Blogging the Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction: Soft Monkey

It has been quiet around here for a while, mainly because I have been busy reading James Ellroy and Flannery O'Connor. They're two very demanding, but very different, writers who've taken up a lot of my time and energy. (Especially Ellroy. I've been plugging away at Blood's a Rover for a while now, and I'm not sure I'm getting anywhere.)

Nevertheless, I found time to read the next story in The Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction. I've read Harlan Ellison's "Soft Monkey" before, but I'm not sure where. I vividly remember it, and I remember it's preface about scientists who found that orangutans who are greiving the loss of a child will cling to a soft doll, and treat it as if it were alive.

The preface wouldn't be all that problematic if the main character of "Soft Monkey" weren't a mentally ill, homeless black woman. I don't attribute any racist intent to Ellison, but there's a rather long, disturbing history of comparing black people to apes that he should have been aware of or acknowledged. The only racist thoughts are in the characters who are trying to kill Annie, the protagonist, a woman who has had a psychotic break after losing an infant child. Annie is targeted for death after witnessing a mob hit, but there's something about this story that still kind of rubs me the wrong way. I'm not sure what it's getting at. I suspect Ellison was trying to get at the bond between mother and child and animal and beast, but I think he might have found a better way to get at it.

Blogging The Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction: This World, Then Fireworks

Since Victor Gischler deprived you of a review of The Deputy, by jumping ship from Bleak House to Tyrus Books, and pushing publication back to April, I'm bringing back my thoughts on the Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction. This week, "This World, Then Fireworks" by Jim Thompson. I have read much of Thompson's better known work, but I'm no expert. Much of his work is said to be uneven, and this posthumous work is a real head scratcher. I'm not sure if it's some sort of half-assed throwaway, a work of twisted, bilious genius, or a combination of the two. It's definitely going to bear another reading.

TWTF focuses on Marty and Carol, an incestuous brother and sister couple who obviously had, a troubled childhood, although the nature of their trauma isn't clear at the beginning. Marty has left his dying wife and kids to return home, after having been fired from a reporting gig for trying a little blackmail. Carol, who has been taking care of their elderly mother, is a whore. When Marty comes back to town, he gets a job with the local paper, gets promoted in record time, and then resigns, because he's perverse. Then he picks up a lady cop, and, well, the story's kind of a mess, and trying to explain it all would just confuse you. It does, in the end, make a twisted sense, to Thompson's credit, but many elements are too convenient, and feel lazy and rushed. There are still, however, moments of genius, like Marty's musings as he wonders through a cemetary:

"Yes, hell. Yes, oh God, yes, it was a wonderful place. The City of Wonderful People. Everyone in it was everything that everyone should be. Some has a little more on the ball, of course, than others; there was one guy, for instance, who was only humble. But think of that! Think of its possibilities! Think of what you could do with a guy like that on a world tour. Of if war prevented, as it indubitably would, you could put him on television. A nation-wide hookup. You could go to the network and say, look, I've go something different here. Something unique. I've got a guy that's-No, he doesn't do card tricks, he's not a singer or a dancer. Well, he does have a sense of humor, but he doesn't tell-No, I'm afraid he doesn't have big tits and his ass looks just like yours and mine. What he's got is something different. Something there's a hell of a need for. And if you'd just give him a chance. They'd never go for it. You'd have to nail him to a cross first. Only here, in The City of Wonderful People, was the wonderful wonderful."

What else is there to say?

Blogging the Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction: Tough by John Lutz

John Lutz is one of the few authors in The Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction, of whom I had never heard. Turns out he's quite prolific, and if his story "Tough" is any indication, he's also pretty damn good. I think this is my favorite story in this collection thus far. It's about three casino robbers who hole up in an old hippie commune that's inhabited by a reclusive Korean War vet. There's the standard conflict, with the old man fighting the gangsters to protect his turf, but Lutz pulls the carpet out from under the reader in a spectacular fashion. I'd go into more detail about this one because it's worth looking at for the story as well as the technique, but that would ruin the fun for those of you who haven't read it yet. Well played Mr. Lutz. Well played.


(You can download "Tough" from Audible.com for about 7 bucks, which is kind of steep for a short-story, but it's a good story.)

Blogging the Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction: A Matter of Ethics

Robert Randisi's story "A Matter of Ethics" has a pretty great setup. Private eye Nick Delvecchio is summoned to a house in Brooklyn by a wife who wants him to follow her husband to see if he is cheating...on his diet. Delvecchio, quite rightly, thinks this is an odd request, but he takes the assignment. The husband is scrupulous about his dietary habits, as it turns out, but not quite as scrupulous about his marital vows. Delvecchio is left wondering whether to tell the wife about her husband's girlfriend. He decides to follow the husband one more day, only to see him fleeing the woman's house a few minutes after arriving. This situation, of course, leaves Delvecchio with another ethical dilemma. This one, of course, is a little more serious, and it leaves Delvecchio scrambling to stay ahead of the police. Unfortuately, the resolution is not as good as the setup, but I'm not sure how it could be.

Blogging the Black Lizard of Anthology of Crime Fiction: Take Care of Yourself

"Take Care of Yourself" by William Campbell Gault is the first story in the Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction to feature a series character. Gault's PI Joe Puma has been hired to find the wayward daughter of a rich southern California businessman. Puma does that quickly enough, but he inadvertently introduces the daughter to a con man. The wayward daughter, of course, takes up with the con man, and the father hires Joe again to keep an eye on her. Joe follows the daughter to the con man's place. There are screams, and Puma breaks in and (surprise, surprise) gets hit on the head and knocked out. When he comes to, the daughter is gone, and the con man insists nothing is wrong. Something is, of course, wrong, and Puma has to find out what it is. \

Gault's story is, for all it's boilerplate PI tropes, pretty subtle. In fact, I didn't realize the full implications of the final line of the story until the morning after I read it. I was in the middle of my workout, and I suddenly stopped cold, and slapped myself in the forehead for not seeing it sooner.

Blogging the Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction #3: Swamp Search

Before Harry Whittington, the lawyer who Dick Cheney first shot in the face, and later threatened to waterboard unless he apologized for getting shot in the face, there was Harry Whittington the prolific paperback author, about whom I probably could have found some relevant biographical information had not the other Mr. Whittington managed to get himself shot in the face by Dr. Evil (Here's a tip: If you can't dodge birdshot, don't go "hunting" with high functioning alcoholics).

Whittingtion is the author of "Swamp Search," the third entry in The Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction. The story is about a young vet and farmer who owns a helicopter he uses to rescue his cows from the Everglades (Here's another tip: Don't try to raise cows in a swamp). Anyway, one day, a beautiful woman shows up and wants to hire the young farmer to search for her defense contractor husband who, in the face of an impending congressional investigation into his war profiteering, decides to go on a hunting trip to the Everglades. Conveniently, his plane crashes, and he is believed dead. His wife, however, refuses to believe he's dead, and our young country squire chivalrously decides to help her search for her husband. He also, not so chivalrously, starts sleeping with her. What follows is a sordid tale of betrayal and greed. The takeaway from this story is that there will always be war profiteers, killers and degenerates, so let's hope they all decide to take hunting trips to Florida.

Blogging the Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction #2: A Cold, Foggy Day

Bill Pronzini's entry in The Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction, "A Cold, Foggy Day" is a twist story with a twist. Actually, it's a story with two twists, one that you will see coming a mile away if your at all familiar with the conventions of these sorts of stories and another that plays with and subverts those conventions. An older man and his younger partner arrive in San Francisco with a job to do. It's a setup that's been done many times before, but it doesn't go where you expect it to. Pronzini's too savvy for that. The result is a very quiet crime story.

Blogging the Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction #1: The Used

"The Used", by Loren D. Estleman, is a strong start right out of the gate. Estleman's story is short and sharp. It follows the final hours of a mob accountant who agrees to testify against his boss for the Feds, only to have his testimony go awry and his chance of relocation to Iowa literally get shredded in front of him. Like any cornered animal, the accountant turns dangerous, but he's not quite dangerous enough.

Estleman hits all of the right notes, and does a good job of ratcheting up the tension in what is a short, short story. There are no surprises here, and it pretty much ends exactly the way it has to, but it's satisfying nonetheless.

In my copy of the anthology, someone underlined a series of words in this story. They are, in order:

pursed
appropriations
clandestine
incongruously
circuitous
berth
tether
practicalities

Blogging the Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction

I've had The Black Lizard of Anthology of Crime Fiction for so long that I forgot I owned it. I picked it up somewhere used cheap a long time ago, before I really became interested in hard boiled crime fiction. I imagine I probably leafed through the contents and saw names like Joe Gores and Robert Edmond Alter and wondered who the hell they were and put the book on a shelf.

Looking for something else the other day, the anthology caught my eye, and I opened it up, and I realized that I now recognized every author's name and had read books by most of them. I put the book on my nightstand and decided I'd work my way through it, one story a week. Then I decided, that while I was at it, I might as well review the stories here. So, look for the first entry later today.