Perchance to Dream (Robert B. Parker, 1991)

The style is okay, and there are a few moments of brilliance (see the hero and cool lines sections). However, sometimes I thought that Parker tried too hard to emulate Chandler and came up with some genuinely corny dialogue.

The problem is the story. Or lack of it... Marlowe basically breaks the case and finds the bad guys after the first ten chapters (and btw, they are pretty short in this one). And then, for some reason, he keeps calling Vivian, and she keeps whining, and the damn thing doesn't move anywhere. So Parker throws in some Chinatown-like water rights conspiracy nonsense that just doesn't make much sense either.

It's not good, but at least it's bearable. Unlike that abomination of Black-Eyed Blonde published last year.

2/5

Facts:

Hero: 
"You're a private detective," he said. He had one of those Hollywood elocution voices which has no real accent but sounds nearly British, especially if you haven't heard a real one. He sounded like a guy that recited bad poems on the radio.
"When I'm not polishing my yacht," I said.

Location: 
L.A. and fictitious (I think) Neville Valley, 200 miles north of L.A.

Body count:  
4, not counting the unfortunate kitten thrown out the open porthole into the sea by that asshole Simpson.

Dames:

Vivian, still beautiful with eyes nearly coal black and full of heat and a full lower lip that seemed specifically meant to be nibbled on. And still tough:

"I'm not as tough as I look, Marlowe," she said
"If you were as tough as you look", I said, "you'd probably have to be licensed." [Fatale]

And of course, horny and a bit kinky Carmen, still cute as a ladybug but far dumber, with the moral sense of an hyena.

Blackouts: 
Yes, no less than three of them:

...something erupted against the side of my head and the lights coalesced into a brilliant starburst and then blackness into which I slid as peacefully as a drunken seal.

Huh, drunken seal? The second one lacks this kind of imagination and is more or less limited to the use of a comparative (or is it superlative?) of the adjective red:

I couldn't breathe. The reddish haze got darker and redder and finally enveloped me and I plunged into it and disappeared.

The last one lacks any imagination at all. Pretty standard stuff:

Something hit the side of my head and I went back once again to a place I'd been spending too much time in.
 

Title: 
According to Wikipedia, it's another euphemism for dead.

Edition: 
Futura, 1991

Cover: 
She is definitely young Bacall, but the guy looks more like the dude who played Eddie Mars in The Big Sleep. Is it possible that the illustrator was given the wrong film still?

Cool lines: 

"This your car?" the fat cop said.
"Nice huh?" I said. "You want to sit in it?"
"What the hell's that supposed to mean?" the fat cop said.
"Sorry," I said. "I didn't mean to talk so fast."
"You'll be talking fast in the back cell under the big lights in a little while," the fat cop said.
"The smaller the town, the tougher the buttons talk," I said.[The Coolest!]

Pearls are a Nuisance (Raymond Chandler, 1950)

Checked this one out while reading Chandler's letters and watching again the brilliant HBO series with Powers Booth. It's a collection of three short stories and a seminal essay The Simple Art of Murder.

Pearls are a Nuisance (1939)

Not bad, but quite forgettable cosy buddy-buddy nonsense. Probably of interest to Chandler's scholars only.

Finger Man (original story 1934, rewritten with Marlowe in 1950)

Opens with Marlowe testifying against some badass mobster. Besides the killing he's accused of, this guy Manny also seems to have a history of shady dealings with "a big politico, a fixer". Some influential people would prefer Marlowe to stay away from the Grand Jury, and the DA advises him to watch his step. Our main man responds simply by saying "sure" and returns to his office, where he's met by a friend who hires him as a bodyguard for the forthcoming night.

So by the end of the first chapter, the setup is complete. And the two plots merge pretty soon, which is good - I don't like those predictable endings with "surprising" revealings of "unrelated" sub-plots. What follows is a standard classical PI story, featuring gamblers, corrupt politicians, tough guys, and amoral dames.

Good stuff. Also memorable for the first appearance of Bernie Ohls in the Marlowe story.

The King in Yellow (1938)

Royalty from the title is King Leopardi (what a great name!), a jazz bandleader whose wild party is broken up by our hero Steve Grayce, a hotel detective. King has an attitude that matches his "blue" blood and gives plenty of it to Steve:

"Leopardi does what he likes, where he likes, when he likes. Nobody's stopped him yet, gumshoe. Take the air." 
... 
"I never did like house peepers," he sneered. "They smell like public toilets."

He doesn't stop at verbal abuse. The asshole even takes a shot at our hero! So, no wonder Steve throws him out of the hotel. But instead of management's gratitude, he gets canned for mistreating VIP guests. Jobless now, he decides to join the ranks of private investigators, and his first assignment is offered to him practically by itself - when cleaning the room after his fight with Leopardi, he finds a blackmail note in King's wastebasket.

It does take its time to get things going, but I really liked this intro. The story then progresses nicely, introducing some colourful characters (with even crazier names, such as Dolores Chiozza and Jumbo Walters), and everything concludes with an excellent, very surprising ending centred around a family tragedy. I could sense it coming with the old, broken couple and the blind man crying. The sad world indeed is the world of Raymond Chandler, but you enjoy every moment of it.

5/5 [anything written by the Master will always get five stars on this blog]

Facts:

Hero: 
We all know everything about Marlowe, but who is Steve Grayce, the (ex) hotel detective?

Steve frowned at the gun and didn't move. The big man looked him over. "You're tough," he said. "I been in the ring long enough to size up a guy's meat. You're plenty hard, boy. But you ain't as hard as lead. Talk it up fast."

Location: 
L.A.

Body count: 
None in Perils, 8 in Finger Man (half of them are related to the Manny Tinnen affair) and 7 in King

Blackouts: 

There's a pretty funny one in Perils:

I bent over and took hold of the room with both hands and spun it. When I had it nicely spinning I gave it a full swing and hit myself on the back of the head with the floor. This made me lose my balance temporarily and while I was thinking about how to regain it a wet towel began to slap at my face and I opened my eyes.

And a more proper one in Finger Man when Marlowe gets "coshed" from behind:

Then he dropped the cigarette and stopped on it and a quick, light step made faint noise behind me. I was far too late turning.
Something swished and I went out like a light.
 

Edition:  
Pan, 1980

Cover: 
Frank Dorr from Finger Man scratching his black Persian cat Toby.

Notable cover blurbs: 
This one, coming from the Daily Telegraph, is a bit old-fashioned but still pretty cool:
"...As tense as a tiger springing into action."
 

Cool lines:  
Obviously, since Chandler and Hammett invented the hard-boiled language, there's no shortage of cool lines, and below are just a few:

He had beautiful teeth, but they hadn't grown in his mouth.[The Coolest!] 

He took out a leather keyholder and studied the lock of the door. It looked as if it would listen to reason.

She had a mud-coloured face, stringy hair, grey cotton stockings - everything a Bunker Hill landlady should have. She looked at Steve with the interested eye of a dead goldfish.

But super cool stuff comes from The Simple Art of Murder essay. The whole thing is available online here. I just pasted a small example of its brilliance:

There is plenty of that kind of social and emotional hypocrisy around today. Add to it a liberal dose of intellectual pretentiousness and you get the tone of the book page in your daily paper and the earnest and fatuous atmosphere breathed by discussion groups in little clubs. These are the people who make bestsellers, which are promotional jobs based on a sort of indirect snob-appeal, carefully escorted by the trained seals of the critical fraternity, and lovingly tended and watered by certain much too powerful pressure groups whose business is selling books, although they would like you to think they are fostering culture. Just get a little behind in your payments and you will find out how idealistic they are.

Brainquake (Samuel Fuller, written in early 90s, published 2014)

Paul Page is a bagman in New York who falls for the wrong woman. Together they steal money from his employers, go on the run and end up tragically in Paris. A bagman? A highly trained professional who transports dirty money for organised crime.

It starts super cool: "Sixty seconds before the baby shot its father, leaves fell lazily in Central Park"

And with such a killer opening line and Fuller and mobsters and an anti-hero with his babe on the run... it simply got to be good, right? Well, not exactly. The first part - the boy-meets-girl & money stuff in New York - is okay, and it might even function if it wasn't so insanely blown out of proportion. Cartoonish characters (like that priest hit-man dude) I can digest, but carrying not just millions but (literally) billions of dollars in cash while being chased by (again, literally) pirates is just a bit too much.

And it should end in New York because the whole Paris thing (another 100+ pages) quickly turns into an incomprehensible mess. The plot falls apart, and there are so many incredible coincidences (like protagonists keep bumping into each other all the time) that they cannot simply be coincidences. I kept thinking for some time that they were some kind of metaphors (that I just wasn't getting) or shit like that. But the further and the crazier it got, the more convinced I was that Fuller simply wanted to finish the book and had run out of ideas.

But interestingly enough, the megalomania and surreal world from the first part gives us one of the craziest and most memorable villains in the long history of villains. Chapter 16 describes a typical day in the office of Cornelius Hampshire - the most powerful man throughout the civilized and uncivilized world of crime. In just five pages, Cornelius and his four lieutenants manage to coordinate crime all around the globe, encompassing everything from narcotics and banana republic revolutions to money laundering and high-level investment banking. They, of course, also briefly touch on the piracy situation in which our Paul is involved. And we get to know the humane side of Cornelius because he seems to be a big baseball fan:

"Good. Michael, what's going on with Citra?"
"She's being executed Friday."
"Get our liaison to buy her freedom. Give him a million."
"He's being executed with her."
"Goddam it! She's the best distributor in Malaya."
"She was."
"What about Russia?"
"The ban on farms growing poppies shot opium prices sky high."
"Addicts'll pay the difference. Take advantage of the revolt of the ruble. And, oh yes, on the baseball scandal? Kill any bastard selling drugs to ballplayers. I love that game. Don't fuck around with baseball. Ever."

Unforgettable. Super cool and funny. The whole chapter demands repeated readings!

I know this is Fuller's last book, and it's great that Hard Case Crime published it, but it has to be said that the whole thing is a bit weird. 

2.5/5

Facts:

Hero: 
Paul Page, a bagman

Location: 
New York and Paris

Body count:  
20 - including two cops in the final shoot-out (although there could be more), but excluding Eddie and Michelle. And I wouldn't give this duo many survival chances because in the very last chapter, they are spotted (another unbelievable coincidence btw) in Avoriaz by the hitman Father Flanagan.

Title: 
Paul suffers from some undefined brain disorder that he calls "Brainquake". It's not a tumour or anything else that modern medicine can deal with, so I assume it must be another metaphor I have missed.

Edition: 
Hard Case Crime #116

Cover: 
Another cool one by Glen Orbik with Max Phillips designing the cover. And after visiting Phillips' website, I finally realised that the man is not an illustrator :) I need to review some of my old posts and update the artists' credits on them.

Notable cover blurbs: 
None really notable. Maybe because all of them are written by filmmakers?

Cool lines:

Entire chapter #16

So Nude, So Dead aka The Evil Sleep! (Ed McBain, 1952)

Wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time mystery. Of the amnesiac-awakened-by-the-corpse sub-genre. With a touch of a particular flavour because our hero is a junkie in this one. Which is cool - I prefer that the leading character in this average-guy-turns-amateur-detective type be some sort of societal reject rather than the usual doctor, schoolteacher, priest, etc.

It works well for a while. But then it slowly drifts into unreal or even surreal. Stuff like our poor Ray being totally strung out on heroin, disguising himself by painting his hair with shoe polish (!?) and then impersonating a police inspector (he is only 26 btw) to interrogate the husband of a woman he's wanted for the murder of. Sure enough, his pathetic "cover" gets blown, but that doesn't discourage him. He goes straight to the club where he picked up the victim the night before and starts interviewing the barman. In the middle of this charade, a beautiful woman approaches him and takes him to her luxurious home, where she tries to seduce him. Eventually (pretty soon, in fact), she will fuck him, but you could see the final 'surprise' twist miles away, couldn't you?

There's more of such stuff, and it's pointless to go through the entire list. Let's just say it culminates on the third day of his cold turkey. Instead of banging his head against the wall of some cheap Harlem hotel and slicing himself with razors, Rey is still vital enough to escape from cops by running eleven floors up the staircase (beating and disarming one cop in the process) and then jumping to several rooftops to complete his escape.

During all this time, his investigation doesn't progress much, and he resignedly concludes towards the end that:

"It's one hell of a rat race, " he went on. "There are so many loose ends, so many blind alleys. I keep asking people questions, but I'm not sure I'm asking the right ones - and I'm not sure the answers mean anything. All I know is that I've got to find the real answer before it's too late."

So the whole thing is a bit amateurish. However, it also has some nice touches. I liked the idea of running against the clock, which is simply trying to stay sane without a fix in Ray's case. And his character is superbly developed. At first, I found flashbacks to his past distracting, but they don't really slow down the pace. And they do help us understand our hero and make him human, so we don't judge him too hard and simply feel sorry for him. For fuck's sake, in a city as huge as New York, he doesn't have a single friend (not even among junkies), and he calls his father when he gets into this mess.

The plot is okay, and its development becomes quite enjoyable once you stop paying too much attention to the story holes (like where are the cops?!?), loose ends and coincidences. The final whodunit is decent, although far from shocking. All in all, it's good, honest and unpretentious writing without moralising or preaching on the complex subject of drug addiction. I imagine it was pretty ground-breaking 60 years ago.

3.5/5 (adding an extra half point for the included excellent short story Die Hard)

Facts:

Hero: 
Ray Stone - ex-pianist, these days a heroin addict

Location: 
New York

Body count:  

2

The second one is pretty funny:

There was a neat little hole right between his eyes, and it dribbled blood down along the side of his nose and over his mouth.
Ray stared at the drummer.
"Massine? Mass-"
He was dead.

Well, people with little holes between their eyes tend to be dead. Elementary, Watson...

Object of desire: 
The answer seemed logical and simple to him: find that bastard. Find him, and the pressure would be off. The cops would have a new sucker to toy with. And then Ray Stone could contact Louie or any other damned pusher in the city.
 

Dames: 
Besides Eileen (lady on the cover), there is Barbara 'Barbs' Cole - "The warmest pair of brown eyes he'd ever seen" and (unfortunately, too) briefly Chinese/Irish cutie Rusty O'Donnell ("They bill her as an artistic dancer. That means strip artist in English.")

Blackouts: 
Yes, he blacks out during the beatings that bad guys give him:

His eyes opened as he saw the gun butt reaching out for him. There was an explosion alongside his left ear, a fiery display of screaming stars. He struggled to keep his head up, felt the next solid blow crush into the base of his skull. He stopped struggling then.
 

Title: 
Pretty cool sounding, but not very profound - Eileen was simply nude when he found her dead. But I think it's still better than the original The Evil Sleep.

Edition:  
Hard Case Crime #120, July 2015

Cover: 
Love it! I think it's so good it qualifies for a painting and not "just" an illustration. Great perspective from above, and the light bulb (although it could be placed a bit over to the left) casts cool shadows and creates nice shades of red and scarlet. Very noir-ish, very stylish.  But not 100% accurate - the murdered girl is blonde, her arm is supposed to have lots of needle marks, and there should be two bullet holes in her belly.

By Gregory Manchess. Who, btw, ought to do some work on his website.

Notable cover blurbs: 
New York Times Book Review blabs the usual nonsense but finishes really cool: "Ed McBain owns this turf."
  

Cool lines:  
Can't think of any really memorable in So Nude, So Dead, but I found this one from Die Hard pretty funny:

"Give me the police."
"Do you wish to report a crime?"
"No, a strawberry festival."
"What?"
"For Pete's sake, get me the police." [The Coolest!]

Death of a Flack (Henry Kane, 1961)

There are three beautiful women in this one, three cases of blackmail, and even three (!) private detectives somehow involved... but still, the plot is very simple and straightforward. Our hero doesn't really investigate in the traditional sense, such as conducting interviews, chasing leads, or piecing together evidence. Various clients simply hire him to perform relatively trivial tasks (such as delivering blackmail money), so he goes from point A to B and C, and along the way, collects a substantial amount of cash and a few large checks. There is no action, not much of a mystery or drama, not much of anything.

Towards the end, this became clear to Mr Kane himself because he included this somehow apologetic (funny?) paragraph:

- a sizable sum in total aggregate of $7300, but if any of you, inspired by this reading, are overcome with the desire to rush into the business of private-eyeing, I must hasten to promulgate the harsh facts of the interminable succession of rank; blank days between bonanzas which flatten the average to exactly that - average. You want to make money? Invent a toilet paper with a new scent for each day of the week and sit back and wipe up the profits.

Hasten to promulgate the harsh facts of the interminable succession?

Anyway, this book'sn't bad at all, and some parts are actually hilarious (see the cool lines), but it lacks any kind of hard-boiled edge. Maybe because all the beautiful and wealthy people throw money (and sometimes themselves) at our PI, making his job trivial. And partly because he is not very likeable and/or interesting fella. He is a bit narcissistic too, and definitely a sexist asshole. There is a hard-to-digest scene in which he slaps Sherry twice simply because she wouldn't fuck him. True, he doesn't feel exactly good about it afterwards, but his rationalising is really fucking weird. He somehow concludes that she's a lesbian ("I now knew she was evil") and asks himself a rhetorical question: "Did that lessen my desire for her?". This brings us to some really misogynistic shit:

I knew why I had hit her. A courting male knows, almost instinctively, the manner of approach to the female of his desire. Some need flowers, some need poems, some need music, some need attentions, some need surliness, some need silence, some need dominance - Sherry Greco needed a good belt in the jaw. I had struck her as part of my wooing act. I had enhanced her respect for me. I had begun to earn her.

Crazy stuff. I wish Kane had dedicated some of this negative energy to improving the plot. It just leaves a dark spot on what is otherwise an entertaining little pulp.

3/5

Facts:

Hero: 
Pete Chambers, Fast-moving PI

"Now don't pretend to be a hipster with me, Mr. Chambers. I happen to know you for what you are - an incurable romantic, a Don Quixote in a custom-tailored suit, and essentially and forever, and admirably, a softie."

"Good-bye, Mr. Chambers. You're an awfully frigging clever bastard, aren't you?"

Location: 
New York

Body count: 

4

Object of desire: 
800,000 dollars worth tiara fashioned in 1550 by Benvenuto Cellini, especially for Eleonora, Princess of the House of Medici.
 

Dames: 
Three of them, introduced straight away, on the third page:

- the poetess, Miss Lori Gilmore (the jeweler's daughter), the inamorata, Miss Sophia Patri (the jeweler's latest sweetheart), the belly dancer, Miss Sherry Greco (my date) - were homogenous in aspects of beauty: they were all ravishingly attractive women, although each was of an entirely different mien... blonde, slender, sinuous, smoky-eyed, intense, reserved, and sullen... tall, red-haired, green-eyed, glistening-mouthed, and shaped with extravagant, bewitching, and always-exposed curves... a full ripe figure, tawny skin, and black smoldering eyes

Blackouts: 

/

Title: 
Flack part:

A flack is a press agent before he becomes a public relations counselor. A public relations counselor is a press agent with a fancy office, important clients, and a rapturous con.

Death part:

He appeared to be regarding us with three eyes, two of which were glazed. The third was a round red hole just above the bridge of his nose. Parker went to him, went from him, reported: "Very dead."

Edition:  
Signet, first printing, May 1961
 
Cover: 
Excellent and pretty hot illustration of Sophia Patri that (probably) depicts a scene in which our hero comes to Patri's apartment and gets ultra horny by simply seeing her armpit! (The smooth hollow of her armpit was more prod to libido than total nudity). According to this cool photo album, it was made by Robert Abbett. 

Cool lines:

Pretty weak on dialogues, but Henry Kane is THE master of metaphors. Although I'm not sure I actually get half of these (and there are many more in the book), they are still unforgettable:

The drizzle had sundered as the hymen of a star-struck virgin upon the first suggestion of a skinny crooner. 

A New Yorker has about as much use for an automobile in this city of car-crowded curbs and congested traffic as he might have for a chrome-adorned toboggan.

I had found him as reliable as rock, as solid as steel, as resourceful as a tiger on the prowl.

I was shuttling in and out of my apartment as though it were a bathroom and I was in the unfortunate piss press of chronic prostatitis. 

The lady's  motives were as grossly apparent as the bulge in the tights of the male star of ballet.

That sat her back on her pretty ass for a moment but she came up swinging like a marijuana group at a progressive-jazz session.

Studded throughout the place, like sparse cloves in an insufficiently spiced ham, were other wan business executives morosely mending last night's sins.

My gastric juices jumped like a sensitive gal insensitively goosed.

His eyes bulged like an overstuffed brassiere. 

The damned thing had more glow than an Irishman full of Scotch whiskey. 

Her firm, young, pointed, pear-shaped breasts had nipples that stuck out like the spiteful tongues of spiteful children.

Nick Carter - Ice Trap Terror (Jeffrey Wallman, 1974)

Came across this one in Bill Pronzini's fantastic Gun in Cheek. It was around the time when I finished The Mongol Mask, and since they are both driven by a similar bizarre "meteorological" plot vehicle, it seemed only natural to compare these two alternative masterpieces (as Pronzini would put it) and gauge them on the scale of ridiculous-meter. And besides, it's about time this blog gets a Nick Carter entry.

But without boring myself again, I can only report that it is as bad as Mongol was. A similar kind of dull, humourless writing where bodies pile with lightning speed, and everything (including sex scenes) takes ages.

Until we reach the final shootout in the penultimate chapter. The mighty chapter thirteen!! Crazy stuff, impossible to describe how over the top that shit is. Instead, I'll take my time and retype some of the best bits below. Sit down, relax and enjoy:

One bullet caught him in the throat as he began to yell and the other poked his eye out.
Bullet poking an eye out??
 
"There have been reports of a woman."
Zembla gave a derisive snort. "Leave it to Carter to have a girl along, treating this as if were a vacation at a sex club..."

And btw - he speaks with "the furious, dogmatic voice". Dogmatic voice?

Fast forward a couple of pages, and we find Zembla attempting to kill Carter and Tamara, utilising one of the craziest killing methods I can remember:

The copter banked slightly and came slithering toward us.
"That bastard! That sonofabitch! I raged. "He's going to drift overhead and pick us off like sitting ducks! Keep your head down, Tamara. Don't look."

Towards the end, Carter has no escape plan, but:

There wasn't any thought as to the odds of discovering a boat, or if we could find a way to run it; there had to be a boat available, if we were to survive. It was as simple as that.

And sure enough:

There was a boat, a sleek and sassy thirty-foot craft, bobbing wildly at its lines like a maverick stallion straining in a chute.
 
The End. Brilliant, isn't it?

3.5/5 (adding an extra point for chapter 13)

Facts:

Hero: 
Nick Carter, agent of AXE

Location: 
It's hard to keep up, but Nick and Tamara fly to the following countries with her little Cessna: Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama.

Body count: 

53

Object of desire:  
Disrupting weather and creating a temporary ice age by creating artificial mountains to conquer Central America and start a Third Mayan Empire.

Confused? Let Colonel Zembla explain it himself:

"My idea is merely to make a mountain. That is, simulate one with radio waves, projecting all the symptoms of a mountain into the air currents of the troposphere. That would have to be about fifteen thousand feet to insure snow. Nobody will see it, and a plane can fly right through it, but the weather will know it is there!" 

Still confused? I cannot fully explain something I don't understand myself, so I suggest you check pages 35-38.

Dames: 
KGB agent Tamara:

It was a face to remember. So was the rest of her, for that matter. Her body was everything a woman's body should be - taut-breasted beneath her checkered woolen shirt, and leggy down to her mid-calf boots. Her face was heart-shaped and matched her body's promise of tenderness and passion.

But make no mistake:

Tamara was tough, pragmatic, and courageous, and above all, nobody's fool.

Blackouts: 
They should put Nick into one of those Duracell batteries commercials because he's indestructible. Shot and wounded twice, repeatedly beaten (including once getting kicked in his balls) and having sex (twice) while trying to save the world, and not once does he lose his senses. But at the end of that epic chapter #13, when the mission is accomplished, he finally gets his well-deserved blackout moment:

But as the yawning pit of unconsciousness closed over me, I looked up at the sky and smiled. The weather was changing again.
 

Title: 
See the 'object of desire' section

Edition: 
Tandem Book, 1977

Cover:  
See the 'hero' and 'object of desire' sections

Cool lines: 
Her round, high breasts were like frozen apples against my bare chest.[The Coolest!]

Nothing More Than Murder (Jim Thompson, 1949)

This one isn't particularly interested in the actual criminal act or the prior plotting that led to it. This is just as well since the bad guys' plan is pretty pathetic. Good old double indemnity insurance scam with a bit of a (silly) twist. The wife catches our hero Joe cheating, and then the trio together decides to resolve this unfortunate situation by faking her death and collecting the insurance money to pay her off so Joe and Carol can live and fuck happily ever after. And the silly twist? They manage to get the "replacement" body by simply placing an advert in a local newspaper seeking a woman who physically resembles Elizabeth (she would die in the fire, burned beyond recognition, so her body/face isn't significant).

Of course, with such an amateurish (stupid?) plan, it is only a question of when and not if they will get caught. It's also a question of who will blow up the whole setup, since Joe soon finds himself blackmailed by a couple of local scumbags, investigated by the insurance company PI. At the same time, his accomplice/lover gets increasingly distrustful (and unpredictable). And if all that wasn't bad enough, he's also in the middle of a fight against his movie theatre's (very hostile) takeover.

And this is where the novel's brilliance comes in. Joe is somewhat like Sheriff Nick Corey from Pop. 1280 - a manipulator who constantly schemes to get his way out of trouble. So, instead of a classical whodunnit, the suspense here is about guessing how he'll manage to untangle the messy web he got himself caught in. And although he's a bit of an asshole (but then again, the whole cast consists of assholes), he's still likeable and even honest in his own way, so I must admit I was kind of cheering for him.

Excellent stuff, and even though this is very early Thompson (his first "proper" crime genre novel), it is put together masterfully. Snappy dialogues, superb characterisation of the main protagonist (I am sure that others are intentionally neglected), great storytelling with some flashbacks thrown in, and just enough psychological depth to keep it interesting, even though the plotting is not very strong. It simply works. Everything clicks as it should.

And I cannot finish this writing without mentioning the small-town mentality and seedy movie theatres and film distribution industry milieu into which the story is set. Amusing stuff that creates a good atmosphere and gives the story a realistic and authentic tone. Too bad that "Glossary of exhibitor terms" is at the end and not at the beginning of the book. I was a bit confused at first when coming upon terms like "dark" (not in operation; a dark house), "product" (pictures) and "paper" (advertising matter). However, it wasn't too distracting, and it eventually became cool once I got used to the slang.

Maybe a bit too light and naive for my taste  (I saw that ending twist coming way too soon), but it didn't really matter. Enjoyed it a lot.

4.5/5

Facts:

Hero: 
According to a local newspaper, "Joseph J. Wilmot, local theatre magnate".

Location: 
An imaginary small town of Stoneville. At least, I think it doesn't exist, since I couldn't find one on Google Maps that would be "an hour driving from the City" or "thirty miles from Wheat City".

Body count: 
2, possibly another one since I'm not sure how to interpret "I caught him right in the act of slugging Jimmie Nedry".

Dames: 
I'd thought she looked awkward and top-heavy, and, hell, I could see now that she didn't at all. Her breasts weren't too big. Jesus, her breasts!
She looked cute-mad and funny-sweet. She looked like she'd started somewhere and been mussed up along the way.
She was a honey. She was sugar and pie. She was a bitch. [Fatale]

Blackouts: 
The whiskey never reached my mouth. I couldn't get it that high. It trickled out on my shirt front, and then the bottle dropped from my hand to the floor. And I followed it.
 

Title: 
Cool sounding. It probably refers to a trivial and oversimplistic plan that our murderous trio puts together.

Edition: Black Lizard 1985

Cover: 
Nice, old-school type of illustration. Made by a guy named Kirwan, who apparently created covers for all of the Black Lizard's classic reissues. And they all look great!

Notable cover blurbs: 
"Jim Thompson is the best suspense writer going, bar none."
- New York Times

Not that I disagree, but still, it seems strange that they would regard him as a "writer going" seven years after his death.

Cool lines:  
She smiled, kind of like an elevator boy smiles when you ask him if he has lots of ups and downs.