As I wrote in Jim’s blog, the first real novel I ever read (or can remember reading) was Moby-Dick. Naturally, we all had to read it in school and we trudged through it as best we could, but something about that book stayed with me, so about a year later, I reread it on my own. I then realized for the first time what could be done with a story, how it can be taken to the farthest reaches of the human experience, how incredible it was that someone could open with something so deceptively simple as “Call me Ishmael” and then follow those three little words with one of the most powerful tales ever conceived.

Anyway, being as young as I was, I’m sure I missed a lot of what Herman Melville was trying to say, but I got enough to fuel my desire to read more. I read other novels of his, but of course, none of them measured up to Moby-Dick.

So I read a few more books and pretty soon I started seeing James Michener’s Hawaii in everyone’s hands. I went ahead and read it and was astounded by the scope of the tale, from the actual formation of the island chain itself up to the tangled politics of statehood. Again, I read several other Michener novels, and while a couple of them were excellent, Hawaii remained at the top of the heap.

Ayn Rand showed me how personal one’s writing could become as The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged insinuated themselves into my being. To this day, I curse the Hollywood powers that cast Gary Cooper as Howard Roark, because Cooper clearly did not get the character at all. His key scene at the end, a very long courtroom speech (which Rand insisted go into the movie word for word as a condition of her signing the rights deal) was completely out of his range and he just did not understand anything Roark was saying. It was a good thing I’d read the book first.

Love Rand or hate her, The Fountainhead is still a great novel and a milestone in storytelling.

My father read a couple of Mike Hammer novels by Mickey Spillane, so I got them as hand-me-downs. Spillane’s visceral, in-your-face style proved to be the other side of the hardboiled coin from Raymond Chandler’s cool detachment. They could take a routine plot and spin it so you would think the story has never been told before. And in doing so, Spillane’s New York and Chandler’s LA burst off the pages at me in ways I will never forget.

I discovered Jim Thompson almost by accident. I read an article about a movie that Anjelica Huston was going to make called The Grifters, based on Thompson’s 1963 novel. Huston said that the novel was a page-turner, with dark and desperate characters. Somewhere in this article, I believe, was the first time I’d ever hear the word “noir” applied to novels. They said the movie, despite being shot in color, was a perfect example of film noir, and that Thompson’s book was an equally perfect example of noir fiction. Being an aficionado of film noir, I rushed out to buy the book, fortunate that Black Lizard had re-released the work of a bunch of the old noir authors. Of course, The Grifters was great, both the novel and the movie, and I loaded up on Thompson immediately afterward. No one, and I mean no one, has ever penetrated the inner workings of the criminal mind as thoroughly as Jim Thompson.

Well, naturally, from there it was only a short hop over to David Goodis, Charles Willeford, Lawrence Block, and Gil Brewer. Noir city, baby.

Somewhere in there, James Ellroy drifted into my sights. I read his LA Quartet and saw how highly stylish and rhythmic an author could be without ever losing control of the story, keeping the reader’s eyes glued to the page. I still look forward to every Ellroy novel.

There have been many others, of course, like Elmore Leonard, Donald Westlake, and Andrew Vachss, but you know, this blog has to end sometime, so I guess it’ll be now.

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 before getting themselves killed.

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.

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.

FIRES THAT DESTROY by Harry Whittington (1951)

Review Copyright 2009 by Mike Dennis

Some guys have all the luck.  Blondes have more fun.  You’ve heard the cliches.  But at the faceless corporation where Bernice Harper works, pretty girls get all the promotions.

And it pisses her off.

That’s the central theme in Fires That Destroy, a tight little noir novel from 1951 by Harry Whittington.

Year in and year out, she watches through her thick-lensed glasses as sexy babes in tight skirts use their attributes to glide effortlessly up the ladder while Bernice, plain and stringy-haired, stays mired in the steno pool.

She builds up a reservoir of resentment, which eventually morphs into self-hatred when her boss recommends her for the position of private secretary in the home of an important client.  Problem is, he’s blind.

She knows they foisted her off on a blind man, almost as a joke, and she doesn’t like it.  Things are made worse when she learns he’s a heavy drinker who never tires of making passes.  This intensifies her hatred, as she knows that he wouldn’t come near her if he could see.

And so begins her descent into hell.

The novel opens with Bernice looking down a staircase at the blind man’s twisted corpse.  She’s just pushed him down the stairs to his death.  In the dark silence of the house, a grandfather clock chimes, freaking her out.  She thinks, “The sound of a clock and I’m paralyzed.  How will I stand the rest of it?”

Not very well, actually.  Whittington ratchets up the stakes for Bernice in nearly every scene.  But she’s so consumed by her hateful obsession with the world she inhabits that she can’t rescue herself.  Her unraveling forms the spine of the story.

In a masterful stroke, Whittington takes the reader deep into Bernice’s mind, as she slowly disintegrates into “the most depraved and sinful woman on the face of the earth”.  Her interior dialogue with herself evokes Jim Thompson at his most dangerous.

Whittington wrote over 170 novels in his astonishing career, hopping around through various genres.  Most of his work, unfortunately, is out of print, but noir aficionados should make a point of locating a copy of Fires That Destroy.

I’m a crime fiction writer, living in Las Vegas, who’s been toiling in the vineyards for years until L&L Dreamspell Publishing picked up one of my novels, The Take.  It’s a fast-paced little noir effort that will be out sometime in 2010.   Thanks go to Morgan St James for her energetic efforts in helping me with the preliminary editing.  You can read an excerpt of it here on this site. 

I’ve always admired the best of the crime novelists.  I’m talking about hardboiled fiction guys like Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford, David Goodis, Gil Brewer, and Raymond Chandler, among others, who between them, managed to kick the door open a crack or two, all the while operating under the stigma of  “pulp” writer.  They made it ”respectable” to write crime fiction, elitist public opinion notwithstanding.  Later, you had Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, Elmore Leonard, James Ellroy, and so many others who shoved the door all the way open so guys like me could just walk right through it.  Speaking only for myself, I owe these men a serious debt of gratitude.