Review of Havana Fever

Leonardo Padura has brought Havana detective Mario Conde back for another investigation. In Havana Fever (Bitter Lemon Press, 2009), the retired policeman is working as a used book dealer in Havana when he uncovers the mysterious disappearance of a young jazz singer that occurred in pre revoultion Cuba. In the heart of a library full of priceless books in a crumbling mansion, Conde unearths an article about Violeta del Rio, a forgotten singer, and his curiosity gets the better of him, but his search turns out to have unexpected consequences, and he and his business partner are soon murder suspects.

Padura's novels have never exactly been fast paced, but Havana Fever is slow even by Padura's standards. Padura lovingly renders Havana, and he brings back the ususal cast of characters, but the price of this dilligence is a that the novel takes a hundred pages to even get off the ground. Padura has always been about atmosphere, but in this case the atmosphere starts to interfere with the pacing, making it a slog at times.

Strip away some of the asides, however, and there's still a solid story there, even if the author inisists on dragging it out. As Conde digs deeper into the mystery of Violeta's disappearance, he comes into conflict with the police department he once worked for and his old assistant Manuel Palacios, who now has Conde's old job, and sends him on a tour of a crumbling society that inspires much soul searching and disillusionment with contemporary Cuban society and what the revolution has wrought.

Preview of Darwyn Cooke's Adaptation of The Hunter

There is a 20 page preview of Darwyn Cooke's adaptation of The Hunter available here. The book is due in July. It's available for pre-order from Amazon, and it's going to be a hardcover, something I didn't know before. It looks pretty good. If you can't wait until July, there is a used copy for a cool grand. Somethow, I think I'll manage for three more months.

Wednesday Paperback Cover

Meow.

Some Tuesday Pulp Art Links

I've seen the ads for Thomas Allen's paperback cutout art around, but whenever I've clicked on them, the links haven't worked right. So, via Metafilter, here's a link to Allen's work. Part of me thinks this is very cool, but there's another part of me that wishes he wouldn't cut up books like that. There are other links in the Metafilter post linked above, but I've covered them here before, with the exception of this link to Canadian pulp covers. Enjoy.

J.G. Ballard is Dead

J.G. Ballard, the English author famous for his science fiction, and maybe more famous, or rather infamous, for works like The Atrocity Exhibition (read the most infamous excerpt here) and Crash, has died. Of course Ballard also wrote more prosaic works, like Empire of the Sun, a novel based on the author's experiences as a young boy during World War II, which was later made into a movie by Steven Spielberg (and starring a young Christian Bale, something I didn't realize until I started researching this post).



A lot of Ballard's later work, like Cocaine Nights and Super Cannes ,are definitely works of crime fiction, obsessed with the dirt that lurks beneath the sleek, clean surface of modern society. I'll be the first to say that I didn't always enjoy Ballard's work. I've put down a couple of his books out of boredom and frustration, but I'll also be the first to say he was an important author who wasn't afraid to wrestle with ugly ideas and come up with some ugly results. I think that's why his work can be so hard to take at times. He spends a lot of time dwelling on various sorts of alienation, and he paints the picture so effectively that the reader inevitably ends up alienated.



Bonus Content: The Normal performing Warm Leatherette, an oft covered song inspired by Crash. The video is from David Cronenberg's movie adaptation of the novel.

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.

A Precedent

When I saw Hard Case Crime's December offering, (or one of their December offerings, I should say. There's a second book coming in December that's still a secret.) The Corpse Wore Pasties, I thought it interesting because it was a murder mystery set in the burlesque world by a burlesque professional. It turns out he's following in the footsteps of Gypsy Rose Lee, famed burlesque performer and author of The G-String Murders.

Wednesday Paperback Cover

Remember the days of easy credit?

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.