Review of Hogdoggin'

Anthony Neil Smith’s last book, Yellow Medicine, never quite came together, with its mix of half-assed terrorists who, for some godforsaken reason, wanted to control the meth trade in middle-of-nowhere Minnesota, rockabilly music, and bad cop and southern transplant Billy LaFitte, it seemed like Smith had thrown a bunch of disparate ingredients in a blender, hit puree and ended up with a bit of a mess. His latest novel, Hogdoggin’ (Bleak House, 2009) brings back many of the characters from Yellow Medicine,but improves upon the first novel in every respect.

Hogdoggin' is the novel Yellow Medicine could have been if Smith hadn't decided to go with terrorists over bikers. Hogdoggin' finds LaFitte acting as sergeant-at-arms for a biker gang run by a man named Steel God. He's trying to stay of the radar, but FBI agent Franklin Rome, humiliated by the beating LaFitte handed out at the end of Yellow Medicine, is putting the squeeze on LaFitte's mentally unstable wife in an effort to flush him out of hiding. Rome's actions work, to an extent, and LaFitte takes off on a turquioise chopper to ride to the rescue of a woman who wants nothing to do with him. While Yellow Medicine was told in first person from LaFitte's point-of-view, Smith decided to go with third person for Hogdoggin', which gives him the opportunity to get inside the head of Rome, as well as LaFitte and other characters. The choice works well, and the characters are more fully realized than they seemed in Yellow Medicine. It's nice to see what makes these characters tick, even if they all are, on some level, monsters. Smith writes monsters pretty well.

The Billy LaFitte saga shares a lot in common with Charlie Huston's Hank Thompson novels, where a garden variety loser gradually turns into a dangerous man, except LaFitte is a dangerous man who is becoming more dangerous, and it's harder to feel sympathy for him than it is for Thompson, although it is possible to feel some empathy for poor Billy because every time he tries to be nice, at least in relative terms, it tends to blow up in his face. The only time things ever seem to go his way is when he gets really nasty. Of course, seeing bad people do nasty things to each other is part of the fun, even if you can't quite bring yourself to pull for any of them.

Wednesday Paperback Cover

Bonus points to anyone who can tell me what a "rood" is in this context.

Review of The Disassembled Man

After reading The Disassembled Man (New Pulp Press, 2009), I was pretty sure the author, Nate Flexer was a pseudonym. (Nate Flexer is a pseudonym for John Basoff, proprietor of New Pulp Press. My instincts were right See comments). His author’s bio identifies him as a high school English teacher, and I’m pretty sure The Disassembled Man isn’t the type of book your typical school board member would take to bed with them. Flexer doesn’t appear to be a pseudonym, however, so maybe he teaches at a private school or has tenure or is married to the school board chairman or something because this is the sort of book that would make your average local politician go crazy.

Frankie Avicious has a pretty lousy life. He has a job slitting cows' throats at a slaughterhouse. He's in love with a stripper. His wife is fat, and her dad is rich, but he won't kick loose with any money. He's also a raging alcoholic who pukes more than a supermodel (there is more vomiting in this book than in any other book ever written). When Frankie receives a visit from a mysterious old acquaintance, he decides to get his life together. Instead of enrolling in community college, however, Frankie decides to kill his father-in-law for the inheritance. From there, it's off to the races, as the body count mounts, and Frankie's tenuous grip on reality becomes even more tenuous.

The Disassembled Man is a little rough around the edges, but it's a first novel, so roughness around the edges is to be expected. Flexer's main character is a little bit of a mystery, though. For a character with a bad (and I mean bad) background who has no education or interest in self-improvement, he's remarkably articulate. The fact that he's deeply, deeply crazy and has trouble keeping in touch with reality doesn't help either. It's entirely debatable, in my mind, if the last third of the book happens anywhere outside Frankie's head.

The Disassembled Man is remarkable for its ugliness. It's hard to think of a book with a character as despicable as Frankie Avicious. It turns out he has valid reasons for being as twisted as he is, but his unapologetic homicidal mania may be difficult for some to stomach. This Jim Thompson on mescaline story is not for the faint of heart.

The Shelf

This isn't my only bookshelf, but it is my biggest one, and the image isn't tilted, the bookshelf is. I'm going to have to get something a little more heavy duty than Ikea offers obviously. I'm expecting it to collapse any day now.

Stark House Steps Out

Stark House Press, known up till now for its reprints of hard boiled fiction, is venturing into publishing originals, having picked up the rights to Charlie Stella's novel, Johnny Porno. According to this blog post the novel is about New York in 1973, when the infamous Deep Throat found a wide audience (scroll down). From the description:


"It's the summer of 1973 and John Albano is a former construction worker with child support and rent payments he can't keep up with by driving for a Brooklyn car service, but then it's his quick hands and honorable nature that ultimately place him squarely in the middle of a perfect storm of danger.

Albano is just trying to make ends meet when he takes a weekend stint counting heads and collecting the take at illegal screenings of the recently banned porno film Deep Throat for Mafioso Eddie Vento. But a devious ex-wife, her more devious ex-husband, the wiseguys behind the film (including one obnoxious wannabe with a frenzied beef for Albano), the Fleetwood Eldorado used in the opening scene of the porno film and a host of cops (both good and bad-including the deranged one Albano punched out) snowball into an often humorous, sometimes violent, action-packed page turner loaded with the masterful dialogue that earned Charlie Stella six *starred* reviews and countless comparisons to such masters of the genre as Elmore Leonard, George V. Higgins, Donald Westlake and Mario Puzo over the course of his six contemporary crime novels."

Sounds promising, and it's good to see Stark House stepping out and taking a chance on new fiction. Hopefully, JP will do well enough that Ed Gorman and company will do it again.

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.)

Wednesday Paperback Cover

Gimme the handkerchief and no one gets hurt.

Plots with (Ray) Guns

The new Plots with Guns is now live. It's a special sci-fi issue, so expect a lot of pew! pew! pew! lasers, as opposed to bang! bang! bang! bullets. It includes a story from Fred Zackel, and the most curious entry would appear to be an illustrated tale by Pinckney Benedict, author of this forgotten book. I'll have to really sit down and check it out after work.

Reviews of Beast of Burden and Gun

Ray Banks’ latest novel, Beast of Burden (Polygon, 2009) concludes the story of ex-con and sort-of private investigator Callum Innes. At the end of his last outing, No More Heroes, Innes suffered a stroke while trying to prevent a bomb from going off in the middle of a race riot.
Beast of Burden finds Innes summoned by Manchester gangster Morris Tiernan who wants him to find his missing son Mo. It doesn’t take Innes long to find Mo, but he’s not alive, so, of course, Morris wants to know what happened, as does detective Donkey Donkin, who is convinced that Innes is involved.



While Innes does return to the alternating first person point-of-view that marked Saturday’s Child, switching back and forth between Innes and Donkin, it no longer seems as gimmicky as it did when Banks’ was a writer with only one other novel under his belt. Banks’ writing continues to improve, and each of his Innes novels has been better than the last.



Burden isn’t a traditional detective novel, though. There is a long, complicated back story involving Innes, the Tiernans, and Donkin. While Banks does a good job of explaining without letting it bog down the story, this book is best approached after reading the three other books in the series, or at least Saturday’s Child, the first Innes novel, which goes a long way toward explaining the situation Innes finds himself in at the beginning of Burden. In a novel more focused on relationships than on plot readers who don’t know the lay of the land are likely to get lost.



While Beast of Burden’s main disadvantage is it’s inaccessibility to new readers, Gun (Crime Express, 2008), is quite accessible, and a good place for readers who might be looking to sample Banks’ style to start. At fifteen thousand words, Gun is somewhere in between a short story and a novella. It’s simple, polished, and elegant. A young, would-be thug is sent across town by a drug dealer to pick up a handgun. It’s an uncomplicated setup, but Banks manages to wring drama, and even a little pathos out of it.

Wednesday Paperback Cover

Things like what? Spiders?

(Suggested by Christopher Grant of A Twist of Noir)