Review of The Dead Women of Juarez

Debut novelist Sam Hawken's novel The Dead Women of Juarez (Serpent's Tail, 2010) is a surprisingly assured and skilled first novel. First novels are often works where you can see the seams, and watch as an writer shows hints of potential. It's a fairly rare that a first novel doesn't seem like a first novel, and Hawken's novel reads like the work of someone who's been turning out novels for a long time.

The Dead Women of Juarez starts out as the story of washed up boxer Kelly Courter, who has retreated south of the border after making some horrible decisions that torpedoed a once promising career. To get by he picks up the occasional unsanctioned fight and helps his best friend Esteban sell weed. He's also involved with Esteban's sister, Paloma, who works for Mujeres sin Voces, a group dedicated to bringing attention to the hundreds of unsolved murders of women in Juarez.

Hawken takes a rather bold turn when, halfway through the story, he has events sideline Kelly, and switches the story's focus to aging Mexican cop Rafael Sevilla, who struggles with the loss of his daughter and granddaughter, who simply went out one day and then vanished, just two more victims of the senseless crime that thrives in Mexico. While he switches characters, Hawken, doesn't switch stories, however, so the transition is smooth, and works well.

Overall, Hawken's prose is strong, the plot is well thought out, and the characters are well drawn. Kelly and Rafael both have affecting and convincing backstories, that make them seem quite human and explains their motivations. The fact that the story is inspired by the real life murders that plague Juarez (more famously the subject of Roberto Bolano's novel 2666), serves to make the novel even stronger.

Review of Killer

Here is my long delayed review of Killer. It's the book I was reading when I had the fire. For some reason, I've been unable to pick it up again until recently.

Dave Zeltserman concludes his "Man out of Prison" trilogy with Killer, a much more subdued take on the story than his previous efforts, Small Crimes and Pariah. Where the first two novels were bloody messes all the way through, Killer is a much subtler affair. Leonard March was a hitman for the Lombard crime family for a long time, but when he finally got caught committing some non-murderous crimes, he managed to cut himself a deal with immunity before confessing to twenty-eight paid killings for crime boss Sal Lombard.

For his deal, March gets fourteen years in prison, and when he walks free, he tells himself he's going to go straight and live a quiet, anonymous life. Of course, it's not easy to live a quiet life when you've got a list of enemies as long as your arm, and March doesn't make it any easier on himself by inviting publicity when he foils a liquor store robbery.

Killer, while an entertaining novel, lacks the punch of Pariah. Pariah was as close to perfect as a novel can get, so comparing the two may be unfair. Still, Killer, feels almost perfunctory when compared to either of his previous studies in evil. March isn't as compelling as either Joe Denton or Kyle Nevin, both of whom were real pieces of work, and the story ends a little abruptly. It feels a bit rushed at the end, which is disappointing because so much of the novel is setup. Zeltserman also picks up a couple of plot threads that never really go anywhere, which isn't like him.

As I said, though, Killer is a letdown only when compared to Zeltserman's previous efforts. As an author, you're in a pretty good shape if the only competition you have is yourself. Taken on its own, Killer is still very good. It's just not great, and not a great introduction to Zeltserman's work. It would be possible for a reader to pick up this novel and wonder what all the fuss has been about. Do yourself a favor and read one of the first two novels in this trilogy before approaching Killer.

Book Trailer for Dave Zeltserman's Killer

The trailer for Zeltserman's forthcoming Killer. Look for my review soon.

Review of Pariah

Question: Who do you have to kill to get a book deal?

Answer: A ten-year-old hemophiliac.

At least according to Dave Zeltserman. His latest novel, Pariah (Serpent's Tail, 2009), tells the story of Kyle Nevin, gangster from Southie, who gets released from prison after an eight-year stretch for bank robbery and decides to go after "Red" Mahoney, his former employer and the one who set him up to take a fall. Mahoney has disappeared, however, and Nevin needs money to look for him, so he plans a kidnapping. The kidnapping goes wrong, Nevin is caught, and, due to some prosecutorial shenanigans, gets off scott-free. Nevin's new notoriety leads to a two-book deal with a major publishing house.

Zeltserman's last novel, Small Crimes, featured disgraced cop Joe Denton, who was one of the most loathsome characters to ever crawl out of someoneone's imagination. Nevin is even worse than Denton. Every time you think that he has surely reached bottom and can't possibly behave in a more repugnant fashion, Zeltserman has his anti-hero find a new low. Nevin is genuinely frightening because his actions are entirely rational, and his crimes are plausible. Forget cartoon psychos who skin young women to make designer handbags, Zeltserman has succeeded in bringing a blithely psychopatic character to the page who will chill the blood.

Despite the utter moral bankruptcy of the main character, Pariah is gripping as opposed to repugnant. Zeltserman's writing and plotting are sharp and the plot is immaculately crafted. The only other author writing about such venal characters with such an incisive eye is Jason Starr, and some of Starr's characters are downright cuddly when compared to Zeltserman's. Pariah is a scathing rebuke of society's obsession with fame, and mythologizing of gangsters and the repugnant moral calculus that allows them to victimize innocent people with impunity. Zeltserman points out that we can embrace a monster, but not a dishonest monster. He's the guy who tells a newly engaged woman that her shiny, new diamond ring likely helped finance a pointless, bloody civil war in Africa, and besides, it's just another goddamn rock. It's an ugly thing to say, but it's entirely true, so what're you gonna do?

As it happens, I have a spare copy of Pariah, which is not getting an American release until October, so send an email to IndieCrime-at-gmail dot com, with "Contest" in the subject line and your name and mailing address in the body. I will pick a winner next Sunday. (Winners are picked using a random number generator).

Review of Tattoo

Pepe Carvahlo is a detective, but he is just as much a sensualist. He thinks just as much about food and women as he does a case. He is capable of great cruelty, but he is not the jealous type-his girlfriend, with whom he has an open relationship is a prostitute. He walks the streets of Barcelona in search of the truth, a good meal and sex, although not necessarily in that order.

In Tattoo (Serpent’s Tail, 2008), Manuel Vasquez Montalbon has his private detective searching for the identity of a man who washes up on the beach whose only identifying mark is a tattoo reading, “Born to Raise Hell in Hell.” Carvahlo is hired for this task by the owner of a hair salon, and he quickly finds himself on his way to Amsterdam in pursuit of the dead man’s name.

To say the plot of Tattoo, which appeared in Spanish in 1976, and has been translated into English for the first time by Nick Caistor, is slight is an understatement. It won’t take anyone very long to figure out what is happening. The attraction of the book isn’t the plot, but the character. Carvahlo is the type of guy who can get beaten and thrown in the canal in Amsterdam and still want to hit the city’s red light district. He’s irrepressible and yet committed to finding the truth about a dead man he never knew. It’s the author’s juxtaposition of animal desires with moral complexity that makes Carvahlo worth getting to know.

Review of Small Crimes

In 1952, Jim Thompson published The Killer Inside Me, a novel about Lou Ford, a small town sheriff who, while maintaining a personable, if somewhat dim façade, hides the heart of a psychopath. It has earned its place among the classics. Thompson revisited the same situation in Pop. 1,280, with small town Sheriff Nick Corey bearing a strong resemblance in character to Ford. Thompson so defined this little subgenre that in order to avoid being anything but a pale imitation of the original any author who wants to approach it had better have a good twist.

Dave Zeltserman’s Small Crimes (Serpent's Tail, 2008) succeeds in paying homage to Thompson’s work without lapsing into imitation because his dirty cop, Joe Denton, is only fooling himself. Everyone else in the tiny Vermont town where he lives has him all figured out. How could they not? As the story begins Denton is getting out of jail after serving seven years for disfiguring the local district attorney with a letter opener. He walks out the door determined to turn over a new leaf, but no one wants to make it easy for him. The DA, understandably, has a grudge and is trying to get the dying local crime lord to make a deathbed confession that will put Denton in prison forever. The local sheriff wants Denton to take care of either the DA or the crime boss, to avoid the nasty repercussions a confession could bring, and Denton’s own parents are determined to keep him from seeing his two daughters.

Zeltserman makes good use of the first person point of view, constantly challenging the reader to use external cues to try and figure out the extent of Denton’s self deception. It keeps the story interesting. He also keeps the story moving, and it never stops to let the reader catch his breath. As the tension and body count grow, Small Crimes goes from being entertaining to disturbing. Zeltserman gradually lets the reader in on Denton’s secrets, and he goes from being sympathetic to being outright scary. It’s a story that will get under your skin and stay with you long after it ends. Thomspon would be proud.

Review of How the Dead Live

Some books are gone when you close the back cover. Even if you enjoyed them, they just don’t make a long term impression. Then there are books that refuse to go away weeks after you read the last page. Derek Raymond’s How The Dead Live (Serpent’s Tail, 2007) is one of the latter. The third in Raymond’s Factory series featuring a nameless London detective who has born more tragedy in his personal life than any non-fictional human could bear, it has been long out of print, and should not be confused with Will Self’s novel of the same name, with which is shares nothing in terms of subject or tone. Self, who wrote an introduction for the new edition of Raymond’s book, cheerfully admits stealing the title without ever having read the book.

How the Dead Live finds the Detective sent away from London to investigate the disappearance of a doctor’s wife in a small town. It is no ordinary disappearance, however. The missing woman, who was once a vibrant, social creature, had taken to wearing a black veil and whispering when she appeared in public. As if that’s not enough, she’s been missing for six months and the local police have made only a token effort to find one of the town’s most prominent residents. This state of affairs does not sit well with the Detective, who has little patience with incompetence and even less patience with corruption, which is what he finds himself faced with the moment he starts his inquiry.

Raymond’s book has many of the trappings of Gothic horror; a veiled woman, a decaying mansion, mysterious voices, but this window dressing serves only to contrast with the real horror. There are no ghosts, no voices reaching out from the great beyond to guide or torment the living. Supernatural horror is a crutch in disguise, something that reassures while it supposedly terrifies. If a ghost can live forever why can’t you? In Raymond’s world no one lives forever, no matter how desperately they want to. The Detective exists in a world where the only constant is death.

For all its horror and police conventions, however, the greatest surprise of How the Dead Live is that, in the end, it’s not a police procedural or a horror story. It’s a romance. The central conspiracy the Detective uncovers is not one motivated by malice or greed, but by love. True, there is no shortage of villains in this book, but, at the very core of the book, where one expects to find the worst humanity has to offer, Raymond substitutes the best. It should be a relief. It’s not.

Review of School for Scumbags

Funny isn’t easy. Just watch television. Rooms full of writers slave away to come up with jokes for sitcoms and late night talk show hosts, and most of them fail spectacularly. It’s not that all of the people who write for those shows are hopeless (although many of them are), it’s just that being funny consistently is nigh impossible, even for very funny people.

Danny King’s School for Scumbags (Serpent's Tail, 2008) is funny. It’s not roll around on the floor holding your sides funny, but it does manage to conjure up laugh-out-loud moments, and even when it falls short, it’s still entertaining. Scumbags follows 15-year old degenerate Wayne Banstead as he get kicked out of yet another school and ends up in the Gafin School For Boys in London. The school, whose motto is “Help Yourselves Boys” is unorthodox in its methods. The boys spend a lot of time learning about crime, and none of their instructors seems to care if they smoke dope or drink. In fact, the only thing that can get a student in real trouble is snitching. Needless to say Wayne, who has trouble understanding the concept of private property, fits right in. Soon it becomes clear that, despite the statements made to students’ parents, no one at the Gafin School is interested in reforming the students, in fact, quite the opposite. The staff want the boys to help pull off a giant heist.

The plot is far-fetched, but fun, and King manages to make Wayne, a character who could easily end up on a reader’s bad side, just decent enough to keep him from becoming unlikable. The pacing is brisk, with the exception of a couple of chapters about a soccer game, which tend to drag. It turns out the only thing less exciting than watching soccer is reading about it, even if it is a rigged match. That one stumble aside, the scheming and plotting of the school boys and their teachers is enjoyable, and the climactic heist is appropriately grand. King manages to make funny look easy.

Edgar Nominations

So, the Edgar nominations are out. Independent presses fared very well this year, Bleak House in particular. Reed Coleman's Soul Patch got a nod for best novel and Craig McDonald's Head Games got a nomination for best first novel. "Blue Note" by Stuart Kaminsky, which appeared in Chicago Blues, got a best short story nomination. If there were ever an occasion for the Bleak House crew to dip into the hookers & blow slush fund this is it.

Other Independent press nominees include

Best Paperback Original:

Cruel Poetry by Vicki Hendricks (Serpent's Tail)
Robbie's Wife by Russell Hill (Hard Case Crime)

Best Short Story:

"The Golden Gopher" – Los Angeles Noir by Susan Straight (Akashic Books)
"Uncle" – A Hell of a Woman” by Daniel Woodrell (Busted Flush Press)

Best First Novel

Snitch Jacket by Christopher Goffard (The Rookery Press)

Review of Swansea Terminal

One of the cardinal rules of storytelling is that the characters must do something. Having characters who sit around doing nothing worked out for Beckett in one instance, but it is not generally a good idea. Robin Llewellyn, the alcoholic, terminally ill, homeless, Welsh private detective at the center of Robert Lewis’ Swansea Terminal, (Serpent’s Tail, 2007) is hopelessly passive. He lives, if it can be called that, only for his next drink, and he doesn’t have any real desire to change. As such, he does not make a very interesting protagonist.

For the first three-quarters of the book, the story involves Llewellyn staying drunk, getting involved with some small time gangsters, and ending up with a job sitting in the dark babysitting a warehouse full of smuggled booze. Although this is clearly a setup of some sort, Llewellyn is more than content to sit in the dark, drink warm lager and wallow in self pity and degradation. It’s difficult to care about someone who does not care about themselves, and Llewellyn doesn’t give a damn. Even his pitch black observations about life don’t make him any more interesting or sympathetic. By the time he finally gets off his ass and decides to do something about his situation it is too late for him to fully engage the reader.

Lewis is a young, promising author, and unlike his protagonist, he has a future to worry about. He might want to consider creating a character with a little more to lose.

Review of Cruel Poetry

Florida is a strange and terrible place. It is full of lunatics, elderly people whose senility threatens what's left of American democracy, real-estate developers, foreign tourists with an affinity for bullets, Kathleen Harris and bugs the size of your head. To top it all off, George W. Bush's brother is running the show. One can't help but be amazed that the legislature hasn't voted to form its own army and invade Cuba...yet.
The madness that can be found in America's only phallic state has long been fertile ground for crime novelists. Since John D. MacDonald kicked off his Travis McGee series by giving his protagonist the address Slip F-18, Bahia Mar, Lauderdale, Florida has been the setting for more crime novels than anyone could ever hope to read in a lifetime. There are the big names, like Leonard and Hiassen, which people think of first, but there are also good, but often overlooked authors, like Randy Wayne White, Les Standiford and Charles Willeford.
Vicki Hendricks belongs to the latter category of writers, but it would be a crime to overlook her latest offering, Cruel Poetry, (Serpent's Tail: 2007) an unrepentantly dirty tale of sexual obsession. The book centers around Renata, a beautiful, amoral young woman who makes her living as a prostitute. Those drawn into her orbit include Richard, a poet and professor who finds himself hopelessly infatuated with her, and Jules, a frustrated young writer who lives next to Renata and listens to her through the walls when she entertains clients. When you throw in Fransico, Renata's boyfriend/business partner, you have the makings of a love parallelogram. Throw in some murders and you've got a real party.
The book alternates between Renata, Richard and Jules' points-of-view, but the story belongs to Renata, who differs from the traditional Femme Fatale, in that she is well-intentioned. She tries to discourage Richard from throwing away his marriage, job and family for her and she is loyal to Jules as a friend. Still, she's dangerous. She prefers sex, but killing comes easily. It's all the same to her. As Hendricks puts it, " [Renata} is like a Florida panther, rare and wild, without reason or purpose of her own, supplying pure primitive beauty to the world." What works for panthers, however, doesn't work for people, no matter how well-intentioned they are.
Cruel Poetry is well-written and never gets off track, which is a danger, because it seems like every other scene is a sex scene. Sex scenes are dangerous because they are often gratuitous, or, worse yet, bad. Nothing kills a story faster than an unintentionally hilarious bedroom scene. When Hendricks does use a cringe inducing phrase like, "the heaven of her ass," one must bear in mind the context. In this case, she is writing from the point of view of a middle aged man obsessed with a younger woman. It's a cringe-worthy situation, and Hendricks knows it.
It is impossible to deny Hendricks' skill as a a thriller writer. She grabs the reader and doesn't let go until she had dragged him through a tangled web of lust and violence, to that most perverse of endings, a happy one, written in blood.

Mergers and Acquisitions

Serpent's Tail publishing has announced it has merged with Profile Books. The money quote from Serpent's Tail's Pete Aytron: " The concentration in the retail sector is making survival of small publishers more and more precarious. The acquisition of Serpent's Tail by Profile, a publishing house known for its idiosyncratic brilliance and consistent profitability, guarantees that Serpent's Tail remains within the independent sector."