Everything I Consume: Kill Now, Pay Later

This was another Hard Case reprint. Kudos on a wonderfully lurid cover, yowza! I got a lot of stares of the subway for reading this one. The rest of the book wasn't so hot. The writer just seemed to keep throwing out plot and hoping it would stick, much like the women in the book who keep throwing themselves at detective Ben Gates. I mean, he doesn't even try with these women and they're all over him.

The story starts with Gates being drugged at a wedding he is working and involves blackmail, dirty movies, hidden identities and arson. It's a big mess and by the end we're not really sure how we got there. The beginning reminded me of The Gutting of Couffignal and the end reminder me of Rebecca, which are two better stories. So, a servicable read that I was able to trade quickly on paperbackswap.com.

My favorite part of the book was the blurb by Brett Haliday, creator of the Michael Shayne series. Author Robert Terrall was one of the ghost writers of the Michael Shayne series at this time so he may have blurbed his own book. Good for you, Robert!

Everything I Consume: A Deadly Shade of Gold

This is classic John D. MacDonald. Our hero, Travis McGee, sleeps with three women, gets shot twice and there are about a dozen corpses. In between detective work and gunplay there's a lot of philosophizing and critical observations of American culture, circa 1965. Travis is every man's fantasy; he's great with the ladies and a gun, more sharp than smart, doesn't take crap from anyone and lives on a houseboat. He sleeps with women but never takes advantage of them. Here's a good description of McGee from an article by Doug Bassett: "McGee is an odd duck, no doubt about it – to use Ed Gorman’s memorable phrase, he was 'a Rotarian’s fantasy of the Cool Guy.' And at his worst, mostly in the early books, he’s quite contrived, an odd bundle of Fifties morality paired with Sixties ratpack 'coolness.' "

I like MacDonald but his writing and plots are often too complicated for my taste. He's definitely a link between the spare style and shorter books of early hardboiled writers like Chandler, Hammett and Ross MacDonald and the more modern style with more characterization and longer stories of writers like Robert Parker and Robert Crais.

One of my favorite parts of the book, and something that tells you a lot about the kind of writer MacDonald is, is when he Travis asks his lady friend if she is Catholic. She give a page-long response about how she had faith as a child and it meant so much to her but lost it when her brother died young, and now she clings to it as nostalgic link to her past. It turns out he wants her to ask the priest a few questions about some people they're looking for. Here's how a few other writers would handle the situation.

Arthur Conan Doyle: "A papist such as yourself should have no trouble asking the priest a few questions"
"I…I will do it , Mr. Holmes," Nora said bravely.
"Holmes, how did you know the woman was a Catholic?"
"It is simple Watson, the vast majority of Italians are Catholic, I merely took an educated guess and was proven correct."
"Astounding!"

Mickey Spillane: "Listen, Padre, the last time I saw my friend he was lying in a pool of gore in a motel room. Are you gonna tell me what I want to know?"

Dashiell Hammett: "Luckily, Nora was Catholic and after hearing too much of her life story agreed to talk to the priest. She found out plenty."

Ross MacDonald: Lew Archer would just ask the priest himself who would answer all his questions and tell Archer the entire backstory.

Everything I Consume: The Lady In The Morgue

This was a very good book, screwball and hardboiled at the same time. The story concerns the theft of an unidentified body from the Chicago Morgue and the chase to find it and identify the body. The detective, William Crane, is dedicated to the case but still finds time to have nice meals (on his expense account) with the two detectives helping him out, drink heavily and go to "penthouse parties". It was a nice change from some of the more obsessive detectives of the era. This is definitely a book where the journey is more important than the destination. I had trouble following the solution but I didn't really care that much. Hey, does anyone remember if they ever found the Maltese Falcon or who the killer was in Murder on the Orient Express? The writing is first rate but Crane's detective agency owes a lot to the agency in the Continental Op stories.

My copy was the cool 1942 printing shown above. I got it at a local antique store but the book seems to be in print or at least available in a cheap used version. I've read a couple of other Latimers including the excellent Solomon's Vineyard. Here's a great interview with Latimer.

Chicago was the home of the other great screwball/hardboiled mystery writer Craig Rice as well as the indescribable Harry Stephen Keeler both of whom I highly recommend.

Everything I Consume: Blackmailer

I had high hopes for this book. It was written by George Axelrod, who wrote Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and Manchurian Candidate, two of my favorite movies. He also wrote Paris-When It Sizzles, an unfunny movie that seems to be on TCM every other week.

After a swift start this one fizzled and got bogged down in a plot that really didn't need to be so confusing. It's about a publisher who gets offered the final manuscript of a Hemingway-esque writer who recently committed suicide. The characters live in a world that revolves around a bizarre townhouse with two-way mirrors, secret recording devices, an elevator and lots of telephones. There's also a character who can duplicate any voice.

Like Chekhov said, if you introduce a character who has a gift for duplicating any voice in the first act you know he's going to do it by the end of the book.

Everything I Consume: The Vengeful Virgin

What kind of book is this? I'll tell you what kind of book it is. While comitting a murder the protagonist is interrupted by his obsessive, drunken ex-girlfriend. This is what happens:

I hit her. I hit her so hard she ran sideways across the lawn, and fell in a heap. I went over and yanked her to her feet. I hit her again. I let her have it hard. Then I turned, with her sobbing and moaning, and bent her arm up behind her back and ran her staggering out on the lawn. her car was parked behind the truck. It was a yellow Buick hardtop.

Anthony Boucher said it was, "a Cainlike story of greed, sex and murder, culminating in a retributive horror worthy of Jim Thompson." and who am I to argue with him?

Everything I Consume: Lucky At Cards

One of the first detective books I ever read was by Lawrence Block. I forget what it was called but I remember two things from it. One, the detective takes a date to a Chinese restaurant and they both get the same fortune. I've been waiting for that to happen to me ever since. Second, at the mid-point (where detective writing books tell you you should have a major plot twist) two seemingly unconnected cases are connected totally out of the blue. I now know that's a pretty common twist but it blew my early teen mind.

This book is from the early sixties. It's not bad, typical of the good but not great output from Hard Case. If you like hardboiled you'll like this. It's about a professional card cheat who winds up in an anonymous midwestern city after he's told to leave Chicago. He is pulled between his life of crime and surprising success at a straight life. But wouldn't you know it, a femme fatale pulls him back in.

I thought the book had a nice start but it petered out. There were a few very good scenes when a woman reveals she knows Maynard, the protagonist, is a crooked dealer and another towards the end when the main character is on the lam. The style is very pulp-like reminding me Jim Thompson and Ross MacDonald. There are some good sex scenes written in a lurid early sixties style as befits a book originally released as The Sex Shuffle (I definitely need a bedroom move with this name). I didn't like the happy ending which seemed tacked on.

I'm selling it if you want to buy it.

Reading, Reading, Reading

I'm very anal about my reading. When we rejiggered the apartment for my son Owen's arrival one of the things I demanded was a shelf in the bedroom with a To Be Read pile. Every few days I fiddle with it and move a few books around or think about reading a book that's way in the back. Like most people's To Be Read pile it's larger than I'd like it to be and I'm always coming up with systems to whittle it down, if only to make my wife happy. It's also spread to another shelf. Last month, I was reading short books so I could finish off a higher quantity. This month I'm going with larger books to make more space.

I don't read the next book in my pile, that would be way too simple. I pick five books based on theme, what I've read recently or whatever crosses my mind and then find an order to read them. An important caveat is to include two books from the Hard Case Crime Club. Since these are pretty much the only books I buy retail (the rest are from Amazon Marketplace, paperbackswap.com and gifts) I feel an obligation to read them and sell or swap them as soon as possible.

I believe none of this makes me a crazy person.

Anyway, here are the next five books I'm reading and a brief explanation of why:

Baseball Before We Knew It by David Block. I've always been obsessed by the Abner Doubleday myth and this book is supposed to have the inside story.

Lucky At Cards by Lawrence Block. I suspect this book is going to suck and don't want it to lie on my shelf forever so I might as well get it over with.

Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky. My wife said it was amazing.

The Vengeful Virgin by Gil Brewer. The day I stop wanting to read books with titles like the The Vengeful Virgin drop me off at the mall and drive away.

The Shroud of the Thwacker by Chris Elliott. I like Chris Elliott.

Everything I Consume: The Peddler

If you know Richard Prather at all it is from his Shell Scott novels and stories written in the fifties and sixties. They're about a hepper-than-hep Hollywood private eye who you have the feeling the Rat Pack would have hired when they needed some help. Though mostly forgotten today they were enormously successful -- only Mickey Spillane and God outsold Prather in the fifties -- and still a lot of fun.

The Peddler is a Hard Case Crime Club re-release of an earlier non-Shell Scott Prather book from 1952. It's the story of a man's rise in the San Francisco prostitution racket. The tone is dark and the book is very dialog heavy. Like much of Hard Case, it's good but not great and enjoyable but a little unsatisfying. There is a great scene in the middle when a raid on a rival brothel goes bad and an ending curiously reminiscent of Out but I doubt it inspired Natsuo Kirino.