Review Round Up November 2011

ALREADY GONE by John Rector, Amazon Encore, ISBN 9781439276006
With THE COLD KISS, Rector made an immediate impact upon us here at Crime Scene Scotland. His taut, spare prose was refreshing and affecting, and the dark, twisted plot made us shiver with the kind of discomfort we really seek to find in the best crime fiction.
Now Rector returns with his third novel, ALREADY GONE, the story of a man who has turned his life around and left behind his old days on the streets to become a respected novelist and new college professor. His wife, an art dealer, has little idea of what he was once capable of but loves him all the same. In fact, things couldn’t be better Jake Reese.

Until the mugging.

Outside a bar, Reese is attacked and his wedding ring stolen. Not just the ring, in fact, but the finger on which it was placed. It’s a violent and disturbing act, but something about it makes Jake think there’s more going on than a simple robbery. That there’s something personal motivating the incident.

After this, the novel kicks into an impressively high gear as Jake wonders whether his own past has come back to haunt him. But the truth may be even more terrifying than Jake realises, and when his wife goes missing, Jake reverts to his old ways in order to find the men responsible for destroying his new life.

Of course, things are never what they appear and – like Deaver or Coben – Rector takes a great delight in twisting the reader’s expectations. Unlike most exponents of the twist-in-the-tail-novel, however, these unexpected revelations that smack the reader about the head are oddly truthful and full of an emotional honesty that really hits home. ALREADY GONE never sacrifices character for plot, or even the other way round. No, Rector’s too smart for any of that.

And while one or two twists might threaten to momentarily throw the novel off-balance (there’s a feeling they may be just a little too clever verging on the cute), Rector’s controlled and balanced sense of scale keeps ALREADY GONE believably tense and occasionally quite terrifying.

ALREADY GONE is simply one of the best character-led thrillers I’ve read in a long time. With its spare, brutal prose, it allows the reader space to read between the lines of the action and to truly immerse themselves in Rector’s dangerous, deceptive universe. No longer simply “one to watch”, John Rector is now firmly established as one of the finest of the new breed of thriller writers and one who deserves to find a large and devoted readership.

DOVE SEASON by Johnny Shaw, Amazon Encore, ISBN 9781935597643

Johnny Shaw’s debut novel makes an impression from the first page with a confident voice and a real sense of place. Reading the book was enough to make me feel dehydrated from the dry heat of rural California, near the Mexican border, so that my short soaked through with sweat even though all I was doing was sitting in a chair.

Atmosphere is king in Dove Season, and while Jimmy Veeder and the cast who revolve about him are the stars of the plot, it is Shaw’s evocation of place that stays with you long after you’ve finished the novel. And that is a great thing; I often feel like I’ve toured the world through the pages of crime novels and the ones that stay with me are the ones that give me a real sense of place. Johnny Shaw’s vision of life on both sides of the border is immediate, memorable and utterly compelling.

Which isn’t to say he shirks on other duties. While the novel appears to take its time – with our protagonist, Jimmy Veeder searching for a prostitute his dying father once knew – in setting up events, it soon becomes that this leisurely pace is essential, and by the midway point, where the gear suddenly shifts and the novel starts to descend into a terrifying freefall, you start to see how clever Shaw is. Plot is as much about the setup as it is about the resolution, and Shaw is a master at making his action unexpected while at the same time appearing natural and utterly inevitable.

This is a complex and quite brilliant novel that is both ambitious and surprisingly accomplished for a debut. Of course, some people may find the move from meandering and thoughtful caper to flat-out thriller territory a little jarring, but Shaw is smart enough to make that move seem inevitable and by the end of the book you’ll be sweating not just from that desert heart but from fear of what will happen next.

DOVE SEASON is a novel about fathers and sons, about life-changing decisions, about finding your own morality. The atmosphere is palpable and all-consuming, and the cast feel like old friends within moments of meeting them. If this is how Shaw starts out, then we at Crime Scene Scotland can’t wait to see what he does for an encore.

HELL AND GONE by Duane Swierczynski, Mulholland, ISBN 978-1444707588

Swierczynski is the master at making the ludicrous plausible. Frome nanobots (THE BLONDE) to time travelling aspirin (EXPIRATION DATE) he excels at taking insane plot points and making them feel real. Much of this is to do with his grounded and utterly convincing voice. More is to do with his ability to pace his novels at such a breakneck speed, you have no choice but to hang on and go for the ride.

The first in his Charlie Hardie trilogy, FUN AND GAMES continued this trend with ex-cop Hardie pitted against “the accident people”, a mysterious organisation who excelled in killing people and making it seem like an accident. Now, in HELL AND GONE, Charlie finds himself incarcerated in a seemingly impossible prison. He is told that he is to be the new warden, and that if he refuses his new duties then everyone in the prison – including the innocent guards that are now under his charge – will die. The prison is deep underground and no one has ever escaped or even attempted to. The inmates and guards alike are utterly cut off from the outside world.

HELL AND GONE is complex – moreso than it first appears – and this makes for a delicious game of twist and countertwist as Swierczynski plays with his readers. Its insane, its ludicrous and its incredibly good fun. Like the best kind of action movies, HELL AND GONE just asks you to accept its rules and have a blast. It’s a burst of adrenaline, and surprisingly smart for something so insane. Swierczynski may be making his own rules, but he sticks by them and refuses to cheat his characters or his readers. This is the kind of action thriller that doesn’t need to talk down to its audience.

Once again, as with FUN AND GAMES, the reader is left on the edge of their seat. But fret not, its only a few short months until the third instalment of the Hardie trilogy. And I’ll tell you this – we at Crime Scene Scotland can’t wait for it to hit our shelves!

NINE INCHES by Bateman 978-0755378647

(The Artist formerly known as “Colin”) Bateman’s long-awaited new Dan Starkey novel is finally here. NINE INCHES (and there’s a moment where that title just clicks – and it’s a pretty good gag too) finds the ex-investigative reporter turned owner of a “Boutique bespoke service for important people with difficult problems” or, as you and I would say, Private Investigator, tackling the case of a local radio personality whose son was kidnapped for four hours and returned unharmed with a note in his pocket.

It’s a case that’s going to turn Belfast on its head. Taking in The Troubles, Organised crime, the perils of life as a butcher and how best to negotiate with a fourteen year old troublemaker by taking away his false leg, it’s a Bateman novel through and through, with just enough of a serious undertone to make all the jokes matter.

If you love Bateman, you’re going to dig the hell out of Nine Inches. The plot is nicely absurd and the gags are often very, very funny. And more than once there are moments of real humanity amongst the caper-like plot.

But if I’m honest, I’m not so keen on Starkey as a character as I am on Bateman’s more recent creation, The Bookseller with No Name. Like The Bookseller, Starkey has a neat line of put downs and timely gags, but unlike The Bookseller he often comes across as overly self-centred and more than a little callous. But then I like my characters with a bit of humility, and its much the same problem as I have with Christopher Brookmyre whereby I prefer the novels without his ongoing character Jack Parlabane. In fact, Parlabane and Starkey have a great deal in common. They’re both stubborn, annoyingly confident, supremely arrogant men who happen to wind up on the right side whether they intend to or not. And that’s fun for a while, but both characters supreme confidence can get a little wearing after a while. The self-doubt of a character like The Bookseller is, for this reader, infinitely more endearing.

That said, I still got a big kick out of Nine Inches. It’s a fun caper novel with a few serious thoughts lurking beneath the great gags as Starkey exposes the self-destructive greed and pig-headed idiocy of those around him with some particularly good barbs pointed in the direction of the political sphere.

A Bateman novel is always good value, even without The Bookseller. He’s one of the kings of the caper and one of an elect few authors who can marry humour with a thriller format and come away with his dignity – and his obvious talent – intact. Nine Inches will only cement his reputation as one of the most consistently entertaining writers on the block.

Round up July 2011

We're still here, you know. Still reading the best crime books. We've made a decision recently that in order to keep the reviews going we need to do more round up reviews than one offs. This means shorter takes but hopefully more reviews. And while they may be briefer, rest assured they're still going to be well-thought out and solidly opinionated, just the way you've come to expect from Crime Scene Scotland.

Anyway here's what we've been reading lately:


BLACK FLOWERS By Steve Mosby Orion Books, 978-1409101116


Mosby’s complex thriller is as much about how storys and narratives run through our lives as it is about the mysterious connection a young writer’s father may have to a long cold case. Mosby uses fairy tale motifs ("This is not the story of a little girl who dissapears. This is the story of a little girl who comes back") to great effect in this unique and unsettling thriller, cementing his reputation as one of the most original high concept thriller writers working in the UK today.

It all threatens to get a little silly as the conspiracy becomes insanely personal, but Mosby pulls it back from the brink by presenting the reader with emotionally honest characters and a genuine intrigue that builds as the narrative progresses. And while the thriller aspects – and in particular those that verge close to a kind of horror motif – are very well done, its Mosby’s investment in character that really pulls us in. Very few writers can create such real characters as Mosby does in the thriller genre, and its this deftness of touch that places him leaps and bounds ahead of the rest of the pack. It helps that he somehow makes even the most high of high concepts appear plausible.

If you haven’t read Mosby before, we advise you start now.

KILLER MOVE Michael Marshall Orion Books, 978-1409133247

As ever with Marshall, the book starts intriguingly with a man who starts to realise that the life he’s living is being manipulated by forces beyond his control. Bill Moore is an ordinary guy, a Florida Realtor, who has started to notice odd things happening in his life. Little business cards with the word MODIFIED start appearing in his workspace. Books he never order come by post. Emails he never sent are recieved by friends. And then the changes start getting bigger and more disturbing. And the worst part is, no one else seems to notice.

Marshall's prose is solid and engaging, and the intrigue and level of tension is slowly ratcheted with a kind of expert control. Its the kind of thing Marshall does with ease; taking the everyday and then twisting into something else. The trouble is that often Marshall's ideas are too big to appear plausible, and as KILLER MOVE races to its conclusion, its only in the last few chapters that the reader may feel the narrative beginning to implode.

As with THE INTRUDERS, there’s that twist of the knife that goes just a little too far. Unlike one of his closest counterparts in modern thriller writing, Steve Mosby, Marshall doesn’t present us with characters complex enought to pull us through the insanity of their situation. They seem more at the mercy of the plot than the plot is at the mercy of them. Ultimately this means that the motivation of the bad guys appears paper thin. Although perhaps that’s because one might need to have read Marshall’s famous Straw Men series first, as another reader has pointed out to us.

Of course, much of this can be down to personal taste, and if you can buy the increasingly insane twists and turns of the plot, this is a well written thriller with one hell of a great opening. How much you can take though depends entirely on your suspension of disbelief and whether you were a fan of the old Michael Douglas movie, THE GAME, which seems to have had more than a passing influence on Marshall’s narrative here (but its an influence and – thankfully – not a direct knock-off) or at least that's how I felt when I realised where events were heading to.

I feel much the same about KILLER MOVE as I did about THE INTRUDERS, which was a solid and intriguing premise rather blunted by an ending that felt rushed and out of left field. But Marshall is clearly a writer of talent and his attempts to inject something a little different into the crowded thriller field should be applauded, even if they tend to self destruct towards the end.

FUN AND GAMES Duane Swierczynski Mulholland Books, 978-1444707564

The first of a trilogy featuring Charlie Harper – ex Philly cop turned “house sitter” – finds our hero getting involved with a mysterious group of directors who arranged accidental deaths for a price. Madden Lane is a starlet with a past whose indiscretions have become inconvenient to the wrong people who now want her dead. But no one reckoned on Harper getting involved.

As always with Swierczynski (THE BLONDE), the action is ludicrous and yet rendered believable by the tight, uncompromising prose and the sheer, relentless pace. Where most thriller writers believe detailing guns for pages on end is a way to get the adrenaline pumping, Swierczynski jumps straight to the chase giving you only what you need to understand the action. And it works, it really does. The author isn’t apologising or explaining his story. He’s letting it stand on its own two feet, and this results in the kind of narrative that just sweeps you up and has you hanging on for dear life. Swierczynski is one of the few writers who can recreate the adrenaline rush of the best action thrillers on the page, and the only thing you can do as a reader is just surrender and go along for the ride. To keep you in the mood, each chapter is headed with quotes from action movies and film stars, which becomes a fun little game to see how the intent of these quotes is twisted to fit Swierczynski’s narrative.

Yes, it’s melodramatic, ludicrous and patently insane. But its sense of self belief is palpable that even a half-naked, one-eyed woman who arranges killings with cold efficiency seems absolutely plausible within Swierczynski’s world. Not to say that the novel isn’t smart. It is. FUN AND GAMES is sly, and fun and just one hell of a good time.

This is the first book of Swierczynski’s to be published in the UK. So if you haven’t read him yet, you no longer have an excuse. Go buy FUN AND GAMES. Right now. Or I’m giving the Accident People your name…


FIFTH VICTIM By Zoe Sharp Allison and Busby, 978-0749009328

For a long time I've been singing the praises of Zoe Sharp's Charlie Fox novels, citing not only her uniqueness in the male-dominated action thriller genre, but also the fact that her books feel absolutely real; there is no questioning the authenticity here.

As the Fox series has developed, another interesting wrinkle has been added - - Sharp gives a distinctly human quality to her protagonist. Charlie is not just another arse-kicking automaton, but a fully rounded human being who occasionally makes bad judgement calls. The last one, of course, wound up with her lover and fellow bodyguard Sean Meyer in a coma.

In FIFTH VICTIM, Charlie finds taking on an apparently simple gig to try and distract her from the reality of Sean's condition. But nothing is ever as simple as it seems and soon enough both Charlie's life and that of her principle are in danger. The plot twists and turns with a surprising ease, but its the final twists that provide a real kick to the heart and the head.

The perfect blend of thrills and emotional investment mean that Sharp's latest novel is her best yet. If you're not reading her, you really should start now.

Russel D Mclean for crimescenescotlandreviews.blogspot.com, 14/07/11

THE BLONDE By Duane Swierczynski (featuring the original novella, REDHEAD)

St Martin's Press, ISBN 978-0312374594, $13.95

Who is Duane Swierczynski? In a relatively short space of time he’s hopped from subgenre to subgenre, barely breaking a sweat. His debut, Secret Dead Men blurred several genre lines. His second novel, The Wheelman had a pace and style that recalled Richard Stark at his finest.

And, now, with The Blonde, Swierczynski changes tack again, giving us a techno-thriller with the bite and pacing of an honest-to-God action movie. It has the thrill and speed of Wheel Man with the genre-bending aspects of Secret Dead Men.

And it doesn’t waste time with pre-amble.

The opening scene of The Blonde sets the tone perfectly, with our hero being told by the attractive lady opposite that his drink has been poisoned. That if he wants the cure, he needs to do what his new companion says.

Of course he doesn’t believe her.

But soon enough he finds she wasn’t lying. And the poison isn’t the worst thing about his new friend…

Without giving too much away, there’s a near SF aspect to The Blonde that, upon reflection, seems almost ridiculous, but which is handled so skilfully you simply accept it as part of the world that Swierczynski creates. A lot of this is down to the pacing of the novel. The Blonde starts in high gear and just keeps going. The technobabble required to set up the MacgGuffin of the story is brief, convincingly straightforward and treated with respect. A lot of writers would spend time apologising or over-explaining the more apparently insane aspects of the story, but Swierczynski lays them out, says, just accept it.

And we do. Even the unlikely use of the word, “fook” that only Ken Bruen seems to ever be able to employ in prose without seeming foolish. In fact, if there are any niggles I had reading The Blonde, it was probably the Irish connection that seems a little superfluous, but doesn’t dampen the pace and mood.

There’s a joy to The Blonde that spills straight off the page. The reason we go so willingly with Swierczynski in his novels is because he’s having a ball with his stories, and this transfers directly to the reader. The best thriller writers don’t need complex plots or end-of-the-world stakes (even if The Blonde does have some extremely high stakes involved) to pull in the reader. They need pacing. Energy. They need the kind of crackling energy that can’t be faked.

The Blonde is a damned entertaining novel, reads at a hell of a speed and refuses to take itself too seriously, delighting in the kind of gloriously over the top action that leaves the reader grinning like a lunatic. And among all that, there’s an unexpected tenderness to some of the characters and their relationships that adds an extra dimension to this fast-paced thriller. Kowalski – a hitman with a past, and a served head in a gym-bag – is noteable for surprising the reader with extra dimensions and wrinkles to his character that a writer more concerned with theatrics may have ignored.

But what makes this paperback edition special is the addition of an original short story, Redhead, which will only make sense (as the author urges in his introduction to the new story) if you’ve read The Blonde.

Redhead picks up threads left hanging in the original novel and runs with them, creating its own kind of frenzied energy and serving as a satisfying and often witty coda to the action in the original novel. To be honest, it’s easy to move onto this final story with skipping a beat. Insert your own fade out and fade in, and you have an extended epilogue that adds something to the original story, but takes nothing away.

You don’t have to read Readhead to get full satisfaction from The Blonde, but it’s a helluva story and adds a more satisfying kick to the package in the paperback edition, along with the kind of joy that’s more often associated with DVD extras to enhance film.

So my advice to you is that you spend time with the kickass Blonde and her righteous Redhead sister. These two girls, they’re gonna slay you…

Russel McLean for crimescenescotland, 11/12/07

OLD SCHOOLS OF HARD KNOCKS

THE BLUE CHEER By Ed Lynskey

Point Blank Press, 2007, ISBN: 9780809556670, $12.95

DEAD STREET By Mickey Spillane

Hard Case Crime, Oct. 30 2007, ISBN 0843957778

And

DAMN NEAR DEAD Edited by Duane Swierczynski

Busted Flush Press, 2006, ISBN 0976715759, $18

Lynskey’s second novel featuring PI Frank Johnson starts with a quite literal bang as the investigators quiet country home is attacked by a stinger rocket. Frank may be looking for the good life, but it seems that the bad just follows him around.

And from bad it gets worse. The rocket is only the start of Frank’s troubles, and soon he finds himself caught up in the affairs of a local hate group known as the Blue Cheer. A group that may have a stronger local support than Frank could begin to guess at.

There’s something endearing about Johnson that we’ve mentioned before; how he seems a kind of strange anachronism at times: an old school PI – replete with a hardass dry-wit and a distinctly Chandleresque dialect – who’s been thrown into the modern world quite unwillingly. Although Lynskey has calmed this down somewhat since The Dirt Brown Derby, that old school charm hangs around the narrative, keeping Frank a compelling character and adding a kind of odd interest that .

Its an approach that works, and decidedly more than it did in Lynskey’s first novel. Part of this seems to be the more active role that Johnson has in this tale. He’s not just a PI for hire, he’s taking his case personally. He’s more willing to push himself for not only the common good, but that of the people around him. His relationships with the townfolks and his closest neighbour (whose past is more than a little murky) make Johnson more than just another hardboiled PI, adding a more human dimension beyond the tough clichés. Lynskey is bringing the old-school hardboiled books bang up to date in an exciting, compelling fashion, and more than that is continuing to evolve as a writer with each new book.

So its interesting to move from a writer homaging pulp influences at the start of his career, comparatively speaking, to a writer whose final crime novel (if not necessarily his last novel overall) has recently been released by Hard Case Crime, a brand whose very existence is predicated on the appeal of the old pulp novel lines.

If you want the real deal old-school hardboiled, you don’t need to look much further than Mickey Spillane. Love his works or loathe them – and he always provokes a reaction, even now – Spillane followed his own particular code when it came to walking those mean streets.

His characters were often tougher than Chandler’s or even Hammet’s, unapologetically violent and hard-headed in their attitudes. They were imperfect people, populating streets where the shadows often provided the most light. In his final crime novel, Dead Street, Spillane takes his mean streets and makes them even darker with the spin of old age. In this novel, the protagonists are battling their age as much as each other.

It shows most in the way the tale is spun. As with Lynskey’s novel, Spillane works in a recognisable modern setting but uses an old fashioned hard boiled voice to breathe life into it. There is talk of terrorism, nuclear weaponry and even the occasional cellphone, but the characters seem ill at ease to use these terms. Put it down to their age. These are the old ass kicking heroes who refused to lay down and die. Who are still walking the streets, even if the streets have changed over the years, become alien to the men who knew them so well. Unlike Lynskey, this is not an homage to the golden age of pulp, so much as a product. Spillane knows his voice, knows his audience, and his voice rings through with a period authenticity that both alienates his character from the modern world and cements his place in it.

It’s a fantastically hardboiled premise that Spillane employs – an old cop finds out the woman he loved is still alive. A woman he thought dead for decades, who once seemed his only reason to find joy in the world. And for all the life that her re-appearance brings back to him (even if she no longer remembers him, even if she’s become someone else) it draws him closer to the end of his own as well. Spillane doesn’t write about anything so simple as love here. It becomes about rebirth, about rediscovery. This old washed out cop rediscovers his younger self. As the book goes on, the prose becomes more obliquely pulp.

Your enjoyment probably varies depending on your opinion of Spillane and his particular approach. If you like his work, you’ll get a kick out of Dead Street. If you never got it, you won’t be converted. But it’s a read that does exactly what it sets out to do, and that’s Spillane’s signature. Its probably worth noting that the manuscript was prepared for release by Max Allan Collins, a productive crime writer who owes Spillane a massive debt of influence for his own series, and who manages to sensitively insert his work into the manuscript so that most people should have a hard time knowing where the editing work was done. Just the way it should be.

Ultimately, Spillane’s final novel is a twisting tale told with his typically snarling attitude. Like its character, it feels a little awkward in the modern world, but that only adds to its charm, making it a nod back to those days and a tip of the hat forward to a new way of writing the old pulps.

It’s the idea of an old man in a new world that formed the central theme of Duane Swierczynski’s anthology, Damn Near Dead, a book I’ve been dipping in and out of (the way you do with the best anthologies) since its release last year, but now seems the ideal time to mention it, tying in as it does with the old and new guard theme of this multi-book review.

“Geezer Noir” is the term coined, and it seems that Swierczynski managed to pip Spillane to the post in this regard. The novel deals with hardboiled characters – thugs, killers and criminals – in their silver years. In worlds that have changed and become alien to them. Like the protagonist of Dead Street, they still have this need to behave like they’re young, to maintain their own power and anger.

There is a breadth of style and content here, and its fascinating to observe the ways in which writers of various ages (the youngest author here, Dave White, is 28 while the oldest, John Harvey is… well, he has a few years on Dave White at least) approach the subject of growing old in a hardboiled world. There’s regret, recrimination and, in Simon Kernick’s snappy and clever Funeral for a Friend even a kind of rebirth. There’s deathly serious approaches to the subject, and there’s the more… unusual stylistic flourishes (Stuart MacBride gets to have some fun with Daphne McAndrews and the Smackhead Junkies, even daring to fly in the hardboiled face of the anthology and throw in a cookie recipe), which serve to highlight the many facets of the talent Swierczynski has assembled. From big names like Mark Billingham and John Harvey to up and comers like Dave White, Sarah Weinman and Ray Banks. Some of the authors have only published short stories. Some have huge backlists. Others are only now debuting. But all of them bring a unique voice to the twilight world of geezer noir making Damn Near Dead a fine introduction to a crew of writers who represent the old and new guard and whose insights into old age present it as anything but the expected dotage society might expect.

Russel McLean for Crime Scene Scotland, 15/09/07

BuyThe Blue Cheer from Amazon.com
Buy The Blue Cheer from Amazon.co.uk
Buy Dead Street (Hard Case Crime) from Amazon.co.uk
Buy Dead Street (Hard Case Crime)
Buy Damn Near Dead: An Anthology of Geezer Noir from Amazon.com
Buy Damn Near Dead: An Anthology of Geezer Noir from Amazon.co.uk