Noir fiction for the modern reader.

BLOOD’S A ROVER by James Ellroy

reviewed by Mike Dennis

As every fan of James Ellroy knows by now, the third and final installment of his Underworld USA Trilogy is now available.  Through its 640 pages, Blood’s A Rover is a rollercoaster wrap-up of Ellroy’s hellish vision of America in the sixties, seen through the eyes of three principal characters.

1. Wayne Tedrow, former Las Vegas cop and heroin dealer, whose father had intimate knowledge of the JFK assassination plot. Now working with the mob to open casinos in the Dominican Republic.

2. Dwight Holly, previously engineered the Martin Luther King assassination while setting up James Earl Ray as the fall guy (all at the behest of J Edgar Hoover). Now turns his attention to disrupting West Coast black militant groups.

3. Don Crutchfield, LA private investigator with a fondness for peeping through windows at night. Lands a job finding a woman who stole money from his client.  Through this, he’s drawn in to a dizzying array of political intrigue, hate-group conspiracies, and Mafia dreams for the future.

At the center of Blood’s A Rover is the shadowy leftist Joan Klein, known as the Red Goddess, along with a mysterious cache of emeralds stolen from an armored truck years earlier.  All three of the principal characters eventually become obsessed with finding Joan, and the book seems to take a subtle turn once she walks into the story, as she slowly becomes the focus of the novel.

Ellroy has expanded his vision well beyond Los Angeles, taking the reader across America from black militant storefronts in LA to Howard Hughes’ Las Vegas hotel suite all the way to the Oval Office.  He spends a good deal of time deep in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, where voodoo potions are the order of the day.

The many, many characters, who appear and disappear with blinding speed, are given to similar-sounding voices, so it’s not always easy to tell who’s speaking.  Their collective voices are, in fact, Ellroy’s own voice, giving him a personal stake in the proceedings.  This is one of the reasons that Ellroy is a tough read.  You have to accept the fact that he resides, to one degree or another, in all of his characters.

The trilogy, spanning from 1958-1972, is a sweeping look at the ugly underbelly of America during that turbulent period, at the precise point where byzantine political plots, racial paranoia, and organized crime collide.  He has said that one could read Blood’s A Rover and glean from its opening the back story of the first two books.  I wouldn’t recommend it.  American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand are necessary steps to arriving at this fitting finish to a cold-blooded epic story.

SUCKER PUNCH by Ray Banks (2007)

Review by Mike Dennis

The world of small-time boxing makes for an irresistible backdrop in noir fiction.  Films such as Fat City and The Set-Up gained classic status by their dramatic depiction of the hopeless nature of that world and those who inhabit it.  There are very few options for these people, and almost all of them end in flames.  This is the message delivered in Sucker Punch, a 2007 novel by British author Ray Banks.

The big time in the sport, represented by championship bouts in Las Vegas, is clearly out of reach for everyone involved in this book.  But that doesn’t stop them from dreaming, and when you think about it, that’s what boxing is all about:  one man’s dream to escape a life of grinding poverty.

Liam Wooley is not the central character in the book, but he’s the fighter from Manchester, the one with the big hopes.  He’s got talent, no doubt about it, but his temper may prevent him from “turning pro”, which is his immediate goal.  He’s laconic to a fault, a sort of young Charles Bronson, who just wants to train in the gym and be left alone.

Cal Innes, a former private investigator, is out of prison on probation.  He forges prescriptions to quench his pill habit and does odd jobs for Paulo Gray, owner of a seedy gym in Manchester.  Paulo gets an invitation to send a fighter to Los Angeles to compete in a small tournament, where it’s rumored that high-level scouts will be in attendance.  He decides to send Liam, his best prospect, and asks Cal to keep him company on the trip and make sure he shows up for the bouts.

Told from Cal’s point of view, the novel takes them to LA, during which time Cal can’t find anywhere to smoke, he rubs Liam the wrong way, and he meets Nelson Byrne, a stranger in a bar who says he’s a former fighter, but now “does some coaching and scouting”.  Hmmm.

There’s enough British street slang in this book to fill a soccer stadium, and I often had to pause to try to decipher it.  But Banks was able to deftly switch back and forth from British voice to American in those scenes where Cal is speaking to Byrne.

I was over halfway through the book before I realized that nothing was really happening.  The first hint of real conflict didn’t come until later, and normally, this is the kiss of death for any crime novel.  Banks’ prose, though, is so hard-hitting that it holds your attention through it all and makes you forget that the story is just standing still.  David Goodis was a master at this, forcing you to turn the page on the strength of his writing alone.

Banks’ Manchester, always cold and drizzly, brings to mind Goodis’ Philadelphia, a miserable, bleak place where the minor players have no shot and where their dreams are easily extinguished.

Be careful when you read Sucker Punch.  You’ll need to take a shower to wash away the grime.

THE GAMBLER by William Krasner (1950)

Review by Mike Dennis 2010

“This is it, fellow,” the motorman said impatiently.  “End of the line.”

That’s the opening of William Krasner’s The Gambler (1950), a gritty noir novel of one man coming face to face with his own limitations.  That man is Ben Wulfson, who, unlike most noir protagonists, starts at the end of the line and pretty much stays there.

He’s just returned to town from an eight-year absence, which is never fully explained.  He makes his way to commission row, which looks like an area straight out of David Goodis’ black vision of Philadelphia.  It’s full of sooty buildings and merciless streets and people with few options, but right away, Ben feels at home.

He wants to get back into the swing of the gambling world, which he knows well, so he hooks up with Tim Coogan, a pasty-faced young man who worked with him years earlier.  Together they set up a dice game.

Now, if you run a dice game legitimately, you’re going to make money in the long run because the odds are immutably in your favor.  Problem is, Ben doesn’t want to wait for the long run.  He wants to make a pile of dough fast, then get out of town for good.  So he introduces doctored dice into his game.

The game cruises along, Ben and Tim make some pretty good money, and then Ben meets Alice, a girl wandering aimlessly in the park, clutching a crust of bread.  She’s wet, cold, and very sick.  Out of sympathy, he takes her back to his fleabag hotel room to dry her out and warm her up.  They develop a strange, distant relationship, but each of them welcomes it in his/her own way.

Problems arise when Ben’s loaded dice are discovered.  Then the local gambling kingpin decides Ben’s game is disrupting the natural order of things.  Meanwhile, his own troubled family issues reverberate throughout the book.  The cops, the gangsters, the gamblers, Ben’s family…they’re all out to get Ben in one way or another, as each scene narrows his window of opportunity to escape.

Krasner paints a desolate picture of people on the other side of town, where no one ever goes.  The scenes are described in great detail, maybe too much so in spots, but all in the language of true noir.  Even the scenes that take place under the daytime sun feel dark and hopeless.  Under his hand, light is co-opted by shadow as easily as ambition is extinguished by reality.

The author of only eight novels, Krasner spent most of his career writing scientific essays for journals and magazines, as well as a lot of TV and radio scripts.  Don’t let that fool you, though.  The Gambler is a bitter, uncompromising tale, very well told.

WEB OF MURDER by Harry Whittington (1958)

Review by Mike Dennis

Charley Brower is a pretty smart guy.  That’s what he thought, anyway.  Shoot, a big, smart lawyer like him?  Shouldn’t be any trouble at all to kill his rich wife for her money, then make off with his secretary.  No sir.  No trouble at all.

Turns out Charley is maybe a little too smart.

That’s the general idea in Web Of Murder, a tight little noir novel from 1958 by one of the masters of the genre, Harry Whittington.

Charley saves guilty clients from the electric chair and has every material possession he could want:  a Cadillac, cashmere jackets, and a big home.  The home, however, is in his wife Cora’s name and that bothers him.

Cora spends her time straightening out her house and getting on Charley’s nerves.  They’re both in their middle thirties, but are already starting the physical slide into middle age.  You know Charley’s brain is ticking when he says, “I was showing my age, but with Cora, I had to look at it.”  You can’t sink any deeper into noir than that.

He becomes obsessed with Laura, a coy little babe who takes his dictation and types up his briefs.  Soon, they tumble into bed together and before the sheets are dry, Charley realizes that Cora has to go.

Harry Whittington, unfortunately, has been nearly forgotten in the sweep of time.  He was an incredibly prolific author, cranking out upwards of 200 novels during his career, which tapered off in the late 1960s.  At one point, he wrote 85 novels in twelve years, seven in one month!  He wrote under his own name, as well as some fifteen pseudonyms, and easily crossed genres from mystery into western and even pornography.

But his forte was noir.

Web Of Murder is a slim little book, probably fewer than 35,000 words, but it tells its tale extremely well.  The characters are well-drawn and the plot is never really rushed.  When it came to old-school paperback authors, Whittington was one of the best, and he holds up to this day.

DIE A LITTLE  by Megan Abbott (2005)

Review by Mike Dennis

Things are never as they seem.

That could easily be the subtitle of Die A Little, the 2005 debut novel by Megan Abbott.  The characters are shrouded in their own obsessions and desires, but the shroud is not easily lifted, so nothing is ever entirely clear in this stylish, neo-noir tale.

Set in Los Angeles of the mid-1950s, during the very zenith of the California-as-land-of-dreams era, Lora King lives out the dream in a little house in Pasadena with her brother, Bill.  They’ve always lived together, even as they passed into adulthood, in a kind of mutually protective, fairy-tale world:  childlike Lora the schoolteacher, parading through sunny kitchens, making ham-and-pineapple-ring dinners; square-jawed Bill, saving society as a crime-fighting investigator for the LA County district attorney.  There’s probably a twin bed in Lora’s room.

But Bill marries Alice, and everything is shaken up.

While Alice is all cleavage and plucked eyebrows, she seems to truly love Bill, but she carries the whiff of the tawdry world that Lora knows is out there, and doesn’t want to think about.

Alice tries hard to bond with Lora, referring to the two of them as “sisters”.  She invites Lora over for dinner parties, and otherwise insinuates herself into Lora’s life.  Lora wants to like Alice, but she has her suspicions.  Alice has no photos of her family, her life before Bill is cloudy, and darn it, she’s just so different.

Pretty soon, a couple of bodies turn up, as Lora finds herself dragged into the back-alley LA cesspool of the time, a world drenched in drugs, prostitution, and murder.  She learns terrible things she didn’t really want to know, as everyone’s true motivations eventually crawl out into the sunlight.

Abbott takes her time in the unfolding of the story, narrating it in Lora’s first-person, present tense voice.  I found the present tense to be somewhat off-putting, not bringing the dark urgency to the story that was needed.  If you can get around that (which I did), then you’re in for an unusual, noirish look at LA in the fifties.

Unusual because of Abbott’s distinctive feminine voice.  It’s not the hard-as-nails voice of say, Christa Faust, but it’s not trying to be.  It’s softer, but no less dark, and always hinting at something creepy behind the milk-and-honey facade.

One more thing:  if you don’t know anything about the story, then the cover, which is a hand-painted photograph, is almost worth the price of the book all by itself.

STREET 8  by Douglas Fairbairn

Review by Mike Dennis, 2010

“Nobody wants to come downtown anymore.  They tell you it’s like coming to a foreign country.”

That’s the sentiment expressed by a Miami native in Street 8, a  hot-blooded 1977 noir novel by Douglas Fairbairn.

The title street, an English translation of Calle Ocho, the main drag of Miami’s Little Havana, is the site of Bobby Mead’s used car lot.  Out of habit, Bobby still calls it by its original name, Southwest 8^th Street, and from the office window of his lot, he’s seen Miami transformed from a sleepy, one-season tourist town into a vibrant Latin city.

The Cubans are everywhere.  They’re even buying cars from him, so for the first time, he hires a Cuban salesman, Oscar Pérez, to accommodate them.  Oscar, however, soon becomes embroiled in the hornets’ nest of exile politics, and the trouble begins.

The problem with Miami’s exile community in 1977 is that, while they’re committed to eliminating Fidel Castro, they also want to wipe out his sympathizers and spies who have infiltrated their organizations.  But exactly who is who?

Told entirely from Bobby Mead’s point of view, Street 8 allows him no letup.  His world is contracting around him, threatening to choke him, and not even his ratty South Beach hotel room offers him any sanctuary.  He has a teenage daughter, but his incredibly twisted relationship with her only serves to further cut him off from the city he once loved.

Fairbairn deftly ushers the reader through the dark fringes of the byzantine world of Miami Cubans.  These were the pre-cocaine-cowboy and pre-Miami-Vice days, and we eventually learn that some of them are more interested in acquiring power in Miami itself than they are in retaking their homeland to the south.

This little-known novel is an excellent noir tale, highly recommended, as it offers an uncompromising look at one man caught up in a city’s convulsive transition.

FIRES THAT DESTROY by Harry Whittington (1951)

Review Copyright 2009 by Mike Dennis

Some guys have all the luck.  Blondes have more fun.  You’ve heard the cliches.  But at the faceless corporation where Bernice Harper works, pretty girls get all the promotions.

And it pisses her off.

That’s the central theme in Fires That Destroy, a tight little noir novel from 1951 by Harry Whittington.

Year in and year out, she watches through her thick-lensed glasses as sexy babes in tight skirts use their attributes to glide effortlessly up the ladder while Bernice, plain and stringy-haired, stays mired in the steno pool.

She builds up a reservoir of resentment, which eventually morphs into self-hatred when her boss recommends her for the position of private secretary in the home of an important client.  Problem is, he’s blind.

She knows they foisted her off on a blind man, almost as a joke, and she doesn’t like it.  Things are made worse when she learns he’s a heavy drinker who never tires of making passes.  This intensifies her hatred, as she knows that he wouldn’t come near her if he could see.

And so begins her descent into hell.

The novel opens with Bernice looking down a staircase at the blind man’s twisted corpse.  She’s just pushed him down the stairs to his death.  In the dark silence of the house, a grandfather clock chimes, freaking her out.  She thinks, “The sound of a clock and I’m paralyzed.  How will I stand the rest of it?”

Not very well, actually.  Whittington ratchets up the stakes for Bernice in nearly every scene.  But she’s so consumed by her hateful obsession with the world she inhabits that she can’t rescue herself.  Her unraveling forms the spine of the story.

In a masterful stroke, Whittington takes the reader deep into Bernice’s mind, as she slowly disintegrates into “the most depraved and sinful woman on the face of the earth”.  Her interior dialogue with herself evokes Jim Thompson at his most dangerous.

Whittington wrote over 170 novels in his astonishing career, hopping around through various genres.  Most of his work, unfortunately, is out of print, but noir aficionados should make a point of locating a copy of Fires That Destroy.