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.

I don’t know, it seems pretty obvious to me that you have to involve the reader immediately. You can’t waste a lot of time with exposition and backstory. But I was shocked not only at the question, but at the responses as well.

Now, I was well aware that these were overwhelmingly self-pubbed/Kindle writers, but the number of people who tried to delineate exactly where in the novel the action should begin was appalling. One said that it’s OK to postpone the “gripping stuff” until at least 1/4 to 1/3 of the way into the book. Another said the first 1/3 of the book “should” be exposition. Where are they getting this from? Can somebody tell me? Surely not anywhere in the real world. Maybe in some “creative” writing class somewhere.

To be fair, though, several respondents insisted on getting the action going right away. And of course, that’s pretty much where I stand.

Naturally, this doesn’t mean a high body count in the first paragraph or laying out the entire story on page one. But it does mean that if a central character is introduced right away, and right away he/she faces conflict, or at the very least, some sort of tension, well, the writer is probably on the right path. If this conflict is well-presented, the reader will want to turn the page.

In addition, I think it’s a good idea (notice I didn’t say “rule”) for the writer to continue ratcheting up this tension on the central character as the novel progresses. Holding the reader is of paramount importance in the first few chapters of any book, and one proven way to do this is to escalate the conflict. This would ideally be done in every scene.

Backstory and info-dumps are a bad idea in the opening of any book. Agents and editors specifically look for that as evidence that a writer doesn’t know what he/she is doing. Better that stuff be skillfully woven into the dialogue and narrative as the book moves along.

How to do it?

Well, therein lies the challenge.

My noir novel, The Take, will be released soon. I know, I know, that’s what I said a year ago. But I was just kidding then. Now when I say it, I really mean it. It really will be released soon.

It’s a novel of human desperation, set in a world where only the cop cars are black and white. Everything else swirls in a kind of gray soup, without any way of knowing who can be trusted or what awaits around the next corner.

When I get a firm date from the publisher, I’ll post it here.

We now return you to our regular programming.

This is huge.

Following a 25% drop in sales (their figures), they’ve decided to make the leap. Very good. Very forward-thinking. They’re right out there on the cutting edge. BUT…

If they charge $7.99 for their ebooks, they’ll find very little success.

Here’s my take on it.

It looks like their thinking runs this way: “Well, let’s cut out all our expenses involved with print books–you know, all that ink and paper and shipping and stuff–and let’s just shovel digital books into the e-world. It costs nothing to ship! With our expenses slashed, we’ll make a ton of money.” This, of course, fully assumes that readers will pay as much for an ebook as they will for a mass market paperback.

This is the kind of thinking that often paralyzes corporate America.

The people who made this decision certainly realize it’s a big leap. Therefore, their primary instinct is to cover themselves. To insulate themselves from blame in case something goes wrong and their corporate higher-ups, who I imagine in Dorchester’s case would be their board of directors, start looking for heads to chop off.

In order to properly create this ass-covering, they no doubt prepared lots of fancy charts and slide shows indicating the growing popularity of e-readers, Amazon e-tail figures, steadily declining hardback sales, and so on. So in the midst of all the dogs and ponies, they slip in the $7.99 number without any evidence whatsoever that it might be the optimum price.

And certainly without any evidence that there could well be a consumer revolt against paying the same price for an ebook as they would for a paperback.

Problem is, they’re afraid to take the final step that might really bail them out. Namely, presenting their product at a competitive price. Afraid because, remember, they have to cover themselves, and a $2.99 price leaves them no cover at all.

I mean, you can’t sell a novel by an established author for $2.99. We’re getting over $25 for a hardcover right now! $2.99 is what all those wannabes sell theirs at, right? “Real” authors and publishers can’t stoop that low, right? Besides, we’ve still got expenses, right? Even after the original slashfest. We’ve got editors, office space, utilities, management people, marketing people (wait a minute, aren’t authors supposed to do their own marketing now?). So we have to charge $7.99 per book, right? Right?

I’d be willing to bet money that, during their meeting when this change was approved, nobody made any mention at all about the rising trend of established writers self-pubbing their own material on Kindle and making money at it. They’re continuing to live under the myth that all self-pubbed books are crap and beneath contempt. So for a New York publisher to get into the cesspool with self-pubbed authors would just be incomprehensible. Oh, the humanity!

Of course, now that I think about it, even if they deigned to sell my ebook for $2.99, would they give me a 70% royalty?

So then, apart from editing and a cover, which I can farm out to indie editors and artists, what can they do for me that justifies their giving me anything less than 70%?

Hmmmmm.

By the way, my rock & roll novel, Cadillac’s Comin’, a hard tale of a rockabilly one-hit wonder who recorded for Sun Records in the 1950s, is up on Kindle for $2.99.

But wait! There’s more!

It’s now on Smashwords for only $1.99. That’s right. You read it correctly. Only $1.99! So you don’t forget, order before midnight tomorrow.

But here goes anyway.

The other day, I was browsing around my friendly neighborhood Barnes & Noble and I came across a trade paperback copy of Homeboy by Seth Morgan. I was stunned, yet thrilled, to see it still in print.

I met Seth back around 1990, when we were both living in New Orleans. I was playing piano in a rock & roll piano bar and he was about to do his first signing session for Homeboy. Oddly, the signing took place at a store called the Abstract Book Shop, about as far from B&N-world as you can possibly get. It was a funky little spot way out of the way in a semi-bad part of town. You could go in there and find The Daily Worker right next to writings by Jesse Helms. Even more oddly, the place was owned and operated by a federal appellate judge!

Anyway, that’s where I met him and he signed my hardcover copy, and included a little inscription. I told him what I did for a living and that I was just getting into writing. I had completed my first novel and Seth was kind enough to look it over. He was very encouraging and what’s more, he liked the fact that a Bourbon Street musician would pick up the pen. We became friends.

And that’s when I learned of his dark side.

Turns out Seth was a ne’er-do-well as a youth. Raised in a wealthy New York family who expected him to toe the elitist line, he attended, and was expelled from, many of the best private schools on the East Coast and in Europe. He wound up in San Francisco, living off his trust fund. This was the swingin’ sixties, so…enter drugs. He eventually graduated from a ne’er-do-well to a real badass.

He acquired a serious jones which not even his trust fund could support, so he turned to crime. He confessed to me that he’d committed over 400 armed robberies to feed his insatiable habit. During this period, he fell in with Janis Joplin, becoming her “boyfriend”. Together, they marauded through the blazing world of Bay Area booze and drugs right on up to her death from an overdose in 1970.

Back on the armed robbery front, he finally got caught and was sentenced to hard time at Vacaville State Penitentiary in California. It was during this period that he took up writing.

In 1978, he won the PEN American Prisoners’ Writing Contest, jumpstarting his writing career. In the late 1980s, he came to New Orleans to write Homeboy, which consumed nearly two years of his life. New Orleans was his city of choice because he felt if he could resist the temptations of drugs and alcohol there, he could resist them anywhere. Once his novel was completed, he got himself an agent and before you could say, “Closed to submissions”, it was picked up by Random House.

His harsh, neon style of writing electrified the literary world at the time. Reviews uniformly gushed with praise. The publisher couldn’t take out enough ads. The New York Times loved him. He appeared on all the morning television shows. They were calling him the next Steinbeck. At 41, this former trust fund baby / drug addict / ex-con’s career was soaring.

The novel was released worldwide, so he went to Europe for signings. While in London, his father came to see him. For Seth, this was to be his long-awaited day of redemption, the day on which his dad puts a hand on his shoulder and says, “Good job, son.”

Instead, his father was cold and critical, crushing Seth’s hopes for ever pleasing him.

He returned to New Orleans and resumed his drug ways, snorting cocaine and consorting with lowlifes. I became the only friend he had in the straight world. He still came to hear me play, and we still talked about writing, but he was clearly more sullen than I’d ever known him to be.

Then one day, I went over to the Abstract Book Shop, where I’d become friends with the owner/federal appellate judge. He told me that Seth had been killed at around four o’clock that morning in a motorcycle accident. He had a girl with him who was also killed, and that cocaine had been found on both their bodies.

I immediately went to his house on Camp Street, an old-line New Orleans two-story job, right out of the early 20th century. My goal was to rescue whatever artifacts of his I could. But I learned I wasn’t the first one there.

The place had been ransacked. His scumbag drug buddies had beaten me to it. I looked around the house for something, anything meaningful that could be saved. I saw his desktop computer sitting out in the open. Grabbing it and a few 5 1/4″ floppies splayed around it, along with his passport, I headed home.

I slipped the disks into my computer and discovered the first few chapters of his second novel, Mambo Mephiste, which he had described to me as a “great big Mardi Gras novel”. In the last few weeks of his life, this book was his only source of excitement. He was clearly committed to turning out a masterpiece. It was written in the same riveting, acrobatic style as Homeboy, and I wept, knowing it would never be completed. This would be the book that would have marked him as the real deal, not just a one-hit wonder.

I drove back to the Abstract, where I turned over Seth’s computer and the disks to the judge. He said he would see that they got to Seth’s family.

I kept his passport.

Seth Morgan could have been a literary giant, as they all predicted. He had it in him. But his demons would not turn loose of his tortured soul.

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.

A lot has been written about a few who have become hugely successful. By now, a lot of us know about Joe Konrath and Boyd Morrison and their unlikely triumphs in the e-world. “Flashes in the pan,” some say. “They’re not typical of what an author can expect if he or she self-publishes online.”

“But it’s the coming thing,” others say. “If they can do it, I can do it, too. I just have to work hard at promoting myself and my book.”

Pardon me while I take another sip. This is good stuff.

I have to come down on the side of the true believers. There are some big changes coming, and they’re coming sooner than we think. It’s not happening in a vacuum, though. There’s some historical perspective that should be considered.

Just a very few years ago, if you wanted to buy a book, you got your ass off the couch, went out to your car, got in it, and drove to a bookstore, or somewhere else that offered books for sale, such as Wal-Mart. Maybe you knew the exact book you wanted, or maybe you didn’t. Either way, off your ass and out the door, or else no book.

Then: Amazon. As home computers spread across the land, Amazon proved that people would sit home and order books by the millions. Before you could say, “One-click ordering”, independent bookstores all over the country started closing down. Even big chains like Doubleday were gobbled up by bigger chains. And when Amazon started the clever come-on of “now that you bought this book, you’ll love these”, people were instantly exposed to more books in that genre. Many people obediently bought some of those books that they might otherwise never have known about.

Amazon’s bigshots were undoubtedly sitting around one day asking themselves, “Well, now that we’ve got everybody ordering books from us, what do we do for an encore?” And somebody around the table blurted out “Kindle!”

So here comes the e-reader. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Sony, and even Apple begin shoveling these devices out as fast as they can. Dad gives Mom one for Mother’s Day, they give Junior one for Christmas, boyfriend gives one to girlfriend, and on and on. Pretty soon, millions of people have them and they’re buying NY-published books at $9.99 apiece. What a deal! Right?

Whew! My heart is pumping here. Time for another sip of the vino.

Okay, now Amazon is making about fifty billion dollars a day and the heavyweights are sitting around saying, “How can we top this?” And somebody suggests, “How about letting people self-publish on Kindle?”

Well, this one probably spurred a little discussion, you know, about letting just anybody self-publish or restricting it only to “real” authors. Of course, the open-door faction won that one, and here we are.

Millions of self-pubbed books will clutter up the e-bookstores for sure. And most of them will be crap. But many will be very good, and some will be great, and most if not all of these would’ve had no shot whatsoever with the bloated New York publishing world, insatiably thirsting for blockbusters. These gems WILL find an audience. Maybe not in the same easy fashion as Stephen King finds his audience, but the readers out there will open themselves up to these new authors.

How, you might ask?  For starters, not everyone lives in LA (something that is hard for LA residents to grasp), and therefore most of us lack easy access to quality bookstores. Amazon has proven that people don’t really need a neighborhood bookstore, or even a big-box Barnes & Noble.

Secondly, through online reviews and recommendations (which are being read more and more), self-published online authors will get their noses above the waterline. Remember, people who own an e-reader will never tire of finding books to download into it, and they will search these books out through online book clubs and reviews.

Thirdly, and this is very important, with prices of self-published books generally ranging from $1-$3, they look awfully good to someone who’s been shelling out ten bucks a pop for his favorite digital bestsellers. At that price, they can afford a couple of missteps without being discouraged. This goes a long way toward exposing them to authors and books they might otherwise never consider.

Some say that authors will now have to go online and slap a lot of backs and come across as a gregarious social butterfly, when many of us are in fact born introverts. Why should being an extrovert be a requirement for a successful author, some ask. To which I reply: for the same reason that a successful author is required to be a marketer, salesman, blogger, and book tour promoter. You know, the same stuff that NY publishers pay people to do, but which they now insist that we must do.

Finally, authors are now able to draw a straight line from their computer screens directly to the readers, much the same as musicians before us, who can now sell their albums directly to their fans without having to wait for the one-in-a-million shot at a record deal.

By the way, did I mention I have a rock & roll novel up on Kindle? No? Well, let me say that Cadillac’s Comin’, a hard tale of a rockabilly one-hit wonder who recorded for Sun Records in the 1950s, is now available at your friendly neighborhood Kindle store.

I think I’m going to pour another glass of this wine. I really like it.

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.