By Tom Pitts
265 KB
112 pages
(Publisher: Snubnose
Press; Oct. 14, 2012)
eBook sales by: Amazon
Digital Services, Inc.
ASIN: B009QS4DBE
A few weeks ago in our
review of his first novel, Hustle, we made it clear we consider
Tom Pitts to be a first order practitioner of dark crime fiction. He knows his
dealers, he knows his junkies and he knows the wannabes and hustlers who lurk
along the fringes of the dope world, looking for an opportunity to score
righteously -- or at least enough to get through another day of crawling
through the gutter.
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| Tom Pitts: A first-order practitioner of noir. (Courtesy Tom Pitts) |
In Piggyback, Pitts gives us
a short tale about a dumb-fuck dealer who loses three duffle bags of grass to a
group of snot-nosed suburban kids. The youths who highjack the load are smoke-heads
that don't realize the dope doesn't belong to the people they have stolen it
from. They have no idea that behind the scenes is José, a Latino drug lord who
not only wants his pot back, but also the five keys of cocaine that he has secretly piggybacked onto the load of marijuana.
Paul, the man who lost
the load, enlists the assistance of an acquaintance in the drug trade named
Jimmy, a successful middle-level dealer smart enough to trace the thieves and
ruthless enough to do what is necessary to recover the load. But by recruiting
Jimmy, Paul has opened the gates of hell. Together, Paul and Jimmy go looking.
It is not a pleasant trip for anybody involved, least of all Paul, who soon
realizes he has tried to correct his original mistake by making things much,
much worse.
By the end, dead bodies
are stacked like cord wood and the reader has witnessed enough violence to fill
a hospital emergency room with trauma cases.
Like Michael Monson's
terrific novella, What Happens in Reno, Piggyback looks black-hearted and
nihilistic, but that surface appearance is a deception: in fact, it is a little
morality tale, noir served straight,
no chaser, by a master of the genre who writes about drugs and junkies with
complete authority and confidence.
Almost nobody in this
book is remotely likeable and Pitts lets you know it in terse, tough-guy prose without
wasting a syllable.
Here is Jimmy watching
Paul, the moron who sought his assistance, nervously light a cigarette:
Paul opened the pack, mumbled a thank you, and stuck one into his
mouth. There was the slightest tremor in his right hand when he tried to light
it. He noticed Jimmy watching him and rolled up the window to steady the flame.
"Those'll kill you too," said Jimmy, "but not as quick
as José. Cancer'd be more fun, too."
Here's a conversation
between Jimmy and José, the drug lord:
"Hello, my friend." José called everybody his friend.
Everybody knew that José had no friends.
Here's the father of
one of the girls who stole José's drugs:
Damon LaFleur . . . wasn't worried about his wife. Not in the
traditional sense. She'd left hours before, drunk as usual, behind the wheel of
their Lincoln navigator. The odds that she'd have gotten pulled over were nil,
she had that kind of luck. The odds of her getting into a crash and dying were
also nil; that was the kind of luck he
was stuck with."[emphasis added]
Jimmy may be the most
sympathetic character in the book: at least he knows the score, and not just
the one Paul has lost. The fact that he is a borderline psychopath who enjoys
using violence to extract information from unwilling informants tells you how unpleasant
this story's characters are. Everybody else is clueless yet arrogant. Everybody
is trying to get over on somebody else. Everybody has dreams, the kind that
come out of a crack pipe, the kind there is no hope of realizing. Almost
everybody gets exactly what they deserve in the end.
Best of all, even those
still standing when the gunplay, pistol-whippings, stun-gun shocks and
shootings are through have a bleak future. When the drug lord catches up to
them, they will almost certainly die, and in a lingering, painful fashion that
could form the basis for another complete novella.
As I said, it's pure,
like Ivory soap. Nobody has stepped on this shit with baby laxative, not even
once.
By Chris Rhatigan
102 pages
(Publisher: KUBOA; April
30, 2013)
ISBN-10: 061581039X
ISBN-13: 978-0615810393
If Piggyback is a book about
a dope deal gone bad, Chris Rhatigan's excellent The Kind of Friends Who Murder
Each Other is about three dopes -- Simon, Slade and Mackey -- who go bad and turn on each other.
The action begins
during one of their regular Wednesday night bowling sessions. They aren't the
greatest bowlers in the world -- Slade is the only one who regularly breaks 150-- but the get-togethers give them an opportunity to get drunk and enjoy a sort
of unfriendly camaraderie that is more like detente than an actual friendship.
On this particular
night, however, getting wasted together, a harmless pastime for the most part,
just isn't happening.
"We were not drunk
enough," says Simon, the convenience store clerk who narrates this 96-page
gem, "not nearly drunk enough. . . another pitcher was pointless, none of
us were going to get drunk, just wasn't possible not on that particular night,
we could swim in alcohol and still be sober."
Unbidden, Mackey
abruptly shares a secret with his two bowling chums -- that he breaks into
people's homes and watches them sleep. Simon
volunteers that he once beat a guy to death with a tire iron, apparently for no
real reason. Slade, shelling and eating peanuts nonchalantly, tells the other
two that he hit a kid in his car once, and then backed over his body just to
see what it would sound like.
"I thought it would make a crunching sound, but it didn't, just a
dull duh-dun, like I'd hit an opossum." He pronounced it ob-possum.
After they have made these
clumsy mutual confessions, Slade realizes that the bowling alley's bartender may have been listening in on their
conversation, and may decide to take
these admissions to the police. Maybe.
Apparently, not one of the three realizes that this kind of third-hand
information has no value in a court of law, and in this case, it wouldn't even
provide probable cause to have them brought in for questioning. At their next
meeting, totally without warning, Slade pulls out a gun and shoots the
bartender twice.
Now they are really in
the shit, with a real dead body, a real gun and real guilt.
This short novella
unfolds a little like Strangers
on a Train, Patricia Highsmith's great psychological suspense novel
that was made into a grim movie
by Alfred Hitchcock. Except for the fact that nobody in Rhatigan's book is a
stranger and there is no train; what he is really exploring in this terse
thriller is the notion of shared guilt and trust, the consequences of immoral
actions, the way in which the mere observation of a serious crime can make the
observer -- however innocent -- feel like a direct participant.
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| Chris Rhatigan: Strangers on a Train without strangers or a locomotive. (Courtesy Chris Rhatigan) |
And eventually become
one.
Friends is written with a
breathless flow that is the opposite of the short declarative sentence style of
Ernest Hemingway, but has its own brilliant authenticity. It reminds the reader
of the statements blurted by a winded man who has finally been stopped after racing
through city streets to avoid an arresting police officer.
Simon is one of the
most anomic, out-of-control individuals I have encountered in a work of
fiction; in a number of ways, he reminds me of Meursault, the alienated
protagonist in Camus' novel The
Stranger, who, responds with apathy to his mother's death and winds
up murdering an Arab man who earlier had assaulted one of his friends.
Rhatigan's main
character seems to be equally burdened by his own indifference to his situation
-- and by his paranoia (he thinks the cops are onto him and his chums; he begins
to believe a flirtatious girl who stops in the convenience store for cigarettes
is a police informant).
His internal narration
shows the conflict clearly:
More I paced, more nausea set in, more room spun, went off-kilter,
reality on a lazy Susan, nothing in proper perspective, he says about
two-thirds of the way through the book, when his derangement is beginning to
take control. Thought I had a fever,
touched my forehead, felt hot, but it's hard to tell, was it hot in relation to
my hand? Was I anticipating that it would be hot and therefore it was? I never
touched my forehead unless I thought I had a fever, so was this how hot my
forehead was normally? I raided the bathroom cabinets looking for a
thermometer, went through a bunch of little drawers, bandages, cotton balls, an
old crusty tube of toothpaste, no luck.
In another part of the
book, Simon says:
I sat across from him, ordered a coffee, insisted on paying for it,
turned down his offer to share his chocolate chip pancakes slathered in butter
and syrup, Rhatigan has Simon say at one point -- a collection of seeming sentence fragments
strung frantically together, the way they might occur to a man who was unhinged
by his situation and unable to control the words spewing from his mouth.
After an encounter with
a leering beat cop who gives Simon the impression he knows about his part in
killing the bartender, Rhatigan has his agitated character say: But maybe he was just having a few laughs
at my expense, doing it because he could, because he knew I couldn't do
anything and soon enough he'd pull the rug out from under me.
And in yet another
place, his paranoid delusions are symbolized by the way he feels he is being
victimized by the clock:
I put back on the shoes I had just taken off, went to the kitchen sink,
drank down a plastic cup of water, blew my nose with a dish rag. Blue digits on
the microwave said it was six-thirty-one, early but not as early as I had
thought, but it never was, time perpetually grinding me under its fist.
The impression left by
this verbal style is marvelous. It gives the reader a clear sense of Simon as a
man who is losing his grip because of his own self-loathing, the mood swings of
his companions and the weird reactions he seems to incite in those around him.
Although Friends
is superficially a book about low-life criminals, describing it that way is
like saying Crime and Punishment is a murder tale, or Les Miserables is a
police procedural. What Rhatigan's book actually is a tale of a man trapped in
a classical existential quandary -- how to act authentically in a world in
which objective right and wrong are obscured and may not even exist.
The task,
unfortunately, proves beyond Simon's capabilities, and the path he chooses turns
out to be arbitrary and pointless.
Friends is simply a
terrific read.
By Court Haslett
482 KB
267 pages
(Publisher: The Rogue Reader; May 2, 2014)
eBook sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
ASIN: B00K3D9B3G
Remember People's Temple? Jim Jones? George Moscone?
If you do, you are probably going to like Court Haslett's novel Tenderloin, which puts his sleuth Sleeper Hayes in the middle of a swirl of historic events that occurred in San Francisco during the late 1970s.
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| Court Haslett: A historical hardboiled set in the 1970s. (Courtesy Amazon.com) |
And if you don't remember all those people, you will probably like the book anyway: it is engaging, exciting, fun and fast paced -- pretty much everything a reader wants in a crime novel.
Hayes is a former hippie who lives in an apartment building where he acts as the custodian and caretaker. He is also a half-assed detective who is not fettered by a badge or license and a good man to have at your back when you are in trouble. In Tenderloin, he finds himself looking into the death of a hooker who defected from Jim Jones' notorious "Church" with a bunch of files detailing the lunacy that Jones and his colleagues engaged in behind its doors.
The cops and her pimp think the hooker was killed by a union heavyweight with close ties to city hall. Former Temple members think she was murdered by the Temple's own hit squad, "The Angels." There seems to be some evidence for both points of view and it falls to Hayes to put the pieces together in a way that makes sense and looks like justice.
In the process, he uncovers a plot to throw a key prize fight, gun-runners supplying arms to religious fanatics, political corruption and enough bent cops to keep a chiropractor busy for a decade.
The characterization is lively, the plot plausible and the action comes hot and heavy, with shootings, stabbings, clubbings and at least one use of a taxi cab as a vehicular weapon in an ingenious manner.
Hayes finally dopes everything out, but not until he has been shot, slashed, bitten on the finger, punched, kicked and abused in a variety of ways familiar to fans of hardboiled fiction.
I did some stringing for New West and the Washington Post during the period when this story takes place so I am familiar with many of the characters portrayed in Haslett's book. (I even did some of the reporting on the deaths of Al and Jeannie Mills, though I might take issue with Haslett's afterward comment that their murders have never been solved.)
As somebody who lived through that period, I can attest that Court's reconstruction is pretty solid.
The book does have some minor flaws, however: in one section Hayes suffers a "tinge of foreboding." A tinge is a very light color; what you suffer with foreboding is a "twinge," not a "tinge." Haslett refers to San Bruno as a prison but it is actually a jail (prisons are state institutions for state inmates). One of the female characters is described as having done two years in Valley State Prison. That particular prison wasn't built until 1995, nearly twenty years after the events described in the book; the character in Haslett's book would have done her time in Frontera, which was the only women's penal institution in California until 1987.
But nitpicking over factual details is a waste of time; Tenderloin is not a history text, though Court Haslett has clearly gone the extra mile to make it as accurate as possible. It's a work of fiction -- and a damned good one, to boot.
By Jim Giugli
213 KB
59 pages
(Publisher: Jim Guigli;
Jan. 15, 2013)
eBook sales by: Amazon
Digital Services, Inc.
ASIN: B00B1T6FX0
I love a story with a
gimmick and Bad News for a Ghost, a "semi-noir" novella by Jim
Giugli, has a slick one: his sleuth, ex-Berkeley-cop-turned-Sacramento
private-detective Bart Lasiter, has to literally go underground to solve a
series of commercial burglaries in Old Sacramento, the historic district fronting
on the river that gives the city its name.
Note the term,
"semi-noir." I use it not
because this story is bleak or laden with doom like traditional noir
stories, but because Lasiter seems to be based in part on the hardboiled detectives
who are the protagonists in them.
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| Jim Giugli: A "semi-noir" set in Sacramento and starring a former Berkeley cop. (Photos courtesy of Jim Giugli) |
You see, Lasiter is not
the world's most successful investigator, at least in the economic sense: he
essentially lives in his minuscule office in Old Sac with his cat Agamemnon,
surviving on burritos and the all-too-infrequent lunch paid for by the even more
infrequent client. So he is delighted when he is visited by Marti Planker, a
local television newswoman who has been riding a small ratings surge while
digging up exclusives on the string of thefts.
Planker plunks down
$300 -- her own money, not her station's -- for Lasiter to help her solve the mystery of
the burglaries. Her motivation is fairly transparent: she hopes to parlay a
solution into a job at a bigger station in a larger market.
Lasiter's motivation,
on the other hand, is even clearer: he hopes to use the money from the case to
pay his bills; when you are barely scraping by in the gumshoe game, money may
not be the most important thing in the world but it's way ahead of whatever's
in second place.
He also hopes for a
modest public relations bounce from solving a case that has the local cops
pulling their hair -- and he wouldn't
turn down an opportunity to get closer to the attractive TV woman.
This is a short piece
of fiction and detailing any of the twists it takes would necessarily serve up
a spoiler. Suffice to say that it is
well worth the 99 cents you'll pay for this neatly served up tale, so go ahead
an spring for it -- it will give you an hour or so of easy summer reading
pleasure.
At the risk of giving
away a major plot point, however, I will share that Lasiter is forced to dig
deep to crack the case, and the solution dates back to the Gold Rush era when
the Sacramento frequently overran its banks, flooding shops in Old Sac and
forcing the young city to reconstruct its waterfront to minimize the damage. Giuli has done research into this aspect of the plot -- a significant one -- and the background work adds an additional bit of satisfaction to his story.
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| Jim Giuli checks out Sacramento's unique "underworld." |
So is it the ghost of a
49er our detective hero confronts? Buy the book and excavate the answer for
yourself.
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