Noir fiction for the modern reader.

Covers. Every author’s favorite subject. Especially when the cover design for his/her novel is imminent. I would imagine that during this uncertain period, more Tums are consumed per capita among crime fiction authors than at any other time. And for good reason. Covers are the source of great anxiety. Will it be dynamite? Will it be terrible? Can I live with it? What’s an author to do?

Of course, the answer is nothing. There’s not a single thing you can do about it, unless you’re Stephen King or somebody. Don’t believe your friends when they tell you you can’t judge a book by its cover. That made for a good Bo Diddley song, but you might remind them that forcing a person to make snap judgments with very little else to go on is precisely the purpose of covers.

However, if you’re fortunate enough to have a hip editor, as Megan Abbott did for her debut 2005 novel, Die A Little, then a lot of the stress melts away and you get a cover like this.

This outstanding cover, designed and photographed by Richie Fahey, is, as I said in a review of this novel, almost worth the price of the book by itself. The use of hand-coloring over a black & white photo, with all the tones just right, make this a book which will grab the attention of even the most casual browser.

Fahey also painted, but did not design, the cover of Andrew Vachss’ The Getaway Man (2003), arguably Vachss’ best novel.

These two covers, along with the ones that follow, are among my favorites. Here’s Cruel Poetry, a great 2007 Florida noir novel by Vicki Hendricks. I just love all the elements of this one.

John Ridley’s terrific noir novel, Love Is A Racket (1998), sported an attention-getting cover. I love the little heart in the gun barrel, as well as the scary font.

No need to introduce Hard Case Crime. We all know the great work they do. Here are a couple of their stunning efforts.

Black Lizard/Vintage Crime put out some pretty damned good covers back during the late 80s and early 90s. Jim Thompson’s classic nightmare novel from 1952, The Killer Inside Me, leaps to the front of my mind whenever I think about them.

I don’t know who they got to pose for this photograph, but one look into his eyes and I can promise you I never want to meet up with him.

Another Jim Thompson book, 1953′s Recoil, has a particularly creepy cover. I think it’s the glasses the guy is wearing.  

The cover to Charles Willeford’s Pick-Up (1967) is a great example of how a photograph can start off looking romantic and then end up looking dangerous.

David Goodis’ Black Friday (1954) is minimalist cover design at its most effective.

Last, and certainly not least, is Dorothy B Hughes underrated 1946 novel, Ride The Pink Horse.

By the way, these are all great novels. If you haven’t read them, I urge you to do so. You won’t be sorry.

Anybody out there got any fave covers they’d like to share? These are just a few of mine, but my list is long.

THE BLONDE ON THE STREET CORNER by David Goodis (1954)

Reviewed by Mike Dennis

“Ralph stood on the corner, leaning against the brick wall of Silver’s candy store, telling himself to go home and get some sleep.”

That’s the opening line of The Blonde On The Street Corner, a 1954 novel written by David Goodis. Of course, Ralph doesn’t go home. Instead, he spots a blonde across the dark street and gawks at her. She eventually calls him over to light her cigarette, which he does.

Now, at this point, one might expect that Ralph would be lured into a tight web spun by this dazzling femme fatale, resulting in his eventual moral destruction, if not death. But Goodis doesn’t write that way. In fact, the blonde is fat, sharp-tongued, and lives in the neighborhood. Ralph knows her, and knows that she’s married. She propositions him right on the corner, but he rejects her. “I don’t mess around with married women,” he tells her. Then he goes home.

Much to the reader’s surprise, this encounter does not trigger the plot of the novel. In fact, it would be right to say that the novel has no plot, in the usual sense. Ralph returns to his impoverished Philadelphia home and spends the rest of the book wallowing in misery with his friends, all of whom are in the same boat as he: in their thirties, usually unemployed, and filled with unrealistic dreams. One of his friends says he is a “songwriter”, but no one has ever recorded any of his songs. Another wants to be a big-league baseball player, but lasted only a week on a class D minor league team. They spend most of their time leaning up against buildings, wearing only thin coats against the bitter Philadelphia winter, and wishing they had more money. They talk a good deal about going to Florida, where they can get jobs as bellmen in a “big-time hotel”, convinced this would jump-start their desperate lives.

The book goes on like this pretty much all the way through, with no moving story line, but it’s Goodis’ prose that keeps you riveted to the page. No one can paint a picture of a hopeless world better than he can. For Goodis, Philadelphia is a desolate place, whose bleak streets offer little in the way of promise. Many of his novels were set there, and they all shared that common trait. Life in that city is, for him and his characters, usually an exercise in futility. These are people who walk around with twenty or thirty cents in their pockets, who cold-call girls out of the phone book asking for dates, and for whom escape to Florida is always right around the corner. The finale provides the mortal body blow to Ralph, stripping him of the last shred of his dignity.

The Blonde On The Street Corner is a potent novel, filled with the passions and despair of its characters.All through this book, you find yourself longing to run into characters whose lives mean something. Then, you realize there aren’t any.

Yesterday afternoon, I returned from Los Angeles, where I attended the Left Coast Crime conference. It was held at the Omni Hotel downtown, and despite the sky-high room rates and costs of everything else inside the hotel, the conference itself was, in my opinion, a smash.

First of all, despite many trips to LA in the past, I’d never really been downtown. I quickly learned that it’s divided into two distinct areas: the clump of gleaming skyscrapers where all the big business is done, and “old” downtown, which is down the hill from the shiny stuff. Fortunately, the Omni is on the border between the two, at the crest of the hill, so that when Jim Bell conducted his walking tour, we all just slipped down the hill and into the old section.

The “old” downtown is surprisingly viable, looking for all the world like LA of the 1950s with newer cars. I half expected to see a Megan Abbott character skulking around, or maybe even Jack Webb pull up at any moment. We toured the Bradbury Building, a gorgeous relic if ever there was one, and down its hallways I kept looking for the pebbled glass door that read “Spade & Archer.” We also zipped through the Central Market, an open-air bazaar where Philip Marlowe had his regular bowl of chop suey. Jim’s informative commentary held everyone’s attention without a dull moment. There were other stops, but you get the idea. It was wonderful.

In addition, I was stunned at how little traffic there was downtown. I never, and I mean never, saw more than four or five cars at any one stoplight, and the streets were generally near-empty most of the time. This compares very favorably with other downtown areas I’m familiar with, such as New Orleans, Houston, Nashville, and Miami. Even my adopted hometown of Key West, hardly a paradigm of metropolitan traffic jams, usually musters up more traffic than I saw in four days in downtown Los Angeles.

Okay, enough of the wide-eyed tourist stuff.

The conference, as I said, was terrific. Every attendee got a goodie bag which included no fewer than six books, each by one of the authors at the conference! Lee Child, Michael Connelly, Jan Burke, and many others were in attendance, and unlike the big authors who were at Bouchercon, they didn’t just fly in, do their bit, and then disappear. They were around and available for buttonholing. Very classy.

The panels were rewarding, too. I learned something from every one I attended. The one I served on featured Boyd Morrison, Lee Goldberg, Dana Kaye, and Ashley Ream as the moderator. Boyd has a compelling story to tell and he told it in great detail at this panel. If you don’t know it, look him up. It’s worth reading. Lee also gave some good advice on the coming electronic age to unpublished writers, and Dana is a publicist whose depth of knowledge regarding internet publicity is astonishing.

Overall, the atmosphere was one of warmth and camaraderie. I made several new friends whom I hope to see again down the road somewhere.

Saturday night brought a cocktail party followed by the banquet. The wine was good, the food was tasty, and the subsequent awards ceremony and auction were lively.

As writers conferences go, you really can’t ask for more. Congrats to Jean Utley, Sherry Lilley, and all others who were involved in putting it together.

Dan O’Shea’s blog, Going Ballistic, got my attention today. He pondered the question of whether or not writing can be taught. He cited several writers and each of their takes on the subject, and they more or less agreed: good writing can NOT be taught. It has to come from within. Dana King added a comment that the same is true for a musician.

Well, this is where I come in. I’m an author now, but I spent decades as a professional musician, and I can say that I wholeheartedly agree with all of the above. Up to a point.

When I was 13, my mother made me take piano lessons. Now, we had a piano in the house and I was always fiddling with it, but couldn’t really play anything of any consequence. On top of that, at age 13, I had other things on my mind way more compelling than major scales. But Mom ruled, so I took the lessons.

Fortunately, my teacher was a guy who worked in the Post Office and played in a little trio on weekends. They did old standards and jazz and whatnot. He didn’t know from classical. One night a week, he would come to the house and show me how to make chords. “This is a C chord, Mike,” he would say before hitting another one. “And this is an F chord.” He got me to listen to the intervals between these chords and how one resolves into the other. Anyway, without getting too technical, what he did was, he effectively taught me to play by ear.

I can’t overstate the significance of this. Within about two or three weeks, I could string a couple of chords together and make a half-assed attempt at a song that was on the radio!  Holy shit! The light clicked on, and from that moment forward, my Mom never had to make me practice again. I was all over that piano.

One night, some eighteen months later, my teacher announced to me that this would be my final lesson. “What, are you leaving town?” I asked. He said no, he just didn’t have anything more to teach me and he didn’t feel he would be earning the money my parents paid him to carry it any further (BTW, he was getting $1 per lesson. That’s one dollar.). Seventy-some-odd little half-hour lessons, and it was all over. So I felt like I was in a rowboat being pushed off into an unstable sea, as he stood on the dock waving goodbye.

Remember what I said about practice? That’s what I did from that day on. Every chance I got. When my parents would go out for the evening, I’d sit at the piano trying out new stuff. And they certainly didn’t mind. They thought it would be just great if they could pull me out for company and have me play a little tune. You know, be the hit of the party. Little did they know I’d been bitten and they’d created the Wolfman.

When I started playing for a living, I took a portable piano with me out on the road so I could practice in my hotel room late at night with headphones. I even took a turntable with me to cop stuff from records (yes, I’m that old!).

Now, you could say that my teacher just guided me rather than taught me, since I had the aptitude for it already, and you may be right. But when he showed how to listen for those chord changes, I put that down as pure teaching. That was something I was just totally unaware of.

So now, I’m writing. My first novel was picked up by a publisher and is coming out this year. I’ve got two more right behind it and working on a third. The writing thing took me a lot longer to pick up, since I didn’t have anyone to show me anything or give me guidance. But I believe I had the ability deep down inside myself, struggling to get out. The cry of the artist, you could say.

Or as Dan O’Shea says, the magic is in the repetition somewhere.

BLOOD’S A ROVER by James Ellroy (2009)

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.

Time for a little BSP. Here’s a link to an interview I did with The Examiner.

http://shar.es/mXyXX

There’s a blog today on The Outfit–A Collective of Chicago Crime Writers, written by David Heinzmann, which grabbed my interest. David mentioned that he was born and raised around Peoria, a solid middle-American town if ever there was one. On a recent visit, he noticed that what once was a lonely country road outside of town, rolling through miles of boundless cropland, is now a busy thoroughfare linking suburban subdivisions to the city proper. Of course, he lamented this change.

Naturally, this isn’t a new story. Many people have seen drastic changes to their hometowns over the years. But David went on to ponder this a little more, concluding that he can’t set any of his writing in Peoria, that it’s all set in Chicago and other locales of his adulthood. Peoria isn’t the same as when he was a kid, he says, and neither is he.

I had never really thought about my hometown as a locale for my writing, and now I know why. It’s a little place called Seneca Falls, nestled in the heart of the Finger Lakes District of central New York State. Back then, its population was 7000, and it bustled with manufacturing activity. Several large factories were there, employing most of the locals and pumping money into the economy. Unlike David’s experience, the town looks almost exactly the same as when I grew up there so very long ago.

Except that today, most of the factories have closed or moved away. The population is still 7000, but they’re on the ropes. Very little money is circulating and the people wear the hard times on their faces. Like so many fading mill towns, Seneca Falls lives in the shadows, on a slippery slope to oblivion.

When I was growing up there, I had no awareness of anything, especially anything regarding the rhythms of life that we all eventually learn. But through reading, television, and looking at maps, I slowly became cognizant of a wider world, a world that called to me all through my adolescence. I figured out that I had to answer the call, so by the time I went away to college at age 17, my mind was made up. I never returned there to live.

Many of the places I lived since then (and there have been somewhere around a dozen) have provided me with great settings for my novels. But I absolutely cannot write anything about Seneca Falls. Because like David, I’m not the person I was during those formative years. Back then, I saw things through the clear prism of childhood, of innocence, before I knew anything about mean streets or good whiskey or dangerous women.

But once I eased into adulthood, and I felt the toxic kiss of corruption, I learned a lot of what I needed to know in order to write crime fiction. I learned it in cities like New Orleans and Las Vegas and even Key West. My novels are set in those cities, and others, because my life in those places, and the choices I made while traveling this long road, transformed me into the man who is writing this today.

As David Heinzmann so aptly put it, I’m writing about places, not where I came from, but where I came to. And most of them exist in a sort of moral twilight.

How about you? Did you leave your hometown? Do you write about it now? Or do you write about the places you came to?