Noir fiction for the modern reader.

There’s an excellent website called whatbookisthat.com, which is primarily a review site. They review many different genres, and I was very pleased when they agreed to have a look at my noir novel, The Take. They gave it an A- and I’m delighted. You can check it out here and when you do, please leave a comment. It will really, really help out.

For the first time in years, I watched The Damned Don’t Cry (1950), and I had forgotten how truly great a film it is. How can you not like something that carries a tag line like, “Ambition. Betrayal. Murder. Don’t let the little things stop you.”

Joan Crawford stars as Ethel Whitehead / Lorna Hansen Forbes, but gets plenty of top-drawer support from David Brian (always underrated, in my opinion) as George Castleman and Steve Cochran, who turns in yet another stellar performance as the conniving Nick Prenta.

The DVD included an interview with, of all people, director Vincent Sherman. The date on the DVD is 2005, so the interview was conducted not too long before his death, which occurred the following year right before his 100th birthday. A veteran of Hollywood’s golden age, Sherman directed other films noir, such as Backfire and The Garment Jungle, as well as mainstream efforts like The Young Philadelphians, one of Paul Newman’s early efforts.

The Damned Don’t Cry, however, was his best. And it is arguably Joan Crawford’s finest hour, too, her Oscar-winning turn in Mildred Pierce notwithstanding. Her scenes with Brian and Cochran crackle with intensity. She worked well with them and they were both up to it. The story of a woman rising up from deep blue-collar roots to the top of society mirrors Crawford’s own life, enabling her to crawl into the skin of her character with ease. But Lorna Hansen Forbes’ meteoric rise is only a prelude to her introduction to the world of organized crime.

Brian runs the show and he sees in Crawford the kind of grit and tenacity that he had within himself during his own trip to the top. He finds her irresistible and eventually figures out how to integrate her into his empire. But of course, Cochran has other plans.

The film’s first half is set in Texas oilfields and New York back streets, but appears to have been shot primarily on the Warner Bros back lot. The second half, however, shifts to a Palm Springs-ish locale, where Cochran is plotting his next move. The look is so authentic, I almost felt as though I were watching a different film altogether. I don’t remember any film of that era with a Palm Springs setting, but this one was very effective.

If you haven’t seen The Damned Don’t Cry, or haven’t seen it in awhile, go find it. You won’t be sorry.

The good folks over at DailyCheapReads.com have posted a little feature on my noir novel, The Take. This is pretty amazing, since they usually feature only very inexpensive books. The Take weighs in at $4.79 for the digital version and $12.95 for the paperback (both prices set by my publisher). They’ve got a great site going over there at DailyCheapReads. Check it out here.

The Caffeinated Diva has weighed in on Bloodstains On The Wall, and she…well, I’ll let her tell you. Go here.

The folks over at TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com were kind enough to post a review of Bloodstains On The Wall. You can check it out here (scroll down a little when you get there). And afterward, please leave a comment of some kind. It’ll mean a lot to me and to them. Thanks.

KISS HER GOODBYE by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins (2011)

Review by Mike Dennis

Mike Hammer is back.

It’s the 1970s. He’s a lot older now, a little mellower, and far more world-weary, as he makes his way through Kiss Her Goodbye, by Mickey Spillane in a 2011 posthumous collaboration with Max Allan Collins (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

After a near-fatal gunshot wound, Hammer has left New York and heads for the lower Florida Keys to recuperate and, for that matter, to retire. He’s had it with PI work, with New York and all its lowlifes, with having to deal with an ever-increasing number of critics and enemies, and with the loneliness that thirty hard years in the business has brought to him.

Not only that, Velda has gone. The love of his life, the one woman who understood who he was and why he did the things he did, has left, sent away by Hammer for her own protection.

Can he handle New York for one more go-around?

Turns out he’ll have to, as he returns for the funeral of Bill Doolan, his mentor, whose death was officially declared a suicide.

It all looks too perfect, too well-assembled. Doolan took a bullet in the heart, ballistics showed it came from his own gun, which lay at his side, and paraffin tests revealed that he had fired the shot. To top it off, he was found in his apartment with the door locked.

Open and shut, right?

Hammer smells a rat.

What follows is another classic Mike Hammer trek through Manhattan as he becomes ensnared in a search for Nazi jewels. Along the way, he encounters glad-handing politicians, a hardboiled female Assistant District Attorney, a Studio 54-type nightclub where cocaine flows like wine, and enough Mafia types to populate three more novels.

Hammer has a harder go of it this time around, though, because he’s a lot less agile. His pain meds have run out, but there’s still plenty of pain to go around, and a lesser man might not have made it through this maze of a plot.

There’s an underlying sense in this book that Hammer has, with the passage of the years, lost some of the anger that drove him through the earlier novels. He seethed his way through books like I, The Jury and One Lonely Night to the point where the reader hoped he wouldn’t blow an artery. His anger surfaces in spots throughout Kiss Her Goodbye, but overall, Hammer seems far more at peace with himself than he ever has, and frankly, it fits him well. It feels right, like a natural transition in his life. This might be attributed to Collins’ hand in the writing.

According to Collins’ introduction, the novel was assembled from an unfinished manuscript and various notes found in Spillane’s home following his death in 2006. Other than occasional nods to 1970s culture points, which probably came from Collins, the writing is seamless. It’s difficult to spot where Spillane left off and Collins begins. One key scene at a Mafia social club seems like vintage Spillane, but is it really? It could easily have been penned by Collins.

Either way, the Mick would’ve liked this one.

The cheap chicks over at DailyCheapReads.com were kind enough to feature my collection of noir short stories, Bloodstains On The Wall, on their site the day before yesterday. Check it out here. They even called it “great late night reading”. You may be assured I will use that hot blurb. A big thanks goes out to them. They’ve got a great site. Go have a look at it.

TRIPWIRE By Lee Child

Review by Mike Dennis

I decided to read Tripwire after Lee Child told me that even though he’d never been to Key West, he set the beginning of this novel there because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Since Key West is my adopted hometown (I’ve lived there longer than I’ve ever lived anywhere), I wanted to see if he brought the setting to life.

The 1999 novel starts off with a healthy dose of Key West atmosphere. Jack Reacher is sitting in a dark bar whose décor includes fishing gear and thousands of business cards, when a stranger steps up next to him and says, “Are you Jack Reacher?”

Of course, Reacher denies it, but learns that the man, who calls himself Costello, is a private investigator from New York in town looking for Reacher on behalf of a client. Later, Reacher encounters two tough guys with New York accents who are also looking for him. Pretty soon, Costello turns up dead and Reacher is overcome with guilt. Before you can say “Margaritaville”, he heads for New York to find out why Costello was looking for him.

The whys and the wherefores take up the rest of the 559-page book, as Reacher is inexorably drawn into Wall Street intrigue, family tragedies, and the complex politics of Vietnam MIAs. Bad guys abound, stalking him at every turn, keeping his reflexes sharp as he moves through New York, St Louis, and Hawaii.

Child writes this stuff very well, keeping the reader pinned to the page with Reacher’s conflicts and wry observations on the immediate world around him. The tension, which is the strong suit of a Child novel, builds continuously, but primarily in non-Reacher scenes. This technique enables Reacher to go about his business of piecing the puzzle together without having to shoot people every time he turns around. Quick scene-to-scene cutting keeps the reader’s attention from straying as the plot unfolds in rapid fashion. Reacher pulls a girl by the hand through the book in his scenes, while the real tension is mounting elsewhere, drawing Reacher and the reader toward the climax.

Even though Tripwire is one of the earlier Reacher efforts, it reads like the character is well-known to all, like he’s been around for decades. And the way Child is going these days, I’m sure Reacher won’t be retiring anytime soon.

MY GUN IS QUICK by Mickey Spillane

Review by Mike Dennis

“You have to be quick. And able. Or you’ll be dead.”

That pretty much sums up Mike Hammer’s philosophy of life in New York City throughout all of his appearances in Mickey Spillane novels. But in My Gun Is Quick, Spillane’s searing 1950 tale of revenge, Hammer actually says this to the reader. He then sets out to prove it.

After making a post-midnight delivery to a client, he stops off at a slimy diner for a hot cup of java. There he encounters a gorgeous redhead down on her luck. He buys her a cup of coffee. They chat. A guy comes up to her, a guy with “a built-in sneer that passed for know-how”, and begins hassling her. Hammer pushes him around, gives the girl some money, and leaves.

Well, come to find out she’s a prostitute and she turns up dead the following morning. As in many other Hammer novels, he dedicates himself to finding her killer and dispensing his own brand of justice before the system can screw it up.

For the uninitiated, Mickey Spillane was considered beneath contempt by much of the literary world for virtually his entire career, which spanned sixty years. His hard-charging, gritty style turned off the literary elites, who also were not wild about his unabashed identification with the working class, which occasionally included prostitutes, gamblers, and street hustlers. Despite this institutional bias against him, Spillane sold over 130 million books during his life. They’re still selling.

All of the snide remarks and bad reviews couldn’t mask the passion that comes blasting through in Spillane’s prose. The dark streets and back alleys spring to life on the page, as Hammer slinks through them like a feral cat on the trail of his prey. The reader will feel Hammer’s hot desires as he strokes the naked skin of a beautiful woman. When he takes a wrong turn and is severely beaten by a few tough guys, the reader will feel the blows. This was pretty strong stuff in 1950, when readers of “mystery novels” were being spoon-fed Miss Marple.

My Gun Is Quick is currently available in a 3-book collection of Hammer novels, alongside I, The Jury and Vengeance Is Mine. The collection contains an outstanding introduction by Max Allan Collins, a longtime Spillane fan and collaborator. Highly personal and revealing, it sheds plenty of light on Spillane’s role in postwar America.

This book is the perfect entree for those who are unfamiliar with Spillane’s work. Get it. You won’t be sorry.

Booklist, the prestigious review magazine, has reviewed The Take in their latest online edition. In case you don’t understand why I’m doing cartwheels in my living room before popping champagne, it’s because Booklist receives submissions of over 60,000 novels each year, but reviews fewer than 1500. Most of the books they review are in the broad mystery genre, which of course encompasses the noir subgenre of The Take, but nevertheless, I’m ecstatic.

Now, apparently the reviewer does not quite get the world of noir and its population of characters with less than stellar IQs. And he certainly didn’t think he was reading The Maltese Falcon, but hey, I’m not complaining. He liked my novel and that’s good enough for me.

The review is also going to appear in their newsletter, which goes out to some 90,000 librarians. And if they don’t start ordering the book for their libraries, I’m calling Charlie Stella to get Jimmy Bench-Press after them.

You can read the full review here.