All Due Respect Issue 2 (18 page)

Stories are a kind of currency when you’re out on the water. There’s not much else to do but talk. You struggle with the gear and sweat the catch and live and die with each haul. You hurt and you stink and you don’t sleep and when you do sleep, you dream about fish. You tell your loved ones your stories from a payphone at the end of a dock, but the connection is bad and anyway, they don’t get it, and at the end of the season you walk away with a paycheck and a notebook full of half-remembered tall tales.

And if you have any sense, you’ll keep that notebook close to you, even after the money’s gone. You’re going to want to remember those stories, someday.

R
EVIEWS

T
HE
G
UTTER AND THE
G
RAVE
BY
E
D
M
C
B
AIN

A
H
ARD
C
ASE
C
RIME NOVEL
REVIEWED BY
D
AVID
B
ISHOP

I’ve long been a McBain fan (I’m currently working my way through his 87th precinct series, in order), but I hadn’t realised how much he’d published early on under pen names. When it first came out in 1958,
Gutter
was originally titled
I’m Cannon—For Hire
, and authored by “Curt Cannon.” This also meant that McBain’s protagonist had his name changed to match that of the author, but thankfully the more recent Hard Case reprint goes with McBain’s original (and preferred) choice of Matt Cordell.

Cordell is a drunk, which we know right from the beginning because he tells us. He’s spending a quiet afternoon with a bottle, on a bench close to the Cooper Union in Lower Manhattan (a college that McBain attended), when an old friend finds him and asks for help. Reluctantly, Cordell accompanies him back to his tailor’s shop, where they find the body of his business partner—at which point, it all kicks off.

When his friend is arrested, Cordell agrees to try and find the murderer, returning again to the life of a private eye, which ended when his marriage broke up and he began crawling into a bottle for a living. Cordell’s investigations lead him to the heart of a complex, sordid family, as well as reuniting him with a much-hated fellow PI. Needless to say, in the finest noir traditions, Cordell takes both a physical and emotional beating before the book is finished; it ends exactly where we found him, a drunk on a park bench, waiting for a cop to move him along.

I liked
Gutter
a lot, largely because Cordell is such a fine protagonist—painfully self-aware, guilt-ridden, and afraid of doing the right thing because of what it cost him in his past. In spite of his faults, he’s also determined to get to the bottom of this case, even though he’s only acting on it as a favour to a friend. There are glimmers of the 87th precinct squadroom here; McBain’s police detectives are no fools, but ordinary men trying their best to do a decent job while everyone else seems intent on lying to them.
Gutter
is an efficient noir thriller, which also points toward some of the preoccupations that McBain would revisit in his other work.

P
LUNDER OF THE
S
UN
BY
D
AVID
D
ODGE

A
H
ARD
C
ASE
C
RIME NOVEL
REVIEWED BY
L
AWRENCE
M
ADDOX

Gringo PI Al Colby, cooling his heels in Chile, is offered one-thousand dollars to smuggle a mysterious package into Peru, no questions asked. The money interests Al almost as much as his sickly employer’s beautiful nurse, Ana Luz. When Al discovers the package holds the key to an ancient Incan treasure, he plunges into a trek across the Andes to the ruins of a fabled fortress. This is a Hard Case Crime reissue, so you know
Plunder’s
Incan lore takes a back seat to greed, double-crosses and bloodshed in what could be called “adventure noir.”

David Dodge’s
Plunder of the Sun
, originally published by Random House, 1949, reissued by Hard Case Crime, 2005, is the second of three crime novels featuring expat adventurer Al Colby. Al is a decent guy and his style is laid-back; he’ll let the other guy strike first, but like a cunning counter puncher, Al will turn things around to his advantage. Al’s adversary is Jeff, a fellow expat and antiquities expert who wants in on the lost Incan treasure. Like the gringos hunting for Mexican gold in B. Traven’s
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
(which reminds me a lot of
Plunder
), the promise of quick wealth brings out suspicion and violence. Part of Al’s quest for the gold is his desire to buy the freedom of the beautiful Ana Luz, a
criatura
, or indentured servant, who is being forced into an unwanted marriage.

All three Al Colby books take place in Latin America, and Dodge paints his landscape like a local. In
Plunder
, Dodge puts his treasure hunters through their paces, trekking Al and his unfaithful companions across the Andes by train, mule, and foot, and finally, to the deadly
denouement
at Lake Titicaca. Dodge really brings Peru to life, and it’s no wonder; Dodge was a very successful writer of travelogues. Like Ian Fleming, Dodge came up with his detailed descriptions of his exotic locales by visiting them. His first two travel books,
How Green Was My Father
and
How Lost Was My Weekend
, are both detailed family excursions into Latin America, and were both published before
Plunder
. The heat, the dust, the lice-ridden huts of the poor cocoa-leaf chewing Cuzco Indians—Dodge makes you feel like you’re right there, digging for golden Incan statues while nervously watching your back.

Warner Bros made a so-so movie out of
Plunder
starring Glenn Ford in 1953. Dodge didn’t like it. He was much happier with Hitchcock’s adaption of his 1952 novel
To Catch A Thief
. Successful in his day, Dodge is largely forgotten by crime fiction readers. He deserves better. Randal Brandt is rectifying that with his excellent website
A David Dodge Companion
(
www.david-dodge.com
). It’s comprehensive, and Dodge’s daughter Kendal assisted his research.

J
OYLAND
BY
S
TEPHEN
K
ING

A
H
ARD
C
ASE
C
RIME NOVEL
REVIEWED BY
S
TEVEN
B
ELANGER

Joyland
is another first-person account by Stephen King, tinged with nostalgia and a healthy dose of regret, which succeeds because the narrator’s voice is so everyday that it’s like you’re listening to one of your good friends.

King has specialized in this sort of first-person narration for a long time—in
1922, Bag of Bones, 11/22/63, Insomnia
, “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,” and “The Body,” to name a few.
Joyland
is a toned-down and muffled version of
The Shining
, of
Bag of Bones
, and of the nostalgia—tinged with getting-old sadness—of
The Green Mile, Insomnia
, and others.

How successful is it? If you’re
only
looking for some staples of Hard Case Crime—very harsh characters, nasty stuff done by nasty people, fast-talking men and faster-moving women—then not so much. King’s style is not hard-hitting, punch-in-the-stomach crime noir. But I read
Joyland
’s 283 pages in one sitting, and I liked it in a way that surprised me.

There’s nothing here you haven’t seen before, and the identity of the killer shouldn’t come as a surprise. It’s got to be one of two characters, really, especially after another finds his way to a hospital. I don’t think King thought this book’s fate rested upon its mystery.

Or its supernatural horror. Because, frankly, there isn’t any. The ghosts appear behind the scenes to the minor characters. You won’t see them.

What you will see is a broken-hearted University of New Hampshire student, Devin Jones, taking a job at Joyland to forget his woes. A fortune teller—whose fortunes are often Joyland babble, but sometimes not—tells Devin his life will be changed by two children, one a girl with a red hat, one a boy with a dog. One of them has The Sight. (That’s
The Shining
reference.) Devin later saves the girl and meets the boy.

You will also see that a young woman had been murdered decades ago in Joyland’s Haunted House. Devin and his friends (Tom Kennedy and Erin Cook; Erin is the scantily-dressed redhead on the cover) discover a series of murders, never connected by the police. Tom sees the ghost of the murdered woman—in an effectively creepy scene—and the summer ends. Though his friends go back to school, Devin stays, and befriends the boy and his young mother. (There’s
Bag Of Bones
.)