Noir fiction for the modern reader.

QUARRY’S EX by Max Allan Collins

Review by Mike Dennis

“Clients opened a drawer, stuck in their hand, and I was the weapon they pulled out.”

That’s Quarry talking, and he’s a professional killer. Like most in his line of work, he sees things through a very tight, all-business prism. He knows the intended targets are the walking dead, slated for extinction by someone else who has paid a lot of money to get it done. So if he has a moment of queasiness or second thought, a replacement will step in and do it instead. Either way, the target goes down.

Quarry is far from one-dimensional, however, and his personality shines through in Max Allan Collins’ Quarry’s Ex, a top-notch 2011 effort for the newly-resuscitated Hard Case Crime imprint.

The year is 1980 and we find Quarry in Boot Heel, a small town in extreme southern Nevada, which is prospering from the patronage of middle-class people, most of whom sport Reagan For President buttons, and who find Las Vegas too expensive and/or too crowded. While having lunch in a casino restaurant, he has a chance encounter with Jerry, a former colleague who, after a few Scotches, starts talking shop.

Turns out Jerry is in town as part of a two-man team whose intention is to kill a movie director shooting a film on location in Boot Heel. As it happens, Quarry is stalking the other member of the team in what will eventually turn the hitman-story subgenre on its ear.

In a rare moment of introspection, Quarry reveals to the reader his reasons for entering the murder business. Due to a perfect alignment of the stars, he tells how he met the Broker years earlier, who began setting him up with good-paying hit jobs. Eventually, Quarry had to liquidate the Broker and wound up with his database of contract killers.

Sensing a big-money opportunity, he then decides to surveil these killers, one at a time, until they go out on a job. Through diligent work, he determines who their target is, and then approaches that target, telling him/her of the imminent danger. For a price, he will eliminate the killer and for a larger price, he’ll eliminate the one who hired the job to be done. Nick Varnos is one of these hitmen and Quarry has been tailing Varnos at his Las Vegas home for a month, waiting for him to go out on a job. Finally, Varnos leads him to Boot Heel.

Quarry’s Ex is the latest entry in Collins’ series about this hardass killer. By wisely filling in some of Quarry’s past, he has added a lot of texture to the character, enabling the reader to invest in him emotionally. We learn that through the years, Quarry has overcome some of his greatest struggles, not the least of which were caused by his cheating ex-wife. Years later, as his body count surges upward, he remains haunted by her and the demons she awakened within him.

Collins is the author of several successful series, as well as bearing the Mike Hammer torch passed to him by the late Mickey Spillane. I certainly hope he finds time in the future to continue this riveting series about a hired killer.

CRIME NIGHT 

at the CORK & STOGIE

1218 Duval St, Key West

On Wednesday, November 9, 2011, from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. the Cork & Stogie hosts a dark and scream-filled night of crime and punishment when four of Key West’s finest crime story writers read from and discuss their work. Our writer line-up:

Jonathan Woods, author of Bad Juju and the forthcoming 

A Death in Mexico 

“Hallucinatory, hilarious, imaginative noir.” – New York Magazine

“A skilled writer, he…emulates Chandler and Hammett with his own off-kilter view of this world.” – Key West Citizen / Solares Hill

Michael Haskins, author of Chasin’ the Wind and Free Range Institution

“A spicy conch chowder flavored with dashes of small-town politics, Cuban intrigue…and island attitude.” – Florida Keys News Bureau

Mike Dennis, author of Set Up on Front Street and The Take

“Dennis writes true noir.” – Vicki Hendricks, author of Miami Purity

Jessica Argyle, author of Arrest Me (Before I Write Again)

“Very good on the male point of view (even the dead) and excellent on
foreshadowing (“there really was a theme developing, no doubt about
it…”). I enjoyed every minute.” – Mark Howell, editor Solares Hill

From left: Michael Haskins, Jessica Argyle, Mike Dennis, Jonathan Woods

The folks over at DailyCheapReads.com have featured the first novel in my Key West Nocturnes series, Setup On Front Street, today. You can check it out here.

I’ve watched this site become very popular among readers over the last year or so. Daily references to it can usually be found on the Kindle Boards Writers Café. Indie authors are often lined up to secure a spot on it. They’ve worked hard over there at building their reputation. So please check them out. You won’t be disappointed.

And when you’re there, please leave a brief comment.

It’s too bad Zachary Scott’s movie career didn’t last longer than it did. He was tailor-made for film noir. The deceptive cheshire smile, the just-right mustache, his oily presence, his ability to portray utterly amoral characters, he had it all. Whenever you saw his name on the poster, you knew someone was going to get royally fucked. Films like Mildred Pierce (1945), Her Kind Of Man (1946), and Flamingo Road (1949) served as great showcases for his sinister-smooth screen persona.

I could’ve seen him as a film noir staple throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, then sliding into villainous character roles in middle age. Unfortunately, a serious injury resulting from a rafting accident in 1950 sent him reeling into a long, painful recovery period and heavy depression. Although he made occasional movies after that and digressed into TV, his film career never recovered.

Which is why I got excited the other night about watching Danger Signal (1945) for the first time. The synopsis said his character “murders women for their inheritance”. I could just hear the producer bellowing into his intercom, “Get me Zachary Scott!”

The film opens in classic Warner Bros style with Scott in a sleazy apartment at night, a female corpse sprawled on the bed. The landlady is pounding at the door, neighbors gather, and Scott rifles the dead woman’s purse. He grabs a fistful of cash and splits out the window. Next thing you know, he’s on a bus to California.

Soon he meets Faye Emerson and he slides right into his slick-gigolo routine that he carried over from Mildred Pierce. She falls for him and she has a younger sister played by Mona Freeman and…well, it gets a lot better from there.

I liked Danger Signal. I liked it a lot. It wasn’t nearly as predictable as it could’ve been, and Scott carried the film well, weaseling his way through a series of women, always looking for the score, the angle. Emerson was the female lead, and she handled it. Her attraction to Scott’s character was believable, as was her slow realization that his intentions were, shall we say, less than honorable. Taut direction by veteran Robert Florey (The Cocoanuts (1929), Murders In The Rue Morgue (1932), King Of Alcatraz (1938)) kept the tension high in all the right spots, while cinematographer James Wong Howe’s brilliant use of shadows and light elevate this film to very respectable film noir levels.

But Scott is really the star of this show. There weren’t too many actors in those days who could play these shameless characters with a straight face and make you buy into them, but he did it time after time. With his unswerving instincts and his solid grip on the material, he made it look so easy.

THAT DAMNED COYOTE HILL by Heath Lowrance (2011)

Reviewed by Mike Dennis

Enigmatic stranger rides into town, kicks ass, rides out.

You’ve seen it a thousand times, right? Didn’t most Randolph Scott movies follow that story line? Some might say that terse little synopsis sums up Heath Lowrance’s short story, That Damned Coyote Hill. But if they said that, they’d fall way short of nailing the essence of this riveting western-horror-noir tale that defies all known genre boundaries. You’ve never seen that story line unfold like this.

Set in the Old West town of Coyote Hill, Lowrance’s stranger shows up in a driving rain as two fight promoters are issuing challenges on behalf of their fighter. Money changes hands, cowboys step up to face the fighter, aptly named Goliath Bunker, and the spectators look on, all of them oddly mute. Hawthorne, the laconic, Charles Bronson-ish stranger, steps forward and everything changes. I’ll just leave it at that.

Lowrance, who shot onto my radar with his terrific debut novel, The Bastard Hand, has shown he’s not afraid to take chances, to take the reader into parts utterly unknown. The beginning of The Bastard Hand threw me a real curve ball, catching me totally off guard, but his prose kept me turning the page. I know this about him now, so I’ll delve into anything he writes, knowing he can transport me to uncharted areas of fiction. And That Damned Coyote Hill fulfills that promise. Lowrance has vowed to keep the Hawthorne stories coming, and when he does, I’ll be there to pick up the next one.

A great story, highly recommended.

Good news, Nucky fans. Boardwalk Empire, the stunning HBO series centered around Atlantic City in the early 1920s, has been renewed for a third season. For the uninitiated, the story arc deals with the dawn of Prohibition and the resulting birth of nationally-organized crime. The birth, as we learn, was difficult. The gangsters groped around looking for inroads in the liquor business, cooperating uneasily with each other.

This show has proven once and for all that the television public will sit still for a thoughtful, considered rollout of characters. In order to do this, you need time, time to flesh out each character and present them not only as breathing individuals, but in tangled relationships with other characters. This is not easy in a medium that often brings in characters for the briefest of periods just so they can be killed off in a dramatic set piece. In contrast, Boardwalk Empire treats each character with care, even the minor ones, and reveals their intimate relationship with the overall story and with others. Only great writing can pull this off successfully.

And then there’s the acting. Nucky Thompson, Jimmy Darmody, Margaret Schroeder, the Commodore, Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Arnold Rothstein, Chalky White, Gillian Darmody, and all the rest of the principal characters are well-thought-out and played to perfection by a hand-picked cast. But even the minor characters ring very true. A young Meyer Lansky, Lucy Danziger, Nucky’s overwhelmed butler Eddie Kessler, Madame Jeunet, and especially Richard “Half-face” Harrow all score. Jack Huston as Harrow is truly a standout, stealing nearly every scene he’s in with his scary face mask and his unnerving presence.

Ten million people watch Boardwalk Empire every week. That includes the repeats and On Demand, but still that’s a pretty impressive figure for a premium cable channel. It tells me this show has struck a chord out there, a chord which will continue to resonate as long as the creators can keep the quality high. Let’s hope they do it for years to come.

How about you? What do you think about Boardwalk Empire?

BAD JUJU & OTHER TALES OF MADNESS AND MAYHEM by Jonathan Woods (2010)

Review by Mike Dennis

“You’ll never take me alive, coppers.”

Been awhile since you’ve heard that line, right. Sounds like it was lifted straight from a 1930s Jimmy Cagney movie, doesn’t it? Probably hasn’t been used in literature in at least that long, right?

Well, Jonathan Woods uses it, and to great effect, in Looking For Goa, one of the stunning entries in Bad Juju & Other Tales Of Madness And Mayhem, his 2010 collection of edgy short stories. This snappy read by New Pulp Press has broken new ground for avant-garde noir with Woods, one of the early additions to their string of original voices.

In this debut book, which features an outstanding cover designed by Kenney Mencher, Woods offers tales from the inner city to the tropics to rural America, characters who hover over the abyss while maintaining at least a shred of humanity. One by one, they march to the edge, each time as a result of their own bad choices, and then, in true noir fashion, wonder how they got there.

In fact, Woods’ central characters are for the most part average Joes and Janes, who just want to get through life without any hassles. For them, however, “getting through life” often entails activities such as adultery, bank robbery, and murder. If only they wouldn’t have to get in trouble for doing these things! Why doesn’t everyone just leave them alone?

In Then What Happened, Bill and Inez are getting together for a little afternoon frolic while Inez’s husband is out of town. Bill narrates: “Rearing like Godzilla from the depths of Tokyo Bay, I fall forward, burying my face in her crotch.” You get the idea. They’re having a grand old time while the TV is showing Barbara Stanwyck planning to murder her husband in Double Indemnity. Everything is just wonderful, but then…

Ah, there’s always a “but then”, isn’t there. For Bill and Inez, it leads them straight into one of Woods’ nightmare scenarios, and before you can say “Kiss me deadly”, they’re ass-deep in hell.

There’s a story of a slimy, slithering wormlike animal crawling up the nose of Ray, the central character in What The Fuck Was That? Is it just some frightened little creature who has lost its way? Is this the opening salvo of a race of brain-devouring worms from outer space looking to conquer Earth? Or did Ray hallucinate the whole thing? The author doesn’t stop with alien worms. He throws a story at you about a tiger shark on the cusp of evolutionary upheaval.

The stories are crisp, punchy, and most importantly, not what you’re expecting. Woods has taken plenty of chances here, running out to the end of the limb with his offbeat take on the short story. With Bad Juju, he’s strapped the format onto his back and carried it into thick, unmapped jungle, chopping his way through it with a perfect mix of sharp prose, black humor, and vivid plots. His next book is going to be a novel, and I for one, will be looking forward to it.

While surfing the blogs today, I landed on Do Some Damage, where Sandra Ruttan posted a very thoughtful piece on the emergence of publishing techniques as a dominant topic in authors’ blogs. Sandra remembers the days when the craft of writing was the primary topic of discussion by authors, who were basically tossing around shop talk to other authors. The tone of her piece was very downbeat, sad, like a requiem to good times gone. I offered my opinion that the best times are right around the corner.

The digital revolution has brought with it many thousands and thousands of new readers, people who perhaps have never read the New York Times, and in many cases, who will never read a hardcover book.

This fact alone has driven many of those people (readers) to blogs that feature some of their favorite, newly-found authors. These authors are not likely to sit around pontificating about POV shifts or passive voice for fear of losing their newly-found audience. Can you blame them? Instead, they talk about their books, their struggle to get them noticed, the constant pressure to promote themselves and their work.

To be sure, blog discussions on craft can still be found, but authors such as Sandra (and myself, for that matter) have occasionally crossed over to talk about publishing. Plus, there are many more new blogs by new authors trying to appeal strictly to their readers, not to other authors. The days when authors felt they should only speak to other authors and not to readers are gone like last Sunday’s newspaper. Those were the closed-society, good-ol’-boy traditional publishing monopoly days. The newer, self-pubbed authors come to the table without the elitist attitude.

Contrary to popular myth, traditional publishing (and I started there) has always been about sales and profit, not about maintaining a high quality of writing. If the two were to dovetail, which they often did, so much the better, but when they didn’t, the likes of THE DaVINCI CODE and Snooki always won out over quality writing. And I mean always. Nowadays, the trad world has even abandoned that charade, saying instead that their raison d’etre is quality editing, formatting, and cover design. That may be true, but I can hire those people myself, and for a lot less than a trad company will want.

I’ve learned my craft by writing, listening to people I respect, and through the enormously valuable critique groups I’ve belonged to over the years as I’ve moved around. As I mentioned, I still find a lot of worthwhile discussions online. Writers conferences are another rich source of learning material. I’m still learning.

The future of blogging is very bright. I know I’ve learned a lot about self-publishing and promotion from the blogs. I’ve been inspired by the stories of some of these extremely successful authors who New York wouldn’t piss on. The realities of the newly-emerging publishing world have become starkly apparent to me through reading some of the more eloquent authors’ blogs. And it’s only going to get better as self-publishing ramps up.

“I don’t think any word can explain a man’s life. No, I guess Rosebud is just a piece in a jigsaw puzzle. A missing piece.”

So ends what might be the greatest film of all time, Citizen Kane.

Readers of this blog know that a week or so ago, I picked up the 70th Anniversary boxed edition of Citizen Kane, and described its contents at length. I also proclaimed it to be well worth the money. Now that I’ve watched all the DVDs, I can easily say my proclamation was correct. It’s a great buy.

The film itself was digitally remastered frame-by-frame. I can’t even imagine how long that must have taken, or the skill involved. And it’s even more remarkable when you realize the original negative to the film no longer exists. The final result is breathtaking in its beauty. Welles’ long shots, with their now-famous depth-of-field innovations spring to life in sharp clarity.

Another thing Welles pulled off in the film was many long, no-cut takes. He would later become famous for this technique in the opening scene of his later film, Touch Of Evil, but in Citizen Kane, he used them to great advantage. You could make the case that Welles was really a stage actor, accustomed to long scenes, so he brought this sensibility with him to the Kane set. These scenes, in the hands of a lesser “stage actor”, might have made the whole film look like a photographed stage play, certain to put the audience to sleep.

Instead, as Peter Bogdanovich pointed out in his outstanding commentary to the film, Welles used unusual camera angles and movement, along with lighting techniques never before tried. When you see these scenes after Bogdanovich’s explanations, it dawns on you what an incredible imagination Welles possessed.

There’s a DVD documentary included in this set called The Battle For Citizen Kane, which outlines the trouble and controversy Welles faced once it got out that the film was a thinly-veiled biography of newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst. The documentary traces the lives of both Welles and Hearst from their childhoods, transforming them into breathing humans. Their egos were enormous, and Welles, even at 26, was clearly not cowed by the much older, more powerful Hearst.

RKO executives, who were not even allowed on the secretive Kane set, were furious once they learned the truth. Hearst threatened to refuse all advertising for RKO films, a move which might have put the studio under. He also leaned hard on the other studios, promising to plaster the country with newspaper headlines about how the Jews really ran the movie business, a fact not generally known outside Hollywood at the time. Fearing Hearst and his power to singlehandedly damage their industry, a consortium of studio heads, led by Louis B Mayer of MGM, approached RKO, offering more than $800,000 in exchange for the negative and all existing prints of Citizen Kane, for the purpose of burning them. This amount would have covered all RKO’s expenses in the shooting of the film, plus added a little profit for the studio. I shudder when I think about what we would have missed, what the movie world would have missed, had RKO accepted the offer. Seventy years later, filmmakers are still learning from Welles’ masterpiece.

Another thing I learned from this great boxed set is that Welles wanted to make Citizen Kane with actors who had never previously appeared in movies. In Bogdanovich’s commentary, he mentions that Welles almost succeeded. There was a scene with two waiters, and it seems that one of them didn’t make the call, so Welles had to hire a studio extra who had appeared in many other films, mostly as a waiter. Welles was very upset with this despoiling of his “perfect” cast.

A third DVD in the set contained the HBO film, RKO 281, with Liev Schreiber as a very convincing Welles. It chronicled Welles’ tribulations in making the film and its aftermath. John Malkovich as screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz is a standout.

There are other little extras in the set, which I mentioned in my previous blog, such as a slim hardcover book about the film and poster repros, but one final thing I want to say here is a tribute to Dorothy Comingore, who played Suzan Alexander, Kane’s mistress. A tragic character, she was molded by Kane as an opera singer, down to the last detail. Her lack of singing talent quickly became apparent, and she became the one thing Kane could not create with his will and his money.

Comingore turns in what is arguably the best performance of the entire film, topping even Welles himself. At first glance, it looks like she doesn’t do much except sit around and work jigsaw puzzles, but at second glance, you begin to realize she’s a powerhouse actress, bringing this complex character to life in a very original way. As one might expect, Comingore was offered many choice parts after Kane, but she turned them all down, thinking none of them were good enough, and her career soon faded. She died an alcoholic in 1971 at 58.

Well, at last, the Yankees have gotten their comeuppance. And in Yankee Stadium, no less. I haven’t felt so good since the Marlins beat them in game 6 of the 2003 World Series in the house that Ruth built. I didn’t see the end of the game last night and it went on too late for the papers to carry the final result. Should it surprise anyone that I actually had a slightly difficult time learning the Tigers had won?

Do you think if the Yankees had won that it wouldn’t be plastered all over every Internet site and on everyone’s lips? Crawls across the bottom of every 24-hour news channel would be filled with quotes from all the Yankee players and management about who they’re going to start in the League Championship Series, and of course, looking ahead to the inevitable World Series.

I don’t know about you, but I’m really tired of this New York-centric culture we live in, which I’ve had to put up with my whole life. You know, it’s the greatest city in the world, they have Broadway shows, Times Square, blah, blah, blah. The Yankees, according to New Yorkers, have been permanently anointed and are therefore supposed to win the World Series every year. Those years which do not result in a championship are considered failures. Give me a break.

Being eliminated in the first playoff round is particularly humiliating for such a team who feels entitled to scarf up everything in its path, who feels other teams should, by definition of being “other teams”, lie down and allow the Bronx juggernaut to steamroller over them. Fortunately, the Tigers had other plans. And now we will be spared having to gaze at Derek Jeter’s fucking smirk until next season. I’m actually surprised that the breathless countdown to his 3000th hit didn’t continue beyond it, so that we’re constantly informed that he’s now at 3001, 3002, my God that was hit number 3003! Anybody remember such hyped-up reporting surrounding Rafael Palmeiro’s 3000th hit? I didn’t think so.

My advice to the Yankees: go back to New York and get another year older.