All Due Respect Issue 2 (19 page)

Finally, you’ll see that a beloved park employee dies, and his ghost is seen, though not by Devin or by the reader. Devin figures out who the serial killer is; the murderer knows he will, and tells Devin to meet with him or he’ll kill the mother and child. They meet, and Devin is saved in the nick of time, and soon the novel ends, and then ends again—a tactic King does well. (Remember how
The Green Mile
ended, then ended again?) It struck me as a little sad. Charles Ardai, the editor of Hard Case Crime, said the ending made him cry.

I’m a tougher, hard-boiled kind of guy, so I just got the sniffles and became wistful.

But this is a Hard Case Crime book by Stephen King, so there is a terror here. The real horror in life, King said in a recent interview, is the cancer that kills the main character’s—and King’s own—mother. It’s growing old. Going senile. Losing loved ones. These things are the horror of
Joyland
as well.

And the joy of
Joyland
for me is in its recreation of another time—a time we’ll never see again. It’s an evocation of our innocent past that maybe wasn’t so innocent—but it sure felt that way, didn’t it? King said
Joyland
was a revisiting of his love for the small carnivals during his own teenage summers. (Think of
Joyland
as Bradbury’s
Something Wicked This Way Comes
, minus the lyrical prose.) By remembering his summer freedoms, King invites us to remember ours, and to do so with, if not love, then at least a wistful appreciation.

Joyland
helped me remember the summers of my past with a smile, and it’ll probably do the same for you.

What else can you ask for as you grow older—as your hair thins and grays, and your bones get brittle? I’d rather look back and smile, than look ahead and frown.

T
HE
T
WENTY-
Y
EAR
D
EATH
BY
A
RIEL
S
.
W
INTER

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

What’s more difficult than writing a crime novel? How about writing three of them, each in the style of a different master of the genre? This is the challenge that Ariel S. Winter set himself in
The Twenty-Year Death
, and the literary ventriloquism he displays is astounding. This 600-pager is split into three linked sections, which stand equally well on their own. The first,
Malniveau Prison,
is a Simenon/Maigret pastiche set in rural France of 1931. This is followed by the Chandler-esque
The Falling Star
, set ten years later and with a Hollywood backdrop. Finally, there’s
Police at the Funeral
, a spectacular riff on the ’50s noir world of Jim Thompson.

It’s to Winter’s credit that he keeps the author’s voices consistent throughout, and
The Twenty-Year Death
is a novel that strengthens as it progresses.
Malniveau Prison
is perhaps the least successful of the three sections, albeit only marginally—in places, the language feels slightly off-key, detracting from an otherwise evocative picture of rural France. Winter is on firmer ground in
The Falling Star
, and the mean streets of San Angelo, down which he sends his detective Dennis Foster. Winter’s everyman protagonist encounters corruption at every turn, in a satisfyingly complex plot reminiscent of James Ellroy’s LA, and one with a twisted family at its centre.

I’d reserve my highest praise for the final section,
Police at the Funeral
. Right from the beginning, there’s an extraordinary, inevitable feeling of dread hanging over the narrative, which you know won’t end well. Winter’s portrait of his protagonist, an alcoholic writer in hock to the mob, is pitch perfect—you can almost smell the desperation pouring off him, and the readiness with which he crawls back into a bottle at any given opportunity is genuinely unnerving. You want to shake him out of his stupor, while also knowing that it’s already too late. In the best noir traditions, his fate is sealed, and all the reader can do is watch.

Despite the unusual structure,
The Twenty-Year Death
is never a tricksy book. Winter is utterly respectful of his source material; and in putting these three very different writers side by side to tell the same, over-arching story, he also pushes at the boundaries of the genre, and demonstrates—in the right hands—just how incisive and devastatingly memorable it can be.

T
HE
C
UTIE
BY
D
ONALD
W
ESTLAKE

A
H
ARD
C
ASE
C
RIME NOVEL
REVIEWED BY
M
IKE
M
ONSON

The thing I most love about this Donald Westlake book is what I love about all Donald Westlake books: It comes off as completely unself-conscious and unpretentious.

Westlake wrote a fascinating, compelling story about criminals and crime and that is all that’s on the page. I never feel like he’s trying to impress us with his language and writing skills, with his plotting, with his worldview, with his characterization. He has figured out a great tale with interesting characters and great settings and he just freaking tells it. I was grabbed from the opening pages and could
not
stop reading until I was done. When the book was over the only thing I felt I’d learned about Donald Westlake was that he was a great writer, a great story-teller—that’s it. I like that very much in a book.

The book covers most of my favorite fictional territories. It’s the story of Clay, a combination fixer, muscle, and hit man for a major New York gangster right around 1960, or maybe just before then (that is the year the book was first published). In his daily life, Clay mixes with people in an urban criminal world from the lowliest junkie to the fanciest mob lawyers and the bosses—and everyone in between. Clay narrates, and he describes his life and the life of his fellow criminals with a refreshing, bare-bones, non-judgmental point-of-view similar to the Parker books Westlake wrote under the name Richard Stark.

At page one, paragraph one, Clay is about to make love to his sexy girlfriend Ella. It’s two thirty in the morning. Just as Clay and Ella turn off the lights and reach for each other, the doorbell rings. Much more interested in the lovely Ella than anything that could possibly be behind the door, Clay at first ignores the bell in the hope that the person will go away. But he finally does answer and finds Billy-Billy Cantell, a stuttering junkie who’s part of that same criminal enterprise as Clay, except that he’s so much less important that the two rarely run in the same circles.

Billy-Billy is in trouble—the kind that involves dead bodies and frame-ups and a potentially nasty and profit-threatening police presence in the lives of Clay and his boss. To help his boss, to whom Clay is utterly loyal, Clay must help Billy-Billy out of his jam and, at the same time, find and eliminate whoever is framing the drug addict for murder and jeopardizing the organization—the so-called “Cutie.” To that end, Clay acts as an investigator for the remainder of the book, and his efforts to find and neutralize this Cutie take him all over town and all over New York society. Along the way, the reader learns more about Clay’s background and how he ended up in his job. By the end of the book, he has to make many hard decisions about the kind of life he wants to lead, decisions that affect his relationship with Ella.

His ultimate decision both shocks and makes perfect sense, and brings the story to complete and very cold, dark end. Again, just what I like in a novel.

T
HE
M
ALFEASANCE
O
CCASIONAL:
G
IRL
T
ROUBLE
ED. BY
C
LARE
T
OOHEY

R
EVIEWED BY
C
HRIS
R
HATIGAN

Modern crime fiction tends to be a mostly male affair. (Just look at the table of contents of this magazine.)

Not only are there few female writers in the genre, but there are far fewer stories
about
women.

Enter
Girl Trouble
, an anthology from the people behind
Criminal Element
. Fourteen stories based on an interesting, open-ended prompt by a formidable cast of authors.

My favorite of the bunch is “Mad Women” by Patti Abbott. It has all the hallmarks of an Abbott story—the lyrical voice, the fluid dialogue, the thoroughly imagined characters. She also excels at crafting detailed period pieces and demonstrating subtle, destructive sexism—both of which are on display here. This story is about Eve Moran, a compulsive shoplifter, and Abbott does a fine job creating Eve’s interior life.

Here’s just one of many excellent passages: “There were always grim-faced men in charge of her, she thought again. Men who guided her around by the elbow, steering her like an unwieldy ship into port. Men who were ashamed of what she’d done—at their association with her.”

Hilary Davidson has a strong entry with “The Barnacle.” Jess is involved with criminal Bobby Torres. When the police come knocking, Jess dutifully covers for him. But it doesn’t take much for Jess to figure out that he’s an all-around shit stain. This one struck me as a mini-novel—I wanted to find out more about Jess and her association with the underworld.