Noir fiction for the modern reader.

Here’s a look at today’s bestseller list of hardboiled books on Amazon. Granted, Temptation Town is free and the Ed McBain book is probably selling 100,000 copies a minute at $4.99, but hey, they’re both in the #1 position. I hope you forgive me for this little bit of chest-thumping, but I don’t often get to see my name at the top of a ranked list with “#1″ next to it, and I wanted to immortalize the moment (a brief moment it will be, I’m sure).

My new novelette, a hardboiled Las Vegas tale called Temptation Town, is now live on Kindle. It’s the first in the Jack Barnett series about a reluctant ex-private investigator laying low in Sin City. Here’s a brief description:

Jack Barnett has had it with the private eye business. They took his license away in LA, and fearing criminal prosecution, he split town in the middle of the night for Las Vegas, where anyone can become anonymous.

He swears off the business, but his money runs low and when a man offers him $5000 to find his missing daughter, he agrees. He soon wishes he hadn’t when the haunting memory of a woman from his past gets in the way.

Temptation Town is a hardboiled novelette, the first of the Jack Barnett series from Mike Dennis. Set in the steaming underbelly of Las Vegas, these tales of a reluctant ex-private investigator drag the reader down the darkest streets of Sin City, USA.

The book also comes with an exclusive preview of the next installment in the Barnett series, a short story called Hard Cash.

It’s available now in ebook form (it’ll be out in paperback in a few weeks) and you can get it here. Please pick up a copy. And then leave a brief review on Amazon. It would really mean a lot to me.

One more thing. The cover you see is not the final cover. It’s currently being designed by my cover designer, Jeroen ten Berge, but it won’t be ready for a few weeks yet. So I whipped this cover up to serve as an interim piece. If you buy the book between now and the time I get the final cover, and if you can’t live without it, I’ll send you a copy of the finished cover when I get it.

Now how can you refuse that deal?

I just received my Blu-Ray boxed set of Mildred Pierce, the HBO miniseries from 2011 directed by Todd Haynes. Nominated for twenty-one Emmys and winner of five, it’s a powerful story of a world-weary woman striving against odds for a better life. I had seen it when it originally aired several months ago and promptly pre-ordered the Blu-Ray box, because I felt it would be one of those things I would want to watch every couple of years or so.

And I was right.

When I watched it again, it didn’t seem at all stale. Rather, I was able to pick up things I’d missed the first time around (always a sign that a movie is doing something right). My overall appreciation of it rose considerably.

Frankly, I’d been waiting for something like this for many years. The 1945 film of the same name may have won an Oscar for Joan Crawford, but it didn’t do any justice to James M Cain’s novel from which it was adapted. For Hollywood purposes, they added a murder and other such nonsense and deleted much of the class division that Cain went to great lengths to portray. The HBO version, however, replicates the novel virtually scene for scene, and it vividly paints the picture of the sharp social differences between the characters. In 1945, Hollywood tried mightily for a noir atmosphere with lots of shadowy photography, especially in the police station (didn’t those cops have lights in their offices?). HBO achieves a thick, textured noir feel through well-fleshed-out characters and their motivations. You could almost call it “chick flick noir”.

Kate Winslet turns in a major-league performance in the difficult title role. Traipsing around in dowdy dresses and aprons, she crawls inside Mildred’s skin as she bakes her pies and eventually runs her restaurants. Crawford, on the other hand, always seemed to be going through her usual motions of acting, always aware of the camera, the lighting, and so on. Winslet makes you feel voyeuristic, like you’re watching her personal life unfold by peeking through the blinds. You will completely forget she was ever in Titanic as she plows through all five Mildred Pierce episodes, trying to get above her raising, caving in to the guilt trips her social-climber daughter is constantly laying on her, and ultimately falling for the conniving Monty Beragon, played with gusto by Guy Pearce.

Beragon, polo-playing man about town, has seen his fortune wane through the depression, and he’s reduced to living in the servant’s quarters of his damp, drafty Pasadena mansion. He was portrayed by Zachary Scott in the 1945 film, and truth be told, Scott fit that character like Clark Gable fit Rhett Butler. But Scott is gone, and Pearce approaches the role from a different angle. Where Scott was oily, Pearce is far more sincere, or so he seems. A key scene in the big Pasadena house where Beragon tells Mildred the importance of rooms and the things they contain makes you believe for a moment that he’s redeemable, that he’s not quite the rat you suspected. One of the audio commentaries that accompany the Blu-Ray set tells us that Pearce’s dialogue coach helped him nail the subtle speech inflections unique to old-time natives of Los Angeles, those who, like Beragon, came from old money.

The miniseries is set from 1931-1940, like the novel, and the title notwithstanding, it is almost stolen by the story of Veda Pierce, Mildred’s daughter, played as a pre-teen by Morgan Turner and from ages 17-20 by Evan Rachel Wood. Only the strength of Winslet’s star turn keeps the story in Mildred’s court. Turner is outstanding as the bratty, self-absorbed young Veda and Wood seems like the natural older version of her. I would imagine Wood’s performance was heavily influenced by watching Turner in the rushes for her body language, her voice inflections, and most of all, her all-about-me attitude.

In a smaller role, Hope Davis scores big as Mrs Forrester, a patrician grande dame who interviews Mildred for a maid’s job in one of the early episodes. Later on, her character marries a movie director and she becomes Mrs Lenhardt. Again she meets Mildred, but under very different circumstances, and can’t quite place her. Davis makes the most of her onscreen time, giving life to a minor character and preventing her lapse into stereotype.

I would be remiss if I didn’t take a moment to mention the production design in Mildred Pierce. Authentic period detail and a palette of muted greens and grays give the miniseries a vivid look at a middle-class American family of the 1930s. Production designer Mark Friedberg, Art Director Peter Rogness, and Set Decorator Ellen Christiansen shared the 2011 Emmy for Outstanding Art Direction.

Mildred Pierce is a winner for everyone involved, though, especially the late James M Cain, who was one of the great noir authors of all time. Nobody could tell a story better.

Well, I actually made a list. No, I didn’t sit down and write things in list form, I appeared on someone else’s list, specifically, Dana King’s Best Reads of 2011. He was good enough to include Setup On Front Street in his list, for which I’m grateful, to say the least. Dana’s own Wild Bill would’ve made my list, if I’d had the energy to sit down and compile one. But I didn’t, so all I can tell you is to go buy it. You won’t be sorry. It’s a realistic tale of mob/police intrigue in Chicago. For that matter, you can go here and read my review of it.

When KDP Select came along a few weeks ago, I was very skeptical. It looked for all the world like another Amazon gimmick to help authors who are already selling a shitload of books to sell two more shitloads. I mean, why would a struggling writer like myself want to put in a lot of time and effort, only to see the big boys and girls walk off with all the sales while I remain buried?

For the uninitiated, KDP Select is a new program on Amazon, wherein a publisher or a self-published author makes a digital title exclusive to Amazon Kindle for 90 days (print versions can still be sold anywhere), during which time anyone with an Amazon account can “borrow” the e-book with no due date. Amazon is putting up around $500,000 a month to be divided among the authors on a per-borrow basis. Readers can only borrow one book per month, though, so you know they’re going to be selective. Meaning they will borrow from among those books that are shoved in front of their faces. Enter the Amazon behemoth and its relentless promotion of bestselling authors.

Here’s a nice photo from a Christmas party I attended here in Key West the other night. Our congresswoman, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen was there and I presented her with a copy of my novel, The Ghosts Of Havana. She’s a big crime fiction fan, and more importantly, she’s a Cuban-American and the leading voice in the US Congress on America’s Cuba policy. She’s a conservative Republican, but here in the liberal Keys, we love her. And with good reason. She’s tackled the issues that are important to us down here, and gone to bat for us on these issues, even if it meant going against conservative orthodoxy.

In any case, I hope she likes the book.

Rock on, Ileana!

If you look carefully over my right shoulder, you can spot another Ileana, although this one is spelled Yleana, also a Cubana. My lady, Yleana Vural. She’s in a white dress and she appears to be checking out another woman’s shoes. Two Yleanas in one photo! The room is spinning!

Rock on, Yleana!

Just want to take a moment to convey my best Christmas wishes to everybody who may have occasion to read this. Down here at the end of the road, we never have a white Christmas (it’s 79° outside my window as I write this), but the spirit is the same. My XM radio is tuned to the Christmas music channel, and I don’t feel any less Christmasy than I did growing up in the frozen north. My girlfriend and I and another couple are going to a friend’s house for dinner and good wine, then we’re coming back home and open presents, followed by watching Christmas In Connecticut on DVR.

It doesn’t get better than that.

EVERY SHALLOW CUT by Tom Piccirilli (2011)

Review by Mike Dennis

What’s the deal with Tom Piccirilli? Doesn’t he realize too much backstory is fatal to any novel? That it absolutely has to be woven in to the story, not dumped up front? Doesn’t he realize you need ample dialogue to move everything along? The reader will, you know, get awfully bored reading all that narrative. There are, after all, rigid rules all writers must follow.

Well, maybe he doesn’t realize the existence of these rules, because if he did, he might not have written Every Shallow Cut (ChiZine Publications, 2011), a shattering novella of our times.

On second thought, maybe he does know about the rules, but broke them anyway, which makes him a far better author than most people realize.

Incredibly, the entire first half of this compact book (I read the paperback in its unusually small format) is nearly all backstory, with Piccirilli pulling a reverse, deftly weaving in the actual story while he recites the grim history of his nameless central character. Dialogue is virtually absent throughout this first half as well, leaving the reader to turn the page solely on the strength of the author’s bleeding prose, as he plunges us into a hard-edged tale of a man whose life has evaporated, who has lost everything in our troubled economic times.

This character is the quintessential noir protagonist. From the first page, he’s in deep shit, largely because of his own bad choices, and it only goes downhill from there. And as with all of us when we make bad decisions, the fiddler must be paid. Yes, Piccirilli follows the noir playbook perfectly.

But somehow, Every Shallow Cut transcends noir and its conventions. It leaps up and slaps you in the face and screams at you that maybe we’re all in deep shit, and maybe our decisions have nothing to do with it. Maybe we all have a screw quietly loosening somewhere in the darkest corners of our souls which, given the right circumstances, could eventually cause all of us to become unspooled.

In addition to the central character, none of the characters has a name, and this fits the story well, because, like it or not, names carry connotations which help bring fictional characters into sharp focus. Piccirilli’s characters are meant to remain cloudy in our mind’s eye, as if seen through a window streaked over with grime. This way, they are almost interchangeable with people we might know, maybe even with ourselves. Even the cover is hard to read. This all adds up to very little distance between the reader and the characters, making the reader uncomfortable and providing a more powerful emotional wallop.

Piccirilli is an excellent author, having written over twenty novels, along with numerous short stories and novellas, and this is not the first of his books that I’ve read. It is, however, the best. I’ve wondered why he’s not better known, why his books don’t sell in such numbers as to propel him into permanent status on bestseller lists. It might be because the American reading public is not ready for Every Shallow Cut. It’s a masterpiece far ahead of its time.

Oh, and about those rules? W Somerset Maugham said, “There are only three rules for writing. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

My new noir short story, Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Eyes, is now live on Amazon Kindle. Here’s the link to its page. And here’s a brief description:

Harry’s a blackjack dealer at the Flamingo in Las Vegas. The kind of guy you’d never notice. Ordinary-looking, inconspicuous, practically invisible. Lives in a little apartment behind the hotel. Been working graveyard shift for twelve years now. Got no life of any consequence.

But one night Petra sits down at his table, and then…

Best of all, it’s only 99¢! Check it out. You won’t be sorry.

Heath Lowrance, a talented author if ever there was one, has just added “man of impeccable taste” to his credentials. He took the time to read The Ghosts Of Havana and write a wonderful review of it. I could stick a slick link in here to the review, but hey, I’m a simple guy, so I’ll just post the entire review below.

When a woman is murdered at his nightclub, Robbie makes it his mission to find out who and why– he’s a bit of a shady character himself, but a feeling of responsibility drives him on. Teaming with the victim’s reporter sister, he finds himself caught up in the dark, sinister underworld of Key West, and uncovers a mind-boggling conspiracy that dates back decades. Robbie is no stranger to violence, but now it seems he may have bitten off more than he can chew…

The Ghosts Of Havana is a relentlessly fast-paced conspiracy thriller, the sort of book that keeps you reading all through the night. I devoured it in two sittings, on the edge of my seat the whole time to see what unexpected turn of events would occur next. Mike Dennis does a terrific job of revealing the seamy side of Key West, with the sort of intimate touches that only a native of that place would be capable of. And his protagonist, Robbie, moves through this dark world as if he’s right at home. 

And the secret behind the conspiracy, once it’s revealed, will blow your mind. Top-notch suspense here.

Heath has written a game-changing novel, The Bastard Hand, as well as a short story in the horror-western-noir genre, That Damned Coyote Hill. He’s also got a short story collection that’s well worth your attention called Dig Ten Graves, along with various other stories and an upcoming novel. Yes, he is productive, and I’m very pleased that he did this review of my novel while he’s on his way up, and still has the time.