and still doesn’t fuck off out of the town. He feels he’s trapped in this vortex without a way out and basically just heavily drinks rum while waiting for the inevitable. 

The story takes its time and goes very slowly, and sends just enough warning signs (loved the one when she squashes a bee in the car!). In the meantime, a few characters are introduced (local law enforcement, a few shady helpers at the inn she owns), and some dark mystery from the past appears every now and then in the local newspaper. Just enough to pay attention…  

Superb writing - simple, tight and stylish without being too over the top. Great plotting and suspense with a good mixture of mystery, drama, thriller and hard-boiled ending. Plus hot women and some sex, just the way we like it!

4.5/5

Facts:

Hero: 
Nelson Swen, aka Swede, police description: “Age 33, Build: Husky, Hair: Yellow, Eyes: Blue, Height 6’2”, Weight 225, Descent: Scandinavian, Occupation: Seaman”

Dames: 
Miss Corliss Mason, after Swede marries her I guess we can call her Ms Corliss Neslon. Sophia Palanka, a mysterious stripper, wanted for murder. Mamie, a cute brunette from the Inn

Body count: 
4 (1 in the past, 3 during our story)

Location: 
California, near San Diego + briefly in Tijuana, Mexico. 1951

Cool lines:
I sat up on the edge of the bunk and opened one eye, cautiously. The first thing I saw was vitreous china, a washbasin, and a stool without a seat. I was in four-by-seven cubicle. Three sides of the cubicle were solid steel. There were bars on the fourth side.

I was glad he had one (handkerchief). It would be something to stuff down his throat after he and I had finished our talk.

The Wounded and the Slain (David Goodis, 1955)

I was tricked into buying this one by the front cover, saying that the author wrote Dark Passage, and of course, being published by the one and only Hard Case Crime. Some of their rediscovered and republished stuff is just amazing, but unfortunately, this one is not one of them. And when I think a bit harder, I must admit I never really liked Dark Passage that much, also...

It starts okay with a drunken guy contemplating suicide in a bar. So you think there must be something sinister in his past, some fucked up crime that he had committed. We pretty soon realise we are in Jamaica, so there’s a possibility of some espionage cover-up secret operation. And there’s a dame on the cover, and you expect her to walk in any moment. Because they almost always do.

Well, nothing of the above turns out to be true. He’s basically drinking himself to death because he is unhappy with his life. He’s unhappy with his life because his job sucks (no wonder; he’s a Wall Street scum) and because his wife is frigid. She’s frigid because she used to be molested as a kid, but tries to push those memories deep into her subconscious. In the meantime - in her present conscious state - she’s trying to decide whether to have an affair with some guy who’s also staying at the same hotel as they are. But back to our hero – we learn that he’s also tormented because a hooker back home fell in love with him and killed herself because he didn’t return her feelings. So now he drinks. 

This finally (after app 150 pages) brings us to a crime - accidental death of a street mugger trying to rob our drunk!??! And right after we get a slim hope of some action and development, this thing really starts to fall apart. Because, for some reason not very clear to me, he doesn’t report this shit to the police, and so he gets blackmailed by some local asshole. And this leads to more moral dilemmas, inner struggles, family shit and so on.

Why was this published by Hard Case Crime? Fuck me if I know. I’m not saying they should publish just hard-boiled stuff; Nobody’s Angel was original and not bad at all, for example. But this is just depressing, messy melodrama crap that doesn’t move anywhere. Writing is good, but very bleak and passionless, which is probably intentional in order to reflect the atmosphere. There are sections totally lacking any dialogue at all, and we need to struggle through this guy's (or her) whining. Must admit I was tempted a few times to just skip a paragraph or two.

Not good, not bad, just boring and definitely not my cup of tea.

2/5

Facts:

Hero: 
James Bevan, 37. A customer's man for a Wall Street investment house. Averages $275 a week.

Location: 
Kingston, Jamaica

Body count:
A hoodlum gets himself killed in self-defence while trying to rob our hero. So technically there is a body count of one, but somehow it doesn't really count...

Dames:
A frigid wife, a hooker with a golden heart and an overweight owner of a bar. They all play some kind of role, but none is very pivotal. No femme fatale here, I'm afraid.

Cover: 
It does catch the spirit of a novel. Our hero spends most of his time drinking and contemplating his relationship with his wife. She spends her time waiting for him and contemplating having an affair. I think her facial expression is way better than his. By Glen Orbik.

Blackouts: 
A few, but they are all caused by excessive drinking.

Cool lines: 

/

Vanishing Ladies (Ed McBain,1957)

I was never really a big fan of McBain, but I had read recently The Gutter and the Grave and really liked it. So I was hoping for some more of that and gave a try to Vanishing Ladies that I’ve found second-hand in a local bookstore for a couple of Euros. Must admit that it being pretty short and not taking place in that damn 87^th Precinct also helped to decide a bit.

And I wasn’t lucky this time, unfortunately, because it is just an average mystery not worthy of a great master’s signature. It feels like he did it quickly for fun or maybe in an urge to fulfil some contract or shit like that.

Plot is somehow a familiar Frantic variation. There’s a couple on their vacation visiting an unfamiliar location/environment, and she gets abducted while everyone surrounding her, confused hubby, pretends she didn’t exist in the first place. In this case, our unfortunate hero is a tough NYC policeman, which makes his confusion and lack of ability to control the situation even worse. The plot soon thickens, of course. There’s a mysterious prostitute, corrupted police, a dodgy brothel at the town’s outskirts, our hero gets help from his cop friends, and also another sidekick, and we naturally get some corpses.

It sounds better than it actually is. The major problem I had was that it didn’t really hold water. Without giving away too much, let’s just say – in economic jargon - that reasons for all the committed crimes and efforts for covering them simply don’t outweigh their potential financial gains. Maybe it the whole setup would be staged in the big city and would be controlled by some almighty mafia I would find it believable.

Also didn’t like the narration. The whole story is told in a flashback as a court testimony, which is just ridiculous when you think about it. Maybe McBain considered this approach inspiring or tried to add a new touch to the classical detective first-person telling style, but it just doesn’t work. There are too many dialogues (and good ones, it needs to be said!) and personal observations to make it consistent and narration fluid. Plus, there’s another testimony in the middle of the book from the hero’s cop friend, and it just adds to the overall confusion. 

So it’s not bad, but also not very good. Will give good old Ed a few more chances for sure.

2.5/5

Facts:

Hero: 
NYC policeman on vacation, Phillip Colby. For several chapters, his role as a narrator is taken over by his friend, cop Anthony Mitchell, so I guess it has two heroes.

Location: 
Sullivan’s Corner near Davistown, 4 hours of driving from NYC. Place that “did not laugh very much.” Present time, which would be late 50s

Body count: 
The victim, her lover and her pimp’s helper. Added bonus is a couple of wounded cops.

Dames: 
His girlfriend/fiancée Ann and hooker Lois are pivotal for the story, but we never really get to meet them. There’s also hooker Blanche and her madam, Stephanie.

Cover: 
My edition was published in 1982 by Penguin, and the cover is totally 80-ish. The upper third is occupied with the author’s name along with the title (name having a larger font than the title) and a smaller tagline, and below is a photograph of a beautiful, half-naked woman. But it is accurate because there is a moment in the book when he walks into his room and a redheaded prostitute dressed in pink underwear is lying on his bed.

Blackouts: 
I felt like a private eye. Only private eyes get hit on the head. 

Cool lines:
“The minute that hits the floor, I dial the local cops,” I said.

The dress hit the floor, and she stepped out of it, grinning. “Ain’t no phone,” she told me.

False Negative (Joseph Koenig, 2012)

I often bitch about how some books are not “crime” enough, and with this one, I certainly got a big dosage of it! We follow this guy, Adam Jordan, who is a crime reporter and fucks up one job big time, but also big time funny and even educational: “Professor Einstein could learn a thing or two from Adam Jordan. It was not impossible to be in two places at the same time, if no one checked.”  Anyways, he then becomes a writer because “we pay better since good crime writers are harder to find than inventive killers.” In one of the numerous sub-plots his editor gets killed so eventually he takes over managing of Real Detective magazine. So, you see, everything is related to crime one way or another so I really cannot complain about it on this occasion.

There is, of course, one main plot, although we are never sure if others are connected. It starts with Jordan finding a beautiful, dead girl on the beach. At first, he’s not too interested, but later, he needs a story for his editor and starts digging into the case. Needles to say that deeper he digs more dirt comes out in the open. And more corpses of (mostly) beautiful women. 

Nothing and nobody is simply black and white here. Everything is gray and in pretty fucking dark shades of gray I might add. That includes our hero who is likeable but nevertheless opportunistic bastard who lives off other people’s misfortunes. We have sleazy photographer, beauty pageant queens with price tags all over them, incredibly cynical (and hysterically funny) editor, hookers, pimps, mobsters etc. Even the only good person freely admits she'll do what it takes to meet the right people. There’s a nice touch at the end when the murderer stoically replies to Jordan that he’s no better or worse than him, as they are all just predators and vultures. I’m sure Raymond Chandler was smiling approvingly when reading this in heaven.

But as brilliant as the story is and colourful as the characters are, for me, the sheer genius of this masterpiece lies in its style. I was amazed to learn that it was published only recently for the first time because the language used and overall atmosphere are totally good-old hard-boiled times. City, of course, is an asphalt jungle, cops are dirty, there’s still racial segregation, and there's lots of jazz. Our hero is a fan and he frequently visits gigs of Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Mingus and others. Louis Armstrong himself even appears in one of the subplots! 

Joseph Koenig is now on my radar.

5/5

Facts:

Hero: 
Adam Jordan, ex-reporter turned pulp writer and editor.

Location: 
1953, Atlantic City for most time, and shortly in New York

Body count: 
7 most likely 8, although 2 are not directly related to the main story

Dames: 
Next Miss America and black (kind of) hooker

Cover: 
Good and pretty accurate. The photographer is an important character of the story, and he does shoot girls nude. I like her facial expression because she’s a bit frightened and not lustful of flirtatious as she’s supposed to. Illustrated by Max Phillips, who is a regular artist of Hard Case Crime books, and I think this one, together with Ed McBain’s The Gutter and the Grave, is his best.

Cool lines:
Don’t bother about the suspect, if she’s the dog you say she is. Describe her as being unconventionally beautiful. 

Like most mid-size east coast dailies the Press gave little ink to Negroes. Sure, Negro criminals preying on whites made for good copy. But if you played out the disappearance of a Negro girl, you would be expected to cover her friends’ weddings, and the birth of their children, and to make space on the obituary page, too. The readers did not want integration with their morning coffee. 

She felt tears welling, but wouldn’t let them come. They were a part of herself she was able to keep him from having.