KISS TOMORROW GOODBYE by Horace McCoy

Reviewed by Mike Dennis

Where do you begin with a novel like Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye? Horace McCoy’s 1948 noir journey through an unusual criminal mind is at once spellbinding and aggravating.

Spellbinding because it’s an intense, hard look at a very different kind of criminal, and because it’s supposedly the granddaddy of all first-person-criminal novels, eventually bringing Jim Thompson face to face with his own hellish visions.

Aggravating because it’s not as easy a read as one might wish. You’re in for a slog through long, forbidding paragraphs and lots and lots of casual, throwaway conversation among the characters.

But beyond all this, the meat of the novel is as noir as it gets.

Paul Murphy, aka Ralph Cotter, is incarcerated on a prison farm, picking cantaloupes. The first two paragraphs, which take up the first two pages, deal with the overpowering odor in the barracks of “seventy-two unwashed men” and how it triggers a sense memory from his long-ago youth. These memories, we soon learn, are always with him, and they’re troubling.

With the help of Holiday and Jinx, two confederates on the outside, Murphy escapes and the three of them make their way to an unnamed city. Holiday is the woman in Murphy’s life. She sees to his every need, and usually lounges around naked under an open bathrobe. Jinx is straight out of the Hollywood School for Sidekicks.

Anyway, before you can say “all points bulletin”, Murphy is completely set up in the new city. He has a place to live, money in his pocket, access to a car, and a few shady contacts. Pretty soon, he’s plotting another job, this one a supermarket robbery. It doesn’t come off smoothly, and this brings on a sequence of events that lead up to a very choppy ending.

The ending notwithstanding, the novel moves right along as we follow Murphy through his odyssey of newfound freedom. One of the stops he makes along the way is the company of a bewitching beauty, Margaret Dobson. You just know that his involvement with her will come to no good.

What makes Murphy unique is that he’s a highly educated criminal. He’s a Phi Beta Kappa, in fact, and he takes an extremely dim view of the average stickup man. For him, people like John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson are beneath contempt, nothing more than mouth-breathing Neanderthals who happened to make a few lucky scores.

He also sees himself as far above the man on the street. There’s a telling passage in which he’s riding a bus, during which he observes that people who habitually ride buses are “cheap, common, appalling people, the kind a war, happily, destroys”.

Moreover, when he’s not slapping Holiday around or pissing off crooked cops, he’s tossing out words like propliopithecustian and integument and at least a half-dozen others just like them.

I told you it was a tough read.

Review by Mike Dennis

You really have to hand it to Vicki Hendricks.  I mean, there are damn few authors out there who would even be willing to consider short story subjects such as Siamese twins or bestiality.  Fewer still would ever actually attempt such stories, and I daresay that only Hendricks can pull them off without making the reader feel like he should be reading them under the covers with a flashlight.

That pretty much sums up the caveat of Florida Gothic Stories (Kitsune Books, 2010), a superb collection of intense short tales, most of which have been separately published elsewhere, but are now together in one volume behind a properly creepy cover. Hendricks, an outstanding noir fiction author of several Florida-based novels, has stepped somewhat outside the comfort zone of her genre, and believe me, the reader will be glad she did.

These stories run the gamut from straight noir to the utterly bizarre. Lethal strippers, trailer park crackers, drug whores, animals in various relationships with humans…all fodder for Hendricks’ fertile imagination. Let’s face it. You know you’re in foreign territory when a story begins with the line, “The day he flushed his meds and purchased a dress for his iguana, Gregory Waxman’s real problems were over.”

All the characters in this collection are infused with a certain desperation, a kind of melancholy beneath their outer personae and, no matter how twisted they are, the reader can feel Hendricks’ devotion to them. She treats them with a tenderness which you might not initially think they deserve, but upon reflection, you’ll ultimately get on board. That’s really the beauty of these stories: they’re not meant to be swallowed in one or two bites and then quickly digested. They require the reader subsequently to think about them, each one, each character, and in this afterglow, their true nature is revealed.

For example, the leadoff tale, Stormy, Mon Amour, immediately slaps the reader with the notion of sex between the central character and Stormy the dolphin. It takes a minute to realize that it’s not a joke, that this has actually happened, and then, once Hendricks has you reeled in to the reality of it, she then convinces you that this is in fact a traditional love story. When it’s all over, you realize that you were reading this in exactly the same fashion as a housewife might watch a daytime soap opera: pulling for the heroine, hissing the villain, and praying for a happily-ever-after ending.

Even a standard noir tale like Boozanne, Lemme Be, gets the Hendricks odd-angle treatment. Mouse, a four-foot-ten, minor-league burglar, has figured out a way to live in the home of Bob and Melodie, a married suburban couple, without their knowing about it. He soon teams up with Boozanne, a fleshy, pig-nosed grifter girl, but after living in the couple’s house for a while, he develops an unusual affinity not for Boozanne, but for Melodie, whom he has never really seen, much less met.

All the stories are set in Florida, of course, Hendricks’ own stomping grounds. As she does in her novels, she plunges the reader into these settings as sharply as she does her players. You will walk the terrain hand-in-hand with these characters, and feel the sweat dripping off them as they plod through sticky summer days and long, dangerous nights. However unpleasant these people may be, Hendricks keeps you right at their side, and you’ll always know you’re in Florida. As a former Floridian (Key West), I can appreciate this authenticity.

Florida Gothic Stories may mark a slight departure for Vicki Hendricks, but don’t be fooled. These plots are original, the characters breathe, and her ear for dialogue is unerring. You can’t ask for anything more than that.

Reviewed by Mike Dennis

“None of the rules apply unless you’re high up enough to dictate them down. Even then, sooner or later, the rules get changed on the fly.”

That’s NYPD Detective John DeNafria clueing his new partner into the world of Organized Crime in Charlie Stella’s 2002 novel of the New York streets, Jimmy Bench-Press. Former boxer Alex Pavlik is DeNafria’s partner. He’s new to the OC unit, fresh out of homicide and ready to kick some mob ass. Pavlik has a reputation for being a loose cannon, not entirely on board with inconvenient rules such as Miranda rights, so DeNafria has to keep a close eye on him at all times.

Brooklyn mob soldier Jimmy Mangino is about to find out how the rules apply to him. He’s a street-level guy, fresh out of prison and back in the rackets. He cuts an intimidating figure and can bench-press four hundred pounds. I’m not a weight-lifter and even I know that’s a hell of a lot of poundage to lift. Yes, Jimmy is one tough dude.

But he wants to become a made man, and that’s where his problems begin. He does strongarm jobs for the higher-ups, like knocking off porn case witnesses and running protection rackets around town. He hopes these little errands will ingratiate him with “the skipper” and move him ever closer to his eagerly-awaited induction ceremony.

Standing in his way are DeNafria and Pavlik, who are working on a low-grade extortion case. They have Mangino in their sights and they hope he will lead them to much bigger fish. From here, the novel moves swiftly along, parallelling the developments in the case, only taking occasional time out for each of the two cops to anguish and commiserate with the woman in his life.

The book is populated by assorted mob lowlifes and their put-upon victims, all of whom Stella has drawn to perfection. His dialogue is fine-tuned to the point where the reader can very nearly hear the actual voices of each character: pitch, inflection, the whole shebang. He clearly has a grip on the material.

Stella is the author of several other novels revolving around New York wiseguys, all of which have been well-received by readers and critics alike. Jimmy Bench-Press, which was his second novel, drips with violence, but in a different kind of way.

A comparison can handily be drawn to Val Lewton, movie producer from the 1940s, whose RKO films such as The Cat People, The Body Snatcher, and I Walked With A Zombie suggested much more horror than was actually shown. Lewton was given microscopic budgets to work with, so he was forced to improvise, but he also firmly believed that the images of horror which resided in the minds of his viewers were much more powerful than anything he could put up on the screen. Once he tapped into those dark corners of their imaginations, audiences of the day had nightmares after coming out of his movies.

Stella, however, can splash all the blood he wants on his pages, and there are indeed some red stains. No surprise there, of course—-it’s the mob, right? But the novel is at its most effective when the reader can feel the violence lurking in Mangino’s threatening persona. All Jimmy has to do is nod or grunt and right away you know the mayhem he’s capable of causing. As with Val Lewton, Stella’s readers can easily conjure up horrific images without seeing them played out on the page.

Jimmy Bench-Press rings with authenticity and is an excellent introduction to the world of the low-level criminal footsoldier.

Reviewed by Mike Dennis, 2010

You would think the Los Angeles area has been done to death in crime novels. The terrain has been plowed sooooo many times by sooooo many authors, hasn’t it? And that’s to say nothing of TV and movies. I mean, doesn’t everyone know about Santa Monica and the Hollywood Freeway and all that stuff? Admit it, when you pick up a novel and the author mentions the San Fernando Valley, you get an immediate image in your mind, right? There’s really nothing new left to say, is there? Haven’t you had it with these LA novels? Aren’t you ready to cry “enough”?

Well, not quite yet. Especially not after reading Stephen Jay Schwartz’s Boulevard (2009).

LAPD Detective Hayden Glass is riding along Sunset Boulevard one middle of the night, eyeballing all the hookers, as well as the johns cruising to pick them up. He slides past strip clubs and drug corners, and he really seems to know what all these sex-trade people are thinking, as if he were deep inside their heads. The whole scene drips with sleaze and stunning detail.

Contrary to one of the “rules” of novel-writing, there’s very little real action in this opening, but you can’t turn your head away. It’s like you’re in the back seat of the car, a voyeur, invited along for the ride.

You’re all set for a novel centering around Hollywood Vice, when you quickly learn that Glass has been moved up to RHD, which is LAPD-speak for Robbery-Homicide Division, the top of the cop heap in the City of Angels. Schwartz hustles Glass through a series of murder investigations, with each killing more horrific than the last. Because of clever clue placement, Glass realizes the murders are linked, probably committed by the same person.

The problem, though, is that no one will believe him, because apart from these tenuous clues, nothing, but nothing, connects the victims to each other. They’re of different races, genders, and backgrounds. Glass sets out to find the killer, but he can’t let on that these clues even exist, because to do so will tip his superiors to his career-ending innermost secret: he’s a sex addict.

Once you peel back the overlay of the plot, this novel is really a disturbing travelogue through the Los Angeles sexual demimonde. Glass knows every boulevard in LA County where hookers stand on corners, and just like in the opening scene, he takes us with him in his Jeep, searching them out. He knows precisely how far to go down each boulevard before making a U-turn for another lap. He knows the invisible turf boundary that divides your more upscale girls from the hard ones. This is where the real Hayden Glass resides, the world to which his soul is hopelessly chained. And this is the Los Angeles that the reader has seldom seen before.

You can feel the intensity in Glass’ eyes as he cruises around endlessly, hoping to spot a “glint of blonde hair”, the tipoff of a hooker. When he sees one get out of a car, he makes a beeline toward her. Problem is, so does every other john who’s around that particular area of that particular boulevard at that particular moment. They all know the routine. It’s first come, first served.

When he’s not cruising the streets to satisfy his addiction, Glass takes the reader along to massage parlors and to strip clubs for lap dances, all the while letting us into his twisted brain. We eventually see that his addiction is not really about the beauty of sex and the pleasure of orgasm, it’s about something far deeper and much, much darker.

There’s a 12-step Sexual Addicts Anonymous organization that has regular AA-style meetings all over the city. We go with Glass to a few of these meetings, where we learn the pecking order of sex addicts. Level One consists of people like Glass, those who commit “victimless crimes”, to use his euphemism, like picking up hookers and going to massage parlors. Level Two includes flashers, peeping toms, and the like, while Level Three is composed of rapists and other violent offenders.

Glass is very resentful that people from Levels Two and Three are allowed into his meeting. He clearly thinks they are beneath contempt and feels the world would be better off without them. You can almost hear him thinking that the Level Two and Three types give sexual addiction a bad name.

While all these sordid details of Glass’ inner life are dripped out to the reader like a continuously-flowing IV, the plot pushes on, and Glass eventually comes to the conclusion that, although the rest of the cops still can’t see the connection between these murders, the killer is doing all this specifically for Glass himself.

This is a very unusual plot twist, and one which requires Glass to deduce, and the reader to accept, that only he could’ve possibly seen the very devious clues planted by the killer, and that he would have connected them properly. It’s a big leap for Glass to make, and he takes a lot of action based on this slender thread of deduction. It’s a bigger leap for readers, though, some of whom may not make it to the other side.

But that doesn’t derail the novel the way it might have. Schwartz keeps you turning the page by making you lose yourself in Glass’ private sexual world and the musings of his dark mind. As I mentioned earlier, I believe that’s really the purpose of this novel. In any case, by the time the climax rolls around, you won’t really care how you got there.

The author never lets the story escape his control, despite numerous points of opportunity to do just that. It’s well-planned and densely cast, and the reader is in for a long ride down gritty streets he’ll not soon forget.

A frightening tale of one man’s struggle with his own internal demons, Boulevard is Schwartz’s debut novel, and I hope he’s got a lot more like this one in him.

Reviewed by Mike Dennis

Is there any such thing as “macho noir”? I’ve never heard of it, but if there were, Shoot would be one of its classic examples.

Written in 1973 by Douglas Fairbairn, it’s a testosterone-loaded novel, which has one of the best openings I’ve read in a long, long time. A group of middle-aged hunters, all buddies and veterans of various wars, are out traipsing through the woods one day in full hunting regalia. As they come to a riverbank, they spot another group of guys, very much like themselves, on the other side. Without any provocation whatsoever, one of the hunters on the other side raises his rifle and fires at our group, wounding one of them. Reflexively, one of our guys, an expert marksman, quickly returns fire, blowing the shooter’s head apart.

A frantic firefight ensues, and eventually, our guys retreat and get the hell out of there without any more casualties. What follows is a well-constructed tale of the nature of manhood and its entwining with pack mentality.

Rex Jeannette is the ultimate alpha male, leading his group of friends through an agonizing analysis of both the bloody event and what they should do about it. Call the police? Go back and confront the attackers again? Do nothing? And speaking of the attackers, what are they going to do? Will they seek revenge for their slain comrade? Will they call the police? Who knows? But Rex is firmly in charge and everyone knows it.

He owns a big department store in town, and when he’s not dealing with the aftermath of the shootout in the woods, he’s busy slugging whiskey and screwing girls who work in his store. He makes constant references to firearms, complete with manufacturer, caliber, and model number. He’s not afraid of anything and he has no patience for anyone who is. Those who step out of line will pay for it.

Fairbairn, the author of the excellent 1977 noir novel, Street 8, is definitely untainted by the world of political correctness and all its stifling restrictions. Understandable, since PC wasn’t really entrenched in 1973. However, you get the impression that through Rex Jeannette, Fairbairn is venting a lot of his own aggression, working out his own hangups, and perhaps searching for his own place in the world.

The climax, while not entirely unexpected, is still somewhat of a surprise, thanks to the tremendous suspense the author has created in the runup to it. The final few lines are a fitting end to an incisive, violent novel.

BACKFLASH

(Yes, the cover really does cut off the publisher’s name at the bottom)

Review by Mike Dennis, 2010

“We live and learn.” That’s what Parker says to an adversary immediately before shooting him point blank in the eye.

They don’t come much tougher than Parker, and he’s his usual hardass self in the muscular 1998 novel, Backflash, by Richard Stark.

After walking away from a heist with $140,000, he plans to take it easy for awhile, laying up with Claire, his longtime lover, in someone else’s summer cottage amid the woods of upstate New York. But of course, he can’t stay out of action for long, or there would be no series.

He’s approached by Hilliard Cathman, former state government employee turned consultant, to do a job. It seems a new gambling boat will soon be unveiled, slated to cruise along the Hudson River. Cathman has the blueprints of the boat, as well as security details, schedules, locations of the safes, and all the things a man would need to hijack a cash-bloated gambling ship. The only thing missing is the team to do it.

Problem is, Parker isn’t sure he wants to take this job. It seems the only way to rob the ship is to do so while it’s cruising. That means getting back to shore with the money, and that means too much exposure in the middle of the river. He’s also suspicious of Cathman himself. Why would this guy, an obscure lifelong bureaucrat, suddenly want to organize a major armed robbery?

Of course, Parker eventually agrees to the job, but not before he figures out an extremely devious solution to the money/exposure problem. He rounds up his usual assortment of criminal types and they set about plotting the robbery in a very matter-of-fact, professional manner. But he’s still plenty uneasy about Cathman.

Stark’s pacing in these Parker novels is always letter perfect, with the plot only slowing down long enough for the character to catch his breath or to contemplate his next move. These moments are usually tinged with suspense, as in a tense scene on the ship immediately before the robbery.

The entire novel takes place in Albany and other smaller towns along the Hudson, and Stark gives the reader an excellent sense of place. Although these locales aren’t that far away from New York City, they still feel like the middle of nowhere, which is exactly how Parker wants it. Less of a problem with witnesses that way.

Backflash is an excellent entry in the long-running Parker series. Beneath all the planning and execution of the heist, there’s a convincing unapologetic defense of the code of criminal justice as meted out by criminals.

Review by Mike Dennis

When you open a David Goodis novel, you can be pretty sure of two things: it’s probably going to be set in Philadelphia and it’s definitely going to be populated by characters whose lives have no significance, often not even to themselves. And that’s exactly what you get when you open Cassidy’s Girl, a 1951 effort by the master storyteller of doomed human beings.

I say doomed because even in this book, which has Goodis’ twisted version of a happy ending, the characters are all lost souls, thrown out with the bathwater into the filthy streets of the Philadelphia waterfront.

Jim Cassidy drives a bus from Philadelphia to Easton three times every day, back and forth, back and forth, because that’s the only work he can get. As a ruined former airline pilot, he’s well into his downward spiral, and his monotonous job only sets him up for his evening activities. He hangs around a slimy waterfront bar where all the hard case drinkers go, he gets in fist fights, and he’s completely under the spell of his wife Mildred, a breast-shaking, hip-swaying drunken nag who would rather cheat on him than make him dinner.

Well, one night while in an alcoholic stupor in his favorite dive, he spots Doris, a twentysomething girl who is, as she puts it, drinking herself to death, and she looks it. Sallow-complected and vacant-eyed, she makes love to the bottle every day and every night. Cassidy falls for her, more out of genuine caring than lust, and he eventually moves in with her. As he falls more and more in what passes for love in a Goodis novel, he tries his very best to get her to quit drinking. In one wild fantasy, he even envisions a proper, straightened-out life for the two of them, dining in fine restaurants and sipping an after-dinner sherry. “There would be no need for the other kind of drinking,” he thinks to himself.

Mildred, however, has different ideas, and Cassidy’s problems start multiplying.

This is why Goodis was such a great writer. He can take the very lowest players on society’s scale and make you care about them. Even when you know they have absolutely no shot, which is usually the case, you still care. Cassidy’s Girl reads like Goodis’ love letter to these people, and for that matter to all the losers who ever appeared in his novels. Anyone who appreciates great writing should make a point of locating a copy.

Review by Mike Dennis

A fortune in illicit cash, a sinister gambling joint operator, a gorgeous redhead, and enough double-crossing to last a lifetime…those are the building blocks of The Squeeze, a fast-moving novel by Gil Brewer.

Written in 1955, The Squeeze is centered around Joe Maule, a Chicago transplant to the southwest Gulf Coast of Florida, the site of many Brewer tales. Joe is in debt to the tune of $12,000, a fortune at the time.  He owes it to Victor Jarnigan, owner of a nearby illegal casino.  Jarnigan, who has cheated Joe out of the money, has concocted a plan to allow him to clear his debt.  All Joe has to do is get cozy with Caroline Shreves, local femme fatale.

Caroline lives with her sister and her husband, who has apparently squirreled away $300,000 in cash.  She’s eye-popping, and likes to hang around local cocktail lounges on weeknights. Joe’s instructions are to develop a relationship with her, then get into the house and try to grab the money.

Well, Joe gets tight with Caroline, all right, according to the plan, but he falls in too deep.  As with most Brewer protagonists, he’s blinded by his lust for this alluring woman who knows all the moves.  She appears to fall for him, too, and before you can say “Judas kiss”, the two of them are plotting to grab the money for themselves and split town.

This is the kind of well-written book that made pulp work back in the day.  It immediately draws you in, continuing its hold over you with a steadily building story line and no-frills plotting.  It’s pure noir:  Joe is screwed from the first page, but he’s the only one who doesn’t know it.

Brewer’s formula of lonely-guy-meets-beautiful-dish works again, thanks to clever variations in his theme.  He pushes all the right buttons in this little gem, which unfortunately has been left in the dust of the last half-century.

Review by Mike Dennis, 2010

How would you like to take a job where your employer cuts your predecessor’s stomach open before your very eyes?  Well, that’s what’s offered to the central character in the opening of The Coldest Mile, a 2009 blow-‘em-out hardboiled tale by Tom Piccirilli.

He’s called Chase, and we learn that he was raised as a grifter by his grandfather, Jonah, who pulled him out of a foster home and straight into a life of crime.  Now, as a twentysomething adult, he’s on his own.  Jonah, now in his sixties, and who is one hardass dude, has plenty of blood on his hands.  But he’s still deep inside Chase’s head, for more reasons than one.

Immediately after Chase takes the job as chauffeur for a disintegrating New Jersey crime family, he runs into problems, all of his own making.  He’s not given to following orders too closely, he talks back, shows no respect, and pushes the family’s gunmen around.  The reader can’t help but think he’s going to get whacked any second.

Referring to a previous Piccirilli novel, The Cold Spot, a dense backstory is cleverly revealed in bits and pieces, letting the reader in on the complex relationship between Chase and Jonah.  In The Coldest Mile, Chase wants to find him again, but for very different reasons.

Piccirilli, an award-winning author of some twenty novels, knows how to write this stuff.  He keeps the reader’s eyes on the page with lots of stinging prose and tough dialogue.  He takes us with Chase to Florida, where the criminals are decidedly minor league, and gives us a finely-tuned feel of the messiness of their organizations.

He also draws a clear connection between Chase and Jonah.  It’s an ambivalent one, filled with both resentment and respect, but most of all, it is riveting, and forms the emotional core of the novel.

Through Chase’s memories, Jonah’s character is well-drawn before he ever actually walks onto the page.  When he finally does appear, he steals every scene he’s in, whether Piccirilli wants him to or not, and he very nearly steals the entire novel.  By then, however, the reader is totally ready for one of the most hardened, uncompromising characters he will ever encounter.

THE WOMAN CHASER by Charles Willeford (1960)

Review by Mike Dennis, 2010

Los Angeles, 1960.  The pinnacle of the California dream.  Cars are king, and the king of the used cars is Richard Hudson, recent transplant from San Francisco.  That’s the backdrop for The Woman Chaser, a fine noir novel by Charles Willeford.

Hudson, a Type A personality if ever there was one, regards himself as one of the greatest used car salesmen of all time, and he’s not too far wrong.  He really knows all sides of the business, as he opens up a Los Angeles lot for Honest Hal Parker, the leading used car dealer in San Francisco.  No angle escapes Hudson’s sharp eye, no customer gets anything less than his highest-pressure pitch, and no car goes unsold.

He makes plenty of money, lives well, tips generously, and you would think he’s hit his lick.  But no.  There’s an itch that he can’t quite scratch.  He longs to be in the movie business.  The position of writer-producer-director will do just fine, thank you.

His stepfather (who is only seven years older) is a blacklisted Hollywood director, and one night Richard approaches him with an idea for a script.  It can’t miss, Richard says, turning on his salesman’s charm.  And before you can say “Lights, camera, action!”, the two of them are trying to get his script turned into a movie.

The novel is divided not into chapters, but sections separated by movie script jargon (dissolve, cut to, fadeout, etc), and it’s somewhat unsettling, but that’s why Willeford is so good.  He can use a pedestrian story as an overlay, or even as a decoy, while he barely hints at the swampy mess that is the human condition festering underneath.  You just know that, despite Hudson’s having made it in the used car business, he’s doomed as a human being.

The title implies that Hudson spends most of his time hitting on women, but nothing could be further from the truth.  Women pop up here and there in the novel, but in fact, he’s wracked with guilt over his own lack of real masculine desire.  It bothers him that he’s too preoccupied with business to get bogged down with women.  And that includes his mother, an oddball ex-ballerina who is a book all by herself.

In reality, Hudson doesn’t need a woman to lead him down the road to perdition.  Like so many of Willeford’s protagonists, he can get there on his own.