Thomas Roche's BOILED HARD

I avoided writing anything about David J. Schow’s very intense book Gun Work when I read it a few years back, because I was so spun out by it and not sure what I wanted to say.

I’m still not.

I wrote a review of it for Good Reads a while ago, but it never quite got at the heart of how deeply messed-up a book this is. So now I’m giving it another go.

In thinking of Gun Work – written by Schow, a horror writer, and published by Hard Case Crime, a publisher of both noir and hard-boiled crime fiction — I’m reminded of my friend M. Christian. I’m reminded of him not because Chris’s writing has any resemblance to Schow’s, but because he’s the one who described to me, back in about 1993, the works of Andrew Vachss. This was back in the days when his short story collection Born Bad had just come out and was causing quite a stir.

Never having read Vachss, I asked Chris what genre Vachss’s short stories fell into. M. Christian described Vachss as “beyond noir.”

That may have been true in one context. But Vachss has a rather simplistic political-social agenda, which deeply erodes any real assignation to the noir label to him. Some of his stand-alone works fall more concretely into that category, but they’re more appropriately described as “merely” hard-boiled. To my mind noir requires a desperate amorality that is directly counter to Vachss’s social activism. That’s not to say that Vachss, as a child-advocate attorney,could not be an activist and write noir, but I don’t believe he can do it at the same time. Hard-boiled fiction is one thing; noir is something entirely different.

Now, Schow’s Gun Work, on the other hand…what the fuck?

If anything’s “beyond noir,” this is beyond noir, beyond hard-boiled. It’s hardcore in the extreme, like the Parker novels of Donald E. Westlake/Richard Stark. Those were beyond hard-boiled, or maybe just ultra-hard-boiled, grotesquely and pleasingly amoral for 1965. Schow’s Gun Work, on the other hand, makes Stark’s Parker stories seem quaint. It makes Parker seem like a nice guy. It’s as if Richard Stark went bad.

Gun Work starts out well-written enough, but deeply average in theme. It’s a pretty straightforward men’s adventure told in a sort of hard-boiled military-flavored style. Then it takes a turn for the dark, violent and thrilling — great pulp action stuff, w00t. Then the book just goes bad, horrific and gross, deep into horror territory without ever leaving the crime genre. We’re treated to page after page of the most disgusting, gruesome torture, which actually isn’t that gratuitous because it’s central to the development of the book.

For the latter segments we take a tour through a hardcore military-commando procedural like what I always wish the Mack Bolan series would be, but never is. Then it’s followed by vastly more extreme violence than the human mind can comprehend, described in loving detail.

Spoiler: It ends badly for pretty much everyone involved. Gun Work is not a book to be read if you want a happy ending.

Overall, Gun Work is a brutal, nasty and deeply effective book. It’s one of the best-written novels I’ve ever read. Some of the writing is so impossibly vivid that it just can’t be believed. When very bad people take very bad creative writing courses, taught by messed-up, mean little sadists, they should get a copy of this book with a post-it on the cover that says, “Here. Now fuck off.” Gun Work is a textbook in how to write action if you are a serious motherfucking son-of-a-bitch, and a cruel mean fucker of an asshole, to boot. It is about the most hard-boiled thing I have ever read. I think it burned off my fingerprints just turning the pages.

But it is such a bitch to read, it’s like being brutalized for 250 pages, and I’m fairly glad I don’t live inside David Schow’s brain.

So Figure A: hard-boiled, here. Figure B: unicorns pooping marshmallows, here.

Only read Gun Work if you want to be kicked while you’re down, with a dose of style so supreme you’ll wonder why you never realized how much you like getting kicked.

Buy Gun Work. Read it. –Love, The Devil. (P.S. I don’t exist.)

P.P.S. Interestingly, the only person who gave Gun Work one star on Amazon.com is some kind of neo-Nazi. His name is “BullDog” and he says “this is the first book I ever threw in the trash.” Here is a screencap of BullDog’s profile:

That book on the left (the one without the Swastika) is The International Jew: Today’s Foremost Problem, a “a four volume set of booklets or pamphlets originally published and distributed in the early 1920s by Henry Ford in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent…a compilation consisting of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as the main and most important source.”

I probably shouldn’t call BullDog a “neo-Nazi,” however — I’m sure he thinks he’s a “Libertarian.”

From BullDog’s review of the Anti-Commie-Conspiracy-theory-The-Sky-Is-Falling weirdness The Venona Secrets, Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors:

Finally the truth is revealed about the Communist infestations in the FDR, Trueman, and Eisenhower administrations. A great book jammed packed with the facts.

Yesteryear’s events are more than history. Communists are still running the show in this country.

I would have given it 5 stars if it weren’t for the authors’ soft-peddling of Eleanor Roosevelt and Albert Einstein.

BullDog also apparently loves Joe McCarthy:

I can’t think of any American who has been more thoroughly trashed and lied about than Senator Joe McCarthy. Instead of being hailed as the great American hero that he was, the one who shone the spotlight on the Communist infestations in our government and our military at all levels, including the top brass, has been vilified by our own government officials in Congress as well as the White House. The news media with all its powers have also completely turned truth on its head. Does Edward R Murrow ring a bell?

So…of course BullDog thinks “Communists are still running the show in this country.” So would Joe, if he were alive to start making up numbers.

Isn’t the internet interesting?

Cornell Woolrich’s Fright seems to have gotten mostly crappy reviews from readers on Good Reads, but I thought it was brilliant.

It was the first Cornell Woolrich I’ve read unless you count the Rear Window screenplay, which is of course excellent — but a screenplay is a whole bag of tricks quite different than a novel.

Regardless, I found Woolrich’s Fright incredibly unsettling, disturbing and weird. It’s sort of the written equivalent of Hitchcock — both in a good way and a bad way. I often find Hitchcock films misleadingly slow, so that you’re unaware that he’s completely messing with you until after your brain has been severely tweaked.

In much the same way as I feel when watching a “slow” but brutally brilliant Hitchcock film like Vertigo, in reading Fright, I felt very tense throughout — to the point where I actually gave myself a cramp in my back because I was sitting so awkwardly in the chair, freaking out as I read it.

I am not a cheap date when it comes to thrillers — so that absolutely never happens. Most books I read at emotional arms-length. Fright, on the other hand, got me thoroughly engaged, and I would even go so far as to say I felt a little creeped out. Believe it or not, Fright actually scared me.

I can only assume the bad reviews of Fright that I’ve seen come from the weirdly gothic esthetic of the language. That makes it very different than the typical Hard Case Crime novel, where hard-boiled prose is the order of the day. Woolrich, on the other hand, is thoroughly noir but not at all hard-boiled. It’s much closer to gothic fiction — in the way that the narrator obsesses over details and doom almost tediously, but at times both terrifyingly and even comically.

Because of that crazy overtone, it’s a mite difficult to identify with the narrator, in maybe the same way Lovecraft’s narrators can be alienating to the reader. If you do like Lovecraft, Fright is a roman noir cut from very much the same cloth.

Plus — another thing that rarely happens — the ending of Fright completely caught me off guard.

A highly recommended read for lovers of gothic and noir fiction.

Savage Night is not one of my favorite Jim Thompson novels. Yet, in a way that is deeply annoying to me, it has recurrently proved itself to be a big influence on me. I’m not entirely sure why, so I’ll try to go there. If I can be accused of rambling in what is to follow, then it can also be said that I’ve done no more rambling than Thompson’s plot does in this book. That is majorly out of character for him. He’s not a writer known for wandering. His books are tight in the extreme, and punch you when you’re not looking.

This one does the latter — and it has a hell of a punch, if you’re not sure why you’ve been punched, or by whom…just that you got punched, and it’s probably gonna bruise or something, even if you’re not even sure what part of your body has been punched (jaw? gut? groin? buttocks? back of your head? duodenum? bile ducts? corpus callosum?) or whether you just dreamed it all and nobody punched you in the first place, you’re just drunk and fell down. Stylistically, Savage Night is tight as hell throughout…but in plot terms it’s really a big WTF.

Here’s the short version: Savage Night is the physically deformed and physically doomed gangster about to die of a lung disease and going on one last hit mission for reasons not always 110% excruciatingly clear. I find Savage Night to be not just deeply flawed, but basically hollow, in a way I almost never find Thompson’s work to be hollow.

Sure, it’s packed with great writing, but it’s marred by discursive and inexplicable subplots, problems with the overall story structure, much too slow a pace, and a murky ending that I found totally incomprehensible.

That ending, like the ending of Willeford’s Pick-Up, is a red-herring turning point in crime fiction, in some ways. It’s not what’s been influential on me, though it’s the most-often-commented-on aspect of this book. It’s just weird, but it’s still important. Basically, at the end of the book everything goes to shit and it all gets surreal and you haven’t got the faintest idea WTF is going on and that is the point — that’s about what you need to know to understand the novel without reading it.

The ending has been described as devolving into Grand Guignol, a description which isn’t entirely inaccurate. In fact, it gets at the heart of the intention there at the end. But my love of gore can never make me forget that Grand Guignol wasn’t good. Not in overall story terms. The techniques of Grand Guignol might be wonderful, exciting, thrilling, brilliant, and overall — to my mind — superior to the kind of garbagey wrap-up that utterly demolishes most detective novels for me there at the end.

But subtle it ain’t.

Tacked on a very subtle book — maybe too subtle — the ending felt all wrong. It felt like this puppy just never got going, then jumped the rails.

I’ve heard the comment many times that Savage Night is one of Thompson’s most brilliant novels. I’ve heard it said that it’s murky at times because the narrator of Savage Night is an unreliable narrator, a technique Thompson has used with absolute brilliance in other works. I’ve heard it said that’s why you can’t take the ending or the main action seriously.

That sounds like Baudelairean bullshit to me. This isn’t The Matrix. This is a realistic crime novel that devolves into psychological horror at the end. That technique, and that stylistic arc, doesn’t bug me one bit. What bugs me is that Thompson never managed to add the plot up — it just doesn’t wash. It’s like the story that keeps bugging Keyes in Double Indemnity. Something’s wrong…it’s just wrong. In my small, sad life, the narrative gaps in Savage Night form a naggy little rock in my shoe that keeps jabbing at my big toe, saying solve it…solve it…solve it…get the bastard…get the bastard…get the bastard.

Well, I got the bastard; Savage Night is not Thompson’s most brilliant work, and it’s not even the most literary (I found The Alcoholics far more subtle and nuanced). It might not even be his most obtuse.

Ultimately, I think I’m probably wrong in categorizing the end as “all wrong.” On the contrary, the end isn’t what spoils it — the end is what saves it. It’s a Hail Mary pass on a book Thompson wasn’t quite sure how to finish because he wasn’t always sure what it was about. It was a freakshow, and he probably enjoyed writing it, but he didn’t know where it lived, thematically and stylistically. I see that as indicative of Thompson’s self-perceived place in the world as a freak — he knew that he was one, but he didn’t want to be one, and he wasn’t sure what it all meant. This is the book where that becomes clearer than ever — as opposed to The Alcoholics or The Grifters or Nothing More than Murder, where moral tragedy from an amoral voice serves as a benchmark for just how big a freak Thompson feels like. Here, he grooved on deformity and maybe didn’t know what it meant…and he was left empty, as the character is, which maybe isn’t intentional. It’s a sad book, tangled up with genius and isolation, fucked-up in the extreme and lackadaisically beautiful in its own mild, pathetic way because it starts out hard and strong, and goes so horribly wrong in the dullest way possible, until finally it blows up in your face.

That’s how I read it, at least.

None of that changes the fact that Savage Night is, at times, stylistically brilliant. Thompson was a drop-dead stylist, and I love him. Even when he’s off his game, he’s almost always a great pleasure to read.

There are just too many logic problems and weird characterization glitches for me to really think it was a good book…but some of the edgy passages should be put in textbooks about writing suspense.

If you’re a Thompson fan, this is unquestionably worth a read.

If you haven’t read him and you’re looking for a place to start, I doubt you’d be impressed by starting here, rather than with The Grifters, A Hell of a Woman, The Killer Inside Me or Nothing More than Murder.

All of which you should go buy right now, even if you have to mug somebody to get the lettuce. When Thompson’s at his best, he hits so hard you’ll maybe never get up again.

In Savage Night, he’s still fascinating, but I was left scratching my head, not rubbing my jaw.

Today is British novelist John le Carré‘s birthday. Why should you care? Let me tell you, it’s not because his books used to put your Grandpa to sleep.

“I hate the telephone. I can’t type. I ply my trade by hand. I live on a Cornish cliff and hate cities. Three days and nights in a city are about my maximum. I don’t see many people. I write and walk and swim and drink.”

–John le Carré

In case you’re unaware, John le Carré is probably the most influential British spy novelist of all time. But if you’re my age or (gasp!) even younger, some of you might think of him as “That guy Grandpa reads.” And, more often than not, “That guy Grandpa falls asleep reading.”

So swipe Grandpa’s Kindle and read The Spy Who Came In From the Cold before you go another minute without knowing how goddamn good a spy novel can be.

Considering le Carré as one of those “old people” writers who was popular in the ’70s is all too common among readers my age, even hardcore book lovers. Even devotees of crime fiction tend to think of le Carré as a snore without ever having tried him. He’s too stodgy, too focused on espionage and politics, too stereotypically British. Who wants to read, like, fifty pages before you even get to the first fistfight?

If that’s what you think, you’re missing out. Mind you, you’re not hearing this from some tea-sipping trust-fundie writing for The New Yorker. Believe me, I’m not all that cultured in my reading tastes. I’m a reader who thinks plot can best be described in terms of body count and “character development” comes from a right hook or the barrel of a 12-gauge. But even if all you want out of a book is a good beating and maybe a hangover, or if the Hard Case Crime-Fawcett Gold Medal style of faster-harder-meaner crime novel is the highest form of art to you, then I submit that you are still missing one of the truly great psychological noir thrillers if you have not read The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. Yes, it “redefined the spy genre,” whoop-de-doo. Yes, it’s one of those book all those old people have read, hoo-ray. Yes, it’s one of those books that’s always there on boring peoples’ bookshelves. Don’t hold that against it; so’s To Kill a Mockingbird, people. The Spy Who Came In From the Cold is tight, fast, mean, and brilliant; if you’ve never read Le Carré, or have not discovered fruitful ground in his longer, at times very complex works, read Spy and understand what genius feels like…50 years on, and fresh as a daisy.

Le Carré is one of the great novelists of his generation, and as far as I’m concerned every generation before or since. He’s a darling of reviewers, but they never have all that much interesting to say about him as a crime novelist, probably because his books are “respectable.”

But le Carré is also in many respects a very, very angry man. He’s deeply disappointed in the ways in which Western governments sold out the promise of a brighter future at the end of of the Cold War…although, to be fair, you can see his distaste for the direction the world is likely to go under the guidance of the Western governments as early as The Russia House, a brilliant novel that came out in the era of Perestroika. It is far more brilliant a novel than a film, if only because le Carré’s relentless, if low-key, experimentation is on display full-force in The Russia House, where the novel is narrated by a secondary character — who is a minor, if significant, character in the film.

In fact, The Russia House is one of three breaking points in le Carré’s career. The question with The Russia House, then and now, was prescient. Would le Carré , who in the 1960s and 1970s had virtually defined the British spy novel as smart, savvy, clued-in to world affairs and almost unbearably melancholy, change as world events changed? Would he find inspiration in alterations in the fabric of reality, or would he be a one-trick-pony like the many other espionage authors — Len Deighton and Frederick Forsyth spring to mind — who turned out unbelievably brilliant spy novels during the Cold War but never really blew past the fall of the Berlin Wall and into the modern era?

With many other spy authors, their relevance in the post-Cold War World was never a likelihood. With Deighton, his spy novels are so crisp, fast and readable that I never expected him to change with the times — why would I? He was a genius at what he did, and as far as I could tell he had a disregard or distaste for greater pretensions. I don’t hold Deighton’s place in history against him any more than I would in the case of Helen MacInnes, Aleister MacLean or Jack Higgins. They were what they were, and Deighton was among the best of them. Forsyth, on the other hand, always felt like a brilliant one-trick pony to me, insightful at times but ultimately unmotivated, even shallow. Higgins was a hack from the get-go, and/or he seems to have passed his later novels on to ghostwriters, as far as I can tell. Clancy, on the other hand, sold out his franchise early, and has spent the years since 1990 fawning over the American power structure, threatening liberals like a drunk barroom brawler and anointing military hardware with his potent Republican seed. Clancy was a joke to begin with. The very idea of any of them writing brilliant and insightful post-Cold-War novels about world affairs is, quite frankly ludicrous.

But then there was le Carré, and twenty or twenty-five years ago, he was a big question mark because he had been one of the chief architects of the Cold War novel. As the Soviet Union shuddered, did le Carré have anything to say about it? Viewed in retrospect, this seems a turning point in the history of British letters. Having built George Smiley out of spare parts and warehoused Churchillian bile, would le Carré descend into self-parody? Le Carré answered with a broadside of great post-Smiley novels; The Russia House was the first, and to my reading Our Game was by far the most human, the subtlest, the most heartbreakingly beautiful, though The Night Manager gives it a hell of a goosing.

Since then, le Carré’s novels have continued to be profoundly audacious — even if, as in the case of Absolute Friends, I found the bitter ending to be a shaggy dog story that ended with me being kicked in the nuts, and the hoped-for rebirth of The Mission Song to be ultimately unconvincing. But then, those two books, alongside the brilliant The Constant Gardner, allude to what makes le Carré , viewed from the perspective of crime as an art form, a Woolrich or a Hitchcock or a Highsmith, not a Chandler or a Lawrence Block.

Here’s why I say that: the fact of the matter is that while le Carré is a genre writer, there’s something different about him. You, as a reader, may be willing to break “spy novels” into a different category than “crime novels.” I am unwilling to do that, because I believe thematically the best of both genres should be indistinguishable other than through politics. Le Carré can’t realistically be considered with political nonentities like Forsyth or foaming-at-the-mouth right-wing yahoos like Clancy. You can consider him in the tradition of G.K. Chesterton or Graham Greene, but that’s the cheap way out. Ultimately, le Carré may some things in common with Greene, but it’s his take on the bitter politics of mourning that intoxicates me, not his cleverness.

In that, I mean to say that le Carré is unpredictable in the manner of the very best “literature,” whatever the hell that is. Please don’t misunderstand me; that statement is not to disparage genre writers; this is, after all, Boiled Hard; I live for genre writers and as far as I’m concerned all the arbiters of what is or isn’t “literary fiction” can go fuck themselves. Genre writers are my primary interest. But there are the writers who lay down a crime novel with unassailable efficiency — Donald E. Westlake, John D. McDonald, Lawrence Block, Chandler, Hammett, James M. Cain and many others. They redefine the genre by being so good at it that they turn it into a kind of puzzle that subsequent generations cannot help but want to put back together. Their personalities and their aspirations simply can’t be ignored, but ultimately the redefine the genre within the conventions of the genre. They might do it radically and explosively, like Hammett and Chandler in particular, but they ultimately did what was before them. They were unpredictable in the way they redefined genre, not in what they did to redefine it (or, in a sense, obliterate it).

Then there are Patricia Highsmith, Cornell Woolrich, David Goodis, Charles Willeford, Jim Thompson and, I submit, le Carré , whose genre aspirations are so tangled up with their deeply conflicting and deeply insightful personalities — in the case of Woolrich, almost suicidally so. Their unpredictability is as different from that of Cain’s as a hawk is from a handsaw. At first glance Woolrich might seem a weird associate for me to put in a category with le Carré ; Woolrich was among the most melodramatic thriller writers ever to put fingers to an Underwood. Willeford, on the other hand continues to convince me through his writing that he was a borderline psychopath. But what these writers have in common with le Carré is the unpredictability for the places they find doom and pain and savagery. If English is a single language — and I’m far from convinced that it is, but let’s go with that hypothesis for now — it’s the aspiration to tell the kind of stories told by Steinbeck or Vonnegut or Shirley Jackson or Harper Lee or Carson McCullers or Faulkner — that leads to novels like le Carré’s. Subtlety can be a virtue.

And none of the writers in the noir tradition ever seemed to know a thing about politics — or to care. The tragic thing in le Carré’s novels is that he does know politics, and world affairs, and he knows how royally the West fucked up. That’s why The Constant Gardener is among his most mournful works. That’s why Absolute Friends ends with a brutal nutpunch to the reader that felt totally unjustified.

Le Carré’s writing, especially his recent writing, is bitter and angry not because he’s like Woolrich or sadistic like Willeford. He seems to have watched with some measure of hope as the Berlin Wall fell, and as the West laid out its plan for a beautiful future.

And then he watched as Western leaders took a crap on everything they’d ever said they gave a damn about.

Le Carré seems to grasp more than almost any other contemporary fiction writer the deep divide between the West’s unconvincing claim of good intentions and the reality of its many, many transgressions. He portrays with a clear and terrifying vision the the tangled web of lies that sits there at the heart of Western world politics, and the slaughter of principles that has followed the end of the Cold War.

In that, John le Carré one of the few fiction writers who still “matters,” if any of us do.

Which I’m far from convinced we do, but hey, let’s go with that hypothesis for now.

Near the end, I finally had to abandon this too-long, too-slow, too-discursive “biography” of Jewish gangster Arnold Rothstein, the guy who — as the subtitle (and The Godfather II, and every book and article about Rothstein) tells us, fixed the 1919 World Series.

Rothstein is a fascinating figure and the times he lived in were amazing. There are a lot of great anecdotes in this book. But I’m afraid the overall information is too random and all over the place; I have no sense of the bigger picture, and that’s saying something since I read a lot of books about organized crime and early 20th century history. I just didn’t get the sense that I was really there; the information was too fragmentary.

I have read over 100 books on organized crime, so when I read a new one I should have at least a vague sense from the first few chapters where this guy fits into the overall history of organized crime in the US, and I didn’t get that sense here. It pains me to say that I got the distinct impression that it was because the author doesn’t really know where Rothstein fits in. Too often, writers on organized crime come in with agendas that have little to do with OC or with history, and I get the sense Pietruzsza might have been suffering from that somewhat, but I don’t really get what he was trying to do. Ultimately, the result was a fairly dull book that wanders all over the place and lionizes Rothstein (more or less) as a hero, which quite simply can’t be the whole story — and in any event, isn’t an interesting enough one to warrant me spending my time reading a book about it.

I will admit that in the early parts of Pietrusza’s Rothstein, there are some great stories and discursive histories of other figures of the time. But it is RARE that I make it 3/4 of the way through a book and then not decide to finish it.

The overall problem is that there’s too little information about Rothstein, which is always the risk in writing about gangsters in earlier eras. (Mike Dash’s The First Family, about the birth of the American Mafia, has exactly the same problem). But in Rothstein, that problem is compounded by the fact that there are way too many detours along the way.

I didn’t even get to Rothstein’s murder, and I’ve basically lost interest in the topic of Rothstein, I’m so disappointed by the experience of this book.

The “classic” text about Rothstein is of course The Big Bankroll by Leo Katcher. But my suspicion is that — as with many of the organized crime figures from early this century — there just isn’t enough info about Rothstein to warrant a full biography. He’s one of those figures who is incredibly important, but nobody’s 100% sure just why he’s important, except maybe the guys sleeping with the fishes. Or maybe it’s just that why Rothstein’s important is a matter of analysis, not occurrence. There’s no “story” to be told, any more than there is with William Wallace. Maybe Rothstein the man is not documented enough to be cooked down into a 3 or 400 page book. Maybe Rothstein’s just a force that weaves through the rest of the organized crime histories, especially those of Jewish gangsters…and it’s only a deep analysis of Rothstein’s effects that really communicates the changes in organized crime philosophy that can be tracked to him.

If that’s true, I really didn’t get such analysis from this book. And in the absence of a compelling series of events that form a thrilling (or at least coherent) history, I found the book a heavily-researched monstrosity that became, quickly, an unfortunate snore.

I very much enjoyed No Angel, the first-person account by an undercover ATF agent who was actually patched in to the Hells Angels — though the investigation ended before he actually got his patch. It’s a good read and at times really mind-bending.

Unlike a lot of books by undercover cops, No Angel moves quick and feels real. Perhaps most importantly, the language and life attitude portrayed by the narrator/cop/author is appropriate to the biker lifestyle, which is important because I look for total immersion in a world when I’m reading a book about undercover work.

That is definitely here — in spades. Dobyns shows a real ability to laugh at himself which makes the book feel more genuine and also makes it read more pleasantly. That wisecracking nature also doesn’t erode the genuine noir-ish, hard-boiled feeling of the book, which is too, too lacking in cop books. I’ll never understand how some cops who write books can see reprehensible behavior and then write about it as if they were writing church sermons. That’s not this; Dobyns comes across as genuinely hard-boiled, and his enthusiasm for the bad-ass life seems real.

For these reasons, I unreservedly recommend this book as a hell of a read. But I have some serious reservations about it both as a work and as a law-enforcement document.

The first reservation about No Angel as a work of art is that Dobyns talks a lot about his family — his wife and his kids who are reportedly adorable. To me as a reader and as a person, nothing is more boring than someone I’ve never met and somebody I’m never going to meet talking about their kids. Unless it’s an undercover cop talking about his kids. It drives me nuts. They’re his kids; of course he likes them. I don’t really like or dislike your kids, Dobyns. But in a cop book a little of that crap goes a long way.

This is a recurring problem with undercover-cop books. For the undercover cop to survive being undercover and live to write a book about it without falling into despair, isolation, alcoholism, drug use, his or her family pretty much must be thought of as perfect and wonderful and ooey-gooey. This is partially because of the psychological demands of being undercover, and partially because in order to be a successful undercover in a violent criminal gang, the undercover cop must develop his or her “dark side” so thoroughly that it becomes at some point a bit terrifying to most of them, in my experience. That’s on top of the fact that undercover work inside a criminal gang is quite simply some of the most nerve-wracking shit you will ever go through; from what I can tell, it compares to being under combat conditions for an extended period, and not much else.

At least…that’s the conventional wisdom as to why undercover cops praise their families so much in books they write after the fact. However, after reading a lot of undercover cop books, I think the real story is that it’s not so much for that reason, or because undercovers form a longing for family life while they are undercover, but because after spending years being neglected, their wives and kids will put hatchets in their heads if the cops don’t lavish them with unending praise.

It serves the cop authors’ purposes, but man! It is damned boring for the rest of us.

Furthermore, at the end, Dobyns throws in a few bleating huzzas for God, who I’m glad he got to know, but I’m sick of hearing about Him in a half-assed context in cop books, since resorting to God to find grace in police work seems irrelevant to my interests and actually actively counters any respect I would have for the insights about law, order, morality and immorality that a dedicated police officer has seen in the world of cop and criminal. If you lay it all on God, in my view you’re abdicating human responsibility. You’re suggesting that you trust in an absolutist model that, to me, is anathema to the kind of real, practical policing I want to see enacted to make society a better place. Not to put too fine a point on it, you’re suggesting that maybe you want to take the side of the anti-secularists, who believe that permissive society is what spawns crime. Maybe Dobyns does, and maybe Dobyns doesn’t. But as a Jesus Freak, he’s both not that subtle and not that enthusiastic. I’m an atheist, but if I believed in God I’d still say cop work is God’s work…if it’s done right. If it’s done wrong, then it’s very much in the purview of that other guy, and I don’t like to think about how many cops out there blissfully and shamelessly confuse the two.

If God is watching, I believe He wants you to actually understand the nasty things about human behavior, not just howl thank-yous to him for saving you from humanity’s dickwads. I trust that Dobyns finding God was important to him and meaningful, but it makes anything about people that I learned from this book feel, to me, empty.

The next, and hugely more important reservation, is actually partially ameliorated by the ending of the book and the ending of the case (which was called “Black Biscuit” — after a slang term for a hockey puck.) Or maybe my point is not ameliorated — it’s just that the courts agreed with my point overall. Hysterical weirdos like Canadian Hells Angels gadfly Yves Lavigne and The History Channel want to portray the Hells Angels as an international crime syndicate on par with the Mafia. Some sources (Lavigne chief among them) said explicitly in the ’90s, following the “collapse” of La Cosa Nostra, that the Hells Angels were going to take over the place that LCN had held in American crime. They claimed the Hells Angels were “trading in their Harleys for Jaguars, their switchblades for Uzis, their saddlebags for attache cases stuffed with cash.” This was and is total bullshit.

I am not arguing that the Hells Angels is an organization of criminals — duh, of course they are. Just read Bill Bonnano’s autobiography alongside Sonny Barger’s, and all will become clear to you.

But that doesn’t make it a criminal organization per se. Not the way some news sources tried to paint the Hells Angels.

And it sure as hell doesn’t make the Hells Angels La Cosa Nostra. Suggesting that it does is to, quite frankly, assign too much blame to the wrong party, simply because they’re scruffy.

Guns, drugs and violence are part and parcel of the outlaw biker lifestyle, but too often I’ve heard law enforcement portray the HA as some organized group of criminal masterminds. They aren’t. As far as I can tell, they’re a motorcycle club that, as individuals and groups, routinely engages in criminal activity, both organized and otherwise. But in an overall OC sense? Yeah, sure, in terms of the war with the Mongols and other clubs, but not in the sense that they should be placed on the same level as other OC groups that exist solely for profit.

This point is underscored by the fact that even after Dobyns and his associates went so deep underground that they were actually made Hells Angels, the RICO case against the Angels fell apart.

It seems to me like it was a crappy case to begin with; the Angels aren’t the sort of group that RICO was built to take down, even if the majority of them are engaged in criminal activity. As far as I can tell — admittedly, from no personal experience but merely from reading books on the subject — is that the criminal activity is not done in a RICO-worthy sense.

To be fair to Dobyns, he writes quite frankly at the end about the fact that Operation Black Biscuit mostly fell apart. Few meaningful prosecutions were gained, which he blames on problems with the government attorneys. It sounds like the press blamed this on the undercovers, which seems pretty bogus. It sounds like good undercover work, but unfortunately not all undercover work ends up being Joe Pistone.

Thank God for that…since I loved this book but I think reading Donnie Brasco is like watching paint dry.

Overall, No Angel is a great read and Dobyns actually sounds like a decent chap despite my bagging on his pro-God yowling.

It also sounds like he got kind of screwed by the government, blamed for some shit that wasn’t his fault, and more or less abandoned after his undercover work. But isn’t that the way?

Despite having a pedigree from the edgy-as-hell horror community, Tom Piccirilli ultimately doesn’t have a gonzo bone in his body as far as I can tell. In recent years, at least, he writes taut, controlled, and melancholy thrillers that owe far more to Cornell Woolrich than to Joe Lansdale or Skipp & Spector. In Piccirilli’s tightly-wound characters, I see the resentment of the doomed for the in-denial, the savagery of the totally-fucked, deeply human critters backed into a corner. There’s also a deeply pessimistic sense of brooding psychological horror that doesn’t take an act of violence to actualize itself…in fact, when the violence comes, it’s something of a relief. And did I mention how the brutality in Piccirilli comes from the sense of hopeless apathy and grim poison in the world around his characters, not from a hopped-up and easily-digested fairy tale moonbeam of violence and gangsters? I probably should also say that Piccirilli is “not for the faint of heart,” since that’s what you’re supposed to say about fiction that punches you repeatedly in the stomach. If that’s not your flavor, move along.

In his self-described “noirella” Every Shallow Cut (March, 2011 from Chizine Books), Piccirilli often feels to me like Woolrich in Fright or like Charles Willeford in Pick-Up or like John D. MacDonald in his underrated pre-Travis McGee Fawcett Gold Medal stand-alones Cry Hard, Cry Fast or The Neon Jungle. But don’t get me wrong; Piccirilli doesn’t have the gleeful, sadistic guffaws of Willeford’s later works; any sadism is born of tragedy, not tourism.

If you’re a misanthropic son-of-a-bitch, bitterly hopeful or just addicted to the poetry of the damned, this shit is tonic for the soul.

In Cut, Piccirilli delivers a lyrical appreciation of the downward spiral with serrated edges. An unnamed first-person protagonist is maybe just a little too close in a few life-details to Piccirilli himself, though probably (hopefully) distant enough to reflect only the darkest side of the author’s fears. It’s a portrait of the artist as exactly what he thinks he is, when the lights go out and the panic attacks start. It doesn’t pull punches.

But that’s where Piccirilli steps out of the thriller genre and slides effortlessly into the kind of down-and-outer tale rendered in Nelson Algren or even Steinbeck’s The Pearl. Our narrator is homeless and broke, living in his car, estranged from his ex-wife, alienated from his only remaining family and isolated by grim depressive tendencies and perceived professional failure from an adolescent past that’s idyllic in retrospect only because the present sucks so hard. He’s got only his smelly dog Churchill to love him — which may sound glurgy, but it’s arrestingly real. Our hero feels fucked precisely because he almost made it, which is when he realized that there was no “almost.” The deck was stacked against him from the start, whether by his own insecurities and failings or by the ugliness of everything to begin with, the narrator is even less sure than the reader.

What’s more, Every Shallow Cut is very much of the moment — a short trip for a doomed misanthrope locked in the hopeless spiral of a world that clearly will not be getting better anytime soon.

I mentioned a lot of influences on this “genre” or “format,” if you can use either word to describe the down-and-outer novel. There’s Woolrich, Willeford, Steinbeck; whatever. If there’s one book that this reminds me of Every Shallow Cut in theme, it’s Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Despite Cut being ultra-noir in writing style, the tones are very different, because Horses is well outside the box for its time period and tradition (the Depression and prewar crime novels, respectively.) But the intention is similar. Every Shallow Cut doesn’t have the sense of breezy, unbalanced and mentally addled humor that permeates Horses, but as a hybrid of what gets called “literary fiction” and what gets called “crime fiction” — or, to put it another way, as a way of hijacking satisfyingly stylistic crime-novel atmosphere in the service of a work of hard-boiled existentialism — Every Shallow Cut is a creepily successful nightmare factory. It may not quite be sui generis, but it’s at once written-to-type and brutally fresh.

Not to make things too obvious, but at times this book hit way too close to home. Let’s just say if you’re a washed-up fourth-rate writer with no hope for redemption — or sometimes worry that you might be — it’s like ripping the scab off the place where Dr. Benway amputated your soul.

Every Shallow Cut is a new entry in a classic but too-rare form that cuts close to the bone. As such, it’s unflinchingly successful.

Today is Lester Dent’s birthday. Pulp fiction author Lester Dent, born October 12, 1904, died 1959, was better known by his pseudonym of Kenneth Robeson. Under this pseudonym Dent wrote 170-ish novels featuring his most popular character, the “Man of Bronze,” Doc Savage — a character he didn’t actually create, but adopted from the publisher and an editor at Street & Smith, one of the big pulp publishing enterprises from the time.

Doc was a two-fisted adventurer and brilliant scientist who was the model for a zillion later heroes — most notable among them, to modern readers at least, being Indiana Jones. Doc became the star of radio, movies and comic books.

Born in Missouri, Dent became a telegraph operator in 1924 and later, while working as a telegrapher for the Associated Press, found out one of his coworkers had sold a story to a pulp magazine. It paid $450 — a strong incentive for Dent, who already read a lot of pulp fiction, to try his hand.

After a small number of sales, Dent found himself solicited by Dell Publishing for a $500 a month job writing exclusively for Dell publications. He and his wife Norma moved to New York. But it was Street and Smith who later poached Dent to write a novel series, a gadget-driven take-off on The Shadow, for $500 per novel. The resulting character was Doc Savage, who became the lead character in a series that would run from March, 1933′s The Man of Bronze to July, 1949′s Up from Earth’s Center, and beyond.

Dent also wrote for Black Mask, the legendary pulp magazine where the hard-boiled style was all but invented. His book Honey In His Mouth, is a grifter-thriller available from Hard Case Crime. Dent’s also one of the characters in Paul Malmont’s pulp meta-novel The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril.

Though I love the idea of Doc Savage and many of the influences he wrought, every early Doc Savage novel I’ve read is a gooey, pulpy, affable enough but ultimately bewildering mess — like first season Buffy, writ lantern-jawed and steel-thewed. Dent was really cranking them out in those years, and I understand the later books have a certain charm that’s missing from the early ones I’ve read.

My very favorite Doc Savage book is not a Doc Savage book at all — it’s the fictional biography, Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, in which Philip Jose Farmer both reminisces about his experiences reading the series as a youth, and treats it as if it’s all bloody real. It’s a wonderful pulp study, and the most fun I’ve ever had with Doc Savage.

The best thing about Doc Savage is that he appears throughout the 20th century’s pulp works, in various disguised form. You can find him in Roger Zelazny’s 1978 time travel novel Roadmarks. As I recall, Doc is chasing down The Marquis De Sade in hopes of performing surgery on him and making him a productive member of society. One of Zelazny’s characters describes this as “performing a lobotomy on you with an icepick.”

This is Zelazny’s way of reflecting one of the recurring and most bizarre elements of the Savage mythology; in later entries in the series, I am given to understand that Doc invents kinds of treatments that allow him to “rehabilitate” his enemies. It amounts to a kind of surgical mind control that makes the series’s villains into “productive members of society,” aka (in today’s nomenclature) helpless consumer slaves.

Mind control? Surgery? The Marquis de Sade being reprogrammed to be a compliant member of society?

I’m sorry, is anyone else getting warm in here, or am I the only one who’s ever visited the Erotic Mind Control Story Archive?

With the Savage mythology, Doc’s hand-waving explanations for his “rehabilitation” techniques were worthy of flapper-era Edward Stratemeyer novels. Are they creepy? There’s not much creepier. Is the famously non-pervy Francophile Zelazny’s pairing of Savage and De Sade in a nonconsensual mind-control scene far creepier if you watch Geoffrey Rush in Quills after reading, say, Philosophy in the Bedroom? No, no in fact, nothing could make Doc Savage with an icepick or De Sade any creepier. They’re just…creepy, and Roadmarks is a mildly underdeveloped but at-times hilarious novel.

I’m really not a fan of him stylistically, but Dent was still one of the originals. He didn’t invent the pulp-adventurer-scientist genre, but his 170 or so Doc Savage novels were a profound influence on a generation of science fiction writers who were boys when Doc was big (Zelazny and Farmer among them). Lester Dent is an architect of the pulp landscape, so I remember him with reverence.

Or is that reference?

Doc Savage #1 reprint cover from the amazing Galactic Central.

Leonard in 1989. Image from Miami Book Fair Archives.

October 11 is longtime Detroit-area writer Elmore Leonard’s birthday. In case you’ve been living in a cave, Leonard wrote some of the most influential crime fiction of the last forty years.

Born in New Orleans in 1925, Leonard graduated from the University of Detroit Jesuit High School in 1943, and then spent three years with the Seabees in the South Pacific. He attended the University of Detroit and was already working at an advertising agency when he graduated in 1950.

He got his start as a fiction writer turning out western stories in the 1950s. In the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, he honed a style of crime writing packed with hip dialogue and rapid-fire pacing, and became a favorite of moviemakers. Just a few of the crime films adapted from his films are Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Jackie Brown (from Rum Punch), The Big Bounce and 52 Pick-Up, plus the westerns Hombre and 3:10 to Yuma. There are like a couple dozen of them, though, plus the TV shows Maximum Bob, Justified, and Karen Sisco.

Leonard’s signature style — fast pacing and a hip style — can be seen influencing a wide variety of crime films and TV shows (Pulp Fiction and The Sopranos come to mind) as well as many, many writers — Carl Hiaasen springing to mind as perhaps the most transparently Leonardesque among the many showing his influence. I think that just about modern neo-noir book or film with rapid-fire dialogue, violence and wry humor owes at least a passing nod to Leonard.

The Accountant’s Story: Inside the Violent World of the Medellín Cartel by Roberto Escobar (Grand Central Publishing, February 2010)

At the Devil’s Table: The Untold Story of the Insider Who Brought Down the Cali Cartel by William C. Rempel (Random House, June, 2011)

About a year ago, I read The Accountant’s Story, the first-person autobiography of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar’s brother Roberto. I wasn’t that thrilled with it. As with many autobiographies and single-source biographies of criminal figures, the information in The Accountant’s Story is kinda suspect, and when it’s not suspect it’s out of context enough that it’s really not that helpful given that my background on the Medellín Cartel is minimal (compared to my knowledge of the American Mafia and biker gangs, Italian/Sicilian outfits, and even Russian Mafiyas).

On some level, I know, reading any criminal’s autobiography requires tolerating the self-serving narcissism that successful criminals, particularly high-ranking ones in organized outfits, tend to have.

But there, Roberto was not as narcissistic he could have been, because he seemed very focused on Pablo. He didn’t claim that Pablo didn’t kill people, torture them, maim them, and corrupt the government — not to mention, of course, shipping a lot of cocaine. But those aspects were definitely downplayed. The really interesting information came when Roberto portrays his brother’s hubris, like the events surrounding Pablo’s election to the Colombian Congress!

Roberto’s “viewpoint” is really what I was going for, because what most fascinates me is what it’s like to be a criminal. While Roberto’s perspective was interesting, the factual events of Pablo’s rise and the hunt for him were too sketchy to really fill in the gaps in my knowledge, given how ill-informed I am about the Colombian political system overall.

Even so, The Accountant’s Story is still so self-serving as to be at best an eye-r0lling adventure.

The most interesting aspect was Roberto’s perception (or claimed perception) of the attitude of Medellín’s poor that Pablo was a hometown folk hero, rather than a criminal. To hear Roberto E. tell it, Pablo gave away money and things to the poor local types and they loved him for it. I’m highly dubious not so much over whether Pablo gave away a bunch of money, but over just how significant it was, and how much it was responsible for the poor hating the government and loving Pablo. The split between rich and poor in Colombia is so extreme that I’m not sure Pablo would have had to give away shit to get the local residents enlisted against the grotesquely corrupt leaders, law enforcement, and military of Colombia. What’s more, Pablo was a significant force in helping corrupt those leaders. So what Roberto is bitching about, basically, is that the United States and the Cali cartel were more connected than Pablo, which is why they won. Yeah, that would probably piss me off, too.

Don’t get me wrong, though; what happened was that the U.S., the corrupt Colombian government and the Cali cartel “won” a gang war, not that there was any triumph of justice. This wasn’t honest law-enforcement work, it was a largely pointless vendetta aimed at plugging up one of the zillion holes in a sieve. Once Pablo was gone, the leaders of the Cali cartel could consolidate their power — in the political, law enforcement and economic spheres, as well as the criminal one.

Change the venue to Cali, where a more recent book tells the story of the consolidation of power by the Cali cartel both before Pablo’s assassination and after — though mostly before. That’s because as soon as the Colombian government managed to whack Pablo Escobar, it turned its attention to Cali.

Change the venue to Cali, and we have William C. Rempel’s At The Devil’s Table:The Untold Story of the Insider Who Brought Down the Cali Cartel by William C. Rempel (Random House, June, 2011). It is not an autobiography, but is basically what I would call a “single-source biography,” in essentially the same confessional form as Nicholas Pileggi’s Wiseguy (which was made into the film Goodfellas). This doesn’t mean there are no other sources used, but the existence of the book owes itself strictly to the account of Jorge Salcedo, the head of security for the Rodríguez-Orejuela brothers, and particularly for Miguel Rodríguez-Orejuela. These brothers founded the Cali cartel with José Santacruz Londoño in the ’70s. They primarily trafficked weed until the 1980s, when they branched out into cocaine and eventually formed a $7-a-year cartel.

Jorge Salcedo didn’t enter the scene until after the cartel was well established and was already heavily in conflict with Escobar’s group. Salcedo was a Colombian reserve military officer, and as someone with experience in the security field he became head of security for the cartel, reporting to Miguel specifically. Incidentally, by Jorge’s account, his reputed cartel connections would eventually cost him his commission in the Army, without his having been convicted of anything.

Being in charge of “security” also meant he was in charge of some offensive operations, though Salcedo downplays this so heavily that I wasn’t sure what to believe. Given that Salcedo eventually cooperated with law enforcement and was relocated, with his family, to the United States, I

Nonetheless, Salcedo laces the early pages his account with accounts of the hunt for Pablo from a different perspective — that of a guy who supposedly hated Pablo Escobar for “patriotic” reasons. Huh?! Yes, yes, that’s what I said. As head of security for the Cali cartel, Salcedo believed that Escobar had corrupted the nation of Colombia through widespread bribery. This is one of the craziest perspectives I’ve ever heard, but then, criminals of every stripe often have weird ultra-conservative views that make no sense to me.

Contrast Salcedo’s view with the perspective related in The Accountant’s Story, where Roberto believed that Pablo was considered a sort of upstart poor person in the views of the Cali cartel and the government. Jorge Salcedo, remember, was the son of a military officer and a reserve officer himself. He was part of the power structure in Colombia. It stands to reason that Salcedo’s “patriotic” hatred of Escobar is not simply the self-serving retroactive attempt to get his biographer Rempel to write a true crime where Salcedo is the hero. It’s also the distaste of the privileged for the underprivileged.

Regardless, I definitely get the sense that given Escobar’s status among the poor, he was seen as distastefully redneck by the Colombian government and social elite — which is a small, intractable, entrenched group that loots the nation of Colombia for its own gain. to the majority of the country. as someone who had stepped outside his station by rising to the head of a cocaine cartel. This perspective is utterly absent in The Devil’s Table. From my experience, that doesn’t surprise me; it’s typical in Latin America, and particularly in South America. Class isn’t talked about, because it’s so ubiquitous.

But Roberto Escobar talks about class. He doesn’t do it extensively or with any real sensitivity, because the advantages of first-person narration are Roberto’s account is completely undermined by his need to portray Pablo as a champion of the poor. It’s not unlike the blathering of a pissed-off trucker for the owner of the trucking company that won’t let him take time off for the holidays. It’s not that there’s no valid concern there — in fact, in my view the corruption of the government by Escobar’s group directly parallels the claims so eloquently phrased by of Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part 2 — “We’re both part of the same hypocrisy, Senator” — when a distaste for “oily” Sicilians is expressed.

Such attitudes — that criminals=poor and corrupt politicians=rich is not so much a realistic appraisal of class and crime, but a justification that criminals throughout the organized crime world use to feel good about themselves. It’s endemic within organized crime, particularly in the organized crime that comes from poor and immigrant communities…but only because rich people have far more lucrative crimes to commit.

Nonetheless, there is some truth to it, and I believe that Escobar being targeted first, and Cali second, by the Colombian government was as much about Escobar’s class background as his position in the world of global drug smuggling.

One of the most telling incidents in The Accountant’s Story is when Pablo Escobar is — believe it or not — elected to Colombia’s Congress as a representative from Medelin. By Roberto Escobar’s account, he discovers there’s a dress code on the floor of the Congress; he as to wear a tie. But Pablo won’t wear a tie, because that represents everything he despises about the power structure of Colombia — ties are for rich people. He finally agrees to wear a tie through the door — one loaned to him by a sympathetic security guard — but then to take it off as soon as he’s in the building. Whether this vignette is true, I haven’t the foggiest, but Roberto uses it as proof that Pablo was “a man of the people.”

Via Google Maps.

During this period, the Cali cartel was attempting to kill Pablo through any means necessary. These schemes are some of the most interesting parts of At the Devil’s Table, because Salcedo was one of the chief architects of these unbelievably half-assed plans. It was obvious to Salcedo, and is obvious to me, that the Rodriguez-Orejuela brothers didn’t know squat about running a military operation, but were so powerful that they thought they could do anything. They had a habit of handing Salcedo the most ill-conceived half-baked plans and then not listening to him when he said, “you’re crazy!”

As a result, much of the book’s first half concerns the truly half-assed hijinks the cartel engaged Salcedo in during the attempt to kill Pablo Escobar. In one particular period covered in both books, Escobar negotiated with the Colombian government to take the U.S. diplomatic and law enforcement heat off the country by pleading guilty in return for becoming the Colombian government’s “prisoner” in a luxurious prison Escobar built himself to share with his brother Roberto, who also pled guilty to relatvely minor charges. The place was outfitted and guarded by elements within the government loyal to Pablo, and though he was technically a “guest of the state,” Pablo reportedly had plenty of guns as well as sex workers brought in. At that point, Salcedo had already been engaged in hiring, equipping and caretaking British mercenaries in their mission to assassinate Pablo, although the mercs seemed to spend most of their time drinking and fornicating in Panama City. They also engaged in an utterly disastrous helicopter search for Pablo that resulted in a copter crash and several casualties. By Salcedo’s account, this all drove him to distraction — in At The Devil’s Table, Rempel consistently tries to present Salcedo as a reasonable man.

Once the Escobars were heavily dug in, armed and guarded within the private prison, however, a direct assault was out of the question. Muguel Rodriquez Orejuela’s answer? Drop a bomb on the prison! He sent Salcedo to Panama to obtain several 500-pound bombs, and to Florida to acquire a small civilian plane that had been fitted with bomb racks big enough to hold them. The Florida plane turned out (probably) to be a law enforcement sting, and Salcedo tried to stall on the bombs themselves, believing the plan to be about the dumbest thing he’d ever heard. But wacky hijinks ensue, most notably when one of the bombs gets lost in a river. LOL!!

At The Devil’s Table bogs down heavily after Pablo’s successful assassination in 1993 (not, incidentally, by the Cali cartel — see Mark Bowden’s Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw for one perspective on that). It gets really slow and tedious until close to the end when Salcedo begins cooperating with law enforcement. Then, the tension gets ratcheted up and things start to move, as the dominos start falling en masse.

The period when the Cali cartel is being targeted — about 1995 — is when things start to get interesting. Unfortunately, there’s very little broad, credible information offered about the political and law enforcement context of the operation. It’s mostly specifics about Salcedo’s experiences, to the point where the account feels myopic. It’s still fairly thrilling — though the book overall is uneven and boring at times — but I have no real sense of the context of the events…certainly not to the extent that I did after reading, for instance, Wiseguy. However, since I was starting out basically not knowing jack about Colombia, it’s not that surprising.

In short, to understand what the rise and fall of the Cali cartel “means,” I’m going to need to read other books — these are both too one-sided and personal to provide that. And, as mentioned, I’m dubious of both confessors’ accounts. I wouldn’t trust either of them as far as I could throw them, and Rempel plays softball with Salcedo, delivering the latter’s account unchallenged.

It’s often said by commentators from outside the country that Pablo Escobar “ruled Colombia,” “owned everyone in Colombia,” “Controlled the government,” etc. etc. That was a talking point provided by the Cali cartel and the U.S. government. If it were true, Escobar would be alive and Cali would have been snuffed. The same thing was said within the law enforcement and government community in the U.S. once Pablo was out of the way (and, by savvy commentators and US Federal cops/prosecutors, before, as they started to realize that Cali was actually far more powerful — party because law enforcement had been focusing on Escobar).

But the claim that “The Cali cartel now rules Colombia” was a talking point, too…this time from US prosecutors and Colombian politicians who consolidated power by opposing corruption and crime.

Were they really opposing corruption and crime?

I’m dubious of that, too…highly dubious.

As for the US prosecutors and cops, I’m sure there are some honest, hard-working people who wanted to see the cocaine off the US streets…in fact, I’m sure that was the primary interest of everyone who worked these cases from the American law enforcement side.

But my take on the morality of the situation specifically dealing with the American role of the downfall of the Cali cartel is this:

The vagaries of a career in Federal drug enforcement means a given prosecutor or agent is first and foremost concerned with his or her career.

I would even go so far as to say that while an individual cop or prosecutor may honestly disapprove of everything that criminals do, the actual reduction of drugs on the street is not his or her job.

That’s a policy matter, and out of the realm of individual operations — or even the targeting of specific cartels. It’s definitely out of the realm of targeting specific criminals, but in the case of Cali it was a whole operation that was targeted.

Why did Escobar get targeted first? He was higher-profile and he was viewed by the power structure in Colombia as being a bigger, more arrogant upstart who had “exceeded his station.” I’m not entirely sure if Cali was more powerful from the get-go, or just had the potential to quickly become more powerful than Escobar ever could have. Either way, Escobar was targeted not because he was “the” genuine threat to American security, but because he, as a perceived threat, was singled out.

Regardless, the result was not — and never could have been — fewer drugs on the street. I may bitch about what self-serving liars the criminals are, but cops are no better when it comes to evaluating things from a policy perspective. I’m just more sympathetic to cops’ need to lie to themselves, because they’re asked to do a job by a system that I (basically) subscribe to and benefit from. But that system makes jack-assed decisions all the time. That system decided in the ’80s that drug use was the chief plague in American society, and combating drug smuggling was the way to cure it. The result was an enormous expenditure.

And fewer drugs on the street? I don’t know, but I doubt it. I knew an awful lot of drug users in about 1995-2005, and quite a few users of hard drugs, not to mention people who worked in the social services sector, and had contact with the users of hard drugs. They never had any problem getting heroin…except, of course, for the usual problem with getting heroin, which is that it costs money. But from about 1998-2002, it didn’t cost a lot of money at all.

In fact, for all that cocaine was still thought of in the press and by politicians as the plague that was infecting America, heroin got real cheap real fast as inexpensive heroin flooded up from Mexico.

Heroin got so cheap, in fact, that at least three people I can think of got back on it after having kicked years before — at least partially for the reason that it was so cheap. People I knew who worked in social services acknowledged that heroin was easier to get in San Francisco than it ever had been before. When the underground press got hold of the crisis, they occasionally described the rise of heroin use in SF in apocalyptic terms. Then there was the flesh-eating bacteria problem…et cetera. Opioid use was on the rise, partially because cocaine got expensive and heroin got cheap.

Could this have been due to the fact that the Colombia operations had been hurt by law enforcement?

I don’t know for sure…but I’ll tell you one thing, I don’t trust cops, criminals, or advocates on either side of the drug policy debate to give me a straight or informed answer. I trust them all to hand me a line of bullshit and lecture me and tell me why I’m wrong. (That’s what blog comments are for, right?) But in order to maintain their conflicting value systems, all these groups have to believe things about drugs, drug trafficking, national security, recovery, addiction, class, race, economics and murder that quite simply aren’t true. “We’re both part of the same hypocrisy, Senator.”

So, that aside, are The Accountant’s Story and At the Devil’s Table particularly good books?

Not really. Criminal figures who portray themselves as honest, upstanding businessmen who never do anything wrong are fairly irritating to me — not out of some moral outrage, but because they’re not that interesting to read about. The two very worst offenders are Bonnano family founder Joseph Bonnano and his son, Bill (Salvatore) Bonnano, who both wrote books so stupendously vapid that they have almost no crime-related content. It’s all boring recollections and vagueness. Compare either Bonnano’s book to Gay Talese’s classic 1971 book Honor Thy Father, about Bill Bonnano and the Banana Wars of the 1960s, and I think you’ll see what I mean.

But even Talese’s book is far too kind to his sources, as far as I’m concerned…books about criminals tend to be pretty kind to them, and that’s just a fact of life.

Roberto Escobar and Jorge Salcedo don’t go nearly as far as the Bonnanos in glossing over their misdeeds. But you won’t be left with the overriding sense that either one of the really did anything wrong. And that hypocrisy leaves a big fat gap in the story.